yet another instance from ripley of why this board needs more women, and yet another example of why that probably won't happen in the initial post. the pro-life position is way too limited in its scope to take into account the various reasons why abortions happen - and need to happen. very few women take this step lightly or use it as an alternative to contraception 1) because it's pretty inconvenient at the very least 2) because the procedure is pretty harrowing for most who have to undergo it. no one is saying that it's pleasant or good or without implication. however, it can be the responsible thing to do for a variety of different reasons. better no child than an unwanted child or a child that would be at any kind of risk unacceptable to the expectant mother, as far as i can see.
to that latter end, walking through hackney the other day i saw a women who was 8 months pregnant if she was a day smacked out of her tree, with a can of tennents super in hand and an equally drunk and fucked up guy slapping her around (luckily several people stepped in to stop this and i didn't have to cross the road and get involved because it was a pretty ugly scene). was keeping the baby the best option in this scenario?
still, outside of casting judgement on people and their ability to look after a child, which is, although in that particular instance pretty clear-cut to my mind, very knotty territory for the most part (ie what really consitutes "being able to care for a child"? a lot of different things actually and there's no perfect set of criteria either), it's every individual woman's place to say what she does and does not want to go through, not a man's and certainly not that of wider society.
wider society (particularly those members on the anti-abortion side) tends toward the hyperbolic, sentimental and irrational when discussing the "right" to life. this is evident in the continual falling back on a belief in god as sole architect/destroyer of life as a way of blanking out life's difficult and uncomfortable realities and the way that new or potential life is privileged over that which is pre-existent. this last point doesn't make a great deal of sense at all. the risk to a woman's health of carrying a child to term is a very important issue here. sure, in the affluent west, we're not living in the 18th century any more and comparatively few women die in childbirth. however, it can still happen, and in significantly more cases giving birth can, while not actually killing the mother, do a hell of a lot of damage to future health. ante-natal care being such as it is these days, most women are made aware of any such problems in advance and those kinds of risks are up to a woman to weigh up and decide upon. after all, if having a baby is going to kill a woman how can anyone say that she has to see the pregnancy through? isn't that "justifiable murder", too? also adoption isn't a straightforward issue for women carrying unwanted babies, either. it has many implications, political and personal.
of course, we'd all rather live in a world where abortions weren't happening because they're not pleasant things to have to think about, but sometimes life is about making the least unpleasant of several unpleasant choices. just because things aren't fluffy and nice doesn't mean that they're not necessary. also, it's always best to avoid standing in judgement over those kinds of choices because you never know when you might have to make them yourself, just as you can never fully understand another person's experiences or circumstances.
) as "quality, not quantity" when it comes to human life? That extinguishing some potential human lives (with birth providing a convenient cut-off point between potential and actual life) while bringing up others that will be cared for and given a decent chance is better than demanding that *all* foetuses be taken to term, even though some of them will be unwanted and (adoption notwithstanding) probably have rotten lives as a result?
