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.

I agree that in theory they are not sexist, but in practice the church in many, many cases put a heavier burden on women

BlueJuniper, what do you think of CantCall's excellent points about the difficulty with rape & damger to life exemptions?

It's also interesting that I've seen you, I think, rightly criticise the homophobia of Progress Pride flags, the threat to gay people TQ represents.
But otoh if you believe the Church's doctrine as you lay out, then presumably you don't think gay people should have full relationships, at least not including sex?

This! Can everyone not just live their lives by their own beliefs and mind their own bloody business when it comes to what others choose? If you don’t like abortion then don’t you have one. Simple.

Stop the lazy stereotyping, I agree with people like Michael Shellenberger that this century, for one, we are probably safe at least in terms of the overall Earth. Both issues need tp be addressed. I don't want poor people bearing the brunt of green technologies, nor do I want women pushed to bear kids they don't want.

Do you then want women made to have kids they don't want? I think it's better to help yhe women, many, who say they are having less than they want.

The foetus is always alive. But do you not see any difference between a 38week old, which would be barbaric, and a 2 week old?

I agree strongly with this, except that a lot of pro lifers DO strongly advocate child support etc. They're not all hypocritically ignoring men's role.

Child support is just one part of that picture though, and my point is that if you advocate for forced birth then you advocate for women's suffering - physical and mental all the way up to and including death. You might say oh also men should have to contribute a bit of money towards children they father, but it is not men's lives, careers and wellbeing on the line.

It was about ensuring you actually sired (yes I chose the old timey word deliberately) a child AND preserving the value of the “cattle”. History shows that clearly. Especially since the punishment for men was non existent(still is really) . Since stoning, shunning and forced imprisonment are frowned upon now , there’s just forced birth left. Because women MUST pay for their sins.

I think marraige is an institution for raising children, and helping each other get to heaven. The multiple partners (even if serially monogamous) outside marraige which heterosexual people have are on par with homosexual relations, it is sex outside marraige that is the issue and there is no special or additional objection to homosexuality. Which many in the church would argue is an act not a state of being. I see these teachings in much the same way as I do laws against assisted dying for example. They must remain prohibited but we must be merciful to those who fall foul of these laws (given appropriate circumstances). The reason is to preserve a culture that guards against the far graver evils of what happens when these cultural cooling rods are removed so to speak, you then have uncontrolled meltdown. In the case of sex, I believe we have all been told for a couple of decades now that it is harmless and safe and we should have as much of it as we please, the more the better. But we all know this is nonsense. The sexual revolution is leading us down a dark road, and I do believe being encouraged to tame our appetites is far better for us and our society than being told to have at it. Like guns, the technology that facilitates promiscuity has its own determinism, in a society that culturally cannot keep up with these developments. I think many of these demands for women's emancipation here are short sighted, and the greater cost beyond the imagination of most who call for them. This is a very poorly structured 4am ramble but I've been busy and didn't want to ignore your responses - I think above all, we need to remember that we exist within cultures, which probably shape us and our attitudes and perceptions more than we shape it.

I think the point here is the issue of slippery slopes... which has always been sneered at as an argument but at this stage is very clearly an iron law.

Yes, I personally think we should have 12 week abortion limit like most European countries. Instead we went from the highest to decriminalisation.

But it doesn't have to be a slippery slope, we're the only country doing that in Europe.

What is the reason people are having fewer kids? Are they not cultural, are they not the demands of parenting that didn't exist for my generation, my peers and I were left largely to our own devices, far less parental input was required or expected. But now it places an impossible burden on mothers and fathers. Because the way society is structured at the moment, children are nothing but a consumer good. A luxury. A massive liability. When we lived closer to our means of production, and owned them ourselves, children were an asset. I don't think any redistribution in our current economic system is going to improve matters. But it is interesting you believe so many wanted babies are going unborn. I'm not sure that is as true as you say it is, though it may be, and if it is, speaks to the persistence of human nature.

If people don't want children then they don't need to be having sex. And of course as we are talking about some ideal society here, culturally men would be held to far higher standards.

It will always be a slippery slope, given the entropic nature of any civilisation. Any technology which offers greater liberty will be embraced. Any temporary legal bulwarks put in place, will not hold.

I don't think promiscuity is good, of any kind. I don't think using contraception or having committed monogamous gay relationships are similarly dangerous at all.

Thank you for this reply,it was very kind of you when busy, and interesting to hear. I will reply more myself tomorrow.

So you think all other European countries are going to decriminalise abortion too? I doubt that.

If anything, I expect this decriminalisation will not hold long, especially as there's more evidence of foetal viability earlier on all the time.

Hmm, I think we agree. I certainly think a parenting culture where kids are far more supervised, walked everywhere etc is to blame much more than contraception.

Economics...I see what you mean but isn't it sad to essentially say that people don't want kids if they don't bring money in? I do agree that kids being an economic liability is part of the issue.

There have been quite a few surveys on mothers in many places having fewer than they wanted. Wil find - other issues were lack of suitable men & starting at too late age.

People who don't want kids shouldn't have sex? That seems a bit harsh. I guess they could have non-reproductive forms of sex, but otoh I understand that Catholicism bans this unless it's foreplay leading to PIV...

I understand there is no special objection to homosexuality but functionally it means that straight people can have a sanctioned relationship but gay people have no option but to remain celibate. (I understand a minor movement about 10 years ago said gay Catholics could have a partner but just no sex, but this was generally frowned on)

I understand the church's claim 'homosexuality is an action not a state of being' but it seems disingenuous. Someone can refrain from sex (& relationships- reducing it to sex solely is disrespectful) but their attractions, whatever they are, still exist.

What do you think of couples who voluntarily remain childless? Are they disrespecting marriage?

I think complete sovereignty of the will is where we are heading and is ultimately the principle which is at the heart of every progressive argument.

Again, technology will offer us more options to allow us to realise this, in vitro gestation might take over, but we are legalising the killing of our elderly, poor and weak now, nobody is really going to care about a feotus if its unwanted, are they? Reading the news over the last few days women won't be required for procreation at all in the future. So there we are, fully emancipated, Firestone eat your heart out, this is what you wanted. God save us.

It seems harsh because we have the option now to have 'consequence free' sex, when this wasn't an option it didn't seem like such a deprivation.

Don't lose hope. Most people don't want the dystopia- Shabana Mahmood does not back euthanasia and I'm hoping she will roll it back.

I feel very strongly about it, as do very many people. This was not a popular demand by a crazed population, it was pushed through by a few zealot MPs.

The House of Lords DID at least put many safeguards in. It does NOT 'legalised the killing of the elderly, poor and weak'. You have to be so ill you only have 6 months to live.

Similarly, more and more people are turning against smartphones.

Also, why act as if IVG is terribly harmful only to women? Surely it makes men just as potentially disposable.

How do you know? If that were fully true, we wouldn't have so much evidence of people in the past trying to prevent conception.

We will always have human appetites, my point is that technology is growing that rather than suppressing it.

We know how this went in Canada, again, the slippery slope. And I think you overestimate public opposition to this... but, I'll take your optimism and try and get back to sleep!

Well, this thread went off the rails overnight! There is no point keeping on a conversation with someone who thinks that women's emancipation leads to the fall of civilisation; we will never reach any agreement or understanding. After hundreds of interesting posts on this discussion, it's veered into some very odd religious and conservative railing against all progress that doesn’t feel relevant to the original topic. But I think we can certainly all see the misogyny inherent in anti-choice, forced birth positions and all of the misogynistic ideology upon which it is built.

I love the way the “feminism has made us all into monsters” delicately overlooks the impact of the internet.

Smartphones chucked a bomb into sex, dating, social life - everything. Try to imagine, for a moment, how “traditional” society would have looked if they’d been online. There’d have been some extraordinary 18th-century pickup apps. Victorian men would have been addicted to WaifHub.

We’re in a meltdown, no doubt about that, but blaming feminism is laughable. Feminists share a single belief: women are the best judges of their own best interests. Not white-haired church elders, not husbands who quietly eye up their daughters’ friends, not domineering brothers.

Notice that this belief is twinned with democracy. Nobody else gets to run your life without being accountable to you. And if women lose this freedom, there’s no reason to expect anyone else to hang on to it for long. Now that’s what I call a bleak road.