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News-Sentinel.com Your Town. Your Voice.
Opening Arguments

Tough calls

Guess we should at least give this pro-choice advocte a salute for her stunning honesty and unwavering commitment: Stop calling aboriton "a difficult decision"

However, when the pro-choice community frames abortion as a difficult decision, it implies that women need help deciding, which opens the door to paternalistic and demeaning “informed consent” laws. It also stigmatizes abortion and the women who need it.

[. . .]

It is a tacit acknowledgment that terminating a pregnancy is a moral issue requiring an ethical debate. To say that deciding to have an abortion is a “hard choice” implies a debate about whether the fetus should live, thereby endowing it with a status of being. It puts the focus on the fetus rather than the woman. As a result, the question “What kind of future would the woman have as a result of an unwanted pregnancy?” gets sacrificed. By implying that terminating a pregnancy is a moral issue, pro-choice advocates forfeit control of the discussion to anti-choice conservatives.

Yeah, heaven forbid we define terminating pregnancy as "a moral issue requiring an ethical debate." That would imply there are competing interests here, and then we couldn't focus on what should be the sole issue, how disrupted a woman's life is when she has one of those pesky, inconvenient little blobs growing in here. Every single one of her arguments about "the woman's futue" of course collapses when one option she never even mentions is considered: Have the baby and put it up for adoption instead of creating the very existence of a baby.

I'm sorry, but any woman who has an abortion without considering it a "difficult decision" is not somebody I would care to know. Call me paternalistic.

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