[extropy-chat] Abortion

[Damien Broderick]

At 03:56 PM 5/7/2005 -0700, Mike wrote:

>When you ask most people [you happen to know] who are pro-choice, they 
>generally
>believe that other people have abortions.

I find this a very strange claim. Certainly it goes against my own 
experience. On the other hand, many if not most younger people who are not 
in favour of banning abortion use fairly reliable contraception routinely, 
and so the occasion might not arise very often. Exceptions do occur. When I 
was younger, before I had a vasectomy, two of my girlfriends became 
pregnant despite one of them having a loop and the other being on the pill. 
We chose to abort the foetuses, because none of us were in a position to 
become parents responsibly at that stage. As a childless old fart, I 
sometimes wonder wistfully what those lumps of cells might have grown into. 
But this is sentimentality. I could wonder the same thing about every ovum 
shed unfertilized by every woman I ever had sex with.

>Few women proudly admit to
>having aborted a fetus. Wonder why?

Because we live in a culture debauched by superstition.

Damien Broderick