Quote:
Originally Posted by Runner Runner
The way the tide is turning on the abortion issue, with younger people more likely to be pro-life than their parents....it is the pro-abortion philosophy which is more likely to be viewed as archaic in 40 years. More and more people are finding it incredibly problematic to afford right to life only at birth.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinio...lumn/24900705/
There's a lot of nuance here. For example, the rise of the acceptance of contraception changes the perspective of abortion. If you use contraception, the need for abortion as a birth control method goes down. This is very different from the context in which abortion was viewed a generation ago.
There's also been an underlying nuance about the abortion debate that strong abortion defenders have had a very hard time accepting, which is that later term abortions are more morally problematic than earlier term abortions. Both the pro-life movement with "life begins at conception" and the pro-abortion movement that takes abortion to be morally acceptable up to the point of natural birth with "My body, my rights" were not viable positions to hold in the long run. There's simply too much absolutism there to be robust enough.
At this point in time, I with the advent of technology and scientific information that has allowed us to see more deeply into the situation and to expand the window of viability of a fetus, the underlying assumptions that are at play are vastly different than when the original decisions were made.
However, I do not expect the overturning of Roe v Wade as something that's really going to happen here. It certainly has a higher chance right now than it has had in a long time. In another 40 years, I'd expect earlier term abortions to still be legal, and for later term abortions to still be illegal (as they actually are in some 40+ states, I think). But I don't really see it being likely for it to be illegal to abort children with certain types of diseases or genetic abnormalities. (I personally think it's a morally slippery to go down the path of selection based on genetics, but that's a discussion for another time and place that will largely be driven by the changing landscape of genetic testing and genetic remedies that become available over time.)