If you are pro-life, that doesn't mean you're a bad person, or foolish. All it means is that you are wrong and you haven't thought about your opinions enough. There are no alternative possibilities. You necessarily have not thought enough about your opinions, because they make absolutely no sense.
Many people are content to just accept that people will just do what they're going to do. I refuse to accept that. That acceptance would feel extremely depressing to me, and I have to believe we are better than that.
I do know that even the best of us tend to just kind of follow along with what we've always been doing and what we've always been thinking. I've never met a single person who didn't seem to...re-imagine reality so that it seemed better-fitted for them...but in my experience it's quite easy to exit from that lemming-like no-think mentality if you only try. Now, no matter how much you try, you'll always have some delusions and biases and re-imaginings of reality (in my experience.) At least for me, no matter how many I catch, I can always find more. I live in a kind of funhouse of mirrors, as I think most of us do, and many of the ways we envision reality are false...but I think if we know what we're looking for we can at least catch our delusions that match that.
So, now I will explain to everyone why the entire pro-life mentality is wrong in the hopes that you can follow along and catch such errors of the mind yourself, and hopefully eventually our society can ditch this crap, because the debate between pro-life or pro choice should not be a debate. There should not be one single pro-life person in existence. The entire pro-life mentality is just wrong and we can depict why it is wrong, really without a huge amount of effort.
So, the pro-life mentality is necessarily about more than what you want to do with your body. You have to want to determine what other pregnant women do with their bodies, or else you are pro choice. Plenty of pro-choice women would never have an abortion.
Being pro-life is not about defending children, any more than being pro-choice is. This is just logic 101. Everyone who thinks about this for five seconds understands this...but you have to think about it, which many people, even clever people, fail to do. This is because if a woman gets an abortion, that is, quite obviously, potentially a way of protecting her child. If a woman has a child with a major disorder for example, and she gets an abortion, if it happens before the being achieves consciousness, absolutely nothing is lost. If she has a second child it lacks the disability she has done the exact equivalent of giving that first child a new body without the disability. Again just...this is all logic 101, but we must think about it or we not discover that.
Now, once the developing fetus achieves something resembling consciousness, then the issue becomes more complex. The fetus has something to lose then. If an abortion happens after this point, the fetus loses something, whereas before this stage common sense tells us that we've lost nothing more than a plant dying...but once consciousness, or the potential for that, is achieved there's something to lose. I say potential for consciousness because even if they're asleep in the womb (I don't know the specifics about how often that is. It may be all the time. It may be less often) they might still dream, which would remain the kind of complex thought processes that would give their lives something that would sensibly be seen as value. Why would they gain value once they achieve the capacity for complex thought/dreaming? It's simply because there would be something there to lose. It's just...if isn't anything there that they can lose, which I'm assuming is the case during the earliest stages of pregnancy, there just isn't anything to lose.
Mentally lazy people will often talk about how there is a slippery slope risk of people thinking abortion is okay someday seeing murder or infanticide as okay.
Well, in truth, common sense tells us that in ancient times, before abortions were an option, infanticide should have been an option. Again, this is jut common sense 101. Five seconds of thought will result in this exact same conclusion without question. Any different conclusions are simply the result of less thought. In the old days you'd have babies born with terrible disorders and problems and you, as the parent, would have the sad choice of either forcing them to die, or forcing them to live with their ailments. Pro-lifers will talk about "giving life a chance." There is no giving life a chance. As a parent, you have no choice but to force you child to live or die. There is no way to give it any choice in the matter. Pro-lifers will for some reason act like life is for some reason inherently better than non-life. I have no idea why this would be the case. All you can do is take a gamble on which risk you believe would be the safest for your child: life or death. Neither is necessarily best.
Actually, even without any disorders, back in the ancient days common sense would tell us infanticide should have been an option even for perfectly healthy babies...because people didn't always have enough food to go around. Now infanticide with healthy babies during times of surplus...then yeah, I could understand punishment for that.
But now, we have better alternatives to those barbaric times. We have abortion and we have adoption. No more need to kill people capable of looking up at us and smiling, and trusting...maybe. Maybe not.
Once a child is born it can be given up for adoption if unwanted by the mother. Before it is born it is still capable of causing the mother harm through the birthing process, so that's one difference, and the further back you go the more differences there are, and the further away from a sentient being the child (presumably) becomes.
And it's tough to know where it is appropriate to draw the line, and it should be tough...but there is a very clear minimum line. At nine weeks the fetus is supposedly the size of a grape. Anything that small will not be very complex, and I could understand polite discouragement of getting abortions at that stage, but if you want abortions banned at that stage, your heart might (or might not) be in the right place, but your head is behaving exactly like a complete psychopath who does not care about children. You are a moral nihilist, because your morality does not come from anywhere except your emotional whims, and that sort of thing can lead to things like this:
In El Salvador, a small Central American country with a population of more than six million, El Salvadoran women who have an abortion, or simply miscarry, can face up to 50 years in prison.
The people fighting the world's harshest abortion law - CNN
Common sense tells anyone who uses it that the slippery slope risk would never apply to the type of people who argued in favor of gay marriage, or the pro-choicers. There will be no mass societal marrying of cars and corpses. There will be no mass infanticide...because unlike the perspectives of the pro-lifers, whose views are built upon the shifting sands of emotional whims and transitory cultures, and subject to easy collapse at the slightest breeze, the moral codes of the pro-choicers are cemented upon a firm foundation of empathy, and thought.
There are noteworthy reasons why the pro-life side often claims pro-choicers are guilty of murder, but the pro-choice side never claims the same of the pro-lifers. Why is that, I wonder? After all, if abortion were banned, people would die. There are plenty of life-shortening, life-hindering results of babies born into unfortunate homes, homes of drug abusers, or young teen moms, or abusive parents too.
It's because we know you're no more murderers and criminals than we are. We sometimes think you're stupid...but that's about it. We know that children with Down syndrome often have life-altering problems. Some pro-lifers want fetuses with Down syndrome aborted for that reason...and often this view is held not for some cold, hive-mind-like craving to benefit society, but to protect the child. Life is not necessarily of benefit to a being. I won't say it's necessarily a bad thing, but it's definitely not necessarily a good thing either.
We also know that we all grow old and die, and we all struggle, and whose to say that the life of a child with Down syndrome, loved dearly by his parents, who receives lots of hugs and kisses and birthday presents, would have a worse life than a banker who kills himself due to the stress of his job and his recent divorce, despite him having an I.Q. of 175, and having been the best runner on his high school track team due to his awe-inspiring, perfect genetics.
But we also know that banker can survive on his own...but that person with Down syndrome will have more trouble...and we hear pro-lifers demanding that we alter our entire lives to engage in the Herculanean effort of raising that child with Down syndrome, and many of us get annoyed. Then the pro-lifers talk about the "easy solution" of giving it up for adoption. Right...what if there is no one else willing to engage in that Herculanean effort required to raise a child with Down syndrome?
There's also the issue of, even if the fetus reaches the stage of having a complex brain, there's still the question of whether a lifetime of hardship is worth a few moments of pain an abortion would cause...and that's where things get really controversial, but one thing that irks me is that the conservative party often claims to be the "freedom" party, the party that despises government control...but the pro-life stance is not pro-freedom. They're not giving unborn children any more freedom. They never had freedom to choose whether to be born or not. The only people capable of making that decision is the parent...or, I guess, as pro-lifers would have things, the government.
So there should be zero pro life category whatsoever. All that it makes sense to have is varying categories of pro-choice mentalities. No doubt some pro-choice persons would want abortion banned at 20 weeks. Some would never have an abortion themselves, but perhaps they'd want it legal for others because they wouldn't want the government regulating philosophical ideals. Some of them would be outright eugenists who advise the abortion of anyone with noticeable disabilities, but want the ultimate decision to be up to the parents. Some of them would dislike abortion, and possibly campaign for its discouragement but nonetheless want it legal...but in a rational world everybody would be some variant of pro-choice.
So, pro-lifers, get rid of this nonsense called the pro-life mentality, please. I can't get rid of it so you should do it. It doesn't make any sense. Thanks.
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