You've hit on a touchy point here. Most pro-life advocates want to avoid having abortion as a recreational thing (we just go out, have sex, get pregnanent, then dispose of life). However, justifications exist for what is essentially the killing of this baby. A child that is an offspring of, for example, a father and his daughter, is not only scarred for life from this incest, but can be born with a (slightly) higher chance of defects and is usually born to a young daughter that has been separated from any means of supporting herself (after all, her father is probably in jail by now). I agree with you that a child is a child, and if I was a women I wouldn't abort despite the situation, but some concessions have to be made. Society is not perfect, after all
peter1191
I hope I've hit on a touchy point, because the issue isn't as clean cut as a lot of people make it out to be. People should think about unintended and uncomfortable consequences of where they stand on the issue.
Anyway, I'd wonder how many pregnant women actually DO dispose of their fetuses/embryos/babies without a second thought. It's easy to characterize a normal woman who gets an abortion as being just some woman who doesn't mind killing her own baby, but again, I think it's a bit more complicated than that. Have there ever been any studies done that have attempted to answer how difficult this decision is for most women? I'm not sure, but I'm willing to bet that most women who get abortions don't throw their babies away nearly as easily as they'd throw away a 3-month old casserole.
As far as the child being raised by someone who isn't prepared to raise it, this is EXACTLY the same in both rape and non-rape scenarios. That's not an argument for or against abortion. Since women CAN give up their babies if they feel that they can't care for them, the people who end up KEEPING these kids probably weren't ever going to get an abortion anyway. It's like, FIRST you have the option of aborting. SECOND, you have the option of putting the kid up for adoption. FINALLY, you get to the step where you keep the kid and raise it. If you get to step 3 (even despite feeling that you're not qualified to raise a child) and choose to raise the child anyway, then chances are that there was never very much chance that you'd have an abortion anyway.
Sorry, I don't see how RAPE is an issue. Sure, the mother would suffer, and that's regrettable. But if we are to believe that abortion is MURDER, then I hate to say it, but a better reason is needed.
Now, as far as incest, I think there's slightly more of a justification. SLIGHTLY. But not much. If it's okay to abort the product of incest because of the CHANCE that the resulting baby will have life-crippling defects, then I don't see that as being sufficient. Hell, even normal non-incest couples ALSO have a CHANCE of these kinds of defects occuring. If this excuses abortion in the case of incest, then it excuses abortion in pretty much EVERY case. A "chance" aint good enough. Provide clear near perfect evidence that the child WILL be born with such a defect, and in THAT case, the argument passes. But even then, that'd be no different than with babies that were NOT the product of rape or incest.
Like I said though, I'm actually pro-choice. As someone who thinks that women should be able to choose for themselves if they get an abortion or not, I'm not very willing to judge. A woman may abort her kid because she got raped, or because she just "gets around" too much and didn't want her pregnancy to interfere with her lifesty1e. Either way, I don't consider that any of my business.
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