"If you want to decrease abortion, why not support better sex education, contraceptive access, and healthcare access instead of trying to outlaw abortion? These methods reduce abortions, while making abortion illegal doesn't."
There are several facets to our answer. 🧵1/5
We do support comprehensive sex education and better access to contraception. Better to prevent unintended pregnancy than have to grapple with abortion or unintended birth. 2/5
That said, outlawing abortion dramatically reduces abortion. Even more mild restrictions (limits on taxpayer funding, parental notification laws) significantly reduce abortion. We link to decades of research demonstrating as much in this thread:
Also, abortion restrictions correlate with increased contraceptive use. When abortion isn't readily available as a back up option, people take more precautions to avoid pregnancy in the first place. Click here to see a thread of studies:
Finally, in addition to these practical considerations, we also fight to make abortion illegal on principle. Abortion kills humans. We want to create a society that offers at least the minimum legal protection of not letting them be unjustly killed. 5/5
Addendum: Even internationally, when you control for other variables, making abortion illegal reduces abortions. We go into much more detail, with citations, here:
I predict that five years from now, American opinion on abortion and Roe v. Wade will have moved in a strongly pro-life direction, as evidenced by reputable polls.
I am not basing this prediction on a grand ethical revolution, as much as I would like to see that happen. Nor am I basing it on an increase in personal experiences with life-saving laws, although that may be a factor.
New peer-reviewed article just published. "Current neuroscientific evidence indicates the possibility of fetal pain perception during the first trimester (<14 weeks gestation)." journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…
A particularly horrifying excerpt. Until the 1980s we performed surgery on newborns with paralytics but not pain meds, assuming they lacked the higher cortical function for it to matter.
Sometimes PCers argue fetuses aren't "persons" until later in pregnancy when they display certain EEG patterns. But when pressed they don't tell me what EEG patterns they're referring to or what they think those patterns mean. Kinda suspect they're just making up criteria.
Let's start with the obvious: #prolife people should never resort to harassment or abuse. That said, Danielle is onto something; I *do* feel especially angry when people use the language of parenting to justify abortion. Why is that? 🧵
I've written an entire (unpublished) novel on this theme, and it's not especially realistic to distill my thoughts into 280 characters at 2 in the morning, but here goes:
Abortion as a "parenting decision" shatters the idea of a parent's unconditional love.
If you subscribe to Danielle's view, you do not -- cannot -- love your children unconditionally. You love them because they fulfilled your conditions. They were conceived at a convenient time; their prenatal screenings revealed no disabilities.
All eyes on the race for Governor of Virginia! Virginians will elect a new Governor on November 2nd; early voting has already begun blog.secularprolife.org/2021/10/all-ey…
Current Virginia Governor Ralph Northam (D) — a strong abortion supporter who is infamous for his pro-infanticide comments and blackface scandal — is term-limited.
Running to succeed him are Democrat Terry McAuliffe, who served as Governor of Virginia from 2014 to 2018, and Republican Glenn Youngkin, a political outsider.
Buckle in, because this may be the most egregious case of pro-abortion media bias we've ever seen.
When Carrie Baker wrote an article for Ms. Magazine claiming that heartbeat bills are anti-science, she made a crucial error: she linked to an embryology textbook which told the truth.
When we pointed this out to her, she blocked us on Twitter, deleted the source from her article, and omitted any notation of the change to her article.
Baker is a professor of "feminist public writing" at Smith College.