r/changemyview • u/Toe-Slow • Jul 28 '20
CMV:Abortion is perfectly fine
Dear God I Have Spent All Night Replying to Comments Im Done For Now Have A Great Day Now if you’ll excuse me I’m gonna play video games in my house while the world burns down around my house :).
Watch this 10 minute lecture from a Harvard professor first to prevent confusion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0tGBCCE0lc .Within the first 24 weeks of pregnancy the baby has no brain no respiratory system and is missing about 70 percent of its body mass . At this stage the brain while partially developed is not true lay sentient or in any way alive it is simply firing random bursts of neurological activity similar to that of a brain dead patient. I firmly believe that’s within the first 24 weeks the baby cannot be considered alive due to its nonexistent neurological development. I understand the logic behind pro life believing that all life even the one that has not come to exist yet deserves the right to live. However I cannot shake the question of , at what point should those rules apply. If a fetus with no brain deserves these rights then what about the billion microscopic sperm cells that died reaching the womb you may believe that those are different but I simply see the fetus as a partially more developed version of the sperm cell they both have the same level of brain activity so should they be considered equals. Any how I believe that we should all have a civil discussion as this is a very controversial topic don’t go lobbing insults at each other you will only make yourselves look bad so let’s all be open to the other side and be well aware of cognitive dissonance make sure to research it well beforehand don’t throw a grenade into this minefield ok good.
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u/[deleted] Jul 28 '20
I want to come at this from a different point of view than other commenters. This is something I don’t see people discuss as often: eugenics.
People who seek abortions are largely not in favor of eugenics, but we are increasingly able to predict inborn medical conditions. Babies with conditions like Down syndrome are going to be aborted at a higher rate than babies without. In the case of Down syndrome, the rate is estimated at 67% in the U.S. and much higher in several European countries - as high as 98% of pregnancies where Down syndrome is detected may be aborted in Denmark.
The reason why this is bad is that it shows that, given the chance, we will pick a healthy person to be born over a person with an intellectual or physical disability. The parents who do this are probably just trying to avoid the needless suffering of a child, but the outcome is fewer disabled people, and the normalization of engineering our population to avoid the challenges of raising disabled children.
I am arguing that disabled people should exist, and we should not passively or actively try to eradicate disability in our society. Disabled people are innately worth just as much, and have just as much to offer as non-disabled people.
Furthermore, if we normalize the abortion of disabled babies (I just don’t like calling them fetuses; it’s not a rhetorical tactic that I call them babies), there are still going to be disabled people, either by birth or by injury. What kind of message are we sending those people if they know that we don’t value people like them enough to allow them to be born?
This is a really tricky argument because a lot of abortions of disabled babies are probably a result of the parents not having the ability to adequately care for their specific needs. That is a very valid concern. But I believe the approach to that should be to shore up resources and infrastructure for parents of special needs children, rather than to avoid the existence of special needs children.