This sounds like a good description of the activist class, full stop. Big on professional advancement through highly visible performative activism, low on real empathy with, or assistance for, the people on whose behalf they claim to speak. It applies across the woke board.
I don’t have a strong position either way on the actual issue. It seems to me beyond debate that it should be illegal to kill human life for personal convenience. The only debate is therefore when a foetus becomes human life. I don’t know
Personally I’d set the limit slightly earlier than the youngest surviving prematurely born baby. According to Google this is 21 weeks and a day, therefore I’d have the limit set at 20 weeks currently. If medical advances in the future mean baby’s that premature are able to survive then I’d drop the limit accordingly
Agree with both of you Martin & Billy. Abortion is a right, but it should never be used randomly, without thought and as prescriptive answer whenever requested. The context of the situations beyond the “righthood” of being able to have an abortion is lost. Pregnancy as the author says – can sometimes be a crisis. But it can also be a start to another human life which can bring change and wonder. It does sound to me like Jessa Crispin slightly misses that point.
What babies? Personally I don’t think dropping the limit by 4 weeks is going to result in thousands of unwanted babies being born that otherwise would have been aborted. I’d wager most women know by the halfway point of their pregnancy whether they want to go through with it or not.
What I don’t agree with is the rules like the Texas one, that is set at a date earlier than some women realise they’re pregnant. That will result in unwanted children, mothers pushed into poverty and the associated bad health outcomes that inevitably arise from it
That’s a question that’s been occupying my mind lately. When there’re so many people waiting for adoption (and a baby is the best age to adopt), why is terminating them the default pro-choice position?
Do you know the sacrifices that pregnant women who do not want to be pregnant and are forced to carry on with their pregnancy go through? I am prochoice and so glad that women in the UK do not have to pay for treatment at point of source.
I had 7 spontaneous abortions, which most people call miscarriages, but I still think that women need the choice between abortion and pregnancy.
Pregnancy for many is political, especially if the woman is single. Too many people think they own the woman’s womb and anything growing in it, when the only person who has anything invested in that womb is the woman herself as without that womb, there is no child born. Therefore the only person who should have any say is the woman whose womb has the foetus inside it. Everyone else needs to back off, unless there is a safeguarding issue where the woman is particularly vulnerable or too young to consent.
Women fought long and hard for legal abortion and nobody should have the right to take it away.
There is no debate about when a foetus becomes human life, abortion is the taking of human life full stop. To argue anything else is just silly sentimentality. It is possible to justify the taking of human life at times, wars etc so I don’t know why abortion advocates can’t be more honest with themselves.
Abortion advocates want to claim that a wanted pregnancy ast say, 4 weeks, is human life, but an unwanted one at 7 months isn’t.
It’s silly and childish
Thanks for Hibernophobia, a new word for me, though I’m not sure it hits the mark. My remark was an observation that the most “my opinion is an undeniable fact” type comments on here tend to come from the US. As far as I’m aware it isn’t a county of Ireland. It is also the type of snarky generalisation best avoided in the interests of an interesting conversation. Mea culpa.
Per the exchange with Gordon below, I don’t think a bundle of cells is a human being, even when it has the potential to become one. I could be wrong, but it’s not an irrational belief and can’t be dismissed as sentimental nonsense by somebody who doesn’t share it.
I personally would feel a murderer if I killed something that looked like a baby, less so about the destruction of something that looked like a blob of snot. For me, they are manifestly not the same. I’m sure there’s a world of philosophical debate round that banal comment, but it’s a real life issue best solved by something like Billy Bobs prosaic but practical compromise.
I edited my comment before seeing your reply as I realised across the pond was a different reference..we see hibernophobia everywhere. We can agree to disagree but i do not see why people are uncomfortable with taking life if they think it’s justified. I can’t agree that humans are humans because of what they look like. In my younger days I probably dated a few fellas who could possibly be described as blobs of snot….
I am not sure I believe that wars can ever be justified if we apply logic. After the two World Wars can we honestly say we are any better off or the world is a better place?
Oh yes, the ‘human life is sacred’ brigade! Until the baby is born that is… From the people who brought you banning birth control, never mind abortion, treating pregnant unmarried women as social lepers, walling them up in laundrys etc. to work for free for the nuns (e.g. the Bone Suckers in Tuam), then taking the babies off the heartbroken mothers to sell to (good catholic) Americans and starving the rest to death before chucking the wee corpses in septic tanks…? Yeah, go you!
Septic tanks hhahahaha. Been watching too many Harvey Weinstein/Louis lentin soap operas I think. “Bone suckers”- you people are hilarious. Also you miss the point, as is usual with low IQ anti Catholic bigots who regurgitate propaganda that was liquidised and fed to them. The discussion was around when life begins, not whether it may be justified to take life in certain circumstances.
Using your argument, Nature killed the children I was carrying. Whereas I think I was carrying foetuses who could not live outside my body, and nature killed them for whatever reason it saw fit! Only many years later, did I find out I have a split womb and would never have carried to term without major surgery.
The only difference between me and the woman who seeks an abortion is that mine happened naturally. And while I would have wanted at least 2 or 3 of these foetuses to grow and be born as children, none were planned and some would have been inconvenient and cost me aspects of my life that I actually enjoy.
So nature made the choice for me and gave me the easy way out, spontaneous abortion, let’s call it what it is, not miscarriage as most people call it. Abortion, spontaneous – the womb expelling the cells, the foetus, of pregnancy due to damage, lack of womb space, whatever. Result – dead foetus, no pregnancy, a whole lot of extra hormones that the woman has to deal with. No abortion is easy but at least one should be the choice of the woman whose womb is carrying the cells of pregnancy.
Excellent comment. I have been thinking for some time now that activism – amplified by social media – is the bane of modern life. How many of those people who went out on the streets for BLM would be willing to – say – mentor a black teenager who has fallen in with a gang? Or to give up marching and protesting in order to have more time to do active community service, like repairing the damage caused by the riots?
Your first paragraph is spot on, the actual issue could be changes to anything else and you would still be right.
As for when a foetus becomes human I think it is still at birth, when a foetus becomes a living separate being. A foetus becomes viable at around 28 weeks gestation, but the law still disregards that, as far as I am aware. Still legal to seek a termination at that time.There needs to be a much, much deeper debate about abortion, particularly now when women can find out whether they are pregnant before their first missed period.
The foetus is only viable at 28 weeks if it is born in a hospital where tens of thousands of pounds/dollars/euros are spent on keeping it alive. Even then it may be alive but severely disabled. If it is born anywhere else, it might live a few hours but it won’t survive. So babies in the West born to middle class families at 28 weeks may live abd may live without being disabled, but babies born to poor women, women who live too far from hospital or those who have to pay for medical care, no chance. They carry the foetus all that time then there is nothing but a corpse at the end. Is that fair? Not in my world…Abortion to 28 weeks should be allowed to save the heartache women all over the world have to go through for their foetuses
I was stating facts as I knew them to be, when I was a nurse. It was very hard to nurse women who had miscarried, and also care for those who had aborted one of the same age.
I do not think the law has changed, to the best of my knowledge, which is that a foetus has no rights irrespective of gestational age.
I would largely agree with you about the survival of a 28 week baby, except for one thing, class has nothing to do with it, access to the correct medical care does. Access to that remains a lottery.
A bundle of cells with the potential to be nurtured to autonomous human existence. That describes a fertilised human egg whether it is 1 week, 10 weeks, 100 weeks or even 500 weeks old. Birth is merely a change of environment for this useless bundle. If killing it is condoned, because the nurturing is inconvenient, there is no moral difference if the age of death is 20 weeks or 200 weeks. That’s it.
A human being is a bundle of cells at all stages of its life, it does not become something else. However, it has to be helped to self-sufficiency or it will die. If that nurture is impracticable, cultures and their legal systems can chose murder … fine… but birth makes no moral or logical partition for the act.
Interesting take but isn’t every form of life a bundle of cells? One description of a human being is certainly “a bunch of cells” but its also a description of a cow, and as such not very helpful.
Immediately before birth a foetus has all the recognisable attributes of a human being, bar the need to breathe. At what point it has enough of those attributes to be considered a human being by any reasonable understanding of that term, seems a reasonable question.
The attributes to be considered a human being are: viable existence as a biological entity consisting of cells containing a particular DNA sequence: these attributes were present at my conception and I still have them today … and the other 7 billion.
Fair enough and food for thought. I don’t have an equivalent “scientific”’response. Instinctively there is more to being a human being than a DNA sequence, but if I can’t articulate it I’m in trouble.
I’m too far into a good bottle of red now to give it the thought required. 15 love to you.
Arnold Grutt
2 years ago
“I often covered shifts for the abortion fund’s hotline, offering financial and logistical counselling for those who were pregnant and urgently needed to figure out how not to be”
Would not having unprotected sex, or indeed not having sex at all cover this?
Exactly. But we are not allowed to say that anymore. Apart from unwanted pregnancies, casual sex does tremendous psychological and emotional harm to women.
casual sex does tremendous psychological and emotional harm to women.
I wonder if this is really true?
My own view is that for many women, and many men, casual sex is emotionally unsatisfying and empty. Most of us find that out by trying it. Some women (but not so many men I think) engage in it as a form of validation. Most eventually realise that they are just being used.
But I’m not sure this the same as doing tremendous harm.
I would agree that it’s promotion as an unalloyed positive is a bad thing.
Well women experience sex differently, perhaps to say tremendous harm is exaggeration but I know many more women who feel deep regret about casual sex than I do men
Depends on the manipulation and blackmail that made sex the only option for survival. You cannot assume either power or competence as a prequisite for preventimg unwanted pregnancy – you should know from taking the calls.
Andrew D
2 years ago
I stopped reading at the reference to ‘reproductive justice’. Justice for whom?
I agree very unuanced article but thought provoking I think.
Mikey Mike
2 years ago
I often covered shifts for the abortion fund’s hotline, offering financial and logistical counselling for those who were pregnant and urgently needed to figure out how not to be.
This would be comedy gold if it weren’t such a gut-wrenching tragedy. Our venerable abortion advocate is teaching people how not to be pregnant at the wrong point in the process. She believes – or wants us to believe that she believes – that pregnancy is some mysterious misfortune which befalls the unsuspecting. And before you begin screeching about pregnancies that result from rape and incest, that’s not what she’s talking about. She’s talking about people who call a clinic surprised that they’re pregnant after performing the very act which leads to pregnancy. It’s so freaking difficult to indulge the crazy talk of abortofeminists.
Last edited 2 years ago by Mikey Mike
Mathilda Eklund
2 years ago
Why would anyone be surprised that Planned Parenting is no friend of women with the gender ideology they also subscribe to..?
Lesley van Reenen
2 years ago
There is no easy answer… much as many think it is.
Annemarie Ni Dhalaigh
2 years ago
What a lot of old nonsense. Everytime I read tripe like this, I wonder if the vote should be taken back from middle class women. They are better suited to being at home and channeling their narcissism into competitive needlework.
McCorvey was a working class woman exploited by two spoilt upper middle class brats, too stupid and narcissistic to realise they were useless idiots themselves. I’m fairly sure McCorvey very much regretted being used in this way
Given the many ways to ensure there will not be pregnancy, there are drugs to end it if used early. Making them easily and cheaply available seems a reasonably easy thing to do via those clinics. But really don’t have sex if the consequences are too much to bear. If none of that works, there are organizations that will attend the mother through birth; there are lines of people who wish to adopt infants.
The UK is heading disastrously for around 80m on the most wildlife and habitat depleted country in Europe. We should have declined comfortably from 55m in the 1960s to 40m over a few decades. More forest, less housebuilding, higher GDP per head, higher productivity. Instead we got an immigration ponzi scheme and disastrous effects on the environment.
Except it doesn’t work like that. A falling population means fewer working age people supporting an ever increasing elderly population in need of pensions and healthcare they never put money aside for. A decreasing population would be economically ruinous
That simply means we must plan for such a future. Demographic time bombs take time. If policy squanders that time, the future will be hard. But I suspect that need is still quite some time ahead.
Marcia McGrail
2 years ago
Life, albeit not self sustaining (yet) begins at the moment of fertilisation; a unique individual that may not look (yet) like you or me, has all the information s/he requires to determine genetic traits such as eye/hair colour, gender, blood type, bone structure, to some extent even personalitiy, intelligence etc but his/her size, stage of development or someone else’s convenience should not be a death sentence. Heart beat and brain waves at 6 weeks gestation; separate blood system; nourished and (hopefully) protected by mom yet so often the most dangerous place to be for a child is a womb.
Campbell P
2 years ago
What is so staggeringly and painfully obvious from this whole debate is, at one end, the sheer selfishness and utilitarian view of life on the part of educated, well off, but fickle and feckless women (abetted by equally fickle and feckless men) who think that personal choice – or, rather, ME! ME! ME! – is all that counts in their lives, and, at the other, the genuinely needy and vulnerable. That and the utterly appalling view of self-styled Libertarians in the US ‘Democratic’ Party and others who think a baby is not a baby ‘until it leaves the hospital’. How many people do you know who, if you’re pregnant ask you, ‘How’s your foetus doing?’ The womb used to be the safest place in the world.
Ian Stewart
2 years ago
Jeez I like the articles on Unherd but, based on a few recent articles about the complexities of the human condition, the commenters appear to be mostly people with very little empathy and no capacity for considering moderate views – typically condemning each other or the writer.
Think I’ve had enough of this extremism.
Francis MacGabhann
2 years ago
What a surreal piece of writing, like some heroic, battle-weary soldier coming in from the front in some just war, complaing about the general staff. I don’t believe I’ve ever witnessed such a staggering absence of self-awareness.
N T
2 years ago
In other news only barely related: Planned Parenthood LA got hacked, and personal data for 400,000 patients/clients may have been pilfered.
Jay Gls
2 years ago
If a woman gets shot, that’s a murder. If a pregnant woman gets shot, is that one murder… Or two?
That’s two lives not lived anymore. Certainly one whole life, and the rest of the life of the woman whose life has ended.
The stark reality of lives not lived was brought home by one of the murdered victims of the Omagh bomb blast in Northern Ireland, in 1998. A woman expecting twins was one of the twenty-six or so lives lost in the atrocity. I recall that in the years following, in the news, she and her unborn babies were frequently referred to when any journalist mentioned the victims: so something that was typically said was, The twenty-six victims including one who was pregnant with twins.
In Ireland a few years ago a dreadful tragedy (fire) led to the deaths of eleven members of the travelling community Travelling people rightfully demanded that media should report 11 deaths – though it was 10 people including a pregnant woman who were killed. Even the low IQ abortionistas at least acknowledged that something else died with the pregnant woman, if it didn’t why report her being pregnant at all?
Depends.
If it’s a black man pulling the trigger, it is white supremacy and structural racism, not murder.
Michael Chambers
2 years ago
I don’t have much time for the activists, politicians and lawyers on both sides of the fence.
The people I respect in this issue are those providing practical support to women in trouble because of their pregnancy, so that, if legally they have a choice, it is not excessively swayed by their personal circumstances.
Chris Wheatley
2 years ago
If UnHerd is about freedom of speech, the right of the individual to choose their own future, the very idea of individual action, could there be any doubt about which side to choose in the abortion discussion?
I am asking this question as a man with no ulterior motive. Because it always seems with abortion discussions that there is another secret dimension which is not open to me, a sort of hidden society operating without my knowledge. Such secret societies are anathema to UnHerd types.
The abortion debate is about the balance between the suffering of the mother and the death of the foetus. To pose this bitter debate in terms of freedom is totally inappropriate and it is moreover the trap set by the militants.
What you say is true only in theory. In practice, in some countries abortion is available as a sort of fashion. I think that many, many women see abortion as a freedom – to allow them to continue life as they are enjoying it. To deny this is a lack of experience of meeting real, non-educated people.
It’s exactly what I denounce. Just imagine what people will say in several centuries on our society : in 1821 slavery was a fashion, in 2021 abortion was a fashion. Crazy.
Some women do appear to have a blasé attitude towards abortion/contraception and frankly they make me glad its legal here as i imagine they would make questionable mothers.
There seems to be a growing indifference towards responsibility today, young people who cant be bothered to use contraception and think they’ll deal with whatever consequences come and then cant be bothered dealing with the consequences and fob them off on whoever they can.
I don’t even believe that they waste time thinking about it. There is no conflict. ‘Should I have the baby and be tied down for ever or should I have an abortion and keep on partying?’ I don’t think there is a choice.
I can’t answer that because I don’t have any real importance in the matter. To me, UnHerd has to discuss things as theories and real life is sweeping by as a series of fashions.
Once upon a time, people on UnHerd would have been valued as a meritocracy. Today, if they step out from behind their computers they would probably be beaten up for being too clever.
I see around me exactly what is happening. Young people live for the moment with no thought of the consequences. They would just push us out of the way.
The old always fear the young, with their noise and energy, their utter certainty and casual strength.
Every generation somehow becomes convinced the one coming up is composed only of violent barbarians. And yet…. somehow, life improves. Would you exchange your life today for one even a century ago, really?
The idea HAS to be wrong. Our children are clearly not all idiots. We weren’t. They also care for beauty and art – and most of them understand decency, courage, patriotism too.
I went to a carol service last night. Nine lessons, young choir, beautiful organ music, except for a bit of Bach at the end. I held a candle and gave thanks for my blessings. I then went to dinner (unmasked), drove home and fell asleep in front of the fire. It wasn’t quite Wind in the Willows, but Badger would have approved every part except an episode of ‘Friday Night lights’.
The young don’t push us aside; they become us – exactly as wonderful and flawed as we are. I’m not saying I love all the modern world. Merely watching the BBC for a while depresses me, but there it is, that great truth:
…every generation despairs of the next – and should not.
I don’t fear the young in any way. In fact, I sympathise with them. Any of today’s problems must have been caused by previous generations – global warming being a arguable exception.
I see people on UnHerd as old men/ women who want to revert to some past system in those halcyon days. Whenever I take the side of the young I just get insults, telling me to get off UnHerd.
More wisdom. I’m still grateful to you for helping my wife see Tuesdays as special occasions.
When the ideological, “we can recreate the world,” certainties of youth, start to crumble in the face of life experience, they turn to muddle and bodge, like the rest of us, to get through.
Being a leading light of the Muddle and Bodge movement doesn’t have quite the cachet of being a freedom fighter, but tends to kill less people.
I think , for once in my life, that humanity is regressing. I am an atheist but have read the Bible and the tale of Sodom And Gomorrah seems to be almost relevant to our society’s direction of travel.
A generation ago we still worked with nature, now we work aggressively against it and many of our young people see it simply as an impediment to an easier and lazier way of life.
Life is not “getting better” it is just getting easier….temporarily.
Within the next decade we have some very important decisions to make concerning living standards and the abuse of our freedoms.
Emre Emre
2 years ago
When there’re so many people waiting for adoption (and a baby is the best age to adopt), why is terminating them the default pro-choice position?
William Jackson
2 years ago
Jessa Crispin, thank you. Health, and peace to all, William
Lesley van Reenen
2 years ago
So the usual Unherd commentary starts – which is largely anti abortion. I would love to take this stance – it is comfortable, but have to ask: in a world with an exploding population, how are all these humans going to survive? Especially as man has intervened to cure many of disease. It is useless to look at it only through the lens of Western society which is currently better equipped to deal with ever more children. I say ‘currently’, because we can see the way Europe and the USA are going.
Or why start with the unborn? We could’ve embraced Covid and spent the last 2 years helping the elderly be as comfortable on their way out as possible. Their clock is already ticking – natures way and all that!
Promoting abortion as a form of birth control, which is what you seem to be advocating, is almost certainly foolhardy. There are simply too many overtly or residually patriarchal countries that use that form of birth control selectively. In other words, female foetuses are aborted and male foetuses retained. This leads to a demographic imbalance and unstable societies.
It would be interesting to guess the man/woman ratio on UnHerd. I believe that men have the right to comment on abortion but I don’t believe they can have the last word.
I don’t think there is a moral high ground on either side of the argument. The way I see it, it’s better to have access to a safe procedure and not need it than need it and not have access to it.
I think both involved in making the life should have a say on that life however in the event of one parent wanting to abort and one one against, the one against should assume all responsibility should the life be brought into the world.
Is abortion most common among the welfare-dependent and the working class, in America and in Western Europe? If so, is there an underlying sense that the lives not lived would not have amounted to much anyway? That no great violin players, nor any great microbiologists, say, would have emerged from the mass of lives not lived? Or should I say if that is the fallacious belief deliberately formed? Developed? Such that society is not short-changed, perhaps even protected, by having abortion written into law?
This sounds like a good description of the activist class, full stop. Big on professional advancement through highly visible performative activism, low on real empathy with, or assistance for, the people on whose behalf they claim to speak. It applies across the woke board.
I don’t have a strong position either way on the actual issue. It seems to me beyond debate that it should be illegal to kill human life for personal convenience. The only debate is therefore when a foetus becomes human life. I don’t know
Personally I’d set the limit slightly earlier than the youngest surviving prematurely born baby. According to Google this is 21 weeks and a day, therefore I’d have the limit set at 20 weeks currently. If medical advances in the future mean baby’s that premature are able to survive then I’d drop the limit accordingly
Agree with both of you Martin & Billy. Abortion is a right, but it should never be used randomly, without thought and as prescriptive answer whenever requested. The context of the situations beyond the “righthood” of being able to have an abortion is lost. Pregnancy as the author says – can sometimes be a crisis. But it can also be a start to another human life which can bring change and wonder. It does sound to me like Jessa Crispin slightly misses that point.
Who is going to look after all these babies?
What babies? Personally I don’t think dropping the limit by 4 weeks is going to result in thousands of unwanted babies being born that otherwise would have been aborted. I’d wager most women know by the halfway point of their pregnancy whether they want to go through with it or not.
What I don’t agree with is the rules like the Texas one, that is set at a date earlier than some women realise they’re pregnant. That will result in unwanted children, mothers pushed into poverty and the associated bad health outcomes that inevitably arise from it
Redirect the massive funds of both pro- lobbies into supporting young mothers/making adoption a more humane option?
That’s a question that’s been occupying my mind lately. When there’re so many people waiting for adoption (and a baby is the best age to adopt), why is terminating them the default pro-choice position?
Do you know the sacrifices that pregnant women who do not want to be pregnant and are forced to carry on with their pregnancy go through? I am prochoice and so glad that women in the UK do not have to pay for treatment at point of source.
I had 7 spontaneous abortions, which most people call miscarriages, but I still think that women need the choice between abortion and pregnancy.
Pregnancy for many is political, especially if the woman is single. Too many people think they own the woman’s womb and anything growing in it, when the only person who has anything invested in that womb is the woman herself as without that womb, there is no child born. Therefore the only person who should have any say is the woman whose womb has the foetus inside it. Everyone else needs to back off, unless there is a safeguarding issue where the woman is particularly vulnerable or too young to consent.
Women fought long and hard for legal abortion and nobody should have the right to take it away.
Feels like a huge knot of conflicting and emotional philosophical strands, cut by a razor of practical common sense.
I like it, but it’ll never catch on.
More’s the pity.
There is no debate about when a foetus becomes human life, abortion is the taking of human life full stop. To argue anything else is just silly sentimentality. It is possible to justify the taking of human life at times, wars etc so I don’t know why abortion advocates can’t be more honest with themselves.
Ah yes, the “I’m right and you’re stupid” debating style.
Clearly dawn has arrived across the pond.
Abortion advocates want to claim that a wanted pregnancy ast say, 4 weeks, is human life, but an unwanted one at 7 months isn’t.
It’s silly and childish
Thanks for Hibernophobia, a new word for me, though I’m not sure it hits the mark. My remark was an observation that the most “my opinion is an undeniable fact” type comments on here tend to come from the US. As far as I’m aware it isn’t a county of Ireland. It is also the type of snarky generalisation best avoided in the interests of an interesting conversation. Mea culpa.
Per the exchange with Gordon below, I don’t think a bundle of cells is a human being, even when it has the potential to become one. I could be wrong, but it’s not an irrational belief and can’t be dismissed as sentimental nonsense by somebody who doesn’t share it.
I personally would feel a murderer if I killed something that looked like a baby, less so about the destruction of something that looked like a blob of snot. For me, they are manifestly not the same. I’m sure there’s a world of philosophical debate round that banal comment, but it’s a real life issue best solved by something like Billy Bobs prosaic but practical compromise.
I edited my comment before seeing your reply as I realised across the pond was a different reference..we see hibernophobia everywhere. We can agree to disagree but i do not see why people are uncomfortable with taking life if they think it’s justified. I can’t agree that humans are humans because of what they look like. In my younger days I probably dated a few fellas who could possibly be described as blobs of snot….
The best craic always requires beer goggles. Enjoy the rest of your evening
You echo Peter Singer!
Much debate is possible. Many fuzzy areas. Think about it
I am not sure I believe that wars can ever be justified if we apply logic. After the two World Wars can we honestly say we are any better off or the world is a better place?
It takes (at least) two countries to be for peace. It only takes one to be for war.
Oh yes, the ‘human life is sacred’ brigade! Until the baby is born that is… From the people who brought you banning birth control, never mind abortion, treating pregnant unmarried women as social lepers, walling them up in laundrys etc. to work for free for the nuns (e.g. the Bone Suckers in Tuam), then taking the babies off the heartbroken mothers to sell to (good catholic) Americans and starving the rest to death before chucking the wee corpses in septic tanks…? Yeah, go you!
Septic tanks hhahahaha. Been watching too many Harvey Weinstein/Louis lentin soap operas I think. “Bone suckers”- you people are hilarious. Also you miss the point, as is usual with low IQ anti Catholic bigots who regurgitate propaganda that was liquidised and fed to them. The discussion was around when life begins, not whether it may be justified to take life in certain circumstances.
See my last comment to you… Who is the realist? Who the fantasist? I know which one I am.
Using your argument, Nature killed the children I was carrying. Whereas I think I was carrying foetuses who could not live outside my body, and nature killed them for whatever reason it saw fit! Only many years later, did I find out I have a split womb and would never have carried to term without major surgery.
The only difference between me and the woman who seeks an abortion is that mine happened naturally. And while I would have wanted at least 2 or 3 of these foetuses to grow and be born as children, none were planned and some would have been inconvenient and cost me aspects of my life that I actually enjoy.
So nature made the choice for me and gave me the easy way out, spontaneous abortion, let’s call it what it is, not miscarriage as most people call it. Abortion, spontaneous – the womb expelling the cells, the foetus, of pregnancy due to damage, lack of womb space, whatever. Result – dead foetus, no pregnancy, a whole lot of extra hormones that the woman has to deal with. No abortion is easy but at least one should be the choice of the woman whose womb is carrying the cells of pregnancy.
Excellent comment. I have been thinking for some time now that activism – amplified by social media – is the bane of modern life. How many of those people who went out on the streets for BLM would be willing to – say – mentor a black teenager who has fallen in with a gang? Or to give up marching and protesting in order to have more time to do active community service, like repairing the damage caused by the riots?
Been doing it all my life and still would. Love helping people move onwards and upwards. OK?
Great! But the question still stands.
Your first paragraph is spot on, the actual issue could be changes to anything else and you would still be right.
As for when a foetus becomes human I think it is still at birth, when a foetus becomes a living separate being. A foetus becomes viable at around 28 weeks gestation, but the law still disregards that, as far as I am aware. Still legal to seek a termination at that time.There needs to be a much, much deeper debate about abortion, particularly now when women can find out whether they are pregnant before their first missed period.
The foetus is only viable at 28 weeks if it is born in a hospital where tens of thousands of pounds/dollars/euros are spent on keeping it alive. Even then it may be alive but severely disabled. If it is born anywhere else, it might live a few hours but it won’t survive. So babies in the West born to middle class families at 28 weeks may live abd may live without being disabled, but babies born to poor women, women who live too far from hospital or those who have to pay for medical care, no chance. They carry the foetus all that time then there is nothing but a corpse at the end. Is that fair? Not in my world…Abortion to 28 weeks should be allowed to save the heartache women all over the world have to go through for their foetuses
I was stating facts as I knew them to be, when I was a nurse. It was very hard to nurse women who had miscarried, and also care for those who had aborted one of the same age.
I do not think the law has changed, to the best of my knowledge, which is that a foetus has no rights irrespective of gestational age.
I would largely agree with you about the survival of a 28 week baby, except for one thing, class has nothing to do with it, access to the correct medical care does. Access to that remains a lottery.
A bundle of cells with the potential to be nurtured to autonomous human existence. That describes a fertilised human egg whether it is 1 week, 10 weeks, 100 weeks or even 500 weeks old. Birth is merely a change of environment for this useless bundle. If killing it is condoned, because the nurturing is inconvenient, there is no moral difference if the age of death is 20 weeks or 200 weeks. That’s it.
Surely something with the potential to become something else is, by definition, not that something else?
A bundle of cells, at the point in time it is just that, is therefore not a human being by your own definition.
Our legal system has to deal with what is, not what it might become, or chaos will follow.
A human being is a bundle of cells at all stages of its life, it does not become something else. However, it has to be helped to self-sufficiency or it will die. If that nurture is impracticable, cultures and their legal systems can chose murder … fine… but birth makes no moral or logical partition for the act.
Interesting take but isn’t every form of life a bundle of cells? One description of a human being is certainly “a bunch of cells” but its also a description of a cow, and as such not very helpful.
Immediately before birth a foetus has all the recognisable attributes of a human being, bar the need to breathe. At what point it has enough of those attributes to be considered a human being by any reasonable understanding of that term, seems a reasonable question.
The attributes to be considered a human being are: viable existence as a biological entity consisting of cells containing a particular DNA sequence: these attributes were present at my conception and I still have them today … and the other 7 billion.
Fair enough and food for thought. I don’t have an equivalent “scientific”’response. Instinctively there is more to being a human being than a DNA sequence, but if I can’t articulate it I’m in trouble.
I’m too far into a good bottle of red now to give it the thought required. 15 love to you.
“I often covered shifts for the abortion fund’s hotline, offering financial and logistical counselling for those who were pregnant and urgently needed to figure out how not to be”
Would not having unprotected sex, or indeed not having sex at all cover this?
Exactly. But we are not allowed to say that anymore. Apart from unwanted pregnancies, casual sex does tremendous psychological and emotional harm to women.
I wonder if this is really true?
My own view is that for many women, and many men, casual sex is emotionally unsatisfying and empty. Most of us find that out by trying it. Some women (but not so many men I think) engage in it as a form of validation. Most eventually realise that they are just being used.
But I’m not sure this the same as doing tremendous harm.
I would agree that it’s promotion as an unalloyed positive is a bad thing.
Well women experience sex differently, perhaps to say tremendous harm is exaggeration but I know many more women who feel deep regret about casual sex than I do men
Yes I agree Annemarie, nature has programmed men and women differently to protect survival of the species.
We ignore nature at our peril.
Depends on the manipulation and blackmail that made sex the only option for survival. You cannot assume either power or competence as a prequisite for preventimg unwanted pregnancy – you should know from taking the calls.
I stopped reading at the reference to ‘reproductive justice’. Justice for whom?
I agree very unuanced article but thought provoking I think.
This would be comedy gold if it weren’t such a gut-wrenching tragedy. Our venerable abortion advocate is teaching people how not to be pregnant at the wrong point in the process. She believes – or wants us to believe that she believes – that pregnancy is some mysterious misfortune which befalls the unsuspecting. And before you begin screeching about pregnancies that result from rape and incest, that’s not what she’s talking about. She’s talking about people who call a clinic surprised that they’re pregnant after performing the very act which leads to pregnancy. It’s so freaking difficult to indulge the crazy talk of abortofeminists.
Why would anyone be surprised that Planned Parenting is no friend of women with the gender ideology they also subscribe to..?
There is no easy answer… much as many think it is.
What a lot of old nonsense. Everytime I read tripe like this, I wonder if the vote should be taken back from middle class women. They are better suited to being at home and channeling their narcissism into competitive needlework.
McCorvey was a working class woman exploited by two spoilt upper middle class brats, too stupid and narcissistic to realise they were useless idiots themselves. I’m fairly sure McCorvey very much regretted being used in this way
Or extreme ironing?
Hahaha
Given the many ways to ensure there will not be pregnancy, there are drugs to end it if used early. Making them easily and cheaply available seems a reasonably easy thing to do via those clinics. But really don’t have sex if the consequences are too much to bear. If none of that works, there are organizations that will attend the mother through birth; there are lines of people who wish to adopt infants.
If that were true why are so many children in state care?
The first problem to solve is the demographic collapse of Europe. All other considerations are of minor importance.
The UK is heading disastrously for around 80m on the most wildlife and habitat depleted country in Europe. We should have declined comfortably from 55m in the 1960s to 40m over a few decades. More forest, less housebuilding, higher GDP per head, higher productivity. Instead we got an immigration ponzi scheme and disastrous effects on the environment.
Except it doesn’t work like that. A falling population means fewer working age people supporting an ever increasing elderly population in need of pensions and healthcare they never put money aside for. A decreasing population would be economically ruinous
That simply means we must plan for such a future. Demographic time bombs take time. If policy squanders that time, the future will be hard. But I suspect that need is still quite some time ahead.
Life, albeit not self sustaining (yet) begins at the moment of fertilisation; a unique individual that may not look (yet) like you or me, has all the information s/he requires to determine genetic traits such as eye/hair colour, gender, blood type, bone structure, to some extent even personalitiy, intelligence etc but his/her size, stage of development or someone else’s convenience should not be a death sentence. Heart beat and brain waves at 6 weeks gestation; separate blood system; nourished and (hopefully) protected by mom yet so often the most dangerous place to be for a child is a womb.
What is so staggeringly and painfully obvious from this whole debate is, at one end, the sheer selfishness and utilitarian view of life on the part of educated, well off, but fickle and feckless women (abetted by equally fickle and feckless men) who think that personal choice – or, rather, ME! ME! ME! – is all that counts in their lives, and, at the other, the genuinely needy and vulnerable. That and the utterly appalling view of self-styled Libertarians in the US ‘Democratic’ Party and others who think a baby is not a baby ‘until it leaves the hospital’. How many people do you know who, if you’re pregnant ask you, ‘How’s your foetus doing?’ The womb used to be the safest place in the world.
Jeez I like the articles on Unherd but, based on a few recent articles about the complexities of the human condition, the commenters appear to be mostly people with very little empathy and no capacity for considering moderate views – typically condemning each other or the writer.
Think I’ve had enough of this extremism.
What a surreal piece of writing, like some heroic, battle-weary soldier coming in from the front in some just war, complaing about the general staff. I don’t believe I’ve ever witnessed such a staggering absence of self-awareness.
In other news only barely related: Planned Parenthood LA got hacked, and personal data for 400,000 patients/clients may have been pilfered.
If a woman gets shot, that’s a murder. If a pregnant woman gets shot, is that one murder… Or two?
That’s two lives not lived anymore. Certainly one whole life, and the rest of the life of the woman whose life has ended.
The stark reality of lives not lived was brought home by one of the murdered victims of the Omagh bomb blast in Northern Ireland, in 1998. A woman expecting twins was one of the twenty-six or so lives lost in the atrocity. I recall that in the years following, in the news, she and her unborn babies were frequently referred to when any journalist mentioned the victims: so something that was typically said was, The twenty-six victims including one who was pregnant with twins.
In Ireland a few years ago a dreadful tragedy (fire) led to the deaths of eleven members of the travelling community Travelling people rightfully demanded that media should report 11 deaths – though it was 10 people including a pregnant woman who were killed. Even the low IQ abortionistas at least acknowledged that something else died with the pregnant woman, if it didn’t why report her being pregnant at all?
Depends.
If it’s a black man pulling the trigger, it is white supremacy and structural racism, not murder.
I don’t have much time for the activists, politicians and lawyers on both sides of the fence.
The people I respect in this issue are those providing practical support to women in trouble because of their pregnancy, so that, if legally they have a choice, it is not excessively swayed by their personal circumstances.
If UnHerd is about freedom of speech, the right of the individual to choose their own future, the very idea of individual action, could there be any doubt about which side to choose in the abortion discussion?
I am asking this question as a man with no ulterior motive. Because it always seems with abortion discussions that there is another secret dimension which is not open to me, a sort of hidden society operating without my knowledge. Such secret societies are anathema to UnHerd types.
The abortion debate is about the balance between the suffering of the mother and the death of the foetus. To pose this bitter debate in terms of freedom is totally inappropriate and it is moreover the trap set by the militants.
What you say is true only in theory. In practice, in some countries abortion is available as a sort of fashion. I think that many, many women see abortion as a freedom – to allow them to continue life as they are enjoying it. To deny this is a lack of experience of meeting real, non-educated people.
It’s exactly what I denounce. Just imagine what people will say in several centuries on our society : in 1821 slavery was a fashion, in 2021 abortion was a fashion. Crazy.
Some women do appear to have a blasé attitude towards abortion/contraception and frankly they make me glad its legal here as i imagine they would make questionable mothers.
There seems to be a growing indifference towards responsibility today, young people who cant be bothered to use contraception and think they’ll deal with whatever consequences come and then cant be bothered dealing with the consequences and fob them off on whoever they can.
I don’t even believe that they waste time thinking about it. There is no conflict. ‘Should I have the baby and be tied down for ever or should I have an abortion and keep on partying?’ I don’t think there is a choice.
“I think that many, many women see abortion as a freedom – to allow them to continue life as they are enjoying it.”
And this differs from the moral point of view of, say, serial killers in what way exactly?
I can’t answer that because I don’t have any real importance in the matter. To me, UnHerd has to discuss things as theories and real life is sweeping by as a series of fashions.
Once upon a time, people on UnHerd would have been valued as a meritocracy. Today, if they step out from behind their computers they would probably be beaten up for being too clever.
I see around me exactly what is happening. Young people live for the moment with no thought of the consequences. They would just push us out of the way.
The old always fear the young, with their noise and energy, their utter certainty and casual strength.
Every generation somehow becomes convinced the one coming up is composed only of violent barbarians. And yet…. somehow, life improves. Would you exchange your life today for one even a century ago, really?
The idea HAS to be wrong. Our children are clearly not all idiots. We weren’t. They also care for beauty and art – and most of them understand decency, courage, patriotism too.
I went to a carol service last night. Nine lessons, young choir, beautiful organ music, except for a bit of Bach at the end. I held a candle and gave thanks for my blessings. I then went to dinner (unmasked), drove home and fell asleep in front of the fire. It wasn’t quite Wind in the Willows, but Badger would have approved every part except an episode of ‘Friday Night lights’.
The young don’t push us aside; they become us – exactly as wonderful and flawed as we are. I’m not saying I love all the modern world. Merely watching the BBC for a while depresses me, but there it is, that great truth:
…every generation despairs of the next – and should not.
I don’t fear the young in any way. In fact, I sympathise with them. Any of today’s problems must have been caused by previous generations – global warming being a arguable exception.
I see people on UnHerd as old men/ women who want to revert to some past system in those halcyon days. Whenever I take the side of the young I just get insults, telling me to get off UnHerd.
Do the young have a side, reliably? I’m sometimes right and occasionally wrong. I’d have thought that applied regardless of age.
More wisdom. I’m still grateful to you for helping my wife see Tuesdays as special occasions.
When the ideological, “we can recreate the world,” certainties of youth, start to crumble in the face of life experience, they turn to muddle and bodge, like the rest of us, to get through.
Being a leading light of the Muddle and Bodge movement doesn’t have quite the cachet of being a freedom fighter, but tends to kill less people.
You did make me laugh with the Tuesdays comment.
I also liked the Muddle and Bodge movement – more power to you. 🙂
I think , for once in my life, that humanity is regressing. I am an atheist but have read the Bible and the tale of Sodom And Gomorrah seems to be almost relevant to our society’s direction of travel.
A generation ago we still worked with nature, now we work aggressively against it and many of our young people see it simply as an impediment to an easier and lazier way of life.
Life is not “getting better” it is just getting easier….temporarily.
Within the next decade we have some very important decisions to make concerning living standards and the abuse of our freedoms.
When there’re so many people waiting for adoption (and a baby is the best age to adopt), why is terminating them the default pro-choice position?
Jessa Crispin, thank you. Health, and peace to all, William
So the usual Unherd commentary starts – which is largely anti abortion. I would love to take this stance – it is comfortable, but have to ask: in a world with an exploding population, how are all these humans going to survive? Especially as man has intervened to cure many of disease. It is useless to look at it only through the lens of Western society which is currently better equipped to deal with ever more children. I say ‘currently’, because we can see the way Europe and the USA are going.
But populations are declining across the developed world…
Not for long…
If overpopulation is the justification, why stop at the unborn?
Or why start with the unborn? We could’ve embraced Covid and spent the last 2 years helping the elderly be as comfortable on their way out as possible. Their clock is already ticking – natures way and all that!
Harsh, but arguably more fair! After all, the oldsters have had a fair crack of the whip, unlike those untimely ripp’d from their mothers’ wombs
We’ve just been letting cancer sufferers die instead.
Promoting abortion as a form of birth control, which is what you seem to be advocating, is almost certainly foolhardy. There are simply too many overtly or residually patriarchal countries that use that form of birth control selectively. In other words, female foetuses are aborted and male foetuses retained. This leads to a demographic imbalance and unstable societies.
It would be interesting to guess the man/woman ratio on UnHerd. I believe that men have the right to comment on abortion but I don’t believe they can have the last word.
I don’t think there is a moral high ground on either side of the argument. The way I see it, it’s better to have access to a safe procedure and not need it than need it and not have access to it.
I think both involved in making the life should have a say on that life however in the event of one parent wanting to abort and one one against, the one against should assume all responsibility should the life be brought into the world.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/honestly-with-bari-weiss/id1570872415?i=1000537717849
This is an excellent discussion of the issue, and I would urge UnHerd listeners to give it a go…..
Is abortion most common among the welfare-dependent and the working class, in America and in Western Europe? If so, is there an underlying sense that the lives not lived would not have amounted to much anyway? That no great violin players, nor any great microbiologists, say, would have emerged from the mass of lives not lived? Or should I say if that is the fallacious belief deliberately formed? Developed? Such that society is not short-changed, perhaps even protected, by having abortion written into law?