[CorsiHockeyLeague]

Originally Posted by Peanut

There’s just no point debating it. It’s also offensive to be called stupid so I’m not encouraged to engage. I actually find the debate really upsetting and also I’m on my phone so I’m not my most eloquent..

I didn't call you stupid. I thought your post was stupid. If I thought you were stupid, then it would be silly of me to be annoyed by you making a stupid post - it would be completely expected and unremarkable. I think the vast majority of people who are staunchly pro choice at this moment do not think very hard about their position, or try very hard to justify it in a way that would hold up to even the slightest scrutiny, because they're surrounded by other people who agree with them, and therefore are never called to do so. I do not know you personally, but your post appears to be a quintessential example of that phenomenon. That is what it means to have created a dead dogma, and it bothers the hell out of me.

I think all arguments at some point relegate the woman to a carrier with no or limited rights, because the fetus needs to live. But her rights don’t suddenly become “restored” once she’s had the baby, because it’s now a living being that needs love, care, and support (financial and otherwise) for 18 years. So it’s actually now a lifetime of imposed restrictions that the woman did not actively choose. And you can argue for adoption, but there’s plenty of kids who don’t get adopted and instead live their childhoods in foster care and whatever else less than ideal circumstances.

I think these are completely reasonable concerns, which are factors for me as to why I land on the pro-choice side of the issue as well. I think this paragraph fails to give full weight to the other side of the ledger, however. The foetus "needing to live" is, at least arguably, a valid concern that needs to be addressed, because in the decades this debate has been going on, there has never been a satisfying reason to dismiss it.

Your adoption point is weak (the possibility that a kid is going to live in less than ideal circumstances is not an argument for preventing that kid from being born - this produces a bunch of reductios, e.g. "children born in third world country X are likely to lead difficult lives, therefore it would be moral to sterilize that nation's population", and so on). But I don't believe it's relevant anyway, because the argument at its core is about whether the foetus has rights that (in any circumstance) should compel a mother to carry it to term when she doesn't want to, and if so how far those rights go. What happens afterwards is for the most part a red herring (there are probably some anti-natalists who will want to fight about this but, you know, generally speaking).

To me (at least in our Canadian system) the simplest message really is “if you don’t want an abortion, don’t have one”.

It's not quite that simple. I'm pretty sure that no doctor has the ability to simply perform an abortion on request after about 24 weeks - there is a review process involved in late term abortion, which inherently involves the delegation of a moral (and medical) decision to whoever is undertaking that review. But those types of abortions are so rare, the system seems to work quite well in practice.

However, the practical functionality of the system does not answer the question about whether the system is the right one. That's what people are talking about here. And what I'm saying is, there may not be a right system, and everyone should be way less certain that they've figured out what it is. There are no simple bumper sticker axioms that make any sense on this topic, nor anything you could write on a poster to bring to a protest that's going to be insightful. This is a potentially unanswerable moral problem, which is why it creates such a useful wedge issue.