Young, British and Anti Abortion.

[TooBigForMyBoots]

I was half watching it last night and intend to watch properly later. The guy they featured was a misogynistic Incel type.

Did anyone else see it?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00256p2

Pro lifers are despicable people, without exception. You have no right to deny another woman healthcare because of your personal beliefs.

Forced birthers never seem to think any further than the point of birth.

Where's all the lobbying for more support/housing/healthcare/benefits for the woman and child that they've forced into a situation they didn't want or need to be in? Nowhere to be seen, unless they're standing by judging the woman for being a single mother on a low income.

I have no words.

The that one was awful! This one too! Absolutely disgusting behaviour of the state!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Case

I don't believe in the death penalty.

I believe in long prison sentences. They allow the criminal to think, and while some will not care others will realise what they have done.

I'm also aware that not everyone has a good time in prison.
If you think prison is easy look up Richard Huckle.

Imagine if the anti-abortion crowd got behind increasing the minimum wage? Or boosting low-fee childcare? Instead they protest outside clinics all day long (at least in the US). They'd rather pretend women have abortions for fun rather than realizing it's often an economic issue. Imagine bringing a child into a situation where they will grow up in poverty and have a really tough go of it... how cruel.

Its not just Texas that women are dying. Many other US states have the same issues. Many people have to spend thousands of dollars to seek abortion care in other US states.

In America we have the effective and very uncontroversial WIC program. And then you have Medicaid after that. Single mothers are given a LOT of support in America.

But single parenthood is tough no matter how you slice it. You cannot compete with a dual-income family with an involved father, no matter how much the government gives you. There are some things money can’t buy.

And it’s already proven that minimum wage increases is associated with job losses, so you’d actually be hurting the very people you want to help.

Tbh pro-life activists are just incredibly naive about human nature. But many of them do advocate mother-baby friendly policies, let’s not resort to lazy stereotypes

You really don't give single mothers lots of support in the US. And minimum wage certainly didn't result in job losses here. In fact it means that people can afford to live and spend more. The money circulates in the economy.
The US does not do social security well at all. And as for healthcare? A brief look at maternal death rates in the US should shock everyone!

First of all, that maternal mortality rate calculation is totally misleading, so please stop using it to make your point. It’s in line with other Western countries: https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/01/31/united-states-maternal-mortality-crisis-statistics-health/

Secondly, single mothers get WIC and Medicaid after that, they get SNAP and Section 8 rental assistance.

There is a debate in conservative circles about how much we want to support these. I’m in favor of cutting most of these support programs and encouraging birth control and abortion if needed. But my views are not in line with the heavily Christian GOP and I recognize that.

And I’m not sure how you can’t understand that if labor is more expensive, you automate and hire fewer people. Why do you think we have self checkouts for grocery stores and fast food outlets?

@RingoJuice, all of those programs sound great on paper. Reality is much different - I recommend you read "Evicted" by Mathew Desmond or "Maid" by Stephanie Land (great Netflix adaptation, too). If the programs you mentioned were so great, why are 30% of single parent families in the US living under the poverty line compared to 6% of dual-parent families?

Poverty is relative. You cannot compete with a two-income family on one government income. You will necessarily not have the purchasing power they do and it will show in the type of neighborhoods you can afford and the car you will drive, for example.

Snap makes food affordable for literally everyone and Medicaid makes medical care affordable to the poor, Section 8 gives you rental assistance. Honestly this is probably the limit of what the government can do.

Why exactly do you think your maternal mortality rates are misleading?
They're awful. And I can't get over how much c-sections cost. It's crazy. You make having children unaffordable and then ban abortion.
In the U.K. the introduction of minimum wage did not result in higher unemployment.

Even arch-capitalist Henry Ford understood that you needed to pay your workers enough to live.

Did you read the linked article?

I guess you didn’t.

Blue collar factory work still pays very nicely in America. But one single mother on a government income cannot compete with a dual-income family.

That’s never going away.

Christian prolifers don’t consider this ofc and that’s why I strongly disagree with them. However I happen to share a political party with them and must undermine them however I can lol.

I think giving this shit airtime is a bad move even if it is done with a critical tone.

Do you really think that companies wouldn't automate anyway? No human can be cheaper than a self-checkout over five years, not even a human working as an owned slave.

The woman who said her sister had Patau Syndrome and lived til 4 and was the happiest child she's ever known. I wonder how a single mum would cope with that level of disability while trying to earn a living. I looked at Google Images for Patau Syndrome and scrolled down. Would she like to live with some of the most extreme forms of Patau Syndrome in the images? I sure wouldn't.

And that's the thing, isn't it? Because once you get that confirmation, whether Patau or Down, you still don't know where on the scale your child will fall. They might have a milder form that you can deal with, and if Patau not for long, or... they might not. Which is why it must be up to the pregnant woman to assess that risk, as she will be doing the bulk of the caring. It must be her decision.

She thinks she knows how her sister felt.
She thinks she knows how her parents felt.
She thinks she knows how embryos and foetuses feel.

Emma is all about her own, personal feelings. No one else matters to her.

Same with James and his misogyny and anger.

it’s simple
if you don’t want one, don’t have one. It’s not for me to say what someone else should do.

I had an abortion at 14 weeks due to Patau's Syndrome. I was surprised to listen to the arguments in the programme from Emma whose views had been formed from having a sister with Patau's. When we got our diagnosis there was a clear expectation that I would abort, it just seemed pointless to put everyone involved through the trauma of continuing the pregnancy as there is a low chance of even making it to full term, or the first year after that, and there isn't really a milder form like there is with Downs, for example there is never a chance that the child would reach adulthood and live independently. I didn't think there was much controversy over the decision I made, even amongst people who might normally be against abortion for other reasons.

I certainly didn't dwell on it too much and I had the abortion within a week of the diagnosis. I am not a single parent and I would not have needed to try to balance working and looking after a severely disabled child, I don't think I need to justify my decision by claiming that I don't have the capacity for that level of need. Financially we wouldn't have struggled, and I'm a sahm and could afford not to work. But I just didn't want to, it's not what I wanted when I made the choice to have a family. I wanted to have a happy, healthy family and enjoy helping my kids have normal life experiences and hit their expected milestones, with the freedom to access regular childcare and services - which I'm very lucky to have now. I don't feel any sense of regret over the decision or get hung up about the morality of it, I just saw it as a stumbling block to finally getting pregnant again with a healthy baby and having the kind of family I wanted.

I did.

It is terribly written. No references at all. Most academic papers do not use an exclamation mark, and if they do it is used appropriately.

In the article it says a tick box was added but at different times in different states but then doesn't discuss that or provide a table of which stated did that and when.

It’s an article from a magazine for general readership …

What is the problem with the content of the article? Because you are complaining about the format and not the actual issue at hand?

Now it probably assumed a general knowledge of America’s federal system which it seems you do
not understand (it’s for an American readership, it’s not a direct criticism of you).

In short: twenty or so years ago, CDC updated death certificates to include a pregnancy checkbox that would be ticked if the deceased had been pregnant in the last 42 days.

The idea is that pregnancy can exacerbate medical conditions, so it would include those deaths as well as the more commonly understand deaths from preeclampsia and hemorrhage.

As more and more states used the new CDC forms, more deaths became classified this way.

Once you use more restricted measurements, America’s rate is in line with other developed countries.

Just a glance at the data should
tell this exact story: the very year the CDC released the new death certificates is the year maternal deaths in the USA started to rise and decouple from Western norms.

So America’s way of counting maternal deaths is an overcount, or other developed countries are undercounting, because they fail to see pregnancy or recent pregnancy as an exacerbating factor.

(come to think of it, this was a huge issue with Covid as well)