Pro-choice is in the middle of the spectrum. The opposite of pro-life is the belief that people should be required to have abortions
I feel like this is where the debate gets lost in the fog-
Access to abortion isn’t about killing babies. It isn’t about population control. It isn’t about avoiding a christian based moral accountability for having unprotected sex.
It’s about consent and an individuals ownership over their body.
The opposite of a government controlling what a anyone can and cannot do with their body is letting the people have full control to what happens to their body.
In this case both the no abortions and forced abortions camps are on the same side. They are on control.
I look at the spectrum as like a horseshoe, the extreme ends are the two ends and pro-choice is the curved end. The curved end is pro-choice and the extremely ends are anti-choice. It’s uncommon, but there are people who believe abortion should be forced in some situations.
Anybody who claims to be pro fife I just refer to as pro forced birth. After birth they really don’t care what happens to the mother or the baby. If they did care then they’d be pushing for healthcare, food, housing, etc.
Because “pro-life” is not describing their position. They are not even “pro-fetus-life”. They are not taking any action to avoid accidental miscarriage in women, no educative program in this sense or collective action like distributing prenatal vitamins.
No, the only way to describe their position is “anti-abortion”. They are not pro anything, they are anti.
They are pro forced birth under all circumstances.
abortion
Use pro-choice, not pro-abortion; and use anti-abortion, not pro-life. Anti-choice can be used when talking about opposition to all reproductive rights, including abortion, birth control, family planning etc.– The Guardian style guide
Doesn’t matter because only religion is used in every argument for anti choice. The real issue is the inability for conservatives to separate bullshit religion from their policies.
Both are politically disingenuous names.
Pro life is a really funny name for “we want abortions illegal” when you also support the death penalty.
Pro choice is a funny name for “we want abortions to be legal” unless you’re trying to play middle lane politics.
They both seek to appeal to those beyond their cause through their name.
Have you ever seen the indy movie Citizen Ruth with Laura Dern? I actually knew the guy who played her meth-head boyfriend, and the fat-ass biker escort later on in the movie.
It’s almost as if believing people should have the right to choose how to live their life isn’t actually extremist
It’s more like a separate consideration than a part of the same spectrum, because these are just priorities that happen to contradict each other. In theory you could be both pro-choice and pro-life and try to optimize for both, making some degree of legal allowances for people to choose abortions but propagandizing against actually doing so and doing things like promoting sex education, the use of birth control, and poverty reduction that would decrease the rate of abortions. Or have a Zardoz esque ideology and be against both.
Of course most of the time pro-life seems to just be a euphemism, since people who are against the right to an abortion tend to not otherwise be concerned with things that make people more likely to want to choose abortions. They mostly just don’t want women to have an out for what they see as the rightful consequences of having sex.
One of the classics.
Their minds always have a strawman example of a “loose” woman whose primary birth control is abortion, something literally no woman wants to have done to herself.
That’s why I just call them anti-choice. Besides, they don’t care about anyone who is already alive so they can’t be pro-life
Pro birth. After that the kid can die for all they care.
They oppose abortion until it’s in a school shooting. It’s all about control.
They fear us because they know what we stand for.
“Pro-life” is just a marketing term.
There are plenty more examples of this.
Say, the political spectrum. We take full equality as radical left and full inequality as radical right. But actually, right is about the few having all the economic means and power, and many not having them, so, the opposite is many holding these means and power, and those from few not having them. So, basically, society turning billionaires into slaves, not equals, or imprisoning/exiling/otherwise oppressing them and their families. This is radical left.
This is what happens through many revolutions - world can be way more left than “radical left”, it’s not hypothetical. But ultimately, after everything is settled, this does not make too much political sense (and neither does the current right-leaning system), so people settle for equality for everyone. As a neutral point, not something radical.
Framing equality as something extreme is one way of swaying people from something they would otherwise easily agree is reasonable and good.
The many having rights and the few being oppressed is how it is for gender. And the people who support that are still right wing. So it’s more like a sideways horseshoe where left is actually the middle, and the ends are both on the right
“Radical left” as you propose doesn’t exist. In a truly equal society, billionnaires don’t exist and instead those that would’ve been, would’ve worked the same jobs as anyone else.
It does not exist because it doesn’t make too much sense in the long run. Besides, people who want to dominate others would rather join right, as there are more slaves to work with.
Doesn’t mean it cannot exist, and it temporarily existed in many revolutionary societies as a result of radical offset.
I’m not saying that this “many dominating few” kind of thing should exist. Neither do I want for the few to dominate many.
I prefer neutrality, and that comes with equality. This is true center, and the only meaningful way to go.
I don’t trust the billionnaires to support neutrality. Whenever they ever have an ability to influence, they can and will abuse it to kick people down the fictional ladder.
Huh. You’re not wrong, it’s called anti-natalism, where making baby is unethical.
What’s their take on accidental creampies?
A bit off topic, but these are great when frozen.
Frozen Nutty Buddy wafer bars were my dad’s favorite growing up… Unfortunately the cheap chocolate that coats them loses the tenuous temper it once had and becomes a liquid sludge at exactly 1 degree below room temperature so it melts all over the place and makes an absolute mess.
My brother and I got good at eating them straight out of the plastic wrapper without touching them.
They might call you unethical, but i believe everyone will call that a weak-ass pullout game across the spectrum.
The opposite of pro-life would be anti-life. When people say they’re pro-life they’re really only anti-abortion. They don’t care if the human dies as long as the fetus isn’t aborted.
That’s why I put “pro-life” in quotes in the title
pro-life has been used by the religious right to suppress womens bodily autonomy, so basically they are ANTI-LIFE.
It is possible to genuinely believe that abortion is equivalent to murder. I don’t see how you jump from there to them being anti-life.
I was against abortion myself when I was younger. But even if you see it as murder, at some point you should realize the situation isn’t black and white and there are situations where abortion makes sense. A friend of my sister is having an abortion because the fetus has a rare condition where it’s intestines are growing on the outside and it won’t live long anyway if born. I would think most sensible people would at least be okay with abortion in situations like that. Why make a baby be born to suffer and die immediately?
Also, it would be nice if so called “pro-life” people supported helping the child stay alive after they’re born, like accessible food and healthcare for everyone
Because outlawing abortion can and will cause deaths. For example, if you have an ectopic pregnancy, that’s life threatening.
Or what if you don’t want to have the child of a rapist? It feels like you’re being invaded, and you don’t want a child growing up without love. And abortion clinics aren’t present because of stupid reactionaries, so trenchcoat it is.
Or what if you simply cannot afford to raise a child right now, and anticonception fails? Then abortion is necessary.
Anti-choice is murder. Has society not failed when a clump of cells has more rights than a full grown person?
They claim to protect “the vulnerable”, but anti-abortion harassers (I reject calling them activists) don’t support your right to decide what to do with your body. And that makes you vulnerable.
If abortion is murder because fetuses are people, then fetuses are responsible for being up the snatches of people who don’t want them there
That doesn’t make any sense.
Yeah, I forgot the first word. Fixed!
The fetus simply cannot be responsible for that. It didn’t exist when the decisions were made to create said fetus.
Responsibility isn’t about who caused it in the past, it’s about who can fix it in the present.
So therapist is responsible for rape - not the rapist?
A rapist can say sorry and work on self-improvement. I’ve been abused and my abusers could do a lot more to help my mental health than my therapists have done. So many of my issues would be resolved if my abusers said they were sorry and helped unfuck the parts of my life they took a dump on. Trump could confess to diddling Epstein’s child sex slaves and go to jail and I bet it would do so much to help those girls.
Pro-Death
I’m just going to have the balls to say it: I’m anti-death. Boom, there it is. Flame away if you must, but I don’t like it when things die. I’m sorry if my old-fashioned views aren’t welcome here.
Have you played Elden Ring? You know why the Lands Between are all fucked up? Because they abolished death. Without death, we doom the world to hideous monsters and swamps of rot.
No, but I did stupidly pirate/start playing Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, not realizing it wasn’t a base game + DLC deal. Maybe that’s what I should do with the rest of my night. Pirate proper Elden Ring. Good call.
And if you like it and buy it, we might meet as friends or enemies.
I’m pro-abortion with few limited exceptions.
If you’re under 30 in today’s society, statistically, you are not economically prepared to adequately provide for a child. Choosing to have a child before 30 is tantamount to neglect, both of that child and of any future children you may decide to have.
All children deserve to be planned and prepared for. Finding yourself unexpectedly pregnant, the only reasonable decision is abortion.
Neither pro-choice nor pro-life but a secret third thing (not forcing the hypothetical potential progeny to become sentient without its prior consent)
I cannot understand this kind of anti-natalist perspective. My life isn’t perfect, and I’ve definitely had my share of struggle and suffering, but I’m elated at the experience overall. There’s absolutely a lot of cruelty and ugliness in the world, but there’s also profound beauty. Not even physical beauty like landscapes and sunsets and stuff, but moving, personal beauty: selfless generosity and compassion, performing artists in flow state, unity and cooperation, real love.
There wasn’t a me to consent to sentience before I had the sentience to consent with, so by your ruling no one could ever be born. Now that I have sentience, I’m glad of it and give my enthusiastic retroactive consent.
Well yeah, sure you are happy to be alive. You have luxuries like a communication medium and some electronics that you use to your liking.
You are literate and an least not heavily disabled, or at least not disabled enough that discussion and socialization are locked away from you.
How many people are born that do not meet that minimum baseline, or are on a clock until they don’t?
You have luxuries like a communication medium and some electronics that you use to your liking.
As do you, as does everyone else on the digital platforms on which the anti-natalist sentiment primarily resides.
And you can always revoke consent.
I want to be clear that I don’t recommend it. I think in the vast majority of cases, it is a permanent solution to temporary problems. I think the vast majority of people who consider it can live to change their minds.
I do think there are those who are so irreversibly disabled that their lives really are mostly suffering, and I support the right of those people to revoke their consent to life. But I think those cases are very rare.
Assuming the environment is reasonably stable, and there’s no serious history of irreversibly disabling conditions, I don’t think there’s a moral compunction to anti-natalism.
Buddy
My point is the anti natalists have the perspective that the risk of suffering is not worth imposing on a new human.
You saying that assessment is overblown does not change their perspective. It’s simple enough that with a bit of thought you can understand it, if you end up agreeing or not.
If you are using the phrase “I don’t understand” an a synonym of “I don’t agree with that stance” then I’m wasting my time.
My point is the anti natalists have the perspective that the risk of suffering is not worth imposing on a new human.
You saying that assessment is overblown does not change their perspective
The real part I didn’t understand is the “prior consent” part. Like I said, before you have the child, there’s nothing to ask for consent. It doesn’t make any sense.
But as to the rest, I’m saying that the assessment is so overblown that it ceases to be rational. A fraction of a fraction of a percent of people will never get fulfillment from life, so no one should ever have children?
There’s always some risk associated with everything. To never do anything because there’s a minuscule chance it could be disastrous is ridiculous.
Ok so you do understand it, but you are dismissing the concern. That’s fine.
For the prior consent part, consent requires active and willful assent to the act being effectuated. By the constraints of existence, children can not consent to be created. It’s an order of operations issue.
The act of consent is not asking. The act of consent is being told, yes you can do that to me.
I know what consent is. I’m saying that applying the concept of consent here is nonsensical. Consent is so logically impossible that it’s irrelevant. This is the part beyond understanding.
That’s why I bothered to go into any of the rest of the concern. The prior consent angle is meaningless, so the next place you go is retroactive consent.
I agree, bringing new people into sentience is not morally wrong at all, living is pretty cool.
I think people should prioritize adoption over birth. Supporting someone who was abandoned is way better than giving birth, and also avoids the physical and psychological pain/trauma of giving birth. That’s the one antinatalist point I agree with.
Same, I used to participate in antinatalist forums because I strongly believe that it’s selfish to bring new life into the world when you could instead love one of the children already in need of a home. But I don’t agree with the extreme antinatalist stance that nobody should be born ever. I think if you get pregnant and you want kids, by all means, keep it. Antinatalists are extremely cynical people who think life isn’t worth living at all.
In terms of ethics, adopting is beautiful. But there’s that one ugly factor that comes to make it so much worse: demographics.
If people come to adopt children instead of having their own, we won’t have enough new people to drive the economy (I know, I know, economists suck, but they’re right on that one). No one will be there to produce goods and services for ageing population falling out of workforce.
Children that aren’t going to get adopted will still be alive and join the ranks of adults. Children that weren’t born will not.
I wish there could be a good way to have both, though.
I do want a biological child or two, but I do also agree with prioritizing adoption. I plan to adopt/foster several children after my biological children grow up. Personally, I feel that’s a bit more ethical, as I’d like to establish my parental skills with the benefits of raising from birth and biological similarity, before I presume to handle the additional complexities of a child with a past.
Not sure what this framing accomplishes.
Semantics really but we all know what they both truly mean
