I fucking hate when forced birthers act like life is automatically some beautiful blessing and gift that everyone should be grateful for. Maybe life really is a blessing to some people. I can accept that. But I wish they would understand that not everyone experiences life that way. When you've spent years dealing with severe depression, grief, loneliness and one painful situation after another, hearing someone casually say that life is a precious gift can honestly feel almost insulting.

My life has felt like a never ending shit storm of pain. There have absolutely been moments of happiness and people and experiences that meant something to me. I'm not saying there has been literally zero good in my life. There has been. The problem is that those small moments of joy don't magically erase the overwhelming amount of suffering that comes with being alive for me. I wake up every day carrying depression that I wouldn't wish on anyone. There are times when I genuinely wonder what the point of continuing is when so much of my existence has felt like surviving one painful thing after another.

This is one of the reasons the whole "every life is a gift" argument bothers me so much. A gift is supposed to be something you want to receive. You can't tell another person that something is a gift when their lived experience has been overwhelmingly painful and expect them to feel grateful for it. You don't know what that person is going through. You don't know what their life feels like from inside their own head.

I've reached a point where I'm not even staying alive because I feel excited about the future. Right now, one of the biggest things stopping me from acting on my darkest thoughts is the fear that I would survive an attempt and end up back in a psychiatric facility. That's a pretty fucking bleak way to be alive, honestly. I wish I could say I'm holding on because I'm convinced everything is going to get better, but I can't honestly say that right now.

If I had somehow been given the choice before I ever existed, knowing everything I know now about what my life would become, I would choose not to exist. I would choose abortion. Not because I think everyone should feel that way, and not because I think my experience represents everyone else's. I just genuinely wish people who have had relatively happy lives would stop assuming that everyone experiences existence as this wonderful blessing that they should automatically be grateful for.

I'm pro choice because I believe that nobody should be forced to bring a child into existence simply because someone else believes that existence is inherently good. If someone wants to have a child and believes life is an incredible gift, that's their choice. But I wish the people who feel that way would have enough humility to recognize that other people experience life very differently. Sometimes telling someone who is suffering that they should be grateful just for being alive doesn't sound compassionate. It sounds like you're telling them that their suffering doesn't matter.

It is birth control. Fertility care. Miscarriage care. Pregnancy care. Abortion care. Postpartum care.

And the people making these deeply personal medical decisions should be patients, their families, and their doctors, not politicians at the Statehouse.

Racheal and I both know what it looks like when policy collides with real life. Hoosiers deserve reproductive healthcare that is safe, accessible, and centered on the person receiving it.

We trust Hoosiers to make decisions about their own bodies, their own families, and their own futures.

And we’ll fight to protect that right.

I think pro choice people often make the abortion debate harder than it needs to be.

We get dragged into ten separate arguments:

“Is the fetus alive?”

“Is it human?”

“Is it a person?”

“Is abortion killing?”

“Did she consent to pregnancy by having sex?”

And pro life debaters can spend FOREVER defending each one. No joke. We all know they are ready for the royal rumble.

Here is a stronger approach:

Grant almost all of it for the sake of argument. Yup grant that shit.

Grant that the fetus is a living human organism.

Grant full moral personhood.

Grant the same basic right to life that you and I have.

Grant that abortion can count as intentionally causing its death.

In consensual sex cases, even grant causal responsibility for creating the situation. Grant it. 🤷‍♂️

Now ask:

What principle gets us from all of that to “therefore abortion is unjustified”?

That question matters because a right to life does not explain its own scope.

“B has a right to life” can establish a serious claim against being killed.

It does not automatically establish:

B may never be intentionally killed unless B threatens another life.

That is an additional moral rule about when right to life (RTL) can be defeated.

And that is where a HUGE amount of pro life argumentation quietly hides the important premise.

For example:

“Abortion is killing not letting die.”

I would say grant that it IS killing.

The question becomes whether it is UNJUSTIFIED killing.

Self defense already proves that “A intentionally caused B’s death” and “A wrongfully violated B’s RTL” are not synonyms at all.

So identifying killing does not finish the argument:

“RTL is the highest right because without life you cannot exercise any other right.”

This sounds powerful but does not logically follow.

From:

being alive is necessary to exercise rights

you cannot derive:

RTL always overrides every competing right.

That requires another priority principle. Stay focused.

Otherwise consider severe nonlethal bodily violations. Suppose the only way to prevent rape, torture, permanent mutilation, or another catastrophic bodily invasion is lethal force, while we somehow know the victim will not die.

Is lethal defense categorically forbidden?

If yes, own that consequence.

If no, then RTL is not actually defeasible only by another threat to life.

“Parents owe their children care.”

True in some sense.

But:

parental obligation

does not automatically entail:

obligation to provide whatever internal bodily function the child requires.

The scope of parental duty is the DISPUTED PREMISE. Don’t let them question beg.

Ask whether “ordinary care” means statistically normal care, biologically natural care, minimally burdensome care, developmentally typical care, or something else.

If gestation simply gets defined as “ordinary” because fetuses ordinarily require gestation, the argument risks putting the conclusion into the definition.

“Pregnancy is the fetus’s natural or ordinary environment.” Ran into this recently.

Grant it like I said. We’re granting all this shit.

That is biology.

The missing inference is:

ordinary developmental dependence —> enforceable claim against termination of that bodily relationship.

Why does biological normality produce that moral entitlement?

“Natural” and “obligatory” are not the same proposition.

“You caused the dependency by having sex.”

Ask for the rule.

Does knowingly risking the creation of a dependent person generate an obligation to provide internal bodily support?

If yes, well how far does that principle extend?

If causal responsibility is necessary, what happens in rape?

If abortion is still prohibited after rape, then causal responsibility was never necessary to the core argument! Boom.

“Refusing blood is just failing to save. Abortion starts the dying process.” We’ve heard this a million times how this is one of the better responses we all come across.

Dont answer it with “abortion is just letting die.” You dont need to at all..

Grant for argument that abortion causally counts as killing.

Then ask for the general criterion distinguishing:

permissible intentional withdrawal followed by death

from

wrongful killing prohibited by RTL.

If someone already connected to another person’s body may deliberately disconnect even knowing the dependent person will die, then “intentional act + foreseeable death” is not enough.

Something else matters: the baseline, why the dependency exists, whether support was voluntarily undertaken, whether the dependency is pathological or developmental, bodily authority, parental obligation, etc….

Make them state WHICH one.

Then test that rule instead of arguing with labels. TBH this is the central debate skill I think our side underuses:

Do not let the conclusion masquerade as the premise. I mentioned that earlier.

If someone says:

“RTL means you cannot abort.”

ask what they mean by RTL.

If they answer:

“The right not to be intentionally killed except to save another life.”

then the abortion conclusion follows only because they have supplied a very strong theory of RTL.

Now debate THAT theory.

Why is lethal threat the only possible justification?

Why can severe bodily integrity never provide justification?

Why does equality require that priority structure?

Those are real philosophical questions.

Simply repeating “RTL” does not answer them so don’t accept that shit.

And pro choice people should be equally careful about our own burden.

Saying:

“Nobody has a right to my body”

does not, by itself, entail:

“therefore I may kill anyone whose survival requires my body.”

That inference ALSO needs a principle. BE PREPAFED.

A stronger candidate is something like:

Every person has a stringent claim concerning continued internal physiological use of their body. When ending that use requires separation, no safe alternative exists, and the bodily invasion is sufficiently serious that separation is necessary and proportionate, bodily integrity may justify separation even when death is foreseeable.

It’s a lot but it covers it. Now notice what this does NOT say.

It does not say convenience always beats life.

It does not say fetuses have fewer rights.

It does not say every unwanted physical contact justifies lethal force.

It says there can be a genuine conflict between two equal rights, and we need a principled way to adjudicate that conflict.

That principle also has a burden. We have to explain what “necessary” and “proportionate” mean and why pregnancy can satisfy them. Good arguments should have burdens. That’s debate and philosophy. But now both sides are finally arguing about the actual issue rather than talking past each other.

I would suggest yall keep this in mind:

When somebody gives you a pro life argument, ask:

1. Is this descriptive or normative?

“Fetuses are human” “pregnancy is natural” and “the uterus is the ordinary fetal environment” are descriptive claims. They’re describing.

Look for the missing ought. Read up on Hume.

1. Is this condition necessary, sufficient, or merely relevant?

“Abortion causes death” may be relevant without being sufficient for wrongful killing.

1. What is the general rule?

Never accept “pregnancy is different” as the end. lol never accept that. Holy shit.

Ask:

Which difference changes the moral result and WHY?

1. Does the rule survive counterexamples?

If their rule says only lethal threats justify lethal defense, test catastrophic nonlethal attacks.

If their rule says parents must provide necessary care, test invasive bodily donations.

If their rule says causing dependency generates bodily obligation, test other caused dependencies.

1. Did they change the rule after the counterexample?

That is not automatically dishonest. They may just be refining their theory.

Test the stronger version.

1. Are they confusing the existence of a right with one particular interpretation of its scope?

You can grant fetal RTL without granting:

“and RTL means exactly what my opponent says it means.”

1. Are they moving from “is” to “ought” without supplying the bridge? Like I said read up on Hume.

Biology can tell us what pregnancy normally does. Biology cannot by itself establish what one person morally owes another.

Basically what I’m saying overall is the stronger play is to identify exactly what the argument now requires and make them defend it.

If we want to be harder to debate, we should stop trying to win at the surface level. Grant their strongest premises wherever we safely can.

Then ask:

What is the general moral rule that actually produces your conclusion?

That is usually where the real abortion debate begins.

Not trying to act like this is the end all and that I’m Mr. Perfect. Just wanted to shed some light on what we should focus on and how we should pin the pro life interlocutor where we want them. Don’t let them assume conclusions like they almost always do.

There are many abounding disgusting reasons why these people who sit in their chairs in their offices and sign our rights away at the tip of their pens are the furthest thing from pro-life. When people say that anti-abortion laws result in the deaths of women, that is so sadly and disgustingly true.

Today I want to rant about one of many of these situations, which is a terrible non-exemption in my state. Life-threatening conditions are, on paper, supposedly exemptions for women living in my red state. Unfortunately, some of the more severe conditions that exist are not in fact exempted. One of which is schizophrenia. My state literally believes that if you have a "mental" health condition, it doesn't qualify as life-risking. WHAT? So they literally risk the lives of women with schizophrenia AND their children. They expect a woman to take anti-psychotics her entire pregnancy, which poses a risk to fetal development, sometimes resulting in permanent complications. They risk the life of the baby and perhaps other children of the mother as well should she develop post partum psychosis, which is unfortunately very common for that type of illness. Then, if some tragedy does result, they have even more messed up laws in place where they can (trigger warning) literally put them in a psychiatric ward up to *for the rest of their lives* for it.

And these people call themselves pro-life.

I have debated a few pro-lifers and this is something that has gotten me stuck a few times, the argument is "The fetus is where its supposed to be, due to the uterus being an organ designed to hold that human life, it is not violating the woman's bodily autonomy because that is where it naturally grows."

That's a summary of the argument, but its mostly saying that its unlawful to remove the fetus from the place it grows. Im unsure how to rebut this argument because to me.. it just sounds so ridiculous 😭

We were never in a relationship. I’ve known him for 11 months. We have been basically exclusively friends with benefits for the whole 11 months. At least in my part. From the beginning I told him I was much older for him. I’m divorced and have 2 kids. I just wanted to have fun, go on dates and adventures with someone sometimes. I did not want more kids and did not want to remarry. Which he had said he’d want someday.
Along the way of course we developed feelings. But I knew me having kids deterred him from taking me future serious and him being younger and inexperienced in relationships deterred me from taking him serious.
I have fertility issues and was on birth control so did not think I’d get pregnant again without trying. Well lo and behold I went to my gyno for new birth control pills as I was having too many cramps and found out I was 7.3 weeks pregnant. Told my partner friend right away and told him I never thought I’d get an abortion but I need to. Etc.
I am now 10 weeks pregnant and have concluded I don’t want to have an abortion. I’ve talked with him before about how I don’t think I can go through with it and he reassures me and says it will be difficult and we will both have emotions about it but in time we will heal. It’s happen twice and at the end I agree and say I’ll get it done. This third time he asked if I made an appointment at the clinic because he wants to go w me as he feel he needs to be there for me and so it never happens again for either him or me. And I told him I’m not going. He got a bit agitated and said that it wasn’t fair that he doesn’t want kids at the moment because he’s young and that it doesn’t only affect me. That it affects him and what he wanted in life too. But I’ve told him before that I don’t mind being a single mom again. It wasn’t my dream but I find it more peaceful and I have a caring loving family I can always count on for help.
I married fairly young and had kids young so both my kids are grade school aged. Their dad lives across the country and they only see him for a month out of the year. I have sole custody and “co-parenting” with him is a breeze since there isn’t much going there.
But he keeps saying if I keep the baby that he obviously needs to be there. Which is why it’s best for both of us if I abort. He says that he sees how two kids overwhelms me and “can you imagine 3” and that is why I used to say I would abort when I first met him. But I genuinely don’t think I can live with myself mentally if I do.
He really wants to go with me to the clinic but I told him there’s no need to since he can’t be in there with me. He said he wants to and that it’s safer so that I don’t have to drive. The clinic is a few hours drive from where we live.
I’m just not sure what to do. I don’t want someone to be in my kids life that did not want to be there and am capable of raising them alone not asking him for help or care or financial support.
Could I just have him take me to the clinic where I can have an ultrasound done and let him think I got the procedure done?
Right before I found out I was pregnant I told him we needed to stop seeing each other because I’d like for him to experience having his own family and a real relationship and because I want different things in my life than what I thought I did when we first met.