Official Abortion Thread

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
One can only wonder... if abortion is no longer available as birth control, how many fewer unwanted pregnancies might there be?

The answer is zero. There will be zero fewer unwanted pregnancies. We know there will be more. We go through this exercise a lot. Cannot wait for those kids to grow up knowing no one wanted them!

Winner of the most stupid post of the day.
Congratulations!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
One can only wonder... if abortion is no longer available as birth control, how many fewer unwanted pregnancies might there be?

Again, we've discussed how using abortion to change women's behavior is not the reason for banning abortion. If you truly wanted to change women's behavior, you'd chose the more effective and less coercive route: sex ed and availability of birth control AND social supports to make having the baby feasible.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Truly awful story of an OB in Kansas being required by hospital lawyers to speak with the legislator of an anti-abortion bill before being allowed to perform the procedure on a critically ill patient.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/20/opinion/abortion-laws.html
I was asked to perform an abortion for a very sick pregnant women in her first trimester. She had a medical condition that was deteriorating much more rapidly than expected because of her pregnancy. She was not seconds away from dying, but her medical specialists were concerned that, in the next day or two, she would be likely to develop kidney failure.

While kidney failure can be managed with dialysis, preventing that from happening is the best medical course. Not only in the short term, but saving my patient’s kidneys also would prevent a cascade of medical events that could end her life prematurely in the long term. After all, life expectancy is shorter on dialysis. That’s why we do renal transplants.

My patient’s specialists believed that, if she were not pregnant, they might be able to avoid dialysis. Ending her pregnancy would not save her life that day, but it might next week or next month or in five years. We don’t have crystal balls in medicine, so we often can’t say with certainty who will deteriorate with a given medical condition or precisely when.

But that year, the Kansas legislature had passed a law banning abortions on state property, which included the medical center where I worked. But under the law, an abortion would be allowed to save the life of the pregnant woman.

So when I received a call asking whether I could help this patient, my next phone call was not to the operating room to make arrangements — instead I called the hospital’s attorneys. They did not know how to interpret the law either. Unless my patient was actively dying — for example, we were running a code for a cardiac arrest — an abortion would most likely be illegal. If I did the procedure, I would be fired.
To reconcile our disagreement, the hospital’s attorneys felt the only course of action was to get the opinion of the legislator who wrote the law. An attorney set up a conference call with this man so that I could plead my patient’s case.

I began to explain the medical situation, how ill she was. He interrupted me after a few seconds: “Whatever you think is best, doctor.”

My patient got the abortion and her health improved as a result. But I was furious. How dare some legislator applaud this monstrous law in public all the while deferring to a doctor’s expertise in private.

And yet I'm not surprised. I know someone who is extremely pro-life, does not believe in exceptions except for mother's life in imminent danger, yet when I suggested certain examples that might happen in real life, with detail, he flipped towards what he regarded as "common sense". I suspect this is often the case with other highly controversial issues--just like how conservatives in some red state town are dismayed when the undocumented guy who's run the local steakhouse for 20 years and is known for his volunteer work gets a deportation order. Hard to understand how the extreme points of view get their political attention.

This is what happens when people (usually men) think they can logic their way into public policy because they are smart or whatever.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
One can only wonder... if abortion is no longer available as birth control, how many fewer unwanted pregnancies might there be?

The answer is zero. There will be zero fewer unwanted pregnancies. We know there will be more. We go through this exercise a lot. Cannot wait for those kids to grow up knowing no one wanted them!

Maybe ask some people from Ireland or Romania? It’s not like this hasn’t been tried before.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
One can only wonder... if abortion is no longer available as birth control, how many fewer unwanted pregnancies might there be?

Again, we've discussed how using abortion to change women's behavior is not the reason for banning abortion. If you truly wanted to change women's behavior, you'd chose the more effective and less coercive route: sex ed and availability of birth control AND social supports to make having the baby feasible.

x 1 million

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:so after it's illegal, what will we do with all the unwanted children born to moms who can't take care of them? Are we going to give them mom-friendly jobs? What if the mom is a 13year old? How do we make the dads support them? What if the dads run off to another state? Are we going to have orphanages staffed with caretakers to help out?

Wondering how you put this in perception given our southern border today? Will the 5000 crossing daily be held to the same standard? Inquiring minds wish to know?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:so after it's illegal, what will we do with all the unwanted children born to moms who can't take care of them? Are we going to give them mom-friendly jobs? What if the mom is a 13year old? How do we make the dads support them? What if the dads run off to another state? Are we going to have orphanages staffed with caretakers to help out?

Wondering how you put this in perception given our southern border today? Will the 5000 crossing daily be held to the same standard? Inquiring minds wish to know?

I guess we'll put them in cages until we figure it out?

[Anonymous]

One can only wonder... if abortion is no longer available as birth control, how many fewer unwanted pregnancies might there be?

We know the answer to this question because we have history to tell us. As another poster pointed out, we also have other countries where abortion is not available to tell us the answer. There will be more unwanted pregnancies . . . we don't have to wonder.

[Anonymous]

Yes, there will be more unwanted pregnancies, especially among those who can least afford it - better off women will usually find a way to get an abortion, legal or otherwise. It’s important to remember also that the fanatics who want to criminalize abortion and believe in “personhood” from the moment of conception also want to ban the most effective means of birth control, the IUD and the pill. So it’s a bit disingenuous of them to make such ludicrous comments as the pp who wondered if there would be fewer unwanted pregnancies if abortion were banned.

This is nothing but religious fanatics who want to force their religious beliefs on others and those who want to punish women for having sex and put them back in their place.

[Anonymous]

So not one person will think to herself...
Hmmm, if we have sex this weekend, we might make a baby. So maybe we better not, because we’re not ready for a baby.

Some of you are ridiculous with your narrative.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:so after it's illegal, what will we do with all the unwanted children born to moms who can't take care of them? Are we going to give them mom-friendly jobs? What if the mom is a 13year old? How do we make the dads support them? What if the dads run off to another state? Are we going to have orphanages staffed with caretakers to help out?

Wondering how you put this in perception given our southern border today? Will the 5000 crossing daily be held to the same standard? Inquiring minds wish to know?

I guess we'll put them in cages until we figure it out?

If current practices are any suggestion, it will depend on whether they are brown babies or white babies.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
One can only wonder... if abortion is no longer available as birth control, how many fewer unwanted pregnancies might there be?

You know women are the weaker sex and couldn’t possibly have the brains to use other birth control
or contraception. Abortion is the only way not to produce an unwanted child. Women just can’t take responsibility for their bodies. They can only control them.

[Anonymous]

So not one person will think to herself...
Hmmm, if we have sex this weekend, we might make a baby. So maybe we better not, because we’re not ready for a baby.

Some of you are ridiculous with your narrative.

No---your naive and arrogant belief that a libidinous uneducated 15 year old is so aware of her ovulatory cycle that she can successfully use the "rhythm method" of birth control is what is ridiculous. Even educated hyper-aware Catholic women have "oops" pregnancies using the rhythm method. And many women (particularly very young women) do not ovulate with predictable regularity.

But your post just proves what other posters are saying---all of this is about a subset of the American population---i.e., Catholics and Evangelicals---seeking to impose their religious beliefs onto the rest of us.

[Anonymous]

Don't you know if we ban abortion, everyone across the nation will behave? Everyone will get married, find jobs and means of supporting the children they didn't want and live happily ever after. We won't have thousands of unwanted children running the streets. That's just absurd. Orphanages are only in the movies and other countries.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:So not one person will think to herself...
Hmmm, if we have sex this weekend, we might make a baby. So maybe we better not, because we’re not ready for a baby.

Some of you are ridiculous with your narrative.

The question is will all women think that? Not just one single woman