I saw in your post on Rachel Jennings' blog that you believe abortion is acceptable because you believe that some children may wish to have been aborted later in life. However, is it alright for anyone to take away someone else's life simply because we don't think they'll enjoy life later? Harsh circumstances can be overcome; death cannot. Someone depriving someone else of the chance to live simply because they think the second person might not want to strikes me as extremely cruel.
I’ll answer this in terms of my own life, because I can’t speak for anybody else.
I can appreciate that it’s difficult to wrap one’s mind around the statement “aborting me would have been better,” so I hope you’ll forgive my delay in answering, and also excuse the following novel. To begin, there’s none of this “believing” “some children” “may” wish to have been aborted. I KNOW that some people feel this way, because I am one of them and its unlikely I am the only one. Here is a story from another woman who also wishes her mom had had an abortion, because,
An abortion would have absolutely been better for my mother. An abortion would have made it more likely that she would finish high school and get a college education. At college in the late 1960s, it seems likely she would have found feminism or psychology or something that would have helped her overcome her childhood trauma and pick better partners. She would have been better prepared when she had children. If nothing else, getting an abortion would have saved her from plunging into poverty. She likely would have stayed in the same socioeconomic strata as her parents and grandparents who were professors. I wish she had aborted me because I love her and want what is best for her.
Abortion would have been a better option for me. If you believe what reproductive scientists tell us, that I was nothing more than a conglomeration of cells, then there was nothing lost. I could have experienced no consciousness or pain. But even if you discount science and believe I had consciousness and could experience pain at six gestational weeks, I would chose the brief pain or fear of an abortion over the decades of suffering I endured.
An abortion would have been best for me because there is no way that my love-starved, trauma-addled mother could have ever put me up for adoption. It was either abortion or raising me herself, and she was in no position to raise a child. She had suffered a traumatic brain injury, witnessed and experienced severe domestic violence, and while she was in grade school she was raped by a stranger and her mother committed suicide. She was severely depressed and suicidal, had an extremely poor support system, was experiencing an unplanned pregnancy that resulted from coercive sex, and she was so young that her brain was still undeveloped.
Pay attention to the bolded bit there, it’s important. While my life and that of my mom is somewhat different that that of Ms. Beisner, the basic idea is the same: life would have been a thousand percent better for my mom if she hadn’t had a child at 19. She was way too young, practically a kid herself. Having me robbed her of a pleasant and fulfilling life. She’d have had a better chance at being happy instead of bitter if she’d waited to have a baby until she was ready.
Is it alright for anyone to take away someone else’s life simply because we don’t think they’ll enjoy life later?
It seems that with this question you are purposefully misunderstanding my statements on Rachel’s blog. But I’ll answer you anyway. In short, yes. I think it is kinder sometimes to abort a fetus that is, for example, going to be severely disabled. When I say that, I mean the kind of disabled that means the person will be bedridden, unconscious, unable to move, and in excruciating pain for a short time before a terribly painful and unpleasant death. I think it’s kinder for the mother to be able to abort a child who has, say, anecephaly, where parts of the head and brain never develop. It is cruel as hell to force a mother to carry a child to term when that child WILL die either before birth or shortly thereafter. It’s cruel to mother and child.
Re-reading your question, I think you mean “enjoy life” in a different way- to mean “have a successful or fulfilling life.” You have no way of knowing if your fetus will grow up to be depressed and suicidal like me. That is a much more complicated issue. There are young people who have never had to worry about food or shelter who grow up to be unhappy, unsuccessful, or unfulfilled in some way, and there are also young people who grow up without two dimes to rub together and go on to achieve fantastic success and happiness. You can’t really say, before someone is born, how their life will turn out (and happiness, like morality, is subjective, and can vary wildly from person to person). You can, however, note that you as a potential parent are unable to afford to feed a child, you can say you don’t want to be a parent, you can say you don’t want to be a parent with a certain person, you can say you can’t give a child a good foundation. The word “enjoy” is just so… elastic, and I think that’s probably the reason you phrased it the way you did. You’re speaking about concepts that are much more fluid than the way you’ve presented them here. Few things are as simple as all that.
Somebody coming to my house and killing me tomorrow would be “taking away someone else’s life.” An abortion is performed before that life begins. I’m not talking about “life” in an abstract sense- grass is alive, tumors are alive- but a life of a conscious individual hasn’t begun until birth happens. “Life,” speaking abstractly, began billions of years ago and just keeps rolling right along. When I say “before that life begins,” I mean, before you begin to learn and grow up and experience life and the world around you. Fetuses don’t really do that. They develop, sure, but not in the same sense of the word.
Frankly, not everyone is special. I’m not special. Reproduction isn’t this special, divine event. I know that sounds unkind, but really- it happens all the time. Bacteria reproduce, and few people fawn over it. I am not special, and my absence on this planet wouldn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. Any minor accomplishments of mine could’ve easily been done by someone else, just like Ms. Beisner wrote. My husband probably would’ve found somebody else if he’d never met me. He probably would’ve been just as happy. If he’d never met me, he wouldn’t miss me because he never knew me in the first place. If I died in a car accident tomorrow or something, I like to think he would miss me. But that’s only possible if he knew me in the first place. If you don’t know what you’re missing, you’re not really missing anything at all. If I were to never have been born, I wouldn’t know the difference. My mom would, though. Her life would have probably been much more pleasant. It’s not really correct to say that, had I been aborted, my life would have been better. I wouldn’tve lived at all, so it wouldn’t be better, which requires improvement on something that already exists. I would, however, been spared two decades of abuse. I would have been spared the awful reality of being locked in a sort of psychological prison, of depression, suicidal thoughts, and self-harm. My mother never wasted an opportunity to let me know that she didn’t want me, and that she resented me. I apparently resemble my biological father a great deal physically, and personality-wise, and it’s probably rough on her to have a living, breathing reminder of the shittiest period of her life in her face all the time. She remarried when I was in elementary school, and had three more kids, so I had a basis of comparison. My sisters and brother were planned and wanted, and it showed. Friends could see it. It was obvious. Even one of my mom’s friends noticed the differences in how Mom treated her four kids, and took extra special care to pay attention to me and be kind to me, and I’ll be grateful to her until the day I die. Because of her, I know I’m not crazy, I wasn’t imagining things, that my feelings were valid, and that I’d be okay.
You say that you find it cruel to deny someone a chance to live. I say its ridiculously cruel to bring an unwanted child into the world and then abuse him or her.
It’s cruel to tell a child, “I never wanted you.”
It’s cruel to scream at a child, “You ruined my life!”
It’s cruel to take out your frustration and disappointment on a child.
It’s cruel to blame a child for the circumstances of their conception and birth. You wanna talk about cruel? I’ll tell you about cruel. I’ll tell you about hate. I’ll tell you about spite.
To be honest, inthearena1, when you say “harsh circumstances can be overcome,” I’m hearing, “you are pathetic.” It seems as though what you really want to ask me is “why aren’t you strong enough to bootstrap yourself out of your depression? Why are you so weak?”
