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.

This is straight from Project 2025, written by men.
https://www.msichoices.org/latest/what-is-project-2025/

Imagine a circumstance where a bunch of women authored a document that prohibited men from ejaculating. Yeah we cant because we all know it wouldnt even get to the think stage, never mind being written. The US is a misogynistic dictatorial state.

What do you think is the motivation for deeming a woman’s wishes to be “mere”?

It is misogyny. You may choose to overlook the misogyny involved in preventing a woman from ending a pregnancy that could wreck her health, her body, her life, her freedom, her future, her career, her relationships, the lives of her children because others don't like the thought of a few cells not being allowed to progress to life but it is.

I don't think his pro-form views necessarily make CK a misogynist. I think his widely quoted views on Taylor Swift and on feminism in general, and his support for Trump are misogynistic though.

The mere wishes of the woman?

That tells me all I need to know about you.

No one gets to over rule my bodily autonomy. No one. Because once you start that you might as well make rape legal. Because why am I allowed bodily autonomy in that case and not if he gets me pregnant?

Haven't rtft but wanted to say that I think the situation would be different if men had to take equal responsibility. At the moment they can skip of into the sunset with no consequences and the mother is left literally holding the baby.
To me a bundle of cells is not a person. If that were true would not a cancerous growth also have a right to life?

I do think that if the cells are viable and of the type to become a baby, at some point during gestation those cells will become a person. I don't think the existing UK line and law is wrong in this respect. But a do think there is a social wrong in putting all the weight off this on the mother.

imagine an automatic financial and parental contract between mother and father containing standard terms ensuring the burden of raising a child is shared equally and the mother is compensated for the damage that motherhood does to her body and career.

No obligation to marry. Mandatory DNA testing. State support for both parents in terms of childcare, housing and income for those who need it, and if one skips out on the contract all state support is withdrawn from that parent, including anything more than basic healthcare from the NHS and instead gets channelled to the remaining parent.

Maybe this would result in a big drop in the underage birthrate and absentee fathers. Maybe reduce grooming and rape of girls and women.
Maybe end the motherhood tax. And maybe stop men having opinions about what women do with their bodies, if they also had to live with the consequence of those decisions for the rest of their lives.

I do think it's mysoginistic because for me it's rooted in religion and I consider the major religions to generally be mysoginistic, invented as they were to control the populace and especially the women.

Ultimately I see abortion as healthcare, and the potential withdrawal of that can only be a bad thing for women.

The thing about abortion up to the point of delivery is that it exists purely for the woman - this isn't something being done on a whim, this is being done because the baby will not survive, or the woman will not survive, and this is the least bad choice to make.

The thought horrifies me, because any woman finding themselves in that situation is in a heartbreaking situation.

Abortion is literally choosing one life over another - it's not a situation there's any question about in other circumstances - you can't be forced even to give blood, let alone give up organs for another human, even if that other human will die. And that's why I don't think the pro-life argument is consistent - or every pro-lifer would be on the live donor registers, and giving blood as often as allowed.

Absolutely abortion should be legal in cases where the mother's life is in danger.

.....
Now to my argument: the pro life position isn't on the whole motivated by misogyny, but by the belief that a foetus is a human being which should be accorded human rights and protections. One such protection is the right to life, and the mere wishes of the mother don't supersede that.

There's your inconsistency - if a mother's life is in danger, then the foetus doesn't have the same human rights and protections - you've already agreed to that, the door is already open.

Every pregnancy is dangerous. It changes you, even if you aren't damaged by it. What's the risk threshold where the baby's life become's less important? Who decides that? Who decides how much risk to my life I have to take for another human?

Why is is different to require a kidney to save the life of a whole human compared to require the use of your whole body to grow a new one?

It’s my “mere wishes” that said no to sex and made it rape.

Why is this any different?

The pro choice position is also logically consistent: it’s not that a fetus has no personhood, indeed people who are pro choice may feel strongly that a fetus does have personhood or they may feel it’s a bundle of cells or anywhere in between, the pro choice position is that whether the fetus is a person or not, it does not have the right to use another person’s body to sustain it without their consent.

Where the pro choice position gets murky is in abortion beyond the point of fetal viability where with intensive medical support a fetus could survive. Obviously a woman can remove a fetus from her body but should she be able to end its life first or opt out of life saving medical treatment? those are where discussions around euthanasia, best interests etc get tricky.

The pro life position is logically consistent, that a fetus has personhood and thus cannot be killed but does not address the issue of where fetal and maternal health and life are in conflict.

A fetus is a person but a mother is also a person, even in a healthy low risk pregnancy the mother is risking permanent health complications and death by continuing. In some pregnancies the risks are extremely high. The pro life camp have to wrestle with where the line is for them.

the two positions are incompatible and always will be incompatible, we end up with a lot of compromises to try and keep the law acceptable to most people but there will still always be issues
Why can you abort a disabled fetus at 32 weeks but not a healthy one? isn’t that disablist?

With such polarising beliefs surely the only reasonable option is that every woman is free to act in line with her own beliefs with her own knowledge of her circumstances and relationships.

I am radically pro choice. I chose to continue a pregnancy where my child had a terminal genetic anomaly, almost everyone else in support groups for her condition was passionately pro life but pro choice does not mean having an abortion nor does it mean not having an abortion. My decision was right for me and I have no regrets, I also have no judgement for others who made a different decision.

Let’s say I develop a technique to induce labor at any point in a pregnancy. So instead of needing to use medication or perform a d&c, a woman could simply give birth at 8 weeks.

Would that change the equation for the pro-life contingent? The woman isn’t having an abortion. She is simply not allowing the pregnancy to exist in her body. If the fetus can survive independently, it can continue to develop. Note, I only invented technology to induce labor, not to sustain an extremely early pregnancy outside a woman’s body.

Kyle Rittenhouse is just one of many

Once again, that isn't my position, but the pro life position. However I do believe it is a coherent position no less than the pro choice argument. To portray it as primarily motivated by misogyny is disingenuous.

Misogyny is not an after thought - it has literally shaped human thought in most of the world for most of history. So the beliefs you mention are a result of a misogynistic way of understanding and thinking about the world. To deny that is disingenuous.

I am also surprised at how many people dont see that you can be driven by misogynistic beliefs and values and still be loving to the women in your family. Misogyny is not all rabid manosphere pronouncements - its the reason that women get paid less, or that most health and safety research uses male bodies as standard, or any host of things which mean womens experience is seen as niche or less important then mens.

Well it’s 1 person dies vs 2 people. How can that not make sense? Abortion is certain death. You do this is medicine all the time- save the most amount of people.

I understand your point. I just don't agree with your conclusion and consider it misogynist.

Yes, a part of the debate can be framed as if/when a foetus starts to have which human rights.
If it doesn't have any, there is no reason to worry about it at all.

When I disagree is - if you decide that a foetus should have some human rights at some moment, that's the moment when the conflict of rights of two humans starts. And the pro-life position is utterly failing to even acknowledge that even if the foetus should have some rights, there is still a woman with her human rights there, and that it might be impossible to fulfill both sets in the same time.

It's the same error as woke and trans - the full trans rights are inevitably clashing with full women's rights.

Many women died because their human rights were not acknowledged when an effectively unviable foetus with a heartbeat was left to rot in them. That's terrible and that's what the pro-life legislation is causing in 21st century.

If there had been a way to remove the foetus I aborted and it still live then I'd have been happy to do so. Provided I never had to see or think of it again. Including its ability to find me as an adult.

Mind you, being that my rapist was a close family member it's entirely possible there would be congenital birth defects and no one would have wanted the child anyway.

I’m so sorry you had to go through that.

Funnily enough, in my country abortion was legalised not as a feminist topic, but as pro-family and pro-polulation topic.

The logic was: access to safe medical abortion prevents damaging the women's lifes, health and future reproductive potential with pregnancies which are bad for them. A woman who didn't have to go through a trauma of birthing after rape, trauma of having a child when the mother is in poor conditions, trauma of still birth in 9th month of unviable foetus, trauma of ..., is in much better situation to want and be able to have a loved and wanted child in a good circumstances.

Denying her abortion of a foetus when a pregnancy is bad for her is denying a chance of life to that wanted child waiting in her future.

I dont agree with you however I think in order to push pro choice, a lot of pro choice individuals get particularly and unnecessarily nasty about the unborn child. I also think they fail to understand that if somebody views the fetus as a human, then of course they are going to see it as wrong. How can that be difficult to empathise with?
And I find the celebration of CK murder upsetting. It was pretty graphic and his kids have lost a dad. Violence upon violence helps nothing.

So you say that being raped is showing a lack of intelligence?
Have you ever heard about victim blaming?

Every late term pregnancy brings significant health risks to the mother and her future reproductive potential.
It's showing lack of both intelligence and respect to women to call it an "inconvenience".

More than a third of pregnancies, probably more than half, depending on when you start observing them, end with a miscarriage. It is factual and kinder to the parents' losing their chance of a child to call the foetus "a bunch of cells" untill full viability stage.

Which is why I said "then for a logically consistent stance you wouldn't make an exception for the mother's life, unless the mother losing her life also meant the foetus losing theirs (so a situation where the mother couldn't be kept on life support or beyond the point of foetal viability)."

It seems like a lot of people seem to forget what pro choice is. It’s about having a choice.. to give birth and keep a baby, to give a baby up for adoption, or yes , to terminate . I support (and have supported women ) in each of those situations.

Whereas pro life , it’s only really about one thing , and not even that, it’s pro birth.

Again, ironically, a lot of pro lifers are staunchly against single mums, welfare system, free healthcare , addiction support etc. So what kind of life are they actually supporting?

Let’s not pretend it ever was or is anything but policing women.

Define inconvenience.
A homeless woman should be forced to have a baby?
An addict ?
A traumatised victim of rape or incest?
A woman who would die ?
A woman who would give birth to a severely disabled baby that would live painful minutes ?
A woman whose existing conditions and treatment aren’t compatible with pregnancy?
A disabled/mentally impaired girl or woman?
A woman in a fucking coma?
Any woman or girl that does not want to be pregnant or have a baby , and go through pregnancy and birth, which carry physical,mental and emotional risks?

That’s a big handbag!