What's your Abortion Policy?

[Person Man]

This is my take-

Pro-choice- abortion is a matter of personal choice until some reasonable point and should be still be available at some amount beyond extreme need until to the point viability. Whether Medicaid performs them should be an open question. Parental notification maybe OK if sufficiently watered down enough.


Pro-choice with exceptions- abortion should be available until some reasonable point but there should be "common sense" abortion control such as not allowing Medicaid to cover them but for extreme need (the pregnancy was caused by a felony or will is more likely than not fatal), and allowing a 1 or 2 business day waiting period and notification of parents if under 18.

Mixed- Abortion should only be available when "need" is established by the clinic performing it (the abortion is not just because the mother doesn't want to have the child or a child of a particular gender or coloring....or for reasons that are particularly offensive without taking out most of the "choice") and should only be available for reasonable time that is well before viability. Abortions should only be done is hospitals or in communities that support their family planning clinics that perform them. The same "common sense" restrictions above but maybe a weeks' waiting period or even have spousal notification/consent. Make non-conforming abortions cause for prosecution of a drug felony for doctors, but never women.

Mostly Pro-Life- You think that in general, that abortion should be cause for at least a misdemeanor domestic violence offense for the mother and maybe the father if he didn't go straight to the police if he knew. Anyone who performed it could get a felony drug or assault charge. However, there could be reasons for an abortion. If the mother was more likely than not to die, or the pregnancy was caused by a felony or maybe if the mother would require a hysterectomy, be paralyzed or become mentally ill to the point of not being able to have a job from it or the child not likely to survive long after the birth or maybe if the child was severely disabled.  Those situations should be decided by the hospital and only performed there. The DA could be privy the decisions by the hospital and would have the right to sue/press charges if the DA there was insufficient cause for the abortion.

Pro-Life- Means that you think abortion should only be performed in hospitals for the immediate self-defense of the mother, or that it should never be legal except for maybe if the mother miscarries because of getting treatment for a terminal illness. Other than that, either the homicide laws should be changed to include any self-sustained biological reaction that could theoretically result in the birth of a human (even if it is unlikely) or abortion should be treated as a felony domestic violence or drug change. Perhaps even hormonal or biochemical birth control and certain medical advances would also be considered abortion. It would be interested how cloning would work into this (would clones be protected or would abortion be mandatory for clones).

[Person Man]

What's your Abortion Policy?

Don't get any bimbos pregnant.  Godawful.  I'll have to deal with that soon enough.  Like living my own adolescence all over again.  The boy's only eight now, but time flies.  Ah, at least he's not a girl.  Gotta be worse to be a pregnant bimbo than the one who impregnated her.

I grudgingly call myself "pro choice."  I'm astonished that we're still having this argument.  There are enough people already.  Accidental pregnancies can be dispatched safely, legally, and with minimal cost.  I'm generally against socialized medicine, but I make an exception here.  Certainly the one-time $350 fee is preferable to the taxpayers than the tens of thousands of dollars per year for 18 years that it will cost the taxpayers to nurture the unwanted progeny of a parent not yet ready to be a parent.  And let's not even get started on the big dollars we'll spend on incarceration of the adult which evolves from the unloved and unwanted child.

Someone mentioned parental notification.  I strongly agree with that and would vote for its requirement in a binding referendum.  We're a very litigious society.  You can't even get a nose job without a parent's signature if you're under 18.  No reason to exclude fetal abortions.  No parent will force his child to abort.  Some might refuse to give the consent to abort, but we'll have to live with that.  Yes I recognize that a small subset of pregnant teens might then resort to illegal, unsafe back-alley abortions, but you have to take the crunchy with the smooth.  Parents are blindsided enough by the increasingly collectivist rules of society without having to accept medical doctrinaire.  On parental notification, I'm a strict conservative--Mostly because children are just that:  children.  If my child leaves a flaming bag of shit on your doorstep and rings a bell and runs away, I get sued, not him.  That's the reality and, frankly, it's fair since parents are morally and ethically responsible for their progeny.  All the more reason for a liberal abortion policy--but overall I'm pretty much with the Liberal mindset on this issue.  Provide funding for those who cannot afford abortions, so long as we can make sure that they're clean and safe, of course, but do not force people to abort if they have genuine inhibitions about it. 


That's an argument for not making a abortion a crime.

[Person Man]

As I've stated before, I could accept placing the dividing line between non-personhood and personhood at anywhere between 10 weeks (the embryo becoming a fetus) and 24 weeks (the generally accepted average point of viability).  However once that dividing line has been drawn, I am absolutely opposed to crossing it in the case of rape or incest.

So, mostly pro-choice? somewhere in between?

[Person Man]

Pro-choice during the first two trimesters, pro-life except for risk to the mother's life in the third trimester.

That's pro-choice.

It's just like someone saying they are "mostly pro-life" when they want a comprehensive abortion ban with a "maternal life" exception (see Treyvon Martin, apparently).

Anything more pro-choice than that is really just pro-death or a baby hater, the same way anyone more "pro-life" than that is just pro-death or a woman hater.

[Person Man]

Pro-choice during the first two trimesters, pro-life except for risk to the mother's life in the third trimester.

That's pro-choice.

It's just like someone saying they are "mostly pro-life" when they want a comprehensive abortion ban with a "maternal life" exception (see Treyvon Martin, apparently).

Anything more pro-choice than that is really just pro-death or a baby hater, the same way anyone more "pro-life" than that is just pro-death or a woman hater.

I don't think it's so simple at all.  Some folks reach the conclusion, through deeply-held moral convictions, that fetal abortion is like murder, always wrong.  They are not woman-haters or death mongers.  There have also been states that encourage abortions of any pregnancies after the first successful one, usually for population control.  They are not "pro death" just because they wonder how they're going to feed millions of people.  There are also many attitudes when it comes to abortion funding, and many rationales behind those attitudes.  It's a very complicated issue, like most issues, and people don't always agree.  Even when they end up voting the same way on a bill, it may have been very different lines of reasoning that brought them to their conclusions.

Generally, I am worried about people who are so anti-abortion that they will give fetuses a greater right to life than born people or those are so pro-abortion that they will allow for infanticide.