To assume if you are anti-abortion, you are...

[Hamandcheesebaguette]

...pro a full, complete and comprehensive government benefits system to fund mothers for at least the first 5 years of her child's life?

I'll tell my story, it's not particularly interesting or traumatic, but had I not had access to a safe abortion at 6 weeks then I honest to god don't know how i would have not have ended up homeless or starving.

When I was 21, I met a man. Same age as me. I was working in an airport, leaving for work at 2.45am and usually not getting home until after 4pm. My take home pay was around £980 per month. After rent in my 1 bedroom flat in the cheapest (and also not particularly pleasant) area in my expensive city, council tax, topped up my gas and electricity meters and phone bill (I didn't even have a TV!) I had £35 left to eat and pay for buses to work for the rest of the month. After only knowing this man for 6 weeks, I found out I was pregnant. I was on the pill, maybe it failed, maybe I had missed a couple, I don't know.

Should I have had that baby... how in the hell would I have been able to provide anything for it on that wage? Oh wait, I wouldn't have had a wage at all bevause I wouldn't have had anybody to care for my baby whilst I was working full time and leaving for work in the middle of the night.

So I assume, if you are anti abortion, and I had had that baby, you also agree I should have been entitled to a reasonable council property (not covered in damp or mould or other H&S issues), my rent paid, my council tax paid, plus money provided for gas, electricity, food etc. Plus some furniture (as I always rented fully furnished and didn't have any furniture of my own at 21), a TV, broadband (or maybe I should have sat in with my baby with absolutely nothing except the walls to stare at...)

Plus possible full training paid for by the government when I could have gone back to work once this baby reached school age, as I wouldn't have been a very attractive job applicant by this point.

AIBU to assume this is tour stance if you insist I should have been forced to have been a mother when I didn't want to be one, couldn't afford to be one?

I do not support abortion , I do support full benefits for mothers and decent housing.
Can I ask in what year you were 21 op?

I can agree there is a big difference practically between smothering a newborn and a very early abortion, but I don't agree that this makes much moral difference, even less so in a late abortion.

There is a massive difference morally between smothering a newborn and having an early abortion. They are not even close to being the same thing.

@auntieaunt, is an abortion at 12 weeks really different to one done at 24 weeks? The end result is the same?

I think lowering the cut off to 12 weeks would pressure women to rush their decision, though saying that in 2016 in England and Wales 81% of abortions were done between 3 - 9 weeks, 11% between 10 - 12 weeks, 7% 13 - 19 weeks, and 2% over 20 weeks. So the majority are done 'early'.

I don't care if the gestation is 2 weeks or 20 weeks

I support abortion because our society deems in neccessary to do so.
However I believe that abortion is murder and a shit decision for anybody to have to make.
Women have to make it because our society does not financially, practically or emotionally support women to habe everu child they may conceive.
This would be wholly different were it men who became pregnant.
Abortion is I believe a component of the patriarchy rather than the liberation of women's bodies and/or rights.

I support women's choice to have abortions because often it really is their only choice. That is the fault of our society.

I'm ideologically pro life but pro choice for reasons of practicality.

A close friend is aGP and told me the majority of women he refers for terminations are in their 30s, in steady relationships and already have at least one child. He said he frequently refers women who get pregnant very quickly after child birth (when they are extremely fertile) , because it is not practical for them to have a second baby so soon. Benefits wouldn’t help them

it boils down to whether you consider an early fetus truly a baby. if you don't then there is no reason to risk your health, or enjoy sex less on the off chance that one method will fail, when in a secure relationship.

There are contraceptive methods available that do not risk your health or impede enjoyment of sex, e.g. condoms, copper coil, pull out method or even NFP which can be combined in any possible combination with any other hormonal or non-hormonal contraception. I think most people who don’t want to chance a pregnancy will ensure they don’t get pregnant. Not using contraception correctly as in OP’s case shows she and her partner were not diligent in that regard.

I'm pro choice. As in, I don't believe in telling anyone else what to do with their body. It doesn't mean I'm pro abortion.

It must be a shitty decision to have to make, and I don't believe that anyone pushing their own views on someone else is morally correct.

One of the pro lifers I know is a sanctimonious cunt disguised as a concerned Catholic.

Forced birthers are, without exception, woman-hating scum. They are people who don't want women to be considered fully human - they regard women as walking incubators, and want all the choices about when to have children, how many to have, etc, to be in the hands of men.
It's woman-hating foetus-worshippers who are frequently behind all these scaremongering campaigns about what women should/shouldn't eat or drink or do while pregnant, as well. Again, it's not about public health, it's about keeping women under male control.
And when these shitstains bang on about the importance of heterosexual marriage - or suggest that an unexpected pregnancy should mean the couple just get married sooner - that's about keeping women under male control, as well.

The whole bundle of bullshit is driven by spiteful terror - that women, allowed autonomy, will refuse to have children, will refuse to do all the shitwork, will refuse to have less money, less privilege, less status...Whereas the truth is that many women do want to have children, are happy to have longterm relationships with men as long as those men are prepared to be partners rather than see themselves as owners.

it's a miracle any of us is here though.

a million sperm in any one ejaculation? is that about right? We could all be at least half different. Or the blastocast could not have implanted.

anybody who is here could easily not be here.

It is indeed!

Lower limit for 'normal' sperm count is 15m sperm per ml (but that's the lower limit - DH had 168m per ml, for example)

Average of a few ml per ejaculation.

However 'normal' morphology (the % of sperm that aren't duff swimmers) is only 4% normal forms. It's entirely average to have 96% mutant sperm that aren't capable of fertilising an egg

Add to that motility - normal motility (how fast they swim in the right direction) is around 40-50% - I can't remember exactly

So out of one ejaculation of 60m sperm, a healthy fertile male will have about 250,000 sperm able to fertilise an egg

Most won't make it to the fallopian tube, so it's really very much survival of the fittest

There's a max of 5-6, 7 days absolutely tops that a woman can get pregnant in any one month.

Then even if the egg fertilises, by the time a woman is 30, only about half of her eggs will be chromosomally normal and have the potential to make a human

Once you're 40 that drops to 10% of her eggs

The reason young women and girls are so much more likely to get pregnant is because a greater % of their eggs will be viable

The monthly chance of conceiving naturally if a woman is 18-25 in a given month is 20-25%

By the time that woman is 36-40 that can drop to 10-15%

As humans we are amongst the least efficient at reproduction in the animal kingdom. So yes it is a miracle that any of us are here at all!

(I'm infertile so unfortunately human conception is a bit of a specialist subject. I'm entirely pro choice, no one should have to go through forced birth for an unwanted child )

I'm ideologically pro life but pro choice for reasons of practicality

Your position is what I would call the pragmatically illogical, or indeed illogically pragmatic, one.

It avoids the extremes of abortion is always wrong at one end and "bodily autonomy- abortion to term" at the other.

The end result of your position is exactly the same as the bodily autonomy argument but acknowledges there was a potential life which has gone. Perhaps it is hypocritical of us but it is a line of thinking I find easier to reconcile- abortion is the least bad of the 2 options. It is not a stance which meets with much approval on MN (although there was an FWR thread a while back where several posters took this line)

Like you I am pro choice for practical reasons. I do not support any restrictions on the availability of abortion in mainland UK or a reduction from 24 weeks. They might as well get rid of the 2 doctor rule- it is a rubber stamping exercise.

I though that the father only had parental responsibility if he was named on the birth certificate? Of course correct me if I'm wrong

Both parents have a duty to support their children. The fact an unmarried father might refuse to be named (or for that matter the mother refuses to allow him to be named) makes no difference to that obligation.

freezerfoodyum

I am pro-choice but I don't agree with the OP on the other issue she is talking about. My support for a woman's right to choose is whole-hearted.

Totally agree w you. I have never had an abortion but I’m sure I would have if I’d got pregnant by accident under certain circumstances. I’m sure it’s 100% harder emotionally to give up a full-term baby for adoption than have an early termination. No-one enters into these decisions lightly but sometimes you have to do what’s best for everyone. No-one asks to be born do they and you have to give that baby the best you can offer and in some cases that’s not to be born at all.

One of my absolute hates in the abortion discussion, and one that is so prevalent on this thread, is the “you made your bed you lie in it” attitude to women. If the foetus is the product of rape or incest then a termination is fine but not if the woman has had consentual sex. So actually it’s nothing to do with the “sanctity of life” just about the circumstances of pregnancy. Hypocrisy at its finest.

Instad of fighting in pro-choice/pro-life camps, we should all be fighting for a world where abortion IS NOT NEEDED. Where there is no rape, no sexual abuse, adequate access to education and contraception accross the world and enough financial, emotional and physical support for women who do have children

OK say we have that utopia, what about feotal abnormality, something that will not allow the child to live outside the uterus. What about those pregnancies?

What about toxic pregnancies where the woman carrying is literally being killed by her pregnancy?

What about the harm that happens to pregnant women? If you are lucky you end up with a few stretch marks and a couple of stitches, but you can end up with life altering conditions. 1 in 1000 pregnancies result in the mother developing a cardiomyopathy.

Instad of fighting in pro-choice/pro-life camps, we should all be fighting for a world where abortion IS NOT NEEDED. Where there is no rape, no sexual abuse, adequate access to education and contraception accross the world and enough financial, emotional and physical support for women who do have children

There is also the straight-up 'don't want to be pregnant' argument. The right to decide whether you want to be pregnant isn't dependent on conditions in the world around you; it's a right.

I have similar views to a couple of other posters on this thread, I support access to safe abortions but I wouldn't have one myself and I would like to see fewer abortions happen because I believe it's a life.

I am in favour of a generous and comprehensive benefits system (guaranteed minimum income or citizens wage).

Except the problem with that argument boopsy is that a woman who has an abortion is very much dealing with the consequences. That's literally what she is doing. Women don't actually have a choice not to deal with the consequences when we get pregnant, whereas men have the ability to wash their hands of the whole thing. A pregnant woman is going to have an abortion, a miscarriage or give birth. Good luck not involving yourself in any of those things.

And sex only for procreation purposes is such a stupid and unrealistic suggestion that it doesn't deserve any engagement at all.

In terms of the consequences of PIV sex, men and women both risk certain consequences when they have it, and they risk these consequences whether they like it or not, and whether they use contraception or not.

Women risk being pregnant, which is in itself more dangerous than not being pregnant, and therefore having to have one of an abortion, miscarriage or a baby. You consent to that risk when you have sex: you don't consent to automatically carrying a pregnancy to term. We get all of the risks and because of this we also get all the decision making rights.

Men risk getting their partner pregnant, and then of not being able to decide what happens next but nonetheless having to deal with the consequences. They consent to that risk when they have sex. They get none of the risks and because of this they get none of the decision making rights.

This shit is all fairly basic. Men and women have different apparatus thus different risks when they have sex.

I am definately pro choice, but it would take very extreme circumstances for me to have an abortion. This is probably coloured by my own experiences of being involved in termination clinics through work.

I personally think that their should be greater penalties for absent fathers. Child support should be a higher percentage of income than it currently is and it should not go down if the father chooses to have more children. Money should be taken at source, like tax is and dividends etc should be counted as well. There should be greater penalties for those that don’t pay and a running debt. In an ideal world countries should work together to force child support if the father chooses to go abroad. But the misogynistic government doesn’t seem interested.

For whoever asked, I was 21 in 2011.

And whilst I honestly can't remember whether my pill had failed, or if I had forgotten a couple the fact is, to be honest, I was a little bit stupid at 21. As are lots and lots of 21 year olds now! There often seems to be people on MN who make out like they are, and have always been absolutely perfect, and have never made bad choices, mistakes or reckless decisions. I'm not proud of who I was then, but I'm certainly not alone. I used to drink until I was sick quite often, snog random men in clubs, walk home carrying my heels at 5am etc. None of those things I would do now because I have matured and grown a degree of sensible-ness. And I am not alone in this by any stretch of the imagination. For what it's worth, I have not missed a single pill since then however, if it did fail now, I might do the same thing again, or I might not I don't know.

My mum was basically me at 21 and she chose to keep me. She's been an amazing mum but she's had a very hard life... reliant on benefits for quite a while as a single mum (both dads disappearing completely of the face of the earth practically) learninf to feed me (and my brother) on £7 a week, and going without some basic essentials so I could attend my karate lessons every week etc.

But my mother was also called scum for being reliant on the benefit system, told to go out and get a job etc... and I just wondered if these people who think that she shouldn't have got the benefits she did, she should have aborted us instead?

The thing is, you can sit there until you're blue in the face saying don't have sex, double up contraception etc but that is just not the reality of the society we live in.. even look at the levels of STIs to show how some people, unfortunately just do not understand the consequences of "having fun" so to speak, which again, is something that is common in the younger demographic.

Hamandcheesebaguette

I did those things too, OP, but they were my responsibility, nobody else's.

I agree to a certain extent, which is one if the many reasons why I chose what I did. Just all the talk recently made me wonder what these anti abortionists think I should have done is all