So, I got myself involved in a (mercifully brief) late-night “discussion” of abortion with a couple of feminists on Twitter…
Of course, it all turned graphically anatomical in the twinkling of an eye:
But here’s what struck me afterwards:
Abortion plays to the lowest common denominator of relationships between men and women.
I use you for sex; you agree to me using you for sex.
We agree we will not see each other again, or at least not see each other for very long.
I care not that you get pregnant. You don’t care either. Surgery can deal with the consequences.
I’m not likely to volunteer hold your hand before, during, or after the termination procedure. I’ve done what a man does (ejaculate and leave); you do what a woman does (get pregnant; have surgery; cry in private; go on marches for your reproductive rights).
Abortion, so you tell me, is your right as a woman. Great! Because unfettered, consequence- and commitment-free sex is clearly my right as a man.
No, really: I don’t have to paint a nursery, put up shelves, mow the lawn, attend pre-natal classes with you, hold your hand during cramps, rub your back for you, bring you cups of tea, change nappies, get up in the night to provide bottle-feeds, listen to you bang on about womanly things or your expectations of me as husband and (partial?) provider, and much, much more.
I don’t even have to share the remote control or give up my video-game marathons.
I just fuck and go.
And, frankly: fuck your feelings!
Why am I writing like this on what is ostensibly a Christian blog?
I’m sorry if the four-letter language causes any offence. Most of my posts aren’t like this. I’m trying to work towards this point:
There has to be a better way.
What if, instead of using women for sex and then abandoning them to unwanted pregnancies and abortions (and letting them suffer unnecessary emotional trauma), men treated women with reverence? With love? With an attitude of commitment?
What if women saw the merit in marriage, and actively prepared for it, instead of joining men in the gutter of commitment-free sex (and later wondering where all the good, eligible men are)? (Clue: they married women who saw the merit in settling down earlier in life while you were busy having drunken flings with one-night stands or spending long years in relationships with men who were happy to have sex but weren’t playing for keeps.)*
What if we didn’t kill unborn babies because we created a world (even just our little corner of the world) in which we didn’t need to kill unborn babies?
When we take the love and commitment out of sex, we almost inevitably end up feeling the need to kill the offspring that results from such sex.
Maybe it’s time we admitted that such a lifestyle is not sustainable. The possibility of killing an unborn child ought to be a huge red flag that warns us off uncommitted sex in the first place.
When we talk about “pro-choice”, let’s be sure of what we are choosing, and where that path leads. Is having sex with people who don’t care about you and won’t stand by you really all it’s cracked up to be? Or is it actually a little bit immature and pointless – merely satisfying our urges with no thought of what happens to those who get in the way? Toddlers do that. The rest of us ought to have grown out of it.
You see, in a way I’m “pro-choice” too.
I’m “pro” the choice to treat people as people, not as objects.
I’m “pro” the choice to treat a woman with respect, rather than as a living, breathing extension of pornography, to be picked up and used and dumped at my convenience.
I’m “pro” the choice to take responsibility for the children we conceive – to love them and bring them up well, rather than to cast them aside.
I’m “pro” the choice to do decent, praiseworthy, God-mandated things that are hard, rather than selfish, lust-driven things that are easy.
I’m “pro” the choice to raise the level of the game I play (and to hold out the same example to others), so that I can be proud of how I’ve lived, safe in the knowledge that my testimony will speak for itself, rather than having to defend my actions.
As I’ve discussed in previous posts, a lot of these choices stem from my hopeless clinging to an outdated, bigoted, sexually repressive, anti-women Bronze-Age made-up religion that is completely laughable and worthy only of your contempt, unless of course the truth about it is somewhat more positive and you’ve missed the point while you were busy rallying for something or other.
Whatever your convictions about my convictions, I refuse to reduce relationships to the lowest common denominator of convenience and self-centredness.
I won’t do it before marriage, and I won’t do it during marriage either, so help me God.
So how about we bring the love back? How about making this a better world?
(EDIT) Since writing this post I’ve discovered a couple of articles that I thought were quite telling:
– Stella Morabito at The Federalist concurs: Why Pro-Abortion Men are Anti-Woman.
… and you know that hook-up culture has really taken hold when Vanity Fair examines it objectively: Tinder and the Dawn of the Dating Apocalypse.
Footnote:
I have nothing but sympathy for women (and men) who have been involved in abortions. Most feel at least some level of guilt; many have bitter regrets. When the Bible talks about repentance from sin and says that we can be forgiven, it applies to this sin as much as to any other. The death of Jesus Christ on the Cross is the proof that God forgives repentant people of all sin, including sexual sin and the killing of the unborn child.
God loves you. God forgives you. Receive His forgiveness and sin no more.
We also need God’s help to love each other and to live a better way.
Why not make that your choice today?
*link is monetised
cookiesupermarket 
What saddens me about this post is that it basically says the same things non-religious men on the Manosphere, who are very bitter because women ignore them, say all the time. They simply use cruder terms. They say that women ‘ride the Cock Carousel’ in their twenties and then ‘wonder why they cannot get married’ in their 30s.
I see non-religious women getting married everywhere, so it is obvious that this pattern you present refers to a tiny group of (possibly alcoholic or substance-abusing) outliers and it is not at all the norm.
I know it is very hard for a religious man who genuinely believes all women want out of life is babies and ‘protection’ to believe this, but most women do not ‘cry in private’ when they have abortions. A college girl focused on her career does not cry in private because she avoided a body-deforming pregnancy that would get in the way of her bright future. A rape victim cries only with relief when she takes back control and gets rid of her rapist’s disgusting spawn. You are a man, and yet you claim to know what women want better than the millions of women who marched for their rights. What gives you that arrogance?
You claim sexual liberation transforms women into something less than human. Don’t you see how much you dehumanise women in this blog post, claiming that they all conform to this cut-and-paste cardboard figure who cries when she has an abortion because deep down all she wants is to be a submissive stay-at-home mom? You claim women merely get manipulated by men and have no desires of their own for freedom from pregnancy, which allows them to have a career and find another man. You claim women have no sexual desire. Indeed, you claim women would want to settle down with any man they sleep with! What if he is not good enough? What if she does not want him? What if she gets tired if him? In your ideal world, she ought to just stay with him nonetheless and have his baby. She ought to have no other choice other than to settle with the first man she sleeps with (and forgive me for being graphic, but if he is not good in bed the ‘Biblical marriage’ they would form would be a very unhappy one).
Thankfully feminism created a better world than this.
Hi Helena, thank you for joining the discussion!
I hear what you’re saying, but I would disagree on a few points.
Firstly, I’m not sure that having sexual relationships before marriage produces as many positive outcomes as is commonly claimed. Premarital sex is a predictor of more probable divorce (leave aside for a moment that couples who cohabit are even more likely to split before their children reach the age of 16).
I’m not entirely sure that I think that all that women want out of life is babies and protection. And while you make a fair point that maybe not all women cry over their abortions, you must surely concede that post-abortion guilt and depression are far more widespread than vested interests such as Planned Parenthood will admit to.
I’m baffled that I’m being accused of dehumanising women in the next sentence after a baby is referred to as “disgusting spawn”. I do not wish to downplay the trauma suffered by a rape survivor, but surely a baby is innocent – and furthermore even rape victims can feel conflicted after terminating their pregnancy. The testimonies of women who have chosen to have babies conceived as a result of rape speak volumes – these children are loved and seen as a gift in spite of the violent circumstances of their conception.
While I understand that some women may feel revulsion at the idea of giving up their rapist’s baby, I do feel that the “disgusting spawn” trope rather lies at the heart of pro-choice. By “othering” the gestating baby – treating it as alien and anything but human – we can more easily convince ourselves of the goodness of abortion. I argue for both men and women to sacrifice lovingly, because we create a better world if we do so.
I don’t claim to know what women want – few wise men do. ;o) I am explaining what is right and good and why they (and all of us) should want that.
Your last paragraph contains numerous points which would take a while to answer individually, but they all seem to be rooted in the idea that we can shop around sexually – the very thing that leads to a huge amount of emotional hurt and, inevitably, unplanned pregnancies for many.
I am not arguing for a woman to marry the first man she sleeps with, so much as to sleep with the man she marries. Of course women have sexual desire. But sex often keeps people together who have no intention of staying together long-term if they think about matters more objectively – it often causes women to waste their most attractive and fertile years cohabiting with guys who string them along with vague promises of commitment or wanting kids one day.
Is it not better to talk about one’s aspirations for marriage, find somebody truly likeminded (whether with regards to having kids or activities in and beyond the bedroom), and to develop character that makes a person worth sticking with?
I know what I prefer – and babies don’t have to be put to death in the process, but rather can be guaranteed a welcome into a stable and loving family.
Is it not worth a shot?
Do you have any studies that prove what you say about couples who have sex before marriage ending up divorced with more frequency? Studies carried out by non-religious groups, therefore non-biased? Also, keep in mind that in many instances divorce is unfortunately necessary and not a bad thing. It is at times healthy especially for young girls to see their mother take control and divorce her husband. It teaches them to stand up for themselves and to never be submissive to a man.
Forgive me, but the impression I get from your points is that what you want is what mostly benefits men (unsurprising, since you offer the point of view of a very patriarchal religion).
I cannot genuinely say I am not nauseated by these talks of a woman’s ‘most desirable and fertile years’ being ‘wasted’. I myself am in my early twenties, and what I see around me are other women like me who work hard to get degrees and build their careers (hardly a waste of time for those who wish to buy a house). During more patriarchal times, women were barred from universities and high-earning careers for a specific reason which you have highlighted: so that they would spend their more fertile years being married to a man and pleasing him and giving him children. We are all aware that men want women who are young and – this is very important – virginal. They want youth for fertility, and virgins because that way they feel like they ‘own’ the woman, because it is in their instinct to worry about paternity and that leads them to want to be ‘the only one’ who has access to a woman.
Obviously, feminism was very much about denying men access to inexperienced virgin brides as much as possible, first of all because a woman must have a career of her own in order to maintain financial independence which is essential (otherwise she would depend on a man for financial survival and that would put her in a position of powerlessness), but also because spending her most fertile years uncommitted to a single man and having sexual experiences is good, because she will be quite sexually experienced by the time she settles down, and so the husband will be unable to feel like he ‘owns’ her or ‘has conquered’ her (a very good thing). It is important that the man does not hold that power over a woman. If she is very experienced, she will also know what pleases her sexually and demand things from her man rather than being naive and just pleasing him and not knowing any better. I am sure you will agree that the dynamics change entirely when a woman is sexually experienced instead of a demure virgin.
Most women nowadays simply refuse to settle down before their late twenties, so men who are outside these small religious circles have two choices: marry a woman with sexual experience, or stay celibate. Both choices are equally valid! They can stay celibate if they like, but I am sure you will agree that most women nowadays will definitely not sacrifice those fertile years spent building their careers to get married. So most men really only have two choices (or they can join a religious group! Their choice!).
Obviously, because we feminists want women to live their lives for themselves instead of pleasing men, we also believe that they must have the right to abortion so they can enjoy sex (I am glad that you agree women have sexual urges too), without it impacting their future. A pregnancy is risky and deforms the body. A young college girl who must focus on her exams does not want to go through a risky pregnancy. And most importantly, a rape victim very often does not want to give birth to (yes) the spawn of her rapist. Some do, but most don’t (hence, pro-choice).
Society – and especially Christianity – has always told women they are ‘helpmeets’ who ought to be ‘submissive to their husband’ (I am sure you will not deny the Bible explicitly says this?), and that is what patriarchal society before feminism told women to do. Restrain your sexual urges and stay a virgin to please your husband! Use your fertile years to bear more children than you want, destroying your body in the process! Do not have a career so that your husband will have complete financial control over you! Just give, give, give. Just sacrifice yourself, always. You try to present this as being ‘the right thing’, but the truth is that it is simply what men want.
We feminists not only believe that a foetus is indeed just a foetus and not a person, we also think that a woman’s uterus is nowhere as important as her ambitions, passions, aspirations. Her desire to go to university is more important than the foetus. Her career is more important than the foetus (and as I said, nothing is more terrifying than being trapped in a marriage without financial independence, it means having no control over your own financial survival). Her desire to have another lover is more important than the foetus (and far more important than the man’s desire to keep her a virgin for himself!). We value women as people, not as servants of others, be it their husbands or a foetus. To us, they do not exist to defer to men and babies and be submissive.
So being pro-choice is one facet of feminism which ties to everything else, and it all boils down to *not* telling women to sacrifice themselves so that men can enjoy that young fertile bride you describe!
One last thing, I am sure you know we feminists do not care much about being demure, and so will not mind me asking something graphic (we are talking about abortions after all!). You said many right things about personality and shared interests being important in a relationship, and I completely agree. However, when you brought up that sneaky little piece of trivia regarding women’s ‘most attractive years’, I am sure what you were trying to say is that sex is important in a marriage, right? I agree with that too!
You say that men ought to be sexually pleased and given the young virgin bride they desire, but what about the pleasure of women? Sorry to be blunt, but I would never marry a man whose size and performance I did not know beforehand! In your view, a man ought to be pleased sexually by being given a woman in her prime years, yet you forget to mention that the woman in question, if she is a virgin, Is possibly going to be stuck in a marriage with an inadequate man of small size and little stamina. The man’s sexual needs are met, the woman’s aren’t. Just like men are programmed to select fertile (young) women, women are programmed to select the best genes, and will quickly leave a sexually inadequate man. Back in the old days, a man in his forties could have a very young woman (who was secretly repulsed by him) as a bride because he was wealthy. Nowadays, I am sure you do not see many young women going after forty year olds! So not only do women have sexual urges, they are also far more selective than men, and will not be satisfied if they are just paired with a single man who might as well turn out to be sexually inadequate. So the model you suggest does not please most women from a sexual point of view because their instinct is to go find better genetic material (this is what they did even before civilisation, in hunter gatherer societies. It is as instinctual as men wanting a young woman).
As I said, you seem to be all about giving men what they want, with very little regard for the wants and needs of women! And it was very honest of you to admit that, as a man, you actually might not know what women want!
Hi Helena. Thank you once again for your comments!
I do apologise for not responding sooner – have been a bit snowed under here with work!
You made quite a lot of points, so my responses are necessarily brief, but I’ll try to do them justice…
– Are there secular studies into the effect of cohabitation on divorce rates?
Yes: cohabitation is negative compared with marriage on every metric measureable, and it’s not only religious people who say so.
American College of Pediatrics study:
https://www.acpeds.org/the-college-speaks/position-statements/societal-issues/cohabitation-part-1-of-2
Cohabitation results in children being much more likely to end up not having both parents in the home:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/mother-tongue/10074614/Almost-no-couples-with-children-who-stay-unmarried-stay-together-study-claims.html
“Cohabiting parents make up 19 per cent of all couples with dependent children, but account for half of all family breakdown.”:
http://www.marriagefoundation.org.uk/research/
Yes, divorce is sometimes necessary, but seems to be reached for far too readily in cases in which marriages could easily be made stronger and love rekindled.
The Biblical view of marriage indeed includes submission of the wife to the husband, but also calls upon the husband to “love his wife as Christ loved the Church and gave himself for her” – a radical position which involves being a servant-hearted leader, not merely the boss or a slave-driver. I’d be the first to agree that men have abused their position at times. God’s ideal for marriage is that the man should have a good heart and lift his wife up, not use her for his own ends or ignore her needs.
I find your view of feminist sexual freedom a little bleak, to say the least.
I agree that sexual satisfaction is important, but when pursued as an end in itself (without commitment and relationship) it would appear to be rather empty.
Your demand that a man should be sexually satisfying to a woman is understandable, but it brings me back to my question in my original article: where is the love in this? A lifestyle of seeking the man of the right “size” and level of desire – and abandoning those who don’t measure up – could end up in loneliness further down the line, because (forgive me for being blunt) if you reject a man for being too small or no longer being satisfactory in bed, what is to stop him from rejecting you when your boobs start to sag or you no longer feel in the mood?
The idea that we can trade up whenever we feel like it seems superficially appealing, but it appears to reckon without the fact that we all age and change, or go through seasons of sickness, depression, etc. I’m totally in favour of people working on their issues (including learning how to please each other in the bedroom), but if your main criterion for a potential partner is performance in the bedroom (and rejecting anyone who doesn’t pass muster), then who will be there for you when you’re both old and smelling of wee?
I am very close friends with a couple, of which the wife has suffered long years of depression and also had a double mastectomy and hysterectomy due to cancer. How much her husband loves her and has stood by her during these times is abundantly evident when she describes the process of losing her breasts and reproductive organs – and, in the eyes of some, her sexual desirability – yet here is her man standing by her, and she stands by him in the same fashion. I’m not sure where this kind of love and commitment would realistically be found in your view.
Sometimes men are bastards, but some lifestyles attract the bastards and repel or avoid the good ones.
I simply don’t buy the argument that one can settle down in later life and commit to somebody for the long haul after decades of doing one’s own thing in the way you describe. I would think that anybody who attempted this would always be left dissatisfied and resentful of their partner because of the feeling that they had “settled”. The idea of promiscuity first and commitment later seems to me to be more likely to end up in discontentment, and again the stats would seem to bear this out. (Please do your own research – bear in mind that the truth may not always be in the feminist echo chamber. Of course there might be a religious echo chamber too; you would have to see who things work out in real life, which could be a good case for visiting a lively church in your area and finding out if what’s in the tin lives up to the advertisements.)
The same goes for the idea that sexual promiscuity is liberating because it makes a woman less dependent upon a man. This may be true on its face, but it seems to me that this is a case of sabotaging all marriage because there are bad marriages. Why not simply concentrate on building a good marriage with a good man?
Of course, many women have grown up not knowing men to be good. I was contacted some time back by a young woman who is an ardent feminist (and pro-abortionist) and deeply contemptuous of men – it would seem largely based on her father philandering for years and leaving his wife and children destitute after the divorce. That kind of thing is tragic, and I think it’s something that God wants to heal, because he cares deeply about women who have been wounded by the men in their lives.
So I understand the temptation to turn relationships into a battleground, or at least a competition, because women perceive that they have to be tough to survive, and play the men at their own game. But it’s not healthy, and indeed is this game even worth playing? There is a way that is better for men, women and children.
FWIW the Family Education Trust has (in the words of one of its directors in private correspondence with me) found that research “confirms the Judaeo-Christian model of the family as being best for children and society”.
http://familyeducationtrust.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=46&Itemid=65
Thank you again for writing in!
Jeremy
I think you bring up a good point about love, but you do not understand what I mean when I say a woman has her right to sexual pleasure as well.
Of course a woman’s breasts sag and she ages and becomes less attractive as well, but the point is, why should a young woman settle for a man who does not please her in bed, at a very young age? In this scenario the man is getting what he wants (a young woman) and the woman is not because she is married to a man whose performance she did not test before and had no other options. You see the imbalance there? That is what I meant. Nowadays we have a much better model in which women only settle down after having had various boyfriends, and are therefore much more knowledgeable about their own sexuality and what they want.
I am surprised at how you turn all this into a war between men and women. I see no such war. I see non-religious women getting married all the time, but with a crucial difference: they do not get married young before they have had the chance to work on their careers, and they do not ‘submit’ once they are married.
This does not mean they are at war with their husbands. It means they mantain their financial independence, indeed contribute to the mortgage, abort children they are not ready to have, and develop their careers instead of being locked in a kitchen.
You say a husband should be ‘considerate of the wife’s needs’, but nothing you have advocated so far is in any way considerate of many women’s needs. You are painting a very cartoonish image of what women are like. You say they ‘cry in private when they have an abortion’ (you do know many women are happy to have abortions and if anything cry of joy about not being forced to go through labour, right?), you say they were probably just being ‘used for sex in long-term relationships’ (I notice your sweeping assumption that all these women were just hoping to get married, do not enjoy sex, and were all desperately abandoned without a will of their own, or that it is not possible they might have not wanted to get married).
Another caricature you present is that of the woman who is very bitter and wonders ‘where have all the good men gone’, and I have to tell you, as a feminist, that I and many of my peers think good men are everywhere. Thousands have marched with us for our reproductive rights, and they are our fathers, brothers, friends, casual lovers, husbands and sons. Indeed I have noticed that the men who instead tend to be the most bitter and anti-woman are those who are unmarried and unwanted by most women. They are the most likely to be angry, and would like to severely limit a woman’s freedom to go to university, have lovers, abort, and not marry if she does not want to.
And this brings me back to the main point: you are not saying anything in favour of willingly childfree women, of those who want to be doctors or whatever else and therefore do not want a husband right now (or perhaps ever). You are not saying anything to support the women who do not want to be mothers and so abort without regrets. I heard nothing from you in praise of women writers and artists who do not want a family and nowadays have the right to choose that path. Nothing you have said suggests you see women as anything more than an overly-emotional, homogenous mass with the same needs: getting married, having children, hating men if they don’t do that.
I think you should really make an effort to see women as people with different goals, instead of just considering them for their reproductive abilities. And there is a lot of research to be done about the feminists who do not hate men at all, and simply strike back when a select little group of men tries to interfere with their chosen lives by taking away their reproductive rights!
Also, I would like to concede a point: sometimes the most virulently embittered, anti-woman, super-Christian people are not men at all. They are older pro-life women. You speak of bitterness, I genuinely struggle to think of anyone more embittered than an older woman who cannot get pregnant ordering a younger one to ruin her body and put her health at risk by going through labour against her will. Older Christian men without a woman in their lives might be bitter and try to take away young women’s freedom, yes, but the older pro-choice women top every other category in terms of nastiness, so far as I can see!
I simply do not see the same bitterness on the other side, because feminists do not attack women who choose to keep a child, but merely those who try to take away other women’s choice! This is the crucial difference between religious and non-religious groups: religious groups think they have the right to tell others what to do and take away their rights, but liberals do not want to take away your right to have a family the traditional way, they just want to give everyone the choice NOT to follow that path if they do not want to!
Hi Helena,
Thank you for your comments. I think you’ve read rather a lot into my silence on certain issues.
I’m not sure what I am supposed to say “in favour of willingly childfree women, of those who want to be doctors or whatever else and therefore do not want a husband right now (or perhaps ever)”.
Why does one have to be childfree in order to have a career in medicine, or any other field? If women (or men) don’t want to have a child that is their right, which I fully support. I just don’t support killing unborn children in order to achieve one’s career goals (or the propagation of the myth that kids are such a clog to one’s personal progress). Not having kids by literally not having kids, and not having kids by putting one’s mistakes to death in the womb are two entirely different issues.
I don’t know any of the nasty pro-life people of whom you speak so I really can’t comment. There are nasty people in a great many political and religious camps. However, most of the pro-life people I know, being Christians who live to love God and other people, are actually deeply compassionate in all kinds of ways.
I also think that the idea of a woman ruining her body and putting her health at risk through childbirth is simply overcooked. If one works on finding a marriageable man before putting oneself in a position to become pregnant, then the issue of one’s attractiveness becomes secondary (research has revealed that because of the nature of sexual bonding, men find their wives more attractive than other women even after childbirth and the effects of aging).
And what else might one lose while preserving one’s hotness and pursuing whatever number of partners one feels comfortable with? There are numerous health risks, as well as that of pregnancy; the very real risk of separating sex from love resulting in an inability to enjoy sex with one’s eventual spouse; the cumulative effect of heartbreaks after numerous semi-committed relationships break down…
Again, according to medics I have read, abortion is never justified for the health of the mother because killing the baby, in almost all cases, does not serve any purpose that could not also be achieved by means that preserve the baby’s life. This also applies to mental health since – in spite of claims that some women are very much at peace with having had an abortion – many women do suffer with mental health problems post-abortion. Planned Parenthood won’t tell you this in its advertising.
I hear you on the subject of a woman’s sexual pleasure, but I don’t think that merely focusing on sexual pleasure (and pursuing it in uncommitted relationship) is going to produce satisfaction for as many women as you claim. The relationship of love, fidelity and mutual submission that constitutes biblical marriage – is what ensures a harmony of love, sex, companionship and a balance of fatherhood and motherhood for their children. It require both spouses to work at it. Your side of the coin plays into the hands of uncommitted men (players) and virtually guarantees that a woman will have hurtful experiences of love and sex, which as research shows, do tend to undermine marriage once people decide to settle down.
“You are not saying anything to support the women who do not want to be mothers and so abort without regrets.”
If I regard abortion as a moral wrong, then of course I do not support the idea of anyone having an abortion, whether they regret it or not. Which is not to say that I would condemn or ostracise somebody who had an abortion. I just wouldn’t want them to do it, and I’d do my best to be a friend to them and to speak of God’s forgiveness if they came to me feeling conflicted afterwards.
Thanks again for responding!
How about the abortions which are nothing to do with the scenario you describe? How about the ones where wife & husband have decided together? How about the ones where carrying a child to term will result in death (or serious injury/ ill health) to one of the parties involved. It’s not always that simple. Very few things are.
Hi there, ktviola! Thank you for your comments.
I think it’s obvious that I’m against all abortion – because of the value of the life of the unborn child – although I try to be compassionate towards both men and women who have been involved in terminating a pregnancy.
As for situations in which “carrying a child to term will result in death or serious injury/ ill health”, I’m not sure I buy the idea that this has to result in termination in anything but a tiny fraction of cases. If the child cannot pass through the birth canal, this can be overcome by means of Caeasarean section. The literature I have read (written by medical professionals) says that there is hardly ever a medical justification for terminating a healthy foetus.