Cav's Place

I’ve recently bumped into a few people who were very much against abortion, which triggered a few discussions of varying length, one of them actually being rather long and moderately interesting. That made me want to write this post and explain exactly how I see this issue and why. I also want to use this to point out that, contrary to what those who are pro-life sometimes claim, the term “pro-choice” is really pretty correct when it comes to most of those who use it to describe their stance on this issue, because I’d like the term “pro-abortion” to describe those who have views similar to mine, which are rather different from what “pro-choice” usually means. Actually, what’s wrong is the term “pro-life”, since I hardly see any of those who describe themselves as such showing that same amount of care for all life.
This won’t change anyone or anything, that’s quite obvious, but at least I’ll be able to just give people a link whenever the topic will be brought up again. I’m saying it won’t change anyone or anything because I’ll try to explain things logically, use reasoning to justify my stance, and those who are against abortion rarely make any use of these faculties when it comes to this issue. This doesn’t necessarily mean that all of them are stupid, only that they find it hard to think about this issue logically for one reason or another. Somebody even admitted to me recently that she can’t exactly think it through when it comes to this issue, it just “feels wrong”.

Let’s start with the legal part, to establish why abortion can’t be made illegal due to any concerns for the unborn child’s rights. You see, from a legal point of view, a person thankfully starts to exist only after they’re born. That’s when the birth certificate is issued, that’s the moment their age starts to be counted from, so any rights can only be awarded from that point forward. You thankfully can’t find a fetus registered anywhere, so you can’t give it any rights and therefore can’t forbid people from doing anything because it’d violate its rights! And you also can’t say that the lack of a birth would harm humans in general in any way, because it’s exactly the opposite: Yet another person would use even more resources, leaving less for everyone else, harming the planet as a whole and everyone who currently lives on it. So there is no reason to be against it as far as human rights go.
The next argument will likely shock many, because it is the spiritual one. It shouldn’t have any relevance, because religion shouldn’t have any say in politics, so it shouldn’t affect laws in any way, but I’m including it to counter the most common argument against abortion. You see, if you believe in souls in any way then you also believe that some higher power either actually places them inside bodies or at least establishes the rules according to which this body-soul link is created, right? Such a being would obviously have to be very intelligent and wise in order to be in such a position, so it would need to have a reason to create this link and would also make sure that it’s only created when and where it could actually be useful. Such a link would most likely be useful in order to allow souls to learn things through their experiences in the physical world, so it would only make sense to be created once a body is reasonably certain to be able to have enough of a life to accumulate some such experiences, so the soul won’t be thrown back right away, even more confused than it was before. That moment can’t be before the actual birth, since there’s not too much you can experience inside the womb, and there certainly isn’t anything at all you can experience early during the pregnancy, when the embryo doesn’t even have a brain! That moment could actually come at some point after the birth, such as when the baby is reasonably certain to be healthy enough to survive, which means that this connection could be delayed even further in case of babies who are born with health problems or who simply are too undeveloped. So there is absolutely no reason that a wise deity could have to allow souls to be connected to fetuses and therefore the spiritual argument can’t be used to justify being against abortion!
Lastly, let me handle the generic issue of life too. Those who are against abortion tend to call it murder, but how can something be alive before it’s born? (I also have to wonder how many of them are equally worried about other forms of life far more developed than a fetus, such as most mammals or birds, which are harmed, exploited and killed whenever it suits humans, but that’s another issue.) What’s more, whatever is inside another’s body should be treated as a part of that body and handled accordingly. Within the first three months of pregnancy, before it has a brain, it’s nothing more than a lump of cells growing inside you. So is a tumor! Do you have a problem with removing those too? True, I was given the argument that certain creatures are still living even without brains and of course that’s correct, microbes are certainly like that, so do you also have a problem with killing those by the billions? I don’t think so, and I don’t think you have a problem with killing more advanced parasites which take residence inside your body either. So things can’t really be alive before being born or hatching and even creatures which are alive according to that definition but are inside another’s body, some of which could be considered more advanced that a human embryo, are to be treated according to said body’s owner’s wishes, without giving them any rights. It could perhaps be argued that it is killing if the abortion is done so late that the child could actually survive outside its mother’s body but measures are taken so that won’t happen, yes, but up to that point it’s either similar to a tumor or to a parasite and has no more rights than those, because you can’t take into account what it might become if allowed to develop further, as some do… All life on this planet consisted of bacteria once, and look what those developed into, and yet those which are currently just bacteria are treated exactly as such, and that’s how it should be.

But this isn’t even about law or morality anymore, it’s about necessity! The population needs to drop and therefore something needs to be done to prevent any significant number of births. Birth control measures which actually prevent pregnancies would be the ideal solution, but when those fail or when the people don’t use them properly (or at all) you still have another, namely abortion. Somebody argued that if something truly needs to be done about this then she’d rather have adults killed instead of unborn babies, because the adults had a chance to solve this problem and didn’t, so it could perhaps be seen as fair punishment, but that won’t work either. Mainly it won’t work because you can’t compare killing something which is alive to destroying something which yet isn’t and also because the adults who choose abortion are actually doing something about the problem, so you can’t take away the solution and then punish them for not using it. But it also won’t work because in order to balance things out you’d need to kill one parent as soon as the child is born and the other some time later, soon enough to compensate for the fact that the child will normally live much longer than either of its parents would have lived. If you do that, isn’t the child punished more than anyone else? So why think of such solutions when you can just prevent the birth and solve the problem before it even arises?
On the other hand, I fully agree that something should be done to those who resort to it frequently, but I’m only talking about sterilizing them permanently and that’s more as a favor than anything else. They’re proving that they can’t even be responsible enough for their own bodies, so they obviously won’t be able to be responsible for a child if they’d ever have one, plus that by avoiding even more abortions in the future you eliminate the associated potential health risks. I also say that an abortion should normally be done within the first trimester of pregnancy and agree that people who have late abortions should be punished in some way, if they can’t somehow prove that they weren’t aware of the pregnancy until then. If we’re talking about terminating a pregnancy after more than seven months then the act itself might become a bit questionable even from my point of view, assuming that the fetus wouldn’t have any significant health problems or malformations, but even choosing to wait until the second trimester should be punished, likely by some sort of fine, simply because it complicates matters and shows that you didn’t really intend to have it done in the first place, so you were actually considering worsening the world’s worst problem. Still, this fine for a second trimester abortion would be quite harmful if it’d end up making people choose to carry pregnancies to term instead of convincing them to have the abortion sooner, so there should be a much harsher penalty for actually giving birth to that baby, which would require population control and that’s another issue, one that I keep ranting about whenever possible.

This should have ended up much better than this, but I rarely can put my thoughts into human-readable form effectively, so this will have to do. At least I assume the part about abortions being a necessity proved what I said at the beginning about wanting to claim the term “pro-abortion” for those who think like I do and thus prove that “pro-choice” is the correct term for the vast majority of those who describe themselves as such.