French Study: Abortion puts future births at risk of death or a disability

[Ecthy]

300,000 a year?

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by Elok
And, lastly, I have never understood how abortion "solves" the problem of unwanted pregnancies. We used to hush up about them, now we get rid of them entirely to avoid the slightest risk of embarrassment. Pregnancy is still stigmatized and shameful under certain circumstances, and abortion only perpetuates that. Rape and incest still happen, condoms still break, some people are still ignorant about proper family planning, but instead of facing those problems we elect to hide their most obvious physical consequences. If anything, that allows the real problems to continue.

1. Do you think people only abort out of shame?
2. What are "the real problems"?

[Jon Miller]

people are responsible...

Jon Miller

[chequita guevara]

The sky is blue.

[Dr Strangelove]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara


More info, please. I don't think I follow you correctly.

You mean about the Kleck survey? Back in the 1990s Dr. Kleck did a telephone based survery of thousands of respondants asking if they had used a gun to defend themselves. He calculated that there had been about 2 million "DGU" incidents / year at the time of the study. The study also mentioned that 25% of the respondants who had used guns to defend themselves had fired their weapons, and of these 60% claimed to have hit their target. That would result in about 300,000 wounded by "DGU" / year. Of course, medical statistics give no trace of this huge epidemic of gun wounds. Kleck explained the discrepancy between the results of his survey and statistics as being due to a vast conspiracy of crooked physicians treating the wounded criminals without properly reporting them.

[Jon Miller]

I think peopel think they hit someone far more often than they do

but also, people bull**** surveys all the time

JM

[Atahualpa]

but also, people bull**** surveys all the time

You should do a survey about that!

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by Jon Miller
I think peopel think they hit someone far more often than they do

but also, people bull**** surveys all the time

Appropriate surveys are supposed to take steps to take it into account.

[Elok]

Originally posted by Spiffor



1. Do you think people only abort out of shame?
2. What are "the real problems"?

The most heavy arguments for abortion that I've heard, other than the quasi-eugenic (this kid is defective or from a bad background, kill it), are based on compassion for the mother's emotional plight, typically because the child was conceived through rape or incest. Or the condom breaks and the teenaged girl doesn't want her parents, etc. to judge her. Greater unconditional support is a better solution to that then just having it squished out, which allows us to more easily ignore the fact that the teenaged girl has jerks for parents, that rape and incest are too frequently allowed to stigmatize their victim or just brushed over, what-have-you.

Even outside of "shame," just about any circumstance for abortion other than the life of the mother, which is increasingly rare with current medical technology, is better answered by addressing the problem directly rather than silencing its manifestation, especially as that manifestation is or could have been a child. For example, greater societal care for the disabled is much more enlightened than exterminating the disabled before they are born. For the case of fatal birth defects, of course, the same arguments that support adult euthanasia might apply, but whether a child "has any chance at a happy life" should be the child's to decide. If its life sucks so bad, it can bash its brains out against a wall when it grows old enough, but it should at least have control over its own fate.

Generally I am just suspicious of the phrase "problem pregnancy." If bringing another human life into the world is a problem for somebody, we need to find out why and address those concerns. More contraception education, crisis pregnancy centers, you get the idea. It costs more, but it ultimately leads to a more stable and healthy society than the brushing-under-the-carpet we call abortion.

[Spiffor]

I'll tell you a little story.

My ex and I are two responsible young adults, and we dated for two years and a half while being students in a demanding exchange programme.

Before we even had sex (we were both virgins at the beginning of the relationship), we both agreed that a child was entirely out of the equation, at least until both of us for several years to come. The main reason, obviously, is because we were both students without a situation, and because a kid would have wrecked her studies (since I wasn't going to be pregnant, it would have affected me less).

We both wanted to avoid an abortion, which is why we used contraception, and successfully so. We had to use two morning-after pills during the whole relationship, but never had to abort. However, if she had been pregnant, we would have aborted, precisely because we definitely didn't want a child.

Please enlighten me: at what point was shame involved in our decision to abort if all else failed?

[Dinner]

Did the study control for age of the women since complications become more common with age? What about for women who had abortions due to medical issues which might be reoccuring? Did it break down between earlier or late term abortions?

Nope, it didn't do any of that so this study is much good.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Originally posted by Elok


The most heavy arguments for abortion that I've heard, other than the quasi-eugenic (this kid is defective or from a bad background, kill it), are based on compassion for the mother's emotional plight, typically because the child was conceived through rape or incest. Or the condom breaks and the teenaged girl doesn't want her parents, etc. to judge her. Greater unconditional support is a better solution to that then just having it squished out, which allows us to more easily ignore the fact that the teenaged girl has jerks for parents, that rape and incest are too frequently allowed to stigmatize their victim or just brushed over, what-have-you.

Even outside of "shame," just about any circumstance for abortion other than the life of the mother, which is increasingly rare with current medical technology, is better answered by addressing the problem directly rather than silencing its manifestation, especially as that manifestation is or could have been a child. For example, greater societal care for the disabled is much more enlightened than exterminating the disabled before they are born. For the case of fatal birth defects, of course, the same arguments that support adult euthanasia might apply, but whether a child "has any chance at a happy life" should be the child's to decide. If its life sucks so bad, it can bash its brains out against a wall when it grows old enough, but it should at least have control over its own fate.

Generally I am just suspicious of the phrase "problem pregnancy." If bringing another human life into the world is a problem for somebody, we need to find out why and address those concerns. More contraception education, crisis pregnancy centers, you get the idea. It costs more, but it ultimately leads to a more stable and healthy society than the brushing-under-the-carpet we call abortion.

Cool. Make the world a perfect place so that abortion becomes irrelevant and unnecessary. I like that idea.

How pragmatic do you think that is?

[Elok]

Ngh. Laz, I said in my very first response that I didn't believe in perfect solutions. I'm only arguing for improving the situation as opposed to flushing the evidence of the problem and hoping it goes away. Unwanted pregnancies will pretty much always happen, we can only make them more bearable and treat mother and child as well as we can. It's called making the most of an ugly situation. Now please stop attacking points I'm not making.

Spiff: Okay, that's not shame, but merely shameful. Adoption exists, dude. Yes, carrying a child to term only to give it away is a pain in the rear and horribly unfair, but getting killed in utero because your parents can't afford you is even more unfair in my book. Lesser of two evils. If you can't accept even the miniscule failure rate of good contraception, you should be prepared to accept the consequences of the unlikely misfortune, nasty as they may be. Saying "I don't deserve my current situation, therefore I'm entitled to behave unethically to escape it" is a common rationalization but still disgusting. It's commonly used by Nigerians to excuse fraud.

BTW, I didn't mean to imply that shame is the only motive, I was just mentioning it as the most common reason given. It's a real tear-jerker, followed closely by its-life-will-suck-so-we'd-better-kill-it.

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by Elok
"I don't deserve my current situation, therefore I'm entitled to behave unethically to escape it" is a common rationalization but still disgusting.

The difference between you and I is that I see nothing unethical with an early abortion. A later aboriton, when the embryo has more markings of a baby, I dislike (which is why I advocate a right to abortion on demand until the third month - after that, the only allowable abortion is medically motivated)

When the embryo is a tiny lump of flesh without even a nervous system, I see it as something that sees no more problem of being removed than an appendix. This is why I see it as something that should be taken out as soon as possible.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
I thought that evidence had been dismissed.

Says whom?

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
Many conservatives routinely bring it up as "junk" science.

Nah, you are just a victim of a misinformation campaign. There is a very good article in The Lancet about how Big Tobacco tried to discredit one of the environmental smoke studies.