fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #4521 ]

[ SECRET POST #4521 ]

⌈ Secret Post #4521 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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[Nine Lives Man]

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[Citizen Kane]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 11 secrets from Secret Submission Post #647.
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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I'm pro choice. always have been.

But these days quite a few of the people who are willing to listen to me are on the right, or near to the right, or think of themselves as the right because the overton window is fucking up peoples perceptions.

So A lot of the people I'm friends with are veering more and more into the pro life side. I don't like that, but hell they're entitled to their opinions. The problem is I like to argue, you all know this.

And the pro life people are happy to oblige me. We can have heated but in the end respectful debates about this, where at the end, when they fail to convince me they let me go about my opinion with no ill will. Which is great.

Now the trouble is that pro life people are not the deranged anti-woman psychopaths that I had always believed them to be during my teens. Their argument are not limited to "WAHAHAHAH! WOMEN ARE THINGS THEY SHOULD BE LOCKED IN RAPE CAMPS AND FORCED TO BREED OUR FUTURE SOLDIERS!!!"

They often have good well thought out arguments, that I won't lie, make a lot of sense to me. And I worry they are going to change my mid on this. I don't mind chaging my mind on a thing, but this doesn't feel like the right way to do it. Having what I believe eroded by a constant wave of good points from one side.

I feel I might be echo-chambered. That is not an organic way to change your mind. I need to discuss this with other pro-choice people.

UNFORTUNATLY, most pro-choice people I talk to are... well they are exactly the way I was when I was a teen. it's the "If you don't agree with me you're evil" tactic. I'm getting nothing but the idea that the vast majority of the pro choice side are emotional angry people unwilling to talk things through. And that pisses me off. Because when the pro life people - People who literally believe I am advocating for infanticide - are hit me with good arguments and accept my stance is still opposed to them... And the other side are, broadly speaking, fucking psychopaths... How do you NOT feel the pressure?

TL;DR

The fucking discourse. It's fucking awful. Fuck the smart pro-life people, and fuck the insane pro-choice people.

So what are the smart pro-life people saying? Honestly, I'm used to them just being Jesus-freaks, so this is news to me.

Generally the point they are making is that the fetus is a human life and any distinguished between a 5 month fetus and a 5 month infant is a matter of an arbitrary semantic line in the sand.

The counter I get from the pro-chioice side is "No it's a clump of cells"

Then the counter from the pro-life side is "A clump of cells with a heartbeat and brainwaves and nerves and all the other criteria of life?"

To which my response has always been "Not all the criteria. Homeostasus is required to call something alive, before a certain point is does not have the ability to regulate it's own body.

Then they come back with "What IS that point" (can you tell I've had this argument before? So many times.)

I say "Generally accepted to be about 22-24 weeks."

"So it after 22 weeks it's a life and should not be be aborted, what about 21 weeks?"

"It's not reasonable to assume it has developed the ability to survive on it's own at 21 weeks"

"But it could!"

"Small chance"

"Yes, but if there is even a small chance that the fetus is a life, can you risk murdering it?"

And here, I would LOVE to know what other pro-choice people think, because this is typically the part at which I have to say "Hey, you think it's a life, I lean in the other way" and we call it a day. Because I don't know an intellectually honest way to answer that.

I am also anti the death penalty - not in principal, some people can only cause harm and NEED to be killed to save others, but in practice there is no way to know with any certainty that the person the state is executing will always be one of these people, and if there is even a small chance that the state is killing someone who does not deserve to die, I cannot support it. BUT if there is even a small chance that the fetus is a living entity deserving of rights... I apparently am a-ok with ending it's life. I simply cannot rationalise those too thoughts.

TLDR there is an internal inconsistency in my thoughts. The more I talk to pro-life people the more they expose it. And the more I talk to pro-choice people the less able I am to reconcile it because all they do is appeal to emotion and guilt.

Don't get me wrong, the pro-life ppl do that too, but they also have a solid train of reason as to why a fetus should be kept alive.

Even if I grant for the sake of argument that a fetus has exactly the same rights as any born human being, that still leaves the issue of bodily autonomy.

No one has the right to use someone else's body. We can't compel organ donations, even from a parent to a child. Even if someone caused a car accident and the victim needs a blood donation or they will die, the cop's can't compel the other driver to give blood. In the US, we require positive consent (either previously given or from whoever has power of attorney) to take organs from a corpse, even though there are people who will die without the organs.

But "pro-life" people want to create a special right for fetuses (and embryos, in the latest laws) to be able to use a woman's body without her consent for nine months.

Pregnancy and childbirth are not risk-free. According to the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maternal_mortality_in_the_United_States

"Although the United States was spending more on healthcare than any other country in the world, more than two women died during childbirth every day, making maternal mortality in the United States the highest when compared to 49 other countries in the developed world.[3] The CDC reported an increase in the maternal mortality ratio in the United States from 18.8 deaths per 100,000 births to 23.8 deaths per 100,000 births between 2000 and 2014, a 26.6% increase;[4]"

One of my friends nearly bled out giving birth. In Los Angeles. In 2001. Her doctor told her that another pregnancy would probably kill her. So when she got pregnant again, rather than risking leaving her husband alone to raise the two children she already had, she had an abortion. Should the government have the power to force her to risk her life?

Pregnant women regularly have short-term and long-term health consequences. Many people choose to accept the risk because they want to have a child, but forcing someone to accept that risk of is a gross violation of bodily autonomy.

Even in a pregnancy where nothing goes wrong, the pregnant person has to deal with a great deal of pain, discomfort, indignity, and inconvenience. Again, there is a big difference between someone freely choosing to undergo the process, and someone being forced to endure it.

The reason that a lot of people on my side dismiss "pro-choice" people as not really being only concerned about "unborn babies" is because we know what reduces the number of abortions: comprehensive sex education and easily available birth control. However, the people who oppose abortion also generally (not always) oppose those policies.

Well, yeah, the libertarian argument usually carries some weight, but it never flies totally well, since there is no comparable situation.

Like the example I keep using is:

If there was a person locked in your basement, totally without your fault or their fault, it was just a "Shit happens" situation, but they were totally trapped, and you couldn't get them out without killing them, and because it was your house you were responsible for feeding them and looking after them: Would you be happy about that? Just... being responsible fo supporting someone you don't know or care about and it being legally mandated that you do that? Cause I wouldn't

And I feel that's a reasonably strong argument but it doesn't always fly because 1. that's an absurd situation completely devoid of real world logic and 2: The best argument they have come back to me with is: "This isn't "totally without your fault" if you choose to have sex you should accept the possibility and the responsibilities."

Which is a bit heartless in my opinion, but the woman who pulled that on me had previously gotten me to say admit that I think it's reasonable to forcibly eject the man from my basement, even if it means killing him because He is not entitled to one scrap of my resources" so I couldn't really play the heartless card on her.

Also the "For the woman's health" is a good argument, and one I rarely get any push-back on. Most pro-life people agree if the woman is in danger an abortion is reasonable. What the come back is from them is to point out that the vast majority of abortions are done for none health reasons, so I tend to stick to the libertarian "Her resources are her's and if that means fetus dies that's fair" and "It's not a life until it can support itself biologically.

Trouble is both of those argument had pretty glaring weaknesses.

It's not a sound argument because it's not a stranger living in your house, it's a stranger living in your body. AYRT's organ donation analogy is much closer to the actual reality.

You can, barring medical complications like infection or hemorrhage, survive donating a lobe of your liver. Over time, it will grow back and you'll be able to able to function at full capacity again. You have to stop drinking and using certain medications for a few months. It's not a perfect one-to-one for pregnancy - donors actually have a lower mortality rate than women giving birth, and both the recovery time and necessary period of unmedicated sobriety are much shorter than a pregnancy - but it's close on many of the key points.

And I guarantee you that the vast majority of pro-lifers would not be remotely in support of a law that mandated they be living liver donors for strangers for whom they were a donor match, and the percentage would only shift a bit if you narrowed it to mandatory donation to blood relatives. Their bodily autonomy is more important to them than other people's lives.

I'll keep the organ donation argument in mind, it has merit, I agree, but I feel I'm gonna run in to the same problem I have with the stranger in the basement argument: It's not exactly the same situation because in the case of pregnancy the person is partly responsible for the existence of the life's very existence.

Like if I made a stupid decision - drink driving for example - and it lead to someone needing a liver donation, would I support a law that forced the driver to have to give up a lobe of their liver to ensure the life of the victim?

Yeah... I kinda would. Again I have some wriggle rom because it's not the exact same situation because DUI is illegal, but the thrust is still the same, isn't it? Make a decision that leads to someone needing a liver donation - You should have to make that situation right and yeah, donate a some of your liver if you can.

If you made a perfectly reasonable everyday decision like driving completely sober, driving safely, and got into an accident that resulted in another person being injured in such a way that they required a liver donation, would you support a law that forced you to give up a lobe of your liver? Because having sex is a pretty normal everyday activity, not a deliberately negligent high-risk one.

Or, more germane to the argument that a pregnant woman is partly responsible for the existence of the fetus, would you be in favor of a law that would require you to donate a lobe of your liver to your biological child? You're partly responsible for their existence, and you're also partly responsible for the genes that increase their chance of liver disease.

And, since abortion restrictions only impact people who have a uterus, would you be okay with this hypothetical liver donation law only being applied to people who were born with testicles? If it aids the thought exercise, let's pretend that we have some new science that proves only people who were born with testicles can successfully do live liver donation.

You're always going to run into the same problem, no matter the argument you attempt, because there is no perfect analogy. There is no other circumstance under which one human being is entirely physically dependent on one single other human being for all of their physical needs, to the detriment of that other human being's health and ability to fully participate in their own life.

I'm sorry you're running into so many unreasonable pro-choicers. I don't know if anything I type will help in your debates, but here goes.

For me, personally, the emphasis is on the "choice" part. I don't know if you're on a similar wavelength or not, but I believe that it should be a woman's choice, whether it's to get an abortion OR refuse live-saving cancer treatment to try and bring the pregnancy to term.

I know this won't be relevant for you, but to help illustrate my point, the only circumstance under which I would choose an abortion is if the baby is incompatible with life. I'd rather the child not suffer with a body that will not support its soul in any way, shape, or form. In every other case, I'd go the adoption route (raising the child myself is out of the question since I need professional help taking care of *myself*).

However, I would fight tooth and nail if someone tried to force me to have an abortion in any other circumstance (like they did in China under the one-child policy). So what right do I have to insist a woman who doesn't want to carry to term do so?

Another point to bring up: Why is an embryo inside a woman more worthy of life than those kept in cold storage? Why is it all right for couples going through IVF to do "selective reduction"? Those are already-conceived babies, by the typical pro-life definition, and are destroyed all the time with not a peep from the pro-life contingent. Most pro-lifers I've run into have no answer for that.

As I said, don't know if any of this helps, but I promise there are still sane pro-choicers out there.

Appreciate it. And the anons up thread. It's good to have a sounding board for this stuff.

For me, it's mostly a libertarian argument: I don't want the government mandating what I allocate my resources on. I wouldn't accept the government telling me: "You see that person on life support that you don't know? You are now responsible for paying for their life support and keeping them alive" I wouldn't accept the government in my wallet even if it's to keep a life alive, so I don't see why it would be any different for a woman body.

The IVF point is an interesting idea. I hadn't considered it before, so I'll think on that and see if I can find any flaws with it, but it looks solid to me.

Anyway, I do appreciate it, and I know there are sane pro-choice ppl, I consider myself to be one. It's good to meet others.

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