r/prochoice

As a teenager with female anatomy myself, (he/they pronouns) being pregnant is one of my worst fears. I understand if you want to be a parent one day, that totally makes sense. I love kids and would love to adopt one with the love of my life one day.

But carrying a baby and giving birth to it is insanely dangerous when you're that young. Pregnancy and childbirth complications are one of the leading reasons for the death of people with female anatomy aged 15-19.

If you have access to safe abortion as a teen, I would say abort it. If you don't have access or really want to keep it... do what you want. But I would recommend aborting it. You have your whole life ahead of you. At least graduate and get a steady job first, and then you can have all the kids you want.

Sorry if I come off as rude in this, I'm just curious.

It has been four years since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization eliminated the federal constitutional right to abortion, leaving Americans to navigate a confusing patchwork of abortion protections, restrictions, and outright bans depending on jurisdiction. Organizers have ramped up efforts to improve access since the ruling, and thanks to that work, measures to protect and ensure reproductive freedoms are expected to be on the ballot in three states come November: Idaho, Nevada, and Virginia. ✊️

In my last post everyone thought I was pro life, so let me rephrase what I meant. Because I forgot to put "after 22 weeks". Don't judge me guys. I didn't get any sleep that day 🥹

Is an abortion AFTER 22 WEEKS morally permissible?

Ik that an abortion after that is only performed to save the mothers life. They literally don't happen outside of that. So I couldn't care less. But from a purely consistent debating perspective, I'd really appreciate some advice.

An abortion after that sounds very wrong to me given that the fetus already possess sentience and so on. But if I had to stay consistent with my arguments, I'd have to say that those abortions are morally permissible too, even if they don't save the mothers life or prevent any health complications.

I love using the analogy of a kidney patient. Noone should force people to donate their kidneys to kidney patients despite the kidney patient being sentient.

So, sentient fetus=kidney patient

Pregnant woman=Forced donor

Women's bodily recourses=Kidney

So a woman should be able to terminate a pregnancy at any time, even if it's only like a month before birth. Idk it just sounds very wrong to me. To be clear, abortions should be legal up to 9 months to save the mothers life or to prevent health complications. But im not sure if I necessarily think that it's okay, if a woman just gets an abortion after 22 weeks despite her being fully capable to have the baby. I mean that doesn't even happen cuz no women just gets an abortion for fun, this is just supposed to be a hypothetical.

Ik that elective lethal abortion is only performed to save the mothers life. The literally don't happen outside of that. So I couldn't care less. But from a purely consistent debating perspective, I'd really appreciate some advice.

Elective lethal abortion sounds very wrong to me given that the fetus already possess sentience and so on. But if I had to stay consistent with my arguments, I'd have to say that elective lethal abortion is morally permissible too.

I love using the analogy of a kidney patients. Noone should force people to donate their kidneys to kidney patients despite the kidney patient being sentient.

So, sentient fetus=kidney patient

Pregnant woman=Forced donor

Can one of you pookies please help me out 🥹

I’ve worked at an abortion clinic for over a year now, I’m not a doctor and by no means an expert. However, I’ve seen a lot of aspects of abortion care, including analysis of fetal tissue. One thing that I will NEVER understand is pro-lifers pretending to be experts on fetuses and obgyn practices. For context, my clinic sees patients up to 16 weeks 6 days, which is the beginning of the 2nd trimester.

The protesters outside hold signs about heartbeats and how the patients have whole babies in them. “You can still meet god!” As they try convince patients they should seek help at a Crisis Pregnancy Center (YUCK). But they’re so far off.

First- the heartbeat thing. It’s not a heartbeat! Heartbeats do NOT start at the 18days post conception or whatever the pro-lifers say. There is cardiac activity, around 5-6weeks, which is electrical signals starting to develop but not an actual heartbeat yet, as there is not a functioning circulatory system in an embryo!

When I inspect fetal tissue, I’m looking to make sure all fetal tissue is removed from the uterus, otherwise it could lead to knarly complications. That’s no baby to me, neither is it a gift from god. It’s a consequence to a biological process. Of course a baby will form if an egg is fertilised and implanted. That’s human biology. When I’m seeing this tissue, I see the basis of a human, but it’s so small and unfinished that I could never value it over a fully-fledged conscious individual. Pro-lifers like to make patients feel that their “baby” has functioning organs. Yes, they have individual organs once they are far enough along. No, that does not make them any more alive or human. Nor does that make an individual’s abortion less “moral”. I understand how it can bother someone, but it’s not their business. If the pregnancy is before 7 weeks(a majority of the abortions I see are 5-7 weeks), the odds of any “real” tissue is slim. It will be gestational sac, yolk sac, and potentially a fetal pole. So there’s not much there regardless. Also, it’s considered an embryo, not even a fetus, until the end of week 8. So, there’s that.

Thank you for reading:)

Texas has that bounty law HB 7 which explicitly says that a pregnant woman who obtained or received pills supplied in violation of the statute gets the entire award of at least $100,000, and the law separately awards reasonable attorney fees and costs to a prevailing plaintiff. It seems like this would create a massive land rush for personal injury type firms to run ads saying “Pregnant? Get $100K!” Importantly, you don’t have to actually have an abortion, just order the pills and you can simply throw them away upon receipt and are still eligible for $100k.

Why aren’t delivery people, website admins, etc. not being sued like mad in TX? This seems like a massive marketing opportunity for bottom fishing firms as they get legal fees paid and their client gets any easy $100k

To clarify i am 100% pro-choice, but i feel like calling a foetus a “parasite” is very crude and pretty inhumane, i feel like it is an awful argument on all fronts:

-By definition: cannot be parasitic as it is the same species (by extension, i hate the argument that a foetus isn’t human as many people like to argue, you can have a human foetus, a dog foetus or a cat foetus, saying that they’re not human implies that all foetuses are just default living beings that miraculously shape-shift into the species of its mother), generally a horrible argument imo.

-By biology: it is literally a symbiotic relationship, it is known that a foetus can transfer stem cells to its mother in the case of injury.

-By logic: come on guys and gals, you are calling an unborn baby a parasite simply because it is a convenient argument, which i see as an attempt to desensitise yourself from the situation whilst at the same time undermining the pre-born living small human inside you.

I want to re-iterate, that i am PRO-CHOICE, people should be given the opportunity to abort their child if they need to; ie illegitimate child (through assault etc), a child that cannot be amply supported, a child that would suffer throughout its life etc etc.

But i just wanted to point out that this argument, at least to me, seems to be incredibly self-destructive and not productive at all, because it makes the people who make that argument sound very ridiculous and borderline insane because it isn’t grounded in reality at all, moreover a hypothetical person who is sitting on the fence and sees such an argument would likely turn away from prochoice.

God made Adam as an already grown man from the dust in the ground. And Adam isn’t alive until god breathes the breath of life into his nostrils. So according to the bible, life begins at first breath. A fetus does not breathe. I repeat. Adam is not living until God breaths air into his lungs.

So dust + breath = life. Dust without breath is just dust. you can’t kill dust, because it’s not alive.

And in Job 33:4, it says the same thing.

**^(‘)**The Spirit of God has made me;
the breath of the Almighty gives me life.’

Breath = life in the bible. NOT CONCEPTION. I’m talking like how I would talk to a toddler because that’s how these people need to learn.

if you’re going to be a bad person, be a bad person. But don’t use god to justify it.

I posted this in r/abortion and reddit suggested I repost here. Some good news this week in my home state of MA. A law I'm deeply involved in:

In 2012, I had an abortion after my daughter, Laurel, was diagnosed with brain anomalies. I was 35 weeks pregnant at the time of her diagnosis. I lived in Boston, and was SHOCKED when my medical team told me that they MIGHT Be able to offer abortion, but they just didn't know. And then shocked again when the referral they found me was 2000 miles, two time zones away.

For the last 14 years, I've been chipping away at a culture that seems to refuse to understand, supporting women like you all here who are navigating tough pregnancy situations, supporting your own deepest wisdom. And, too, I've been pushing for more freedom for us to make our choices at home, more affordably, more dignified, and better supported by our communities.

I just wanted to share that on Monday, my governor signed a law lifting all dates-based limits off of abortion in Massachusetts. I was invited to the signing. It was incredibly moving.

A lot of people do not understand this law. They say all sorts of inflammatory things about it. But the Governor looked right at me and said: we're doing this for your family. And I know she's right, because I've been telling my story to the point of exhaustion over and over for 14 years to try to get law-makers to understand -- and enough of them finally do here at home. I believe the law takes effect 90 days after it was signed on mon. After that, we still have to help hospitals and doctors and nurses understand why this care is important, as legality is the first step to access, not the last. That is work I'm more than willing to continue.

My abortion was the least-awful (but still awful) resolution I could find to my crisis. It was both my salvation and a tragedy. I just want to shine a light 14 years down the road and say, not only am I secure enough in my decision to be ok with all the bullshit people are spewing at me today, but I'm also proud and happy and powerful BECAUSE of my abortion.

I know it can feel dark in those early times (early years, for me!) There is life, rich and full, on the other side.

Pro-life people always talk about how pro-choice lowers the fetuses value simply because they aren’t born.. whenever they themselves are lowering the pregnant women’s value?? Just because something is alive and human doesn’t give it rights to infringe on someone else’s bodily rights??? its genuinely disgusting. They’re both human and alive so why does the fetus get more value than the woman? smh.

In a major victory for supporters of abortion rights in Kansas, a Johnson County District Court judge on Monday granted a permanent injunction blocking a bevy of state laws that imposed strict requirements for abortion providers and patients.

“Today’s ruling allows me to do my job the way I was trained to and focus on what’s most important: my patients,” said Dr. Traci Nauser, an OB-GYN who owns an Overland Park clinic that provides abortions.

The lawsuit against the state of Kansas was brought by Hodes & Nauser and Planned Parenthood Great Plains, another Overland Park abortion clinic.

Monday’s decision invalidates various provider mandates that the clinic owners argued were designed to scare and shame people out of terminating pregnancies.

The 261-page ruling comes more than nine months after a bench trial in Johnson County. It was filed with the court on Monday, the same day that its author, K. Christopher Jayaram, was sworn in as the newest member of the Kansas Supreme Court.

Some of the restrictions enjoined by the decision have been on the books since 1997. Others, including a requirement that abortion providers survey women about their reasons for seeking the procedure and provide medically dubious information suggesting that pill abortions are reversible, were adopted by the Kansas Legislature in 2023.

Those and other pre-existing requirements, including Kansas’ 24-hour waiting period for abortions and a rule that physicians must listen to a fetus’s heartbeat 30 minutes before an abortion, were temporarily halted by Jayaram in the early stages of the court proceedings in 2023. Additional requirements adopted in 2024 were also blocked on a temporary basis before the permanent injunction was granted.

The ruling was handed down on the eve of a primary election where voters will weigh a proposed constitutional amendment that would overhaul the process for selecting Supreme Court justices by switching to direct election — a proposed reform that Republican officials believe could help the cause of assembling an anti-abortion majority on the high court.

The GOP lawmakers who placed the proposal on the ballot have long been frustrated by the Supreme Court’s stubborn independence, including its 2019 determination that the right to an abortion is enshrined in the Kansas Constitution.

They always say “slave owners thought this way too” and crap like that.

Because why should it even be a discussion? To me it’s something so obvious and simple. Woman’s body=woman’s choice.

But apparently not.

It also really annoys me especially when men try to jump in with their pro-life bs. I would never even think to tell a man whether he should have been/should he circumcised or not, or whether he should get a vasectomy or something. It cringes me out.

It’s sad that it’s something we still have to talk about, and illegal in so many places and it recognises that to make a change you do have to talk about it…

But it’s still unsettling and why I hate watching pointless unofficial debates about it and don’t debate anyone.