Is it just me, or are many pro-choicers (i.e. the dedicated activists, rather than your average kiwi punter who sits on the fence on this issue) starting to sound more and more like the anti-choicers that they accuse pro-lifers of being?
In the last fortnight several different campus rags around NZ have run articles focused on attacking the pro-life position, to the point of absurdity, and even angry hate-fueled ranting – see last week’s blog post about the CRACCUM article.
Tangent: the author of that CRACCUM article, which was published in print edition without any name attached, has since been revealed – he’s a young socialist/atheist who wears a cardboard beer box on his head (no, I will not be inserting any witticisms about the symbolic nature of wearing alcohol product packaging on your head). He actually took the time to post a brief comment on this blog last week, accusing me of engaging in “strawman” arguments – but everyone knows that I don’t believe in strawman arguments, being a good feminist I only accept the existence of ‘strawperson’, or even better, ‘straw subjective gender construct’ arguments. I digress, back to the pro-choice crusade that has begun around the country.
More and more, and this is by no means a NZ-only phenomenon, we are seeing pro-choicers who are becoming decidedly anti-choice in their approach to the issue of abortion.
There seems to be no willingness to actually discuss this issue in a reasoned, open and honest fashion, instead they would prefer to silence even the slightest whiff of dissent from their pro-choice ideology (yep, cause that’s exactly what it is; an ideology that was invented to try and evade the serious ethical challenges to the legitimacy of the act of abortion) with all manner of attacks.
Having said that, I can kind of understand where they’re coming from though, it must be hard to remain steadfastly committed to an ideology whose popular support is waning on a yearly basis, and whose most diehard adherents are now referring to being prop-choice as being part of a shrinking “post-menopausal militia“.
You see, the landscape is changing, and I’m not sure if the pro-choicer’s can actually see what’s happening.
No longer are women lining up in droves to express an ardent and undying commitment to the pro-choice ideology.
I would suggest that a large part of this has to do with the fact that, while many women out there might still be open to the idea of legalized abortion, they certainly aren’t huge fans of the act itself, with many simply choosing to quietly hold a personal opposition to abortion.
You see, we now live in a culture that places a high regard on human rights (and rightly so), and this means that more and young people are being steeped in a culture which encourages them to think about the ethical rights and wrongs of all manner of actions – from product manufacturing and consumption, to the way animals are treated, to the way we establish legal and policy frameworks in relation to human persons.
More and more young people are becoming attuned to important concepts of social justice, and this has coincided with massive leaps in medical science and technology, which now gives us a far greater insight into exactly what a fetus is – a human being (I mean come on, it’s not like a pig or a cow is ever going to pop out of a human womb after nine months – duh!) that meets all of the criteria for biological life (metabolism, growth, reaction to stimuli, reproduction).
What we are seeing in our culture is a meeting of two beautiful things: growing ethical awareness and growing scientific awareness – and the end result can only lead in one direction – a growing discontentment with the act of abortion, and a desire to move towards a more humane solution to the problems of crisis or unplanned pregnancies.
We see this very thing playing out in the medical fraternity where more and more doctors and other medical professionals are quietly refusing to participate in the ugly business of abortion, preferring instead to devote their talents to the far greater and more fulfilling work of saving and caring for human life.
Sadly many in the pro-choice lobby, especially those in positions of influence and authority, are responding to these positive developments of human enlightenment with negative and reactionary acts, grounded in a desire to remain in an unenlightened and closed approach to the issue of abortion.
Trying to silence groups on campus is far easier than actually having to debate the issues with them, especially when your ideology is not supported by logically sound ethical propositions, or by advances in medical science.
If the pro-choice lobby truly believes that their position is built on solid propositions, and that it enjoys widespread popular support, then why all of the reactionary and fearful closing of the doors to open and honest exploration of this important ethical issue?
Surely for any choice to be truly free and informed then the right to full knowledge has to be the initial foundation upon which that choice is built, explored and eventually made – without knowledge there can be only ignorance, and ignorance can never result in a truly free choice.
This week Massey University student magazine Massive Magazine is running a debate section topic on ”Should the practice of abortion be banned within New Zealand?”. Massive Magazine is the largest student publication in New Zealand with access to over 30,000 students.
ProLife NZ and pro-abortion organisation ALRANZ were both asked to give a reply to this question.
We had Amy Blowers and John Fox provide their point of view with this excellent article “Time to talk”. To view both articles and have the opportunity to leave a comment, check out the Massive Magazine debate section here.
Time to TalkI
Abortion is a difficult issue. It can so often feel as if polarising alternatives dominate the debate; as if you are forced to choose between two undesirable alternatives, like dismembered foetuses and women dying in back streets, or upholding the individual over the right to life of the baby.
But behind the rhetoric, and the genuine difficulty of trying to balance these things up, lies some substantial common ground—and some real, and more human, choices.
Some pro-lifers would like to see the law tightened. Some focus on achieving cultural change to promote the value of unborn life. We all agree that abortion is a grave tragedy, that even the 16,630 abortions in 2011 were too many. We are committed to building a society where abortion is unnecessary, and unborn children are respected and protected, by their parents, and by society. We agree on the personhood of the unborn child, as a matter of biology, and an urgent issue of human dignity. We agree abortion hurts too many women. And we agree that by the time the choice is made to terminate a life, society has already failed.
But here’s the thing. Thoughtful pro-choice advocates, while disagreeing with us on the value of the unborn child, can also agree, at least sometimes, with many of these positions. No one thinks abortion is the “best” option. And few are prepared to assign the unborn no moral value at all.So, in the spirit of open debate, we’ve come up with some questions. We’d love to know what you think.
Why is it adoption is so hard? Surely it’s time we got rid of the 1950’s vibe around adoptions, and updated our law to make adoption easier?
Why is it our abortion rate is so high? 98% of abortions are done not for terrible reasons like danger to life, or fetal handicap, but under the vague “danger to mental health” clause–and more disturbingly, according to the Supervisory Committee, many are repeats. We’re a small country. Surely we can do better?
What alternatives to abortion exist, and what can we do to support them? Our nascent crisis pregnancy movement deserves our help. Our welfare and childcare structures need a second look—and the list goes on.
What is the role of the father in pregnancy? How can we encourage men to take responsibility, and both parties to take a less disposable and consumerist attitude to relationships?
What can we, as a society, and as individuals, do, to build a culture which welcomes and respects life, supporting both women and their babies? We aren’t interested in shouting, or talking past each other. It’s time we talked instead.
One of my favorite stories as a child was the Emperor’s New Clothes.
It tells the story of a king who falls for a massive con, believing two tailors, who are actually swindlers, when they tell him that they can weave new royal clothes for him that are invisible to people who are hopelessly stupid. The king can’t see the clothes, but because he doesn’t want to appear hopelessly stupid he doesn’t ask any questions of the tailors, instead he pretends that he can actually see the garments and he ends up walking the main streets of his kingdom in a royal parade while absolutely naked.
And even though their king is completely naked, the king’s subjects simply participate in the great con and act as if he’s wearing the finest clothes they’ve ever seen as he strolls buck naked through their streets.
The ruse is finally brought to an end when a humble little child, who still has an uncorrupted paradigm of the world, shouts aloud that the king isn’t wearing any clothes, at which point the deception is finally accepted for what it always was – a great lie.
In many ways, the Emperor’s New Clothes is actually the story of the pro-choice ideology and Western society over the last 40 years.
The weavers are the ardent pro-choice ideologues who have sewn the pro-choice ideology into the very fabric of Western society over the last 40 years or so, successfully convincing many people that what was being sold to them was the greatest and most impressive freedom they could ever possess.
The king is like the majority of our populace, who have all sorts of personal reservations and doubts about the ethical nature of abortion, and who have never actually been comfortable with it, but at the same time have been too fearful of being considered foolish, or branded as anti-woman, or a radical, etc if they spoke up. So instead of saying anything they just quietly went along with the pro-choice ideology.
The loyal subjects are like the mainstream media, and other information transmitting entities who simply went along with the whole pro-choice pretense in the public square, never willing to actually allow a robust and open debate about the ethics of abortion, or to allow any substantial challenges to the naked flaws in the pro-choice ideology.
And then there’s the little child.
Firstly the child represents the younger generation, who are not bound by the stuffy old conventions of the king’s subjects, and who are not afraid to ask the difficult questions and point out the obvious flaws in the pro-choice ideology. They are truth seekers, not interested in pretense, or simply going along with the rest of the crowd because they have been told that they must. So they ask the hard questions, and point out the obvious flaws in the pro-choice ideology.
Their unabashed commitment to honesty and reality is a game changer, one that the pro-choice tailors, the king and the general populace have no real answer for – their willingness to seek out the truth holds a mirror up to the rest of society and challenges us to face the serious problems with the pro-choice ideology that we have so willingly gone along with.
I am talking here about things like the willingness of pro-choice ideologues, like New Zealand’s very own Richard Bock, to turn a blind eye to gendercide abortions (where human beings are aborted because of their gender) in order to keep up the pro-choice pretense.
Or there was the seeming unwillingness of pro-choice ideologues to speak out against infanticide when two Italian ethicists associated with Australian universities made international headlines over the last week for proposing that the very same arguments that the pro-choice movement uses to try and justify the act of abortion can also be used to justify the act of infanticide.
One can’t help but sense that the reason they never actually spoke about publicly against this was because they realized that their pro-choice rhetoric CAN actually be used to try and justify infanticide, and the last thing they wanted was a light being shone on that important and extremely problematic truth about their ideology.
Last week’s infanticide story was actually also symbolic of the little child, for it suddenly and out of the blue forced Western society to confront the frightening and inconvenient truth that the pro-choice ideology we have unquestioningly embraced over the last 40 years does actually also provide an ethical justification for ending the lives of newborns as well as pre-borns.
Yes, just like the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes, the con men have had their day, and it is now only a matter of time before the pro-choice pretense comes to an end because of the fearless and inquisitive truth seeking of the next generation.
You may have seen the story about the two Italian ethicists associated with Australian universities who are seriously proposing that “killing a newborn could be ethically permissible in all the circumstances where abortion would be”.
As far as I can tell this story was first reported by the excellent BioEdge website last Saturday, and then a Christchurch-based religious pro-life organisation were the first to alert kiwis to this story via an update on their Facebook Page on Monday morning, however the story has garnered far greater attention in the last 24 hours after various international pro-life news sites, and even a NZ talkback radio station have begun to focus on this story.
What I find most interesting about this whole issue is that some people are talking about this story as if it is a new development within the world of academia and ethical discourse, when in actual fact there is nothing new about this idea at all. Ethical theories attempting to legitimize infanticide have been floating around for a long time now, with utilitarian ethicist Peter Singer being one of the more famous proponents of such ideas.
What I think is worthy of our attention and discussion here is the issue of ethical consistency that underlies the arguments of these two Italian ethicists who support infanticide (although they use the euphemism “after-birth abortion” to describe the act of infanticide in their writings).
You see, for a long time now, certain people within the pro-life movement have been stating that almost all of the arguments used by the pro-choice movement to try and claim justification for abortion can also be used to support the killing of newborn infants.
Let’s take a quick look at the key arguments often used by the pro-choice movement to try and ethically justify abortion, and how they can also be used to justify infanticide…
1. The fetus can’t feel pain
This argument is a disputed point amongst experts in the area of fetal pain, with some suggesting that a fetus feels little to no pain, while others suggest that they do feel pain, and that at certain early stages they may even feel it more intensely than they do later in the pregnancy.
Ultimately this argument is a total red herring though, because whether an entity can feel pain is totally irrelevant to the question of whether it is ethically acceptable to end the life of that entity.
If pro-choicer’s truly believe that an inability to feel pain equals the loss of the right to life, then this would mean that infanticide would be ethically permissible as long as we first anesthetized the infant before ending its life.
2. The fetus is an imposition on the bodily rights/freedoms of the woman
Basically this argument is built on the idea that a fetus is little more than a parasite (obviously it ignores the many health benefits that a normal pregnancy can offer a woman), and that the relationship between mother and unborn child is that of a host/parasite (which obviously ignores the fact that the relationship the two entities share is not that of cold and indifferent strangers, but that of the profoundly mysterious relationship we call ‘the maternal bond’ – which can only ever be shared by a mother and her offspring).
The argument goes on to suggest that no one, not even her biological child in its fetal stage of development, has the right to impose upon the bodily rights/freedoms of a woman, therefore a woman should have the right to consent, or reject pregnancy via abortion if so desired.
If pro-choicer’s accept this argument as valid, then surely they must also have to accept that a newborn infant has no right to impose itself upon the bodily freedoms/rights of the woman by robbing her of sleep, requiring breastfeeding, regular nappy changes, etc. – all of which make ongoing and often intense bodily demands of the woman.
Some pro-choicers will respond to this by saying ‘ah, but once the baby is born it can be adopted out, or another adult can take care of it, but before birth it is only the mother who is forced into sacrificing her bodily rights/freedoms’.
However what they are suggesting here is really just a matter of degree, rather than something that is substantively different – in other words, if you can immediately hand the baby off to another person then terminating it is ethically unacceptable, however if you can’t, and you would be required to sacrifice your bodily freedoms/rights for months before you could hand it off to another person to take care of (because it is in the womb) then terminating becomes okay.
But just imagine the following thought exercise: what if a mother of a newborn infant was on a remote island, with no communication to the outside world, and she decided that she no longer wanted to have her bodily rights/freedoms imposed upon by that baby. No one else on the island was willing/able to care for the child, and the next boat off the island (which would allow her to take the baby off the island to have it offered up for adoption/state care, etc.) didn’t leave for another nine months. Would it be ethically acceptable to end the life of that child?
If pro-choicers are going to adhere to the idea that having to wait for months before your bodily freedoms/rights are restored (i.e. waiting until birth when the baby can be adopted/given to someone else) is justification enough for abortion, then surely they must also accept that the same must also apply when the child is out of the womb, and unless bodily freedoms/rights can be restored immediately after birth, then surely infanticide is justifiable using the pro-choice reasoning here?
3. The fetus is totally dependent on its mother for viability
This is a similar argument to the one above.
Obviously things change at the point of fetal viability outside the womb (which is getting earlier and earlier as medical technology advances), which is why so many pro-choicers are hesitant to support, or at the very least are uncomfortable about abortions being carried out after a certain point in the pregnancy.
I won’t go into it here, but basically viability is a totally unreliable marker for determining whether abortion is an ethical act or not. For starters, every healthy fetus is totally viable as long as it is left in the womb long enough, and viability outside your current location does not tell us anything about the nature of what you are as an entity (i.e. are you a human being or not – and therefore entitled to fundamental human rights?), it simply tells us that you can’t survive outside your current location.
Just as a fetus early in the pregnancy is not viable outside the womb, neither is an astronaut viable outside her lunar module when she is in space, yet you don’t hear too many people suggesting that space traveling astronauts aren’t human beings entitled to the right to life because of this fact.
The key point here is that, not only is a fetus early in the pregnancy totally dependent on her mother for viability, so is a newborn infant – it can’t feed, clothe, shelter, hydrate or deal with waste by itself. It is totally dependent on its mother, or another adult (remember that variation by degree thing we talked about above) for its continued viability.
No new born infant is viable outside the women for more than a matter of hours without the essentials of life (life-support) being administered and provided to it, so if viability is a justification for abortion then surely it can also be used as a justification for infanticide.
4. The fetus has no self-awareness
Proponents of this argument will try and tell you that you aren’t a human being unless you currently possess self-awareness, or consciousness – I don’t think too many sleeping people, or people in comas, or those who have imbibed far too much alcohol will be too happy to learn that their present lack of self-awareness has just cost them their right to life.
Just like viability, self-awareness/consciousness is a totally unreliable marker for determining whether abortion is an ethical act or not. The lack of self-awareness does not tell us anything about the nature of what you are as an entity, it simply tells us that you aren’t currently self-aware as an entity.
If pro-choicers are going to accept the notion that a lack of self-awareness equates to being no longer human, and is therefore an ethical justification for abortion, then surely they must also accept that it is also an ethical justification for infanticide, because a new born infant does not posses self-awareness until several weeks after birth.
(This reasoning would also give ethical justification to the killing of any human being who is sleeping, in a coma, excessively drunk or lying unconscious on a sports field).
5. People can’t be expected to care for babies they can’t afford, or are not ready for
This argument is a pretty straightforward one, and I’m sure everyone can see how it can also be applied to new born infants to try and justify infanticide – imagine a situation in which a mother decides moments after birth that she is no longer ready, or financially capable to care for a new born baby, then surely she could also invoke such reasoning to justify infanticide?
I could go on, but I think you probably get the point by now.
So the only question that remains to be asked is this:
If many of the pro-choice arguments used to try and provide an ethical justification for abortion can also be used as an ethical justification for infanticide (er, I mean ‘after-birth abortion’), then doesn’t that make them completely flawed arguments that are not worthy of truly caring, compassionate and intelligent human reasoning?
If the answer to this question is ‘no’, then the only other option, that infanticide is an ethically acceptable act that we should also be pro-choice about, is just far too frightening and ethically abhorrent for any normal person to even contemplate.
Would you be surprised if I told you this quote came from a pro-abortion activist? Well, it did. Here is the quote in its context from Salon’s recent interview with Merle Hoffman, president of US abortion clinic Choices Women’s Medical Center:
“Interestingly, although the standard pro-choice line is essentially to let the woman define the embryo or fetus for herself, Hoffman has a more controversial stance: ‘In the beginning they were calling it a baby. We were saying it was only blood and tissue. Let’s agree this is a life form, a potential life; you’re terminating it. You don’t have to argue that abortion stops a beating heart. It does.’ She adds, ‘I can’t say it’s just like an appendectomy. It isn’t. It’s a very powerful and loaded decision.’
As the Salon article acknowledges, this is not the standard pro-abortion stance. Often the abortion debate boils down to a disagreement on the humanity of the unborn child. But here Hoffman agrees with the typical pro-life view that abortion is not like other medical procedures, as it takes a life and stops a beating heart.
I am pro-life because of the humanity of the unborn child. Hoffman is pro-abortion despite the humanity of the unborn child. Though more medically honest, this stance on abortion is far more frightening than the average pro-abortion stance.
Admitting that abortion ends the life of a human being and still advocating for it sets a very dangerous precedent for our society. Who are we to determine whose heart is allowed to beat and whose is not? Every major social injustice, be it genocide, slavery, or oppression, starts with this terrible assumption, this belief that some humans are less deserving of fundamental rights than others.
Though she initially acknowledged abortion for what it is, Hoffman followed her honesty about abortion in the interview with euphemistic language about abortion.
“With my choice I was fighting for the right of all women to define abortion as an act of love: love for the family one already has, and just as important, love for oneself. I was fighting to reclaim abortion as a mother’s act.”
Hoffman clarifies that she is speaking about love for oneself and other family members, while love for the aborted child is completely overlooked. She already conceded that abortion stops a beating heart — which definitely is not loving the child.
Let’s look at the two kinds of love that were addressed: love for oneself and love for one’s born family.
For oneself, Hoffman ignores the large number of women who feel pain and regret following an abortion. Whether their symptoms are nightmares, depression, or just the feeling of someone missing from their life, none of these common symptoms are evidence that abortion was an act of love toward the women who aborted.
As for love toward one’s born family, abortion still is not the answer. Let’s put this into perspective: If a parent killed one of their born children so they could better take care of another, would the living child consider that an act of love? It is not loving to end the life of one’s brother, sister, son or daughter — born or unborn.
Abortion stops a beating heart. Once that is admitted, it is neither a “loving” action, or an action that should be permitted in our society.
Cross posted from LiveAction with addional comment from ProLife NZ.
Another article appeared in the Herald a few days ago about how the Waikato Hospital has decided to stop performing abortions itself and instead contract abortions to the Auckland Medical Aid Centre.
The pro-choice movement is against this apparent decentralisation as it might result (at least temporarily) in longer waiting times and distances to travel for women and girls living within the Waikato region who wish to have an abortion.
Over the last 30 years in the US, a significant trend has been observed with abortion procedures moving away from being performed in public hospitals and mainstream practice into being done almost exclusively with abortion clinics. This trend has been completely unintended and undesired by the pro-choice movement. As Emily Bazelon in the New York Times states:
“In 1973, hospitals made up 80 percent of the country’s abortion facilities. By 1981, however, clinics outnumbered hospitals, and 15 years later, 90 percent of the abortions in the U.S. were performed at clinics.”
This significant shift in the US, has been brought about my a number of factors including the objection of some doctors in mainstream practice as well as an unsuitability of some hospitals to actually continue the practice.
Abortion advocates have responded with a counter-movement to push abortion back into hospitals and integrate it into mainstream medical practice. Unfortunately with some success: the medical school of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) has established a ‘family planning fellowship’ abortion program, a program designed to attract physicians entering the practice which has spread to 21 medical schools. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education has also made abortion training a requirement for all OB-GYN residency programs seeking its accreditation.
The pro-choice movement here is attempting even to force those who have a conscience objection to abortion to be required nonetheless to refer those seeking an abortion to an abortion provider and therefore be part of the overall process that leads to an abortion. Fortunately (and much to the annoyance of ALRANZ), the Medical Council has backed down on enforcing this after a group of pro-life doctors took the issue to the High Court.
Even though it probably won’t be any time soon for abortion in this country to be pushed away mainstream practice, any movement or trend towards moving abortion out of mainstream healthcare should be considered a positive development if it ultimately leads to any reduction in abortions. The best place for this to start is for more doctors to object to performing or being trained in any abortion and abortion-related procedures.
Cross posted from the Culture Vulture:
About a week or so back, the Abortion Law Reform Association of NZ (ALRANZ) published a post on their blog which covered the the Women’s Choice 2011 Suffrage Eve Debate that took place on September 22 at Auckland University.
At the event various political party representatives were asked the following question by ALRANZ:
“Our 36 year old abortion laws are medically outdated, what action would you like to take to reform the law?”
Now before we go any further I think that it’s important to point out that this question is both a form of logical fallacy known as ‘begging the question’, and also highly ironic.
It is begging the question because it assumes that the premise that NZ abortion laws are medically outdated is actually correct, without actually proving that premise to be true.
This is a loaded question, because it starts by forcing the person being questioned to accept ALRANZ’s unproven assertion that NZ abortion laws are medically outdated.
No matter how a person answers this question (either “I would do X”, or “I wouldn’t do anything”) they have basically given their assent to the proposition that NZ abortion laws are medically outdated.
And just think, pro-choicer’s accuse pro-lifers of being deceptive in their tactics.
The massive irony in this question comes from the fact that NZ abortion laws are actually medically outdated, but not in the way that ALRANZ is trying to suggest here.
Our laws are outdated because they don’t reflect best medical practice regarding informed consent (no independent counseling, no cooling-off period, lack of information provided to women about risk factors, etc.), instead our current abortion laws leave NZ women majorly vulnerable to serious, and unforeseen health and emotional problems.
Let’s move on from the issue of this question and look at how the politicians responded to it, and how ALRANZ and other pro-choicer’s felt about one of these responses in particular.
You see, many of the political candidates referred to abortion as a “traumatic decision” in their responses, and this is where things get interesting, because ALRANZ, and other pro-choicer’s, took exception to the notion that abortion can be a “traumatic” event, in and of itself, for women.
Instead of accepting that the act of abortion can actually be a massively traumatic event, which has psychologically scarred a lot of women, they try and pass this trauma off as being caused by other things (and therefore not actually being real abortion trauma).
Here’s the list of things that ‘Mothers For Choice’ claims are the cause of abortion related trauma:
The distress lies in the process to get an abortion.
The distress is in the lengthy waiting times.
The distress is in the multiple appointments.
The distress is having to convince two certifying consultants that they should approve your own decision.
The distress is going to an unfamiliar environment and feeling that you should be ashamed of something you shouldn’t be.
What these comments expose is that pro-choice lobby groups, including ALRANZ, are more committed to abortion than they are to the women that it effects.
If they really did care about women then they wouldn’t be trying to downplay, or write-off the very real and very traumatic abortion experiences that have hurt many women, and which have everything to do with the actual procedure of aborting an unborn child, and not with these other administrative matters.
Not only does this show that the pro-choice movement has little regard for the real and lived experiences of actual NZ women hurt by abortion (instead their commitment is to the pro-choice narrative that abortion is a totally trauma-free experience), it also shows that the pro-choice movement is starting to become more and more like the flat earth society, due to their unreasoned rejection of the huge and growing amount of anecdotal and scientific evidence now available to us which shows that abortion is a psychologically risky procedure for women.
At the end of the day, and despite all the protestations of these pro-choicer’s, the many women who have experienced abortion related trauma won’t be fooled by this hollow rhetoric, for they know that even if their abortions had taken place quickly, when they wanted, with minimal appointments and no certifying consultants, and in a totally familiar environment, they would still be facing the same hurt as a result of their abortion.
According to a recent Gallup Poll there appears to be a consensus on a number of abortion-related views.
The main areas of consensus include:
-Requiring informed consent for abortion procedures from the woman having one
-Making abortion illegal during the third trimester
-Banning partial-birth abortions
-Requiring parental consent for minors who may undergo abortions
-Being legal when the mother’s life is in danger and in the cases of pregnancy from rape and incest.
Surprisingly, a slim majority (52%) of self-described pro-choicers agree with making second trimester abortions illegal.
Click on the image to see it more clearly:
There are of course significant differences in views too including:
-The legality of first trimester abortions
-Abortions for when the developing unborn may be impaired either physically or mentally
-Whether it should be permissible for financial reasons
-Whether abortion should be allowed in consideration of the mother’s mental health.
Click on the image to see it more clearly:
You’ll also notice that a percentage of self-described pro-lifers support the legality of abortion in issues which would be strongly attributable to pro-choice views. Why might a minority of pro-lifers support abortion in these aforementioned cases? Because the ‘pro-life’ term here is a self-descriptive term; amongst pro-lifers there are those who consider themselves pro-life in regards to themselves (they would never personally undergo or be involved in an abortion), but pro-choice in regards to whether others should be allowed to have one, which just goes to show the variation in perception and usage of such labels.
These findings suggest that there may be enough public support to legally prevent post-first trimester abortions happening, as well as maintain an informed consent process and parental consent for minors. These common ground views contrast to those held by abortion advocate groups and services which often have no limitation on the extent of how much they wish to liberalise abortion laws. It also suggests that Americans appear more pro-life in a number of regards than is often suggested.
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