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Jun 24, 2022Liked by DJ

Followed for the pod, but I was intrigued when this was in my inbox. Very well written and I agree!! I do not want abortions to happen, but they absolutely need to be an option. Birth control and sex education are vital to lowering abortion rates. I’m so frustrated that many media outlets award extreme views with the most attention, making us seem way more divided than we are.

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Two things:

1. IMO the Atlantic does a good job of providing fairly balanced coverage most of the time... but not in the heat of the moment of partisan battles (see their contemporaneous coverage of the Kavanaugh hearings). The article you reference is from 2019, when passions around the issue of abortion were relatively cool in comparison to now. I expect their coverage will be far from balanced over the next month at minimum.

2. You write, "the life of the mother is more valuable than the life of the unborn child because that mother is already alive, and the child is not."

I think you mean to say that the mother is already a fully agentive being, since the beginning of your sentence implies that the child is alive (a biological fact).

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1. I think you're probably right, and this article is old, but it's better than 99% of articles on the subject during the same period. Even their heat and passion will be nothing like the Times which I will likely not open for the next month at a minimum. And they will probably provide heated arguments from both sides. Both extreme sides.

2. No, I meant what I said, fetal viability - as well as agency, are important to my thinking. Even a 2nd trimester fetus is unlikely to live without medical intervention and pregnancies can self-terminate at any stage. I said unborn child because at some point a child will come of that pregnancy, not because the unborn baby is a child during pregnancy and because I really don't like the word Fetus. It's like how a lot of people feel about moist. I don't believe unborn babies should have the same rights as children, as it's possible the pregnancy wouldn't be viable anyway and because they're just not children, but they should definitely have most of those rights and beyond that, society should have an interest in preserving them.

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