Thread: "Abortion addiction"

Well, gwahir, people who are fat and smoke are more of a burden collectively on a healthcare system than this one woman.

I wouldn't be surprised if individually at least some of them were more of a burden on a healthcare system.

Yeah, this woman is an idiot, and even I have to question to ethics of getting chain abortions just for the fun of it. Still, shit happens, no system is perfect, and sometimes wierdos do weird things. Eh.

Because even though I support available and legal abortion, I still think there are both practical and ethical issues with it that at least should be given a bit of consideration.

No, I don't think there is an invisible being that infuses zygotes with souls. On the other hand, there is simply no clear cut time when a fetus becomes viable and thus has personhood ascribed to them. If anything, I think one could make a valid argument to the effect that babies are themselves not viable after birth up to a certain age Indeed, some people have made this argument in favor of legal infanticide, and infanticide used to be a regular practice when humans felt as though they didn't have the resources to support their children. (Yeah infanticide is practiced in modern times mostly on unwanted girls, but so is selective abortion of girls as well.)

Also, with the development of more and more advanced neonatal technologies, viability is likewise increased in earlier and earlier in the pregnancy. So are you telling me that when a fetus is a human is dependent on the state of our technology? Well, according to Roe vs. Wade, at least legally it is what determines if the fetus can be aborted or not.

At any rate, the argument in the above paragraph only address a very small fraction of abortions, as those that late in the pregnancy are rare, and neonatologists think that there is a hard limit of 22 weeks when a pre-term baby can survive at all (obviously, there has to be some hard limit). However, what if there is developed an artificial womb-like environment external to the mother's womb that pushes viability even earlier? For now it is a hypothetical argument and thus its applicability to the current abortion debate is dubious at best, but still I think it's at least an interesting scenario to consider.

Another concern is with regards to abortions used to be that they might have a psychological toll on some women, but a review of studies on women that have one abortion seems to conclude that they are methodologically unsound, as they do not adequately control for other sources of psychological trauma (such as poverty, abuse, etc.) There might be some evidence that multiple abortions might be psychologically more trying on women, but that's the strongest statement I've read on this.



These are just a couple of the issues surrounding abortion that I think do surround the abortion debate. In the end, you are arresting the development of something that will eventually become a thing we recognize as a human, and it really is a gradual development from zygote to baby with no real clear cut off between phases. I have to admit that mostly I'm playing the devil's advocate here, as again I am in support of safe, available, and legal abortion.

Originally Posted by Absolution

Let her do what she wants with her body and money.

That's the thing, though. It's not her money. She is an Australian spending the taxpayer's money for her abortions.