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“The Only Moral Abortion is My Abortion”
(joycearthur.com)
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this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2025
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Everyone has blindspots dude, that was hers. Empathy is a learned behavior.
I'm not gay or trans but I still care about those people and those issues without needing to be directly affected by them.
It IS good that she came around eventually but it is a far too common problem.
Agreed. That doesn't mean that it's not learned though, some people are in hateful social structures their whole lives and can't see an alternative until they do.
You and I just learned empathy earlier because our experiences led us down that path, just like this woman, only later on.
Another thing to point out, although it didn't take this exact extreme experience for us to have empathy for women and their choices, it did for her. Now it has changed how she empathizes with everything else in her life. We both had something or multiple somethings in our lives that lead us to the same behavior.
There are plenty of people that will live under hate their whole lives and never change. If no one is there to celebrate the wins and the work people put in to change when needed, what's the incentive when they're still told they're incorrect because they didn't do it at the same time we did? Humans are social, and despite everyone saying it, everyone cares what each other thinks. It's how we operate.
Agreed again, it's way too common. I feel like we were on a real good streak for awhile, then with the emergence of social media misinfo campaigns and the rise of the alt right, we just got kneecapped back into the 50s.
I'm just glad that after she realized she needed to change, she put in an extraordinary amount of effort to help others in the same situation that she was in. It's not like she only cares about things that affect her; she simply didn't realize she should care until she experienced it. Subtle difference, but it's reflected in her behavior after she realized her mistake.
But she did care. She states her herself. She actively opposed womens rights until it effected her.
Made an edit to my other comment on there and just wanted to make sure you saw it, I don't know if you get pinged for those or not
Nah, its all good. My debates tend to come off as combative myself, and I want to make it clear that while I do strongly disagree with her point of view, to the point of being genuinely angry, I dont want to seem that I was angry at you. I did notice you were extremely civil and I appreciate it.
I do see your point, and I can empathise(see what I did there?) with where you are coming from, but I do think that celebrating people who have changed their views for the better during their adult life is somewhat downplaying the harm that they have done. I view it in the same light as the US taking in nazi scientists after ww2 in exchange for clemency(I definitely recognise that the situations are not at all similar, but they both strike me as unjust). Or drug users who get clean later in life being celebrated while there are no celebrations for those who never got addicted in the first place.(That one is way different since they are generally only hurting themselves, and as such i dont really care what they do)
I suppose I view it as there being a baseline level of humanity, and reaching that baseline is nothing to be impressed by. Going beyond that baseline is. If we start to celebrate people simply moving towards that baseline, it effectively lowers the baseline on what a "decent" human should be.
I do not get pinged for edits, and I wasnt going to mention it bc it wasnt relevant, but just so you know to quote someone the command is > not [
Thanks, hopefully I'll remember that
This one is also different due to genetics, upbringing, environment, id say it probably doesn't have a spot in most of this discussion, but there's some overlap I can see.
Idk if impressed is the word id use for how I feel about it. But I would say it's commendable for sure, and something to have respect for. Especially with what humanity's baseline actually is vs. what we want it to be.
I don't think it takes away from the baseline, and I don't think it's downplaying the harm either. The harm is real, and it's hurtful, but this is still a win. It's definitely not a perfect win, but I think this may be a case of letting perfection get in the way of progress. This woman's actions are going to echo and hopefully help other people grow as well.
Children are sponges, adults are too, just less so. It sounds like you grew up absorbing empathy from whoever it was that you grew up with, or whatever you grew up with (books, media, etc.) these people absorbed hate, and for them it was celebrated and too often still is.
I think that this is a problem that cannot be solved by family or in some cases only introspecting without adding viewpoints of people that understand empathy. It's going to take community. That's what this woman was given on the worst day of her life, and it paid off. Unfortunately we can't know what happened before that, but you can probably take an accurate guess based on people you know that are deeply embedded in a lot of different Christianity sects.
The keyword you keep glossing over as if it means nothing is "did"
You, and I, and all of us also did this until we learned true empathy, and started applying it to other aspects of our lives and thoughts.
Edit: that first sentence up there was kind of combative, my bad
Were you born into a capitalist society? Did you have the opportunity to look around and see that there are haves and have nots? Did you ever read a book with the morals of the story being inequality? Have you ever heard of racism?
You dont get to be 8 years old in this world without taking a look around and realising everything is fucked. That should be all it takes. Holding those beliefs until you are an adult(which she presumably was) is disgusting. Being anti-abortion is means of control, there is no argument to the contrary. She never even attempted to justify her beliefs, she just wanted to hurt people until it was her being hurt.
|You dont get to be 8 years old in this world without taking a look around and realising everything is fucked. That should be all it takes.
I couldn't agree more, but that's not reality. A lot of people don't catch on that easily and are tied up in hateful social structures. In her story, she states that it was other people that empathized with her although she was so hateful and it forced her to change how she thought about that and other things in her life.
It's the same process you went through, just later, with different people, and a different perspective.
Yeah, she hurt people with her actions, and that does suck. But she grew from it. She doesn't need to justify past belief if she is correcting it. The very fact that it isn't justified is what led her to this decision.