I find it annoying when anti-abortionists call themselves “pro-life” – which carries the implication that those who don’t fully agree with them are “pro-death”. I don’t like abortion, but I’ve never heard of anyone who does, not even those who get paid to do it. It happens naturally, in the form of miscarriages: Nature does not expect every embryo to become a baby.

I live in Ireland, where abortion is still illegal, but there are many “counselling services”, and family planning clinics are a mere day trip away from Dublin, by ferry to Holyhead in Wales. The key objection to it here is religious vitalism, the idea that a fertilised egg immediately gains an ineffable “spark of life”. If you don’t believe that, you are left with the idea that the development of a life is a continuum, something that happens gradually over time, and not a yes/no proposition. This leaves a grey area that the law of the land tries to fill, with varying degrees of success in different countries. When you have to draw a line through a grey area, you can’t expect to please everyone.

Personally, I take a long term view: prevention is better than cure, so contraception is preferable to abortion. If contraception fails, however, and abortion is considered, the long-term problem becomes one of bringing a child in to the world who is unwanted, and who may only suffer a life of hardship.

This may sound harsh, but this world does not need more people: it needs fewer and better people, people who have been loved, cared for, supported, and allowed to develop to their full potential. That has to start with being healthy and wanted, being a boon to their parent(s), and not a burden from before birth. As a civilization, we are past the stage where breeding is an imperative, a duty to perform; now, since we don’t have to do it, we may as well try to do it as well as we can, with an eye on the whole process, from conception to adulthood. We don’t have to emulate Nature in all respects, if we can avoid the consequences of overbreeding.

Posted: June 1st 2009

See all questions answered by brian thomson

Every “pro-life” person I’ve dealt with is coming at it from a religious perspective. Often they will try to rationalize their belief and pretend it’s based on science and/or ethics, but the bottom line is that anti-abortion is a religious belief.

Also, as noted, the most vehement anti-choice people are usually anti-sex education, and sometimes even anti-birth control. Abstinence education has been proven to be a disaster, yet its advocates continue to proclaim it as the best solution, even when the evidence against it is right under their noses. (Sarah Palin.)

If you talk to an anti-choice person long enough you’ll usually find their attitude is that women who get abortions are cheating God. Their unwanted pregnancy is a punishment for promiscuity, and they should be forced, by law, to take that punishment.

Since this is a religious belief, it should not be legislated. It is a deeply personal decision, so should be left to individuals, not decided by political weasels who are, for the most part, old men.

Posted: May 26th 2009

See all questions answered by Dave Hitt

I am opposed to all efforts to make abortion illegal.

I think the only effective way to reduce the number of abortions is to improve the availability of contraceptive devices and to provide comprehensive sex education for all who need it. Thus, we can reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies and reduce the need for many abortions.

Such an effort would also have the effect of reducing the number of sexually transmitted diseases in our society. Also a worthwhile goal.

I also think the issue of abortion and reproductive rights is one on which there has been far too much hype and hysteria voiced from both sides. (There’s an essay titled “A death in the life of a controversy” on my website, which fleshes out my thinking on this. It’s slugged “thoughts on abortion.”)

And thanks for the comments regarding this site. If it has helped you gain some perspective about what atheists think, then it is serving a useful purpose.

Posted: May 25th 2009

See all questions answered by George Ricker

Thank you for your valued and much appreciated feedback regarding your learning the reasons why we have no god belief and becoming acquainted with what we do believe.

Abortion can be a very difficult choice. In my case, it wasn’t. I was terribly sick, it was an very early gestation, and I viewed it as an essential medical procedure for myself. Almost immediately after the abortion, my crushingly debilitating sickness vanished and I wanted to live again. The most important lesson of my personal experience is that it was my choice, informed by my doctors. Not society’s, not that odd man in Rome with bad fashion sense, not my family’s or my friends’, not even the man whose sperm fertilized my egg.

There were anti-abortion protesters present outside the clinic, while I was helped into the waiting room. They made absolutely no difference on my state of mind and resolve to have the abortion. When I walked out, I was smiling. It was a very successful medical procedure.

The rule of thumb that is used is not when a gestating form becomes a person (whatever that means anyway, as racists consider that certain people are not people even when they are fully grown and Muslims regard women as a half of a person), but when that gestating form is viable on its own and/or with medical support. This rule of thumb is getting more and more challenging to apply, because of the advancement of medical science with premature infants able to survive earlier and earlier.

It is best to have women educated in birth control and for them to have affordable access to it as women are the ones who will carry the baby to term and most likely care for it while the child is dependent on them for many years. The are the ones that risk death giving birth. Abstinence – or more likely the failed attempt to abstain – is the fool’s way to family planning. If a method, no matter how effective it is – and abstinence is 100% effective – does not meet with significant patient compliance then it is useless in reality.

There is a problem of over-population, stressing the allocation of resources on earth. I view dogmatic religious beliefs, especially Catholic ones, to be a big problem in terms of controlling world population because the Catholic Church is a powerful, global organization which has political clout in developing countries with burgeoning population rates. Their dogmatic notion that even sperm is sacred actually is increasing the occurrence of the often ethically messy procedure of abortion.
Non-Catholic Christian sects who encourage 'opening the womb to god’ are also problematic in terms of controlling world population.

There is no evidence for any of their beliefs, and yet their decision to have unlimited babies for the love of an unproven supernatural being is adversely affecting the well being of us all—not at all unlike the rabid anti-vaccination crowd who are decreasing herd immunity through their non-evidential belief that vaccination has a causative relationship with autism, causing an increase in dangerous childhood diseases that once were vanquished.

Keep in mind, the majority of the percentage of women who choose abortions in America are religious. What does that tell you? That these women are not true religious believers? They are. They love their religious beliefs and are very much comforted by them. They are women who chosen abortion because it was their choice, not because they were influenced by a 'liberal agenda.’ If religious women are choosing abortion, then the heads of those religions are missing something very important. If your own members are going against your dictates, you need to employ another method, a method that works in Europe to keep the abortion rate low, and that is sex education/family planning and access to birth control and as early/least number as possible abortions as abortion is a medical procedure with risk.

Atheists point out that the unproven god, itself, in which religious believers insist on existing, must be responsible for many abortions—the gestating form is rejected automatically in a number of cases because there is something wrong with its development. I had one of these 'god-chosen’ spontaneous abortions, and I can tell you when that small bloody mass of cells plopped into the toilet (the same age of the gestating form I had selectively aborted), I did not feel in the least any motherly/nurturing sense towards this bloody clump. It helped of course that I did not know I was pregnant and I was not emotionally expecting to carry to term a baby.

So what’s up with this intelligent designer? It has many women aborting spontaneously small bloody clumps of tissue for what reason? Sounds like a very untalented 'intelligent’ designer.
And I can tell you neither me nor the folks in the restaurant (especially the squeamish and mostly unhelpful male customers) where the spontaneous abortion occurred appreciated god recalling back his defective design at that exact moment.

Posted: May 25th 2009

See all questions answered by logicel

I think there are occasions, all of them unfortunate, when abortion is the best choice. Therefore I think there is a choice to be made, so I’m “pro-choice”.

An important part of this choice is at what stage the unborn becomes a person, subject to the same protections as a newborn. Without the premise that a soul enters at conception, conception is not that stage.

I look at it this way. Two days after conception there is merely a collection of cells with nothing to do but divide, incapable of thinking, remembering or suffering. (Elsewhere I’ve called it “cell soup”.) Eight months after conception there is a complete human being which could be born prematurely and probably survive. Somewhere between these two stages is a tipping point, a reasonable threshold of personhood. Every baby develops differently, so one needs to consider the case at hand every time.

My feeling is that the threshold is generally about two months after conception, roughly when the term “foetus” can first be used. Before that it’s a blastocyst, a zygote or one of many other forms. At these earlier stages, the capacity for human function is extremely limited at best.

After the threshold, there had better be a very strong reason to abort, for example to protect the life of the mother or to prevent the future suffering of a severely deformed foetus. I’m not saying either of these is a cast-iron case for abortion, but they certainly make the choice more difficult.

In practical terms, being “pro-choice” means choosing not to abort most of the time. Abortion is always a loss of great potential, so I’d rather it never had to happen. Unfortunately, sometimes people must decide with the greatest love and care that it needs to happen.

Posted: May 24th 2009

See all questions answered by SmartLX

I do believe strongly that in matters like these (abortion, doctor-assisted suicide, near-death medical treatment), the people who are closest to the decision are the ones who matter.

Having said that, here’s what I think about abortion (from the US perspective, since that’s where I live).

The vast majority of abortions are due to unwanted pregnancies. So, if you want to reduce abortions, you need to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies.

To do this is trivial. France has 1/4 of the pregnancy rate, Germany 1/5th, and the Netherlands 1/9th. They do this by comprehensive sex education, and they get the benefit of much lower rates of STDs as well.

The reason the US has crappy sex education is because of our puritanical roots and overall discomfort with the subject. Many evangelicals would rather have kids get STDs or have teenage pregancies than teach them to use condoms. The catholic church is the worst offender in this area. I can understand the “every fetus already has a soul” perspective (though I don’t agree with it), but I don’t understand the “every sperm is sacred” (to rip off Monty Python) approach. Any religion that values the number of people without any respect to the quality of life is morally bankrupt to me.

And I think anybody who thinks that widespread STDs and teenage pregnancy is better than the alternative is nuts. Until you have done your best to reduce the number of unintended pregnancies, you have no right to say anything about abortion.

So, that covers a lot of the abortions right now.

The remainder cover cases where people don’t plan well (no birth control), cases of failed birth control (and no access to medications like Plan B), or medical issues (either harm to the mother or birth defects).

As I said in the beginning, I think people need to make their own decisions in those circumstances. I don’t think abortion should be a casual decision, but think that it’s not one in the vast majority of the cases already…

Posted: May 24th 2009

See all questions answered by Eric_PK