There are other reasons people want to get abortions, such as knowing they can't provide for the child or give them a safe/stable household. Adoption is rare, and the foster system in most countries absolutely ruins kids. So those aren't good alternatives.
What you mean by that? There is extremely high demand to adopt newborns, which is why parents desperate for children adopt from other countries. There is currently a waiting list of 2 million families willing to adopt newborns.
Children in foster care are different story - people are much less willing to adopt older kids.
Maybe finish adopting all those kids who exist and need families right now, regardless of where they’re from, rather than force people to give birth to more babies that need adoption.
> Domestic – If you are looking to adopt a newborn or young infant, you are looking at a domestic adoption. It’s that simple.
> more babies that need adoption.
That's a strange way of looking at it. When you say it like that, it sounds as if a new baby will create an imbalance between supply and demand. There's 2 million families waiting to adopt a newborn, so a new baby will help balance that, not imbalance it.
Fertility is dropping, so I wonder if there will be an even higher demand for newborns in the future.
Most folks in the US are too poor to adopt and it doesn't matter how well they'd care for the child: It isn't exactly a free process just looking out for the needs of the child. (I'd argue that if we were just looking out for the child, the legal costs would be covered by taxes and eligibility wouldn't be put on finances at all. We'd have to use tax money to support the child without adoption, after all).
My parents looked into adopting from another country - it was a program they were introduced to through church. It cost $20,000 plus travel... in the 1990s.
I mean that most kids who end up without a home were never up for adoption anyway, for whatever reason the child was taken away from a home that couldn't take care of it and as you mentioned, they're too old now.
We should provide free birth control and better sex education. Morning after contraception should also be free -- a fertilized, un-implanted egg is not a human -- it's a potential human.
>a fertilized, un-implanted egg is not a human -- it's a potential human.
Is there a scientific reason for that idea? I don't see how implantation can really be considered a transition from potential human to human. I think with enough scientific advances a human could be raised entirely outside the womb, and in that case there would be no implantation.
I think the way GP phrased it is a shorthand for "egg just after fertilization" - because today, fertilized eggs either get implanted early or rejected by the mother's body. When science and technology advances to the point of making it possible to gestate humans entirely outside of the womb, the way we talk about this will have to adjust to be more precise.
(Implantation itself doesn't feel like the transition point either, but it's just the last obvious discrete step before the continuous progression all the way to birth.)
I don't see why we can't try to adjust to be more precise now.
It seems strange to say that our current definition is not the correct long-term definition, but we'll keep using the current one. To me that's basically saying our current definition of human is wrong, and I don't see why it's acceptable to use a wrong definition.
In countries with a good safety net (including parental leave and child care help), comprehensive sex education, free access to contraception and abortion and general health care, abortion rates are often lower.
I'm not sure it avoids the majority since a decent amount of folks have the knowledge and tools to simply avoid the pregnancy in the first place, but it does lower it.
I'm not certain there is a level of foster care that could provide good outcomes. I think that's a bit of a pipedream. If your argument is instead that a shitty life is better than no life at all, I couldn't really disagree. But I think it's somewhat inhumane to bring a new life into the world knowing it will be suffering.
I think the main reason kids in foster care suffer is that the kids are already old and have been through a traumatic situation that caused them to have to be put into foster care. That trauma plus the transition can leave emotional scars. Another problem is the foster parents cannot fully take in the kid. The kid can be taken away from them by the government and given back to the kid's original parents.
Putting a newborn up for adoption is different, it doesn't have either of those problems. There are 2 million families in the US waiting to adopt a newborn.
I'd hope someone would know fairly early in the pregnancy if they will be able to provide for a child or not. (i.e. before the baby can feel pain, is basically a complete human being, etc.)
That's why there's so much interest in defining limits around abortions. Late term abortions are pretty much described as horrific by the vast majority. There should be room for political agreement here.
Most abortions are as soon as the woman knows she's pregnant. Very, very few are late term, and, as a sibling mentions, those are almost universally due to health risks (possibly also a major change in financial status, relationship, etc).
To be clear, you are right that a late term abortion is pretty horrific. They're also -traumatic-. No one is -intentionally- waiting around to get an abortion; there isn't room for political argument here because anyone who finds themselves pregnant at a late stage and doesn't want to be is already in the case of "reasonable exception". A medical complication, a change in financial status to where she can't support it (when before she thought she could), etc.
No one is finding out they're pregnant in the first trimester, and then just can't make up their mind until the third, and we as a society need to set a date she has to make up her mind, or force her to keep it against her will. That's a made up justification, and as we continue to see, the same forces that make that justification don't even stop there.
>“[t]here aren’t good data on how often later abortions are for medical reasons.”
>“Based on limited research and discussions with researchers in the field, Dr. Foster believes that abortions for fetal anomaly ‘make up a small minority of later abortion’ and that those for life endangerment are even harder to characterize,” the report stated.
For perspective, note that the studies you're referring to are studying a rare occurrence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion refers to CDC statistics that 1% of abortions may be at 21+ weeks, but even that is with the caveat that what they're really looking at is medical procedures, and thus that "According to the CDC, due to data collection difficulties the data must be viewed as tentative and some fetal deaths reported beyond 20 weeks may be natural deaths erroneously classified as abortions if the removal of the dead fetus is accomplished by the same procedure as an induced abortion." Additionally, 56% of women declined to participate in the study, and there will surely be some correlation between that choice and the cause for the termination.
Of course that doesn't invalidate the findings; but it is a a fairly small number of events they're talking about here, that's all.
>Additionally, 56% of women declined to participate in the study, and there will surely be some correlation between that choice and the cause for the termination.
I think you're misunderstanding how the sentence I quoted relates to the study. The study I linked to actually only studied women who had abortions unrelated to fetal anomalies or life endangerment. So none of the 56% who declined to participate in the study nor any of the 44% who accepted to participate in it had abortions related to fetal anomalies or life endangerment.
The quote I quoted was basically an offhand remark that the paper made to justify its relevance, not backed up by evidence in the paper, but instead backed up by a citation to a different paper that I found hard to understand in a quick skim.
Not to mention the reply left out my original "possibly also a major change in financial status, relationship, etc", since my entire point was that late term abortions, while for a variety of reasons, are not simply people taking the most expensive, most traumatic, most controversial option as a form of contraceptive. It's for a variety of nuanced, complex reasons that aren't "for convenience", as the convenient path is always to abort or prevent the pregnancy earlier. Which is why pro-choice advocates say it should be between the woman and her doctor, -not- government; the fact the situation is arising at all means it is exceptional.
I did see that, but since it was in parentheses I interpreted it as you saying that was lower likelihood.
The general way I interpret the meaning of parentheses is that it's a part of the sentence that provides extra information, but the sentence would still be correct if it was removed.
I know it's relevant because it's the politics that are setting the rules right now, but political agreement isn't really the crux of the discussion for me. It's about minimizing suffering and the ethics of controlling someone else's body.
That said, I don't think there will be political agreement because it's not 100% about the rules around abortions anyway. It's a political instrument at this point. Either side is trying to win, not do what's right, and that's how things have gotten so extreme.
Well he did qualify the reasons he provided as being only 0.1%. So obviously there are 99.9% more reasons.
But then here you come with the ~93% of reasons that boil down to convenience. It's more convenient to murder this baby than to not murder it so murder it is.
There is a very important and overlooked 7% of abortions that are medically related that save the whole concept of legal abortion for me. Mothers who want babies but, because literally everything in biology can go wrong in ways that make abortion the only humane option, those poor women can't. And they don't need police investigating their terminations in the middle of unimaginable grief.
> But then here you come with the ~93% of reasons that boil down to convenience.
It is absolutely not convenience. To flip it another way, these are often homes you would never allow to adopt a baby, or homes where the child is inevitably taken by child services due to abuse or incapacity of the parent(s). Then they end up in foster care, far too late to be adopted by the nice well-to-do family with a white picket fence, and they bounce around the foster system.
The foster system can't even handle all the kids that aren't adopted, and some kids end up too broken to stay in care. What happens then? At some point they just throw a bunch of broken kids into a shitty house together and have a child services worker come check in on them every day or so.
You're right. Those homes are too difficult, too far gone. They have no hope anyway. There's no point in giving them an opportunity when killing is easier.
My understanding is that prior to abortion being legalized, attempted abortion was not an uncommon cause of death. If someone is so willing to avoid pregnancy that they kill themselves, I don't know if it can be reasonably described as convenience anymore.
