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Permalink Reply by equinox on August 23, 2008 at 7:41pm

Interestng Question. I have asked the same question of athiests and it has never gotten very far. It doesn't look like your question got off the ground either. There are some pro-life atheists out there. I know Robert Price has called abortion 2nd degree murder.

I was thinking that an atheist argument against abortion would center around the the genes. Given Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, could we say that our genes want to live? Ultimately, aren't we just vehicles for our genes? And we pass on our parent's genes to our kids. Our kids' kids get our genes. So maybe grandparents should have some say in whether on not an abortion gets carried out.

I have often wondered if we were to do some analysis comparing abortion rates per year to genuises and award winners per year...if we were to find that we may be slowing down progress by having abortions. So if we were to count up the number of Nobel prize winners, Pulitzer prize winners, science winners, etc., not to mention 2nd place runner ups for one year and compare that to the number of abortions that happen per year...I wonder if we would find statistically that we may be aborting a few geniuses, award winners.

Some may counter that an unwanted child may not materialize to much, so we may want to do some analysis on genuises that came out of humble means, poverty, ophanges, etc.

Arguments can be made that we are also sustaining life by having abortions, but this seems like a temporary measure as evolution happens through having offspring.

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Permalink Reply by Tanya Levin on August 24, 2008 at 3:20am

I'm pro-choice, but I believe abortion is murder. The organism survives over its mother's needs, e.g. fetus taking calcium from mother's bones and teeth if not given enough calcium.

Question for me is when it is a justifiable murder? The answer seems to come back to the body count in war. If one man can make a decision for millions, surely one woman can make a decision for one unborn or even a few.

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Permalink Reply by Rosa on September 2, 2008 at 9:29am

"My problem is with consenting adult women who do not use birth control, then want an abortion – as if it's a form of birth control. They are playing fast and loose with potential human lives. It's irresponsible and immoral."

RAmen

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Permalink Reply by Prog Rock Girl on February 4, 2010 at 12:01am

Sure, but this "abortion as birth control" argument is overdone. I'm wondering how many women use abortion as birth control, and what is the criteria? Having more than one abortion? Or just not using enough other contraception? That's a very expensive and painful form of birth control!

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Permalink Reply by Andries on August 31, 2008 at 4:23pm

I wouldn't want an abortion if I was the father to be. I would have the child and raise and love it, although it might change the plans I had for my future. I couldn't kill my offspring to be. I would never want to forbid abortion for others. Women who abort their children should be supported in their choice, they did not made this dicision easily.

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Permalink Reply by Rosa on September 2, 2008 at 9:26am

and in the rare case a woman takes such a decision easily, then it's probably better for her not to have children anyways.

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Permalink Reply by Rosa on September 2, 2008 at 9:23am

I'm pro-life, but I'm also a libertarian. That means I would never have an abortion myself (unless the baby had serious malformations and such, it was dangerous to me, or it was the product of rape) but I don't believe I have the right to choose for other women.

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Permalink Reply by Sammy on September 11, 2008 at 4:28am

Well, I'm pro-choice, but I wonder the same thing.
You'd think there would be quite afew pro-life athiests, though I understand why there would be way more pro-choice.

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Permalink Reply by Luke Q on September 11, 2008 at 6:13am

I would say ask any woman who ever had an abortion: I don't imagine it could possibly be a pleasant experience, so any argument against abortion would have to deal with avoiding it: sex-education, contraceptives, in short: don't get pregnant if you don't want to; of course we do need abortions because we live in an imperfect world, but I'm afraid even the best of abortions (in terms of the conditions under which it is performed) will be a sad experience. Education is alway the key...

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Permalink Reply by Hank Fox on July 5, 2009 at 10:09pm

It was Dear Abby or Ann Landers, some years back, who asked her readers "If you had it to do all over again, would you have kids?" And more than 70 percent said No! They said things like "I had all these plans, and having kids wrecked them."

Sure abortion is a sad experience. But it's not the only sad thing, and it may not even be the saddest. Bringing an unwanted child into the world, into your life, despite all the happy fairytales we have in our cultural mythology, really can be a tragedy.

I'm thinking of one example I witnessed personally. A high school buddy, the brother of a friend, got his girlfriend pregnant when he was 15. They got married, she had the baby, and mother and baby turned out fine. But the young father resented the little girl, treated her like shit her whole life. She never developed any self-confidence and as an adult, suffers from chronic depression. And the dad isn't any prize either, come to think of it -- the loss of his own childhood had a profoundly negative effect on him.

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Permalink Reply by stefchoad on September 14, 2008 at 8:09am

I'm pro-abortion so I'm not an example of the mythical person you're looking for. However, I think this might be largely reactionary to the typical religious argument for pro-life. They create a situation where you're either with them a X-religion or you're an evil Heathen. Extreme polarizing arguments always undermine any chance of universal agreement except out of fear.

I do find it ironic that most religious arguments for pro-life seem to want to tie into "family values" (a horribly vague term). The American right wing definition of family values is the two parent (one of each gender) married family. Yet, a pro-life agenda actually creates more families with solo unmarried mothers. This seems to counteract their goals.

This is not my own revelation, but something I read in an article earlier this week. If anyone else read it and actually remembers the article, it might be useful to post the link. Sorry for not being better at citing my sources.

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Permalink Reply by MissElainie on September 14, 2008 at 10:05am

I'd imagine that an athiest arguing pro-life would have to do it from a scientifc or biological platform . . . something along the lines of a "life imperitive" once fertilization has taken place, but that's really much closer to a spiritual perspective than a scientific one. I don't know, I'm kind of stumped here, but I love the question. It's worth examining.

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