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.

“Doesn’t have equal rights because it needs its mother”

erm, you do know newborns need their mother to survive, to feed them?

Obviously, you’ll say they can be bottle fed. Yes, now they can. That’s very recent, and artificial. A newborn cannot survive on its own for many years.

The only argument for pro choice people is the ‘my body, my choice’. Yet, that argument denies biological reality…women are the ones carrying every single baby. Their bodies have a unique function. So it’s never just ‘my body’ in the case of a pregnancy, it just isn’t. You can repeat the mantra that women matter more, but….its not particularly convincing. and seems a bit…selfish?

You DO recognise some difference surely? Bc you would want a doctor to save the mother if giving birth would be fatal? So in that sense at least, you would agree women are more important?

Women do own their bodies, they're not just instruments of a function.

I suppose pro lifers would say that if men could get pregnant they'd say the same. Pigs 🐖 might fly...Until then, I feel confident in saying that many pro lifers are misogynistic to some degree, but many are not.

I’ve never ever said I would force women to give birth - I’ve said the opposite.

It is really tedious when people deliberately misrepresent what you say, really childish

Are US libertarians anti abortion? My impression online was they were often edgelord types who thought sex work was good & tech expansion also always good, also pro surrogacy. They didn't seem particularly anti-abortion.

I know there is a set of right libertarians who are more socially conservative though.

You know what people mean, that you would ban most abortion so that most women who wanted one wouldn't be able to have one.

Of course women at risk of death should be saved. I’ve never said anything other,

It doesn’t actually make them more ‘important’ though, it is just obvious pragmatism. Lose one or lose both?

Clearly for some posters, the fact that the maternal mortality rate increases so much when abortion is banned - clearly demonstrated by comparing data from US States pre and post abortion bans and also with states that do not ban abortion -- is just the price we pay for saving all those foetuses. For you, women's deaths matter less.

I want to try to explain why these women do matter, but beware, it's going to require empathy and we know how Kirk felt about that.

Try to understand that before modern medicine, pregnancy and birth killed a lot of women and infants. When we deny women modern medicine, they die. So, you ban abortion. Now a woman who miscarries fears that if she seeks medical attention, she may be accused of attempting to induce an illegal abortion. Have a look at El Salvador where women are jailed for miscarriages and stillbirths. So she stays home and miscarries in private. Only it's a complicated miscarriage, she suffers in agony until it's too late and she goes into septic shock and dies.

Or else a woman does seek medical attention. It's an ectopic pregnancy, it isn't viable, but still the doctors won't intervene. They don't want to be accused of carrying out an abortion. They watch her haemorrhage to death.

These things happen when you ban abortion. You can say, oh well we want exemptions in those cases, but they still happen in practice. And twice as many women are dying in Texas due to pregnancy and birth than died before the abortion ban.

These women could be you. They could be your wife. Your sister. Your friend. Your mother. They leave behind grieving families and motherless children.

A foetus does not.

If you value the theoretical life of a foetus over those living, breathing women, you are a misogynist.

legal, safe and rare is my position

I think there are too many, it’s too casual, and it’s doing something to us that I can’t articulate but it’s something around the word callous.

The callousness is those in states where abortions are banned and women die.

I know you don't WANT women to die and you'd like them to be saved. But restricting women's access to abortion kills women even if you don't like that consequence and wish it wasn't true.

I wish we lived in a world where rape never happens, and pregnancy is safe and straightforward for every woman. We don't, so there is no point arguing for an abortion policy based on that. In the real world, the harm to women from restricting access to abortion is real and it is great. The casual cruelty comes from men like Kirk who can treat the idea of unwanted pregnancy as theoretical because it will never be him.

It doesn’t actually make them more ‘important’ though, it is just obvious pragmatism. Lose one or lose both?

And you think it's abortion making people callous.

Well you don’t know many people then as there are absolutely people who hurt women like this. There are women dying in America for being denied an abortion - and probably all over the world. Just google ’women denied abortion care and dying’ and you’ll find plenty of examples.

I am vehemently, passionately pro choice both theoretically and personally. But even if I wasn’t, the issue is that once you deny women’s rights over their own body in one scenario, you open the gates to denying them so much more. Women’s lives have been immeasurably better in the last 20 years than in the last 20 decades and a huge part of that is the access to reliable and safe birth control of all sorts.

Great. And how much time and effort do you spend arguing for the policies that would make it rare?

• 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

Or is the time and attention that you spend on this topic focussed mainly on criticising the women who are having to make their choices in the context of all the above not having happened?

Obvious pragmatism...charming.

What if the mother would die, but you knew you could save the baby? Would you choose baby or mother?

There ARE consistent pro life positions but he didn't hold one. Consistent pro life positions are anti abortion for any reason, anti war (and prepared to take prison for conscientious objection), anti gun, and anti euthanasia. It's not a stance a share but it is a consistent one. But Charlie Kirk literally said that a certain number of shooting deaths are acceptable to protect the right to bear arms so that's a different thing altogether.

The tricky thing with only allowing abortion if the mothers life is at risk is that it's not always a straightforward thing to define. What level of risk counts? All women are more at risk from death when pregnant compared with not being pregnant. How imminent does the risk have to be?

Looking at real life cases it is very difficult for doctors to decide where the acceptable level of risk lies.

No one is doing anything to you. If you don’t want one, don’t have one.

@hamstersarse, I do somewhat agree. But otoh is this stacking up w the facts? Most women who have them are not Julie Burchills using them as contraception. The most common reason is lack of finances, for one.

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/reasons-for-abortions#:~:text=Financial%20circumstances,by%20texting%20START%20to%2088788

Most women do take abortion seriously.

If you're thinking of stuff like indiscriminately saying the foetus is a 'clump of cells' (no matter how far on', doesn't have 'spark of life', or is a parasite, or gross stuff like Shout Your Abortion or abortion up to birth, I would agree. But those are fringe groups.

I see you're probs thinking of decrim. I thunk most wimen feel v uneasy about late term abortion , and it's not common at all. I suspect the case of the jailed mother played some part

It's really worth thinking about why it's so important to @Honesting and @hamstersarse to insist that anti-abortionists and Kirk are not misogynistic.

Both these posters carefully distance themselves from the viewpoint they're advocating. They caveat it and make it more palatable by saying they themselves aren't anti-abortion, they just for some reason think it's of vital importance that no one associates the removal of women's rights with misogyny.

They're opening the door. They want views like Kirk's to be considered mainstream. They want to appeal to the centre, to the moderates and they need to hide the poisonous, rotten core of the movement. So they won't quite argue for a ban on abortion, but they'll keep trying to tell us that right wing fundamentalist evangelicals aren't misogynists and aren't a threat to women.

But women have already lost their rights, their freedom and in some cases their lives thanks to the success of the anti abortionist cause in America. It can spread further and it can even come here, if we aren't very vigilant in our protection of our hard-won rights.

This is an entirely misogynist movement and we all need to look very hard at those who want to deny it.

I just want to know why I’m not allowed bodily autonomy.

As a rape survivor, that’s my line in the sand.

Oh absolutely.

its about normalising this extreme dynamic between men and women and putting a very narrow band of religion into public and political life. Its about control, and control of women. To that end that Kirk guy (who has no baring on my life, hadn’t heard of him until the press made it news) is going to be very useful in death, perhaps more-so than in life to these extremists.

but to paraphrase a previous poster, mass shooter events are vanishingly rare among gun owners. So this news event really shouldn’t matter.

and certainly shouldn’t be the basis for law reform in the more civilised western countries. No matter how much they flood our socials and newscycle with this kinda crap.

That doesn’t make sense? If the mother is dying but you could save the baby…why wouldn’t you?

Absolutely this! Agree with every word.

This is how it starts, always. Remember the days in very recent past when admitting being Reform supported would be a social suicide, at least here on MN? this all started with "what about" etc and it's mainstream now.

This horrible brainwashing always starts with posts like this on SM.
Let's see it for what it is

Thank you for telling me what I think

The problem you have is it is a misrepresentation of what I think. You can’t have reasonable debate if you constantly misrepresent arguments and positions

@hamstersarse why do you bnot allow me bodily autonomy? Why would I have to carry and birth my rapists baby?