Pro-life or pro-choice?

[Anonymous]

Pro-life

Pro-choice

Updates

+1 y

And does your answer differ if it is to be used for only rape or incest survivors

[nightdrot]

Voted "Pro-Life."

The British statesman and political philosopher Edmund Burke wrote, "The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do as they please. We ought see what it will please them to do before we risk congratulations." Therein lay the problem with laws that permit abortion on demand.

A society that premises its law as "Choice"- to use the locution of abortion rights advocates - effectively leaves open the question of the value of human life. It becomes not a standing principle, but a subjective judgment to each individual. In such a society, human life becomes not an end in itself, but mere instrument. Life becomes not an object whose preservation is the highest standard, but rather a convenience to be maintained or not according to the satisfaction of another's will.

We shape our laws and then our laws shape us - see also the civil rights laws of the 1960s which have effected a revolution in race relations. (The idea that a black man and a white man cannot sit together at the same lunch counter is as alien to this generation as Neptune. Yet in 1965 it was pretty much the norm.)

Inherent then in the pro-choice argument is the idea that life has no value save that which each person chooses to attach to it. It denies society any authority to make a collective judgment on such questions. Therefore, in this view, the law may not afford protection to life except at some arbitrarily defined (and inherently subjective) point.

This then conduces to an assertion of power over rights. Life is maintained not as its own end, but according to the will of the person who, effectively, controls it because they can. An ethic of convenience is established and it is a slippery slope on which to build a culture and a legal edifice.

Such a society will not value life that sees life as not an end, but as a means to some other end. Indeed, that is why at about the same time as the culture began to shift on the abortion question we also saw a rise in child abuse, spousal abuse, divorce, out of wedlock births and other social pathologies. These were not unrelated phenomena.

Aristotle said that the first questions of politics are, "How ought we to live? What kind of a people do we wish to be?" The implicit answer of those who support abortion on demand is, in effect, that it is nobody's business. Predictable results follow. One cannot expect the society to absent itself from collective moral judgments on the value of life and then expect an ethical social order to result.

[HighlyVolatile]

Pro-life by values and pro-choice by law. I don't want to make abortion illegal but I want to discourage it and offer help to people with unwanted pregnancies if I can. Most of all, I want to discourage people who don't want children from having irresponsible and unprotected sex so that we don't have to have this debate in the first place.

[HighlyVolatile]

But to make it illegal seems too muddy to me. I generally err against wanting to enforce my values through the law, since laws tend to have their share of perverse incentives and a tendency to create an underground market.

[HighlyVolatile]

For example, if abortion were illegal, a lot of women with unwanted pregnancies might still find ways to get an abortion out of the country/state, or worse, underground in unsafe labs. If it was legal but there were loopholes for rape cases, there might be a greater temptation for women with unwanted pregnancies to claim they were raped even if they weren't. So I err on the side of keeping it legal but I want to discourage it through persuasion and by offering help.

[HighlyVolatile]

* [...] If it was [illegal] but there were loopholes for rape cases [...]

[Anonymous]

Choice. Men have that choice to put a condom on or not.

[boggboss]

Pro choice I don't feel its right to by default make that choice for all women I agree we need better teaching for things so abortion is not used as a form of contraception but not banning it

[dorksided1]

For myself personally pro life, for anyone else that's their issue

[Anonymous]

I'm pro-choice right now.

However if in the future adoptions, foster care, and things like that were better. Plus there was a way to remove a fetus and grow it in like a tank or something. Then I would be pro-life.

[CuriousMufuxka]

Choice! Please abort future criminals so they don't grow up and rob me when I'm actually old and up shitting my depends while I have a stroke and die of a massive coronary laying my own ass juice.

[EssenceOfLight]

Pro choice.
Everyone has the choice not to abort a pregnancy if it's against their belief.

[Dargil]

I am pro-choice to not commit infanticide.

[Agape93]

100% pro choice, no restrictions.

[Aiko_E_Lara]

Pro choice for lots of reasons.

[whereismyjohnny]

Pro-choice.