To ask if anybody on here is pro-life?

[Teeandee]

When it comes to the subject of abortion I've noticed a high number of people on here are very pro-choice and support abortion. Is there anybody else, like me, who doesn't?

Everybody is entitled to their opinion of course and I don't think badly of anybody who has had a termination and I don't judge. It's only my personal outlook and life experiences that shape my view and was wondering if I really am in the minority here?

guacatrole

I said ON THIS SITE! Not outside clinics never been to one couldn't tell you what it's like.

I support the decision to abort for any reason whatsoever. I'm so glad to live in a country where this is legal and accepted.

A woman should be able to terminate a pregnancy and be treated with respect, not pity or judgement for making the right choice for themselves.

It's no one else's business to judge.

I don’t think anyone is truly pro choice because everyone has their limit at which point they would feel an abortion was unacceptable. E.g. how many people would genuinely not bat an eyelid at someone terminating a pregnancy because the baby was the wrong sex for instance. That doesn’t make you pro life either but truth is that everyone has their cutoff points. Otherwise the pro choice alliance would be supporting terminations to term regardless of the circumstances and for the most part, they’re not.

Personally I believe a woman should be able to have a termination up to twelve weeks and that includes babies with disabilities. I do not support any law which states that a baby with disabilities can be terminated to term when otherwise non disabled children cannot. It sets the division between disabled and non disabled in which disabled is considered to be a second class option firmly in place before those babies are even born and it’s hideous. My only exception to this would be conditions which are incompatible with life, but not downs, not club foot, not any other disability. When you fall pregnant you do so in the knowledge that you could give birth to a child with disabilities, and those disabilities may not be diagnoseable and people wouldn’t support someone’s right to kill a baby if it were born with a disability or even to give it up for adoption (go and look up Julia Hollander on here as an example of that,) if you decide to have a baby you don’t get to decide to get rid of it if it doesn’t suit your ideal of what it should be and then have more babies until you get what you want.

And for the people who will say “but some women won’t find out until past twelve weeks that they’re pregnant,” well that’s unfortunate. There is currently a cutoff point anyway and there will be someone who finds out past that cutoff point but for the most part there won’t.

TinklyLittleLaugh - that's awful! As far as I'm aware you can only legally object to taking part in treatment that results in termination. And then only as long as the woman isn't at serious risk by you doing so. So doing a scan after an abortion has taken place is not in that category; I wouldn't have a problem doing that anyway but even if the sonographer did I don't think it was legal to refuse. At the very least she should have been able to see someone else straight away. I hope your friend complained.

I am pro choice, I don’t think I could have an abortion myself, but I do agree that they should be available to those who want or need them up to a certain number of weeks.

I can’t pretend that I am not internally frustrated with couples who are regularly lax with their contraception and then seek an abortion as a result though. I knew a girl at uni who would regularly have one night stands/short relationships (which is absolutely her prerogative) but wasn’t on the pill and didn’t use condoms because she ‘didn’t like them’, and presumably none of the men that she was sleeping with were intelligent enough to insist on one either. Not only was she putting her health at risk, but she was obviously in danger of falling pregnant and given that she was not in a relationship and halfway through a degree I’m assuming if she had have done that pregnancy would have ended in an abortion. I think it’s attitudes like that that can cloud people's perception.

sconebonjovi, I am very pro life and have never supported abortion. However, I do not have any control over another woman's choice.

So those of you who would never have an abortion would not use the coil or the pill I presume?

I find it a very difficult subject. I've suffered a miscarriage; as a nurse I've seen abortion performed, seen miscarried foetuses, and it caused me great upset. I respect a woman's choice but can't help but feel very sad about that loss of life.
The rape/incest angle muddies my thoughts greatly and although I still feel very sad about the loss of life I think abortion is the best decision there.
What I can't get my head round is the slack with contraception, now's not a good time for us, have an abortion mentality.
So many of my patients struggled to conceive or couldn't conceive after having abortions in their teens/20s and it did make me wonder from a spiritual point of view if the two were related.
I'm a single mum and my ex wanted me to have an abortion so my view is skewed perhaps.
I personally view a child as a blessing and a gift but I appreciate not everyone does and it's a very personal decision.

I am 100% pro life. But I don't push my views on others - that is just my personal view.

Does anyone really use abortion as a means of contraception? I think not.

I’ve had a miscarriage at 17 weeks , an ectopic pregnancy that nearly killed me and a baby. I’ve also had an abortion that felt like a good choice..
I still think that we need to promote pregnancy and the right to life.

I think there’s a great deal of misogyny about denying how special pregnancy and unborn babies are. Men would love us to abort an awkward pregnancy without a backwards glance. Not that it matters if that’s how you feel but it’s easy to feel that convience is more important than life. Nice middle class girls still don’t have babies in their teens and twenties. And that’s not actually an attitude I want to promote.It should be up to the mothers feelings alone.

I am pro choice!
It's a woman's body and a woman's choice.

I have a complex heart condition and I do see parents considering terminations for the same condition but only the parents know what they can cope with.

As I have said before adoption isn't always the best outcome for the mother even in relinquished children.

So many of my patients struggled to conceive or couldn't conceive after having abortions in their teens/20s and it did make me wonder from a spiritual point of view if the two were related

So you’re a nurse, but you wonder if there’s a “karmic” aspect of infertility?

guacatrole

Women having to take boats to England to get end wanted pregnancies with fetuses that are dying inside of them is misogyny.

Yeah I know thanks my aunt had to do it many years ago for a very much wanted pregnancy. Don't need your pearls of wisdom thanks.

Firmly in the camp of, 'if you don't like abortion then don't have one'.

Find it abhorrent that people would seek/campaign to change the laws on this depending on what they themselves find acceptable.
For me it all hangs on bodily autonomy for women and is nothing to do with anyone else.

Summer gems. You know you can't go back in time, right?

I am RC and absolutely pro-choice.

I was the reason for and product of a shot gun wedding. My biological father was violent and my mum left him when I was less than a year old. She let me know constantly throughout my childhood that I was unwanted and that having me had totally ruined her life. My childhood was miserable. Having experienced that I know that abortion is not the worse thing you can do to an unwanted baby.

What I DO think (unpopular opinion warning) is that society as a whole has changed its view on sex since the advent of contraception.

Prior to the pill and because of a lack of reliable contraception a couple knew there was a chance that sex could result in pregnancy. And took steps to try to minimise the risks based on withdrawal, their cycle etc.

With contraception now presented as being so reliable, it almost seems like the act of sex is a stage removed from pregnancy. This does women a disservice because contraception ISN'T always reliable but there is little emphasis on doubling up on it.

So many of my patients struggled to conceive or couldn't conceive after having abortions in their teens/20s and it did make me wonder from a spiritual point of view if the two were related.

What about infertile people who never had an abortion? Did you ponder what that might be spiritually about?

@Userplusnumbers

I said THIS SITE, not THIS THREAD, it will defend though give it time. I have literally never been on a thread about abortion that doesn't end in a slagging match and I've been on here for years. Sure there had been some but I've never witnessed it.

This does women a disservice because contraception ISN'T always reliable but there is little emphasis on doubling up on it

I agree with that. A male GP asked me whether I was sure I wanted to bother with contraception as I have infertility

I was always, always pro-life and anti-abortion and that was fuelled by my Catholic upbringing, a sense of humanity, of right and wrong and because it took me 14 years to become a mother. I now have 2 children.

My youngest, Dd has just turned 12. Her father did not want her - "kill my half, then". I struggled with everything and spoke to my priest who gave me the phone number for pro-life whilst telling me that I had to make the right decision for me. I phoned the pro-life people and got an answerphone so, it was a dead end. I called the clinic to ask questions and got straight through to a cheery young woman who just wanted to book me in for the appointment. From that moment I had become pro-choice but, even now I think I'm still pro-life but, I had a mixed wash that got a hint of grey in it.

I think circumstances are a big factor for any woman's decision and I hope I never feel judgemental about a woman's reasons for choosing to terminate but, I do think it'll make my stomach knot just a little.

I genuinely don’t see it as a life being taken until the baby could survive if born and even then I'm not always against that

You could argue that no baby – or even a child up to maybe 4yo - could survive without adult intervention. Before birth, its needs are essentially to be successfully carried and nurtured in the uterus, and then, after birth, it has different basic needs, such as being fed, but they are still needs without the meeting of which the child will die.

Granted, after a child has been born, any adult can take on the job of keeping him/her alive whereas, before birth, it all falls to one person only.

Taken to the extreme, one could ask what is hugely different in principle between this and a severely physically and/or mentally disabled adult requiring 24/7 care – who may have no real apparent mental processing ability or understanding of the world. Is mandatory euthanasia in such cases so different, and, if not, why – apart from, again, the fact that caring for them can be done by any one of a large pool of able and qualified adults?

Without proposing taking anybody's rights or freedoms away, I don't think it can be a bad thing to rationally think through what is actually taking place and how significant and long-lasting the aftermath in many cases.

Abortion is a big deal and it helps nobody (least of all the pregnant woman in question) to treat it as a simple, uneventful routine action as if it were like taking paracetamol to get rid of an annoying headache.

ladyrenoir it’s not the same as murder. When you murder someone, you take a life away. A foetus doesn’t have a life, it hasn’t experienced the world and cannot think- it’s a bundle of cells.

But at what point can you categorically determine that a bundle of cells has transitioned to become a life? At five minutes before birth, a baby hasn't experienced the world, but not many people would be in favour of abortion during labour. How do you define ability to think – and do you distinguish between being able to think and any form of sentience?

I know that there are as many reasons for abortion as there are abortions themselves, and it’s not a decision that any woman makes lightly, but I think the fact that no woman who miscarries a much-wanted baby ever brushes it off as just losing a worthless bundle of cells (or will even commonly use the less loaded, more neutral term ‘foetus’) means that it can’t just be a simple case of a random bunch of cells with life-potential suddenly becoming a valuable life at any point other than at conception.

I feel very strongly against late abortions. For me the cut off would be some weeks befor a foetus is capable of independent life.16 weeks would be my upper limit.
Otherwise it all depends on the reasons and it isn’t up to me to speak for others.
Health of mother or child, rape of a young teen, these would be cases where I could agree with abortion. Late contraception or ‘oops didn’t mean to’ not so much.