Quote:
Originally Posted by jet
I'm anti - abortion in some ways, pro - abortion in others, like in cases of the mothers life being endangered, or they are in an extremely fragile emotional state, rape, or young teens who haven't matured enough to understand the risks.
Apart from that, no. In this day and age, with contraception freely available anyone who takes the risk should be responsible for their actions. To deny an unborn baby the chance of a life because of irresponsibility makes me so angry.
The excuses of 'I couldn't afford it, or 'I don't want to be a single mother' or 'It would disrupt my career' etc are self serving.
It is obviously heart rending and hard, but the inevitable emotional and physical pain of going through with having the baby should be borne, and that of giving the child up for adoption to those who long for a child and can't have one.
I firmly believe in life from conception, once life had begun there is no going back no matter how tiny and hard to imagine that life is. It is like saying a 1 year old's life is not as important as a 7 year old's in my opinion.
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Once upon a time I had a fairly similar opinion but it's changed dramatically over the years. The first thing that prompted it really is my second daughter's extra needs. She is wonderful and she is thriving but to do so, she needs a huge amount of our resources, both emotional and financial. Having a third child "unplanned" would have been an absolute disaster for our lives, for her, and for her older sister. Totally devastating. I've had the snip now and we never had to go through the trauma of an abortion but for over a year if she was ever even slightly "late" it was panic-stations, and we had essentially pre-decided that if it ever did happen, we would have to get an abortion. The "in this day and age with contraception" argument doesn't hold up that well either as we have had pregnancies on three different types or contraception - pill, coil implant, and condoms. My eldest was conceived while my wife was on the pill, and we have been through two miscarriages.
The second thing that changed my opinion on "life starting at conception", is those two miscarriages. The first was upsetting, the second was a bit of a non-event to be honest, but the important part, is that it's clearly nothing like comparing a one year old to a seven year old. I don't feel like a "father of four" who has had two "children" die. And to be totally frank, I sort of think comparing an early-stage miscarriage to the death of a child or even a stillbirth is grossly offensive to anyone who has actually lost a child. Would you genuinely go up to someone who has had a child die in an accident or of illness and say "Hey man, I totally know what you're going through, we had a miscarriage at 8 weeks".
It's just not the same, or anything even resembling the same.
Also, here's a (for some reason) little known fact: something like 30% of conceptions fail to implant and miscarry within the first two weeks (before the first missed period), without the woman having any idea that she was ever pregnant. Many couples trying to conceive will have multiple of these and never even know. That sounds like an awful lot of child death until you realise that it just... Isn't.