For me a child that is alive is better than one dead and certainly there are line ups of childless couples who want to raise a baby. It's not about fixing a person it's about having people deal with the consequences of their actions.
If a man RAPES a woman I don't blame her for wanting an abortion.
You are contradicting yourself here. If the guiding principle is that we can and should deny people the right to make decisions about what happens inside their own bodies so as to force them to deal with the consequences of their actions, then anyone who's caused themselves illness or injury through irresponsible habits or behavior should be denied that right also, which goes against the 'better alive than dead' principle. If the guiding principle is 'better alive than dead,' then how precisely a woman got pregnant, including rape and incest, must be treated as irrelevant--we don't punish innocent persons (assuming that status is being implied here) with death for wrongs they had no hand in. So, which is it? Using your body irresponsibly imposes a legal obligation to let nature take its course uncountered; or, all human life from the moment of conception has the moral status of personhood, with all the legal protections (and corollary severe punishments for murderers) that entails?
Incidentally, in the US at least, the infant relinquishment rate has held steady at around only 13,000 infants per year for several decades now, despite abortion rates, net birthrates and single motherhood rates having fluctuated considerably during that same time period. Even in the 1950s, when abortion was illegal and the stigma against single motherhood very strong, less than 10% of single mothers chose to give their infants up for adoption. (It's the swelling numbers of older children in the foster care system that's the problem: few prospective adoptive parents are interested in a 9-year-old with 'developmental issues' resulting from neglect or abuse in its birth family, whereas infants are almost always successfully placed for adoption within several months maximum.) So the data don't support glib invocations of adoption as some ideal 'win-win' alternative; on the contrary, they strongly suggest that
most women who go through with an unwanted pregnancy, voluntarily or not, will prove quite unwilling to give someone who endured none of it the one thing left in their lives that they still feel they have some control over. Which might not be a good attitudinal foundation for responsible parenthood, but as an emotional response, it's eminently understandable.
Now of course I'm the type of guy that has no fear of forgoing a high consumptive standard of living to pay for unexpected children and from what my parents told me I was unplanned but I'm pretty happy they kept me.
The 'Well I'm happy
I was born!' argument has never resonated with me, since if I hadn't been born, it's not as if I'd be floating around disembodiedly out there wailing about it. Nor would there be logical reason for anyone else to grieve over someone they'd never known, nor would I expect it to have perverted my mother's soul and transformed her into some abominably evil or cold or irresponsible person.
They also had to sacrifice a consumptive standard of living (they never earned high wages) to keep me but my Dad was responsible. My parents couldn't pay for my education but I got a student loan and did odd jobs to make my own way. If he wasn't responsible and I was adopted instead I still would rather be alive than dead. My mom also had dementia for 15 years before she died and I helped my Dad take care of her despite less money. It's amazing what people are capable of when they are flexible.
That's wonderful that you and your family were able to pull together and support each other through various financial and medical crises. But I do hope you realize that you're far from alone in this forum in having such a background. Quite a few of us, 'pro-life' and 'pro-choice' alike, are in no need of lectures from anyone about what family members can sometimes do to support one another through crises and hardship. Then there are also some who know quite a bit about what individuals can sometimes do for themselves when their families have utterly failed them.
Hence we have child support and we try and force men to to pay-up precisely because we think men should be responsible as well.
As anitram already pointed out, this is naive at best and glib at worst. Particularly if the intended implication was that 'it all evens out in the end'; it doesn't and it can't.
The act of abortion is more of a woman's issue because of biology not because women don't matter.
Abortion is, yes. But women don't get unwantedly pregnant merely because sexual intercourse happens, they get pregnant because
both partners failed to use contraception themselves (device failures excepted). Contraception is also a man's responsibility--that I think was BAW's main point there, and mine as well. A man who observes the unfailingly high standards of sexual responsibility you so readily demand of women will
always use contraception himself, every time, regardless of what his partner also claims to be using, unless the two of them have agreed that parenthood is a desirable outcome. (And quite obviously, a lot of men
don't do this.) It's not just about his willingness (or ability) to pay child support.
The problem of abortion today is that it looks like lady justice taking off her blindfold and tipping the scales against the children. It's like negating the child and treating the child like an 'it' because the child cannot speak.
I don't personally consider fetal life to have the moral status of personhood, and I only take those who claim to seriously if they're consistent in refusing exceptions for rape and incest (not the fetus' fault) and insisting on comparably harsh punishments for women who have abortions (and any 'accomplices' who help them) to those of other murderers. So again, your turns of phrase here don't resonate much with me. I
would quite willingly support a compromise position of unrestricted access to abortion only through the first trimester, and afterwards only for reasons of medical necessity as certified by a doctor.
I often get the sense that people who support criminalizing abortion are of the opinion that if women are allowed access to it, this somehow threatens to turn them en masse into cold, brutal, reckless creatures who are incapable of caring for anyone's needs besides their own. This I think is a wholly emotion-driven, rather than reason-driven view, with no meaningful 'evidence' to recommend it. While I'm biased here by virtue of being a parent myself, I will admit I
do tend to suppose that, by and large and as a generalization, people who are parents are
more likely to have a well-developed capacity for putting others' needs and wants first than those who are not. I couldn't say, though, that this must therefore logically make them 'better' people, more 'good' or more valuable to society somehow, and I've certainly seen enough being part of the broader community of parents to be quite certain that you can't force this willingness to put children's needs first on people from the outside--they'll either rise to the occasion or they won't, in the long term. Understand, I'm not observing this in the context of some pro-choice 'future child's quality of life' argument; it's an observation about parental moral responsibility and where it does and doesn't come from.