Can Pro-lifers be feminists?

Just for clarification - are the anti-abortion feminists on this thread saying that I, personally, shouldn't be able to have an abortion?

I will answer as an anti-abortion feminist... on the basis that an unborn baby is a live human being, if you are to kill this baby, then you should have a very compelling reason to do so.

I think the right to abort right up until birth has to be on very strong medical (life threatening grounds). In that situation, I'd absolutely support it.
If someone is advocating that right 'just because' it's every woman's right, I couldn't support that, because I too can't see any difference between 'ok to terminate on Monday', 'not ok on Tuesday because it's actually being born'.
You still end up with the same issue though.... a termination at 1 day seems ok because it's easy to consider the foetus as less than human, and it's not ok to terminate the day before birth because at this stage, it's hard NOT to see the foetus as anything but human. But where in the intervening 9 month do we draw the line? 24 weeks seems to be the line that science has drawn (for now).

Ah yes I've heard that so many times now.. I grew up in the Ireland under the Catholic Church
If a Woman has sex for pleasure and becomes pregnant tough but if she's raped then it's not her fault but still she should take it on the chin and carry on
women know your place!

I had a man tell me I should have kept my legs closed if I didn't want to get pregnant and having mental health problems wasn't a "good enough reason" to have an abortion

Off to bed now, not abandoning the argument.

If you want to encourage a positive attitude towards abortion rights, I recommend that you don't try to introduce the right to have an abortion for any / no particular reason up until birth.

It's not "shit" - people on here are arguing for the absolute right to abort up until birth.
And we've heard that where this is the law doctors can't bring themselves to carry out the abortions. Maybe because they went into medicine to save lives?

But a fully viable baby that is due to be born in a few weeks being killed before the woman gives birth to it or has it cut out of her body, because she would prefer it not to "walk the earth" is not my idea of a great solution either.

OK, then find an example of a situation where this actually happened and we can talk about it.

For anyone who really does want to reduce the number of abortions happening later rather than earlier the best way to do so is to make abortion more easily and quickly accessible. There are part of the US where women have to travel hundreds of miles to a clinic that does abortions, and that certainly can cause a delay, especially if the woman doesn't have much money and works at the kind of job where it's not easy to get time off.

An anti-abortion atmosphere does not in any way help to achieve this goal, as can be clearly seen in the US.

"Babies being killed" 🙄 this is when I stop listening to someone who has a different view on abortion to mine.
I'm open minded, I like a debate and love to hear others opinions and why they have those opinions.

I just can't take a person seriously when this shit is spouted..

Same as someone on the other side saying an embryo/foetus/unborn baby isn't human
Both stupid extremes

Angry - in what way am I not being honest? Either now or previously? No, having a baby "reluctantly" because you didn't make your decision to have an abortion in time is not a wonderful situation. But a fully viable baby that is due to be born in a few weeks being killed before the woman gives birth to it or has it cut out of her body, because she would prefer it not to "walk the earth" is not my idea of a great solution either. Because I consider a baby that is about to be born as not being so very different from a baby that has just been born. I think that what you want is too biased in favour of the woman. And let's not forget that she is the person who 1) had sex and became pregnant, 2) didn't make a decision about abortion in the several months that were available to her.

*right there!

Removing the sense of urgency for women making difficult decisions actually seems to me to be a good reason to increase the time limit (or remove it). You can argue that abortions would happen later, but you could also see that some women may feel rushed in to abortion (as the law currently stands) and obviously it is better if the woman is allowed the time to make the correct decision for her.

(Last comment aimed not at Lass so much as at the people who seem convinced that abortions past week 30 are something women do for fun or convenience.)

My point about Canada was that having no limit may make it more difficult to access abortion than a jurisdiction where there is a recognised "no reason" time limit and no time limit if there are exceptional reasons. Canadian doctors were voluntarily imposing lower limits than UK doctors.

I concede this is virtue of Prof. Google but interesting.

Over 90% of abortions in Canada are done in the first trimester; only 2-3% are done after 16 weeks, and no doctor performs abortions past 20 or 21 weeks unless there are compelling health or genetic reasons

Abortion services are fully covered in Ontario, but wait times are long (up to 6 weeks in Ottawa). Only one in six hospitals in Canada offers abortions. There is a looming shortage of doctors willing to provide the service; many are approaching retirement and younger MDs are not replacing them, some out of fear of harassment and others because they have not witnessed the dangers of unsafe abortions. Hence, therapeutic abortion services may in theory be available, but they may not be accessible.

www.med.uottawa.ca/sim/data/abortion_e.htm

and in the next breath say a woman's life is equal to an embryo/foetus

That's the problem right their though - pro-life don't see it as 'just' an embryo / foetus. They see it as another human - with some scope for debate about the point at which it becomes a human.
IF someone sees a foetus as a life, then the whole picture changes, and you have a paradox of the right of a woman do with her body as she pleases and the right of the human to live.
It's a hell of a lot easier if you don't see a foetus as a life.

I think a great deal of the public believe a foetus grows into a sentient person, and that it become a sentient person prior to birth, but they can't quite pinpoint the precise point at which this happens. An abortion at 8 weeks seems ok, but one at 39 weeks doesn't (in the eyes of a lot of people). Everything between is where most of the debate is.

Why do you want women to "reluctantly" have babies? In what way does that strike you as a positive outcome?

Again, I don't think you're being very honest.

The reason why women who have late abortions at the moment do so in extreme situations (eg find out late that child will be very badly disabled) is because that is when they are allowed late abortions.
I'm not assuming that loads of women will move to having late abortions if they are allowed to do so. But I think it is pretty inevitable that some will. There will be less of a sense of urgency in making the (for many women very difficult) decision. And I think we can assume that some women at the moment don't make their mind up on time, and then go ahead and have the baby, reluctantly.
So there will be an increase in babies being killed when they have reached the viable stage. And that number will include babies who would either have been aborted earlier, or would not have been aborted at all, if the law remained as currently.
I don't trust every woman to make the "right decision". Some women get pregnant and abort repeatedly. For starters, I don't believe that they are making the right decisions. Why are women assumed to be such infallibly good decision makers? And why are unborn children being given absolutely no value at all, while suddenly gaining massive value and rights as soon as they leave the uterus? If you feel this way about the unborn baby, it doesn't seem too much of a leap to approving of female infanticide, for instance - there's only 5 minutes difference between what has been described as a parasite in the woman's body, that she should be free to deal with as she wishes, and the newly born unwanted baby girl.

If we're doing hypotheticals here's one (though more applicable to people who're against abortion even within the first 8 weeks). You're in a facility that does IVF and associated procedures, and a fire breaks out. In the room with you is a container with hundreds of already fertilized embryos, and a toddler. You can only carry one. Which do you save? If a fertilized embryo really is a life then surely you'd have to save the container with hundreds of them rather than one child. And yet I've never yet encountered a person whose immediate gut response wouldn't be to grab the toddler and run.

I don't think people taking the "all life is equal and a fetus is a human life right from the beginning" stance are being very honest.

It's hard to believe many women would wait longer before termination, but I think that's partly because there's plenty of education on the subject now, and an awful lot of publicity around the 24 week viability figure. Rightly or wrongly, I think a lot of young women DO see 24 weeks as a 'real person' and have no wish to let a foetus reach that stage. If conventional wisdom said that viability was at 34 weeks, then maybe more women would wait longer, but it's only heading in one direction right now.
Once people can visualise a small baby, everything becomes a whole load more emotional and moral and the evidence is pretty compelling that neither pro-life or pro-choice are particularly comfortable with that visualisation aspect.

Just for clarification - are the anti-abortion feminists on this thread saying that I, personally, shouldn't be able to have an abortion?

My question is - they're not just saying they think it's wrong and they wouldn't have one. But they would also want to prevent me and other women from having one?

I personally feel you can't say you are a feminist and in the next breath say a woman's life is equal to an embryo/foetus..
That opinion really shocks me

I have many friends who would never have an abortion themselves, I have two sisters that feel the same but never would they judge anyone else's life

I've been teaching my dc about empathy recently.. it should be compulsory in schools IMO

(Last comment aimed not at Lass so much as at the people who seem convinced that abortions past week 30 are something women do for fun or convenience.)

Seriously, do some research on late term abortions and you'll find that those are the ones that usually are tragic, and not at all something that's happening because the mother wanted to go on holiday.

(Jaw still dropped at the sheer absurd misogyny of that idea.)

Canada doesn't have a time limit on abortion but they don't have a huge number of women having abortions at a very late stage

On a previous thread where this was discussed the point was made that Canadian women were crossing the US border to have late abortions as Canadian doctors were not performing them. I think that "late" was not late by UK limits.

The majority of abortions are carried out within 8 weeks
38% of them were women who'd had a previous abortion
2% were due to serious abnormalities
About 200 abortions (0.1%) took place after 24 weeks.

That's the thing though, there's no evidence to support the idea that if there was no time limit lots of women would wait until very late in their pregnancy to seek an abortion, and no logical reason why they should do so. When an abortion happens late it's usually a wanted pregnancy where something has gone horribly wrong, or because the mother has become ill in a way that makes continuing with the pregnancy dangerous to her.