This is a very US culture war take. Places like Japan and the Scandinavian countries also worry about low birth rates, but (eg) criminalizing abortion is simply not on the table.
Even outside of abortion, a lot of discussion is about wanting women back in the kitchen, dependent on partner. Simultaneously being forced to marry to have resources and simultaneously being unable to leave it things dont work well
In Scandinavia women are a part of the draft and parental leave is being equalized such that men can leave the workforce as long as women to take care of kids.
There is no pressure for women to get kids at all (besides what their mother might say).
> Now that it’s become impossible to pretend that a fœtus is anything other than a separate human, the debate has become about whether it’s a justified homicide or not.
This is a very theocratic answer.
I know zero people who regard a fetus as "a separate human". Last time I did, it was the 90s and I was in a Catholic secondary school in the UK. Since then, even famously-Catholic Ireland has liberalised their abortion laws.
That one can also make an argument that says "it doesn't even matter if you think they're a separate human or not, we don't force people do donate kidneys and that has the same risk as a pregnancy", doesn't change the fact that even thinking a foetus is a person is primarily a religious position at this point.
I believe the point is "separate, as in not the same as the mother". It's not the mother - it has different DNA. This is the problem with the whole "a woman's right to do what she wants with her own body" response: It's not her body. Or at least, it's not all her body. Part of it is a different individual. And so her right to do what she wants with her own body is inextricably intertwined with another individual that she does not have that same right over.
But, in the sense that you took it: We currently can save children born prematurely at 22 weeks. Normally such a child would live within and attached to the mother for another 18 weeks, but if we need to, such a child can live outside but attached to a bunch of machines.
So, at least separable, even if not usually separate.
>This is the problem with the whole "a woman's right to do what she wants with her own body" response: It's not her body.
It is. Or so I claim. Renders the rest of the argument moot.
Also, no woman is aborting fetuses for fun. The whole issue is a waste of time and just a way to get people riled up for no reason, at the expense of women losing rights because doctors now have to watch their back for even more liability.
You would be surprised. I know of some "women rights activists" who basically do this for bragging rights, or maybe some kind of "rite of passage". And some doctors who talk about aborting 9 month fetuses as if it was giving them a boner.
I also know a celebrity who had an abortion, because she didn't feel like moving to a bigger apartment (which she could easily afford, given that she and her partner are making millions in income).
It’s a lie, not just outside the norm. Later term abortions are all for medical reasons. See data in MotherJones link.
But people against women’s rights will have you believe there is some sort of epidemic where women are choosing to go through 8 months of pregnancy, and then wake up in an evil mood, go to the doctor’s office, and order an abortion off the combo menu to get their jollies off.
And if that wasn’t crazy enough, that there are doctors that would just go ahead and do it.
It is not homicide and never was. The homicide point is just an excuse.People who want to criminalise abortion do not care about lives after being born in the slightest.
It is about punishing women for sex about wanting them to suffer if they have risky pregnancy.
We need to stop pretending conservatives have honest motivations.
I’m pro choice but when I was at a catholic high school my peers and the adults seemed genuinely convinced that abortion was literally killing a human - akin to infanticide. I think many of them indeed opposed abortion based on this. It’s part of why the debate was intractable - it even brings in the hard problem of consciousness, and we don’t have an answer to that.
