37
votes
Anti-abortion activists, including one who kept fetuses, convicted of illegally blocking a reproductive clinic in Washington, DC
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- Published
- Aug 29 2023
- Word count
- 522 words
I don’t get how these individuals are so fixated on other people’s lives.
The proverb goes: “ Whose house is of glass, must not throw stones at another”
Mind your own business.
Someone else living their live does not, and should not, offend you.
I mean I kind of get it. If I thought my neighbour was going to kill their child, I’d involve myself in that situation. A lot of this really revolves around what you personally think a person is. I think it’s pretty stupid to consider a lump of non-sentient flesh to be a full blown person with all the accompanying rights, but if I for some reason thought otherwise then abortion might be a big deal for me.
Yep. I used to be anti-abortion, and what it took to change my mind was convincing me that fetuses don't have full human rights.
The abortion debate is one of the most frustrating things to watch, because the side I agree with is by far the worse one at debating.
The anti-abortion side literally believes you are murdering children. For most of them, it's not some abstract evil plan to control women's bodies, and trying to twist the argument toward women's rights or medical privacy is an obvious attempt at distracting from the fact that you're murdering children. Until you address that, pro-abortion-rights arguments will sound to them like "well, we want to murder children, but you don't have to murder children, all we want is free choice".
I'll also trot out the age-old argument about taking care of these so-called lives before birth (aside from the abortion question) and taking care of the children after birth. If the people equating abortion to child murder really cared about the welfare of these (so-called) children, it would seem to follow that they'd care about the health and well-being of the mother during pregnancy and would advocate for comprehensive care after birth.
Or, to put it tautologically, if you cared about children, you'd care about children.
(Edit: grammar.)
"You have an inherent right to life but not to anything else in addition to that" is also an internally consistent worldview. It's one I strongly disagree with, for the reasons you describe, but I can see people (particularly libertarian-leaning people) legitimately believing it.
I also used to be anti-abortion (I was raised a fundamentalist Christian) but this is not what convinced me to be pro-choice. In general, I don't think trying to convince folks who are anti-abortion that fetuses aren't people is a particularly good idea. While I think you're right about the perspective of anti-abortion folks on the "murdering children" aspect, I don't think most of them can be productively argued out of their belief that fetuses are children with full personhood -- most were not argued into it, but simply accept it as fact because it's part of their religious dogma. Obviously there are exceptions to this, but I think this would accurately describe the vast majority of anti-abortion people I grew up with. That doesn't mean they don't authentically believe the "murdering children" stuff -- I used to believe this myself and it genuinely distressed me back then! But I didn't know a single physical or philosophical argument for fetal personhood back then, I simply believed it because it was what I had been told and what everyone around me believed.
I personally changed my mind about abortion rights due to arguments like the famous "violinist argument" (originally laid out in "A Defense of Abortion") -- the idea that the right to life does not entail the right to use someone else's body to sustain one's life. While it's got its flaws as a philosophical argument, in general I think approaching the issue of abortion from the perspective of moral philosophy like this is more tenable than trying to untangle much less answerable questions like "What counts as a person?" For me, it was getting away from the arguments about fetal personhood that resulted in me changing my mind and becoming pro-choice.
Therein lies the problem. The vast majority of abortions are performed on something that would fit in a Petri dish. A tiny blob of goo. It's a growth in a woman's body and nothing more. Pretty much the only time late term abortions happen is when the pregnancy has already failed and the dead fetus needs to be removed, it has such serious defects that it will only live for a few minutes of agony outside the womb, or the pregnancy is threatening the life of the mother. These people who believe abortion is killing babies have been lied to, repeatedly, and they refuse to accept any evidence to the contrary. They carry protest signs featuring photos of late-term miscarriages or even the dead fetuses of other animals and truly believe that's what a human abortion looks like. They think people are pulling out living breathing babies and killing them, which is demonstrably incorrect but Pastor Jimbob McJesus said so and he talks directly to god so he can't be lying.