This is one of my favorite articles I've read that ERI has put out. I may try to integrate parts of this into my own pro-life presentation. Excellent stuff.
Great article! What I have find particularly ironic is that too many who support tax-funded abortions not only see abortion as "healthcare", but they actually give it higher priority than actual, life-saving healthcare. My first example is the fact that the "very progressive" city council of Austin, TX recently approved $150,000 in its 2020 budget to help cover "transportation, lodging and child care" for women seeking abortions. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/09/12/austin-abortion-funding-access-services-texas-lawsuit-first-city/2306192001/ Even when I attempt to look at this fact in the most charitable way possible, I am absolutely shocked at the priorities shown here. Texas is one of the states that has declined the Medicaid Expansion offered it under Obamacare. https://amp.caller.com/amp/1932174001 Excerpt-- "Texas is one of 16 states that continue to refuse the Medicaid expansion. About a million uninsured Texans would be eligible for Medicaid under the expansion. A new University of Michigan study estimates that 15,600 people nationwide have died because their states refused the Medicaid expansion. The annual rate in Texas of deaths that could be avoided by expanding Medicaid, according to the study, is 730 (emphasis mine)." That means that the city of Austin (as the rest of Texas) likely has lots of uninsured and underinsured medically-needy residents. Yet, Austin's city officials would prefer to use taxpayer money to further the cause of killing healthy babies residing in the wombs of their healthy mothers for non-medical reasons than to use that same money to save the health and even the lives of the sick and injured among them. Even worse than that is the fact that in the state of Colorado, "progressive" political groups joined with conservatives to defeat a universal healthcare proposal because the proposal may not have covered ALL of the state's abortions. "Here's Why Abortion Advocates Won't Vote for Universal Health Care in Colorado A ballot measure asks them to choose" https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/09/colorado-ballot-measure-universal-health-care-abortion/ The political "progressives" in that state decided--among other things--that the survival of cancer patients played "second fiddle" to financially inconveniencing women seeking to kill their unborn children. It is really sad that "progressivism" has come down to this.
This is a really good, thoughtful article. so thank you for posting it. Thought I find most of this convincing, (and am pro-life anyway), there is one tiny little potential snafu I see in this rebuttal. I think the abortion is not preventative is solid. Abortion as not being labeled as restorative (given certain premises of course), I find a little more difficult. I'm glad you brought up the FGM, because it acts as the counter to my example. What about medical intervention for trans folks? So for some people we know that they derive physiological/ psychological pain as a result of the body they inhabit being male or female when they have a strong disposition to the other. I would definitely consider it restorative, for example, for an FTM to recognize that male-body as the actual ideal, normative form. I would not consider it sexist to consider transition surgery as healthcare as a result. So similarly, while I think the numbers are much lower than pro-choice advocates like to believe, I think there are a population of women who, when pregnant, have significant physiological/ psychological pain, that their normative body is a not pregnant one. This could be for many reasons. Perhaps it is trauma through rape (and again, I think the numbers show that the people feeling this pain would be very low, given that women pregnant from rape don't abort at as high a percentage as women who became pregnant through consensual actions), perhaps it is because the female bodied person in question is trans and this sends them into dysphoria, perhaps the woman is horrified at the changes in her body because pregnancy simply can be brutal. Perhaps, like a trans-woman or trans-man, this pain is something that can and will lead to this person's suicide if nothing is done. I think in that case, abortion of a pre-viable pregnancy can be argued as being restorative. Not that I'm completely sold on that, but I think it is arguable. But two caveats: 1) It would ONLY be for those particular women and given that these particular women are such a small percentage, in the interest of the other life at stake, we'd have to figure out a way to correctly identify those people. We can't even fully identify trans-people; there are a small percentage who regret their transition. Now, I'm okay with people being free to transition and maybe it is a mistake, maybe it is not. It's their life. But with another life involved, there is another human paying the price for a mistake. 2) Along those lines, even if it is healthcare, going back to your primary points, there is STILL and ethical question involved with regards to the life that also exists within the mother. We already recognize this in other situations. Cutting off a weaker conjoined twin might be the only way the stronger one survives, but we still have medical discussions about it, and methods to prevent that being used as as excuse to just go and off any conjoined twin for any reason. Using the organs of the dead is something that can restore, but there's a lot of ethical questions we need, and do, ask ourselves about because of the potential for market forces to incentivize organ collection at the cost of quality/quantity of life for the dying patient. So in the hypothetical "abortion is healthcare", we STILL need to discuss how worth it is it to kill someone for the shorter-term relief of the issue? A life for a life, perhaps that makes sense (i.e. when the woman becomes suicidal as a result), but a life for 5 more months of existential distress? I don't want to put anyone through 5 months of existential distress, but I don't think relieving them of that distress a few months earlier is worth the life of a completely different human being.
First I would like to say that I think that this is an excellent article containing a lot of very important information and ideas that is well worded. I would like to respectfully point out one serious flaw that you are using as something to bolster your viewpoint and prove your point. You state that pregnancy is not a pathology and that it is evidence that a woman's body is healthy. I agree that pregnancy is not a pathology unless of course the poor little baby is growing outside of the uterus however I disagree that it is evidence that the woman's body is healthy. There are extremely sick women becoming pregnant and managing to stay pregnant for the full 9 months all the time. Women dying of cancer become pregnant. Women who have been taking nefarious substances everyday for years and are severely underweight and haven't had a bite of healthy food in months or years become pregnant. So pregnancy is not always an indication of health and well-being. I would also like to respectfully point out that you state that the purpose of abortion is to cause embryonic or fetal demise. You word it in your article as though everyone knows this and agrees upon this. The word demise indicates that life exists. The overwhelming majority of so-called pro-choice people and articles that I have heard and read deny that there is any life in the womb. Usually they state the unscientific comment that what is in a pregnant woman's womb is the pregnant woman's own body even though science has proven that what is inside a pregnant woman's womb has its own unique human DNA not the woman's. I very rarely come across anyone claiming to be pro-choice who admits that there is something alive and that the purpose of abortion is to end life. These people claim that it is just a lump of tissue or an issue of protein or even a parasite and that no death is occurring. They claim that they are terminating a pregnancy but not terminating a life. I know that that is cognitive dissonance however I am simply sharing that the pro-choice people I know are adamant that it is not a life and that no "demise" whether of a baby or fetus or an embryo is occurring. Thank you very much for your article.
Hi, Thank you for your kind words. I am glad you enjoyed the article. I do not think that pregnancy means that a woman is healthy, rather I say that pregnancy is not something which has gone wrong with the woman’s body or some sort of illness. As for your second point, you might be running into one of two problems with the pro-choice people/sources that you are encountering. The first problem could be miscommunication and misunderstanding. Many times when pro-choice people say things like “no one knows when life begins” or “the fetus isn’t alive” they mean something different than biological life. They are talking about meaningful or valuable life, but pro-life people think that they are talking about science. Or they say things like “the fetus is part of the woman’s body” when they actually mean it is inside her body. The are making a claim about women’s bodily autonomy, not science. The second problem that might be contributing to the biology discussion is that you’re talking with people who are uneducated. This is especially common is you’re having discussions online. We see the biological debate go around in circles online much more than when we talk with people in person. In face to face conversations the biological facts are easily agreed upon in less than five minutes. I think it has to do with the environment of the internet and the way people process information online and the fact that the conversations our staff has in person have largely taken place with educated people. The terminology of “fetal demise” or “killing a fetus” is commonly used by abortion practitioners and other educated pro-choice people. I know it can be frustrating sometimes when you’re talking with someone who simply doesn’t understand the biological reality of abortion, pregnancy, or embryology. As pro-life people, we often find ourselves having to explain the same scientific facts again and again, but we should remember that sometimes we are talking with someone who just hasn’t had this conversation before or has a lot of walls up around this subject. If we want to change their mind, we need to find the patience to explain it to them with the same respect we would want someone to have with us.
"You state that pregnancy is not a pathology and that it is evidence that a woman's body is healthy." She had written: "pregnancy is something the female body does when it’s functioning well, not something it does when it’s broken." How about "While pregnancy does not prove that a woman's body is completely healthy, it at least proves that it is not completely broken. It is at least some evidence of health."
Great article! How would you respond to the argument that it is an intervention made to restore emotional or mental well-being (as opposed to physical)? Does this inherently imply that the pregnancy is a pathology? It seems things become a little more subjective when addressing emotional and mental well-being...I guess I wonder if you can base the entire argument on pathology as sometimes the cause is unknown, but measures are still taken to alleviate symptoms. Maybe the question is, does everyone who thinks abortion is healthcare consider pregnancy the cause of the negative condition? If not, how would you defend your argument?
Thank you, Melody. I'm glad you asked this because I considered addressing it in the article, but I thought it would be too distracting to include! If someone is mentally ill then they should seek mental healthcare treatment, like professional counseling. Sometimes mental health problems can have a physical pathology that contributes to the mental condition. For example, clinical depression often is accompanied by the physical condition of low Serotonin levels, so a Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressant is prescribed. In this case, the SSRI is a physical intervention restoring the physical pathology. The professional therapy, depending on the type, is going to be something like cognitive intervention to restore emotional wellness. But in the case of pregnancy, there is no physical pathology so physical intervention, like chemical or surgical abortion, is not restorative care.
I am interested in how you would address the issue of someone who has a type of mental health issue that needs a medication that very might likely cause birth defects. You mentioned depression and ssris which are unlikely to cause birth defects. What if a woman has bipolar or schizophrenia and needs to take a mood stabilizer or an anti-psychotic medication? Now I do believe that abortion is the taking of human life and is a super bad idea 100% of the time. However is woman's question made me think about this if a woman would become so mentally ill by stopping taking her bipolar or schizophrenia medication that it is not something that is even an option yet the medication has a high likelihood of causing birth defects that would negatively affect the entire life of the little human growing inside of her what are we supposed to do then?
Hi Karah, I appreciate your question.There are two variations of this question so I would like to give a response to both. Scenario A: A woman is taking a prescribed medication for some severe condition which can cause severe birth defects if she becomes pregnant while on that medication. Scenario B: A woman is not receiving any medication or treatment, becomes pregnant, and during the pregnancy develops a condition or has a condition discovered which needs treatment urgently, but that treatment is harmful to the baby. In Scenario A, I think the woman has a moral obligation to avoid pregnancy while she is on that medication. Women of child-bearing age are always warned by their doctor thoroughly in these cases about the dangers to the child if she becomes pregnant for this reason. Because she is informed, if she becomes pregnant during this time from consensual sex, then I think she is morally culpable for harming her child, but I do not think that the law should allow her to kill that child which she has disabled. If she is able to stop the medication temporarily, then I think she should, but I don’t think she should be legally obligated to go off the medication. I think that the doctor advising her should take into consideration the life and health of both patients when advising her to continue or to stop the medication. In Scenario B, I think that the doctor should make an evaluation based on the health of the two patients: mother and child. In some cases, even important treatment can be delayed a little while and in some cases not. Consider something like cancer. Sometimes women choose to wait long enough so that they can have a C-section before beginning chemotherapy, but I think it depends on the situation. I think the woman has a moral obligation to protect her child, but not a legal obligation to delay treatment. Killing the baby is not a necessary part of the treatment for these sorts of conditions. There is a sort of idea with this scenario like “justified endangerment” to the child. For example, there is an element of serious risk for a mother to try to escape North Korea with her baby, yet that risk is undertaken for the well being of both mother and child and seems reasonable. Similarly, giving a woman some latitude to balance the competing ends of her safety (which is a benefit to the child as well) and the child's safety in potentially harmful treatments seems a reasonable way to go about things. Another thing to note is that there is sometimes a hidden premise in the conversation that says it would be better to kill someone than disable them. This actually comes from a euthanasia mindset about disabled people. Andrew Kaake wrote an article on this subject: https://blog.equalrightsinstitute.com/abortion-fetal-euthanasia-disguise/
It’s pretty straightforward. The vast majority of family physicians, as well as Ob-gyns, do not perform abortions despite being perfectly capable of doing so and getting requests from patients (as far as technique is concerned, there’s not much of a difference between using suction aspiration to remove the remains of a deceased unborn child and doing an elective abortion). Even in Canada’s nuttiest province, the government been trying to recruit a late-term abortion practitioner for many years without much success. Evidently despite what the professional medical associations say, most doctors do not really consider abortion to be healthcare. It’s a lot easier to virtue-signal about how abortion is healthcare than it is to actually live that way.
ABORTION IS STILL HEALTHCARE.
Prolifer want to take away that option.
So, prolifer act cruel.
What I have find particularly ironic is that too many who support tax-funded abortions not only see abortion as "healthcare", but they actually give it higher priority than actual, life-saving healthcare.
My first example is the fact that the "very progressive" city council of Austin, TX recently approved $150,000 in its 2020 budget to help cover "transportation, lodging and child care" for women seeking abortions.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/09/12/austin-abortion-funding-access-services-texas-lawsuit-first-city/2306192001/
Even when I attempt to look at this fact in the most charitable way possible, I am absolutely shocked at the priorities shown here.
Texas is one of the states that has declined the Medicaid Expansion offered it under Obamacare.
https://amp.caller.com/amp/1932174001
Excerpt--
"Texas is one of 16 states that continue to refuse the Medicaid expansion.
About a million uninsured Texans would be eligible for Medicaid under the expansion.
A new University of Michigan study estimates that 15,600 people nationwide have died because their states refused the Medicaid expansion.
The annual rate in Texas of deaths that could be avoided by expanding Medicaid, according to the study, is 730 (emphasis mine)."
That means that the city of Austin (as the rest of Texas) likely has lots of uninsured and underinsured medically-needy residents.
Yet, Austin's city officials would prefer to use taxpayer money to further the cause of killing healthy babies residing in the wombs of their healthy mothers for non-medical reasons than to use that same money to save the health and even the lives of the sick and injured among them.
Even worse than that is the fact that in the state of Colorado, "progressive" political groups joined with conservatives to defeat a universal healthcare proposal because the proposal may not have covered ALL of the state's abortions.
"Here's Why Abortion Advocates Won't Vote for Universal Health Care in Colorado A ballot measure asks them to choose"
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/09/colorado-ballot-measure-universal-health-care-abortion/
The political "progressives" in that state decided--among other things--that the survival of cancer patients played "second fiddle" to financially inconveniencing women seeking to kill their unborn children.
It is really sad that "progressivism" has come down to this.
I think the abortion is not preventative is solid. Abortion as not being labeled as restorative (given certain premises of course), I find a little more difficult. I'm glad you brought up the FGM, because it acts as the counter to my example. What about medical intervention for trans folks? So for some people we know that they derive physiological/ psychological pain as a result of the body they inhabit being male or female when they have a strong disposition to the other. I would definitely consider it restorative, for example, for an FTM to recognize that male-body as the actual ideal, normative form. I would not consider it sexist to consider transition surgery as healthcare as a result.
So similarly, while I think the numbers are much lower than pro-choice advocates like to believe, I think there are a population of women who, when pregnant, have significant physiological/ psychological pain, that their normative body is a not pregnant one. This could be for many reasons. Perhaps it is trauma through rape (and again, I think the numbers show that the people feeling this pain would be very low, given that women pregnant from rape don't abort at as high a percentage as women who became pregnant through consensual actions), perhaps it is because the female bodied person in question is trans and this sends them into dysphoria, perhaps the woman is horrified at the changes in her body because pregnancy simply can be brutal. Perhaps, like a trans-woman or trans-man, this pain is something that can and will lead to this person's suicide if nothing is done.
I think in that case, abortion of a pre-viable pregnancy can be argued as being restorative. Not that I'm completely sold on that, but I think it is arguable. But two caveats: 1) It would ONLY be for those particular women and given that these particular women are such a small percentage, in the interest of the other life at stake, we'd have to figure out a way to correctly identify those people. We can't even fully identify trans-people; there are a small percentage who regret their transition. Now, I'm okay with people being free to transition and maybe it is a mistake, maybe it is not. It's their life. But with another life involved, there is another human paying the price for a mistake. 2) Along those lines, even if it is healthcare, going back to your primary points, there is STILL and ethical question involved with regards to the life that also exists within the mother. We already recognize this in other situations. Cutting off a weaker conjoined twin might be the only way the stronger one survives, but we still have medical discussions about it, and methods to prevent that being used as as excuse to just go and off any conjoined twin for any reason. Using the organs of the dead is something that can restore, but there's a lot of ethical questions we need, and do, ask ourselves about because of the potential for market forces to incentivize organ collection at the cost of quality/quantity of life for the dying patient. So in the hypothetical "abortion is healthcare", we STILL need to discuss how worth it is it to kill someone for the shorter-term relief of the issue? A life for a life, perhaps that makes sense (i.e. when the woman becomes suicidal as a result), but a life for 5 more months of existential distress? I don't want to put anyone through 5 months of existential distress, but I don't think relieving them of that distress a few months earlier is worth the life of a completely different human being.
I would like to respectfully point out one serious flaw that you are using as something to bolster your viewpoint and prove your point. You state that pregnancy is not a pathology and that it is evidence that a woman's body is healthy. I agree that pregnancy is not a pathology unless of course the poor little baby is growing outside of the uterus however I disagree that it is evidence that the woman's body is healthy. There are extremely sick women becoming pregnant and managing to stay pregnant for the full 9 months all the time. Women dying of cancer become pregnant. Women who have been taking nefarious substances everyday for years and are severely underweight and haven't had a bite of healthy food in months or years become pregnant. So pregnancy is not always an indication of health and well-being.
I would also like to respectfully point out that you state that the purpose of abortion is to cause embryonic or fetal demise. You word it in your article as though everyone knows this and agrees upon this. The word demise indicates that life exists. The overwhelming majority of so-called pro-choice people and articles that I have heard and read deny that there is any life in the womb. Usually they state the unscientific comment that what is in a pregnant woman's womb is the pregnant woman's own body even though science has proven that what is inside a pregnant woman's womb has its own unique human DNA not the woman's.
I very rarely come across anyone claiming to be pro-choice who admits that there is something alive and that the purpose of abortion is to end life. These people claim that it is just a lump of tissue or an issue of protein or even a parasite and that no death is occurring.
They claim that they are terminating a pregnancy but not terminating a life. I know that that is cognitive dissonance however I am simply sharing that the pro-choice people I know are adamant that it is not a life and that no "demise" whether of a baby or fetus or an embryo is occurring.
Thank you very much for your article.
Thank you for your kind words. I am glad you enjoyed the article. I do not think that pregnancy means that a woman is healthy, rather I say that pregnancy is not something which has gone wrong with the woman’s body or some sort of illness.
As for your second point, you might be running into one of two problems with the pro-choice people/sources that you are encountering. The first problem could be miscommunication and misunderstanding. Many times when pro-choice people say things like “no one knows when life begins” or “the fetus isn’t alive” they mean something different than biological life. They are talking about meaningful or valuable life, but pro-life people think that they are talking about science. Or they say things like “the fetus is part of the woman’s body” when they actually mean it is inside her body. The are making a claim about women’s bodily autonomy, not science.
The second problem that might be contributing to the biology discussion is that you’re talking with people who are uneducated. This is especially common is you’re having discussions online. We see the biological debate go around in circles online much more than when we talk with people in person. In face to face conversations the biological facts are easily agreed upon in less than five minutes. I think it has to do with the environment of the internet and the way people process information online and the fact that the conversations our staff has in person have largely taken place with educated people.
The terminology of “fetal demise” or “killing a fetus” is commonly used by abortion practitioners and other educated pro-choice people. I know it can be frustrating sometimes when you’re talking with someone who simply doesn’t understand the biological reality of abortion, pregnancy, or embryology. As pro-life people, we often find ourselves having to explain the same scientific facts again and again, but we should remember that sometimes we are talking with someone who just hasn’t had this conversation before or has a lot of walls up around this subject. If we want to change their mind, we need to find the patience to explain it to them with the same respect we would want someone to have with us.
She had written:
"pregnancy is something the female body does when it’s functioning well, not something it does when it’s broken."
How about "While pregnancy does not prove that a woman's body is completely healthy, it at least proves that it is not completely broken. It is at least some evidence of health."
Everyone who claims the opposite must have sociopathic tendencies
Now I do believe that abortion is the taking of human life and is a super bad idea 100% of the time. However is woman's question made me think about this if a woman would become so mentally ill by stopping taking her bipolar or schizophrenia medication that it is not something that is even an option yet the medication has a high likelihood of causing birth defects that would negatively affect the entire life of the little human growing inside of her what are we supposed to do then?
I appreciate your question.There are two variations of this question so I would like to give a response to both. Scenario A: A woman is taking a prescribed medication for some severe condition which can cause severe birth defects if she becomes pregnant while on that medication. Scenario B: A woman is not receiving any medication or treatment, becomes pregnant, and during the pregnancy develops a condition or has a condition discovered which needs treatment urgently, but that treatment is harmful to the baby.
In Scenario A, I think the woman has a moral obligation to avoid pregnancy while she is on that medication. Women of child-bearing age are always warned by their doctor thoroughly in these cases about the dangers to the child if she becomes pregnant for this reason. Because she is informed, if she becomes pregnant during this time from consensual sex, then I think she is morally culpable for harming her child, but I do not think that the law should allow her to kill that child which she has disabled. If she is able to stop the medication temporarily, then I think she should, but I don’t think she should be legally obligated to go off the medication. I think that the doctor advising her should take into consideration the life and health of both patients when advising her to continue or to stop the medication.
In Scenario B, I think that the doctor should make an evaluation based on the health of the two patients: mother and child. In some cases, even important treatment can be delayed a little while and in some cases not. Consider something like cancer. Sometimes women choose to wait long enough so that they can have a C-section before beginning chemotherapy, but I think it depends on the situation. I think the woman has a moral obligation to protect her child, but not a legal obligation to delay treatment. Killing the baby is not a necessary part of the treatment for these sorts of conditions. There is a sort of idea with this scenario like “justified endangerment” to the child. For example, there is an element of serious risk for a mother to try to escape North Korea with her baby, yet that risk is undertaken for the well being of both mother and child and seems reasonable. Similarly, giving a woman some latitude to balance the competing ends of her safety (which is a benefit to the child as well) and the child's safety in potentially harmful treatments seems a reasonable way to go about things.
Another thing to note is that there is sometimes a hidden premise in the conversation that says it would be better to kill someone than disable them. This actually comes from a euthanasia mindset about disabled people. Andrew Kaake wrote an article on this subject: https://blog.equalrightsinstitute.com/abortion-fetal-euthanasia-disguise/