for lack of a better title

socopolitics:

1. Yes I believe putting a child in an orphanage is better than killing it.  I’d rather live on the streets myself than never live. Its a morbid thought to think so many will never take a first breath. 

2. You can get injured/die from having abortions. When your body undergoes changes, these things happen. If the woman’s life is at risk, the baby is too. Abortion in that case is reasonable. A woman that just doesn’t want a child does not constitute as a women at risk.

3. Do you know what maternity leave means? It means they have to guarantee you your job when you return. We have laws to prevent those sort of abuses, but this, and their career choices, is why women get paid less. They run the risk of getting pregnant. Your “I wouldn’t be surprised if’s” do little for your argument. You obviously know nothing about maternity leave or the laws around it..

4. Know what cost less? Condoms. Buy them, but use more than one contraceptive. Get on some pills. If you do get pregnant, home births run much cheaper (we’re talking about 2,300 for checkups, birth and all costs) and have better care than hospitals. I plan on getting one. Even if you don’t have that much money, 2,300 isn’t hard to collect. Trust me I was a Girl Scout. Have a bake sale  If you don’t want to keep the child, many times the adopter will dish out the money and the cost of birth is frequently a part of the contracts for newborn adoptions. 

5. Save a baby. Go fuck yourself. 

1. I can’t actually win this one. Not because I think I’m wrong, but because we have fundamentally different ideas about what constitutes human life. Personally, I’d rather not put the rights of a small bundle of cells that will eventually possibly develop into a human (if a miscarriage doesn’t happen, or other complications don’t arise) over the rights of the woman it’s attached to. So yeah, this one isn’t even arguable ‘cause neither of us is going to change our definitions.

2. I don’t actually care about risk. I care about women not being forced into a 9-month to 18 year commitment they didn’t want at the time, which can also irrevocably change their physical appearance in ways they aren’t consenting to. Obviously I also want abortions to be available for women who need them for medical reasons, don’t get me wrong. But a mother who is forced into carrying a child or raising a child at age 17 or 21 or 23 or fuck, 32 when they don’t want one? Among other things, that’s the sort of entrapment that reinforces poverty cycles. It can also drag an otherwise financially stable woman down below the poverty line. It can result in parents who aren’t up to par when, perhaps if they’d been able to choose of their own free will when to have a child, they might have been better. An unwanted and poorly timed pregnancy ruins lives.

Also, I checked out your list of abortion complications, but… I’m just not buying it. Most of those stats are unsourced, and just feel blatantly stacked or massaged, whether you did it or got the information second-hand. This one I’m actually going to do some digging into, so let’s see what I find, eh?

http://www.prochoice.org/about_abortion/facts/safety_of_abortion.html for starters, which paints a picture of legal abortion as being pretty much one of the safest medical procedures possible, but let’s go digging for some sites without an admitted bias in the url, eh. (Though that article DOES cite all its sources…)

And now I found an actual academic journal. I’ll admit I’m just skimming for tables here because I don’t really feel like reading an entire paper this morning, but even still: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1965375?uid=3739392&uid=2&uid=3737720&uid=4&sid=21102283052717

From what I’ve seen, post-operation hospitalization for abortion patients in most cases is extremely short, with a general maximum of 8 days. 0 days of hospitalization is also pretty likely. Hospital stays increase as the lateness of the abortion increases, but this isn’t particularly surprising to me all things considered. Let’s see what the rate-of-complication and mortality figures are…

Complication rate in general is 10% of abortion patients, HOWEVER it’s worth noting that a vast majority of said complications were minor - a single day of fever or nausea after the procedure, for instance. Major complication rates are much lower - 10% of people who experience complications experienced a major one, which tallies out to 1% of all people who underwent abortions. The mortality rate found by the study was 8.2 per 100,000. You have a higher chance of dying while getting your tonsils removed. Converted to a percentage, that’s a 0.0082% chance of dying while getting an abortion - and if you get it in the first trimester, the rate of death is even lower.

So sure, there are complications, but they’re pretty vanishingly small. In addition, your complications information is actually misleading - 10 percent of patients report complications, yes, but you’re being deliberately obscuring of what a complication is. From that paper, a majority of the complications are minor. It’s also worth noting that feeling suicidal is bundled into major complications - meaning less than 1% of all abortion patients actually feel suicidal after the operation.

Furthermore, your suicide facts are blatantly wrong, and I didn’t need to go further than wikipedia to find that. 

Systematic reviews of the scientific literature have concluded that that there are no difference in the long-term mental health of women who obtain induced abortions as compared to women in appropriate control groups.^[4] While some studies have reported a statistical correlation between abortion and clinical depression, anxiety, suicidal behaviors, or adverse effects on women’s sexual functions for a small number of women, these studies are typically methodologically flawed and fail to account for confounding factors

(http://www.contraceptionjournal.org/article/S0010-7824(08)00369-7/abstract is the link to the source there.)

So… yeah, unless you’ve got some other papers you’re hiding, I think this one’s mine.

3. Alright, to start off with, did you seriously just try and justify the wage gap? Is your logic actually ‘women run the risk of getting pregnant, and therefore get paid less and have fewer career options, but this is okay?” Really? You’re actually advocating for a system in which women are actively discriminated against because of a biological fact that, beyond contraceptives, we have a solution to?

Let’s move on though. I just did a quick google search for women who were fired for getting pregnant. There are a lot of results, yo. I think this one article sums it up pretty well for me, though. http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2012/04/05/epidemic-of-pregnant-women-getting-fired-legal-loopholes-to-bla/

Important things to take away from that: discrimination against pregnant employees is so common the EEOC has had to hold a hearing to figure out ways to get employers to obey the law. Women can try to seek advocacy, but it would appear there’s a tendency to fail. And beyond that, even in just a quick search (this isn’t even hard research just quick googling), I saw several stories of employers just… making the job so hard or unbearable that newly pregnant women either quit to avoid the harassment, or were terminated due to performance issues the management created.

Not to mention, like that article says, the Maternity Leave laws don’t actually give women a salary or the rights to keep their job before they take maternity leave. So, say you’ve got a woman living below the poverty line who makes her money doing hard labour. If she gets pregnant, she’s not going to be able to do that any more - and she’s not guaranteed a damn cent from her place of employment even if she manages to take maternity leave. And if they fire her wrongfully or other abuses occur? She doesn’t have the money to find advocacy and doesn’t have the power to win even if she did seek out legal assistance. That is a situation that needs to be corrected, yes, don’t get me wrong, but forcing women into that situation against their will while the system is still broken is just going to ruin lives.

4. 2,300 is a small amount? Man, I don’t exactly know what the minimum wage is in the US, but here in Canada? Working at a minimum wage full time job, that’s two full goddamn months of pay. And as far as I know, a midwife can’t administer a c-section if it’s called for or deal with complications, so that option goes out the window if you know ahead of time it’s going to be a problematic birth in one way or another, or if you’re not physically capable anymore of having a vaginal birth. In purely economic terms, an abortion wins. Every time. The average cost figure I found was about $465, and don’t get me wrong - for a woman living hand to mouth, that’s still pretty fucking steep, but it’s a hell of a lot better than $2300, or $10000+, especially if said woman doesn’t have health insurance to mitigate any of those costs.

Actually gonna edit this too ‘cause I’m not quite done here. That’s just the brute cost of delivering a baby, it says nothing of the costs of care before the event. I’ve done enough googling for one day and I need to book a vet appointment for my cat so I’m not going to look up figures, but I wouldn’t be surprised if ultrasounds and other standard procedures for pregnant women run up the costs significantly too.

I lied, I checked. At the cheapest, an ultrasound is $100 per. That’s significant if you’re strapped for cash.

Do you seriously think that everyone in America just has $2300 to throw at a problem like that, let alone has the option to give an assisted birth at home? That’s just being blind, man.

5. I can’t be arsed to come up with more unique ways to curse you out so whatever, I’m just gonna drop the mic and walk off. Ball’s in your court again, come at me bro.

socopolitics:

thisiszen:

socopolitics:

Yo bro, forcing a girl into finishing a pregnancy before she’s ready to have a child isn’t creating a responsible mother, it’s chaining a woman to a mistake she made that was easily fixable. A woman who has a child on her own terms has a HELL of a lot better chance of…

Is it really such a hard concept that a pregnant women can give up her child for adoption?

Because what the adoption system needs is more kids when they can’t adopt out half the ones they already have? Sure that’s a good plan. Especially if the child falls into any number of different categories with horrid adoption rates, like for instance having a disability of some sort. The adoption system in the US is already drowning in kids, and your solution for the ‘sake of the child’ is to force yet another kid into the system? Where, sure, MAYBE they’ll find a loving family, but maybe not and the alternative is pretty shit?

Not to mention forcing a woman to carry a baby to term can have enormous physical impacts. In the Western world we’ve been able to make childbirth much safer but there are still plenty of health risks, and even if the pregnancy is absolutely picture perfect, if the baby is large or carried in an unfortunate way, it could potentially cause lifetime physical alterations to the mother’s body. My brother, for instance, was a very, very big baby. He permanently stretched out my mother’s ribcage over the course of that pregnancy.

Not to mention any situation where a woman might be working when she becomes pregnant, where those 9 months of labour actually turn into a liability - even if she CAN keep working for the majority of the pregnancy (not a guarantee) eventually she’s going to take maternity leave, which can be relatively damaging for her career prospects. I don’t have any links, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were places where you could be or would be terminated before you could take your maternity leave. Especially when the woman in question is poor and doesn’t have much in the way of personal advocacy, those sorts of abuses of power wouldn’t surprise me at all.

Plus, y’know, healthcare costs in America are fucking insane and I imagine the bill for a delivery would be hefty, because the bill for EVERYTHING in America as far as I know is ridiculously hefty. Or: Having a baby could put someone into the poorhouse for medical bills. And god forbid there be any complications!

In summary, I notice you haven’t impaled yourself on your own bullshit yet. Seriously, I wasn’t kidding. Shove your entire argument up your ass, preferably sideways.

EDIT: A quick google search confirms to me that an uncomplicated birth would still run you about 10 grand, and if you need a c-section that’s another 5000. And those are both for relatively uncomplicated procedures - imagine if something goes wrong and figure out how much it’d cost then. Now consider how many people in the US can’t afford health insurance.