to think they would feel differently if they had children?

[Violetbeauregardesgum]

Just reflecting that the three most vehemently pro-abortion, abortion on demand up till 40 weeks women I know are all child free. Was talking to one the other day and was taken aback by how uncompromising she was. The 32 week old baby that the woman was imprisoned for aborting was not a baby, all women have the right to end a pregnancy at any point.

I am pro choice but think the 24 week cut off is about right. AIBU to think they would feel differently if they had gone through a pregnancy to term themselves?

Most rape victims still manage to have terminations with 24 weeks with some very rare exceptions like severe mental health issues

But it's the mother who has to bear the emotional, hormonal and physical impacts of the pregnancy

And quite frankly in the UK given how shit CMS is its the woman who has to bear the brunt of the financial, emotional and physical upbringing of the child. And even if the man pays theres literally no way to force them to actually parent the child.

So you aren't punishing the mother and father. You are punishing the mother for not being "pure"

Because if you were interested in making men live with the impact of their mistakes you would be more interested in stopping men being able to evade their financial and parental responsibilities to the child, rather than fixating on policing womens behaviour. If we had a society where men actually stepped up, women would potentially have less abortions.

And how do you prove whether she's been raped or not?

Say you were responsible for coming up with a country's abortion law and you decide that it should be legal for a woman to have an abortion if she's been raped but not if she had consensual sex, how are you checking whether she has been raped or not?

But it's the same procedure. The same thing happens. So yeah, you are punishing the mother. It's like if I broke my arm because I was hit by a drunk driver I'd be treated, but would be refused treatment if I broke it BMXing because I'm the one who decided to do something potentially dangerous. That would be punishing me.

So how exactly do you prove contraceptive failure or rape?

Not the innocent unborn child’s fault*

That particular poster is saying abortion should ONLY be allowed in rape cases

Great question.

Yes, it's clear you're not a doctor, otherwise you'd know that a doctor can only determine a woman has been raped on specific circumstances and by doing an invasive medical test.

What a ridiculous analogy. An unwanted pregnancy isn’t the same as an injury from a car accident. We are talking about human life here.

It's not their fault that the mother was raped or the condom broke either.

And even then they would have to do it, like, before she's even had a shower, which means about two weeks before she would even miss her period and take a pregnancy test.

My argument wasn’t whether or not we can prove rape. Simply that, in such a situation, it makes more sense to carry out abortions.

Its not ridiculous and abortion is an abortion regardless of what led to the pregnancy in the first place. But you are saying that it should be allowed or not based on the circumstances of the conception, even though it is exactly the same thing. So you don't give a shiny shit about human life.

As I said before the whole argument is moot as even if society had a radical change of heart and decided abortion at any gestation for any reason was a great idea, there would be nobody to carry it out. Believing in this from a nice, clean distance is very very different to watching the 34 week baby on a screen sucking its thumb as you pass a needle into its heart and watch it stop beating, before delivering its body and seeing its tiny hands and face. In the same way most people who eat meat and have no moral issue with it would be horrified if they had to kill the cow/pig/sheep in question themselves.

I always think it’s quite indulgent to hold these sorts of views actually.

I did clarify, I wasn’t talking about rape victims or failed contraceptives in my original comment.

What is the difference between an abortion at 23 weeks 6 days and 24 weeks 1 day?

If (and I havent followed your posts so I don't know whether you are pro choice) you are pro choice up to 24 weeks and someone else is pro choice up to full term then surely the debate is where the line is, not if the line should exist?

If you are pro life then debating the line at all makes more sense

Do determine whether we can carry out an abortion due to rape, we first must determine whether rape has occurred.

And what did you mean by "I'm not a doctor" if you don't think that doctors can prove rape?

But the "unborn" is just as innocent regardless of how it was conceived.

If you are advocating for a law that only allows for abortions in the cases of rape and failed contraceptives then you are going to have to come up with some way to police it otherwise its pointless

Its the same as the guy in America saying an abortion didnt need to happen in an ectopic pregnancy because the foetus could just be implanted in the womb, when that medical procedure did not exist.

You cannot create a law for Doctors to follow that is impossible for them to stick to.

As I said before the whole argument is moot as even if society had a radical change of heart and decided abortion at any gestation for any reason was a great idea, there would be nobody to carry it out

That’s not why the argument is moot. It’s moot because, contrary to the popular belief amongst the religious right, there aren’t hordes of women getting to 30+ weeks pregnant and suddenly thinking “oh - can’t be arsed with this any more”. It’s a vanishingly small number of women who have late abortions, who are either enormously vulnerable (look at the Mayo case - a child herself) or who’ve had devastating news about the health of their unborn child.

Don’t extrapolate. So what if it’s done in the same procedure, doesn’t mean it’s okay to throw it around and be acceptable and available to anyone for “changing their mind,”
at whatever gestational stage without proper reason like medical benefit of mother or child. It’s clearly not a pleasant thing to do, regardless, which is why laws exist.

There's no such thing as "abortion at any stage of pregnancy"

At a certain point it's a stillborn baby instead.

It can’t be ‘moot because it only affects a small number of women’. That’s not what ‘moot’ means - it means uncertainty to the level which renders the topic pointless. It would only be moot if it would never be used at all.

But anyway, nobody actually answers how it would be practically enforced if legalised, given there would be virtually nobody to do it. And therefore why it should be legalised at all.

There is no difference, other than that we have to draw the line somewhere.

My personal view is that I am uncomfortable with it being as late as 24 weeks and the UK is a bit of an outlier in allowing abortions this late without a medical reason. But I think it's really important that women are able to access safe and legal abortions, and the number of women aborting healthy pregnancies at 23 weeks is really low, so I wouldn't campaign for the time limit to be shortened. Where I live the time limit is 14 weeks, which seems pretty short to me, so I guess my personal comfort level would be somewhere in between the two.

But I don't make the rules, and as many people have pointed out, it's all fairly arbitrary, but you have to draw the line somewhere. Unless you support a total ban on abortion or are advocating for there to be no restrictions at all and abortion to be available on demand even when the woman is already in labour, you must accept that we need to draw the line somewhere and the only question is where you draw that line.

That doesn't mean that a 23 week foetus is a clump of cells or a parasite and a 24 week foetus is a human being with rights. It just means a deadline is a deadline.

When I was at uni our essay deadlines were always at 12pm on a Friday. What's the difference between an essay I wrote and handed in at 11:59am and the same essay which I wrote and handed in at 12:03pm because my printer ran out of ink? It's the same essay. There is no difference except the fact that I missed the deadline.

So some countries think the appropriate cut off point is 24 weeks and some think it's 16 weeks and some think it's 12 weeks. Some countries such as Canada apparently think it's when the baby passes through the birth canal, and yet they can't find doctors to actually perform abortions at full term, and clearly if the baby has passed through the birth canal and you kill it, it's murder, even though it's exactly the same baby whose life you could have legally ended ten minutes ago. Just like the essay handed in three minutes after the deadline is the same essay you might have handed in a minute before the deadline, only now you fail.

If you think about it, the only countries whose abortion laws are genuinely logical are the ones with a total ban, because wherever you draw the line, the embryo/foetus/baby immediately before the cut off point is no different to the embryo/foetus/baby after the cut off point.

But unless you support a total ban, you have to make a somewhat arbitrary decision as to where that line should be drawn. And I think legal flexibility would be more harmful than legal certainty on this point. As I said in an earlier post, if a woman who is 20 weeks pregnant is dithering, it's kinder to focus her mind on the fact that she only has a couple of weeks left to make a decision and at the very least she needs to get booked in for a termination even if she changes her mind at the last minute than it is to let her think she can terminate at any time and then have her desperately searching for any doctor, anywhere in the country who will agree to end her healthy pregnancy at 38 weeks.