Tired of the pro-choice lie

[Honesting]

I keep seeing people bring this up again, especially after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, that he once said if his 10-year-old daughter became pregnant through rape he’d insist she carry the baby. People call it misogynistic and vile. To be clear, that’s not my view and I’m not here to argue the pro-life case.

I actually have mixed feelings about abortion. I'm okay with the MAP and not okay with abortion up to the point of delivery. Where to draw the line is something I haven't decided yet.

What I do want to say is that it’s dishonest to pretend CK's position comes from hatred of women. The pro-life stance is very consistent and, internally, very coherent. If you genuinely believe an unborn child is a human being with rights, then ending its life is always wrong, no matter how it was conceived. We’d never allow a raped woman to kill her newborn, even if it was the product of rape. So if you see the foetus as having equal rights, then by that same logic, it shouldn’t matter whether conception was through rape.

I know the other side, and I understand it. I’m not dismissing the complexities. But the idea that the pro life argument is born of misogyny is simply false. It comes from a clear and reasonable moral framework: once human life begins, it carries human rights.

An evidence review commissioned by Centre for Women’s Justice has found that children born as a result of rape are at risk of suffering serious and long-term harm due to the distressing circumstances of their birth, from infancy well into later life.

https://www.centreforwomensjustice.org.uk/news/2022/8/15/daisys-law-new-research-commissioned-by-centre-for-womens-justice-demonstrates-why-children-born-from-rape-should-be-recognised-as-victims-in-law

You can only think that if you believe raising children is low status

I don’t think it is, and CK didn’t either

It comes from a clear and reasonable moral framework: once human life begins, it carries human rights.

Human life begins at birth. The point at which a human can exist autonomously of it's mother's body @Honesting.

I don’t think you’ve thought this through….

It's the 'submit to your husband and accept he's in charge' bit that tells me what he thinks about women's status compared to men. Not childrearing. The bit where he explicitly tells women that men should be in control of them!

You can support guns and not condone murder though for example if I was faced with someone trying to take my life you can bet my final moments will be wishing for a gun

It is misogyny because it is the only option of value you recognise for women

if raising children makes women so happy why are there so many women raising children who are unhappy?

You’re losing this argument quite stunningly. No amount of deflecting will change that.

But luckily there is a solution that protects foetuses and women. The most pro life thing we can do is chemically castrate all men and prevent unwanted pregnancy and therefore prevent abortions. Once a man finds a woman willing to procreated he can have his boner back. You must agree that if prolife is the most important stance, this is the only way.

I'm not sure he believed women were lower than men just different life roles man has a role woman has a role its a very ridged and backwards view in my opinion but it works for some people

You still haven’t told me why you don’t support forced vasectomies?

life couldn’t then be created and the issue does not arise. Why would you not do that? Vasectomies have FAR FAR FAR less long term
impact than giving birth. Sounds like the ideal
solution to your concerns that are being driven by your morality and firm ethical convictions no?

Handmaids Tail becoming live

Sorry that was in regards to the statement about forcing his hypothetically pregnant child to give birth to her rapists baby.

After her body is violated by a rapist, he would then force her through a physically difficult pregnancy and the mental and emotional torture of being pregnant and giving birth to a human reminder of the sexual assault.

Does she not have a right to her own body to avoid all of that? Is it not more important to look after the person that already exists over the small section of cells within her body that can't sustain themselves without her?

He said women should submit to their husbands. He said men should be in charge of their wives. That's not 'different life roles' - that is men being given power over women.

That's the thing. I understand hamstersarse has adopted family members, and that's a wonderful thing, if only that could always be the outcome. But the reality is that esp if a child has complex needs, it may be very hard to find people to adopt.

You can't force adoption, and a lot of adopted children criticise the narrative some pro life adoption agencies present that it's a automatic solution to the problem of infertility (esp if they don't agree w IVF, as many US evangelicals don't). Fwiw, many adoptees are at least somewhat pro-choice.

So don’t have one if you don’t want one. Trust women to make the right decision for them.

Unless you’re a lawmaker, I don’t see what it’s got to do with you. Or are you standing up for the bunch of cells?

How often do we hear that people shouldn’t have babies they can’t afford? If people accidentally get pregnant and can’t afford baby should they be forced into poverty? Maybe one extra child will mean they can’t afford to work if the cost of childcare becomes too much. You happy to pay her more in benefits?

We should be careful to not talk as if a child born of rape has no chance of a happy life, and is automatically at risk of teerible trauma. I know that isn't what you meant, but I thjk we should phrase carefully.Their mother may decide to raise them and good may come out of the horrific situation. Or they may be adopted and not know how they were conceived.

Children conceived by rape now I think are recognised as extra victims here? We must acknowledge the harm, but also be careful to acknowledge that many are able to lead happy lives.

This is NOT saying a rape victim should not abort bc hee child could be happy. It should be totally her decision.

Simply in terms of thr rationality of your OP @Honesting, it is built on a false premise and is therefore an unsound argument.

There is no equivalence between a mother killing a newborn baby and a woman having an abortion because the baby is able to survive without requiring anything further from the woman if she chooses to have nothing further to do with it. She is entitled to just step away.

The actual ethical equivalent would be if someone is taken against their will, and unconsentingly hooked up via tubes etc to an unconscious patient who has missing vital organs, and the unwilling healthy person is therefore being enforced and imprisoned to being a living life-support machine for this other individual, their kidneys, liver and lungs doing double duty to keep the other individual alve. In that (very much sci-fi) scenario it is true that some people might choose from compassion to grant consent retrospectively at the expense of their own health and wellbeing, but anyone who does not choose that, and who rips out thr tubes and escapes that imprisonment, does not commit murder or any other crime desipte that the patient will die in consequence, because their right to bodily autonomy is supreme and cannot be outweighed by the best interests of another individual. That is universal human rights law and cannot be disagreed with unless women are less than fully human, and that is why the so called "pro life" (more accurately "forced birth" position is misogyny.

A truely pro-life position without misogyny would be promoting all the policies which would cut abortion to a fraction of its current level:

• Massive investment in sex ed services for young people.
• Massive investment in better contraception options that don't damage women's health or disrupt an enjoyable sex life.
• Easy and free contraception.
• Massive investment in benefits and services for new mothers so that no one needs to fear falling into poverty if they keep the pregnancy.
• Strengthened rights to paid maternity leave and support for either choosing to return to work or not, with neither choice being forced financially
• benefit and support structures that guarantee to eliminate childhood poverty

90% of abortions would be unnecessary with these things in place, and the cost of offering them is well worth it to anyone whose anti-abortion stance is genuinely about caring for children rather than subjugating women.

hamstersarse is not a man- afaik? We shouldn't say someone is a man bc we disagree or find their position bad for women.

Op, a very difficult question for you :

IF you see the foetus & mother's lives are equivalent, would you think there should be any circumstance in which a woman who had an abortion should be prosecuted for murder?

so this is about redistribution of babies?

Some women want babies but can't have them, some fall pregnant when they don't want it. Let's force the latter to give birth and give their babies to the former?

What if former feel cheated and still want own children? no IVF for them, they should be grateful for "second hand" babies.

Gosh, people, are we really having this discussion in the UK in 2025???

Not to mention the small number of gay couples who exist. But ofc CK would not have agreed w that, since he said gay relationships were like 'an alcohol or drug addiction'.

I'm trying hard to understand - these pro-lifers, are they British women living here in the UK? or is this an army of trolls trying to influence support for the likes of TR, Farage etc?

It's not about raising children in my view. I object to his comments, made multiple times in multiple arenas that wives should 'submit' to their husbands.

I know quite well that conservative Christians argue that the wife submitting doesn't mean she's unequal.

But I don't buy that one little bit. Anymore than I buy it when women who wear the burka (less than 1% of UK women whatever CK said when he visited this 'third-world hellhole') or sell sex say that's it's not degrading and doesn't devalue women.

In the case of Charlie Kirk and the US right it’s not consistent though.

Charlie himself said that unnecessary deaths (gun shootings) are the unfortunate sacrifice for freedom. (Ie. Their right to protect themself from a tyrannical government).

Exactly the same can be said of abortion. That ending a pregnancy (a potential future human life) is an unfortunate sacrifice for women’s freedom.

I don’t know if it’s misogyny or not. But the idea that it’s ok for children to get slaughtered regularly in schools is an acceptable price they must pay to ensure a bunch of middle aged blokes can be armed to the T in preparedness against a potential hypothetical tyrannical government.

Vs it is absolutely not ok for a women to artificially induce an often natural process of miscarriage to a collection of cells is a completely unacceptable price to pay for women’s actual freedom and autonomy here and now. Are completely inconsistent views. This is not coherent thinking really.

They value hypotheticals or potential as more important than actual reality and lives here and now. And they are the only western country which does so. So that part is consistent. It’s a unique inverse of most other western civilisations value set. It’s really strange.

There are pro life British women, religious and otherwise. I read in the 2014 Guardian women are more likely than men to be pro life. We shouldn't automatically dismiss them as US, tho there is def a lot of that influence on the internet esp rn.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=www.theguardian.com/science/the-lay-scientist/2014/apr/30/why-are-women-more-opposed-to-abortion&ved=2ahUKEwjz1OVrtmPAxVwd0EAHbJzOx0QFnoECCkQAQ&usg=AOvVaw02fHYWRtXiKa4JiMavglDs