Abortions can destroy young women, says DUP MP Shannon

Simon Carmichael: Pregnancy can destroy women. Post-natal depression can destroy women. The financial and emotional burden of an unwanted child can destroy women. Each woman deserves the choice to decide what is best and safest for her. It’s insulting to suggest the DUP remotely cares about women facing crisis pregnancy.

Matt Jones: ‘What’s best for her’? Not for the child? I suspect this is the sort of statement that spurs on pro-life campaigners. We all sound very selfish. All about me. I have to look after number one.

Simon Carmichael: People that don’t exist don’t have a point to consider. It’s difficult to engage with adults whose position depends on a perfect ignorance of scientific and medical knowledge. Hence, why their side is backed by religion.

Matt Jones: And at what point, then, do they ‘exist’?

Peter Lombard: One individual deciding if another lives or dies is not equality; it’s discrimination.

Chrisanne English: A foetus is a potentiality. For the rights of a potential person to trump those of an already independently living sentient person is nonsensical.

Mark Lawson: You have a choice to practise safe sex. No one is taking that away from you. Post-natal depression (like mental illness) can be — and should be — treated with counselling and, if necessary, medically. Chrisanne English: Mark, your argument dissolves with the fact that birth control isn’t 100% effective. It fails regularly, leading to unwanted pregnancies. In order for women to maintain control over the direction of their lives, abortion is an unfortunate, yet essential, medical provision.

Donald Andrews: I would really like to live in the land of Mark Lawson.

Claire Louise: Then use protection. Not wait until you create a life and then, ultimately, kill your own child. The ignorance frustrates me. Haven’t you ever heard of post-abortion depression? The guilt women feel living with what they’ve done? Look it up.

Peter Lombard: Proponents of abortion routinely use dehumanising language in relation to the unborn child. However, the fact remains that a ‘foetus’ is qualitatively no different than a ‘toddler’, an ‘adolescent’, or an ‘adult’. Each is a descriptor for one individual.