if your anti abortion stance is fueled by the reasons women have them - then it's anti women rather than pro life. I had a pro life friend who argued that if society valued women and children then all the support a woman would ever need would be there and she wouldn't need to terminate - a little wishy washy but not anti women at all
I agree with this post and the sentiment of the friend mentioned.
Your mention of a 'party lifestyle' and 'couldn't be arsed' feelings are the sort of comments I would expect to hear in the Irish debate on abortion. I also agree with the posters who said your friend had no right to question your decision - it was insensitive at best. However, I can't help wondering if she had been a rape victim and whether your party lifestyle comment hit a nerve.
I think from a 'big picture' pov the picture where economies and philosophies and questions of rights and access to all the modern world offers in terms of education and opportunity exist abortion is the easy way out. On a personal level I don't think it can ever be easy. But on the level of legislation and welfare and legal rights and the apparently difficult area where the rights and responsibilities of men as fathers are concerned it is easier to legislate for abortion than to legislate for true equality or fairness for women -- look at the Equal Rights Amendment sinking without trace in the US at the same time that Roe vs Wade ushered in the right to abortion. Look at the paltry minimum wage anywhere in the world there is one. Look at the recent disaster in Bangladesh for an example of the way the wheels of commerce are allowed to grind the poor - with very few objecting, and poor women (and their orphans) being the ones paying the price. Children who lose their mother in the so-called developing world have very poor prospects.
Unfortunately the current Irish debate centers only on the baby's rights and on [mis]characterisations of women and their motives, and not on the sort of savage environment where anyone finding herself pregnant would be forced to look seriously at abortion as an option. A responsible debate on abortion would place the question in the context of pitiful sentences/deterrents for rape, pitiful minimum wage, practically non-existent facilities for free and good quality childcare in the workplace or in the community, hopeless access to decent quality housing, the fact that women are forced to deal with an abusive man without sympathy or backup from the courts and without regard for the toll that takes on the woman (and often on the child) for years and years after separation or divorce, simply because they had a child with him. A responsible debate would not pit the rights of one individual against another while the third element of the situation emerges unscathed every single time.
It is possible to be against something but still allow others to choose what they do with their own life.
I agree with this too. I think from the pov of justice the logical result of acknowledging that women are equal and free is that they should have the choice. I just wish nobody had to make that choice.
Regarding the party comment, that part of the argument was about whether it should be universally legalised, not individual cases. I'm not a militant pro life kind of person, and I agree that a woman should not be forced to have a rapist's child, however easy access to an abortion for a woman who just can't be arsed to be a mother bothered me. i dont know, it's hard to draw the line I suppose.
In my opinion, legal for one has to be legal for all. Legal only for rape victims or women whose life is threatened by pregnancy leads to all sorts of problems, loophole exploitation, medical problems arising from delay and stress, and horrible 'solutions' including the Girl X case in Ireland where the right to abortion based on one of the exceptions recognised by Ireland of a 14 year old girl who had been raped by the father of her friend was decided in the courts, with attendant pain and anxiety on top of being raped, or the case of Savita Halappananvar whose incompetent doctors put the potential for life of a foetus living in a uterus from which most of the amniotic fluid had drained and who was therefore at risk of potentially fatal infection (to both mother and foetus) ahead of their duty to both the mother and the foetus (the foetus was doomed once the amniotic sac was breached and they should have administered antibiotics at the very least to Savita). Legal for some can end up with both the life of the mother and the life of the foetus jeopardised.
This is what I mean by pitiful sentencing /deterrents when I speak of rapists:
From The X Case chronology and commentary.
"5 March 2002: The victim?s perpetrator is sentenced to 42-months in prison for the kidnap and sexual assault of another young girl. Back in 1992, he was sentenced to four years for the unlawful carnal knowledge of Miss X."
This man had sexually assaulted Girl X for two years before getting her pregnant. He got four flipping years in 1992 despite the comments of the judge that he was 'an evil and depraved man'. What do those words mean, exactly, when the sentence is a mere 48 months? He did it again to another victim once released. He got 42 months that time. There is extreme reluctance on the part of the world's court systems to see rape as a serious crime that deserves serious and meaningful punishment and that must be discouraged.
This is something Ireland badly needs to address.