An adult, a teen, a child, a baby, and even a fetus cannot force another person, against their will, to use any part of their body to keep them alive.
There are many arguments for why abortion should be safe, legal, affordable, and readily available to any person who needs one, for whatever reason, at nearly any point in a pregnancy. ** I use the word “nearly” because in the last dozen to 15 weeks of a pregnancy, the fetus is approaching viability on it’s own and no longer needs to use the mother’s body to survive. The number of abortions that happen in the third trimester are very rare and almost by definition occur because the mother’s life is in imminent danger. Emergency c-section is the fastest and safest way to remove/deliver a third trimester fetus/baby to first and foremost, save the mother’s life and with NICU care, hopefully save the life of her premature baby.
The vast majority of abortions happen in the first trimester which is at the end of twelve weeks. The second trimester which goes from 13 weeks to the end of 26 weeks, marks the second time-zone that abortions happen and often occur after prenatal testing shows that there is something seriously wrong with the fetus, often a severe genetic abnormality.
Many second trimester abortions are often difficult, deeply personal, heart breaking decisions because a woman knows she doesn’t have the emotional strength, family support, or financial resources to care for a disabled child. It is often out of mercy and love for her growing baby to NOT bring it into a world where it will only know pain, suffering, hospitals, surgeries, severe disabilities and create a lifelong financial burden on her, her family, and older or future siblings.
Or maybe she lives in a red state where abortion access is deliberately impeded by numerous insidious GOP-laid roadblocks and she wasn’t able to get one in her first trimester.
Whatever the reason, it should always be her choice, and her choice alone, if she wants to proceed with a pregnancy or terminate it for any reason. It is after all her body that she is granting permission to be used as a life support system and it is her right to withdraw her permission, aka “decide to pull the plug” when and if she wants.
The Government cannot force you to donate blood to save another person’s life, even if they are bleeding out and die in front of you. And it doesn’t make you a murderer, punishable with years or even life in prison if you refused to donate blood to save someone’s life.
Forced-birth Republicans have rapidly radicalized to believe they have a Christian religious right to insist that a fertilized egg is “life” and no matter how it was conceived, even by rape or incest, that zygote is “innocent life” so it is “pure” and even more deserving to live than it’s mother — to terminate that “life” is murder. They are forcing their religious beliefs on the rest of us.
Christians are so twisted and repressed in their views of sex that any woman who is pregnant is a “sinful slut” because she “opened her legs” to have dirty, sinful sex. Even if she is married, she knew the “consequences” of having sex and those consequences must be exacted upon her, even if she herself is a child or was gang raped at gunpoint. She is no longer a virgin and as such, she is impure and deserves to pay the price, the consequences of her sin, no matter if it kills her.
BTW, Republicans do not care if women and girls die from back-alley or botched self-induced abortions because they think they are murderers who deserve to die. Don’t even bother with that argument with them, it is a losing argument.
In our society, it is 100% your choice if you want to donate blood or bone marrow or even a spare organ like a kidney or lung to save someone else’s life. Your organs cannot be removed from your dead body to save another person’s life without your expressed, written permission prior to your death. As such, a dead American woman has more bodily autonomy than a living American woman.
I have seen many valid arguments online to protect the bodily autonomy of women, to enshrine that it is your body and you alone get to choose if and when you will allow another being to use your body to live. I think one of the best argument is not to argue “when life begins” as that is a philosophical argument that is based in radicalized, fabricated religious dogma. It’s a red herring.
So let’s assume for argument's sake a fetus is a full person, no different from a baby or child. No baby, no child can force you to donate blood, bone marrow, a kidney to save their life so how can a person force you to donate your uterus for nine months to save their life? And yes, I am calling the fetus a person for the sake of this argument.
They can’t. They shouldn’t. It’s wrong.
Because it doesn't matter when "life" begins, no person, not even a fetus person, can force you to use your body against your will to save their life.
Period.
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