Are there any pro-life atheists out there?

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Permalink Reply by EvilGod on January 8, 2009 at 11:01am

The term Pro-life is so misleading. I'm Pro-quality-life, a firm believer in "If you can't feed 'em, don't breed 'em". Being a man I believe I have NO right to be pro-life. It's not my body to make decisions about. Nor should any man be able to tell a woman she can't abort a child because it's 'his'. Being a sperm donor does not a father make. I think every pro-life proponent should be forced to provide, and fully fund, a quality life for a child that was logically destined to be aborted. Unfortunately they would probably raise them as pro-lifers.
Free RU486 for all!

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Permalink Reply by Rosemary LYNDALL WEMM on January 8, 2009 at 1:01pm

EvilGod Wrote: I think every pro-life proponent should be forced to provide, and fully fund, a quality life for a child that was logically destined to be aborted.

That would be a great idea, EvilGod.

After I had my child, and I lived to bring him up, my Right To Life contact provided me with a basket of baby stuff and then turned tail and ran. She was no-where to be found during the next very hellish 18 months. My baby boy had ADHD and Asperger's and I had various medical problems, including 10 months of excruiating post-herpatic pain as the result of an accident during the emergency Ceasarian.

I choose to have that child for what I consider to be all the right reasons. I wanted to continue with my very accidental conception (less than 1 chance in about 6 million), believed that I had a reasonable chance of looking after the final result properly and was prepared to put up a lot of discomfit in order to get there and do so. It cost me dearly. I have permanent health problems as a result.

The parting remarks from the hospital gynacologist were (in paraphrase): "Well, you've got your little boy now but don't EVER do it again. If you turn up to this hospital pregnant again we will shoot you on sight. You would have problems from the very beginning, you would probably die and your fetus would definitely die. You would tie up hospital resources which are better given to people with problems that could not have been avoided. Be responsible and have your tubes tied."

I followed the doctor's tubal advice in spite of the RTL woman's attempts to convince me that such a course of action was immoral because it was preventing the conception of another new life. My stance was that it would be highly immoral to put the mental and physical well-being of my new born at risk by inviting a pointless death.

The whole incident highlighted the cruelty behind the RTL position.

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Permalink Reply by Christopher Peter Robinson on January 31, 2009 at 1:04pm

I believe in quality of life. But I also believe "If you do breed 'em, don't kill 'em".

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Permalink Reply by Rosemary LYNDALL WEMM on January 31, 2009 at 4:58pm

There are slow ways and quick ways to kill things. And there are cruel ways and humane ways.

Allowing a conception to develop until it reaches personhood and can breath, feel, think, emote and consider the future is laudable if there is a reasonable possibility that you, or someone else, can provide for its reasonable needs. If that is improbable, or even unlikely, then you are forcing a slow and cruel death on something instead of allowing it to die quickly and humanely. This may not be an easy choice, but we are talking about humane choices, not easy ones.

In contrast, the choice you perceive is falsely easy. The real choice is not between simple life and simple death but between the probable quality of life and the probable quality of death.

Nor is the real choice simply about the potential life of the conceived entity. It is about the effects which that conceived entity will have (with an estimated degree of certainty) on other human beings of worth.

We humans live in families and communities. Parents have responsibilities that go far beyond the life of a freshly conceived entity. They have responsibilities to themselves, to their spouse or partner, to their other children, to their wider family, to their community, to their nation and, more and more importantly in this time of dwindling and misuse of resources, to the world. It is not possible to make a mature and reasonable decision about continuing or terminating an unexpected or dangerous pregnancy unless you take the reasonable needs of other people into account, especially if you have bred them yourself. "If you breed them, don't kill them" should be applied to your fully formed existing children first.

As people mature they are generally able to make decisions which take into account a widening set of factors. In twenty years time, when you have children of your own, you may wonder how you could ever have been such a one-track thinker. For the sake of those future children, I hope so.

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Permalink Reply by Christopher Peter Robinson on January 31, 2009 at 1:05pm

It's not the mother's body either. It's the child's.

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Permalink Reply by Rosemary LYNDALL WEMM on January 31, 2009 at 5:25pm

At the stage when medical abortions are performed, it is an unreasonable anthropomorphic stretch to describe the conceived entity as having a "body". At that stage it is not a "child" (feeling, thinking, breathing, aware) and it does not have a "body."

If you have a wet dream and spill a few thousand sperm on your sheets you could be destroying more human life forms than an abortificant drug or a doctor performing an early abortion.

Should you deposit these sperm in some woman's virgina the chances are that one might impregnate an egg which fails to attach itself, or fails to remain attached, to the uterine wall. The resulting human "child" is usually lost in the tiolet. You might consider the idea of sifting through your household toilet bowl in case one of these baby bodies dropped in there. No? Then rethink your position.

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Permalink Reply by Daniel on January 8, 2009 at 2:46pm

I have a friend who is atheist and pro-life. It's the only thing we truly argue on.

He expresses many of the opinions mentioned here among the on-the-fencers or the ones who say things like a girl who doesn't use birth control and then has an abortion as a means of birth control.

My answer to him and to those mentioned above is that the abortion rights laws MUST be held up because those staunchly opposed will never stop until the very birth control pill itself is illegal.

What would that mean to a society such as ours? In the past, before the pill, we had some really neat automatic mechanisms that kept populations low, such as diesease, birth defects, exposure, wild animals and more. Oh the good old days.

We've got a good handle on many of those things today and I think the pill is really the great equalizer.
Without it, we would all be like the woman on TV last mother's day who was about to have her 18th child. They interviewed her with praise and admiration, immediately following a piece on "Your Human Footprint" (which I thought was the funniest thing). Imagine this woman's footprint! Whew!!!

I would also argue that the pill comes along at a time in history when woman are rising as equals to men. I think the pill gave many women in the 60s a chance to finish and education and start a career who may not have had the chance due to unwanted pregnancies.

Let the pro-lifers in, even a crack and you can eventually say good bye to the pill. Even the banning of the pill wouldn't be enough for them. Many on the far end of that argument would want capital punishments for the law breakers.

They use late term abortions, partial birth abortions and fetal rights (such as criminally charging a woman with child abuse if her baby is addicted to drugs) as crow bars to crack open the door but make no mistake, a crack wouldn't be enough.

For me the benefits of the pill far outweigh the consquences of removing it from society (not that you could anyway at this point).

On a side note, it's good to see that after the Atheist revolution is over, we will still have things to argue about. LOL

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Permalink Reply by LeaT on January 13, 2009 at 11:18am

I think you raise many good points although some of them are a little exeggerated. Just because pro-lifers argue that abortion should be illegal it doesn't mean that any other forms of stopping conception should be; I can however see a danger where some people would indeed taking it too far but that doesn't mean that everyone will.

Also, isn't it funny how these pro-lifers always argue that if a woman gets pregnat she must take responsibility but yet refuse to argue for how the woman can learn how to act responsible during sexual relationships? Or I guess you should pray that all women suffer from such great pains when they perform vaginal sex that everyone will refrain from it. However, the truth looks rather differently.

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Permalink Reply by Rosemary LYNDALL WEMM on January 13, 2009 at 11:53am

I think what Daniel is implying is that almost all hard-core "pro-lifers" are also against the use and teaching of reliable methods of birth control. So while there is, theoretically, no connection between a stand that wants to make abortion illegal and one that wants to make reliable contraception illegal, in practice the two are usually intimately connected - at least in Christian countries. (This may not be the case in Muslim countries. Anyone care to comment on that?)

LeaT, have you considered how funny it is that pro-lifers almost always behave as if it is entirely the woman's responsibility for being "responsible during sexual relationships"? Or why this same line of thinking implies that it is entirely, or almost entirely, the woman's duty to suffer the consequences of male irresponsibility during sexual relationships?

The abortion debate would be very different if men got themselves pregnant or were forced to carry the fetus that they had fathered and suffer all of the health risks involved.

The solution to the whole damned problem of women having to pay the price for the sexual and social crimes of men could be solved quite simply: cut a male child's sperm tube at birth, and only reconnect it when he and a female partner have obtained a license to have children.

If only it were really that simple!

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Permalink Reply by Christopher Peter Robinson on January 31, 2009 at 2:37pm

Wow, so many stereotypes, so little actual logical rebuttal.

Regardless of who got pregnant, the unborn child has the same moral worth.

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Permalink Reply by Rosemary LYNDALL WEMM on January 31, 2009 at 4:15pm

Provide me with valid demographics about anti-choicers which refute the "stereotypes" you don't like and I would be quite happy to revise them

We differ in what we call an "unborn child" and in the moral worth we place on the products of conception during the various stages of development. We also differ in the worth we apportion to these stages vis a vis the female host, those for whom she has responsibility and those who care for her.

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Permalink Reply by Hank Bones on February 3, 2009 at 11:41pm

I'm new to A/N, and this is a really awesomely intense debate.

For my part, I'm pro-life, but only in the David Foster Wallace tradition: "the only really coherant position on the abortion issue is one that is both Pro-Life and Pro-Choice."

I think that human life, because it is so rare, should be valued. We need more understanding of when a fetus truly has Humanity. Once a fetus becomes a Human, they should have the same rights as the rest of us. That is my Pro-Life side.

My Pro-Choice side is that I have no right to tell anyone else what to do with her(/his) body. It has very little to do with me, and especially in cases where the woman's health is in serious jeopardy.

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