Would you advocate your own abortion?

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Nonsense.

If you used your trip in the time travel Delorean car to persuade your mom to abort you then...you are committing suicide. No different then if you used that time trip to whip out a pistol and shoot your mom to death on the spot.

I dont know what the REAL issue is that the Glitch is really asking after.

He could be trying some political debating gambit having to do with your stand on the abortion issue.

Or he could be asking if you want a lite form of suicide.

One or the other.

Even pro choicers dont go around "advocating" that any individual should get abortions. So why would they do that for anyone back in time? Not ones own mom surely, but even a Right-to-life might go back in time and try to persuade Hitler's Mom, or Jeffery Daumier's mom, to have an abortion.

But if you're suicidal then you might well "advocate for it" in the OP's scenario regardless of your political or religous beliefs.

Or at least thats the case the way he has it set up.

You can postulate a scenario in which your own death is taken out of the equation. There is the parallel universe theory that at every juncture a different time line is created- likes forks in a road. So even if you did persuade your mom to abort you it would just create a seperate time line into a seperate parallel universe in which you dont exist, and you would still return home in the Delorean to the present in your current time line in which you do exist. Problem solved.

In that scenario you would not be committing suicide regardless of what you do. So myself... pretty much what Isabelle said. Not advocate FOR an abortion, but coach her on what the options are and let her decide.

And then there is the "Grandfather Paradox". You have just this one timeline (no forks in the road to parallel universes). You go back in time and gun down your parents before you were born (or advocate for the abortion in question or whatever). And thereby cause yourself to cease to exist. Thereby preventing you from making the time travel trip, thereby preventing yourself from ....preventing yourself from being born....thereby insuring that you ARE born, and that you DO exist, thereby enabling you to...make the trip after all ...so you CAN prevent your own existence....

But thats a whole nother can of worms. For the science section. Not the Philosophy section.

Not all women have it but many do, myself included.
That's why if we're "pro-choice", we must always accept that a choice to keep the baby despite all odds and reasoning is also a very valid choice. If my mother had to abort me, she would be very badly scarred for life.

BTW, I call myself "pro-support". Focusing on the quality of both the choice and the life.

I've been saying I wish my mother aborted me for years.

No. I'm glad I got the right to live my own life even though usually it's not easy nor satisfying.

I consider myself pro-life, but not anti-choice. Fetus is a human, life begins when gametes fuse.
I'm convinced that every woman should be able to make her own decision, especially when it's about her body. The government is not the institution to judge individuals' decisions, it is getting dangerous when it broadens its prerogatives and harasess people, as history taught us.

The irony of this question - a lot of the people with the lowest self esteem and the most likely to say 'yes' are some of the most valuable, and some of the people we'd most want to say 'yes' emphatically (a guy waging war right now comes to mind) would have been most likely to emphatically say 'no'.

These sorts of scenarios at least make psychopathy look a bit like a superpower and simple humanity and honesty about life appear to be a weakness.

OP is not asking whether you would like to not exist, but whether you would prefer to have been aborted. Given the current political debate, there are connotations.
But the question of whether I would like to have been killed before I got conscious presupposes well... Me.
But the foetus that would have gotten killed only developed into me and my current mental state over the following 38 years.
The whole time travel debate is nice and hypothetical, but it's free of the real world debate that's being had right now.

So, only a depressed person would wish to have been aborted, but the fetus being aborted is not that depressed person. It's not the non-depressed person who would answer "no" either.
I mean, the question basically will find that about 20% or how ever high the rates of depression in the population are would prefer to have been aborted, 80% not, meaning there's an 80% chance an abortion is destroying a person who would like to live or whatever.
But there's no transcendent place where the souls wait to get born and then get disappointed for not having been born. These people just don't exist at all, if the fetus doesn't get born.

Most tales of said transcendent place are known to have somewhat casual reasons for miscarriage, such as a couple who was having a relationship-fatal falling out over whether a boy would be circumcised, the wife had a miscarriage in the shower several days later, a daughter was conceived, and the daughter claimed memories of having been the first child, elected them as her (then his) parents, and chose to stop the process and come in as a girl to avoid divorce of would-be parents.

I said some things about the abortion debate and Roe v Wade in the US (current news folder) that you might find interesting. My speculation over there - this may very well have more to do with neoliberalism needing more bodies for work and taxation (particularly work no one else would want to do) than it does with an 80's evangelical conservative base, by now mostly in assisted living. I could be wrong, I hope I am, but if that were the case we'd really have to keep an eye on that development.

Nah, neoliberalism is not to blame here, per se. But at reproduction rates of 1.4 children perwoman, pension systems collapse and economies shrink. And shrinking economies, whether neoliberal or not, are a catastrophe for any capitalist system that runs on 'everything will be better as long as the economy is growing'.
Sure, there's a need for low-end labour, but at these reproduction rates, any kind of labour market collapses.

OP is not asking whether you would like to not exist, but whether you would prefer to have been aborted.

@ Shlaifu

How is that not a "distinction without a difference"?

Its no different then saying "would you like to go back in time and gun down your grandparents preventing yourself from being born?".

AND...even if you could show me that there IS a difference then...why ask the question?

That's kind of my point: I can say that I would or would not prefer my own non-existence over my current existence.

But my own abortion? That question leads to an entanglement in hypotheticals. There's now our families to consider, all the people we met, the state of the world etc. - but we can't really imagine that as a place in which we never were born because we literally only know our experience of it, it's impossible to imagine a world which we only know as our experience- but without us.

It's a bit like asking if the world would be better without Hitler - sure. But if you bring a time machine into the mix and plot Hitler's death, you get entangled in time travel paradoxons and the question if someone else had taken his place and what would Stalin had done without a fascist threat from the west etc. And you might end up with maybe you shouldn't kill Hitler. - and maybe you really shouldn't time travel and murder Hitler, because it would lead to something worse. But would the world be a better place without Hitler? - in the abstract, yes.

But thinking about time travel and killing Hitler has little consequence, it's not up for debate right now and this thought experiment won't lead us to bad conclusions which we will turn into bad action.
But entertaining such thought experiments on a real world discussion that's being held needs to be considered - the way the thought experiment is set up might favour certain conclusions over others, and currently, there's the opportunity to actually act on these conclusions

Last edited by shlaifu on 08 May 2022, 8:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I don't have a girlfriend or a wife or any children or family. The most that would change is I didn't exist is that my creditors wouldn't be profiting from the interest I'm compounding.

No because I'd be curious to see what happens which kind of defeats the purpose

I believe the OP is trying to make a pro-life point through starting this thread.

It would depend on om her reasons.

A crush is not "love".
I could have had a "man-crush" on a guy I admire (when I was young), but it isn't "love".

That is dependent on *context*.
I believe in pro-choice for the woman, but from an objective perspective, I would consider the situation more closely.

Having a baby in a famine, with others dying around you from starvation, is *not* a choice I would support.