What's your Abortion Policy?

[afleitch]

My views on abortion are nuanced. Ultimately I don’t take a personal view on what is essentially a gynaecological matter that affects women. No man will ever carry or child or contemplate the choice of terminating it. Secondly, I think the life of the mother is important. There are too many attempts, particularly by those who seek to restrict access, in trying to redefine what life is by pushing it further and further back and applying emotive rather than empirical measurements. It has became a ‘chase’ right back to before viability even to before zygote formation, to as close to the moment of conception that you can muster ensuring that if you classify life in it’s broadest sense, then you are essentially suggesting that the bodies natural response to pregnancy which in turn can lead to termination or miscarriage at any stage in the pregnancy is ‘death’. If ‘life’ begins at conception, then the ending of this by whatever means is by definition ‘death’. You are now in the realm of making moral statements on what are essentially natural bodily responses. This is a great disservice to women who are now charged with involuntarily destroying more ‘life’ than they create. I am aware that this may not be the intent of defining life in this way, but it logically leads from that proposition. A more purposeful approach is to determining ‘life’, if life has to be determined in utero, is the point of viability which is between 21-24 weeks. And that’s that. A baby delivered before that period, will die because it is not able to live. There shouldn’t need to be a big argument over abortion up until that point. At that point the only concerns that should kick in regarding termination during the period of viability should be the mothers health (which for me as a ‘born’ life has to be weighted higher than an ‘unborn’ life but that’s a separate issue). The fact that there is a freight train of opposition trying to push ‘life’ back before the point of viability to even before embryogenesis is what clouds what should be a fairly simple matter.

[afleitch]

That there would be none.

Whoo! Let's let 10 year old girls who have been raped get physically mangled brah.