Is it me or ...

My 25 year old DD is staunchly pro choice, always has been, whether that's down to me and her dad holding the same views or her own ideology, who knows. She is a teacher with a year 8 form and deals with some horrific home situations, abuse, grooming, you name it .
She has definitely become more outspokenly feminist since starting to teach teenagers 2 years ago.

I dI'd a debate in my childcare course about abortion as a very naive 18 yr old very much against abortion but I think as you mature you do realise how things work now as a middle aged woman I'm very pro choice I think this multiple abortion is a myth. They hear so and so had had 3 and so on as if women are using termination right left and centre

and what kind of life will the unwanted child have, or the mother with 'it'.

I don't think it's relevant for the purposes of deciding whether or not to continue with a pregnancy.

And not sure if I'd run that argument as you run the risk of being shot down by the fact there are undoubtedly children who became very wanted when they arrived/children very successfully placed for adoption/children very successfully brought up by grandparents/lone fathers who always wanted the child.

And as the op says, other womens' rights too. Very dictatorial.

I don't think many (any?) have an abortion lightly, or would never be troubled by it again.

The point about the baby / foetus is interesing. I always used to get bored of beginner-ethics debates because they all do eventually come down to the rights of the mother v the rights of the foetus, they then entrench and clash for all they're worth. I focus on the rights of the mother, not least because the foetus and then the baby (if you prefer) is dependent on the mother. It can't survive without her and what kind of life will the unwanted child have, or the mother with 'it'.

It troubles me that more and more young women are turning against their own rights.

I've aalways been pro-choicechoice but I also went to Catholic school (Catholic schools produce masses of university students every year) and I would find it very difficult to have an abortion myself.

I remember some of the teachers used to tell us stories about women with infertility and how horrible it was for them to witness young women having abortions because 'a baby would clash with going on holiday' it was very manipulative and having an abortion was subtly pitched as being selfish. Women of course are conditioned not to be selfish.

Just to make this extra hypocritical it was private so if a girl had got pregnant and decided to keep it I think they would have been told not to come back (I am fairly sure this happened at least once)

I don't think young people are necessarily more right wing in the traditional sense, from the stats I've seen, but they don't necessarily hold the same ideas teenagers traditional have either.

I absolutely agree that teenagers are black and white and that they have forever been so! It totally depends on who is influencing them and what their agenda is.

I was brought up pro-choice (thank you, mother!), but it was having a pregnancy scare at university and realising that, if I had been pregnant and abortion hadn't been legal, I would have done the thing with the coat hanger that made me deeply, viscerally pro-choice. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Oh why do they become right wing? I don't know, I didn't say that.

I think they come down on the pro-life side because they don't think of it as controlling a woman's body or fertility - they tend to focus on the baby tbh.

With the exception of rape, where they suggest adoption or that that and a baby being born with a life threatening disability being exceptions, they pretty much discount all practical issues as not as important as the hypothetical baby.

Things like finances, destroying educational or career opportunities or timing issues they just don't see as important...because to them at that point, they're not, they're not dealing with them.

You get lots of comments about being able to live on benefits or you can go back into education or work or that they know lots of single parents.

I'm sure some of the young people I was teaching have grown up to be pro-life, but equally I'm sure some of them would now be pro-choice.

I agree with both of those - you see more flexibility as you get older - but still, my response and what I remember of my generation was to come down heavily on the pro-choice side. Being restricted to black and white doesn' t necessarily put you on the right-wing side by itself.

I'm in my 30s and was pro choice in my teens, but went to Catholic school and had pro lifers give us lapel pins of tiny baby feet at x weeks gestation (we weren't told they were pro lifers and I'm sure it was put across as some sort of sex education). I was always pro choice but waivered on whether it was something I could choose for myself.

I don't have many young people in my life, and none I would have a conversation about abortion with. My thoughts on why young people may be anti abortion stemmed more from a general place of remembering being pretty black and white about things as a teenager, through to a young woman, and being pretty immovable once I had made a decision.

Now I have more life experience I am more open to the idea that I could be wrong or that my opinions may shift in light of new information.

Oh I'm still pretty opinionated, lol.

I didn't mean at all that strong opinions are always negative .

I just meant that the ability to see that things aren't always inherently right or wrong no matter what the circumstances came as I either got older or gained life experience.

Not this issue to be fair, but just in general I think I've gained more understanding that lots of things depend on the circumstances surrounding them rather than just being a clear cut that is right and this is wrong.

If that makes sense?

Tabula, I saw things in black and white as a teen and twenager too. I came down on the pro-choice side. I still have strong opinions. Why do you think a strong opinion is a negative one?

Seriously worried!

Yes I'm wondering about that Villa and Puffins. How old (roughly) are those saying they were anti-abortion when younger? Let's try a local poll. I'm 40 and was pro-choice in my teens. As far as I remember most teens and my fellow students then were. There were occasional times when a right-wing christian (theynearly always were professed christians, and many were male) briefly made me question myself but I always went back.

Our whole society has shifted to the right and there is accordingly a backlash against feminism at the same time. This is going to sound harsh, but my reaction is 'when did young women stop being able to think?' You don't need to be personally affected right now to imagine a situation where you might be. Why is there no empathy in our society any more?

I can remember in 1975 (when I was 16) my friends and I talking about a girl in the year above us who had had an abortion.

She was someone we disliked a lot with good reason. She was a nasty bully, very full of herself and had been very cruel to at least one of us. I recall us talking about it that it might take her down a peg and that she wasn't as clever as she thought she was.

Not very nice of us but I don't recall any of us saying she should not have had an abortion or criticising her for it. There were plenty of other reasons for judging her but her right to choose to abort was a given.

young people, in the recent past have tended to be politically left of the older generation. Young people now are more to the right of them.

This is a pretty worrying trend, especially when one considers that generally, people veer slightly to the political right as they get older.

The idea that the political right wants to have less government involvement is pretty laughable when stated against the aim of preventing women from having bodily autonomy really.

Still I agree. I think it's probably more about life experience than age, but for the majority of people one comes with the other.

Oh teenagers definitely are so black and white (I know the OP was talking about older people than that, but that's where my experience is) they're so sure that things are either right or wrong...some of that is because it is all hypothetical to them.

I know when I was that age I had much stronger opinions on things than I do now, I think the ability to see both sides of an argument and to actually have any chance of putting yourself in someone else's shoes comes much later - I'm pretty sure brain development doesn't stop until you're in your twenties?

Ample possibly however the ones who are theoretically anti might change their minds when faced with the reality of an unwanted pregnancy.

I think what Tabula said is kind of what I was aiming for.

Still I'm not in any way suggesting every young woman feels the same or approaches the subject the same. For you, you were pro choice because it was something that could impact you (I appreciate you may well have been pro choice even if it didnt) but for those who won't be affected it's very easy to be black and white about it and think only of the baby and not the mother.

I've become more pro-choice as I've got older too. I agree with what others have said about young people sometimes being a bit more black and white about things and quicker to judge (eg. "Well she shouldn't have got pregnant if she didn't want it...").

I also think there's a generational difference. My mum and several women of her generation have told me they're shocked by how anti-abortion younger women are. They fought hard for the abortion act and many women that age will remember the horror of back street abortions and self-administered abortions. Maybe it's harder for young women to imagine the reality of abortion being illegal or harder to access.

Maybe younger people view the world in black and white.
I used to be anti abortion until I realised that there are grey areas between the black and white.

I also had anarchist learning. I really thought that all people would live peacefully together in there were no laws or police.

When I was 25 ( 40 years ago) I also thought there would never be any more wars in Europe, because we, the people wouldn't allow it.

Then seeing car stickers printed with 'have a good day, kill an Argie' made me realise that not everyone shared my values.

I've taught classes on abortion in schools...that sounds wrong, lol, it was actually morals and ethics as part of religious studies and one of the topics is abortion.

Young people on the whole are anti-abortion, to the point where sometimes it's even hard to get a debate going as a whole class will just agree and you really have to push to get them to even consider the opposing view.

It's partly that they always think they're right, even with little knowledge about a subject and so sure that things don't happen unless they choose them (as in, the view that women shouldn't get pregnant if they don't want a baby)partly just a lack of life experience and partly that they often have a romanticised idea of little cute babies and aren't mature enough to really understand quite how life changing that is or that adoption isn't easy either.

The older the class is the more you get mixed opinions, so I assume that continues after they've left school.

Oddly, the same classes were fairly strongly pro-euthanasia.

m.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27865991

I haven't asked any young women about this. However, young people, in the recent past have tended to be politically left of the older generation. Young people now are more to the right of them. Would therefore make sense theyd be anti choice too.

Sorry me again, Ample I definitely did not think of abortion only , or indeed, at all in terms of the foetus. I remember being a week late once at 16 and I was 100% sure a baby would ruin my plans. It was me I was thinking about.