We should provide free birth control and better sex education. Morning after contraception should also be free -- a fertilized, un-implanted egg is not a human -- it's a potential human.
>a fertilized, un-implanted egg is not a human -- it's a potential human.
Is there a scientific reason for that idea? I don't see how implantation can really be considered a transition from potential human to human. I think with enough scientific advances a human could be raised entirely outside the womb, and in that case there would be no implantation.
I think the way GP phrased it is a shorthand for "egg just after fertilization" - because today, fertilized eggs either get implanted early or rejected by the mother's body. When science and technology advances to the point of making it possible to gestate humans entirely outside of the womb, the way we talk about this will have to adjust to be more precise.
(Implantation itself doesn't feel like the transition point either, but it's just the last obvious discrete step before the continuous progression all the way to birth.)
I don't see why we can't try to adjust to be more precise now.
It seems strange to say that our current definition is not the correct long-term definition, but we'll keep using the current one. To me that's basically saying our current definition of human is wrong, and I don't see why it's acceptable to use a wrong definition.
In countries with a good safety net (including parental leave and child care help), comprehensive sex education, free access to contraception and abortion and general health care, abortion rates are often lower.
I'm not sure it avoids the majority since a decent amount of folks have the knowledge and tools to simply avoid the pregnancy in the first place, but it does lower it.
I'm not certain there is a level of foster care that could provide good outcomes. I think that's a bit of a pipedream. If your argument is instead that a shitty life is better than no life at all, I couldn't really disagree. But I think it's somewhat inhumane to bring a new life into the world knowing it will be suffering.
I think the main reason kids in foster care suffer is that the kids are already old and have been through a traumatic situation that caused them to have to be put into foster care. That trauma plus the transition can leave emotional scars. Another problem is the foster parents cannot fully take in the kid. The kid can be taken away from them by the government and given back to the kid's original parents.
Putting a newborn up for adoption is different, it doesn't have either of those problems. There are 2 million families in the US waiting to adopt a newborn.
