@Krumple,
Quote:Spend it seems useless trying to have a conversation with you. If you make abortion illegal there will always be desperate women who will seek illegal abortions.
And most of those women will be poorer women.
The more affluent women will get on a plane and fly to a place where abortion is legal and can be performed under proper medical circumstances.
It's easy for people like spendi and Foofie to be rather cavalier in their views and their attitudes in opposing a woman's legal right to choice in the matter of abortion. They're not the one's faced with the dilemma of being in a circumstance where the birth of an unwanted, or unplanned for, child would present insurmountable challenges that the woman might not be able to manage, or that she feels she couldn't manage. And life circumstances are the reason most women give for choosing to abort.
I read recently that it costs about $10,000 for prenatal medical care during pregnancy, and for the costs of hospital delivery, and for care of a newborn. And all sorts of maternal medical problems can arise during a pregnancy that might require treatment, medication, and even hospitalization. I can't attest to the accuracy of the $10,000 amount, but any amount is costly for a woman who lacks medical coverage--and many in our country lack medical coverage.
And again, poorer women might be disproportionately affected if they lack medical insurance.
So there are women who might not be able to afford the pregnancy, let alone the cost of raising a child. If the woman is single, and she works, she might not be able to afford child care so she can continue to work and earn a paycheck in order to be able to house, and feed, and clothe, and provide medical and dental care for her child. And, if she can't work, who will support her and her child? And, if she has already existing children she can barely feed and clothe, how can she provide for another one without depriving those existing children even more? For not only her sake, but for the sake of her already existing children, she might opt to abort. And these sorts of circumstances can apply to married women as well, particularly if household finances are very tight, and not a lot of money comes into the home from the husband, or it comes in very sporadically, and the wife must work as well just to make ends meet. It costs about $200,000, I think, just to raise a child in the U.S..
Many women who do abort might make a different choice if their life circumstance was different--they might want to have a baby, if they felt they could provide, both materially and emotionally, for the child, but their current life circumstances, or maturity level, just doesn't allow for that at this time in their lives. And those women might well regret having to make that choice, that sorrowful choice, to abort, even though they might do so out of necessity--and even though they might do so with full awareness they were destroying a potential human life.
So, the pregnancy might be unwanted, but it isn't always true that the potential child is unwanted. It's just that something about that woman's life circumstances can't allow her to have that child now, or to be able to give it a decent life and adequate mothering right now, or it might harm other relationships, such as those with her already existing children. These women aren't indifferent to "life" at all--in fact, they may value "life" so much, they realize it would be unfair or wrong to bring a child into the world under certain circumstances, or it might too negatively alter the situation of their existing children's lives.
It's nice for Foofie and spendi to have hypothetical discussions about what they think these women should do, but they aren't standing in her shoes, or dealing with her life circumstances, or her internal conflicts, or her emotional state, or her responsibility for this potential child. And that's why they shouldn't be making, or limiting, the choices available to her.
I don't think they understand why a woman might choose to have an abortion
out of necessity. And, if they can't understand that, they certainly couldn't understand why a desperate women would turn to a back alley hack if a, legal, medically safe, abortion was unavailable to her--even though she'd be risking her own health and life by going through that illegal abortion in unsafe, and degrading circumstances. And, if abortion is illegal, there will always be such desperate women. And some of them will die, along with their fetuses.
