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I wonder how many vegans are agaisnt abortion after 1 month on the grounds it has a brain (granted not to the level of sophistication of an adult human)... I also wonder how they could possibly reconcile that with their vegan position.
As a side note prior to 1 month the fetus has no neurons, so i can see an abortion as "vegan" prior to 1 month. But an abortion after one month i cant see any way to justify that as compatible with veganism.
Please feel free to share your thoughts if you wish.
@louis All reasonable points. I do assume we are talking about ethical vegans opposed to killing and not health vegans or best-for-society vegans (econology).
And yea, I could also see consistent logic in being vegan and not being willing to have an abortion yourself but also wanting it to be legal for others. That said if a vegan took that stance of abstain-but-legal to truely be consistent they would have to also they they feel the sale of meat should remain legal and would oppose any effort to outlaw meat on ethical grounds.
@freemo And I think that's generally true. Most vegans will talk your ear off about it at the drop of a hat, but only a militant minority want to actually outlaw meat.
@freemo But doesn’t vegan relate to eating?
I’d hope that a significant number of people here don’t eat human foetuses…
That said, there’s probably an instance dedicated to foetus eating on a blocklist somewhere.
@freemo animals need more help right now than humans
@freemo@qoto.org I don't know too much about the development during pregnancy, so I can't say too much about that.
What I would say is that abortion is part of a persons bodily autonomy which, in principle, takes precident over the developing child. It may be comperable to how I can not be forced to donate my kidney to you even if you'll die without it.
Things are of course more complicated than this, but I think it rudimenteraly illustrates how abortion rights may be reconsiled with ethical veganism.
Do you know of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexitarianism? I feel that the wiki article fails to describe a variant where the choice depends mostly on cost/level of incovenience caused by not relying on animals. That is an approach that I mostly have, my threshold of inconvenience above which I ignore is pretty low, and yet I eat mostly vegan due to the power of defaults.
The reason I mention this is that I imagine a person with a similar approach to mine, but slightly better organized and with a slightly higher threshold would eat basically only vegan food[1], but their approach to abortion would be basically unaffected.
[1] I specifically mention only food, because the levels of inconvenience caused by e.g. having to find an alternative to leather hiking boots or woolen shirts are very person-dependent.
@freemo Well, you're describing only one motivation of many for veganism, but for that particular motivation, I'd generally agree.
That said, making the personal choice to abstain may not necessarily translate into wanting to impose that decision on others... i.e. someone can simultaneously be both pro-choice and decide that an abortion would never be morally appropriate for themselves.