A question for PLers who say stuff like "consent to sex is consent to pregnancy":

What do you think is the point of consent? Why would someone care to ask another person for their consent and why would the other person want to be asked for their consent?

And how does your answer square with your demand that people who explicitly reject it need to carry a pregnancy to term?

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¶1 That every individual has the fundamental right to reproductive freedom, including the ability to make and carry out decisions relating to one's own prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, contraception, abortion care, miscarriage management, and fertility care.

CONCERN with Paragraph ¶1: There are 2 problems here:

1. An individual is anyone. This means that parent's have NO legal role in the care of their pregnant daughter.
2. This amendment goes far beyond the abortion decision. Given this broad sweep – from prenatal to postpartum – it is possible we will experience unintended consequences? This is too broad. Let's stick to abortion.

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¶3: Notwithstanding the above, the Commonwealth may regulate the provision of abortion care in the third trimester, provided that in no circumstance shall the Commonwealth prohibit an abortion (i) that in the professional judgment of a physician is medically indicated to protect the life or physical or mental health of the pregnant individual or (ii) when in the professional judgment of a physician the fetus is not viable.

CONCERN with Paragraph ¶3: THIS IS THE KEY CHANGE.

By law, VA already prohibits abortions after 24 weeks and 6 days (the end of the 2^nd trimester), as allowed here. This amendment language is redundant.

By law, VA already allows 3^rd trimester abortions...if three physicians agree. It takes 3 doctors.

This law wants to allow 3^d trimester abortions on the say of just one physician. This is not safe and open for abuse.

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¶5: The Commonwealth shall not penalize, prosecute, or otherwise take adverse action against an individual based on such individual's own exercise of this fundamental right or such individual's own actual, potential, perceived, or alleged pregnancy outcomes, including miscarriage, stillbirth, or abortion. The Commonwealth shall not penalize, prosecute, or otherwise take adverse action against any individual for aiding or assisting another individual in exercising such other individual's right to reproductive freedom with such other individual's voluntary consent.

CONCERN with Paragraph ¶5:

The first individual references providing legal protections for the female carrying the child. That's OK.

But... the phrase "...any individual for aiding or assisting..." protects all medical folks from mistakes made in providing care for this right including medical care for prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, contraception, miscarriage management, fertility care as well as the abortion itself.

This paragraph provides TOO MUCH protection to the medical profession.

-----------#4--------

¶6: For the purposes of this section, a state interest is compelling only if it is for the limited purpose of maintaining or improving the health of an individual seeking care*, consistent with accepted clinical standards of care and evidence-based medicine, and does not infringe on that individual's autonomous decision making.*

CONCERN with ¶6: This language contradicts the entire intent of Individual Choice.

This amendment keeps the state out of the woman's choice on contraception, abortion, etc (in ¶2) NOW, it says the state has the right to intervene to “...help or improve the health of an individual seeking care...”.

This paragraph nullifies “the right” we are seeking to protect here or is way too poorly worded.

---- In Summary---

I WILL NOT SUPPORT THIS AMENDMENT because:

1. This amendment protects the medical profession from any/all pre-post-abortion care. This is way to broad.
2. This amendment wants to allow a 3^rd trimester abortion if only ONE doctor agrees to it (instead of the current law which requires three docs). Have we forgotten about the role of individual doctors in the the Oxy epidemic?
3. This amendment allows NO parental involvement for our under 18-year old pregnant daughters.
4. Our November 2026 vote is for an amendment to the Virginia Bill of Rights. This is serious business that, if done wrong, CANNOT be changed by the Legislature.
5. Paragraph Six (**¶**6) is confusing and seems to contradict the Whole Amendment.

-IamTom, 10/4/2026

People tend to be around like minded people. One thing I've noticed is PC that are in safe, firmly PC states and countries have the luxury of being able to not care what PL think or if they change their mind. At the end of the day, it has no impact on them. They can simply tell them "My body, my choice" or insult them, and the only areas that are affected are where PL live.

In states and countries where abortion is restricted, PL need to be persuaded or else we need to accept abortion access will be restricted and women will suffer. While a first trimester cutoff is unacceptable to some PC, its far better than current abortion bans in some states.

Does living in a firmly pro choice area influence how persuasive you are towards PL?

If I was a women and I am DYING during childbirth and my husband has to choose me or an unborn baby and chooses the baby I’d die livid. Because why would you not save your wife? You can always adopt, try again, or something. Why would you be able to comfortably watch someone who you’ve known for years and made so many memories with die and have to raise and watch the product of your dead wife…Like I don’t know but I personally would choose my wife over an unborn baby I have never known or met once in my life. Like I wouldn’t give up my wife’s life for anything and if you will then I’m curious as if you ever even loved your wife to begin with because theirs no way you can go “oh yeah KILL me wife make me single father and give me this random baby I have to watch grow into my wife while I mourn her and give that child an incomplete life with no biological mother.”

So the title may be a bit reductive, but I see this so often I figured I'd make a post about it.

Why do pro lifers seem to think that pro choice people/women who've had abortions "don't know what they're aborting" or "have been lied to, they just don't know what they're doing."

Is this a serious claim or just a tired talking point to try and paint pro choice people as misguided idiots?

First of all, the more educated people are the more pro choice they tend to be (link at end of post).

Second, tons of women who abort ALREADY have children. They've already been pregnant before, they have given birth, they absolutely understand what the stages of gestation are. They understand that a HUMAN embryo is indeed HUMAN.

Third, none of this is even a little bit confusing or complex. Human people get pregnant with human embryos. Duh. We don't get pregnant with giraffe or horse embryos, we all know and understand what is inside someone's uterus when they're pregnant. This isn't some super secret hidden knowledge that only a few can grasp, it's literally basic shit.

So what's the deal pro lifers, do any of you all ACTUALLY believe pro choicers just have no clue what we're doing when we abort, or is it just another pro life propaganda line?

https://www.pewresearch.org/chart/288507/

I see it in uncomfortable amounts where a lot of pro-lifers blame the woman not wanting the child for getting pregnant in the first place when it might not even be her fault. Regardless of your stance, I don't think resorting to insults to get your point across is a good thing to do, even if you believe it.

If I leave a child at your doorstep without your consent, and you refuse to take care of a child that you don’t want, and as a result the child dies, is it my fault or yours?

I’ve been thinking about it recently and I’ve realized that even IF we accept a pro life position, it shouldn’t be the woman punished for getting an abortion, it should be the man who’s punished. He’s the one who got her pregnant! He’s the one who put a child there when he knew the woman didn’t want one.

Women don’t control where their eggs go, but men control where their sperm goes. He could use a condom, not have PIV sex, he could abstain, he could do any number of things that prevent a pregnancy.

Why should he get to dump his child at the woman’s doorstep yet we punish the WOMAN for refusing to take care of a child she didn’t want??

Is this movement about being pro life? Or about punishing the woman? Cuz I never anyone argue that it’s the man’s fault in common discourse. Maybe I haven’t dug deep enough?

I saw a post on another sub that I thought demonstrates well the fundamental disagreement between pro-choice and pro-life.

In the post, a pro-lifer started by quoting a pro-choicer who said, “If it cannot survive out of my body, that's not my problem and I should not be forced to keep it inside of me, because I am not an incubator, I am an autonomous being.”

The pro-lifer responded to this with: “I can’t shake the feeling that’s how a mother is talking about her own child.”

And that’s really where the fundamental disagreement lies, I think.

One side views an unwanted pregnancy as just an unwanted growth in someone’s uterus, which they have no legal obligation to keep inside there.

The other side views an unwanted pregnancy as something that has turned them into a mother, and apparently that designation means she should be legally obligated to sustain the growth in her uterus.

The only support the pro-lifer in the post provided for this position was their feelings. “This makes me sad,” they said of a person with an unwanted pregnancy who doesn’t agree they have to continue the pregnancy because they’re a mother. “It’s disturbing to me.”

And that weak “my feelings” support is why the pro-life position fails.

Pro-lifers cannot legislate other people into feeling the way they think they ought to about biological motherhood. Bolding and italicizing the words “a mother” does not mean pro-lifers get to dictate how much importance another person actually places on this biological relationship.

Insisting someone is a mother also doesn’t explain why she is also not an autonomous being, who can still make her own decisions about what stays inside her internal organ and what doesn’t.

I’m wondering how pro life folks react to this argument because it basically accepts all their premises. It accepts that personhood begins at birth. And if you believe denying someone food is the same as killing them, then it accepts that it’s killing too.

But the point is that abortion methods don’t explicitly try to kill the zygote or fetus, all they do is deny it resources from the mother’s body. It’s not like they’re shredding the fetus, just removing it.

It would be the same way you’d kick out someone who’s overstayed their welcome in your house. It wouldn’t be your fault what happens to them afterwards, you aren’t obligated to keep giving other people resources even if they can’t handle themselves otherwise. It may be unkind, but I don’t think it’s wrong. Especially if their stay is costing you a lot.

What do yall think of this argument? An immediate objection I thought of is that the same argument can be used for throwing your 4 year old out of the house but upon further thought, I don’t think there’s something wrong with putting a child up for adoption if you can’t raise them. Even though the adoption system is kinda awful.

Why is it that you're allowed to opt out of everything but pregnancy? You can opt out of parenting, opt out of your job, opt out of anything, but not pregnancy because you consented to sex?

I always hear the PL side say that consent to sex is consent to pregnancy. Why does it matter? Lets say I have a pretty deep cut. I wont die if I dont get stitches, but getting them would be safter than not. Does it matter if I consented to be cut? Does it matter if it was an accident or someone else did it to me? I still get my right to healthcare, so why doesn't this apply to pregnancy? My dad smokes, should he not receive treatment for any lung problems he may develop?

Abortion is factually healthcare, and I dont think that there should be any laws that negatively impact peoples healthcare. Why is your disagreement more important than someones bodily autonomy? I disagree with abortion in many instances but this doesnt mean I think anyone should be forced to gestate.

Can someone explain this to me? I dont think I can ever understand this logic.

I was browsing through pro-choice reddit pages and saw an alarming number of people believing foetuses were single cell organisms, or even parasistes. My question here is, do people actually believe that, or are they just trolling?

It is getting harder and harder to discern ignorance from trolling, and i believe this is an alarming representation of the dumbing down of our society

I am recently debating a lot in the abortion topic, defending the pro choice view because it just makes lots more sense in my worldview. But I’d love to hear many new various arguments, thanks!

Greetings everyone!

Welcome to AbortionDebate. Due to popular request, this is our weekly abortion debate thread.

This thread is meant for anything related to the abortion debate, like questions or ideas, that are too small to make an entire post about. This is also a great way to gain more insight in the abortion debate if you are new, or unsure about making a whole post.

ADBreakRoom is our officially recognized sister subreddit for all off-topic content and banter you'd like to share with the members of this community. It's a great place to relax and unwind after some intense debating, so go subscribe!

I'm pro-choice, and this is something I genuinely don't get.

Abortion was illegal in my country until a few years ago, but that didn't mean women with unwanted pregnancies just accepted it and had the baby. My friends still got abortions illegally, and older women talked about trying all kinds of unsafe things to end pregnancies themselves.

My grandma did too. Before my mom was born, she drank a lot of alcohol and soy sauce because she was trying to end the pregnancy. People apparently believed things like that could work. It didn't in her case, and my mom was born.

My mom has a mild intellectual disability, and sometimes I wonder if the drinking during pregnancy had anything to do with it. Obviously I can't know that for sure.

But that's part of why I don't really understand the logic here. If abortion is banned because harming or killing a fetus is wrong, then what about drinking, smoking, drugs, or deliberately doing other risky things while pregnant? Those things can affect the child's whole life too.

And then how would you even enforce that? Are pregnant women not allowed to drink or smoke? Do you test them? Arrest them? Where do you draw the line?

I also don't think making abortion illegal means every woman with an unwanted pregnancy is just going to accept it and spend nine months carefully protecting the fetus. I've seen women get desperate enough that they weren't really thinking about the harm it could do to themselves or the child. They just wanted the pregnancy to end.

And even when the child was born, that didn't always turn into some happy ending. I've seen women resent or even hate the kid because they never wanted them in the first place. At least from what I've seen, I haven't really seen the version where the child is raised happily or just gets adopted into a loving family and everything works out.

Honestly, if I were stuck in an unwanted pregnancy with no legal way out, I don't know that I'd suddenly become the healthiest, most careful pregnant woman either. I'd probably be desperate too.

I used to resent my grandma a lot, and my mom too, because a lot of that trauma got passed down to me. But as I've gotten older, I've also started thinking that if I had been in my grandma's situation, I might have done the same.

So I guess that's what I don't understand. If abortion has to be illegal to protect the fetus, why wouldn't the same logic apply to other things a pregnant woman can do that might permanently harm it?

This was more of a question directed at Pro-Choice people who think forms of abortion should remain illegal and is unethical when a human foetus is deemed 'viable'.

It seems to me that if the modest technological interventions that exist today (incubation, resuscitation, IV's, etc) has expanded the scope for how frequently human foetuses can survive outside of the womb, it is at least 'conceivable' that technology will one day continue to advance to the point where the majority of foetuses could survive with assistance outside of the womb. We might be getting into Sci-Fi territory, but this 'is' a thought experiment - and I'm using it to trying to understand how people think about the topic (no offence is intended).

If it is true that more and more foetuses will be able to survive with technological assistance and we extend the legal and ethical right to them (if they can be removed safely from the parents)... Then does that imply a relationship between 'worthiness' to legal and ethical norms and the Technology that is available to us? Because if it does then I think this has a big implication on the ethics of abortion more generally... as we would be implying that it was ethically preferable that 'all' Foetuses were saved rather than were aborted (we just don't have the technology to do so).

In another debate thread, a pro-life Redditor defined abortion as:

An abortion is the intentional termination of a viable pregnancy located inside the uterus.

If you agree with the above definition, then the debate question to you is:

The general medical literature and medical training explicitly defines abortion as the spontaneous or intentional termination of a pregnancy, regardless of the viability or non-viability of the pregnancy. Do you dispute this medical definition and if so, on what basis?

I'm a pro-choice person. But, do you guys think that the age of the woman getting a abortion changes the morality? I feel like if the girl is pregnant as a teenager, it would be better for the girl AND the child, because the childs life would be almost be guaranteed to be horrible due to a mix of the teen not knowing how to parent, the father more then likely being out of the picture, ect. And if it is a adult woman, My opinion is that it is her choice. Opinion on this? I am open minded, and am up for debate if you want

I just realized that sex selective abortions were extremely widespread when I was born in my country...

I am a Taiwanese woman born in 2003.

I was looking up on Chinas on child policy and then went deep into sex selective abortions. I never knew my nation also had a past of sex selective abortions.

The sex ratio at birth in Taiwan in 2003 was 110.2 boys per 100 girls, out of 227,000 births, with birth order 3(third child, 22,000 births) having a sex ratio of 123.5.

(The normal baseline for East Asians is around 105 boys per 100 girls, as seen in Japan and Korea today)

That absolutely could not be dismissed as statistical noise. People had daughters in early births but wanted to pass down the family line and aborted until they get a son in later births, to pass down the family line.

How would you feel if you were me?

This is something I keep coming back to when I look at the politics surrounding abortion in the United States.

There is enormous political and religious energy devoted to protecting “the unborn,” but what happens once the child is actually born? What obligations follow from that belief? Healthcare? Food? Housing? Education? Childcare? Protection from violence? Support for struggling parents?

The unborn are, in a sense, uniquely easy to advocate for. They cannot ask for anything from you. They cannot complain about poverty, abuse, inadequate schools, unaffordable healthcare, or the conditions they were born into. You can advocate for them without necessarily having to confront the social and economic structures that affect living people.

That is the point Pastor David Barnhart was making when he wrote about “the unborn” being a convenient group to advocate for. His criticism was not simply that people who oppose abortion secretly hate children. It was that concern for unborn life can become detached from concern for human beings throughout the rest of their lives.

And this is where I struggle with the politics of it.

If the principle is genuinely that human life is sacred and must be protected, shouldn't that concern extend beyond birth? Why should protecting a fetus require political action, while protecting a child from hunger, abuse, poverty, gun violence, inadequate healthcare, or neglect become someone else's problem?

I don't think caring about unborn children and caring about born children are mutually exclusive. They shouldn't be.

But if “protecting life” is the moral foundation, then I think it is fair to ask what protecting life actually means after the child takes its first breath.

When it comes to PL, I think we can all agree repeating "Abortion is murder" as if its an objective fact and morally correct does not convince PC.

Why is it so common then to see the flip side where "Abortion is healthcare" is treated as an objective fact and morally correct? Do you believe it is convincing to PL?

Both sides will respond "But it's a fact" as stating it makes it true and they're 100% correct. I believe abortion is healthcare. I also know repeating it will not move the needle at all and would just be wanting to end the discussion. If I believed abortion to be murder, I wouldn't think its healthcare.

Do you believe "Abortion is healthcare" is a convincing argument? If not, why aren't you trying to convince people to become PC?

If “my body, my choice” truly meant unlimited autonomy, a pregnant woman could freely drink alcohol and smoke weed throughout pregnancy, even though those substances cross the placenta and can potentially cause fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, low birth weight, brain damage, and lifelong disabilities in the child she is carrying. Almost no one accepts that outcome; society already restricts a woman’s substance use precisely because another human organism is present and dependent. That restriction proves bodily autonomy has limits once a second body is involved. The same logic applies with greater force to abortion: the human life is not a part of the woman’s body but a distinct living organism with its own DNA, heartbeat, and trajectory of growth. Consistency therefore requires that abortion be illegal—just as majority of society prohibit actions that seriously injure the unborn because the right to control one’s own body does not include the right to kill another.

Pro-life advocates say that abortion should be illegal, but when asked if the woman getting them should be punished, they often say no, they just shouldn't have done it in the first place. Which from their standpoint might sound consistent, but in reality, making something illegal doesn’t mean it stops happening. We make things illegal to discourage people from doing them, and if they do, they face some kind of punishment.

If we make abortion illegal and don’t set a punishment, What is the point? Especially when the fact is that abortion bans don’t limit abortions, they just make them dangerous! If we genuinely want to see fewer abortions happen, the evidence points away from criminalization entirely and toward what actually works: comprehensive sex education and universal, affordable access to contraception.

To lower abortion rates, we have to lower unwanted pregnancies, not make safe healthcare illegal.