Thanks for this article. As someone who has made this choice and suffer every single day as a result of it, I know all too well the consequences that NO ONE talks about. I am now staunchly pro life as a result, but felt differently for many years. I appreciate your honesty and willingness to look more critically at this. And I do have to say, being on the other side of this choice is never the place a woman wants to be once she’s there. It’s a horrible horrible thing, and I do strongly now believe the world would be a much better place without it. I am reminded of my own life in that way every single day.
And this is why laws can't be based on feelings. Because I'm also on the other side of that choice, and I'm grateful I was able to make it. I believe the world is a better place when women are able to weigh up what's right for their families and have that agency. Yes, it is a horrible and fraught situation to be in, but I'm relieved I had safe and compassionate healthcare.
Which one of us is right?
Both of us, because this is how we feel and not some objective truth.
This is one of the topics I've changed my mind about as a result of grappling with some of the same points you've raised here. It's easy to frame the abortion issue in a way that leverages oneself into a position of moral authority, while evading engagement with thornier aspects of the question. One version of this is framing the issue as "men trying to control women's bodies." Often this is accompanied by sentiments to the effect that men should be silent on the issue, and that weighing in at all is an attempt by men to usurp women's bodily autonomy. ("No uterus = no opinion!" the ill-conceived placards declare petulantly.) It is an emotional ploy meant to evoke the image of a salacious man (somehow) deriving a rapey sort of pleasure from "controlling women's bodies" in the form of legislatively restricting abortion access. (Quick, get the tissues and lube! The Senate session on C-SPAN is about to start!) The problem is, this framing of the issue doesn't even vaguely resemble reality. About half of the people who support abortion rights are men, and about half of the people who oppose them are women. This isn't about patriarchal men oppressing women. Telling men to shut up only has potential to silence men who would otherwise support abortion rights, since your demands are unlikely to hold any sway with the men (and women) in the opposing camp. Well done feminists, you've just halved the support for your own cause. And you've completely sidestepped any engagement with your opponents' actual motive, which is this: they think abortion is murder. Speaking of which...
On the other side of the aisle, we have those who treat the evil of abortion as a moral self-evidency, and who use visceral imagery and emotional language to delegitimize their opponents. "Sorry, I don't take moral lectures from people who think it's OK to stab innocent babies in the back of the head with scissors." This post was shared to Facebook by a friend of mine, a devout fundamentalist Christian. I replied "Unless of course the baby is a Hittite, Amalekite, or Midianite." What ensued was a lengthy, heated theological argument that nearly ended our friendship. The point of my response was one I could never get him to acknowledge: In one context, you regard "killing babies" as a moral abomination at face value without any possible justification. In another context, you produce an astounding array of sophisticated theological arguments to justify ... drum roll ... killing babies. Is it conceivable to you that your opponents in the abortion argument might have an equally compelling basis for their position that might be worth exploring?
My apologies for the long comment. All this is just to say, to make any progress on this subject, I've learned you first have to relinquish your favorite delegitimizing tactics and step down from the moral podium.
This was a crossover I didn't see coming! Mallory Mosner and the Black Sheep together? Two of my favorite pages on Substack together? It's like a dream come true! I've followed Mallory for a long time, and I know how thoughtful, open-minded and capable of growth she truly is! I really loved this piece, Mallory! You did such a wonderful job being nuanced and charting your evolution from someone who was rigidly pro-choice to being able to see the issue in all its complexity! Here's the thing, abortion is seen as a binary issue where one is either for abortion being totally legal or is for abortion being totally illegal. Your law professor back in college really changed you're thinking on this issue for the better forever. You saw that whether women should have the right to bodily autonomy is a separate question from if abortion is technically a cessation of life, should be allowed and to what point in a pregnancy. You than realized this isn't as simple an issue as you first thought it was. Mallory, you brilliantly explain in a clear and concise way how the fetus develops at different stages of the pregnancy and that there are a variety of opinions among Americans as to which trimester abortion should be legal up to. As you astutely point out in the article, even the most staunchly pro-choice people usually scoff at the idea of third trimester abortions. You also do a good job showing there is no agreement among the American public or scientists on when personhood even begins. I agree with you Mallory, the stereotypes on both sides are wrong and the two sides need to start looking beyond the stereotypes of each other and see each other as what they are-good people who just want to protect the sanctity of human life. If people did try to understand where each other were coming from and tried to understand why they believe what they believe and that comes from a place of compassion-this certainly would be a much better country. Most pro-choice people aren't crazy, shrieking, feminist harpies who want to commit mass murder and most pro-life people aren't raging misogynists and foaming at the mouth Christian conservatives who want to keep women down. I myself am pro-choice and believe abortion should be safe, legal and rare. I do however believe that abortion should only be legal up to the first trimester which is statistically when most abortions occur. However, I do support exceptions for rape, incest, the life of the mother, and fetal abnormality beyond the first trimester. I do NOT consider abortion to be murder but rather a moral gray area like physician-assisted suicide, euthanasia and the death penalty. I agree 100% with you Mallory on Planned Parenthood. I too support federal funding for Planned Parenthood. Family planning and access to birth control are both extremely important. I also support teaching comprehensive sexual education in our schools and restoring Roe v. Wade. I'm so proud to have voted for Missouri Amendment 3 that enshrined reproductive rights in our state constitution! All that being said, I too care about life in the womb and will be just as happy if a woman decides to have the baby and raise it. I don't want the unborn baby to suffer or have its life terminated if it's not necessary to do so. I think teaching comprehensive sexual education and funding Planned Parenthood is something we all left, right and center, can agree on is helpful. If Democrats and Republicans supported a bipartisan bill that did both those things it would address everyone's concerns. Abortion would be legal and safe, and women could get the healthcare they need and the numbers of abortions would decrease as people knew how to practice safe sex and had easy access to birth control. As always, I enjoyed reading your amazingly insightful thoughts on the hot button issues of our times, thank you so much, Mallory! I'm so glad you've officially joined the Black Sheep community!
Thank you so much, Noah! A balanced, kind and reasonable comment (as always). Always love hearing your thoughts Thank you for sharing -- it certainly makes me feel hopeful about finding more common ground and nuance!
I was pro-choice until I gave birth to my son at 20 weeks and 4 days. He lived for 2 hours, and he was a person. And my stance on abortion changed. I still fully believe in abortion for rape and incest (immediately after it happens...not months and months later), or to save the life of the mother. However, the fact that 92.5% of the one million abortions performed in America every year involve none of those things is sickening to me. This is the 21st century. There are countless forms of birth control and the morning after pill. Most abortions are simply an easy out for taking responsibility for a decision that you, as a woman, made, fully knowledgeable of the possible consequences..
That's just my opinion. I enjoyed reading your viewpoint though.
I’m pro choice and ive always said that the pro-choice movement isn’t HEARING the pro life side when they say they’re against abortion because they’re against killing babies. The disagreement was never about women’s agency. It’s about: when does life begin? Personally however I’m willing to concede to the Supreme Court in Roe V Wade that 20 weeks is a good enough benchmark.
There is a dehumanizing aspect to those who are pro choice that none talks about. That is the reason for the 2nd trimester abortions. It is mostly because the woman or couple find out that the child has Down syndrome or some other disability. This is not the same thing as if the family knows the child has Tay Sachs for which there is no cure and no hope of a cure. The truth is our society does not actually value life. It values perfection.
Another reason is there are sex selective abortions as well. Abortion is also a war on unborn females as the issue in China and even India proves.
People, societies, cultures need to learn to value life, all life.
Well when they are aborting a child because it is female what would you call it if not a war on unborn females? There is a terrific documentary from years ago “The 3 most dangerous words- It’s a girl” abortion is not merely about American culture.
But it’s also indicative of how a culture views females at any stage of their lives.
You're doing that thing where you dehumanise people and make assumptions about situations you know nothing about.
When you have children already and you're faced with difficult situations that will greatly impact their quality of life, you might suddenly realise the extent of the scars you would take on to your own soul in order to protect them.
This is what I am talking about. Why is there scars to bring a disabled child into the world? That is what is dehumanizing. That is why in countries that allow suicide, they allow perfectly healthy autistics to commit suicide. The disabled are nor considered fully human
You've misunderstood my comment. Many parents choose to abort disabled fetuses because of the negative impact they believe it will have on their children. They will take on the burden of having an abortion, including the belief they may go to hell over it, because they believe it is best for their family as a whole.
It's nothing to do with "valuing perfection over life." It is looking into your children's eyes, the ones right in front of you whose wellbeing is your highest priority, and deciding what is best for them. You might disagree with their choice, but that's not the point.
I can only imagine you've never been in that situation to think that's what's going on when parents go through that heartbreak.
Also, because you mentioned autistics, I have Asperger's. My oldest child is very likely neurodivergent. These things factor into people's decisions when weighing up whether they can realistically meet the needs of potential future children. This stuff is complicated, and people who make different choices than you would are no less human.
Both of my sons are autistic so I am very attuned t o how the disabled are treated and thought of. I also never said those making these decisions are not human. I said I wished they viewed their disabled unborn children as human.
Sex selective abortions were pushed on India and China by the west through the world Bank and IMF. They were terrified that many new babies would mean more communism. They decided limiting the number of women would limit population growth and pushed family planning methods in all kinds of ways including supporting a literal dictatorship in forcibly vasectomizing the poor.
Think about it - why would son-preference mean aborting daughters unless you were pressured to have only one or two children in some way? When I look back to my grandparents' and great-grandparents' generations, they had anywhere between 3 to 10 kids, and they were of either gender in any birth order. This is even through the worst famines. They valued all their children. If they had a son preference, they'd stop having kids when they has a son... but they didn't. And I have a great-aunt who was born disabled in the 1920s and was the apple of her parents' eye, rescued from polio, educated highly... people who'd do sex selective abortions don't do that.
I cannot speak to your family’s experience, but both of these cultures still value males over females. And the China issue comes from their 1 child policy back in the 20th century. That is why there are over 100 million Chinese men who will never find a bride in their society. India is a different issue. It is actually illegal in India to have sex selective abortions. So i do not think it has anything to do with the IMF or the World Bank. Banning sex selective abortions had to come from something going on in Indian society itself. If an outside force wanted to get rid of females and had control of a country they would not have allowed that law.
Now on the other hand, when a nation has rapid population growth as they did in India but no way to feed these people, then the realistic thing is to limit the population. So yes, vasectomies may have been prescribed. And yes abortions may have been used as a form of birth control. But considering that India is still one of the most dangerous countries for women, the culture and the dowry murder reality proves that as well, I don’t think sex selective abortions was the idea of some foreign cabal.
As an Indian woman I've had more horrible things happen to me on the NYC subway and the streets of San Francisco than anywhere in India. When there was even a sign of misbehavior on public transit in my hometown, men stood up for the woman and ensured she was safe. When worse things happened to me on the NYC subway and I fought off my groper, no one there did anything to help other than to tell me I should probably not kick the man like I was (this was in 2012).
Look at statistics of SA in India vs the US. Indian rates are minuscule. You can say there is underreporting but an analysis of registered rape cases in Delhi showed only 1% were genuine https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-38796457
India has had female heads of government and heads of state for decades already and America still struggles with the very idea of a woman in power. India's current president is a woman from a very backward tribe, and any and all discourse about her has been of respect. Contrast this with Americans photoshopping Sarah Palin's face onto porn, or calling Hillary Clinton a shrew, or saying that kamala harris slept her way up. Heck, even when Bill Clinton was proved to be exploiting his intern, she was publicly vilified and mocked while he is still highly respected.
Your words are rooted in ignorance and fear of acknowledging the misogyny you live in.
Again I cannot argue with your personal experience here or in India, but what I do know is that my sister was told a few years ago not to go to India on business because it was not safe for her since she would be traveling alone by people she works with who are Indian. So that is my personal experience which is just as valid as yours.
And yes, India does have a rape problem. Why you wouldn’t admit it I don’t know. I also don’t care. That is your problem, not mine. It is consistently listed as a country with this issue by international groups.
I am not a misogynist, being female, and I am not ignorant, because I base my opinions on facts. And the documentary i pointed out is quite specific about India and its cultural preference for sons, and the pew research from 2022 proves that nothing has changed since the documentary has been made.
But since you devolved into name calling I am done with this discussion. By name calling you only prove I am wasting my time.
Look up any listing of single cell animals to see if humans are listed. They are not. I am sorry but I have little sympathy for those who cannot distinguish between a single cell ( . ) and a 👼. Further when I hear people saying no exceptions for rape or incest I wonder if they truly believe that a young girl raped by her father should be forced to give birth to her sibling. Our incoming VP does believe this. He says that two wrongs don’t make a right. Cruelty personified.
I personally go along with the majority and would permit abortion during the first trimester for any reason and after that for health reasons and the lack of viability of the baby.
Thank you for this! I'm legally pro-choice (due to the extremes), but disturbed by abortion in general and the rhetoric I hear from the pro-choice side.
"According to Scientific American, what we define biologically as consciousness arises between the 24th and 28th week of gestation. In terms of “physical substrate, the thalamo-cortical complex that provides consciousness with its highly elaborate content” happens at this time, and around two months later, “synchrony of the electroencephalographic (EEG) rhythm across both cortical hemispheres signals the onset of global neuronal integration. Thus, many of the circuit elements necessary for consciousness are in place by the third trimester.”
You've misread the Scientific American article. While the biological components *necessary* for consciousness arise in the thirs trimester, the article states that the low oxygen levels of the fetal environment, along with other neuroinhibitors, prevent consciousness from arising until outside the womb. Necessary does not mean sufficient.
I think your point about overly binary thinking is really important, especially when it comes to issues like abortion that involve medicine/science. Instead of looking at this as something you're either totally for or totally against, we should be thinking about what actual science says about when abortions are safe or unsafe.
It doesn’t MATTER when abortion is “generally” acceptable. The law should protect women’s autonomy on the issue 100% because things HAPPEN after 21 weeks that either a) threaten a pregnant woman’s health (maybe not to the degree that some lawyers in states that have recently restricted abortion would feel comfortable ok-big an abortion) or
b) reveal that said fetus was unlikely to be viable
I enjoyed this article but felt like it was just about to get into the meat of the bioethics you mentioned, when it ended.
Something I learnt recently that I'd like to read more about is how the Republican party used to be pro-choice and switched to get the Catholic vote, which seems to be politics influencing culture and widening a rift that wasn't necessarily a significant issue in the past.
I do agree that there's a lot of black and white thinking and dehumanizing on both sides. It's incredibly frustrating the way politics is pushing to extremes something that the majority of people I imagine are fairly moderate on, and can see the nuance.
Thank you, I’m so glad you enjoyed! I wanted to avoid going into the meatiest part of that specifically because I wanted to encourage other people to do more investigating and contemplate the nuances of bioethics for themselves.
I think the history of the politicization that you mentioned is a fascinating component of the discussion, and could be an essay unto itself.
But I totally agree with you, thankfully I think most people are a lot more moderate and reasonable than the loudest voices would suggest.
As any moral debate, it is just a problem about following personal choices coherently. You can define life from heartbeat, but then you need to stay with your decapitated (but still heartbeating) grandma on Christmas
Thanks for this article. I greatly appreciate it any time someone brings nuance and sincere attempts to understand different viewpoints to an issue so often demagogued like abortion. Given the comments section here, the article seems to have provoked more nuanced, thoughtful dialogue (with some exceptions, of course).
If anyone would like to engage in more information on similar topics, please consider subscribing to my Substack newsletter Born Curious in which I do data analysis and reviews of research on controversial topics. I have some articles about abortion, and I happen to be in the middle of a series of articles about changes in public opinion on abortion in the United States over the past 70 years.
Thanks for this article. As someone who has made this choice and suffer every single day as a result of it, I know all too well the consequences that NO ONE talks about. I am now staunchly pro life as a result, but felt differently for many years. I appreciate your honesty and willingness to look more critically at this. And I do have to say, being on the other side of this choice is never the place a woman wants to be once she’s there. It’s a horrible horrible thing, and I do strongly now believe the world would be a much better place without it. I am reminded of my own life in that way every single day.
And this is why laws can't be based on feelings. Because I'm also on the other side of that choice, and I'm grateful I was able to make it. I believe the world is a better place when women are able to weigh up what's right for their families and have that agency. Yes, it is a horrible and fraught situation to be in, but I'm relieved I had safe and compassionate healthcare.
Which one of us is right?
Both of us, because this is how we feel and not some objective truth.
This is one of the topics I've changed my mind about as a result of grappling with some of the same points you've raised here. It's easy to frame the abortion issue in a way that leverages oneself into a position of moral authority, while evading engagement with thornier aspects of the question. One version of this is framing the issue as "men trying to control women's bodies." Often this is accompanied by sentiments to the effect that men should be silent on the issue, and that weighing in at all is an attempt by men to usurp women's bodily autonomy. ("No uterus = no opinion!" the ill-conceived placards declare petulantly.) It is an emotional ploy meant to evoke the image of a salacious man (somehow) deriving a rapey sort of pleasure from "controlling women's bodies" in the form of legislatively restricting abortion access. (Quick, get the tissues and lube! The Senate session on C-SPAN is about to start!) The problem is, this framing of the issue doesn't even vaguely resemble reality. About half of the people who support abortion rights are men, and about half of the people who oppose them are women. This isn't about patriarchal men oppressing women. Telling men to shut up only has potential to silence men who would otherwise support abortion rights, since your demands are unlikely to hold any sway with the men (and women) in the opposing camp. Well done feminists, you've just halved the support for your own cause. And you've completely sidestepped any engagement with your opponents' actual motive, which is this: they think abortion is murder. Speaking of which...
On the other side of the aisle, we have those who treat the evil of abortion as a moral self-evidency, and who use visceral imagery and emotional language to delegitimize their opponents. "Sorry, I don't take moral lectures from people who think it's OK to stab innocent babies in the back of the head with scissors." This post was shared to Facebook by a friend of mine, a devout fundamentalist Christian. I replied "Unless of course the baby is a Hittite, Amalekite, or Midianite." What ensued was a lengthy, heated theological argument that nearly ended our friendship. The point of my response was one I could never get him to acknowledge: In one context, you regard "killing babies" as a moral abomination at face value without any possible justification. In another context, you produce an astounding array of sophisticated theological arguments to justify ... drum roll ... killing babies. Is it conceivable to you that your opponents in the abortion argument might have an equally compelling basis for their position that might be worth exploring?
My apologies for the long comment. All this is just to say, to make any progress on this subject, I've learned you first have to relinquish your favorite delegitimizing tactics and step down from the moral podium.
This was a crossover I didn't see coming! Mallory Mosner and the Black Sheep together? Two of my favorite pages on Substack together? It's like a dream come true! I've followed Mallory for a long time, and I know how thoughtful, open-minded and capable of growth she truly is! I really loved this piece, Mallory! You did such a wonderful job being nuanced and charting your evolution from someone who was rigidly pro-choice to being able to see the issue in all its complexity! Here's the thing, abortion is seen as a binary issue where one is either for abortion being totally legal or is for abortion being totally illegal. Your law professor back in college really changed you're thinking on this issue for the better forever. You saw that whether women should have the right to bodily autonomy is a separate question from if abortion is technically a cessation of life, should be allowed and to what point in a pregnancy. You than realized this isn't as simple an issue as you first thought it was. Mallory, you brilliantly explain in a clear and concise way how the fetus develops at different stages of the pregnancy and that there are a variety of opinions among Americans as to which trimester abortion should be legal up to. As you astutely point out in the article, even the most staunchly pro-choice people usually scoff at the idea of third trimester abortions. You also do a good job showing there is no agreement among the American public or scientists on when personhood even begins. I agree with you Mallory, the stereotypes on both sides are wrong and the two sides need to start looking beyond the stereotypes of each other and see each other as what they are-good people who just want to protect the sanctity of human life. If people did try to understand where each other were coming from and tried to understand why they believe what they believe and that comes from a place of compassion-this certainly would be a much better country. Most pro-choice people aren't crazy, shrieking, feminist harpies who want to commit mass murder and most pro-life people aren't raging misogynists and foaming at the mouth Christian conservatives who want to keep women down. I myself am pro-choice and believe abortion should be safe, legal and rare. I do however believe that abortion should only be legal up to the first trimester which is statistically when most abortions occur. However, I do support exceptions for rape, incest, the life of the mother, and fetal abnormality beyond the first trimester. I do NOT consider abortion to be murder but rather a moral gray area like physician-assisted suicide, euthanasia and the death penalty. I agree 100% with you Mallory on Planned Parenthood. I too support federal funding for Planned Parenthood. Family planning and access to birth control are both extremely important. I also support teaching comprehensive sexual education in our schools and restoring Roe v. Wade. I'm so proud to have voted for Missouri Amendment 3 that enshrined reproductive rights in our state constitution! All that being said, I too care about life in the womb and will be just as happy if a woman decides to have the baby and raise it. I don't want the unborn baby to suffer or have its life terminated if it's not necessary to do so. I think teaching comprehensive sexual education and funding Planned Parenthood is something we all left, right and center, can agree on is helpful. If Democrats and Republicans supported a bipartisan bill that did both those things it would address everyone's concerns. Abortion would be legal and safe, and women could get the healthcare they need and the numbers of abortions would decrease as people knew how to practice safe sex and had easy access to birth control. As always, I enjoyed reading your amazingly insightful thoughts on the hot button issues of our times, thank you so much, Mallory! I'm so glad you've officially joined the Black Sheep community!
Thank you so much, Noah! A balanced, kind and reasonable comment (as always). Always love hearing your thoughts Thank you for sharing -- it certainly makes me feel hopeful about finding more common ground and nuance!
I was pro-choice until I gave birth to my son at 20 weeks and 4 days. He lived for 2 hours, and he was a person. And my stance on abortion changed. I still fully believe in abortion for rape and incest (immediately after it happens...not months and months later), or to save the life of the mother. However, the fact that 92.5% of the one million abortions performed in America every year involve none of those things is sickening to me. This is the 21st century. There are countless forms of birth control and the morning after pill. Most abortions are simply an easy out for taking responsibility for a decision that you, as a woman, made, fully knowledgeable of the possible consequences..
That's just my opinion. I enjoyed reading your viewpoint though.
I’m pro choice and ive always said that the pro-choice movement isn’t HEARING the pro life side when they say they’re against abortion because they’re against killing babies. The disagreement was never about women’s agency. It’s about: when does life begin? Personally however I’m willing to concede to the Supreme Court in Roe V Wade that 20 weeks is a good enough benchmark.
There is a dehumanizing aspect to those who are pro choice that none talks about. That is the reason for the 2nd trimester abortions. It is mostly because the woman or couple find out that the child has Down syndrome or some other disability. This is not the same thing as if the family knows the child has Tay Sachs for which there is no cure and no hope of a cure. The truth is our society does not actually value life. It values perfection.
Another reason is there are sex selective abortions as well. Abortion is also a war on unborn females as the issue in China and even India proves.
People, societies, cultures need to learn to value life, all life.
I respect your opinions, but alas, as long as you're using language like "a war on unborn females," I doubt we'll find much common ground here.
Well when they are aborting a child because it is female what would you call it if not a war on unborn females? There is a terrific documentary from years ago “The 3 most dangerous words- It’s a girl” abortion is not merely about American culture.
But it’s also indicative of how a culture views females at any stage of their lives.
And we don’t have to agree that’s fine.
https://itsagirlmovie.com/
here is the TEd talk about the issue of gendercide
https://youtu.be/qeSYN2c8f_A?si=OBoJ7IRX0qjUD9j1
You're doing that thing where you dehumanise people and make assumptions about situations you know nothing about.
When you have children already and you're faced with difficult situations that will greatly impact their quality of life, you might suddenly realise the extent of the scars you would take on to your own soul in order to protect them.
This is what I am talking about. Why is there scars to bring a disabled child into the world? That is what is dehumanizing. That is why in countries that allow suicide, they allow perfectly healthy autistics to commit suicide. The disabled are nor considered fully human
You've misunderstood my comment. Many parents choose to abort disabled fetuses because of the negative impact they believe it will have on their children. They will take on the burden of having an abortion, including the belief they may go to hell over it, because they believe it is best for their family as a whole.
It's nothing to do with "valuing perfection over life." It is looking into your children's eyes, the ones right in front of you whose wellbeing is your highest priority, and deciding what is best for them. You might disagree with their choice, but that's not the point.
I can only imagine you've never been in that situation to think that's what's going on when parents go through that heartbreak.
Also, because you mentioned autistics, I have Asperger's. My oldest child is very likely neurodivergent. These things factor into people's decisions when weighing up whether they can realistically meet the needs of potential future children. This stuff is complicated, and people who make different choices than you would are no less human.
Both of my sons are autistic so I am very attuned t o how the disabled are treated and thought of. I also never said those making these decisions are not human. I said I wished they viewed their disabled unborn children as human.
Sex selective abortions were pushed on India and China by the west through the world Bank and IMF. They were terrified that many new babies would mean more communism. They decided limiting the number of women would limit population growth and pushed family planning methods in all kinds of ways including supporting a literal dictatorship in forcibly vasectomizing the poor.
Think about it - why would son-preference mean aborting daughters unless you were pressured to have only one or two children in some way? When I look back to my grandparents' and great-grandparents' generations, they had anywhere between 3 to 10 kids, and they were of either gender in any birth order. This is even through the worst famines. They valued all their children. If they had a son preference, they'd stop having kids when they has a son... but they didn't. And I have a great-aunt who was born disabled in the 1920s and was the apple of her parents' eye, rescued from polio, educated highly... people who'd do sex selective abortions don't do that.
I cannot speak to your family’s experience, but both of these cultures still value males over females. And the China issue comes from their 1 child policy back in the 20th century. That is why there are over 100 million Chinese men who will never find a bride in their society. India is a different issue. It is actually illegal in India to have sex selective abortions. So i do not think it has anything to do with the IMF or the World Bank. Banning sex selective abortions had to come from something going on in Indian society itself. If an outside force wanted to get rid of females and had control of a country they would not have allowed that law.
Now on the other hand, when a nation has rapid population growth as they did in India but no way to feed these people, then the realistic thing is to limit the population. So yes, vasectomies may have been prescribed. And yes abortions may have been used as a form of birth control. But considering that India is still one of the most dangerous countries for women, the culture and the dowry murder reality proves that as well, I don’t think sex selective abortions was the idea of some foreign cabal.
Here is Pew Research on son preference in India from 2022
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/03/02/son-preference-and-abortion/
https://www.bbc.com/news/14213136
As an Indian woman I've had more horrible things happen to me on the NYC subway and the streets of San Francisco than anywhere in India. When there was even a sign of misbehavior on public transit in my hometown, men stood up for the woman and ensured she was safe. When worse things happened to me on the NYC subway and I fought off my groper, no one there did anything to help other than to tell me I should probably not kick the man like I was (this was in 2012).
Look at statistics of SA in India vs the US. Indian rates are minuscule. You can say there is underreporting but an analysis of registered rape cases in Delhi showed only 1% were genuine https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-38796457
India has had female heads of government and heads of state for decades already and America still struggles with the very idea of a woman in power. India's current president is a woman from a very backward tribe, and any and all discourse about her has been of respect. Contrast this with Americans photoshopping Sarah Palin's face onto porn, or calling Hillary Clinton a shrew, or saying that kamala harris slept her way up. Heck, even when Bill Clinton was proved to be exploiting his intern, she was publicly vilified and mocked while he is still highly respected.
Your words are rooted in ignorance and fear of acknowledging the misogyny you live in.
Again I cannot argue with your personal experience here or in India, but what I do know is that my sister was told a few years ago not to go to India on business because it was not safe for her since she would be traveling alone by people she works with who are Indian. So that is my personal experience which is just as valid as yours.
And yes, India does have a rape problem. Why you wouldn’t admit it I don’t know. I also don’t care. That is your problem, not mine. It is consistently listed as a country with this issue by international groups.
I am not a misogynist, being female, and I am not ignorant, because I base my opinions on facts. And the documentary i pointed out is quite specific about India and its cultural preference for sons, and the pew research from 2022 proves that nothing has changed since the documentary has been made.
But since you devolved into name calling I am done with this discussion. By name calling you only prove I am wasting my time.
Look up any listing of single cell animals to see if humans are listed. They are not. I am sorry but I have little sympathy for those who cannot distinguish between a single cell ( . ) and a 👼. Further when I hear people saying no exceptions for rape or incest I wonder if they truly believe that a young girl raped by her father should be forced to give birth to her sibling. Our incoming VP does believe this. He says that two wrongs don’t make a right. Cruelty personified.
I personally go along with the majority and would permit abortion during the first trimester for any reason and after that for health reasons and the lack of viability of the baby.
Thank you for this! I'm legally pro-choice (due to the extremes), but disturbed by abortion in general and the rhetoric I hear from the pro-choice side.
"According to Scientific American, what we define biologically as consciousness arises between the 24th and 28th week of gestation. In terms of “physical substrate, the thalamo-cortical complex that provides consciousness with its highly elaborate content” happens at this time, and around two months later, “synchrony of the electroencephalographic (EEG) rhythm across both cortical hemispheres signals the onset of global neuronal integration. Thus, many of the circuit elements necessary for consciousness are in place by the third trimester.”
You've misread the Scientific American article. While the biological components *necessary* for consciousness arise in the thirs trimester, the article states that the low oxygen levels of the fetal environment, along with other neuroinhibitors, prevent consciousness from arising until outside the womb. Necessary does not mean sufficient.
I think your point about overly binary thinking is really important, especially when it comes to issues like abortion that involve medicine/science. Instead of looking at this as something you're either totally for or totally against, we should be thinking about what actual science says about when abortions are safe or unsafe.
It doesn’t MATTER when abortion is “generally” acceptable. The law should protect women’s autonomy on the issue 100% because things HAPPEN after 21 weeks that either a) threaten a pregnant woman’s health (maybe not to the degree that some lawyers in states that have recently restricted abortion would feel comfortable ok-big an abortion) or
b) reveal that said fetus was unlikely to be viable
Oh, and if you want to “fight for the wellbeing of women in America,” then fight to secure their CHOICE! F
I enjoyed this article but felt like it was just about to get into the meat of the bioethics you mentioned, when it ended.
Something I learnt recently that I'd like to read more about is how the Republican party used to be pro-choice and switched to get the Catholic vote, which seems to be politics influencing culture and widening a rift that wasn't necessarily a significant issue in the past.
I do agree that there's a lot of black and white thinking and dehumanizing on both sides. It's incredibly frustrating the way politics is pushing to extremes something that the majority of people I imagine are fairly moderate on, and can see the nuance.
Thank you, I’m so glad you enjoyed! I wanted to avoid going into the meatiest part of that specifically because I wanted to encourage other people to do more investigating and contemplate the nuances of bioethics for themselves.
I think the history of the politicization that you mentioned is a fascinating component of the discussion, and could be an essay unto itself.
But I totally agree with you, thankfully I think most people are a lot more moderate and reasonable than the loudest voices would suggest.
As any moral debate, it is just a problem about following personal choices coherently. You can define life from heartbeat, but then you need to stay with your decapitated (but still heartbeating) grandma on Christmas
Thanks for this article. I greatly appreciate it any time someone brings nuance and sincere attempts to understand different viewpoints to an issue so often demagogued like abortion. Given the comments section here, the article seems to have provoked more nuanced, thoughtful dialogue (with some exceptions, of course).
If anyone would like to engage in more information on similar topics, please consider subscribing to my Substack newsletter Born Curious in which I do data analysis and reviews of research on controversial topics. I have some articles about abortion, and I happen to be in the middle of a series of articles about changes in public opinion on abortion in the United States over the past 70 years.
What are your thoughts on child support insurance?
https://substack.com/home/post/p-144088456?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web