Abortion

Erik Bates | April 6, 2024
[hidden by request]

Samir Mehta | April 7, 2024
[hidden by request]

Samir Mehta | April 7, 2024
[hidden by request]

Scott Hardie | April 13, 2024
When it comes to this subject, more people sharing more of their true personal stories with abortion can and should make a difference on this matter. We get lost sometimes in abstracts like religion and politics and principles, and forget that real people face real consequences of these decisions every day. (And yeah, I get that there's a double standard in that aborted fetuses can't speak for themselves except the occasional exception whose mother changed her mind, but real talk still matters.) So I'm grateful whenever I see someone make the difficult choice to share their personal story. I would share my own if I had one -- which is another way of saying that my voice in this debate matters a whole lot less than the people actually affected.

The strictly binary terms "pro-life" and "pro-choice" are too reductive. I consider myself "pro-life" (after all, I oppose the death penalty and stand-your-ground laws and non-defensive military operations) and I want to see fewer abortions. But I want to achieve that goal by means other than criminalizing abortion, such as improving sex education in school, providing free public access to contraceptives, clearing the rape kit backlog, and strengthening child protective services. Imprisoning women who make the difficult choice to terminate a pregnancy, who are often forced into it by circumstances beyond their control, is terribly cruel, and disruptive to society, and oh yeah it also doesn't work at reducing abortions.

I'm so sick of the lies from certain parties on this matter. Obviously Donald Trump is going to lie through his teeth, but there are plenty of other falsehoods being pushed. "Fetal heart rate" is an absurdly useless measure of fetal viability (the earliest detectable contraction of blood vessels is at 4 weeks when the fetus is the size of a poppy seed!) and it pisses me off whenever I hear someone using that phrase to prey on people's ignorance and emotions. Also, Democrats have not long pushed an agenda of unfettered access to abortions at any stage of pregnancy; the post-Roe standard that lasted for five decades was based on fetal viability, ie. abortion was legal until 5-6 months into a pregnancy and illegal thereafter, which most Democrats (and a significant number of Republicans) were fine with. Also, the idea that a fetus the size of a grain of sand, or a frozen embryo in Alabama, is a person is just absurd on its face; potential personhood is not the same thing as actual personhood and should not be treated equally under the law. (Cynical people see that Alabama ruling as a deliberate stepping stone towards a future ruling that all unfertilized eggs inside a pre-menopausal woman are protected life forms, thus laying the groundwork for further restrictions on her freedom to drink, smoke, choose sexual partners, travel freely in public, and so on. I don't know how to evaluate how plausible that misogynist dystopia is, but similar things have happened elsewhere and it's genuinely frightening that it's even conceivable here.) Also, the Bible is nearly silent on abortion; interpreting its references to life growing inside the womb to mean that abortion should be legally equivalent to murder is, to put it mildly, a stretch.

I too want to say:

I miss the days of TC