Abortion

page type::article thing type::process

About
Abortion is the killing and removal of a fetus before birth. It is generally only an issue with regard to human birth, where it is forbidden by many religions and opposed by others. It is also illegal in some countries, and more countries make it illegal as the fetus comes closer to term.

In the 🇺🇸, proponents of legalized abortion generally describe themselves as "pro-choice", while those who seek to restrict or criminalize abortion generally describe themselves as "pro-life". Feelings on both sides tend to run very high, but extremists on the "pro-life" seem to have a greater tendency towards extreme actions, e.g. making threats against doctors who perform abortions, and even occasional acts of bodily harm or murder.

Positions

 * anti-abortion: generally views killing of any fetus, at any developmental phase, as murder
 * pro-life: opposes abortion in the name of promoting life, generally opposes violence too but some violent anti-abortionists call themselves "pro-life" nonetheless
 * Claims of those who oppose legal abortion include:
 * /eugenics: the primary goal of abortion choice advocates is based in eugenics
 * Abortion for boutique eugenics: editorial arguing that abortion will inevitably be misused
 * /black genocide: a primary goal of abortion choice advocates is that of reducing the number of black people, or possibly eliminating them altogether.
 * /profit: abortion doctors and clinics are primarily motivated by money
 * The real money is in 2nd and 3rd trimester abortions; nobody wants to do 1st trimester.
 * /health: health effects
 * /cancer: it is claimed that abortion causes cancer
 * /industry: abortion is a huge industry (this is related to, but separate from, the profit claim)
 * /prohibition: anti-abortionists generally see prohibition as essential
 * pro-choice sees abortion as an unpleasant necessity, while working to reduce the need for it

Discussion

 * legislation:
 * /legality: Under what circumstances (if any) should abortion be legal?
 * /public funding: Under what circumstances (if any) should abortion be publicly funded?
 * ethics:
 * personhood: at what point does a fetus become a person, and acquire the right to live?
 * science/facts:
 * Human gestational development: the stages of development of a human embryo/fetus
 * /reasons why abortions are requested
 * There is some evidence that the legalization of abortion in the U.S. led to a dramatic decrease in the crime rate at approximately the time when the "ghost children" (the kids who would have been born if abortion had remained illegal) would have been reaching adulthood.
 * See: Freakonomics, ISBN 006073132X, and commentary by Orson Scott Card
 * Obviously this does not prove a connection, but the evidence deserves further examination.
 * If a connection can be established, then there also remains the ethical question of whether a decline in crime is worth the cost of the increase in abortions (costs and benefits for this particular outcome, or in other words: How much less crime? How many more abortions?), to which some groups might well answer "no".

Related issues

 * reproductive issues
 * birth control
 * sex education
 * extramarital sex

Reference

 * Wikipedia:
 * Abortion
 * Abortion debate
 * Roe v. Wade led to legalization of abortion in the U.S.
 * : Hippocrates prohibited abortion, and it's a billion-dollar industry in the US and Western Europe
 * (Reproductive health)
 * (Reproductive health)

Official Positions

 * 1995-03-25 Pope John Paul II restates the Catholic Church's position on abortion and other "life" issues, with links to keyword indices

to be filed

 * 2012-01-19 Abortion more common where it's illegal: Where are rates highest? "The new global abortion study - that's published in the Jan. 19 issue of The Lancet - is from the U.S.-based Guttmacher Institute and the World Health Organization. Researchers found a link between higher abortion rates and regions with more restrictive legislation, such as in Latin America and Africa. They also found that 95 to 97 percent of abortions in those regions were unsafe."
 * 2007-04-21 How Media Mistakes Fueled the High Court Abortion Ruling by Gloria Feldt, Women's Media Center: states that there is no such thing as a "partial birth abortion", but this term is apparently used to refer to Intact dilation and extraction
 * 2007-04-19 Supreme Court Ruling Threatens Women's Health by Amy Goodman
 * 2006-06-21 Anti-Choice Legislators Have Gone Too Far (should eventually go in anti-abortion article)
 * 2006-01-27 Abortion-rights and anti-abortion groups share some values

Video

 * 1992 When Abortion Was Illegal: Untold Stories: includes some anti-abortion arguments in the comment section
 * 2006 Lake of Fire A documentary showing realistic and extreme views on abortion.

Humor

 * 2006-08-01 Thinking of the children (D.C. Simpson, I Drew This): right-to-life vs. early childhood welfare

Quotes
JESUS AND ABORTION: Consider the trap that the left has fallen into regarding Jesus. Back in the sixties, much of the clergy leaned leftward and away from supporting the Vietnam War. The image of Jesus was that of a bearded quasi-hippie in sandals, who preached that the rich should give their very shirts to the poor. What has changed? Certainly not the passages of scripture that were quoted then. Passages that would make Jesus seem... well... rather socialistic in any era. Then came abortion. It gave the right a handle by which to reclaim Jesus. By declaring ideologically that any fertilized cell is a full human being, radicals turned any abortion - even many forms of birth control - into baby killing. And despite all his other socialist leanings, Jesus would have to take sides against baby-killers, right? Voila! Suddenly the moral high ground no longer belonged to the left. That is, in the eyes of anybody who could be talked into seeing a human being in a fertilized egg. When that became a major dogma of the right, millions went right along. So the left lost Jesus. And with Jesus went the churches. And with the churches... well... Must all liberals play this game between two sides who insist on waging social war over fertilized cells? At risk of incurring ire from some of my feminist friends, I don't see any reason to declare absolute all-or-nothing positions on a subject so murky and ill-defined as when human life begins. Imagine some liberal group declaring: "All right, there may be some changes afoot that we don't like. A new Supreme Court may start pushing at the fringes of Roe-vs-Wade. We may need to raise millions in "scholarships" to fly poor women from red states to New York... "But let other groups handle that. We refuse to get involved in abortion. We welcome anti-abortion people who want to work with us on other matters, helping the poor (as Jesus would want), questioning capricious or ill conceived wars, raising the minimum wage, preserving God's Earth. Let other groups be proudly secular, or even pagan. We are going to reclaim the man who walked in sandals among the poor, feeding them from a loaf and a fish."