Nothing can possibly go wrong (Part 1- Abortion)

So I try to make a conscious effort into tricking Facebook and other feeds into seeing the bulk of my list. I mean, I intentionally keep the circle small y'know? And half of the people on it are dead or near-dead accounts best as I can tell.

So I've found that my feed mostly doesn't have what you'd call Movement Conservatives- that is, the sorts of folks who toe the Republican Party line on economics, foreign policy, the shebang. Instead, you can boil down Republican support to four main issues.



1. Abortion
2. The Second Amendment
3. Welfare Programs
4. Immigration

And really the last two are in a weird tangled mess where people don't so much have clear for or against beliefs as a general sense that they're being screwed somehow in the deal.

So I want to go through this list in much the same way the last big post went through the liberal approach to racism. 3/4 I may well lump together, and honestly I kinda outlined some of those points last time, and will reuse some arguments overall for them.

The rest of this post then will be about the jolly topic of abortions.

I'm not going to get bogged down into numbers or technical definitions here, because those are useful if you're trying to debate the crafting of specific laws on how to regulate abortion, not for creating the moral argument for abortion.

Instead I'm going to posit a series of hypothetical cases. These are going to be descriptive for purpose of illustrating the point I'm building to, so... be warned is all.

1. A driven businesswoman discovers she is pregnant after a one-night stand and, unwilling to derail her career, terminates the pregnancy.

2. A college freshman sleeps her way through her dorm room, unsurprisingly becomes pregnant, and terminates the pregnancy to avoid having to drop out.

3. A young married couple unexpectedly becomes pregnant with their third child due to a birth
control failure, and deciding they cannot afford another child, terminates the pregnancy.

4. A woman, having recently left an abusive relationship, discovers she is pregnant and terminates the pregnancy to avoid reminders of the relationship or temptations to return to it.

5. A high school girl, assured by her older boyfriend that you can't get pregnant the first time, discovers this is a lie. She terminates the pregnancy.

6. A college student is invited to a party, blacks out, and discovers a few weeks later she is pregnant. Terrified about what might have happened, she terminates the pregnancy.

7. A 13 year old girl is discovered to be pregnant, and ultimately reveals her uncle as the father. The pregnancy is terminated.

8. A young married woman passes out. An ultrasound reveals an egg had implanted in her Fallopian tubes, causing internal hemorrhaging. The pregnancy is immediately terminated.

9. A woman discovers in her 7th month of pregnancy that the fetus has expired. She is immediately induced to prevent the necrotic tissue from infecting her organs.

Now, this was intentionally ordered by my best estimation from least to most sympathetic. Whatever your personal beliefs, odds are you had both a scenario that matched your assumption of what "most" abortions were, as well as a point at which you would grant that an abortion was a justified option (and a second point at which an abortion was required).

So when you say you're "against" abortion, or that it's "murder", we could rephrase it as being opposed to your assumption of a 'typical' abortion, that terminating a pregnancy just because you don't want it is morally irresponsible. However, we also have to acknowledge the medical and possibly ethical situations in which abortion is an acceptable remedy.

Once we acknowledge that, the legal defense of abortion as a practice becomes imperative. Those cases where they are necessary means that they must be easily accessible, and crafting laws too tightly to more strictly control who can get them will generally just cause fewer facilities to offer them, the exact opposite of our intent.

Because that's the trick. I have my own views on what is or is not a moral circumstance to terminate a pregnancy, but that's somewhat irrelevant because I also want to make sure that nobody who needs an abortion is forced to go without because they can't get to a facility that offers them, or they can't afford one, or their parents lock them up and force them to carry to term, or any of a dozen horrible outcomes because we live in a world whose default state is horrible.

That's not to say that there's no room to debate some regulations on the procedure. Moreso that those regulations will have to err on the side of being too permissive- the costs of being too restrictive are much greater.