LogFAQs > #964014338

Wanded posted...

first of all the question of "but what do we do after" is an irrelevant pivot to the topic of whether abortion is bad or not

Not at all. Without that piece, "I want abortion to be illegal because I care about the lives of those children" becomes a bald-faced lie. Caring about somebody's survival means caring about their entire life, not just their gestation. If you aren't willing to commit to that, you aren't willing to commit to what you claim is the fundamental basis of your position, which suggests that the actual basis is something you're unwilling to admit (and for many pro-lifers, the actual basis is wanting to punish women for having sex and the "pro-life" thing is a flimsy effort to disguise that as something more palatable).

Wanded posted...

the topic of whether abortion is bad or not which is the topic at hand that you are not addressing, if it's bad then there should be a consensus of wanting to prevent it but it doesn't seem you actually think it's bad, on your side it's often viewed as a positive good thing, a rite of liberal passage even - "abort babies to own the cons!", so do you think abortion is bad?

adjl posted...

Pro choice, but on top of that, pro-making it as easy as possible for people to avoid unwanted pregnancies. In my ideal world, there would be no abortions, not because nobody was allowed to get them, but because nobody ever had an unwanted pregnancy. Subsidized birth control, comprehensive sex ed, better (and more affordable) prenatal care to ensure maternal safety... It's never going to be perfect, obviously, but there's a lot more that can be done to reduce unwanted pregnancy rates than is being done, especially in the areas with the strongest pushes to make abortion illegal (who seem averse to such solutions for some very mysterious reason).

TL;DR: Abortion is bad, but trying to reduce abortion rates by forcing women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term is also bad. Stopping the issue at the source is more effective and has better outcomes for everyone involved.

Wanded posted...

on your side it's often viewed as a positive good thing, a rite of liberal passage even - "abort babies to own the cons!",

This doesn't actually happen on any meaningful scale. You would do well to rely less on straw bogeymen to make your points.

Wanded posted...

unprepared parents can be be prepared, this is 2022, all the info you need is online and again there are pro life organizations who help with these kind of stuff

The Wikihow page on parenting isn't going to pay for feeding a child, or provide child care while a single parent works the long hours needed to support their family, or provide prenatal care to minimize the risk of being killed or injured by the process of pregnancy, or bring back a mother who was killed by her pregnancy (reminder that the US has one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the developed world). This isn't an issue of not knowing how to be a parent, it's an issue of children being a tremendous burden in every capacity, and no amount of "this is 2022" is going to alleviate that.

Wanded posted...

i still don't see how what i did is appeal to emotion, if i say murder is bad is that an appeal to emotion? your claim can stay logically consistent only if the answer to this question is yes.

On its own, yes. We'll put aside the issue of legalistic morality (by definition, killing somebody is only murder if it's illegal, so that phrase could be interpreted as saying "killing is bad if it's illegal," but I don't believe that's what you're trying to say), but you need to establish a logically consistent framework for deciding when and why it's bad to take somebody's life. If you don't do that, you're relying on people reacting emotionally to the concept of murder to make your point for you instead of substantiating it with any sort of concrete rationale. If you do, then you're relating the subject at hand to that logical framework to come up with a consistent, defensible position.

So let's do that: Why is killing people (we'll move away from the term "murder" to avoid legalistic confusion) bad? Having defined that, are there any circumstances in which killing somebody could be considered acceptable, despite being bad?

Wanded posted...

even if no one can help abortion is still bad and shouldn't be done for no good reason because murder is bad and shouldn't be done for no good reason.

All other things being equal, sure. But you seem to be forgetting that the fetus is not the only individual being considered here, and all other things are not equal. This is not simply a matter of choosing between "kill baby" and "don't kill baby." This is a matter of choosing between "kill baby" and "force woman to endure pregnancy," which in turn means subjecting the woman to a considerable amount of pain, danger, financial hardship, and disruption to everyday life (especially if she works in a physically demanding field) against her will.

Some women will choose the latter option for themselves, and there's nothing wrong with that. What's wrong is taking away the choice by making the former illegal. Not aborting a pregnancy comes with a very, very significant cost, the vast majority of which is borne by the pregnant woman. People have made legitimate self-dense claims for killing conscious humans over less than that, and this is talking about somebody pre-conscious (comparable to taking a vegetative person off life support). Forcing her to bear that cost (especially as somebody who will never even have to consider bearing it themselves, to return to the point of "don't force somebody to make a sacrifice you will never have to make") is very much not right.

Again, to flirt with whatboutism, contextualize this by considering the Covid vaccine: The notion of forcing every person in the world to take the shot for the sake of saving millions of lives is completely unfathomable, given the potential for side effects and the insistence on respecting bodily and medical autonomy. Pregnancy, however (especially in the US, compared to other developed nations), is a couple orders of magnitude more dangerous and harmful in every regard, so why is the notion of saving lives enough to justify forcing people who don't want to carry a pregnancy to term to do so?