LogFAQs > #922056432

Unbridled9 posted...

That's an already-abundant amount of rights.

You heard it here, folks. Once you reach a certain number of rights, you no longer need the right to dictate what happens to your body. So what, if we take away women's ability to opt out of organ donation, then they can have an abortion? Or maybe she can get an abortion, but in return has to donate blood? Can we trade bodily autonomy rights like that?

That's not remotely how it works. It doesn't matter how many other options exist to avoid pregnancies. If you ban abortions, then you are restricting women's rights to decide how to use their own bodies. Period. Yes, another life is on the line, and that makes it a more serious decision, but lives are also on the line when we look at organ and tissue donation. Despite that, we respect the prior expressed wishes of the now-dead person and don't use their organs to save lives if they didn't want them to be used. Under laws that prohibit abortion, pregnant women have less right to bodily autonomy than corpses. That sounds dramatic and hyperbolic, but it's completely literal and true, which is really quite bad.

As it happens, I quite agree that treating abortion as just being another form of birth control is terrible. Enough options exist that are effective enough that abortion should really only be used as a last line of defense for that 1% chance that a baby happens despite due contraceptive diligence. That said, gatekeeping abortions on the basis of how hard the couple worked to prevent the pregnancy would inevitably end up being a nightmare of arbitrary restrictions, invasions of privacy, and bureaucratic delays that would end up pushing the abortion into the third trimester more often than not, by which point, you've got a viable baby and the issue's pretty much moot (such delays already happen in many areas with restrictions on how late abortions can be performed, effectively turning those restrictions into outright bans). As such, it's far better to just stick with a basic restriction on how late they can be done (brain function's a reasonable point to draw the line, or any point after which the baby stands a reasonable chance of survival if it's just delivered instead of aborted) and instead look at more proactive ways to reduce the number of abortions, such as birth control subsidies and comprehensive sex ed (both of which have been thoroughly demonstrated to significantly reduce the risk of unwanted pregnancies), as well as including birth control consultations with any abortion that is performed (a "do you have a plan to prevent this from happening again?" sort of deal, with advice and prescriptions as needed). Will that stop people from treating abortions as first-line birth control? No. But such people really aren't common enough to warrant overhauling all laws on the matter to catch them, at the expense of countless people who just got unlucky or made a mistake.