āIf you donāt like abortion then donāt get oneā
This will not convince anyone whoās pro-life because they believe abortion is the same as murder. To them itās like saying āif you donāt like murdering people then just donāt do itā.
āIf youāre a man then just shut up about abortionā
AFAIK, just about every opinion poll thatās ever asked the public about abortion has found that men are not really much more anti-abortion than women are. If there is a gender gap, itās like 5 percentage points or less. I think Iāve even seen one or two polls that show women to be more pro-life than men (but again, not by a big margin). So if thereās not a big gender gap on abortion then I donāt really see how this talking point is helpful.
Seems to me that the most likely consequence of this argument is it will discourage pro-choice men from participating in the cause & offering support.
(also, fwiw, itās cissexist; trans men exist and can get pregnant)
āMaking abortion illegal will not decrease how often abortion happens; it will only drive it underground and make it less safe.ā
I donāt think this is a good argument. I have a few reasons why:
- Banning abortion probably will indeed decrease how often abortion happens. After all, bans tend to be fairly effective at getting people to not do things. Just as one example: there are a lot of semi-automatic firearms in the US, but not nearly as many fully automatic firearms. Why? Probably because fully automatic firearms are banned. I donāt see why the same wouldnāt happen with abortion.
- If you want another example that is more directly related to abortion: during the Roe era, red states developed a tactic of putting onerous and extremely contrived rules on abortion providers, with the unstated goal of getting those abortion providers to shut down. And it worked. A lot of abortion providers in red states shut down because they couldnāt comply with these ridiculous and obviously contrived regulations. Statistics bear out that red states have a lower rate of abortion than blue states. If contrived targeted regulations were effective at reducing abortion, then an outright ban probably would be too.
- A lot of the time when this argument is made, itās articulated in a way that seems to concede the idea that decreasing the recurrence of abortion would be a good thing, and Iām not sure why we on the pro-choice side should concede that.
āIf abortion is murder, then every time a man masturbates is genocide, and every time a woman menstruates is murderā
Most pro-life people are smart enough to know the difference between a gamete and a zygote, so this doesnāt convince anyone.
āTheyāre not pro-life, theyāre just pro-birthā (sometimes phrased as āpro-forced-birthā)
Usually this isnāt actually an argument for legal abortion, itās just a reference to the fact that conservatives generally oppose social safety nets. Which, yeah, it is shitty of them that they want to force (often poor) people to have children but donāt care much about the welfare of those children once they are bornā¦ but thereās no inconsistency there. Itās not a hypocritical position, just a very cruel one. So we shouldnāt act like this is some amazing āgotchaā moment.
āIf weāre gonna ban abortion then how about we force men to start paying child support as soon as the woman gets pregnantā
This is just not an effective argument. Most anti-abortion people would be just fine with this idea. They are more than happy to force their āfamily valuesā on men as well as women.
You wouldnāt be able to tell from liberal/leftist conversations, but conservatives resent liberal, non-religious, sexually promiscuous men to a similar degree as they resent liberal, non-religious, sexually promiscuous women.
āTheyāre just anti-woman/they just want to control womenā
I think thereās some truth to this one (conservatives definitely harbor resentment towards sexual activity & expression that they perceive as un-Christian) but ultimately I donāt think this is the best argument to use. I donāt think that misogyny is really what motivates them. I think they actually are convinced that a just-fertilized zygote is a fully formed person with a soul and a mind and a conscience.
āIf men could get pregnant, then there would be abortion clinics on every cornerā
- As stated before, trans men exist and can get pregnant
- As stated before, there is not really much of a gender gap on abortion, and it is not helpful to imply that there is.
So. What arguments should pro-choice people use?
In my opinion, the abortion issue really just comes down to two main questions:
- Is an embryo/fetus a person?
- If it is a person, does that mean it has a right to continue growing in its
motherāsbirth parentās (I guess thatās the more correct term) uterus?
And our answers to those questions should be as follows:
- No, it is not a person. (At least, not until itās developed enough to survive outside the womb - Iām not sure what I think about this exactly)
- No, it does not have a right to use and benefit from another personās organs
Thatās really all that we need to say about it, although I have a couple of extraneous thoughts below that might also be useful:
- An embryo/fetus is not a person. It has some of the characteristics of a person, but not all of them. It cannot survive outside the womb because its organs arenāt developed enough. Until about 24 weeks of gestation, it canāt even feel pain because its nervous system isnāt sufficiently developed. It is not sentient. It cannot perceive itself or its environment. It does not have subjective experiences. If it isnāt sentient, then it has no interests to protect (which, when you think about it, is basically what ārightsā are).
- an abortion is generally defined as āthe termination of a pregnancy via the removal or expulsion of an embryo or fetus from the uterusā. Notice here that it is NOT defined as āthe destruction of the embryo/fetusā or āthe death of the embryo/fetusā. It is merely the āremoval or expulsionā. This is why miscarriages are considered by medical professionals to be a type of abortion - specifically they are a āspontaneous abortionā. So, even if one considers an embryo/fetus to be a person, an abortion is not actually an act of killing that āpersonā, it is just the act of removing that āpersonā from the uterus. If the embryo/fetus dies after it has been removed from the uterus, that is a separate event and it is not the doing of the (formerly) pregnant person.
Most pro-life people are smart enough to know the difference between a gamete and a zygote, so this doesnāt convince anyone.
Lmfao what a fucking joke, I guarantee you that the % of pro lifers who know what those words even mean is in the single digits, at most 10%.
the words arenāt the point people can tell the difference between sperm/eggs and a fertilised egg and distinguish between them