To hope we look back on this in horror?

[Fanfeckintastic]

I'm in Ireland and recently watched a documentary about Irish women going to England for abortions because it's illegal over here. I was saying to DP that hopefully one day we'll be able to look back on this with the same horror we do at the fact interracial couples were once not allowed to marry, homophobia etc but he doesn't think it's comparable because interracial marriages and homosexuality etc involves consenting adults. In my opinion abortion involves a consenting adult, that's it.

I'm not saying they're the exact same thing but am I unreasonable to hope that one day we'll look back at the fact it was illegal in my country to have a choice about what we do with our own uterus?

puffins if it makes posters like bumbley realise there are actual women and families affected by these laws then I'm happy to stand my ground.

The women I met on the recovery ward were mostly women who already had children having early term (13 weeks or less) abortions in their late 20s/early 30s. I saw no women having late term abortions whilst I was in the clinic. Of course that's just anecdotal evidence from me, but the statistics quoted by dawn do agree with what I saw.

Ernormouse, I'm so sorry we still live in a day and age where shit like that goes on. I'm glad at least you could come to the mainland.

I'm going to try and take my own advice and stay off the thread as I'm not coherent enough to argue this. Someone shout at me if I come back.

Take care Rainicorn

Dawn, my stats were DOH for Great Britain, yours do not include Scotland. Not that it is relevant, just didn't want to be accused of making up statistics.

Fair enough, vdb

I say this on pretty much every abortion thread I post on, particularly where bumbley is concerned, and yet it never quite seems to sink in. Some people just love the idea of controlling women too much I suppose :(

If you don't like the idea of abortions, don't have one.

If you want to control women, play the Sims for god's sake, then you can make them have as many babies as you like.

When it comes to real life, if you do not support the right of a woman to have an abortion, then you do not support the woman's rights over her own body, therefore you are anti-women. How could you be anything else?

Please answer the question vbd- you are one of the 'life begins when sperm meets egg' from you first post .

Why not have a think about what your answer might be if instead of 2 frozen embryos on the fridge there were 50. Who would you save then?

Assuming your answer is that you would save the child and not the 50 embryos ( i.e. that you are merely a hypocrite rather than a nutter)- then consider the fact that the irish constitution states that the embryos right to life is EQUAL to that of the Woman carrying it.

Have a good ol think about that

It also sort of implies that a woman has the same rights as a fridge (read: vessel)

"the irish constitution states that the embryos right to life is EQUAL to that of the Woman carrying it"

Good old eighth amendment, eh? It also has implications beyond just abortion in terms of maternity care, etc. Basically it's a giant clusterfuck that shouldn't be in our constitution at all.

So by the rules of the Irish constitution, you would have to save the 50 embryos, because there are more of them and each one is equal to the life of an already 'here' person? Wtf?!

"So by the rules of the Irish constitution, you would have to save the 50 embryos, because there are more of them and each one is equal to the life of an already 'here' person? Wtf?!"

There'd be a legal argument to be made for it, yes. Though there's been a lot of legal kerfuffling over whether "the unborn" as per the constitution includes pre-implantation embryos. There was an attempt to amend the constitution which was rejected in 2001 (I think) that actually specifically said that the constitutional protection was from implantation - it was basically campaigned against by almost everybody because the more virulent anti-choicers wanted it to specify "from conception" and pro-choicers objected to a lot of the wording, eg, it specifically excluded being suicidal as a reason for a therapeutic abortion to save the mother's life.

Obviously bubbleymummy my experience may not be entirely representative, though I have had a fair few conversations that suggest it's typicality but my child was adopted through a Catholic agency. The volunteers,the catholic agency SW were never heard of again once my child was adopted. Counselling,help with returning to education, photo exchanges were all forgotten about and when I fought to get the few photos the parents had promised I had to make a formal complaint about my Catholic SW before I was able to be given them despite those photos being in a file waiting to come to me. This was one incident and not the only one that told me exactly what the Catholic SW team really thought of a teenager in my position.

Now I work with care homes, foster carers and do a lot of coordination between volunteers and children in a care. My heavily catholic area has very few volunteers that consider themselves catholic and non that represent their faith as a group though we do have some other denominations who link with us. Their contribution cannot have any religious influence and they are happy with this. If only the placard waving bigots and their equivalents on forums concerned themselves with the livings children. And those in care in Ireland are particularly fucked by every measure.

Oh and Kew - yup fairly sure we are both pretty representative of both adult sides of the adoption triangle in seeing it as a least worst option for the child blooming marvellous though your family is IYSWIM.

vdbfamily - The whole argument about adoptions and how there are loads of kids waiting to be adopted does not really hold water because many childless couples want a new baby rather than a child who has often experienced childhood neglect and trauma. There are virtually no babies left to adopt other than those removed from mothers at birth who are considered unable to parent.

I'm really a bit confused about what your argument related to adoption and abortion actually is, but this thread is about Ireland and as I've posted above, domestic adoption is virtually unheard of in Ireland. There were 16 non-family adoptions in Ireland last year. Sixteen

I know none of the pro-lifers on this thread actually seem to want to address it but my post of Thu 05-Feb-15 09:48:20 cover the facts.

If a pregnancy is unwanted in Ireland and you're married then tough shit. You have to have the baby and ether look after it for life or condemn it to a life in care. Which makes a mockery of anyone trying to claim that its about protecting the rights of unborn children. It's entirely about protecting the "sanctity" of marriage.

Birobenny, the reason I am not answering the question is that in 2013, out of 200,000 abortions, only 73 of those cases were done on the grounds of danger to the life of the mother. I personally find the idea of 50 embryos in a freezer quite sickening but that is by the by. There are few pro-lifers who would say that if a womans life is genuinely on the line,she should continue with her pregnancy,( I have already given my view on that) but that is a medical decision and I repeat, 73 out of 200,000 does not suggest it is a common problem.
I would also add that I am not speaking from a place of ignorance here.I have had 2 pregnancies that were very bad timing for me in terms of my plans for how life would pan out. One of them was 3 months after the birth of my first. I went through the panic,horror,tears,how will we cope? etc and then having reconciled myself to the idea of just having to cope, I had a 12 week scan and found the babies heart had stopped and then had to go through a miscarriage and the sadness mixed with guilt that I was slightly relieved.
I personally value a babies life over my right to have things just as I want them.
I would also add that despite what I believe, I would never impose this on anyone else. My genuine desire is that as a nation we learn to respect that having sex with someone can have consequences and should not be undertaken lightly. That we educate our children to not use sex as a recreational activity that is undertaken lightly and often without protection. If people do have unprotected sex,the morning after pill is a way of preventing pregnancy that I do not have a problem with as it will prevent a pregnancy occurring but will not affect a foetus.
There are no easy solutions to any of this but we kid ourselves if we think that by killing off all unwanted babies in utero, we are doing anything to improve civilisation in any way.

Freaky cross-post national!

My son is indeed blooming marvelous - though to be fair he'd no doubt be every bit as marvelous if he were living with his birth family in safety and prosperity. I'm as certain as I can be that if his other mother had any other viable choice she would have taken it. It wasn't her fault those choices didn't exist or at least not in the moment she had to make a decision and she made the very best choice she could at the time. And I'm grateful to her for it, but I live with the fact that my joy was gained at the expense of another's pain, though I too had few choices and DS had no choice at all!

Like you I get very cross with those with no experience throwing around adoption like it a panacea for society's ills. As if it's a seemless transition from one parent to another which totally whitewashes the reality.

under the constitution the unborn child's right to life is equal to that of the person in which it happens to be in - the constitution is silent as to whether that right to life is equal to that of anyone else.

The point of the fridge thought experiment is that it demonstrates the fallacy of the anti choice argument that from conception the embryo had the same right to life as a born person. It shows that no one really thinks that -

I support abortion to term. That's not extreme. I just don't think women's rights over their own bodies end at some arbitrary point.
I've never understood anti-choicers who say that abortion is ok in cases of rape. Surely if you believe an embryo is a human with full rights it doesn't matter what made them that way? Can someone explain that please?

Just answer the question vbd

I assume by your last post you are also anti ivf?

Vbd I agree with you regarding sex ed, contraception, the morning after pill and attitudes towards sex. That all needs to change!
But even if/when it does people will still fall pregnant as no contraception is 100% and people will still make mistakes and women will sadly still be raped. We will still need abortion.

That we educate our children to not use sex as a recreational activity that is undertaken lightly and often without protection.

What a lot of nonsense. Sex can be a recreational activity and should be enjoyed as such, it's not just there for procreation, although evolution has made it pleasurable to ensure procreation. What we actually need in the UK are proper sex education lessons, lessons that state it's acceptable to have sex, it's important to utilise contraception, and actually it doesn't have to be part of a relationship if both parties choose that. We need to teach that forcing, coercion etc it wrong. We need to accept that our children have sex whether we like it or not, so we should arm them with all the information and protection possible. Until we start behaving like responsible adults with regard to sex education, nothing will change. I believe that contraception should be freely available in schools.
Having said all that, mistakes happen, contraception failures happen, mental and physical illnesses occur. Abortion is an absolute necessity and should be freely available to all who require it, when they require it. No judgements, no counting how many were due to this, that or the other.

We absolutely should be educating young people that sex is for recreation! Sex, if consenting and chosen and with the right person, should be fun and enjoyable and pleasurable.
Most of us are not having sex purely for procreation (and some of us not at all) and to tell young people this is bullshit.
Sex education needs to focus on consent, enthusiastic and willing consent, responsible protection from communicable diseases and unwanted pregnancy and pleasure and fun.
The amount of young people, and young women particularly, I work with in this area now who do not understand this is frightening.

The only reason I have mentioned adoption is because one of the arguments often thrown into this sort of debate is "well who is going to adopt all these unwanted babies, there are thousands of children in care that no-one wants"
That is not really a fair representation of the situation as there are lots of childless couples wanting to adopt babies. In saying this I am not belittling the fact that giving up a baby that you love but feel you cannot support would be heartbreaking. Maybe we need to be more creative about maybe fostering children for young mums but allowing them regular access until their life is in a place where they feel able to take on more of the care.Does that happen already?
I'd also like to say that I have always been interested in fostering/adoption but do not have a spareroom and 2 of our kids share a room and we cannot afford a bigger house. Therefore I am conscious that I am not able to do much to 'put my money where my mouth is' other than financially support organisations that are helping to support struggling mums.

Re IVF, I do not have a problem with an egg being removed,injected with a sperm and implanted in a womb but I feel very uncomfortable about the foetuses that are subsequently disposed of/not needed .
As I have said previously,I would love to live in a world where abortion was not needed.That every baby was conceived in love and wanted from the beginning. I can hold an ideal and at the same time know it will not happen. I therefore do not think it is hypocritical in those circumstances to fight for the best that we can get. The procedures used post 9 weeks for abortion IMO are unbelievably horrible. Therefore,whilst I would prefer no baby is aborted, I can also see that the more that are done at 9 weeks or earlier,the better, so this is what I would push for. We need to really look at the issues that a) cause unwanted pregnancies and b) cause delay in decision making.

To revert to the original op, I think Ireland may have stood more of a chance of the law changing if the law in England was less abused. Once there was a statute in place in the UK it slowly got eroded to the point of being abortion on demand.Doctors pre signed paperwork so that there did not need to be a discussion and the original idea of the law which was to preserve the life of the mother was lost totally. Obviously Ireland legislaters will have observed that and realise that once the floodgates open,there is no stopping.

I do think abortion is wrong in most circumstances, with the exception of pregnancies which are the result of rape,

If it is wrong..it is wrong. Not just when the mother "didn't bring it on herself by opening her legs".

I think position actually irritates me more than general anti-abortion stances because you clearly don't see it as "murder" or it wouldn't be trumped by rape. You see it as a punishment for having sex.

Anyway OP, yanbu