The real moral imperative is not to force women who cannot afford to raise another child to do so. This is the primary reason that abortions take place. Letting another child be born into poverty and deprivation in this country is hardly moral. Abortion was not widely considered monstrous by anyone but Catholics until the 1970s when Nixon hit upon that issue as a way to galvanize the Republican base and turn back the tide on progressivism.
No-one has ever considered it to be good or desirable, but in an imperfect world, it is necessary. Outlawing it will not slow down the rate of abortion, but it will increase the incidence of unsafe ones where women die. The Supreme Court set the limits based on when a fetus is potentially viable outside the womb, as that seems a reasonable demarcation line from when the rights of the woman may be overshadowed by the rights of the fetus.
Actually, one could make the legal argument that a fetus is committing a battery upon the woman — unwanted physical contact with someone that is non-consensual. Also, a fetus is not a citizen under the constitution.
Where do you stand on fertility clinics? They dispose of fertilized eggs every day. The ability for a woman to make her own reproductive choices is a civil rights issue because she is more than a host and a baby factory. She does not lose that right just because a man has ejaculated irresponsibly. This is an intersectional issue and trying to ignore that won’t make it any less so.
“Although media depictions tend to portray a woman getting an abortion as a young, single, White, middle-class woman without children, the majority of people having abortions are in fact people of color, the majority of whom are already parenting in poverty. According to the Guttmacher Institute, Black women account for 30 percent of abortions, Latinas account for 25 percent, and other non-White races account for 9 percent.
And there are other complexities buried in the statistics. While it’s true that Black women obtain abortions at five times the rate of White women, researchers attribute this to lack of health insurance and contraception access. And here’s the unfunny punchline: Low-income women tend to get their contraception dispensed from the same reproductive health care clinics that are being shut down.
Because these low-income women don’t have access to contraception, they need access to abortion care. Of all women obtaining abortions, 42 percent are living below the federal poverty level of $10,830 for a single woman without children. Another 37 percent live between 100 percent and 199 percent of the federal poverty level. And another unfunny punchline: Women denied the abortions they seek are three times more likely to be living in poverty two years later.”
Edit: As I recall, you aren’t in the US, but the same reasoning applies to other countries as well. The only way to reduce the need for abortions is to focus on making sex education and contraception accessible and affordable and also by making men the primary focus of our attention around this topic. 100% of unwanted pregnancies are caused by men ejaculating irresponsibly.
