I have come to believe that for some people the primary motivating factor for being against abortion is indeed the perpetuation of traditional patriarchy.
Birth control, abortion if disallowed creates more dependency. It's long been known that the more children women have the more difficult it is for them to escape poverty, or leave abusive relationships.
I don't assume that every pro-life person thinks this way, but a good portion do. It's not like I think abortion is "good" I just think it should be an option, because if it isn't an option there are many terrible consequences...for women.
How I see it is that it's a worse moral error to force women to go through full term pregnancies than for women to hav abortions. I would like everyone to plan families and never have any accidental pregnancies, and I would like abortion to be a rare occurrence, but outlawing it isn't right for many, many reasons. The first and foremost reason is that the decisions should lie with the person who is pregnant. Technically there are many ways they can terminate their own pregnancies ways that are often dangerous to themselves. A lack of legal abortion just means more illegal abortion.
Lastly I've seen pregnancies I've seen births. This is something that puts an extreme amount of stress on ones body. Forcing women to go through with this just to give up the child or raise a child they do not want is simply wrong. The fetus, the zygote can survive without a woman hosting.
Abortion rights are part of a greater movement of women choosing when they have children.
I appreciate people that actually acknowledge that without abortion there should be robust funding for welfare programs, for adoption and to help impoverished people raise children. Most people who are pro-life also don't want that. Instead what they seem to want is dependency. They see a society where divorce is difficult, where there are few welfare resources for children and single parents as a good thing, because this all reinforces "traditional family" which is to say where women are trapped in marriages and completely dependent on their husbands.
I have a different view of the world. I say this as a happily married man with children. That women and men should be able to leave unhappy marriages, that children should be supported and allowed to thrive and that people should be able to make decisions about their own bodies...family planning up to and including abortion(if it comes to that.)
I think the best thing that can be done to prevent abortions is to have a healthy robust society with a strong middle class where people make good choices, plan their families, be well informed and healthy. Where vile acts like rape are rare. You can outlaw abortion all you want abortions will still happen. Maybe if you outlaw abortion, you get more infanticide. There are many negative consequences to outlawing abortion. This is well documented in countries that have done just that.
Which leads me to my next point. People think the past was great. It wasn't. Right now is better. The further in the past you go, the more suffering. While some people look at the past with rose colored glasses, and buy into a false notion that it was filled with a more moral, and less dysfunctional family system, they want to return to that.
The past sucked. If you go back far enough women didn't live very long at all because many died from childbirth. The nuclear family has only been the primary family type for a brief period of incredible stability right after WWII. The primary family type one way or another for most of human history has been this weird complex thing that is difficult to define. "To death do us part" usually wasn't 30+ years when people first started uttering that it meant on average a much shorter time because death was so common. My point is that the US is chasing a proverbial dragon when it comes to the expected family structure. A lot of, not all of the pro-life movement is about bring back this fairy-tale.
I guess the US government could force people to stay married, force women to be pregnant. That is a miserable idea imo.
Thank you! I'm not expert in the medical or policy sides of this - but I don't think I need to be. I'm a women and I believe I, and every other AFAB person, should be able to control when we conceive and carry to term - simple as that.
I have come to believe that for some people the primary motivating factor for being against abortion is indeed the perpetuation of traditional patriarchy.
Birth control, abortion if disallowed creates more dependency. It's long been known that the more children women have the more difficult it is for them to escape poverty, or leave abusive relationships.
I don't assume that every pro-life person thinks this way, but a good portion do. It's not like I think abortion is "good" I just think it should be an option, because if it isn't an option there are many terrible consequences...for women.
How I see it is that it's a worse moral error to force women to go through full term pregnancies than for women to hav abortions. I would like everyone to plan families and never have any accidental pregnancies, and I would like abortion to be a rare occurrence, but outlawing it isn't right for many, many reasons. The first and foremost reason is that the decisions should lie with the person who is pregnant. Technically there are many ways they can terminate their own pregnancies ways that are often dangerous to themselves. A lack of legal abortion just means more illegal abortion.
Lastly I've seen pregnancies I've seen births. This is something that puts an extreme amount of stress on ones body. Forcing women to go through with this just to give up the child or raise a child they do not want is simply wrong. The fetus, the zygote can survive without a woman hosting.
Abortion rights are part of a greater movement of women choosing when they have children.
I appreciate people that actually acknowledge that without abortion there should be robust funding for welfare programs, for adoption and to help impoverished people raise children. Most people who are pro-life also don't want that. Instead what they seem to want is dependency. They see a society where divorce is difficult, where there are few welfare resources for children and single parents as a good thing, because this all reinforces "traditional family" which is to say where women are trapped in marriages and completely dependent on their husbands.
I have a different view of the world. I say this as a happily married man with children. That women and men should be able to leave unhappy marriages, that children should be supported and allowed to thrive and that people should be able to make decisions about their own bodies...family planning up to and including abortion(if it comes to that.)
I think the best thing that can be done to prevent abortions is to have a healthy robust society with a strong middle class where people make good choices, plan their families, be well informed and healthy. Where vile acts like rape are rare. You can outlaw abortion all you want abortions will still happen. Maybe if you outlaw abortion, you get more infanticide. There are many negative consequences to outlawing abortion. This is well documented in countries that have done just that.
Which leads me to my next point. People think the past was great. It wasn't. Right now is better. The further in the past you go, the more suffering. While some people look at the past with rose colored glasses, and buy into a false notion that it was filled with a more moral, and less dysfunctional family system, they want to return to that.
The past sucked. If you go back far enough women didn't live very long at all because many died from childbirth. The nuclear family has only been the primary family type for a brief period of incredible stability right after WWII. The primary family type one way or another for most of human history has been this weird complex thing that is difficult to define. "To death do us part" usually wasn't 30+ years when people first started uttering that it meant on average a much shorter time because death was so common. My point is that the US is chasing a proverbial dragon when it comes to the expected family structure. A lot of, not all of the pro-life movement is about bring back this fairy-tale.
I guess the US government could force people to stay married, force women to be pregnant. That is a miserable idea imo.
I'll pull out an old Quaker saying here: "This Friend speaks my mind!"
Great essay. You're right - you've scratched the surface but it's a solid chunk you've begun.
Thank you! I'm not expert in the medical or policy sides of this - but I don't think I need to be. I'm a women and I believe I, and every other AFAB person, should be able to control when we conceive and carry to term - simple as that.