Incoming medical students walk out at University of Michigan’s white coat ceremony as the keynote speaker is openly anti-abortion.

I agree with you, except it will be the opposite. "How did people think it was okay to force women into this with no choice? Even at the risk of their own lives in a country with a high maternal mortality rate."

"How can they have freedom be one of their foundational guides, but think restrictions on what women do with their bodies is alright?"

How did people think it was okay to force 13 year olds to give birth to rape babies? How did people think it was okay to force a woman to give birth to the corpse of her already confirmed dead child or carry her dead child until it rotted inside her? How did people think it was okay to let women go to jail for having a miscarriage? How did people value a bundle of formless non-sentient cells more than rape victims or children or even just women in general who deserve autonomy and respect? How did people understand why it was wrong to force someone to donate their organs without consent, and yet still tried to force women to donate their wombs and in some cases their lives without their consent?

Oh yeah, because they were fucking idiots, like you.

No, what will actually happen is they will wonder how people could ever mistake a clump of cells as a baby and force women to carry a child they don't want.

I like when people use the "clump of cells" argument like that doesn't perfectly describe all life as we know it. You sir are just a clump of cells, can I take your life because you are an unwanted clump of cells?
- "I" am not a clump of cells. I am the ghost in the machine. A pattern, existing in a biological computer, piloting a meat mech. Once that pattern ceases to exist, "I" cease to exist, even if the meat mech is still fully functional. At that point, what remains is just a clump of cells. Or, more usefully, a collection of spare parts, for other meat mechs.
  
  For many, the key difference between a fetus/baby and a "clump of cells" is the ability to support similar patterns (a soul, if you will). Almost all abortions happen long before the clump of cells develops to the point it can support such a pattern. (Neurons alone aren't enough, it needs a critical mass and proper wiring)
  
  There is a potential for argument on late term abortions. I agree that should be restricted. Even that, however need to be dealt with with solomness, logic and care, not emotional knee jerking.
- Early foetal development stages are literal clumps of pluripotent cells. A lot like most medical test matter when it comes to testing mechanisms in human/eukaryotic organisms. What both lack, is Organisation and viability. If we were to follow your argument, we wouldn’t be allowed to use nearly all medication developed in the last 50 years or so. Also: whom would you try for the repeat murder of Henrietta Lacks?
- That clump of cells would need “conciousness” or the ability to think for itself to be considered sentient, something you apparently lack as well.
  
  There's the ad hominem. Out of curiosity how do you determine if someone or something has a consciousness, how do you feel about people on life support that are clinically brain dead? How about people in a coma?
  
  Not a great argument. If they're brain dead then correct, they're no longer sentient. Therefore I wouldn't disagree with pulling the plug at all.
  
  If I was braindead with no hope of recovery then I would seriously hope my family pulled the plug. It wouldn't be me anymore and I would hate to be a drain on resources for nothing.
  
  That's a great point about people in comas. It should be considered murder to pull the plug on a comatose loved one. They're still a living person, and it's disgusting we get to just murder them when they still have so much potential. Sure, it's expensive to keep someone monitored at a hospital, and there's no guarantee they'll come out of it, but they're still a living person.

I'm going to presume that you're confused rather than lying.

NOBODY thinks "it's okay to kill babies."

The reality is that those who support a right to abortion do not believe that fetuses qualify as "babies" at all. In their opinion, a fetus is at most a potential person - not an actual person.

Yes - I understand that that's not your position, and I'm sure you have lots of what you believe to be compelling arguments to support your view that fetuses docqualify as "babies," but that's explicitly NOT the position of people who support a right to abortion.

So when you characterize the pro-choice position as one that asserts that "it's okay to kill babies," you're at the very least misrepresenting what they actually believe.

I presume you consider yourself to be a moral person, so you should likely ask yourself - just how moral is your position, really, if you feel compelled to lie and misrepresent the views of those who disagree?

A failure to understand or believe that abortion is murder does not make it no long a murder. For the people that believe Jews deserve to die their opinion does not change the fact that the holocaust was genocide. I also said "in the future" since, much like slavery was accepted in the past, I believe our understanding of human life will undergo change and abortion will be viewed as a murder of innocents.
- How many children do you foster? How many have you adopted? 3, 4, 10, 100?
  
  Funny you should ask I work in a fostering program and have much more experience I'd wager with foster children both those taken from homes and those given up for adoption. However just because a child isn't wanted and is in foster care does not mean you should be able to kill it.
  
  Sure, once they are a child. But before that point wouldn't it be great if they never wound up in the system? Anti-abortion people always bring up the "well put the baby up for adoption " idea, and my point is that's not really a viable solution in America. Also, you didn't answer my question. How many have You adopted? Because if it's not at least 1, and probably should be more, your a hypocrite. You don't want to care for a child, or judge you don't have the means or capacity to, so you don't adopt. Which is the same decision these women have come to in many cases.
  
  Look into the statistics of age ranges for foster care/adoption, I think you will be very surprised at the data. But unfortunately regardless of how many children are left in poor life circumstances because of a failure by the government to give adequate incentives to promote fostering/adoption as well as funding to foster care organizations that does not change the morality of killing a healthy baby that would, if left to nature, be born. As I responded to another person, want and convenience does not dictate morality. Just because we don't have the perfect solutions doesn't mean we can stop playing the game.
  
  So does all that mean the child doesn't suffer? Does that mean that their suffering is preferable to abortion? Does it mean that the mother's potential life long side affects didn't occur? That her real risk of poverty, medical conditions, and death never happened? Or do all those things just mean absolutely nothing?
  
  It's not a game. It's not about convenience. It's about being able to choose for yourself, your family, and your body. There is literally no other situation in which we force people to give up their bodies, risk their lives, or give up their livelihood for someone else.
  
  I have two children. They could need one of my organs to survive, but no one could force me to donate. No one. No one could force my husband. No one could force you. But when a person is pregnant, suddenly their body isn't their own anymore. It's viewed as an irreversible event that we have to leave up to chance no matter what. People talk about children who would be alive if not for abortion. What about subsequent children who wouldn't be alive if an earlier pregnancy wasn't aborted? The women who would have died if not for abortion?
  
  Sure, there's the "for the life of the mother exception", but in reality, it doesn't work out so clear cut. Doctors are afraid of spending their lives in jail and having insurmountable fines, so they wait until women are dying right here, right now. Women risk their fertility and their lives. Families risk losing their mother because of these unnecessarily harsh consequences. There's no other situation in which we say, hey, you might die from this, but we won't do anything until you're dying right this second because if someone can "prove" that you wouldn't have died, then we'll go to jail for life.
- So far, you have managed to involve slavery and holocaust into (apparently) a conversation about abortion.
  
  Do you think you can top it off?
  
  Day is young...
- Going to pretend you're not a troll BigToe.
  
  It seems like you're all for lab grown meat and killing off the livestock for meat industry correct? Fish and other animals would be similar? Anything with a nervous system and at least some semblance of intelligence or self preservation that probably isn't a plant? With eventually lab grown plants or nutrients that aren't used through forced reproduction or killing offspring since they're alive, but not sapient.
  
  How do you see birth control working in that future? With zero abortions, you'd have to have something like men and women sterilized at adolescence then allowed conceiving rights once they hit an arbitrary age like 18? Free condoms, medical procedures, or other variations of birth control in every home or at a free doctor for everybody under 18?
- Presuming, for the sake of argument, that the consensus in the future comes to be that it is in fact murder, then yes - it's rightly labeled "murder" regardless of the view one might hold.
  
  But that's beside my point.
  
  To carry on with this particular context, what you're asserting is that those who support a right to abortion believe that murder is okay, which is very much NOT what they in fact believe. They believe that it does not qualify as "murder" at all.
  
  So again, you're misrepresenting what they actually believe, and doing so in order to saddle them with a moral position they do not in fact hold, snd that dishonesty, in my estimation, calls into question the notion that you actually are a moral person.
  
  Oh, and for the record, I think you're wrong anyway. I think that when all of the reactionary, emotional fervor dies down and cooler heads prevail, the beginning of human life will be defined by the exact same thing that's already the accepted marker for the end of human life - the presence or absence of measurable cortical activity.
  
  And curiously enough, cortical activity can only be detected in fetuses well into the second trimester.
  
  I disagree with your logic, it is a massive logical fallacy to say that becuase something isn't murder now that even if it's seen as murder in the future it wasn't murder in the past. Slavery now is still the same as slavery in the past and past atrocities do not become humane because they are viewed through the lens of time. Now legally speaking sure, if slaves are allowed then slavery is legal, but legality does not in any way dictate morality. This begs the question why do you keep insinuating that because something is legal then it is moral?
  
  The premise of your argument is that they're going to consider it murder in the future. But what if they don't? Anyway, the logical fallacy is worrying about what future societies might think, since they're not here now.
  
  Abortion is moral and merciful. Forcing an unwanted child into the world is cruel.
  
  Your opinion that a fetus deserves rights is something that most of us don't respect here.
  
  it is a massive logical fallacy to say that becuase something isn’t murder now that even if it’s seen as murder in the future it wasn’t murder in the past.
  
  I'm not convinced that's actually true, but it's irrelevant anyway, since that's not what I said.
  
  The other poster did not assert simply that abortion is murder, but that those who support a right to abortion explicitly advocate for murder.
  
  The assertion was not about the morality of the act, but about the morality of the people who support the right to commit that act.
  
  Do you grasp that distinction?
  
  Slavery now is still the same as slavery in the past and past atrocities do not become humane because they are viewed through the lens of time.
  
  Certainly, but again, that's irrelevant, since the exact point I was making was that the other poster was rendering a moral judgment of the people - not the act.
  
  And slavery makes a good comparison. Yes - we now view slavery to be wrong, and simply wrong - it was wrong in the past just as it would be wrong today.
  
  But we can't legitimately condemn those in the past who held slaves in societies in which holding slaves was deen to be entirely moral, since they were doing the exact same thing that we're now doing - they were doing the best they could to lead a moral life. It's not that they were evil and we are good - it's that they were good by the standards of their time just as we are good by the standards of ours. That's the most one can generally do, so that's all anyone can ever justifiably be expected to do.
  
  If standards change such that an act that at one time was judged to be good is later judged to be evil, then yes - it can be said that it was always evil. But those who committed the act specifically because they were taught that it was good - those who set out to be good people and acted as they did specifically because the society of which they were a part told them that [this] is what good people do - cannot legitimately be charged by later generations with advocating for evil. They advocated for good, just as we do. That they were, by our standards, wrong about what does or does not qualify as good doesn't alter that fact.
  
  This begs the question why do you keep insinuating that because something is legal then it is moral?
  
  I... didn't even come vaguely close to "insinuating" that. I have absolutely no idea where or how you got such a wildly inaccurate impression.
- So far, all you've shown is that you don't understand squat about murder, fetal development, slavery, or the holocaust. Care to add any other ignorant takes to the pile you've built yourself?

“how did people think it was okay to kill babies that inconvenience them?”.

Let me fix this for you.

"How did we create a society with so little support for mothers that some had abortions for financial or lack-of-support reasons?"

That's the real tragedy. If a woman doesn't want a baby, then she's going to be a horrible mom and raise a horrible person. Those people can have abortions all day and night for all I care. But the women who might want one, but can't afford it, but don't feel safe in their own home, that's society failing.

Hopefully in ghe future the need for abortions is close to zero becuase of better education, birth control and standard of living.

But today it is better to have abortions than put people into this world when nobody is going to take care of them the way they need.

I think they will look back at this time and think "how sad that they did not have the tools and care needed to avoid abortions".

That's completely fair and very possible, but I do disagree morally that it's better to have an abortion than to bring a baby into the world that isn't wanted. Want should not dictate the viability of life nor the concept of basic human right to life. Most times the right thing isn't easy or even what we want, but that should not get in the way of doing what IS right. Should there be better foster care systems and increased funding for both systems and families willing to foster/adopt? Absolutely. But the failure of our government to put spending where it should to assist with fostering/adoption and, as you mentioned, in education and standard of living, does not change the morality of the ending of a baby's life through abortion.
- It's not a baby, it's a clump of fetal cells that has a 75% chance of failing on its own even without an abortion.
- Adoption doesn't change what pregnancy does to a woman's body. Comments like these focus solely on the fetus and ignore the woman who can have life long consequences of simply carrying the fetus to term.

Thank you for your comment. I really appreciate the opportunity to block your account.

It’s funny since I just learned how to block a user after viewing the Big Toe comments. The troll drove me to figure out that feature. So at least something good came out of it.
- While I completely disagree with his opinion on abortion I think that's all it is. This doesn't appear like trolling at all. It seems almost as irritating as the pro liver to block anyone you disagree with and call them a troll on top of it.
  
  No, he’s def a troll 🙄

I'd like to think that, in the future, people would realize most if not all anti-abortion activists were low information and largely indoctrinated. When you actually understand the science behind reproduction, it's really hard to look at a blob of cells that's frequently lost without human intervention anyhow as a "baby".

And this, yet again, is why science education, REAL science education, is so important.

The vast majority of abortions, like 99.9%, are either for medical reasons or sexual assault. The conservative hegemony has done an excellent job of brainwashing people like yourself into believing the opposite. I can't even imagine the horror that rape victims go through when being forced to give birth to a constant reminder of the unbelievable hell that they endured.

Whenever these two reasons (medical and rape) are brought up to abortion opponents, they all seem to be ok with terminating pregnancies as these are acceptable exceptions.

That is 100% false. Please do some research before commenting.
- Like the research you didn't do?

I think rather they would look back and wonder how we failed so badly at education to result in comments such as yours to get to the point where we allowed risking a woman's life for dead clump of cells.

https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil215/Thomson.pdf