My Mind Is Gone

nunubunkie:

bronzebasilisk:

ryunwoofie:

sonneillonv:

autumn-and-eve:

erinsmomma:

How can someone stand behind abortion, when you have a life inside of you that God created for you? How can you say that this life isn’t worth it? If you can’t take care of the baby for whatever circumstances than there is always adoption available to couples who can’t conceive, but still want the joy of being parents. OPEN YOUR EYES! God has bigger plans for us all that we don’t even realize the picture.

Excuse me but it appears your baby is actually upside down
Did you take Sex Ed freshman year because babies come out headfirst

Hi, OP!  As someone who was given up for adoption, allow me to call bullshit on your little post there!  You see, when I was adopted, I was a white-skinned, healthy, neurotypical infant, which basically put me at the top of the list, right underneath white-skinned, healthy, neurotypical MALE infants!  There’s only one kind of infant people wanted to adopt more than me!  I was SOOO lucky!  But if you actually bothered to look at the information readily available on the interwebs, you would be aware that the majority of people who are forced to rely on abortion for family planning are poor people and people of color.  Of course, those two demographics intersect, thanks to the institutionalized racism of our society!  Neat huh?!

Of course, even babies of color are not in high demand with couples looking to adopt.  Many who do want to adopt outside their race choose to go outside the country, where laws are less strict and the process is often less expensive.  Of course, most of the infants adopted this way are obtained in unscrupulous fashion, but who cares about that when you’re saving a little Korean or African baby from the horrible fate of growing up in Korea or Africa???  And all those children who have birth defects, are born with diseases or disabilities, or have other issues… WELL.  Who wants to invest that kind of expense and time?  Why would you adopt someone broken, LOLOL?!

Granted, there are some wonderful people who understand the system a little better, and make it a point to try and give POC and disabled children a good home.  But they make up a very small fraction of potential adopters!  This difference in supply and demand leaves a lot of children stuck in the foster system, where their chances of being adopted diminish with every passing year, and their chances of being physically or sexually abused INCREASE!  Isn’t that wonderful?

And of course, we haven’t even talked about the person who is giving birth to the baby!  I know you probably think pregnancy is a wonderful, happy time, and for some people it is, but it is also one of the greatest health risks a person can take. I love my son very much, and from the day I found out I was pregnant with him, I wanted him!  But I also nearly died giving birth to him.  You see, I had pre-eclampsia, the most commonly fatal birth complication in the world.  My blood pressure was 180 over 130!  At twenty-two years old, I was actually headed for a stroke, hah hah!  How funny is that?  And all it took was missing a single pre-natal appointment during which my blood pressure rose to dangerous levels and my body tried to kill both me and my son.  Those seizures sure were fun, as was the emergency c-section performed without anesthetic!  And being chained down while the operation was performed, because I was delirious and wouldn’t stop trying to fight off the doctors, that was a BLAST!  It was great for my husband too, since he almost lost his wife and child in just forty-five minutes.  You can imagine how thrilled he is at the prospect of me ever getting pregnant again.  Babies are certainly cute, but pregnancy can have massive health complications, and I know it’s such a bummer, but they are PERMANENT.  :(  My abdominal muscles never recovered from being hacked through with a scalpel, and the flood of hormones caused by late pregnancy have changed things from heartburn (never used to have it, now, all the time!) to my emotional reactions (I cry when I see pictures of kittens now.  I used to be tough).  These are changes I did not ask for, cannot control, and cannot fix!  And many people go through worse!  I know, right?  Unbelievable, but go look up the word ‘episiotomy’ and then look up ‘birth rape’ and I’m afraid you’ll find some stuff that just isn’t very shiny.  Plus, the studies actually show that people who carry a baby to term, give birth, then give it up for adoption suffer HIGHER rates of post-pregnancy complications like post-partum depression and post-partum psychosis, general depression, and other mental health issues.  Adoption actually isn’t good for the person giving birth at all!

I’m afraid the picture you chose to use there is also pretty disingenuous.  I know, I know, it seems like nitpicking.  I’m not trying to be mean!  :(  But that picture shows a fully developed, viable infant, and most abortions are performed when the fetus isn’t even a fetus - it’s a blastocyst.  That’s just a clump of cells.  Seriously! You can totally find pictures on the interwebs and they’re not even gross, LOLOL!  Later-term abortions are usually performed because of health complications, though some of our intrepid state legislators are trying to change all that!  They care so much about people who are pregnant, you see, that they want to force them to carry dead or dying fetuses inside them until their body either becomes infected while it rots in their tummies (this is called sepsis, and it makes people very sick, and can even kill them!), or forces it out naturally in a gush of blood and fluids!  Isn’t that so caring of them?  I’m so glad they’re around to make those decisions for me!  And if a pregnant person is not allowed to terminate an unviable fetus, in some states, they have to carry the child to term, give birth to it, and then watch it die in their arms because its lungs weren’t developed, or its brain formed outside its skull, or any of a million possible birth defects that will kill you just as quick as lickity-split!  Isn’t that wild?!  Of course, these people go through terrible grief, and as I mentioned, some of them may get sick and die from not being able to abort dead or dying fetuses.  But I guess that’s just A-okay with you, huh?

Basically, I think before you suggest adoption as a universal alternative, you should actually go do some research on adoption.  And before you condemn abortion, you should do some research on abortions - not the stuff your church is giving you, the stuff the real doctors are saying.  Go to Planned Parenthood (if they haven’t all been closed down, ROFLMAO!) and request whatever information they have on the process, the statistics of who has abortions and why… and actually, all of that is on the interwebs!  Isn’t technology AMAZING?

And in closing, since I’ve been asked this question many times and I know it’s coming?  Yes, I realize I am here talking to you because I was not aborted.  But the thing is, if my mother had chosen abortion, I wouldn’t know the difference, so it wouldn’t matter to me.  And if she decided that choice was best for her, then that choice would have been best for her, and I would never want to take that choice away from her.  As it is, since I was given up for adoption, and since I have seen the statistics on how badly people who give their children up for adoption suffer, I have spent much of my adult life worrying about her, whether she’s healthy, whether she’s okay, and feeling that if she did suffer from any of the common post-birth symptoms, it is at least partially my fault, even though she made that decision on her own.  Which is silly, I know, but at some point, all children have to stare down the consequences of their parents’ having them.  For some, that’s poverty.  For others, a life-time of their parents struggling to treat and care for a severe illness or disability.  For others, it’s wondering if their mother ever got over giving them away, and wishing you could reach out and assure her that it’s okay, she doesn’t have to be haunted.

May your birth control never fail!

Pro.

Sonneillonv deserves a mother fucking standing ovation here.

(devil’s advocate here, cuz that’s what I do cuz it’s fun and I like intellectual discussion, teehee)

while Sonneillonv’s post was awesome and super thought provoking and about a reality that more people should DEFINITELY know about, I’m gonna try to propose an opposing, yet hopefully still thought provoking rebuttal.

okay, so the issue against abortion isn’t just “GOD SAYS NO”, its a lot more complicated than that. behind it is a conflict of justice that people can’t agree on.  “Wait,” you may say. “Isn’t justice a matter of common sense?” but as you can see, there is no absolute definition of justice as one side yells it is unjust to remove a woman’s right to chose, and the other yells back that it is unjust to kill an innocent child. 

Underneath all notions of justice is a set of relative faith assumptions the individual has made.  For example, from a strictly scientific viewpoint, there is nothing to say that living organisms are anything special, let alone that humans have any sort of inherent dignity or rights.  So by a strictly scientific perspective, we’re just a mass of chemical compounds that exist at a certain point in space and time.  I could go out and kill someone right now, and it wouldnt be wrong, it wouldnt be right, it would just be. As Stephen Hawking said: “the human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate size planet” and nothing is telling me it’s wrong or right or purposeful or useless if my mass of carbon and hydrogen and shit went out and rearranged another ‘person’s (read: blob of atoms and chemicals) chemical composition.

But if you think it is wrong if i go out and kill someone, (or tumblr trigger: went and protested against gay people) or if you think its wrong and offensive that i just made that last statement, you have an idea of justice and freedom that is not scientific or ‘logical’, but based on a set of moral beliefs. you have created a belief that humans do have some form of inherent dignity and rights, and those beliefs have no scientific merit supporting them, making them based on faith, and religious in nature.

So to bring it back to the issue here, abortion rights supporters typically charge that their pro-life opponents are trying to impose a particular set of moral and religious views on society, but the same is for the pro-choice supportors.  Cuz, if it’s true that the developing fetus is morally equivalent to a child, then abortion is morally equivalent to infanticide, and few would maintain that government should let parents decide for themselves whether to kill their children.  But as said earlier, the “pro-choice” position on the abortion debate is not neutral on the underlying moral and theological question; it implicitly rests on the assumption that the Catholic Church’s teaching on the moral status of the fetus… is false.

it’s a moral belief system on both sides.  One side has made the judgment that the clump of cells growing in a uterus is sacred, that human life begins the moment the two haploid cells become a zygote and form a bigger clump of cells, and that life was created with a purpose (whether that purpose is based on some destiny, reincarnation, intelligent designing god, or whatever) and it it wrong to kill that life or any life, and take away its chance to life a full life and live its destiny, or whatever.

the other side has made the judgment that the blastocyst or clump of cells is not human, it’s not killing a life, or that whatever life that clump of cells might have had was not purposeful, and the parent has the right to chose whether or not to give that clump of cells a chance for life.  Because, i mean, statistics show that it sucks to be put up for adoption, so even tho i don’t believe in destiny, and this thing, once human (cuz suddenly life happens when a bunch of sells becomes a bigger bunch of cells) can end up anywhere in its life, i will off this cell matter before it has to suffer through all that of living. cuz it’s not alive yet, it can’t live on its own, and doesnt look like a human.

I’m not advocating for any side here, I completely agree with all of Sonneillonv’s points and concerns dealing with child birth, birth defects, birthing complications, emotional issues, and the shitty system that is foster care. my POINT is, that this is a faith issue. that one side has moral views based on beliefs and the other side has moral views based on belief.  we will never get peace over the issue unless we can all agree on a societal justice (like we had to do with slavery, and then racial equality, and then with woman’s rights, and are now doing with LGBT rights… ect) we are constantly redefining what justice is in society since it’s an empty word, and we define it on what majority ‘feels’ is right and common sense.

okay sorry, i probably didnt explain everything as well as i hoped, and this is all probably tl;dr and now you’re all mad at me cuz i suck at words, but i’m a biomolecular engineer, my whole CAREER is about engineering life and and what life means and what’s “ethical” when tampering with cells and life and cloning and genomic engineering, and… and this is stuff i think about. :/

I thought Sonneillonv’s argument was extremely well spoken, but I do also have to comment on nunubunkie argument on the different moral belief systems on both sides. 

This was always one of the things that fascinated me, ever since I read a terribly thought provoking article on Psychology Today about why politically partisan groups would always think the other either evil or stupid. It is a common misconception today that humanity shares a common sense of values of right and wrong, a shared instinctive sense of what is moral built into our bodies and brains. And while, to some extent this is true, if all of humanity shared the same value system then someone with totally opposing views on how to run society is either a.) incredibly stupid or b.) deliberately ignoring their moral sense presumably for moral gain. So either stupid, evil, or both!

But the thing is, different types of people don’t have the same sense of right and wrong as each other. People with liberal political standing are generally more concerned with whether something harms another and whether it is just. People with conservative political standing are also concerned with these things, but also equally with purity, authority, tradition, loyalty to the group, which makes for totally different stances on social and even economic policy.

This becomes even more interesting when you consider that conservative and liberal brains have actually been found to have some biological differences. Liberals tend to have larger anterior cingulate cortexes and conservatives tend to have larger amygadalas, meaning liberals are prone to being more open to new experiences where conservatives are more likely to see a threat. Other differences have been found, such as conservatives experiencing the sensation of ‘disgust’ more profoundly than liberals and liberals being more likely to follow the gaze of the person they are talking with. It raises the question as to whether these differences in moral values might possibly be linked to different evolutionary strategies. 

I recently found a blog post that talks about a lot of these articles I had read and a couple more that you might be interested in:  http://www.ianmonroe.com/blog/2011/02/15/biological-differences-between-the-liberal-brain-and-the-conservative-brain