How to Prevent Eugenic Abortions

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If we make abortion illegal in the first place, selfish parents who want to murder their own children as well as the doctors who perform abortions will be put behind bars. If you think this will only raise the child abuse rate, we can also up the penalties for child abuse. Only fear will keep these scumbags in line. Love and fear are the most powerful motivators. If love doesn't work, fear of legal repercussions certainly will.

Well....I guess this means roughly half the members of this group are "scumbags", "murderers" and "selfish".


That would include me. For the record....i'm 100% prochoice. I support a women's right to kill her fetus at any time, for any reason.

And I refuse to make any apologies for it.

If you don't want a baby, why not get your tubes tied? Just wondering

It's proved that the severety ofd penality don't have influence on the crimes rate. If it was the case USA will have the lowest crime rate of western country, which is not the case.

Banning abortion isn't going to actually prevent abortions from being performed. Many will be performed regardless of illegality. If abortion is legal, at least those that are performed are done so in conditions that are unlikely to endanger the woman's life.

The reasons a woman may be influenced to get an abortion may be reasons she can't control. Maybe they can't afford to properly care for a child, or maybe the child's biological father was abusive toward her and she fears that he would be abusive toward a child, or maybe she fears that the child will be abused by someone else. Increasing penalties for child abuse does nothing to rectify these problems.

Also, many children who would be born would be neglected or unloved, or may be given up for adoption.

It is not possible to force a woman to love her child, even through legislation. It is also not possible to force a person to be a good parent.

first of all, what exactly do you mean by "eugenic abortions". it all depends on the context.

there is no point of giving birth to a child with down syndrome or something like that because not only is it wrong to bring someone into the world if they are only going to suffer, but doing something like that would be a burden on society.

there is also the possibility that a child would be born with a terminal illness like HIV or cystic fibrosis. in that case, whether or not it is ethical to give birth to a child who is likely to have a very short, painful life, is debateable.

what does bother me is the possibility that parents are only going to abort for convenience (since one can always give a child up for adoption instead of aborting him or her), or even worse, that parents are only going to want to give birth to perfect children.

there is genetic research on autism, so that the genes for autism could be annihilated, which bothers me because there are still high functioning autistic people, who may be really smart and contribute a lot to society. yet apparently, even if you are in the high functioning range of the spectrum, in people's eyes you are no different from the cases that are depicted in the media.

not to simplify a very complicated issue, but i think abortion should only be legal if a) the child would be mentally disabled and b) the mother was raped and giving birth is a danger to her health.

i dislike the idea of killing fetuses, yet for example, there was one case where a 12 year old girl was raped by her abusive father and became pregnant with twins. not only were the twins likely to have genetic defects because of incest, but the girl most likely would have died from giving birth to twins, which means that both the mother and the children would have died. if i remember correctly, she had an abortion and the pope ended up excommunicating her.

Because having a complicated surgery isn't preferable to using temporary birth control, which leaves the options open. Furthermore, doing that has side effects and one might not be able to afford it, either. Early abortion (Right after one suspects conception) is simple and easy, and is no different from the large amount of miscarriages that happen without the woman even knowing she was pregnant in the first place.

I think abortion should be illegal.

I also think that most pro-lifers (and, for that matter, most pro-choicers) are doing little to no thinking about all the things that have to be changed when it comes to women's rights, reproduction, and child-raising.

Right now, a woman may easily be economically forced into an abortion. She's grown up with not too much information about birth control; she's not too good at being assertive about her rights; and now she winds up pregnant. Let's say she's got a high-school education. She's got two choices, basically: Have the baby, and try to raise it; or get an abortion. If she has the baby, she'll have to support it on whatever job she can get, which with a high-school diploma will probably be unskilled or semi-skilled at best. If she doesn't have sympathetic relatives who'll watch the child while she's at work, she probably won't be able to afford child care. She's almost certainly going to have to depend on the government for her child's medical care; and if she can't find child care, she'll have to go on welfare herself. College? Forget it. Career? Forget it. Her life has been put on hold, possibly forever, just because she had a baby. Whereas, if she had an abortion, none of that would happen; and most people are not saints.

That, folks, is not "pro-choice". It's "forced choice".

This problem is why making abortion illegal is not just as easy as passing a law, and why keeping it legal is not helping women any more than it's helping their children.

We need better education and better access to birth control, so people don't get pregnant in the first place unless they want to get pregnant.

We need better resources for women who do get pregnant--birth control isn't 100% effective, after all--so that they can raise their children and still go to school, have a career, and do all the things that they would do if they weren't mothers. Gender equality can't happen until the most essential parts of being a woman don't hold us back.

We need better adoption policies, so that women can give up children for adoption if they don't want to raise them themselves. Open adoptions go a long way.

Child care is important--both in terms of affordable day-care centers (which, incidentally, creates jobs), and in terms of supporting relatives who provide child care.

And we need to tell the women who need them about the resources that exist, and how to use them.

It is NOT as easy as passing a law. Even if you're pro-choice, you haven't got any good reason to be sitting back, satisfied that you've given "reproductive freedom", whatever that means, to the country's women, because what we have right now is a betrayal of a woman's very nature. Making it so hard to raise children that you have to kill your own fetus just to have a decent life is NOT women's rights. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

I am pro-choice and I've had an abortion - I guess this makes me a "murdering scumbag" or something to OP. Unwanted pregnancy is a horrible thing, being forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term is even more horrible. I don't regret my abortion one bit. Even if you were able to successfully ban abortion - you'd have a bunch of unwanted kids in an already overpopulated world. I don't like the idea of eugenics, but I'd rather have less kids that are wanted then a bunch whose parents don't want them or can't deal with them plus the added benefit of torturing women with pregnancies that have a chance of killing them.

some women want them, but you then have these idiots called rapists/sexual predators wandering around.

In any case, the only situations I really believe abortion should be done are with cases of incest or rape.

But Callista, there are plenty of kids that do keep their child, even if it will ruin them financially. And even though this is a terrible choice, these people do have a choice. And there's another thing: How can you regulate reproduction? Can the government really tell who is allowed to reproduce, who can have children, who must have children? Maybe in China, but not in the real world.

Abortion is just another form of birth control. Using a condom and aborting a pregnancy have the exact same results, and the world is usually a better place for it. What's the difference between using a pill or an implant or abortion? Is abortion "murder"? Because potential for life is everywhere, but most of it is "murdered".

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Excusez-moi, but why would you abort in a case of (presumably voluntary) incest? Surely it's no different from any other pregnancy, unless it's rape, and if there is a fear of the child being unhealthy then why make it specific to incest and not to all cases of potentially disabled children?

Last edited by Michael_Stuart on 17 Apr 2010, 4:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Well, you can make that 'burden on society' argument about a lot of people who have no mental deficiency whatsoever, it's really a matter of opinion after all.

I've known several people with Downs Syndrome and they have all seemed among the most generally happy and all around good-natured people I've met anywhere. As far as I'm concerned we need Downs Syndrome people around to remind the rest of us not to stress over every little thing.


I'll grant that it's the female's right to make her own decision, up to a point, and I'm certainly old enough to know that if you aren't living in another person's shoes, you have no right to second guess and judge their personal decisions - they may feel they have no other viable option, even if you think they do - if you aren't living with a father who will beat you to death for getting pregnant, then 'give it up for adoption' sounds like a reasonable idea.

But that doesn't mean that I approve the morality or ethics of the decision. Even if 'life' is defined as the drawing of the first independent breath, there are so many of methods of birth control available in this world, making that decision retroactively is (in most cases) just irresponsible. Religion aside, the willingness to treat one's own progeny with such cold-blooded dispatch says a great deal about the value one places on human life and people in general. Talk about your lack of empathy.

Is there a reason you left out the obvious third choice -- adoption?

I am pro-choice because I would never force anyone to go through with a pregnancy. And I felt that way even before the 10 month nightmare that was my pregnancy.

That's true; I did forget that option in that particular sentence (if you'll note, I mention it later). However, adoption is so scary to many people nowadays that some wouldn't consider it. Women shouldn't be forced to put kids up for adoption any more than they should be forced to have abortions.

When your opinion, medically and philosophically, is that the fetus is a human being, then the fetus's life trumps the woman's right not to be pregnant. But that's only because there isn't a third choice that allows the fetus to live AND the woman not to be pregnant. There are only third choices that allow the woman not to become pregnant, or not to have to raise the child, or not to have many other choices taken from her because she is raising the child.

The basic question that makes the difference between pro-choice and pro-life is, "Is the fetus human?" Both sides care about human rights--or, anyway, should--and only differ on what the definition of "human" is. Pro-choice says "no" and thus the woman's rights are more important; pro-life says "yes" and considers the rights of both. The way we are going now, though, it's all been overwhelmed by political posturing, and the actual efforts to uphold people's rights are suffering for it.

Last edited by Callista on 17 Apr 2010, 4:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Not wanting a baby at a specific time in your life, or for some other reason, has nothing to do with never wanting a baby at all.

If you don't like abortion, don't participate in it. But keep your nose out of other people's business. It isn't your choice, it isn't your fetus, your religious and moral views are not to be taken as correct just because it's you who thinks it.