Current Events > To pro-life people: Consider this.

(+) Yeah! (+)

Not my post but I'm sharing it here anyway:

This will get buried, but I'll say it anyway.

To the pro-life people out there: I understand how you feel. Honestly. This is such a difficult moral issue, and I know there are plenty of people who feel like murder is finally illegal. I get it.

But there is so so much more to this than the question of one life or two. In the United States, you have to choose to be an organ donor. You can't even use a corpse to save someone's life unless that person gave explicit consent when they were alive. You certainly can't force a living person to give up an organ to save a life, even if both people would walk away alive. That is the concept of bodily autonomy.

Just consider for a moment the incredible cost of pregnancy and birth. Your body physically changes in dozens of ways. You probably experience nausea, dizziness, swelling, back pain, constipation, mood swings. You have to change what you eat, what you drink, how you move, what you do. You may be unable to work or go to school. You may be let go for spurious reasons. You may find it difficult to find people to hire you. You will need ultrasounds, checkups -- health insurance. You will go through the most physically painful experience of your life, where in 70% of cases the baby literally tears its way out of you. You will owe the hospital thousands, if not tens of thousands, of dollars. Your body will physically never be the same.

Now imagine you never chose this. You never wanted this. But you have no choice.

How can someone end up pregnant and not want to be? There are a myriad of scenarios, all with moral implications. Maybe you have a steady partner and you are using birth control, but the birth control didn't work. Maybe the condom broke. Maybe he couldn't pull out in time. Maybe you never learned about birth control because your school only taught you about abstinence. You didn't intend it, but here you are.

And then worse. Maybe he lied and took off the condom when you wouldn't notice. Maybe he drugged you and raped your unconscious body, or maybe he raped you while you were awake, so the sounds and the pain and the smell is seared into your brain. Maybe he is your teacher, your pastor, your police officer. Maybe he is your brother, your uncle. Maybe he is your father. It happens so much more often than any of us want to think or talk about. And now the seed, the DNA of the person who violated you, is growing inside you, and there is nothing you can do to stop it.

So you give birth, unprepared and unwilling. Because you didn't want or plan for this pregnancy, chances are you didn't take care of yourself as well as is ideal, and chances are you are not providing an ideal life for this child. Maybe you drank alcohol before you knew you were pregnant, or you drank alcohol on purpose to try to kill your baby. Maybe you smoked. Maybe you are addicted to opiates and now your child will be too. Maybe you are poor -- the cost of childbirth didn't help -- and have no means to buy food, diapers, cribs, or other supplies for your baby. Maybe you are a felon or are otherwise ineligible for SNAP or WIC. Maybe your partner beats you and will beat your child, but you can't leave because then you would be homeless. Maybe you are homeless. Maybe your partner left you. How will you get a job? Who will take care of the baby? If you are in school, you almost certainly have to drop out. The effects of neglect, of abuse, of malnourishment, of fetal alcohol syndrome, of neonatal abstinence syndrome, all of these have profoundly negative effects on the child for the rest of their lives.
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It is understandable why some pregnant women become desperate, and what a desperate person can do can be horrifying for everyone involved. To quote a clinic administrator (from the 2016 documentary Trapped):

I told her you can come to San Antonio and we can help you here, and she said, "I can't, I don't have the means, there's no way I can get to San Antonio. So what if I tell you what I have in my kitchen cabinet, and you can tell me what I can do."

I doubt anyone's read this far. It's for my own catharsis anyway. But given that you can't obligate someone to give up their bodily autonomy to save someone's life in other cases, why is this, pregnancy and childbirth, something that will affect someone for the rest of their life, why is this mandated? Why should a mass of cells without even a brain have the right to require of a living woman what we cannot even demand of a corpse? So many women who have had abortions and later have children express the relief and gratitude that they didn't have a child when they weren't ready. Because of their choice, they were able to save their own lives and bring new life into the world for whom they could properly care.

Now, because of this law, thousands will suffer. The Alabama lawmakers have already handed down their sentences. They had a choice. Now we do not.
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Because religion.

Seriously, that's the only logical reason I can think of.
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St0rmFury posted...

Because religion.

Seriously, that's the only logical reason I can think of.

From my own talks with others, it's because they know everything above to be true, they just don't see a binary between all those horrible things, and killing a fetus. It's like a responsible sex life is not even a potential option. I once heard it described as akin to saying "what am I supposed to do, not drink and drive?"

It's not that I don't support abortion as a preferable alternative to kids born into misery, but I've read enough posts like above to not think to many, abortion is something they want to avoid the adult responsibility of trying to avoid unwanted outcomes, rather expecting there to be an undo button for mistakes.
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St0rmFury posted...

Because religion.

Seriously, that's the only logical reason I can think of.

That's basically all it is.
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I am inevitable

@Reis

Can you sum that up?
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Dat_Cracka_Jax posted...

Can you sum that up?

Would love a cliff-notes myself
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