Abstinence-only sex education pushed by religious fundamentalists. Prophylactics are widely available (often free from any Planned Parenthood), but demonized.
"The United States ranks first among developed nations in rates of both teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. In an effort to reduce these rates, the U.S. government has funded abstinence-only sex education programs for more than a decade. However, a public controversy remains over whether this investment has been successful and whether these programs should be continued. Using the most recent national data (2005) from all U.S. states with information on sex education laws or policies (N = 48), we show that increasing emphasis on abstinence education is positively correlated with teenage pregnancy and birth rates."
Poor education below middle class (I’d argue even for middle class, compared to international peers). Poor access to medical care below middle class. And then poverty, generally.
Thanks. Your link shows that the US is above all tracked western countries in terms of abortion rate, which goes against OP's point about the US having a lower abortion rate than comparable countries.
I just did a quick DuckDuckGo to find some stats, but according to the first page I found, the US is not even in the top ten (the top one being Russia according to the site). The US seems roughly on par with other developed countries.
It might be that it seems more common, as it seems to be a more contentious issue in the US than among its peers.
That said, it probably has a lot to do with pregnancy rates. Singapore has a very low rate yet access is pretty wide open. Most of that a legacy due to fear of overpopulation (they had a “stop at 2” policy for quite and while and like China, are now panicking about low birth rates).
Looking at people willing to get abortions shows ordinary rates relative to other developed countries, demonstrating that demand for abortions is inelastic among those willing to consider the option. The problem is that the US also has disproportionately high rates of teen pregnancy:
"Despite considerable declines in recent decades, the U.S. adolescent pregnancy rate, at 57 per 1,000 in 2010, is the highest in the developed world outside the former Soviet Bloc. The next highest rate is in New Zealand (51 in 2010)."
They are not so common, but it is one of our top two political issues. People will vote based on these issues even if all other issues run counter to their beliefs. abortion and gun rights.
Just because the title used the word "overwhelmingly" doesn't mean it is common. It is still rare. "overwhelmingly" in this context only means percentage among those having abortions.
They are, you can even get them for free or very cheap if you're poor. Well maybe not in Texas, you can where I'm at in Ohio. I'm not really sure that abortions are really common, it's just a hot button issue. From a quick Google search it's 195 abortions per 1,000 live births in us in 2019 and 270 in france in 2018.
Impossible to answer without knowing what you mean by "so common." The rate is around 1-2% of pregnancies [0]. I wouldn't consider that very common. If everyone with a good reason (health risks, life circumstances) to get one did so, I'd honestly expect more.
Furthermore, birth control is not 100%. You can do everything right and still get pregnant.
For the entire US, the rate is not very high, and has been decreasing over the last few decades; it's similar to rates in the UK and France.
There's likely more variance, though, since some groups and individuals are much less likely to abort, whereas others are much more likely. The latter involves, partly: contraceptive perceptions, access, poverty, among others.
>Being from outside of USA, can someone explain me why abortions are so common.
They're... not though? Your entire premise doesn't seem to have any basis here, see ex. [0]. The US rate doesn't look dramatically different than anywhere else. It's almost identical to Sweden or Australia. Plenty of Eastern European and Asian countries are higher. The US doesn't even make the top 10. France and England are lower but not dramatically so. And a lot of the countries that claim it's low in official stats are clearly full of it, with abortions merely happening illicitly with no report.
The US is not noticeably better or worse than other countries supplying data; certainly in the same ballpark as the UK, Canada and Sweden. The US is much larger than those countries in absolute population, so the raw # is larger.
They aren't any more common than other countries where it is legal: It might not be more common than places where it is illegal, but it is harder to count in those places and they more commonly have to look at hospitalizations after unsafe abortions to guess numbers.
Regular birth control measures are available. You might not be able to afford it, though, for example: If you'd rather have birth control pills, you need to be able to afford a visit to a doctor first and that doctor may require a pelvic exam even though it isn't necessary for it. Condoms are sold at most gas stations, pharmacies, and grocery stores but I'm not aware if they'll send you condoms for free. You don't have a right to sterilisation (even after 25), so a doctor can simply refuse (it isn't unheard of for a doctor to tell a woman no if she doesn't have children - even if it will improve her health - or require her to talk to her husband about it).
You also have a situation with poor sex education. So while condoms are available, how to use them properly isn't as known. Instead of information, you generally get slut shamed and told you need to wait until marriage, and then the message is that birth control isn't an issue for you then. A lot of time was taken to tell us about diseases, too, but not necessarily that some are fairly easily treated or aren't as horrible as they made it seem.
They're not common but the right to have one is important and we're nuts about forcing our personal morals on strangers, which is why we talk about it so much. Some very loud, obnoxious, portion of the population believes religious freedom means you're free to believe in whatever version of Cheesus you want and anyone who thinks anything else is encroaching on their rights.
Unintended pregnancies (UPs) per 1000 women ages 15–44 years old by year and region:
- 1990-1994: 66 European average vs. 50 in North America
- 2010-2014: 41 European average vs. 47 in North America
Specific countries report numbers differently:
- Britain 2013 "16% of British pregnancies are unplanned, 29% are ambivalent, and are 55% planned"
- France 2008 "33% of pregnancies are unintended"
- Sweden 2013 "12% of pregnancies were fairly or very unplanned"
- USA "slightly less than half (45%) of U.S. pregnancies in 2011 were unintended".
Of course, UPs are not the same as abortions. Many abortions are due to an UP (USA: "Over 92% of abortions are the result of unintended pregnancy"), but not all UPs result in abortions (USA: "In 2001, 44% of unintended pregnancies resulted in births, 42% resulted in induced abortion, and the rest in miscarriage.").
Looking just at abortions, Estonia has the fourth-highest* rate with 33.3 whereas Belgium has the lowest at 7.3. Europe is all over the place (and it's not as if abortions are illegal or deemed immoral in Belgium, quite the opposite). USA is at 20.8. These figures are per 1000 women from https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/abortion-...
So are abortions "so common"? Dunno, it seems quite high when looking at a the area I'm from (max(NL/BE/DE)=10) but it's also not through the roof.
* Most countries don't have a known value for abortions though, like most of Africa/Latam/Southeast Asia and all of South America, so take "fourth highest" with a huge grain of salt.
>In Texas teaching sex education is strongly discouraged while teaching abstinence only education in public schools is mandatory.
Holy shit, that's even more backwards than my poor backwater Eastern European country where the Orthodox church still has big influence. Teaching sex-ed to kids and giving them free condoms is becoming the norm.
How is this possible in such a wealthy, educated and developed country?
No alcohol before 21, no sex before 18, etc., American kids must be going nuts over there.
Yes, the “I’m moral and will prevent your mistakes” crowd somehow is more determined to win. Teenagers subverting the grownups is part of the national culture.
Rick Perry, governor of Texas from 2000 to 2015 and then Trump's Secretary of Energy, tried in early 2007 to add vaccination against some strains of HPV that cause cervical cancer to the list of required vaccinations for children to attend public school in Texas (with exceptions easily available for parents who object on the grounds of religion or conscience), and make it free of charge to anyone not covered by insurance.
This was unpopular enough with the rest of his party that he had to give up on it. One of the main objections was that since HPV is sexually transmitted protecting against it would encourage kids to have sex.
That is of course a ridiculous objection. You'd be hard pressed to find an actual horny teen couple for whom the risk that sex would lead to cervical cancer 30 years later would be something they would consider when deciding how far to go.
Everyone is now doing what Florida and Texas have been doing all along.
There's a good chance Mask mandates and COVID restrictions would have been permanent if it was federal law.
The freedom of ideas given via states rights allows for a wide variety of ideas to be tested which allows the best ideas to be selected.
Instead of a federal law that stamps out any ideas but one.
Thank goodness the rational headed members of the Surpreme court ruled against vaccine mandates as well despite Sotomayor falsely claiming that there's 100,000 children on ventilators.
Liberal states (and countries) were absolutely brutal with their Covid response.
It took the brave governors of Texas and Florida to open up during a time of mass sensationalism and demonization to show that it wasn't as bad as the liberal states were predicting.
With the Liberals taking both branches of federal congress and the presidency it doesn't take a rocket scientist to put two and two together.
They tried to put through a federal vaccine mandate which was struck down by the courts on grounds of....federal overreach.
And now thanks to conservative governors and states rights we can all live our normal lives again because everyone is falling in line with those conservative states who were brave enough to stand up against the crazy liberal policies.
This applies to defunding the police as well. Many of the liberal states that implemented defunding the police are changing that as well.
Sensational policy making appears to be a pattern with liberal states which is why states rights are beautiful. It highlights poor policy making.
It is a double edged sword though because liberal states have many good policies.
The point is having a variety in policies leads to richer, better governing.
There is nothing brave about republican governors in majority republican states following the misinformed party line for political brownie points on mask mandates and vaccines, in fact the exact opposite would have been brave and saved thousands of lives.
Maybe now the approach makes more sense since vaccination rates are higher but it certainly did not at the time.
Vaccinations rates are 65% of the population only 15% higher than 6 months ago.
Deaths are between 1500 and 2000 a day across the U.S..... higher than all but 3 to 5 months of the 2 year pandemic.
The people who are going for misinformed political brownie points are the Liberal states who know if they don't lift the covid restrictions during a voting year they will be removed from office which is extremely sick and hypocritical if you ask me, especially after demonizing republicans who stuck to their priniciples.
The 2k deaths per day are vast majority unvaccinated, republican governors in those states are partly directly responsible for the low vaccination rates by participating in this madness of misinformation and partisanship.
These people should not be dying at this point if it were not for this propaganda.
It is science not liberal. The hospitals were full of dead and dying. Macho dullards are not heroic they're misinformed and leading the dumb over a cliff.
They are doing it now because the vaccination rate is high enough that the increase in transmission will not translate into overwhelmed hospital systems. Doing it earlier in dense population centers would have been complete madness.
No one is looking at Florida or Texas and thinking they were right then other than people who’ve lost all perspective on the truth.
If the Texas governor was so brave why was the Texas governors mansion closed for public tours for the official reason of protecting his family from Covid?
> It took the brave governors of Texas and Florida to open up during a time of mass sensationalism and demonization to show that it wasn't as bad as the liberal states were predicting.
It’s pretty audacious to post an article as a source that actually debunks your misinformation at the bottom:
> Missing context. The 6% figure used by users online to calculate COVID-19-only deaths originates from a 2020 database and represents the percentage of death certificates with COVID-19 listed as the only cause mentioned. This extrapolation is misleading, however, and doesn’t take into account that conditions listed in a death certificate may be caused by the virus itself. While a comorbidity may cause someone to be at higher risk of COVID-19, the comorbidity is not necessarily the cause of death.
I doubt that is the case. As I understand it slavery was expected to be on the outs for economic reasons anyway when the constitution was written, so abolishonists gave ground they might not have given if they knew the cotton gin would make slavery viable again.
Regardless, I think slavery is a dreadful example because it leaves the definition of personhood up to individual states and that is ridiculous.
> If legal slavery was a federal law, it would still exist today.
Perhaps if the confederacy had won, given that the confederate government did institute laws to that effect upon its member states: confederate states were not allowed to aid or abet fugitive slaves.
Confederate Statutes, Chapter 19, Section 50.
But they didn't, and the United States government explicitly abolished slavery (despite some states wanting it, and some states not) that we don't have slavery in the US, not even in the states which embrace confederacy ideals today.
And, not having slavery? That's a good thing. Thanks, US Government.
No. I mean what I said. The US Government is made up of representatives from the states, but it was not the state governments who wrote the law, it was the federal government.
Imho the biggest failure is firearms control, because it makes illegal firearms trivial to move across a state border. Countries with borders and strong firearms laws can do much more than US states to keep illegal weapons out of criminal hands.
Abortion is under a complex social and religious controversy that would make it difficult to presume that organic sentiment will just recognize it as good. See: the only moral abortion is my abortion.
Similarly it’s very strange to advocate that at some point a majority will just hand over rights to minorities. That’s really not the practice of oppressive systems like regulating peoples bodies.
So elected officials of one kind are making decisions based on the merit, and other elected officials are making decisions based on... Hating their voters, I guess?
I feel that states are an outdated concept based on travel time and that we should eliminate a few layers of government to save tax money. There's no reason to have one law in texas and one in new York and pay two senates and two police forces. It just feeds disunity and bloated payroll. We should have abortion or not have abortion, have pot or not have pot. It's crazy that we all go to work every day and then shell out for federal senators and state senators and county executives and town boards and village boards. It's crazy. We could cut the deficit in half if we just unified laws and chopped the payroll. Proponents of local laws are always avoiding the issue that the exceptional law protects. And I guarantee that the money saved would more than pay for the problem being addressed by the law.
I can't see the original comment but your premises are wrong.
Just because someone is a certain gender doesn't mean their opinion is invalid on what should happen in the society s/he's a part of.
Most women abort due to convenience, not wanting to hop on the teenage mom life. There's a minority who risk losing their life because of their pregnancy and I agree that's a valid reason to kill someone, in the same way as eating someone on a boat in the middle of the ocean is not a crime.
Life is obviously created at conception when an egg is fecundated - hence why it's called conception.
What we're debating on is whether it should be legal to terminate that life or not.
I'll start by saying it would be very convenient for me to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. I had a scare when I was a teen and definitely thought we'd abort if it turned out we were expecting.
That said, I was and I am aware it would be killing a human life. Even if it's legal, it's definitely immoral - but something I would do, because I think that my convenience trumps someone else life (I know, unpopular opinion, call me callous and heartless).
One of the roles the government is to protect the life of its citizens; according to this definition, abortion shouldn't be legal, if we care about consistency.
I personally believe if there's a government it should protect everyone's lives, including a fetus - but I would prefer a government-less society where people are protected by private companies and abortion (and anything else) is unregulated. A fetus won't be able to afford protection so his parents would be deciding for him until he's big enough to support himself.
This is not because I think killing a fetus is moral, but because I think that can be prevented only through a centralised violent entity that control everyone and need to sustain itself through theft - and I think abortion is a tolerable price to pay for not infringing on anyone's freedom.
Hopefully in a freer and richer society abortion would become rarer and rarer.
As a man I feel the same about eating meat. It’s a convenience thing for staying lean and getting enough proteins for my muscles.
Abortion happens before the human fetus has a developed central nervous system (at 6 months), so the animals we eat have a much more painful life / death than the aborted life. As long as I eat meat I don’t feel like I can have a say in whether abortion should be allowed or not. At the same time it will have devastating consequences on the population level.
That’s a strange headline… If abortions are restricted in Texas, it would logically follow that in order to get an abortion, you would have to leave Texas. It’s almost misleading.
That's why SB8 was so stupid. Criminalizing what women can do with their bodies only incentivizes them to go elsewhere that doesn't criminalize them while making Texas look backwoods to the rest of the world.
I'm just disappointed that companies didn't protest as strongly as they did with NC's bathroom bill.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] thread"The United States ranks first among developed nations in rates of both teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. In an effort to reduce these rates, the U.S. government has funded abstinence-only sex education programs for more than a decade. However, a public controversy remains over whether this investment has been successful and whether these programs should be continued. Using the most recent national data (2005) from all U.S. states with information on sex education laws or policies (N = 48), we show that increasing emphasis on abstinence education is positively correlated with teenage pregnancy and birth rates."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3194801/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_abortion_...
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/abortion-...
which does show many comparable countries, but it seems like much of the info is from ~10-15 years ago.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/abortion-...
Source: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/abortion-...
That said, it probably has a lot to do with pregnancy rates. Singapore has a very low rate yet access is pretty wide open. Most of that a legacy due to fear of overpopulation (they had a “stop at 2” policy for quite and while and like China, are now panicking about low birth rates).
"Despite considerable declines in recent decades, the U.S. adolescent pregnancy rate, at 57 per 1,000 in 2010, is the highest in the developed world outside the former Soviet Bloc. The next highest rate is in New Zealand (51 in 2010)."
https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/adolescent-pregnancy-a...
Furthermore, birth control is not 100%. You can do everything right and still get pregnant.
0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_statistics_in_the_U...
There's likely more variance, though, since some groups and individuals are much less likely to abort, whereas others are much more likely. The latter involves, partly: contraceptive perceptions, access, poverty, among others.
They're... not though? Your entire premise doesn't seem to have any basis here, see ex. [0]. The US rate doesn't look dramatically different than anywhere else. It's almost identical to Sweden or Australia. Plenty of Eastern European and Asian countries are higher. The US doesn't even make the top 10. France and England are lower but not dramatically so. And a lot of the countries that claim it's low in official stats are clearly full of it, with abortions merely happening illicitly with no report.
0: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/abortion-...
Here's a Google search result for per-capita data: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/abortion-....
The US is not noticeably better or worse than other countries supplying data; certainly in the same ballpark as the UK, Canada and Sweden. The US is much larger than those countries in absolute population, so the raw # is larger.
Regular birth control measures are available. You might not be able to afford it, though, for example: If you'd rather have birth control pills, you need to be able to afford a visit to a doctor first and that doctor may require a pelvic exam even though it isn't necessary for it. Condoms are sold at most gas stations, pharmacies, and grocery stores but I'm not aware if they'll send you condoms for free. You don't have a right to sterilisation (even after 25), so a doctor can simply refuse (it isn't unheard of for a doctor to tell a woman no if she doesn't have children - even if it will improve her health - or require her to talk to her husband about it).
You also have a situation with poor sex education. So while condoms are available, how to use them properly isn't as known. Instead of information, you generally get slut shamed and told you need to wait until marriage, and then the message is that birth control isn't an issue for you then. A lot of time was taken to tell us about diseases, too, but not necessarily that some are fairly easily treated or aren't as horrible as they made it seem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_pregnancy#Epidemiol...
Unintended pregnancies (UPs) per 1000 women ages 15–44 years old by year and region:
- 1990-1994: 66 European average vs. 50 in North America
- 2010-2014: 41 European average vs. 47 in North America
Specific countries report numbers differently:
- Britain 2013 "16% of British pregnancies are unplanned, 29% are ambivalent, and are 55% planned"
- France 2008 "33% of pregnancies are unintended"
- Sweden 2013 "12% of pregnancies were fairly or very unplanned"
- USA "slightly less than half (45%) of U.S. pregnancies in 2011 were unintended".
Of course, UPs are not the same as abortions. Many abortions are due to an UP (USA: "Over 92% of abortions are the result of unintended pregnancy"), but not all UPs result in abortions (USA: "In 2001, 44% of unintended pregnancies resulted in births, 42% resulted in induced abortion, and the rest in miscarriage.").
Looking just at abortions, Estonia has the fourth-highest* rate with 33.3 whereas Belgium has the lowest at 7.3. Europe is all over the place (and it's not as if abortions are illegal or deemed immoral in Belgium, quite the opposite). USA is at 20.8. These figures are per 1000 women from https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/abortion-...
So are abortions "so common"? Dunno, it seems quite high when looking at a the area I'm from (max(NL/BE/DE)=10) but it's also not through the roof.
* Most countries don't have a known value for abortions though, like most of Africa/Latam/Southeast Asia and all of South America, so take "fourth highest" with a huge grain of salt.
Some in the Republican party want states to be able to ban birth control as well. [1]
[1] https://www.freep.com/story/opinion/columnists/nancy-kaffer/...
EDIT: Link to PDF about sex education in Texas https://tfn.org/cms/assets/uploads/2015/11/Report_final_web....
Holy shit, that's even more backwards than my poor backwater Eastern European country where the Orthodox church still has big influence. Teaching sex-ed to kids and giving them free condoms is becoming the norm.
How is this possible in such a wealthy, educated and developed country?
No alcohol before 21, no sex before 18, etc., American kids must be going nuts over there.
This was unpopular enough with the rest of his party that he had to give up on it. One of the main objections was that since HPV is sexually transmitted protecting against it would encourage kids to have sex.
That is of course a ridiculous objection. You'd be hard pressed to find an actual horny teen couple for whom the risk that sex would lead to cervical cancer 30 years later would be something they would consider when deciding how far to go.
This is the beauty of states rights vs federal laws.
The states change, based on the merit of the idea, not a federal law forcing it upon them.
Over time sentiment will shift organically towards abortion approval, if it's a good enough idea for Texans.
There's a good chance Mask mandates and COVID restrictions would have been permanent if it was federal law.
The freedom of ideas given via states rights allows for a wide variety of ideas to be tested which allows the best ideas to be selected.
Instead of a federal law that stamps out any ideas but one.
Thank goodness the rational headed members of the Surpreme court ruled against vaccine mandates as well despite Sotomayor falsely claiming that there's 100,000 children on ventilators.
Do you have any evidence this is the case? Current federal institutions have fluctuated their guidelines, the opposite of permanency.
It took the brave governors of Texas and Florida to open up during a time of mass sensationalism and demonization to show that it wasn't as bad as the liberal states were predicting.
With the Liberals taking both branches of federal congress and the presidency it doesn't take a rocket scientist to put two and two together.
They tried to put through a federal vaccine mandate which was struck down by the courts on grounds of....federal overreach.
And now thanks to conservative governors and states rights we can all live our normal lives again because everyone is falling in line with those conservative states who were brave enough to stand up against the crazy liberal policies.
This applies to defunding the police as well. Many of the liberal states that implemented defunding the police are changing that as well.
Sensational policy making appears to be a pattern with liberal states which is why states rights are beautiful. It highlights poor policy making.
It is a double edged sword though because liberal states have many good policies.
The point is having a variety in policies leads to richer, better governing.
Maybe now the approach makes more sense since vaccination rates are higher but it certainly did not at the time.
Deaths are between 1500 and 2000 a day across the U.S..... higher than all but 3 to 5 months of the 2 year pandemic.
The people who are going for misinformed political brownie points are the Liberal states who know if they don't lift the covid restrictions during a voting year they will be removed from office which is extremely sick and hypocritical if you ask me, especially after demonizing republicans who stuck to their priniciples.
And New York and California are still lifting covid restrictions.
State's are realizing that Florida and Texas were right from the beginning and copying them.
NY and CA have lifted all Covid restrictions despite having 2000 deaths a day which a higher rate than most of the pandemic.
Clearly vaccines aren't having as great an impact as expected and hospitals are not overflowing.
They're doing what FL and TX have been doing all along.
If the Texas governor was so brave why was the Texas governors mansion closed for public tours for the official reason of protecting his family from Covid?
Florida hasn't done very well with COVID [1].
http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-...
California and New York lifted their covid restrictions the past few weeks... even though the pandemic is not over...
Florida and Texas were right.
[1] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-...
Still higher than most of the pandemic over the last two years.
They're lifting them because they're realizing the restrictions are pointless and hopeless.
Which means they were wrong all along and Tx and FL were right.
> Missing context. The 6% figure used by users online to calculate COVID-19-only deaths originates from a 2020 database and represents the percentage of death certificates with COVID-19 listed as the only cause mentioned. This extrapolation is misleading, however, and doesn’t take into account that conditions listed in a death certificate may be caused by the virus itself. While a comorbidity may cause someone to be at higher risk of COVID-19, the comorbidity is not necessarily the cause of death.
If legal slavery was a federal law, it would still exist today.
The beauty of states rights is that there's context to see why something is good or bad.
Rather than the despotic federal boot that crushes any dissent.
Regardless, I think slavery is a dreadful example because it leaves the definition of personhood up to individual states and that is ridiculous.
Slavery does not even fit in to those basic fundamental Bill of Rights.
Perhaps if the confederacy had won, given that the confederate government did institute laws to that effect upon its member states: confederate states were not allowed to aid or abet fugitive slaves.
Confederate Statutes, Chapter 19, Section 50.
But they didn't, and the United States government explicitly abolished slavery (despite some states wanting it, and some states not) that we don't have slavery in the US, not even in the states which embrace confederacy ideals today.
And, not having slavery? That's a good thing. Thanks, US Government.
Similarly it’s very strange to advocate that at some point a majority will just hand over rights to minorities. That’s really not the practice of oppressive systems like regulating peoples bodies.
Even harder if it's a federal law
The secular case does not, with https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/11/29/the-secul... being the only treatment of it that I have seen. Worth a read regardless of one's personal stance on the topic.
Isn’t that like asking the head of the NRA their opinion on a gun control law? I mean, of course they hate it.
>forcing anyone to get abortions
Bzzzt.
Just because someone is a certain gender doesn't mean their opinion is invalid on what should happen in the society s/he's a part of.
Most women abort due to convenience, not wanting to hop on the teenage mom life. There's a minority who risk losing their life because of their pregnancy and I agree that's a valid reason to kill someone, in the same way as eating someone on a boat in the middle of the ocean is not a crime.
Life is obviously created at conception when an egg is fecundated - hence why it's called conception.
What we're debating on is whether it should be legal to terminate that life or not.
I'll start by saying it would be very convenient for me to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. I had a scare when I was a teen and definitely thought we'd abort if it turned out we were expecting.
That said, I was and I am aware it would be killing a human life. Even if it's legal, it's definitely immoral - but something I would do, because I think that my convenience trumps someone else life (I know, unpopular opinion, call me callous and heartless).
One of the roles the government is to protect the life of its citizens; according to this definition, abortion shouldn't be legal, if we care about consistency.
I personally believe if there's a government it should protect everyone's lives, including a fetus - but I would prefer a government-less society where people are protected by private companies and abortion (and anything else) is unregulated. A fetus won't be able to afford protection so his parents would be deciding for him until he's big enough to support himself.
This is not because I think killing a fetus is moral, but because I think that can be prevented only through a centralised violent entity that control everyone and need to sustain itself through theft - and I think abortion is a tolerable price to pay for not infringing on anyone's freedom.
Hopefully in a freer and richer society abortion would become rarer and rarer.
Abortion happens before the human fetus has a developed central nervous system (at 6 months), so the animals we eat have a much more painful life / death than the aborted life. As long as I eat meat I don’t feel like I can have a say in whether abortion should be allowed or not. At the same time it will have devastating consequences on the population level.
I'm just disappointed that companies didn't protest as strongly as they did with NC's bathroom bill.