So, I recently had a discussion about abortion with my pro life friend that started fairly light hearted, but then quickly descended into a conversation about whether pro lifers actually allow exceptions for the mother's health. A lot of my own perspective is based on the idea that...they don't, but he insisted they did, so I'm going to explain why this current crop of GOP politicians often do not allow exceptions for abortion when it should occur.
For reference, when I was pro life as a fundamentalist Christian, I always would have allowed exceptions. For me, while "elective abortion" seemed immoral to me, I would have allowed abortion for reasons like rape, incest, birth defects, and a threat to the mother's health. And I was pretty pro life until 2011.
But then in 2011, the tea party took over, and enacted all sorts of abortion bans. And I found them terrifying. I remember horror stories like people with stillborn fetuses being forced to carry them to term. And the article I just linked pointed out mentioned that "the “Protect Life Act,”.... would have allowed medical providers to refuse to perform abortions even when women had life-threatening medical crises." This was an act passed by the house that failed to get implemented into law, but yeah, they tried it. And again, while many of these are difficult to find on google these days, I remember tons of horror stories coming out of the states where these laws were passed on the state level that led to people who should be able to have abortions, not being able to get them.
Honestly, this is where I first cracked on the issue and became pro choice. I was still Christian at the time, but in 2011, there were a lot of changes I made to my worldview as the tea party republicans took over state legislatures and the house of representatives. At the time, I justified my pro choice positions under right libertarian pretenses. I was in my edgy late teens/early 20s libertarian phase, and I basically said that government doesn't do anything right, and that includes abortion regulations. Because the government seems unable to properly regulate the issue, it doesn't deserve to regulate it at all. This caused me to justify an extremely pro choice position. I was still reluctant of and against abortion in my own personal life, but I honestly believed government had lost its right to regulate it.
Then the next year my Christian worldview collapsed entirely, and I was left with a very liberal secular humanist worldview. Rethinking the abortion issue, I developed my largely current views on the issue, where I am okay with abortion until around 24 weeks, on the basis of viability and the level of consciousness/ability to feel pain of the fetus itself. Before 24 weeks or so, I considered it perfectly moral. Between 24-28 weeks, I considered that the moral grey area. After 28 weeks, I considered it very immoral.
However, given my research into the issue, and how most people who seek late term abortions do so for medical reasons, and how they're a very small minority (less than 1% of all abortions), I decided that I for keeping it legal beyond that. Again, the tea party put me off. They completely showed their ineptitude at governing the issue properly, so it actually made me more radical in the defense of abortion rights. In an ideal world, I'm actually not opposed to third trimester restrictions. I actually think abortion that late is problematic and at that point the fetus is equivalent of a premature baby. BUT...because the right basically went too far with restricting it, I considered that to be the greater evil.
And I think that's why some liberals are okay with abortion until birth and are absolutists on it. It's about protecting access for those who do deserve it. It's better for people to have the right and to misuse it than for the right to be unjustly infringed upon. The latter leads to cruelty toward the born, and could even cause grievous injury or death. And because I quite frankly value the lives of fully sentient born persons over semi sentient late term fetuses, it's not a particularly difficult decision for me to make.
But back on hand, with the fall of Roe v Wade, the right is back to restricting abortion rights again. And once again the horror stories are coming out of various states involved. In Ohio, a 10 year old rape victim with an incest baby was denied an abortion, and had to travel to neighboring Indiana to get one. In Idaho, state officials refused to add exceptions for the right of the mother. In Louisiana, a woman was refused an abortion despite carrying a skullless fetus. I mean, the list goes on and on. I'm pretty sure for every story I share, there are many many more that go untold here. But it seems pretty obvious that the GOP really doesn't care about women in this case. They never did. Remember back in 2012 during the last slew of abortion laws I told you about? Todd Akin at the time said that in cases of "legitimate rape", the "body shuts that whole thing down." And more recently a Michigan GOP candidate said that rape babies are "blessings." Like, really, there's just no limit to how low the GOP can go in defending things like being forced to have rape babies, or babies with birth defects or otherwise threaten the mother's health.
I'm sorry, but to go back to my original stance as an ex pro lifer, I was NEVER this extreme. EVER. I always accepted exceptions should exist, and even back then when forced with this kind of insanity, I decided I'd rather be pro choice than restrict abortion for those who need it. Again, if you can't govern the issue properly, you shouldn't be able to govern at all.
And now, I'm just literally as pro choice as I can get. In part because of shifts in my philosophical convictions, but also in part because of insanity like this.
I'm sorry, but the modern pro life movement is INSANE, and if you still support them in this modern era, you are enabling this insanity. And I just find that extremely unethical. No, they don't allow exceptions for the mother's health. No, they don't allow exceptions for rape either. That's a huge part of the problem, they don't allow exceptions.
Honestly, you could probably get me to support reasonable third trimester restrictions if they allowed for the right exceptions. The problem is, the modern GOP don't do that. They wanna ban abortion down to single cell embryos, and not allow any exceptions for it. it's insane. So, I'm forced into a position of defending pro choice until birth. The more extreme they get, the more extreme I get.
No comments:
Post a Comment