Single Parents

[Eulalia]

I don't want to start yet another message board so will tag on here as it is relevant.

I wondered what the parents here thought of the case in the news of the father who is fighting to prevent his partner from having an abortion. He says he will bring the child up himself. As the current law stands the embryo is said to belong to the mother but an abortion can be refused. However in practice it rarely is and we effectively have abortion on demand.

So who is right? Are some women becoming to lax with getting rid of unwanted babies (and unwanted partners)?

Should a father have the right to force a mother to go through pregnancy and then take the child away? What about breastfeeding? Is it right for a child to be knowingly brought up single handed?

I feel that abortions are too easy to get but as for this individual case I don't know enough details. I do know that there was a case similar to this recently and the woman did go ahead with the abortion and regretted it afterwards.

Out of interest, do those who oppose abortion here also oppose it in connection with a foetus that is deformed/disabled in any way?.

In my opinion, I would feel far more confortable with abortion when the mother concernd simply cannot cope with having a child than in the scenario where a comfortably off couple abort a foetus because it has Downs syndrome or similar.

Gracie I think that we are pursuing the same argument. Society isn't addressing these issues as well as it could and that must be partly why the abortion rate is so high.
Tigermoth, you didn't upset me. I just wanted you all to know that to be unwanted doesn't necessarily mean that you turn in to a millstone around the neck of society. Afterall, there are plenty of much loved and very wanted children who turn into very dysfunctional adults.

Bugsy your last point is well made! Just to add to the list of experiences; my mother was not married and very young (and inexperienced) when she found out she was pregnant with me, but she gave up college, got married and had me. I had a lovely life thank-you! and we are a very normal family. However, I always said to my mother that i wouldn't have blamed her if she had got rid of me, because I appreciate how hard it was for her financally and emotionally. she never even considered abortion though and I would have. Maybe its a generation thing.

I only found out after both my parents had died that I was an 'accident'.The classsic - I saw the date on their marriage certificate and compared it to the date on my birth certificate.

I will never know what went through my mother's mind when she found out she was pregnant. She was 40 at the time, and had only just met my much-older father, so I suppose she was pretty settled with the idea of being childless.

Like Lil, I too had a very happy childhood and felt very wanted. But had I been her, and had abortion been available I might not have proceeded with the birth.

My mother spent the next 35 years caring mostly full-time for my seriously ill father. I do not know if she would have gone through with this marriage if she not been pregnant with me.

What I'm saying is that I didn't suffer, but I think she did. In some ways she gave up her life so I could have mine.

Glad things have moved on since then.

Lil, of course you wouldn't have blamed your mother because you wouldn't be here. Both you and Tigermoth have described the love and happiness you have had in your lives and yet still hint that abortion may be an option you would consider if in their shoes. All that love and happiness terminated? Many women who have had abortions cannot even bear to discuss them and when they do they describe the regret and sense of loss they feel for the rest of their lives. I doubt that many women who've had children in trying circumstances look back with a similar sense of loss and regret.

Maybe not Bugsy, but many women end up being very bitter and resentful in these circumstances.

Yes, and that is why we need to be able to provide better support for anyone having children in circumstances that are not the best or happiest.

But surely that's in their nature. I am thinking of one woman I know in particular, who has had a materially comfortable, well to do existence all her life - but continually bears a grievance that she didn't go to university (leading one to hypothesize that she could have been Prime Minister I suppose!). She doesn't seem to have heard of the Open University. Other people have positive, happy lives even though they have known considerable hardship and have never had anything approaching the opportunities this woman had.

Yes Sml I agree, its definitely peoples charcters that can't be changed. So Bugsy there is no 'support' society can possibly offer that will stop mothers regreting what they have missed through having that unwanted child. Whether its a career, a father for their child, or a mothering instinct. I believe the time just isn't always right!

Mixup here, I was agreeing with Bugsy - I was replying to Gracie's last point, just saying that people who want to go through life moaning about the might have been will do so anyway.

We shouldn't have such high expectations of our lives and such rigid ideas of what makes a successful life, that we are prepared to kill our unborn children to achieve our own goals.

I would be very reluctant to encourage anyone to have a child to be adopted, rather than an abortion. I had a baby adopted at birth eleven years ago. Whilst I have never regretted my decision one iota, and in my particular circumstances it was absolutely the best thing for me, the baby, and the adopted parents, it was sheer hell to go through, and certainly the worst experience of my life. It also is something you have to live with for the rest of your life, and all sorts of repercussions too.

All I'm saying is adoption is an extremely difficult thing to go through, for all concerned - and as Bugsy pointed out may not be great for the child either, (though I try not to think about that). For me it was preferable to an abortion, but I would not want the responsibility of influencing someone else's decision in a similar situation.

Just wondering....but has anyone here ever had an abortion!? I firmly believe that everyone (and this includes women) has the right to control what happens with their own body. It is not the place of anyone else to decide for them! I am not pro-abortion, but am definately pro-choice! What right do you all have to judge women who have had abortions when you do not know their circumstances!

Sorry Sml but I don't think many people have an abortion in order to achieve "their own goals". It is usually out of desperation. I also think the use of the word "moaning" is inappropriate in connection with having to bear an unwanted child. Obviously the vast majority of abortions in this country are carried out on women at the bottom of the socio-economic scale. I don't know how much you've seen of deprived areas but I suggest you spend a Saturday afternoon on a South London Housing State to get a flavour of what sort of goals these women can have. To my mind, our society is just NOT positioned to take adequate care of all the unwanted children that would be born if women ceased to have abortions.

Kmg I really admire you. That must have take extraordinary strength of character.

Gracie, people do have abortions to achieve their own goals. Even if the goal is merely to stay childfree to be financially better off and carry on looking for a permanent relationship. Goals do not have to be high ones.

Please don't make assumptions about my experience of life - I have just spent 4 years living right in the middle of a deprived inner city area and sharing these people's lives.

Hear hear Gracie, Sml you seem to think that the 'goals' women want to achieve are all based around women wanting careers and money instead of a baby. You are surely not alone in this cosy middle-class thinking. I mean Gracie has hit the nail on the head, these unluckier women in the lower social scale, have goals that consist of having enough money to pay for nappies and avoiding the druggies next door. I think its commendable that they wouldn't want to bring up a child in that environment. They need our support and empathy not moralistic preaching!

Excuse me Lil, that's just what I said!!! And I can assure you that we had druggies next door (on both sides at one point). To clarify: people's goals can be as low as staying childfree in order to carry on with their life as it was before, eg low paid job, & clubbing on Saturday night. You are mistaken about money for nappies though: more babies means more income support, which pays for basics like nappies.
I am not saying that life is easy on income support, and I have been on it myself with 2 children before anyone accuses me of being comfortably off. But the point is, it isn't harder on income support with 2 children than it is with one child because your money is increased accordingly. It is always kept at the level where you can just get by.

Hmm, timing askew there! I'll start again... Sml can I put something to you that might explain where I'm coming from?

Here's scenario 1: women gets pregnant by accident in late teens early twenties, father not interested, mother has no secure work ,therefore financially dependent on the state. Parent and child find themselves below the poverty line, with no real way out. Scenario 2: women has abortion and goes on to get pregnant later with father around, and finances more secure.

Either way one of these children doesn't get born. Why are you so anxious to enforce scenario 1? Surely you have to look at people's quality of life in the long term?

Point is, child one already exists. If you have the abortion, you are killing it. Child 2 never comes into existence.

The other thing is, life is not static, it is dynamic. Relatively few people stay single below the poverty line. The longest I ever heard of was 6 years. And don't quote me official statistics about single parents - they're all rubbish! Too many people are fiddling the system one way or another.

OK then, as a tax payer I do not want scenario 1. It is in the best interests of society, the mother and the state that scenario 2 comes about!

Lil, all that you say about not wanting to bring up children in an unsuitable environment is right but it doesn't necessarily mean that abortion is the answer. Somehow, we have to look deeper and longer-term at our society and how we live and find ways of making our society a better place to live. I don't think that a violent personal act is the answer. People need better contraceptive education in the first place, so that most women would never have to even contemplate going down that route and then we need to take a bloody hard look at why in a so called first-world country in the twenty first century people still live in such grim conditions.
KMG, I feel bad now for relaying my story. The criteria for adoptive parents has got so much tighter since my own adoption 30 years ago. You did the best thing you could, as did my own natural mother and I have never thought badly of her on that account.

Sorry Sml, but has someome who has done a lot of charity work on London council estates, I just cannot judge these women for not wanting to bring more unborn children into their world. The lack of affection, attention and support for teenagers on these estates is horiffic to see as is their subsequent complete de-linking from what most people would regard as a civilised society.

Gracie, I agree with you about the lack of civilisation. But, from my experience, living and working (not charity work) with these people, the uncivilised ones were not necessarily unwanted as babies. Anyway, it is rather uncivilised to say that the answer is to kill them before birth!
Lil, what you say about tax payers, mothers, etc may be true. But what about the unborn child? doesn't it have have some rights too? Life is very precious, and shouldn't be taken away without better reasons than most people can provide for having an abortion.

I'm not saying that abortion is the answer necessarily SML, just that I don't feel able to judge them if they do decide that is what they want to do.

Incidentally, here are some statistics:

There were 183,250 abortions in the UK in 1999.

In the US, there were 1,363,690 abortions in 1996, the last year for which reliable figures are available.

75% of US women who had an abortion cited the fact that a child would adversely affect their studies or career or family life as the main reason for having an abortion.

Well, you can present it any way you like but I bet the words "adversely affect" masks an awful lot of desperation and heartache