Abortion: would making it illegal actually solve the problem - Page 15 - Political Forum

anya · 04-23-2008, 08:15 AM

Ahtu, I don't think your descriptions of things like the size of baby, when it can hear and so on are accurate. Just saying that. My daughter is currently pregnant and I thought baby could hear from the beginnig but she checked it and it was more like 4 or 5 months...and a one month gestation baby is certainly not 8inches in size and so on.

My position on this remains the same as it has always been.

Abortion needs to be legal because some women always have had and always will have abortions regardless or whether or not they are legal. Legal abortions allow women to have them free here in the UK and safe everywhere.

I would think most people would prefer to have an abortion as early as possible.

I have never had one and I am very glad I never felt in a position where I had to make that choice.

Legal abortion is not something that anyone would say is a great thing. It simply is better than women dying through illegal ones.

FreeFallin · 04-29-2008, 08:28 PM

no, no no no, havent we learned from the horors of illegal abortion that women will terminate pregnancies no mater what, and who wins? the fetus's still is aborted, the women likely DIES, yay! what u need to stop abortion is SOCIAL REFORM, take all that energy and teach these kids not to have sex, make better birth control pills. fix up adoption, then tell us its not a choice

chocchip · 05-03-2008, 07:18 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rsather139

One thing I've noticed is that many anti-abortion people seem to think that by making abortion illegal all the problems associated with it will be solved. Thing is, would making it illegal really do anything beneficial or solve the problem? I think not. All it would do would be to close down the medical clinics where you can get sterile abortions, and lead the practice to be done underground where we could lose the woman as well as the fetus.

I think of this much like Prohibition, it might look good on paper and make us more moral but the reality is it is not feasible.

Thoughts?

My opinion abortion should be legal. They really don't think about the women that would be involved. I mean how many cases where the condom broke? Yes, many can be irresponsible too, like having one too many one thing led to another. But what about when a women is raped? Imagine a poor young girl having to go and have a backyard abortion somewhere that itself can lead to much worse. We need to have these clinics that perform these procedures no matter how morally wrong they might be. And I don't think its going to prevent women falling pregnant if they make it illegal.

FreeFallin · 05-03-2008, 10:12 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by chocchip

My opinion abortion should be legal. They really don't think about the women that would be involved. I mean how many cases where the condom broke? Yes, many can be irresponsible too, like having one too many one thing led to another. But what about when a women is raped? Imagine a poor young girl having to go and have a backyard abortion somewhere that itself can lead to much worse. We need to have these clinics that perform these procedures no matter how morally wrong they might be. And I don't think its going to prevent women falling pregnant if they make it illegal.

yes! its actually backALLEY abortions. the people who peformed, and will perform(if we ban it) these illegal abortions, aren't even really docters. just terrible people who will do god knows what to those women

BratWurst · 05-06-2008, 11:10 AM

Keeping something that is wrong legal, just because it's still going to happen is just pure nonsense. Then maybe everything that happens illegally should be legalized. That heroine addict that shoots up every day, he would be a lot better off if he could just walk into the hospital and get handed a sterile needle filled with heroine, right?

Lets own up and have those babies, then put them up for adoption.

"Oh, but what if she was raped?"

Well let me ask you, what percentage of total abortions in the US spawned from rapes? What percentage of those rapes came from the woman "calling it quits" at the last second, and the man not conceding to her wishes? (which would be half her fault in that case). Women need to own up one way or another, wether it's changing their lifestyle, or a change in the way they dress.

Rape is NOT always JUST the mans fault. (Now lets see how many people want to twist this statement into me meaning that rapists should be excused or some such nonsense.)

FreeFallin · 05-06-2008, 04:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by BratWurst

Keeping something that is wrong legal, just because it's still going to happen is just pure nonsense. Then maybe everything that happens illegally should be legalized. That heroine addict that shoots up every day, he would be a lot better off if he could just walk into the hospital and get handed a sterile needle filled with heroine, right?

Lets own up and have those babies, then put them up for adoption.

"Oh, but what if she was raped?"

Well let me ask you, what percentage of total abortions in the US spawned from rapes? What percentage of those rapes came from the woman "calling it quits" at the last second, and the man not conceding to her wishes? (which would be half her fault in that case). Women need to own up one way or another, wether it's changing their lifestyle, or a change in the way they dress.

Rape is NOT always JUST the mans fault. (Now lets see how many people want to twist this statement into me meaning that rapists should be excused or some such nonsense.)

so you would rather have these women and the featus die? who wins then? your obviously not saving babies if it still happens, the difference between those and illegal abortions is that having it legal is safer for the women, with drugs its bad for you either way. keep you idea of 'owning up' to yourself and let these women make there own decisions. and besides adoption is already a messed up process lately. its not a fairy wonderland for children

Gnuf Said · 05-06-2008, 06:19 PM

Some statistics here: Reasons given for having abortions in the United States

Quote:

REASONS GIVEN FOR ABORTIONS

reason % of abortions
rape or incest 1 (0.4-1.3)

mother has health problems 3 (2.8)

possible fetal health problems 3 (3.3)

unready for responsibility 21

is too immature or young to have child 11 (12.2)

woman's parents want her to have abortion <0.5

has problems with relationship or wants to avoid single parenthood 12 (14.1)

husband or partner wants her to have abortion 1

has all the children she wanted or all children are grown 8 (7.9)

can't afford baby now 21 (21.3)

concerned about how having baby would change her life 16

doesn't want others to know she had relations or is pregnant 1

other 3

You can see that less than one percent of abortions are the result of rape or incest.

As for the idea that illegal abortion would result in many back alley deaths, some information from Straight Dope about abortions before Roe v. Wade here: The Straight Dope: Before Roe v. Wade, did 10,000 women a year die from illegal abortions?

Quote:

Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman recently wrote, "After all, those of us who remember when birth control was illegal and when 10,000 American women a year died from illegal abortions don't have to imagine a world without choices. We were there." I write a blog about life after abortion, and one of my co-bloggers says that the claim of 10,000 deaths is well known to be an urban legend. However, Ellen Goodman is a famous journalist, and she clearly believes that it is the truth. Is it? —Emily of After Abortion, via e-mail

Cecil replies:

No. Establishing exactly how many women died due to botched illegal abortions is obviously impossible, since many of these deaths likely weren't reported as such. However, even a generous reading of the statistics we do have indicates that Goodman is off by a factor of ten; a stickler might say she blew it by a ratio of 250 to 1. It's not like this is a news flash, either. A reasonable approximation of the annual total in the 60s has been public knowledge for 35 years.

Quote:

In Aborting America (1979) Nathanson writes: "In NARAL we generally emphasized the drama of the individual case, not the mass statistics, but when we spoke of the latter it was always '5,000 to 10,000 deaths a year.' I confess that I knew the figures were totally false, and I suppose the others did too if they stopped to think of it. But in the 'morality' of our revolution, it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics?" (Emphasis is his.)

Quote:

A statistic perhaps more typical of the pre-Roe era was reported in a 1969 Scientific American article cowritten by Christopher Tietze, a senior fellow with the Population Council: "The National Center for Health Statistics listed 235 deaths from abortion in 1965. Total mortality from illegal abortions was undoubtedly larger than that figure, but in all likelihood it was under 1,000."

Quote:

Self-induced and back-alley abortions were becoming a thing of the past long before Roe: sex researcher Alfred Kinsey estimated in the 1950s that around 85 percent of illegal abortions were performed by physicians, even if the physicians weren't all in good standing.

Quote:

For 1972, the last full year before Roe, the federal Centers for Disease Control reported that 39 women died due to illegal abortion. (The death total for all abortions, including legal ones, was 88.)

Also, consider medical conditions have vastly improved since 1972.

Further research in this matter has shown me that if Roe v. Wade were overturned, and the matter of abortion turned back over to the states, the number of abortions in the United States would probably remain about the same. I can provide the data to back that up if need be.

Gnuf Said · 05-06-2008, 06:27 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Izzibeth

Go ahead and make it illegal. I would like to see what the legal ramifications for having an abortion would be since it appears to be the one question that can never be answered.

What should be the punishment?

In the past, abortionists were sent to jail. Sentences varied. The mothers were not punished.

Miltiades · 05-06-2008, 07:37 PM

well, just putting my view out...

If abortion were made illegal I think it would solve little. "Accidental" (this is a horrible term, but is used a lot) babies wouldn't be arborted in a clean doctors facility (its illegal now!), rather the mother would simply abandon or maybe even kill the child herself or have someone else do it illegaly.

Making somthing illegal doesn't stop it from happening-it just makes punishment available for the crime

Gnuf Said · 05-07-2008, 11:01 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Miltiades

well, just putting my view out...

If abortion were made illegal I think it would solve little. "Accidental" (this is a horrible term, but is used a lot) babies wouldn't be arborted in a clean doctors facility (its illegal now!), rather the mother would simply abandon or maybe even kill the child herself or have someone else do it illegaly.

Making somthing illegal doesn't stop it from happening-it just makes punishment available for the crime

Actually, I think most illegal abortions would be done in a doctor's office, just as they were in the past. The image of the back alley abortionist with a coathanger is nothing more than fearmongering by pro-choicers.