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I completely agree that the general support for abortion stems mostly from both men and women wanting pregnancies to be optional; I think calling this desire an "accountability problem" is a pointlessly obtuse way of framing the issue except that it attempts to build consensus. Fwiw, both of my children were from unexpected pregnancies (birth control ain't got shit on me) that we actively elected to keep, which seems far better than having unexpected pregnancies that we were forced to keep and never got to consider "wanted".
However, I think you dismissing the extremely rare cases too easily. Having your daughter/self forced to carry a child of rape is a completely horrific scenario that you can except essentially no chance of. Having your wife (or worse, mother of your children) die because they were forced to carry a life-threatening pregnancy is another absolute nightmare. These are things that, from my perspective, need to just have a zero probability.
Rape and extreme health risks with regards to abortion are some of the clearest examples of motte-and-bailey arguments I know of. The best way to spot a motte-and-bailey argument is to see if the person is satisfied if you were to grant them the motte. In this case, imagine abortion was 100% completely legal up to any point in the pregnancy for rape cases and for significantly higher health risk than usual pregnancies, and 100% illegal for family planning purposes. If necessary, imagine an omniscient arbiter were able to make sure no rape victim gets dismissed and no one could get away with falsely claiming rape just to get an abortion.
I think a majority of pro-life people would be overjoyed. Even though they might have preferred a full ban, what they want, to save what they percieve as life, is in accordance with the arguments they put forth, so any decrease is good. Pro-choice people would be almost uniformly against, because extreme cases like rape and risky pregnancies are not the reason they are pro-choice, family planning is (but it's a harder sell, especially to family and duty minded conservatives). So in that case, guaranteeing absolutely no rape victim or no risky pregnancy is forced to term is not worth giving up on family planning.
*EDIT: In fact, I suspect that they would be unhappy in ways they could not reasonably explain themselves if full right to abortion were granted to rape and high medical risk cases on top of current compromises. Truthfully because they could not then use these as a shield to expand family planning rights, but I can easily imagine half-assed excuses as to why the medical establishment (or the omniscient arbiter) has no right to judge whether a woman has really been raped, only she can know!
Why, then, is it that so many abortion bans do not have exceptions for rape? Falsely claiming that one was raped to get an abortion is not something I hear of very often. It seems like nothing but red meat for pro-choice people.
I think the pro-life people, particularly the religious who form a majority of them, don't tend to view the question tactically. If a position was imposed that reduced abortion rates without bringing it to zero, they'd still be happy, but they cannot themselves argue for a mere reduction because if they did they imagine themselves being tormented in the afterlife by the ghosts of the unborn fruits of rapes asking them "Wasn't I also a precious human being worth fighting for?". So for them, it has to be a total ban. This might change in the future if the pro-life position gets taken up en-masse by people who have another basis than religion for it; after all, natalism is not inherently religious.
No, that's not right at all. We're not against it because we're worried about an afterlife of torment. We're against it because we consider it evil and wrong to kill babies. Indeed the whole concept that it's wrong to kill babies for the sake of convenience would seem to be a Christian one, since infanticide is otherwise a fairly common thing for humans to engage in.
The reason we're not arguing for middle-ground legislation which bans elective abortions but makes exceptions for rape is that there's zero political will on the other side to accept such a compromise, as you pointed out above. The only way to get any kind of restriction is to get enough power to enforce full restriction, so there's simply no game-theoretic reason we'd even try to do anything less.
But there's more than two sides to this, I'd point out. There's a large contingent, maybe even a plurality, that believes that being born from parents who didn't want you sucks, that ideally children should only be born from parents that want them, that wouldn't care to defend considering a fetus a human being at the moment of conception, but ALSO wouldn't care to defend it only being a human being at the moment of birth. That contingent feels intuitively, even if they cannot articulate it with nice convenient lines, that there is a difference between an abortion days after conception and an abortion days before expected birth.
That contingent might be easier to compromise with. In fact, compromise is what they want, and usually get. Taking off the table some few but highly sympathetic exceptions might make them willing to go for a more restrictive compromise.
Yes, and that's why the status quo lies where it does.
I realize that you're not making this argument here but I've always found it awful. What's worse -- having parents who didn't want you, or literally being dead? The whole concept suggests a broken understanding of life to me; some kind of deep conviction that life is only worth living if it's not too far from ideal (by whatever random standard). Same with the people on reddit who say that if every child can't have their own bedroom that's abuse and it would be better not to have them.
Never mind that a lot of people are waiting in the wings to adopt; never mind the many, many people who have gone on to live great lives despite rough beginnings. Sorry kiddo, you're not going to get this one fairytale thing that I've arbitrarily decided is more important than life itself; down the drain you go!
"Life being worth living" suggests that there is a person who would appreciate that life. Debate is out on whether the nascent brain activity of a fetus counts as a person.
This is not implied within a non-secular context. Indeed it's pretty commonplace for us that we'll only be able to fully appreciate our lives in retrospect, in the light of our expanded consciousnesses in the resurrection.
Does the brain activity of someone in deep sleep count as a person? Is there a moral issue with killing them?
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