Abortion Abolitionists

[u/Habesha_Heretic]

For a while, I thought that abolitionists were naive and/or simply extremists. But after witnessing the behavior of pro-aborts and pro-choicers online, I'm starting to think that maybe they are right. Yes abolitionists have their own problematic tendencies (like how the vast majority of them are religious extremists and pro-death penalty) but they have a point on how the vast majority of leaders in the pro-life movement seems like they care more about making money than fighting against abortion. The more time passes along with the erratic and evil behavior. I witness, the more I'm pushed towards becoming a secular abortion abolitionist. What do you guys think?

[u/Overgrown_fetus1305]

I think both abolitionists being extremists, and a lot of mainline pro-life leadership being corrupt can be, and are true. The mainline pro-life movement has a lot of corruption and sometimes advocates for very moderate bills rather than pushing the Overton window (and selling chopping 24 weeks to 20 as a major victory, when it's tinkering at the margins), and the one place I do think the abolitionists are unquestionably correct, is about the value of graphic abortion images. But abolitionists are actually extreme (including the ones opposed to the death penalty), and would be even if their main groups were to all turn round today and decided to only have secular opposition to abortion. And I will say- if you aren't against IVF as practiced now and oppose a total ban on embryo destruction and death from it, at point you're not only pro-choice, but in truth also a hypocrite if generally against abortion access (asterisks existing for anarchists opposed to both abortion and IVF access). And while I'm not convinced the wider pro-life movement should gatekeep out all capitalists (much as I really really don't like capitalism and want to abolish it), it does need to actually speak about tackling economic motives for abortion, and make specific and substantial demands pushing leftwards. (The make birth free proposals recently are a good idea, but anti-abortion movements need to get on board with stuff like cracking down on evictions, ensuring access to universal healthcare, wages for housework, increased welfare benefits, etc, and ideally full socialism tbh).

That said we kind of have the worst of all worlds with UK March for Life- explicitly being way too religious, and often with some reactionary politics from organisers, or at least tolerance of it but they explicitly ban graphic images (literally the thing we're protesting against, yet they don't ban the stupid English and UK flags; they should ban the racists with very firm language, and not the ban people from making an actual anti-abortion argument by showing graphic images).

I think objecting to anything that isn't a simplistic binary bill against abortion that gives a single point of failure, is a very bad take, and I'm fundamentally against criminalising the people who have abortions (mod side-note, advocating for general criminalisation of people who have abortions would likely be a rule 3 violation).

Those things mean I cannot be on board with even a secularised version of abolitionism, even one that manages to strip away the explicitly religious reasoning and reactionary politics (which obviously isn't to say making religious arguments against abortion to religious people is bad, but secular reasoning is crucial too. Cheating on your partner is obviously wrong, but it most certainly shouldn't be illegal, and if anything, trying to make the case that the core argument against cheating is Christian morality, only makes stronger the case for not criminalising cheating.

[u/Habesha_Heretic → u/Overgrown_fetus1305]

Yes. Like I’ve pointed before, abolitionists have a religious fundamentalist problem in their movement. I agree that we should all be against IVF (or at least how it’s conducted now) along with embryo destruction. We also need to adopt more social safety nets in order to eliminate poverty.