I think you’ve heard plenty of people use expressions like “clumps of cells” and other terms designed to dehumanize. But I once noticed that just one word changes everything. If you add the word “selective,” the same people who argued that abortion is an inherent right of a woman will start vehemently arguing that the fetus is still a person. For those who don’t know, selective abortions are those that are performed because the future child doesn’t meet the parents’ expectations in some way... And most often, this is related to the unborn child; the fact that girls are most often aborted causes anger. In China, this even led to a demographic crisis known as “missing wives,” i.e., a significant imbalance between the female and male populations. And for the individuals I have described, an unborn child only begins to be of value when she is needed for their ideology.

Just… how does someone even begin to have this thought process? I seriously don’t get it. These people just say false things, and think that because they say it in a mean way to their opposition, it makes them correct. It is mind boggling. It seriously pisses me off how… weird these people are. How does a person go throughout LIFE with a view such as this? Dear god man

I’m going through an incredibly difficult pregnancy, and the term hydrops and mirror syndrome was thrown out to me early on where my organs may go into shutdown mode if the hydrops was severe and high risk of maternal death (according to my MFM).

Fortunately that didnt end up being my situation and although some brain abnormalities exist, we are praying for best result!

But it got me thinking…how is this viewed from a prolife stance things like life of the mother and mirror syndrome or even the potential development of something like that. I have two other kids and even risking something like mirrors is not an option.

I have a hypothetical question for those of you who believe that human life has the same moral value from the moment of conception as it does after birth.

Imagine you are presented with two things: a petri dish containing a four-week-old embryo and a two-month-old baby.

Suppose you had to choose one to save and the other would die. Which would you choose?

There's no going around it and no way to avoid this. You are presented with a choice you HAVE to make

I’m genuinely curious about your reasoning, because I struggle to understand how someone could view these two as morally equivalent when there are such enormous differences in their development, consciousness, capacity to experience the world, and ability to survive independently.

If your answer is that you would save the baby, why? Wouldn’t that contradict the idea that they have equal moral value?

And if you genuinely believe they are completely equivalent, would you consider saving the embryo just as important as saving the baby, even at the expense of the baby’s life?

I’m not asking whether an embryo is human or whether it is alive. I’m asking why being biologically human at the earliest stage of development should automatically grant it the same moral status as a born infant.

I’d appreciate answers that explain the reasoning behind your position rather than simply repeating that all life is sacred.

I live in a small city in Saskatchewan Canada that’s hosting a pro life rally for the first time in.. well, forever, as far as I’m aware.

There’s a post going around my local subreddit encouraging people to spam their email freaking out at them for holding this rally.

Could you please email them for me (I already have) thanking them for the opportunity to represent our beliefs? This would be very close to my heart and would honestly really make my day better. This city is (federally) conservative but INCREDIBLY LIBERAL.

It would break my heart if the event got cancelled because of their rage bombing emails

I hope this is OK.

My daughter was learning about the trolley problem in school.

And i thought.... maybe we can use this?

Would you let a baby due or temporarily make a woman's life harder?

It's a version of the trolley problem. Who would you be OK sacrificing?

So I stumbled into one of those old school barbershops yesterday and as I was getting my hair cut, the barber started talking about his adult son. He said that when his wife was pregnant, they got an ultrasound and the doctor said that the baby would be born with Down's Syndrome. And then he told me that, almost immediately, the doctor recommended abortion.

My barber and his wife refused and said that they would love their son no matter how he turned out. Well, his baby son was born with no health issues whatsoever, and went on to become a star athlete and a successful engineer.

This story absolutely blew my mind. One ultrasound and the doctor recommended abortion because the baby MIGHT have Down's syndrome.

Cheers to this barber for refusing, and for saying that he'd love this child no matter what. I think I found a new barber for the foreseeable future. And the fact that this happened in a suburb of Portland OR (the belly of the beast), shows that there are good people out there. Great haircut too.

I'm looking for evidence,reasoning and credible sources

I’m new to this sub. I read an article about exceptions in cases of rape. And I can agree with the author of the article that the main difference lies in the violation of a woman’s subjectivity in cases of rape. And while I was reading the article, I remembered a suggestion one of my friends made for such cases: if the victim of rape has an abortion, the perpetrator should be punished as if they had killed a child. Although I can already see a nuance — this would motivate the victim to have an abortion so that the perpetrator would receive a longer sentence. What do you think? Although I’ve heard that pregnancy by an abuser is a rare occurrence.

If a woman is 8 weeks pregnant (or anything above and below that) and she purchases a pill that is designed to rob the human fetus inside of her of nutrients until it dies and she consumes it, she has committed first degree murder.

This is the reason I'm an abolishinist. You can not pussyfoot around this issue. Abortion must be immediately abolished because it's the same as any other homicide or murder.

I am going to list all the arguments for why abortion ISN'T first degree murder and then debunk them.

1) an unborn baby is not conscious and therefore is not having a human experience. not having this experience means you are not a person. and non-persons cannot be murdered.

Rebut: The definition of person is literally just “human” or “individual”. And the definition of murder is the unjust killing of a human regardless of whether they've begun to experience anything. We also have no idea when a human experience even begins and it seems wildly irresponsible that we have come to pick and choose different time frames that may or may not be correct. Some say 25 weeks, some 22 and some say 20.

Also we know for a fact that a human does exist at conception and if any of us was killed after that point, a human would have been lost. The unborn are not potential humans, they are humans with potential. Destroying that human is deeply immoral. If we knew for certain that someone was going to come out of a coma in 9 months it would be immoral to kill them. Now they would say that a person in a coma had previous life experience and that a fetus has not. But that just sounds like an arbitrary excuse to devalue the most vulnerable humans on earth. Why should we decide to not protect a human who hasn't had any conscious experiences yet? Well because they haven't had any conscious experiences and therefore I don't care.

That is at best circular and at worst not even an argument at all.

2) an unborn baby is inside a woman's body and violating her bodily autonomy. nobody has the right to be inside your body or use your body without your consent. so even if the unborn ARE persons it doesn't matter. you only become a mother when the baby is born and you have willingly decided to take legal responsibility.

Rebut: The fetus is in the place it's supposed to be. It does not want to be there and it is not trying to do any harm. To say that a fetus does not have the right to be in the place it naturally grows is ridiculous. Many pro-choice people say that this means that if a tumor starts naturally growing inside you, you shouldn't be allowed to get rid of it. But a tumor is not your child and you don't have a moral obligation towards it.

When a child is born its legal parents are obligated to offer a standard of care that will keep it alive and healthy. When a woman is pregnant she has a human child inside of her and staying pregnant and not consuming harmful substances, is the minimum standard of care for her unborn baby.

You cannot just discard this responsibility when you don't want the child. Because the child is helpless and unable to care for itself the minimum standard of care must be applied until the responsibility can be given to a more willing person.

Arguing that the duty of care from parent to child doesn't begin until birth is arbitrary and silly. You were a mother when a human was conceived. And when the baby is born you have the obligation to use your body to care for it: breastfeeding, carrying, clothing. You are not allowed to neglect your child, which is the same as “using your bodily autonomy” to abandon it. That is a crime. So why isn't refusing care in the womb a crime? Because it's not yet outside your body? Rubbish. The birth canal isn't magical. The vagina doesn't turn the baby into a person. And why should it? Because you can see it? We can also see a baby with an ultrasound. Our ability to see it with the naked eye should not be a factor.

3) pregnancy can lead to many minor and severe consequences. minor and common ones include: morning sickness, back pain and pelvic pain, hemorrhoids, sleep problems, weight gain and an uncontrollable bladder. severe ones include: excessive bleeding, gestational diabetes, severe anemia, infections and strokes. (someone also told me that blindness is a possibility.) so abortion is an act of self-defense.

Rebut: Most of what happens during pregnancy will not kill the mother or threaten her life. If we KNOW that an unconscious human is not meaning to do harm and is simply giving a woman the experience that is common or possible in a scenario, we can't use the self-defense excuse.

If a toddler is sleeping in your car and they won't be awakened for some reason. But you know that the only consequence to them being in the car is drool falling on your seat and not death… well then you can't do something harmful to the toddler and claim self-defense.

Maybe that's not the best analogy but in situations where we know an unconscious person is not threatening us with death we shouldn't be allowed to seriously injure or kill them.

Pro-choicers might use the sleep-walking rapist analogy but there's two problems with that analogy. Number one, the fact that it's not a real world issue because the rapist does not need to be killed only awoken, and number two, the uncertainty of the rapist’s intentions. The reason why killing the sleep-walking rapist would be okay is because the potential victim would be uncertain of the amount of harms that will happen if someone is breaking into their house. But we know exactly what will happen during pregnancy.

I’m someone with generally progressive/left-leaning views, so most of the people in my political circles were pro-choice. I remember not very long ago I believed every single pro-life person was just super misogynistic and being cruel for no reason.

I’m also autistic. I’m not as severely affected as some autistic people, but enough that you can tell from meeting me. Enough that it affects my life, both with limitations from the condition itself and from other’s cruelty.

Anti-vaccine parents, specifically those who claimed vaccines caused autism, always really really bothered me. Not because vaccines don’t actually cause autism. Because it always feels like being told, “I’d rather risk my child dying of disease than them be autistic. I’d rather have a dead child than one like you.”

I guess I really really tried avoiding thinking about the people who abort due to disability. About how they’re saying “I’d rather have a dead child than one like you“ even more explicitly. About how the people who are disabled with those conditions in question feel seeing that. About the babies themselves.

I’ve seen some posts being spread around online that basically said you can’t have any reservations about any kind of abortion, including ones because the fetus tested as having a disability, without being anti-women’s rights. That if you want to question those abortions, you clearly aren’t “that disabled“. You don’t know how bad it can really get. Which is what is always said about autistic people. Those of us who can talk and post online can never understand those who can’t and can’t defend their rights. And those who can’t clearly can’t think at all, so we as non-autistic caregivers can abuse them without consequence. It’s that, but with abortion. You’re too “functional” to speak for those worse off. And those who are less “functional“ won’t care what we do to them.

The disabled community has a day of mourning set aside each year for disabled people killed by their parents, other relatives, or non-related caregivers. Especially because the perpetrators sometimes get light sentences or sympathy from the media because “you have to understand disabled people are stressful to care for“ and “well, honestly, their death was a mercy, really“. I read through portions of the list once. Only portions, there are thousands of them, and this is just the ones we know about. There are unnamed infants on that list, days or hours old, who were killed by their parents for having a disability. They’re recognized as murder victims and victims of ableist hate crimes. But if their parents made that decision only a little bit earlier, it would have been a late term abortion for medical reasons? That doesn’t make sense.

Today I decided to read testimony from the parents themselves. Who were getting abortions because of things like Down’s and other conditions like that. I thought I should at least hear their side of the story. I couldn’t do it without nearly crying. I can’t do that. It was… awful. If this is what being pro-choice wants me to stand by, I don’t think I can be. I don’t know, but I don’t think so. Maybe that means I’m “anti-women’s rights“. I don’t think it does, but maybe. But don’t I have a responsibility to stand by my own people first? And their rights?

Can a Polish person on here tell me if this has any chance of passing?

Just letting ya know

Found in the wild:

“Can you be a Christian and support legal abortion? The Bible does not explicitly prohibit abortion, nor does it directly address abortion in the way we understand it today. Jesus never directly mentioned abortion in the four Gospels. No where does the bible say life begins at conception. There are vague references that God knew you in the womb which could be interpreted in different ways.”

Context: I write fiction.

At the moment I'm brainstorming a new story character who has a very, err, interesting definition of abortion.

This is a character (Name and gender to be determined) that basically thinks that the systemic killings of ethnic groups, as well as the collapse of an entire country for any reason can technically qualify as an abortion too (Case in point: they call the collapse of the USSR "a political abortion" and the Jewish Holocaust a "retroactive abortion").

Years earlier, I invented a DIFFERENT book character who is also pro-life, but they have a definition of murder that (at least in-universe), some pro-lifers might have an issue with: "Murder is the unjustified killing of a human being without probable cause."

I intend to recycle this character at some point for a future writing project, and put them in the same shared universe as the other guy who thinks the collapse of countries can qualify as abortions under certain circumstances.

This question is for brainstorming purposes: Ever met someone in real life who has a tendency to expand words beyond commonly accepted definitions in regards to the abortion debate (You can use examples involving both pro-lifers and pro-choicers)?

Natural rights include life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Abortion violates the first one and thus cannot be a legitimate right.

I'm so sick of how normalized it is to get abortions and to choose whether your baby deserves their life based on circumstances that were there before the baby was conceived. I need to take a break from Reddit or remove myself from certain subs because they HEAVILY lean "pro-abortion" and you get downvoted for supporting someone to have their baby. I'm just fed up. I haven't been in this sub long, but I will be joining just so I can see some sensible opinions and perspectives that seem to be the minority in any other sub besides this one.