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 Medium of Death wrote:
Is it not arguable that woman only feel terrible for having abortions because society makes them feel terrible? I wouldn't care if anybody I knew had an abortion, I'd encourage it if the child wasn't planned (and that was the route they were thinking about taking, obviously not encouraging abortions for all unplanned children).

Of course it is. It's not even arguable that the people dancing around screaming that you're evil for having an abortion play a part in all the guilt. And some people have an abortion and don't care at all.

But then, it's all about policing women's sexuality anyway. If it wasn't they'd actually care about the fetus after it was born.

PhantomViper wrote:

A heartbeat doesn't define something as human, otherwise pretty much all animals would be considered human.
Having a shape similar to the human form also doesn't qualify something as human, otherwise pretty much all simians would be considered human as well...

You know what makes someone human? Our brain, our sense of self.

Of course, if you go by measurable brain activity then you're again including many animals.

All that aside, there is a potential discussion about disability that is quite interesting and touches on a lot of the assumptions we make about life (though it's a bit buried under the nonsense about a fetus being "a baby".). If you could tell your baby was going to turn out disabled in some way and abort it, then have a new, un-disabled baby, would that be a good thing to do?

I find it easy to say, well, if you do that then maybe the net misery in the world will decrease and we'll all be better off, but that seems very dismissive of the positives hardships can provide and the value of diversity.

Ableism has to play a part somewhere - the idea that a disabled child is somehow worth less. But I don't believe that more lives > less lives.

I think my final answer is that it's a problem that we view disabled people's lives as worth less than other people's, like there's some objective standard for judging how valuable someone's life is and they're at the low end of it. Aborting disabled kids is a symptom of that rather than the issue itself.