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this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2023
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Ask Lemmy
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Banning abortion doesn't stop abortion, it just shifts it to a black market where women are far more likely to die.
What does demonstrably reduce abortion to effectively insignificant levels is better sex education and easy access to contraceptives.
Prohibition has never worked. Education always has.
Let's replace some words. I think that abortion is murder. So it becomes:
"Banning murder doesn’t stop murder"
Do you see the point I'm trying to make?
You can equate the two, but they're not functionally the same in reality. There is statistical evidence that banning abortion does not work and in fact has the opposite effect, so swapping the words makes no sense. A better comparison would be Prohibition in the US in the 1920s - banning alcohol didn't stop the production or use of it, it just made it exceedingly dangerous, lots of people got sick, went blind, and died from homemade liquor that contained too much methanol.
If you truly care about the life of the child at conception and after its birth, you'd choose the option where there is never an unwanted or accidental pregnancy. Most unwanted pregnancies result in children suffering abuse, entering the foster system, and eventually aging out without ever having a permanent or stable family. Many of these kids live a life where they've NEVER been loved.
There are nearly 400,000 children in the foster system in the US right now and the number grows every day. There's no one to adopt these babies. Forcing women to have children does not work. No child should ever be unwanted, every child deserves loving parents. This is the world that abortion bans create.
Nobody is pro-abortion. Nobody likes or wants women to have abortions, especially the women getting the procedure...it is NOT pleasant. Pro-choice supporters would be thrilled if there's never another abortion again, as long there were no unwanted pregnancies.
The best, statistically proven method to prevent abortions is education and easy access to contraception. Full stop.
The point behind this is that your argument boils down to essentially "people still break laws, so why have laws?" That is a poor argument that isn't going to convince anybody who believes that abortion is murder. Particularly if you are saying that the "murderers" in this case are just putting themselves at risk.
I say this as someone who agrees with you, that the best way reduce the number of abortions is to provide better sex education and access to birth control.
My mother has been an anti abortion activist for as long as I can remember, so I'm familiar with the thought process.
We have laws that regulate abortion, alcohol, etc already. I said nothing about "why have laws?" in any part of my argument. I said banning abortion will not reduce abortions, much less stop them. That statement is a proven fact.
You and others seem to be applying my belief that abortion should not be illegal to all other laws, which is not the case. That is my opinion on a singular issue. I never stated nor implied other laws shouldn't exist.
You're still missing the point.
When a person sees abortion as murder, the view of abortion laws is the same as those of murder. If you say "making murder illegal doesn't reduce the number of murders" anyone with any sort of a moral center will say "I don't care, murder should still be illegal." And that's the perspective will not be changed no matter what the murder rates are. That's how the argument gets reduced to "Why have laws?" To them, it's basically saying "It doesn't help enough, so why even draw that line at all?"
That said, let's look at your proven fact for a moment. I don't believe the data will help, because when you narrow the focus to the US, and look at reaction to legal changes, you see a very clear drastic rise in abortions in the 70's, which didn't begin to fall until the 90's, and it fell at a much slower rate, and is still higher than it was in the 70s. ( source )
Which makes logical sense, if you increase access to the service, of course more people will be able to use it. At the same time, since Roe vs. Wade was repealed, there have already been multiple news stories showing that the strict abortion laws did prevent some (often medically necessary life-saving) abortions.
You may say these numbers aren't statistically significant, but to a person who sees abortion as murder, preventing even one is better than not preventing it.
Anyway, all of this misses the major point of the abortion rights side to begin with. Which is that sometimes abortions are medically necessary and that should be between you and your doctor to decide when that is.
I want to say that the most effective argument is to show just how drastically the abortion rates fell in the areas where they increased access to birth control and sex education. However, when I showed my mother, she responded with a Youtube video that tells me how Planned Parenthood eats babies.
You're missing the point. If you conflate abortion and murder, you're either being willfully ignorant or exceedingly simple. Just because some people equate two things, doesn't make them the same in reality. Whether you like it or not they are different, and applying the same standards to them makes no sense.
Your argument is like saying "Advil and heroin are both pain relieving drugs, so the law should apply equally." They are not the same, and we should not treat them the same, even if some people mistakenly equate them.
I completely agree. This is a much better argument to make. For example, I generally concede that abortion = killing, but not murder. In the same way that killing a person is justified (for example, self-defense applies here), sometimes it's justified to have an abortion, even if that is killing a baby. And because it involves such personal, sometimes traumatic territory, that should be between you and your doctor only.
But that's a different argument than what you began with.
More like banning any medical procedures during pregnancy will force people to get then somewhere else. Also killing someone who is using our body without your consent is self defense.
Aborting a non viable pregnancy isn't and never will be murder. In fact, stopping women with non-viable pregnancies from getting an abortion often can be murder itself. Therefore abortion != murder
I see you lack basic understanding in science and human development, and it’s unfortunately infected your opinions, feelings, and thoughts on the matter to the point you’re too far gone down the rabbit hole to ever come back to reality.
Good luck down there!
Perhaps, but it will likely at least severely reduce it. It's certainly not appropriate to assume that every woman who would have had an abortion when it's safe and legal would also do so when it's dangerous and illegal. More likely, it would lead to a rise in babies given up for adoption.
There is historical precedent that your assumptions are not the case. Assumptions are deadly if you use them to ignore the world around you.
And it's not like there are great systems in place to support babies given up for adoption, even if that was what happened.
So you're saying it's better to perfectly kill babies than to imperfectly give them up for adoption?
Yeah, I'm going to need a source on that.
No, I don't see fetuses as babies, I feel no moral stress whatsoever in supporting abortion rights. But that is a different point. You were casually claiming adoption as a solution even though it requires thousands of times more effort from a society that currently refuses to provide that effort.
And this is an internet comment, not a research paper, google it. There is so much data on this shit, I'm not gunna spoon feed it to a stranger just because I point out something they said is BS.
You know what I changed my mind. I'll do a little research paper for you, but only if you do it first, defending your claim that the most likely result of an abortion ban is (mostly) an increase in adoptions.
I prefer sources to be papers, but I'll accept anything that cites it's data well.
I honestly wouldn't know where to start looking for data on that. But I didn't make the claim that this was definitely going to happen, just that it was the likely outcome, based on the common sense assumption that if abortion access wasn't easy, safe, and anonymous, and involved a significant risk of injury or death for the mother, more women would likely find it less risky to carry their pregnancy to term and give up the baby for adoption if they haven't changed their mind on it by then.
Also, they may simply choose to use birth control more often, and/or insist on their partners wearing a condom.
From my point of view, I find the claim that making abortion illegal would not prevent even a single one from occurring far more incredulous and therefore requiring a higher level of proof.
Alright I'm gunna take this point by point because broadly I understand what you are trying to get at but you have a few details that bother me and I feel derail the whole thing.
Me neither, I was talking about historical precedent, not some hard and fast rule of the universe.
First of all, with the "death or injury" part of this, I don't see why this is preferable. Seems like threatening their lives and happiness in the interest of forcing births. But also, this assumes there aren't other ways this can shake out in the end, and child abuse, abandonment and childhood homelessness, and human trafficking are all part of this topic and all things that increase when abortion is illegal. Your common sense assumption is based on a situationally perfect example, and it doesn't make sense when applied to real world experiences.
This is just a piece of that bullshit take that argues women will learn to love their future babies if they are just forced to carry them long enough that abortions are more difficult and less legally accessable. Nah
Good thing I wasn't claiming that then. I'm saying the amount prevented would be negligible, not magically impossibly zero. It would likely be a small amount, and utterly overshadowed by the negative effects of banning abortions.
Generally any search engine is a good start, although you can go to google scholar if you want more academic and dense results. Then, just look for what experts/doctors are saying. Try to stick to groups that verify each other and are verified by outside groups, individual experts are fallible on who knows what, so trust the experts that other experts seem to trust. Generally unless you want to be a researcher yourself, these are the most trustworthy and direct sources for data and such you can possibly get.
Well that's the thing, "historical precedent" means that this has actually demonstrably happened before, in which case there should be data on it. That's why I asked for proof. Which I understand you're most likely not going to be able to provide, since there obviously can't be any reliable data on the amount of clandestine abortions that happened before it was legalized.
I mean, I'm not a woman, but if I were, and I was given the choice between having an illegal procedure that had a good chance of injury or death (and no possible recourse), and carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term, I think I would choose the latter, because it seems a lot safer, no matter how inconvenient.
Well, in the absence of any hard data, I find that idea more convincing than the opposite, but again, I'll admit that I'm not a woman. But unless you are, you're likely no more of an expert on this than I am. And even if you are AND have gone through all this, you'd just be a single data point of anecdotal evidence, which would not be enough to convince me.
You realize that for statistical purposes, "zero" and "negligible" are absolutely identical, right? It's called a null hypothesis, look it up.
You said this:
I rejected that. I didn't say "there would be the same amount of abortions no matter the law" or anything like you seem to think. I don't think it would be "severely" reduced, and the negatives are extreme to the point of being unacceptable.
As for the data you want me to provide, I refer to the other things said. Unless you agree to also put in the effort to provide data to support your argument, I'm not going to put in all that effort for a random internet convo. Since you made the first claim (at least that I interacted with) ("Perhaps, but it will likely at least severely reduce it"), you can go first.
To be blunt I find the behaviour of demanding rigorous sources and academic honesty in internet arguments obnoxious and hypocritical. Very few people read them, they just want them as stamps of approval. And most conversations I see where someone is demanding sources, they are who should be logically providing sources to the conversation. It is just a silly part of internet culture dancing around pretending to be intellectualism. On a personal level I do love sources though, when they get posted. Not just for accuracy, I find them fun to read.
Okay, well I don't care enough about winning arguments on the Internet in order to write a whole research paper right now, so I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree and call it a draw.
That is exactly my point. Glad you could see it my way.
Except for the draw part. This wasn't a competition, and in the nicest way possible, I'll just walk away from this thinking you are fully incorrect, and I assume you will do the same about me. "Agree to disagree" is more for people who actually know each other. Bye stranger!
Well, a draw means that neither of us is more correct than the other, at least that's what I'll take away from this.
Stop trying to be a winner on a fucking argument and just look for the facts instead you silly goose.
It’s not a draw. You look ridiculous.
Not as ridiculous as you, who, having made no arguments whatsoever, just comes barging in two days later just to give their opinion on the matter.
You sound like a petulant child out of their depth. An intelligent person would have a fairly easy time figuring out where I stand on the topic based on my response.
Forgive me for not being terminally online and Lemmy showing me older posts.
Yeah, I’m afraid that’s just an ad hominem, not an argument.
And no, I don’t have a problem figuring out where you stand on the issue, but since you apparently can’t even defend your position without resorting to insults, this seems to be a clear case of “you can’t reason anyone out of an opinion which by reason they never acquired”.
If you think you have the right to tell a woman what she can and cannot do with her own body then I don’t give a flying fuck about anything you have to say, regardless of how you dress it up.
Don’t bother responding.
Of course I have a right to tell her that, whether or not she actually does it, or whether I have the right to violently enforce my opinion on her is an entirely different matter. But we were just arguing hypotheticals in this thread anyways.
FWIW I’m not convinced that banning abortion is the solution, but neither that making it easier and safer to access solves any problems, because neither do anything to address the root cause of why women feel like they need to have any abortions at all (excluding those necessary for medical reasons of course).
But sure, I’m clearly the petulant child here that’s out of my depth, because an intelligent person would have no problem seeing such nuances instead of resorting to politically popular catch phrases.
And it’s funny, isn’t it, because women tell men all the time what they ought to do with their bodies (go to work, make money, provide for the family, share the housework, don’t drink, don’t do drugs, the list goes on), yet as a man, I’m supposedly not allowed to even have an opinion what what a woman should do with hers? I’m sorry, that just sounds like blatant sexism, but I’m sure that as long as it’s in favor of women, you’re perfectly happy accepting that.
I would rather die than be pregnant. Nobody wants their body hijacked and raped for 9 months. That's something you only do if you consent to it. Otherwise you might as well waterboard someone for 9 months they'd much prefer it.