Being pro-forced birth means being pro-condemning disabled people to death by forcing them to carry pregnancies to term that their bodies can not handle. Being pro-forced birth means forcing intellectually disabled people to go through an incredibly traumatic experience that they may not understand, that were conceived as the product of abuse. Being pro-forced birth is forcing people who can not or can barely look after themselves to go through an incredibly difficult, taxing, expensive, and potentially traumatic experience that could lead to them being institutionalised, homeless, or worse. Being pro-forced birth is being inherently anti-disabled rights.
Being Pro-Life means knowing that even the smallest of lives is worth protection and consideration. Being pro-life means knowing that a diagnosis shouldn’t be a death sentence. Being pro-life means that someone’s life or worth isn’t tied to how productive they are or how much help they need. Being pro-life means condemning abuse rather than continuing it. Being pro-life means a number on a bank account doesn’t excuse ending a life.
Being pro-life is inherently compassionate to the struggle and genocide happening to disabled people.
P.S. I refuse to let tumblr be an echo chamber.
Why do the lives of living, breathing disabled people mean nothing to you, then? If you condemn abuse, why do you think a living, breathing disabled person should be forced to suffer or die? If you're "anti-genocide" why do you think that living, breathing, thinking disabled people should be forced to sacrifice their lives to be living incubators against their will? Do you even know what genocide is? And why should a fetus be allowed more control over disabled people's bodies and lives than any living human being has ever been allowed?
You don't give a fuck about lives. You don't give a fuck about disabled people. You give a fuck about pearl clutching and controlling the bodies of others. Tumblr isn't an "echo chamber", it's just that every reasonable person who gives a fuck about others disagrees with you.
P.S: "Pro-life" isn't real. You're pro-forcing others to carry a pregnancy to term and give birth against their will.
I know that your view is motivated by the desire to impart good to the world, as does mine, and it is out of that desire for good that I ask you to at least consider what I’m going to say:
1. Science emphatically agrees that a unique human life, your life and my life, begins at conception. You can ask google or chatgpt if you don’t believe me. So the debate here isn’t about what a fetus is, a human child, but rather about if that child should be given status as being a “person.” And honestly it’s a debate that is worth having, especially as disabled people. It’s not necessarily black and white at first glance. So how should we define personhood? Should it be defined by your ability to think or understand the world? As you said though, some with disabilities might not meet that standard but we both agree they deserve human rights. Should it be consciousness? Well I’m knocked out with general anesthesia pretty often and I still retain my human rights, and I’m even offered additional protection in that vulnerable state. So what should the standard be?
2. Pro-life views do not endanger the lives of mothers in cases where the pregnancy poses risk. That’s just a myth. I’m likely a person who would be at an increased risk of death in pregnancy and none of my views would interfere with my ability to get care. Now, there is an issue when laws are changed of physicians not understanding what the law is and that certainly has harmed women. And that isn’t okay. I’ve been vocal about this issue publicly.
3. This ties into the last point. If there is a genocide of disabled people dying from pregnancy complications let me know, because I will be first in line to end that. But again, pro-life views are not endangering the life of the mother, and that has never been the case.
4. I think genocide would be something like a woman named Margaret Sanger founding a network of buildings in predominantly black neighborhoods that end the lives of black children for the explicit purpose of aborting the black race out of existence. Or possibly the jubilant desire of nearly every advanced country to identify and end the life of any child with Down Syndrome, and have actually nearly eradicated that population in a handful of European countries. Now remember, science agrees that life begins at conception, so the systematic abortion of disabled children is and has been happening for decades. A genocide by all definitions.
The pro-life view isn’t about controlling women’s bodies. If we could take unborn children out of women who don’t want them and care for them in a plastic bubble instead, we absolutely would. In fact, neonatal medicine has improved dramatically over the years where this may be a possibility soon, which is incredible! And I’m totally excited for that. So to say that pro-life means that I’m a horrible person who hates everyone and want all disabled people to die (including myself??) is just untrue, but I’m more than happy to talk about points of actual contention like the ones above.
Of course you think ChatGPT is a good fucking source. ChatGPT doesn't know shit, it scrapes information from anywhere and everywhere on the internet, which includes biased and downright incorrect ones. Which I suppose is fine if you don't care about factual information, just about confirming to yourself that you're correct. If you get all of your information from ChatGPT then immediately your opinions are invalidated, but I'll bite.
Honestly, it doesn't matter where life begins. No human being who has been born has the right to another person's body. Do you believe that someone should be able to forcibly remove your blood and organs if it will save another person's life? Even if it will kill you? If a fetus has human rights then it does not have a right to parasitise or kill someone for its own gain. No human has that right. In almost all countries, someone would be permitted to defend themselves with however much force is necessary in that situation.
That said, at the point of gestation that almost all abortions take place, an embryo does not actually resemble a human baby, let alone have a functioning heart (what is commonly cited as a first heart beat is actually a motor flutter of cells that could eventually become a heart) and isn't even able to feel motor pain until about 25 weeks, which is well after 98.9% of abortions take place. I can find absolutely no evidence that scientists universally agree that life begins at conception whatsoever, which is either something you were told and repeated, or was hallucinated by ChatGPT. But considering that 40-50% of fertilised eggs fail to implant, if life begins at fertilisation, then human life is ridiculously fragile.
And yes, "pro-life" does endanger the lives of people whose lives would be at risk in carrying a pregnancy to term. Out of curiosity, is this whole response written by ChatGPT? Maternal mortality is 11 times higher in disabled people, the risk of thromboembolism (blood clots in the lungs or veins in the legs) is more than six times higher, and the risk of severe preeclampsia, a potentially deadly hypertensive disorder, is more than double. All other serious complications are higher too, varying between 16-48% higher. (same source.). Abortion restrictions have already been observed to have severe implications for disabled people. Disabled people are also nearly 3x more likely to experience sexual assault, and up to 90% of women (and people perceived to be women) with intellectual disabilities experience sexual assault in their lifetimes, so not only are disabled people more at risk of health complications and death, we're also more likely to be put at risk without our consent. That's what you support.
While there have been instances where abortion has been used as a tool of eugenics in the past, the same could be said of many medical procedures. Do you believe that people shouldn't be allowed to undergo reproductive health procedures such as hysterectomies, vasectomies, orchidectomies, etc. even for vital medical reasons, because they were once performed on people against their will? Additionally, the higher rate of abortions among Black individuals coincides with higher rates of sexual assault, particularly in minors, 3-4x the rate of maternal mortality, and higher rates of every kind of severe complication during pregnancy, as well as massive wealth inequality. As for the impacts of abortion on people with Downs' Syndrome, it's pretty obvious that the issue is systematic screening for non-fatal disabilities, and not abortion itself? Abortion can and should exist without screening for disabilities. To suggest otherwise is just ridiculous and disingenuous.
Honestly, it doesn't matter if you would remove the fetus and allow it do develop outside of the human body if you could. You can't. We don't live in a perfect world where pregnancy and birth are safe and easy either, even in the general US population nearly 1 in 40 pregnancies will result in severe complications, while in both the UK and the US, maternal mortality is on the rise, and is nearly doubled in states where abortion is banned. Additionally, up to 40% of people find pregnancy and childbirth to be traumatic, with 4% of people developing PTSD following childbirth. All of these numbers are significantly higher among people who wanted an abortion but were refused one, and people forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy are also significantly more likely to stay in an abusive relationship. Even in cases where there are no serious complications, pregnancy and childbirth cause permanent changes to the body and brain. Pregnancy is not completely safe for anyone, and abortion bans do not help that at all. In fact, after the abortion ban maternal mortality in Texas rose 56% in the first year alone, and the maternal mortality rate dropped by 70% in Ethiopia after abortions were legalised.
There's also the fact that banning abortions doesn't even prevent them from happening or reduce the rates, they just don't happen in safe, sterile environments and aren't performed by trained doctors. In places where abortion is banned, 3 out of 4 abortions are unsafe, compared to 1 out of 10 in countries with permissive abortion laws. Unsafe abortions are one of the leading causes of maternal death, causing 13% of maternal deaths worldwide, at a mortality rate of about 0.2%. In comparison, safe abortions have a mortality rate of less than 0.0005% in the first trimester, and 0.0067% after 18 weeks. This is over 25x safer than most elective surgeries.
Safe, legal abortion is a disabled rights issue. To be anti-choice is to be anti-disabled, to believe the wellbeing of disabled people should be secondary to something unthinking and unfeeling, and your personal beliefs, is undeniably ableist. There is no such thing as "pro-life", because restricting abortion doesn't save lives. You advocate for forcing others to carry to term and give birth against their will, regardless of the danger it will put them in. Nothing more.
Thanks for responding! These conversations are important to have, and to be fair, the average pro-life or pro-choice person doesn’t ever get into the intricacies of the conversation like this, so thank you! I’ll just blanket statement say, I never used chatgpt for this conversation and I agree that blindly trusting chatgpt is not wise. I’m always a bit irritated when people accuse me of using chatgpt (happens over on my Instagram page) but I suppose it’s an issue of the times. Anyway, point is, my sources are not “chatgpt” and I only suggested it as a quick way to find common questions, not a magic portal to knowledge haha.
Your first paragraph is sort of two issues in one, and it makes the most sense if I address the first part now and the second issue further down. Firstly, I think it’s extremely important to understand when life begins, especially when the debate is over when we can end a life. It actually confuses me why you would say this doesn’t matter at all? If life begins at first heartbeat then I’d have no issue about ending a pregnancy before then. If life begins at 16 then no one should care about kids dying at 15, because it’s not human life, right? So it’s exceptionally important to know when life begins, otherwise we could just kill whomever we deemed not yet human. The entire issue here is deciding if the child or “clump of cells” is human yet. If you can convince me that life begins at some other time, then I’m happy to concede that abortion should be legal until that point. Your arguments against the human status of the fetus are all conditional, and actually would result in several fully adult humans losing their human status. Being “recognizable” is a bit of a poor standard because someone with severe burns, or limb differences, or other visible disfigurement might not be recognizable, but they are still human. What standard should we adopt to ensure only people who look human enough ought to be considered human? Next, Heart beats, even the absence of a recognizable heart structure, shouldn’t be our standard of life because there are plenty of people who lose heart function and are still considered humans, for example, those on ECMO or on bypass. Even ability to feel pain is faulty as a standard for humanhood because plenty of people have altered or lost ability to feel or experience pain or distress. Conditions like congenital analgesia, spinal cord injury, nerve damage, or even my inability to feel one of my hips shouldn’t make me less human. The most convincing argument I’ve heard of this variety is the appeal to neurological development and ability to have and understand a unique human experience or consciousness to some degree, which is still being studied and we’re not exactly sure when to label a human as conscious because even into infancy babies are still developing major neurological and psychological foundations, but largely a fetal human experience is marked around 24-25 weeks. But we yet again run into an issue where even perfectly healthy people can lose consciousness, can be sedated, or even being asleep to some degree is an alternate state of consciousness. There are also conditions affecting the brain like TBIs, strokes, Alzheimer’s, which result in severe neurological and cognitive deficits, or even hydranencephaly which results in only fractions of the brain forming. A boy name Noah Wall was actually born with this condition and had only 2% of functioning brain tissue, as well as Spina Bifida, and is paralyzed from the neck down was told he would never survive outside the womb, and by all measure wouldn’t even be capable of a human experience without a brain is now 13 years old, is able to communicate, and still considered to be human. He can’t feel, can’t talk, and didn’t even have a brain, but it would still be murder if someone shot him in the head.
Point is, these standards of human development all eventually breakdown and risk labeling even disabled people as sub-human, and the only way to prevent that is to find a standard where humans are given human rights simply for being human. It’s called innate value. We don’t have to “earn” human status in order to receive human rights. At because, at conception, this is the first point of creation for the unique DNA of a unique human being, this must be the start of life. That life growing in the womb, that clump of cells, is human. Not a cat, or a raccoon, or a snake. A human. Science agrees that even that first single embryonic cell is a human embryonic cell. With unique human DNA, even if they are so small we can’t quite recognize them. And yes, many of those tiny humans don’t survive long and life is fragile and precious. My life expectancy is pretty short actually, but I’m still human.
The next few points are mostly about the risks of pregnancy, which are real and can be quite scary, but I never argued that pregnancy was totally harmless, I said that pro-life views do not interfere with the ability of a woman to get care due to complications. So yes, pregnancy is a big deal, and access to care is an important thing especially for disabled people at a heightened risk. We agree!
I will clarify here though, because I know it can be a bit convoluted. Many pro-life people will argue, and I’m sure you’ve heard this yourself, that abortion isn’t medically necessary. The statement here isn’t that there is no such thing as ectopic pregnancy or emergency situations, many pro-life people just don’t consider the procedures needed in those circumstances to be “abortion.” It’s a language issue, which, frankly, is such a dumb way to go about explaining pro-life views. We pro-life people should not be trying to change the names of things and then using a definition of abortion that the majority of people don’t use. That’s on us, sorry about that. We are not against medical procedures needed to save the life of a mother, even if that procedure inevitably leads to the loss of the child.
The fifth paragraph is sort a few tangential issues, I’ll try to just answer rapid fire, but let me know if you’d like further explanation. I’m totally fine with hysterectomies and vasectomies and whatever else is needed, even just if you wanted one for fun. The higher rates of injustice in black communities is horrible, and we should all work to improve those issues, but abortion isn’t the solution. Access to education, better jobs, better housing, safer communities, are part of the solution, killing babies isn’t. I’m adopted myself, if a mother truly feels they cannot care for a child, that’s always an option. There are over 2 million families on the adoption waiting list, there is no such thing as an unwanted child. I’m not entirely certain what the last argument was (sorry, please clarify if you can), but think we both agree that disability screening should not be a factor for abortions, yes?
The next area circles back to medical necessity, and I did touch on that already, but you also brought up medical impact that might not be emergencies, but are definitely still relevant. There are two categories here, voluntary pregnancies and involuntary pregnancies. In voluntary pregnancies these issues like body changes, morning sickness, and even emotional delivery experiences are part of pregnancy. We can do our best to make pregnancy as comfortable as possible with lifestyle changes, pregnancy pillows, nausea medication, epidurals and more, but ultimately the process of pregnancy will always have some degree of discomfort, and while I wish we could snap our fingers and make it go away, the life of a human child shouldn’t end because of discomfort. It’s probably annoying to spend all your money on baby formula or to be woken up at all hours of the night, but we don’t don’t allow moms to kill their toddlers in the name of discomfort so we shouldn’t justify it for other children. But again, if you can convince me that life begins at some other time, we can reevaluate, but if the entity in the womb is a human child, then killing it isn’t justified in the name of discomfort. Now, involuntary pregnancy, while utterly tragic, are not cured by abortion. Abortion won’t undo assault, it won’t erase PTSD, and it won’t make everything okay again. The solution here is to have stronger protections for women, and honestly I’m not against castrating a man who assaults a woman. They chose violence and I’m fine to chop off the jewelry in the name of justice. But abortion won’t stop men, in fact, it empowers men to be even more reckless and degenerate.
I’m honestly not familiar with the statistics on illegal abortion, so I’m happy to defer to your stats, but even as a logical argument it doesn’t make sense. If abortion is the killing of an innocent child, it shouldn’t matter what the stats are if the act is morally wrong. Imagine if legalizing rape led to fewer rapes. Legal and illegal rape still harms the woman. Assault is still wrong and should still be illegal.
Moral of the story here, if you can convince me that life begins at some other time, I’m absolutely on-board with all of your arguments, but because we’re talking about human life, a very vulnerable and fragile human life, I think the right to life should be taken seriously from the womb to infancy to adulthood and when you’re old. Human rights shouldn’t be abridged based on convenience or preference, that’s called genocide.
Thank you again for engaging, it’s necessary!
