TheAgitator.com
Obligatory Abortion Post
Tuesday, April 27th, 2004I’m normally fairly passive in my anti-abortion views. I believe it ought to be an issue decided at the state level, if not at a level even more parochial. So I’ve no use for a “pro-life amendment,” but I’m not crazy about a federal guarantee to an abortion, either. I see a clear and distinct difference between a morning after pill (which I’d probably even allow to be legal if it were up to me), and a late-term, partial birth abortion, which really can’t be distinguished from infanticide. But I also have no problem with, for example, Utah banning any and all abortion. If the issue is important to me, I can choose to live in a state with readier access (and that’s really the state of the procedure today — in practice if not in letter).
That said, the pro-choice rally this weekend on the National Mall felt ugly and untoward to me. It was pretty clear that the signs, the chants, and the cute phrases amounted not to an affirmation of a morally troubling but still (arguably) ascribable right, but rather a celebration of abortion as gender or sexual liberation; a celebration of the actual practice of abortion — not as a sometimes-needed but lamentable medical procedure, but as a political statement. You got the feeling that if they could, many of these women were ready to immediately go and have an abortion if for no other reason than to piss off John Ashcroft.
I’m all for pissing off John Ashcroft. But I’d rather we not have a collective abortion to do it. Couldn’t we all just download some porn instead?
This brings me to a post by Brooke Oberwetter.
No, I don’t think Brooke wants to have an abortion to piss off John Ashcroft. But I was troubled by hints of that kind of pro-abortion thinking by one clause in this otherwise thoughtful post (that I of course largely disagree with).
Brooke levels the ad hominem claim that men have no place in the public debate over abortion because men aren’t significant stakeholders in the actual abortion procedure.
One rebuttal to that is that about half the fetuses aborted are male (not to mention human), meaning men have the same stake in the abortion debate as, say, Christians in America do when speaking out against the persecution of Christians overseas. Or that any of us do, really, when speaking out against the mistreatment of anyone other than ourselves (yes, I know the word of contention here is “people.” More on that in a moment).
Maybe a metaphor will bring the stakeholder question into sharper focus.
I realize that the quickest way end an abortion debate is to invoke slavery and/or the Holocaust, but here I think the slavery metaphor is apt (actually, the quickest way to end an abortion debate is…to actually have an abortion debate. But we’re already there.).
If Brooke’s claim that those without a personal stake in the issue have no room in the public debate is true, then couldn’t we say the same thing about non-slaveholding abolitionists?
After all, they were neither slaves nor slaveowners. Just as pro-choicers say the decision to have an abortion is between the woman, her body, and her doctor, so too could slaveowners say the slavery question was between a man and his property, his slaves. Why should it be of any concern to someone who is neither?
And just as the pro-choice crowd today says a fetus doesn’t retain the set of rights a full-fledged person does, slavery factions said the same things about slaves,didn’t they?
Yes, looking back, we can objectively say to day that slaves were indeed human beings, and that we all, also as human beings, also had a stake in the debate. But the question wasn’t so settled at the time, was it?
And isn’t this what the pro-life folks say about the fetus? That it’s human? I’m not sure that asserting your own belief that a fetus isn’t human gives you carte blanche to then say no man has any right to speak out about abortion. You’re accepting as a premise a point that’s still in contention.
I’d submit that the stake non-slaveowning northerners had in the slavery debate is precisely the same stake Brooke ascribes to men in the abortion debate.
To her credit, Brooke does acknowledge in the comments section that she’d give men the right to “abort” parental responsibility early on in a pregnancy, bringing at least some notion of equity to the reproductive debate. Of course, that would likely inspire more abortions, and it’s a proposition neither side would ever sign on to, for obvious reasons. But I find it’s a useful test of pro-choicers (particularly of the libertarian stripe) to see if they abandon all notion of equity and reason on an issue this contentious.
Brooke didn’t. Dammit.
One other thought on the weekend protests here in D.C.:
I’ve often made the case (and been chastised for it) that the pro-choice folks’ claims to be “pro-choice, not pro abortion” is mostly bunk (it’s also my opinion that pro-lifers aren’t any more loyal to their preferred moniker, given the way many of them treat single mothers). Not all of them, of course. But most of them. And particularly the loudest ones. I think my point would be made if you’d pull any random protester from the past weekend aside and ask how she’d feel if a woman planning to have an abortion were somehow dissuaded from the decision by a pro-life activist on the way into the clinic.
How many do you think would feel “relieved” that a potential abortion had been thwarted? By contrast, how many do you think would be annoyed, angry, or outraged that a pro-lifer had successfully prevented a woman from exercising “choice?”
I’ve asked every activist pro-choicer I know this question (and yes, many people who are pro-choice aren’t the hardcores on the Mall this weekend). So far, every one of them has objected to the woman being talked out of the abortion. I’ve also asked if they’d rather live in a country where abortion is forbidden, or where it can be forced upon women, as is sometimes the case in China. Or, which half of “choice” is more important, the right to have children, or the right to abort them?
Most all say they’d prefer the latter.
Together, both questions suggest to me that “choice” for many pro-choicers is only truly “choice” when it results in abortion. Actually carrying a pregnancy to term is something else, but it isn’t “choice.”
I find the assertion (that has been made to my face more than once) that abortion is a “women’s issue” and that I have no business saying anything about it extraordinarly offensive and ignorant. I appreciate your analogy to the slave debate, when it was a debate, and I’d offer a couple of other points as well.
First, there’s the commonly made point that I, in fact, was a fetus, and around half of the fetuses that are aborted are in fact male. If one doesn’t accept the assertion that the fetus is nothing more than a part of the woman’s body, it’s ridiculous to assert that any person living should have no say in the matter.
The second point is that if one accepts that abortion is an issue for women and women alone, it’s only fair that women should have no say in the matter of child support. Why should a woman have the option to rid herself of the consequences of an uwanted pregnancy while a man cannot? If a man is given no say in whether or not the fetus comes into the world after conception, it’s impossible to justify forcing him to accept the consequences of what amounts to someone else’s choice.
No matter how you slice it, the assertion that men shouldn’t have a say in the issue is blatantly and completely wrong. Couple that belief with the belief that child support should be enforced by the government, and you’ve got yourself a self-righteous, self-centered, unthinking hypocrite.
” Couldn’t we all just download some porn instead?”
Done. Now you can’t say I never do my share.
Damn great post, Rad mah lad.
Radley says:
“You’re accepting as a premise a point that’s still in contention”
If you could ever figure out a way to actually communicate that point to the PCs–there would probably BE no abortion debate.
Also,
“it’s also my opinion that pro-lifers aren’t any more loyal to their preferred moniker”
I prefer to call myself,”anti-choice”. I think it is a more precise description of my position.
This is an equal protection under the law issue to me. A “wanted” baby/fetus is every bit as valuable as an “unwanted” one.
It’s a baby, not a card to play in the relationship game.
OOPS! above posted by Rocketman
“I’ve asked every activist pro-lifer I know this question. So far, every one of them has objected to the woman being talked out of the abortion”
I’m thinking you probably mistakenly typed “pro-life”, since I’ve never known a single pro-lifer that would object to a woman being talked out of getting an abortion. Otherwise, the statement makes no sense.
On a different note, I was glad to see your slavery reference, as I have long said (hoped) that one day we would look back on this holocaust of abortion with the same kind of disgust we reserve for the institution of slavery.
I have always maintained that those supporting abortion today are the same type of people as those that practiced or supported slavery. Those people were equally stubborn, unwilling to consider that what they’ve been doing and supporting is quite likely wrong. The only way minds were changed was with the changing generations. Basically, we had to wait for those supporting slavery to die off. After all, slaves weren’t REALLY human anyhow, were they?
Rejoice, however, pro-choicers! You will one day be remembered by your great-great grandkids the same way some currently view their slave-owning ancestors - with confused disgust.
Roger-
FUCK YOU.
“I have always maintained that those supporting abortion today are the same type of people as those that practiced or supported slavery.”
Abolute rubbish. Slavery was(is) the matter of forcing people who have no choice to serve you. Abortion is a medical procedure. If you think it is murder, fine, but that is unprovable on either side.
The most important part of the debate (IMO) is that the best interest of the child AND mother are protected as much as possible. An aborted fetus will not know (and I assume go to heaven for you religous folks), and the mother will have to live with whatever choice she makes.
I will respond to any post, but I have too much to say in one post.
(As I am sure many of you do too.)
Anonymous -
Very persuasive argument. And classy too, I might add.
“Slavery was(is) the matter of forcing people who have no choice to serve you. Abortion is a medical procedure”
Like I said, slaves weren’t really human like the rest of us anyhow, right? For many people at that time, that argument was also “unprovable on either side”, so slavery should remain legal. Funny, but it seems most of us feel a little differently at THIS time, wouldn’t you say?
Don’t forget to give your slaves a good beatin’ before you go to bed. Gotta keep ‘em in line, you know.
Thanks you for proving my point.
Radley, I love you dearly, but I have to admit this post suprised me. In answer to your two “gotcha” questions (I’m pro-choice):
1) No, I would not feel “relieved” if a pregnant woman was talked out of an abortion. But what you’re missing is that I don’t think abortion is morally wrong - you might as well ask if I’d be “relieved” if she was talked out of getting her tonsils taken out. Nor would I be disappointed - I’d hope that she made the right choice for her, and that she had the financial and psychological ability to either raise the child or give it up (and that she wasn’t intimidated or guilt-tripped into her choice, because I’ve been screamed at by those Problem Pregnancy “clinic” people, and I know guilt and intimidation are their main tactics), but one more or less abortion in the world is no skin off my nose, either way.
2) I would rather not live in a country that forbade _or_ mandated abortion. If someone held a gun to my head, I’d probably choose the country where it was forbidden, but only because it’s easier to get a secret abortion than to secretly carry to term (and secretly raise the child).
Oh, and I do support the “financial abortion” or “Choice for Men”, or whatever it’s being called these days. It only stands to reason that men should have the opportunity to sign away parental rights in exchange for absolution of any financial or legal responsibility for the child, at least up to the point where the mother could reasonably abort (IMO, 14-16 weeks). There are a lot of problem situations with the idea however it’s implemented, but it seems to me that it could be handled in the courts at least as well as such things are now, and the paranoid could sign preemptive release/rejections with all their paramours.
But maybe us pro-choicers don’t all fit the stereotypes that the pro-life crowd likes to pin us with.
Radley says:
“You’re accepting as a premise a point that’s still in contention”
Rocketman says:If you could ever figure out a way to actually communicate that point to the PCs–there would probably BE no abortion debate.
Rocketman - funny, I feel the same way about ACs. The difference is, I don’t want the government to step in and regulate on issues where there’s no clear line to draw (and clear harm to be done by the prohibition) - I’d rather people draw the line themselves.
Part of the problem that the main disagreement never gets discussed (actually nothing gets discussed, withing three words this subject always breaks down to a shouting match). That is, at what point is a couple cells a human. With that not agreed upon, the rest of the argument will never get resovled.
This stuff is odd to me. I’m pro-choice because I see no other option. Not a big fan of abortion, but not at all keen on prohibition because I’m so well aware that it doesn’t work.
The analogy with slavery is particularly weak. The most obvious difference is that the ‘woman’s right to choose’ is a choice over whether to provide or withdraw support for a growing life which is entirely and exclusively dependent on her for its continued existence. We wouldn’t have a problem if the woman could choose not to support it and pass that on to someone else. The issue is polarised because she can’t. The choice to withdraw support will lead to the death of the fetus. No such claim can be made of slavery.
The real question, to me, is ‘Are people legally obliged to support a life which is entirely dependent on them?’
The only sensible answer I see for a libertarian is ‘no’. You don’t have to like abortion to believe that women should be allowed to choose to have them.
“cyclopatra says”,
I don’t want the government to step in and regulate on issues where there’s no clear line to draw.
I do.
For the same reason I would expect the government to prosecute firemen for not immediately responding to a fire alarm.
Some alarms are pranks or otherwise false alarms.
Does that mean that firemen could continue to watch TV until their favorite program was over if they “chose” to because we could not “prove” to their satisfaction that a given alarm was real? I think not.
Human life is valuable enough to respond in a manner that safeguards it even when some doubt exists. What happpens if I get my way and I’m wrong? We deprive citizens of the least medically recommended form of birth-control out there. What happens if you get your way and you’re wrong? Answer, “anonyomous” above knows the answer-hence the guilt-ridden expletive.
Radley, please don’t allow what you see of a movement’s activist fringe prejudice you against the movement as a whole. The vast, vast majority of pro-choicers out there regard abortion as a contentious and morally fraught issue. But as with any issue, when you create a large enough crowd with a high enough proportion of wing-nuts, you will hear a lot of shouted slogans that are simply absurd.
No movement, however vile, is as vile as its loudest members shouting in a group. Evangelicals are nearly all less nuts than Mr. Phelps. Hawks are nearly all less nuts than the LGF mob, doves almost all less nuts than the Alternet crowd. And most of those who favor abortion rights in fact embrace a moderate position far more subtle than the sorts of loonies who have nothing better to do with their lives than march around Washington hoping that someone (who?) will hear them.
In the end, both wings of the abortion debate take as given the answer to its central question — at what point does a mass of cellular matter become human? This is what distinguishes them from normal humans, who look at that question and say, “uh, I have no idea.” I think that really that’s the true abortion debate: People utterly convinced that they can definitively answer a vague, ill-posed, and thorny moral question, versus the rest of us. The wings, pro- and anti-, are more like one another than they are like the center.
–G
More *Cringe*ing
Since I was only able to tolerate a little bit of the angry chick crowd, I’ll post a link to Brooke who seemed to pick up about the time I gave up. (Link stolen from Radley, who has an excellent…
I doubt Radley will ever sleep with Brooke now.
Radley,
I’m pretty much with you on this issue. I could never understand people who equate a first trimester abortion with a late term. And if it takes place, ideally, the sooner the better. It’s pretty ludicrous to think that the birth canal imbues a child with moral and Constitutional protections. “My Body! My Choice!” sloganeering only goes so far.
I guess I’m a PCer, but I definitely don’t match your characterisation, Rad.
When I was raped, I went to my campus clinic and was given (a) a latex condom (which I can never use because of my allergy), (b) a pregnancy test and (c) two packets of 2 hormone pills each. One was for right then, the other for safekeeping, just in case.
I’m not drawing a line between fertilisation and implantation and saying “this is life”. I’m just glad that I was safe and that the rape had not/would not end in pregnancy.
When I have sex by choice, I am responsible and use reliable birth control. If, however, I were to become pregnant, I would not abort.
I’m not everywoman though, I am luckywoman who is loved and has plenty of support. I don’t feel as though I have any business telling a woman who may not have such strong support that she must follow through with an unwanted pregnancy. I don’t like it, but I don’t feel that I can dictate that sort of thing.
I can only imagine the quagmire if we tried to legislate what circumstances (surrounding the parent’s financial, physical or emotional state, or simply the conception event alone) qualify to validate an abortion.
I admit that perhaps I am taking the coward’s route on this one. I’ve made my decision, I know my own mind, but I won’t try to apply my decision in a global imperative. I simply don’t feel qualified.
This thread misses the point just as virtually every public discussion on the matter. The abortion battle is as much about economics as morals.
A few thoughts:
A) Abortion is murder. I like the old bumper sticker slogan: ‘If it’s not a baby your not pregnant’. If you favor killing unwanted babies, just say it.
B) As others have pointed out, prohibition is inherently problematic given the rise of black markets.
C) The advances of neo-natal medicine enable preemies to live earlier and earlier outside of the womb. This will inevitably clash with viability rules that are built into abortion legislation.
D) Declining prices and increasing variety, access and efficacy of birth control methods should be taken into account. I have little empathy with women who have unplanned pregnancies because it is now so cheap and easy to avoid becoming pregnant in the first place. I have heard all the excuses from these women as to why they got pregnant, but it ALWAYS boils down to lax application of birth control. The price of sex for a woman is birth control. Women ignore that cost at their peril.
My conclusion: this will be a dead debate fairly soon due to advances in reproductive medicine. Even the dumbest and poorest of women will eventually figure it out. At least I hope so.
Ack, posted too soon. Great post Bronwyn.
“You’re accepting as a premise a point that’s still in contention.”
Yes, I am. Willfully and joyfully.
“I’d submit that the stake non-slaveowning northerners had in the slavery debate is precisely the same stake Brooke ascribes to men in the abortion debate.”
I disagree. My basic supposition is that the early term fetus–my opinions change drastically and rapidly as we discuss abortions past the first trimester or when the fetus might reasonably survive outside the mother’s womb–simply isn’t human, simply doesn’t have the rights that non-slaving holding abolitionists were trying to defend. Anti-abolitionists believed that the slaves had human rights, and part of being a rights-bearing individual is that you are also responsible for not violating the rights of other rights-bearing individuals. A fetus can’t by its very nature respect the rights of a mother who doesn’t want it there.
Matthew, in the first comment, made my point for me: “If one doesn’t accept the assertion that the fetus is nothing more than a part of the woman’s body, it’s ridiculous to assert that any person living should have no say in the matter.
Exactly. I do embrace the assertion that early on in the pregnancy the fetus is nothing more than a part of the woman’s body. Someone on Tim Lee’s blog asked me if that meant I wouldn’t let menopausal women vote on it or if I would let 14, 15, 16 year old girls vote on it. But what it means to me is that NO ONE should be voting on it.
“The second point is that if one accepts that abortion is an issue for women and women alone, it’s only fair that women should have no say in the matter of child support. Why should a woman have the option to rid herself of the consequences of an uwanted pregnancy while a man cannot?”
I agree wholeheartedly. As long as abortion remains legal, men shuold be able to opt out.
JN makes a good point: “Part of the problem that the main disagreement never gets discussed (actually nothing gets discussed, withing three words this subject always breaks down to a shouting match). That is, at what point is a couple cells a human. With that not agreed upon, the rest of the argument will never get resovled.”
Agreed. I’ve picked the point at which I beleive life begins (second trimester)and I’m arguing it from there. I’ve tried to be consistent and clear about that, and all of my arguments come from that starting point.
brooke,
how do you feel about late term abortion or pre-mature babies being terminated and why?
Christina. Your point A) is immediately refutable.
Murder is defined (legal definition) as ‘unlawful killing’. Abortion is legal. Therefore abortion is not murder.
I believe what you mean is ‘I want abortion to be classified as murder’.
On the other issues, it will be interesting to see how advances in neo-natal medicine and birth control availability affect things. My guess is the impact won’t be as soon or as significant as you expect.
I think late term abortion is morally repugnant. After about 21 weeks (viability), actually, the nature of the procedure changes, and so should the debate.
Um, I’ve never heard of premature babies being terminated. It sounds awful.
abortion is a necessary evil of our times. until the following happens, it will never go away:
-both men and women fully understand how to prevent pregnancy (not including absintance) and follow through on the prevention. i continue to be shocked at how uneducated some people are about this (despite being otherwise very educated). i grew up in a suburb of NYC and knew quite a few girls who had abortions. very smart young women who all went through the same health class i did…who “dated” some very irresponsible young men who promised them “they wouldn’t get pregnant.” should they have listened? no. but that’s easy for me and you to say…
mothers and fathers: talk to your kids about sex! they’re not going to “just say no.”
then brooke, you must agree with christina’s argument that as the ability to take care of pre-mature babies advances then the immorality of abortion increases.
for example, if it becomes possbile for a 1 week old fetus to exist “outside” the female body due to medical technological advances, then abortion will be immoral.
Aborton is necessary evil. Prohibition of _anything_ is unnecessary evil. I would wote for banning all prohibitions without a second thought.
http://zygote.swarthmore.edu/intro5.html
is always a good reference when debating this topic.
I would put the start of human life at around 25-27 weeks.
now are you sure lee? i mean positive its not 24 or 28 weeks. i dont know, but it seems pretty important to me that we get it right.
I like the way some pro-choice people try to sweep aside the complicated moral issues by labeling it as a “Medical Procedure.” So is a lobotomy. Want one?
Michael, would society fund the maintenance of these 1 week and above foetuses through tax and spend?
I can foresee conservatives squealing pretty loudly at that idea, given that the cost to society would increase very rapidly indeed.
Brooke says,
“part of being a rights-bearing individual is that you are also responsible for not violating the rights of other rights-bearing individuals. A fetus can’t by its very nature respect the rights of a mother who doesn’t want it there”
Pardon me if I missed something Brooke, because my question strikes me as too obvious but…
Why does your criterion not justify infanticide?
Bernard - Your refute to Christina is immediately refutable. You use the legal definition of murder to state that abortion is not murder because the law allows it.
So, it has absolutely nothing to do with the act itself, but is only dependant on what the members of government think at any particular time period?
In other words, it wasn’t murder when all the Jews in Nazi Germany were, uh, “terminated”?
Or to go back to the slavery example again. Slaves were considered property. All this time I thought all those slaves that were beaten to death or lynched were murdered. I guess it’s a relief now to find out that that wasn’t the case since no law existed at the time to protect them. Whew. I think I’ll attend the next million-man march and make sure I make that point loud and clear as I’m sure it will be an immediate relief to all those in attendance knowing their ancestors were never mistreated or murdered in this country.
What if Congress passed a law next year saying it was your right to terminate babies who were under 1 year old ? What about Latinos? Blacks? Gays? Basically, then, you can define murder, and by extension morality, simply by getting enough of your people into office. Now THERE’s a concept…
Michael,
I agree that as what is medically possible changes, so should the abortion debate. Such advances would also change pregnancy as we know it–if a baby could survive after one week outside of the womb, it certainly seems silly to carry it around inside the womb for an extra eight and half months at great inconveniece to the mother. So sure, my views are certainly subject to change.
Rocketman,
Because once a baby is born, the burden needn’t necessarily fall on the mother; the burden of caring for the fetus MUST fall on the mother. It can’t be assumed voluntarily by the father, by adoptive parents, by grandparents, or by (unfortunately as is often the case) the state, as the burden for an infant can.
Brooke - you make the statment that a “fetus isn’t a rights-bearing individual because it is, by its very nature, incapable of assuming the responsibilities that go along with the possession of rights.”
That statement fits my 4-year old. As a matter of fact, it also happens to fit my mentally handicapped 12-year old.
I hope everyone out there realizes the chilling implications of Brooke’s stance, especially since her feelings are very indicative of the PC crowd.
If rights are given only on the basis of being able to assume the responsibilities of those rights, then we are in deep shit. More specifically, my daughter has no chance. She basically sits all day, rocks back and forth, and sings to herself. On a good day. She will *never* be able to assume any of the responsiblities Brooke thinks one needs to assume in order to have rights. In other words, my daughter has no rights. She contributes nothing to society. In fact she is a drain - taking tax dollars to support many of the services she requires. So, is she expendable? She is basically a parasite (to use Brooke’s words) and always will be. Someone please explain to me the difference when it comes to rights between her and the fetus? According to Brooke (and Bernard, for that matter), all we would need is to get a majority of people in government who think handicapped people are parasites and they’re done for.
This is why the pro-abortion movement is so terrifying - all you need to do is classify one group of people as having no rights and they are fair game for whomever is in power. (See Nazi Germany, circa 1944, for another example).
Think that’s far-fetched? Abortion, Euthanasia, doctor-assisted suicide, “quality of life”, etc. It’s coming, baby. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.
Jerry. You seem to be confusing an emotionally charged issue with a coldly definitive one.
The repugnancy of the Holocaust comes irrespective of whether German law at the time decree’d it murderous. The act itself is what rational society condemns, not the way that act is described.
Likewise people who say ‘Capital Punishment is murder’ are wrong, irrespective of the moral issues involved.
On a related note, if I were to say something like ‘paedophilia is murder!’ I’d clearly be wrong, but that doesn’t mean that paedophilia is either legal or acceptable.
When we start using or proscribing words for their emotional force rather than their definitive accuracy, we get into political correctness territory, and I’m hoping that that’s really not somewhere most of us want to go.
Bernard, I’m not confusing the issue. I just don’t think you can define murder (or truth for that matter) based on a signed piece of paper or the whims of politicians.
I think you dodged the issue. Please answer these two questions, yes or no.
1. Was the killing of 6 million Jews murder (as opposed to just being ‘repugnant’)?
2. Was the lynching of a slave murder?
Jerry. Would I be wide of the mark in guessing at an early stage that you have nothing to share but propoganda and alarmist hyperbole? I’m not seeing a lot else in what you’ve said so far.
Now, as I have answered all your points in previous posts, i’ll go through them once more. If you still aren’t getting it after that, i’ll leave you to work things out for yourself.
‘I just don’t think you can define murder (or truth for that matter) based on a signed piece of paper or the whims of politicians.’
I’ve already given you the definition of murder as ‘unlawful killing’. If you take issue with dictionary definitions that is something to take up with them, not with me.
‘I think you dodged the issue. Please answer these two questions, yes or no.
1. Was the killing of 6 million Jews murder (as opposed to just being ‘repugnant’)?
2. Was the lynching of a slave murder?’
I’ve no idea which issue you think I dodged, and I’m not going to do your homework for you. If you want to know more about the legal systems in wartime Germany and the early USA you will have to either ask someone with more expertise or read up for yourself. If they were against the law, they were, legally speaking, murder. If they weren’t, they weren’t.
Jerry,
Read my post directly above the one where you accuse me of being PC, which I’m certainly not. Once the child is born, the burden needn’t fall on the mother.
Do you think of the effort you put into your kids as effort you put in because you HAVE to, or as effort you put in as a labor of love?
as for Radley’s gotcha questions, I think the reason why I’d be peeved by a pro-life demonstrator talking a woman out of an abortion is because demonstators outside abortion clinics often intimidate the poor women that are trying to perform a legal medical procedure. I’d have no problem with a friend convincing a woman to keep her baby. But the idea of anti-abortion types gaining a convert is creepy and evangelical.
and hey, pro-lifers, if abortion is murder, do you believe that women who take the morning-after pill should get the chair? (or life in prison if you don’t believe in the death penalty)
Brooke,
I did not accuse you of being PC. I said your stance was indicative of the PC crowd. In other words, whether you are PC or not, in this particular case, your views are very much in common with the views of pro-choicers, or at least the ones I have read and listened to. If it wasn’t clear please know that is what I meant.
You’ll have to explain something to me. You clearly said that rights were based on the ability to assume responsiblities. But in response to Rocketman you said it doesn’t justify infanticide because other people can care for the infant? I don’t see how those two things are related.
Rights are rights, regardless of who is your caregiver. How can the ability to have Grandma watch over you suddenly give you ‘rights’?
All I know is that to even hint at linking rights to the ability to be responsible is *CHILLING* to every parent of a chid who does not possess the capabilities and mental facilities to be responsible in any way, shape or form. No matter how you cut it, whether my wife, myself, or my brother, whomever, watches over my daughter, her rights must come from something more fundamental, something more inherent to her being, then just the ability to be productive or be responsible. Otherwise her, and others like her, have a very bleak future.
As far as your last question, you may be surprised. I have four kids. For my birth children, yes, all the effort is a labor of love. But for my mentally handicapped child, no. At least not at first. You see, my handicapped child is adopted from Romania. When we got her we found that her handicaps were much more severe than what we had been told. But it was too late, she was ours. I have to be honest and say it was an incredibly difficult time for everyone. I did not love her, especially if you define love by feelings, affection, and warmth. Sounds cold, I know, but it is the truth. But I knew we could not give her back. So we poured all our effort into her because we *had* to, because it was the right thing to do, and because she needed us. It was love based on ‘doing’ not ‘feeling’. Over time the love *has* come, slowly but surely, as I was pretty sure it would. So to answer you question, ‘yes’ on both counts.
brooke,
so, morality is definable by technological innovation?
Bernard, I think you are ascribing an opinion to me that I don’t have. I never stated that I want abortion legally classified as murder. In fact, I pointed out that prohibition is inherently flawed.
To put this on personal terms, when I first became sexually active I knew that were I to become pregnant I would seriously consider killing it. I was using birth control, but I had to think about my situation and my boyfriend’s situation and I knew carryng a baby to term would significantly fuck things up. But I never ever pretended that an abortion is anything but killing a baby.
Now I’m a married lady and I have ruled out abortion as an option. My opinion of the procedure hasn’t changed, just my personal situation. Based on what Brooke has said, my perspective isn’t that uncommon.
Let’s just have the government harvest all of a woman’s eggs at about 11 years old and then re-issue them at a later date when she has the maturity, intelligence, and means to have a child, then there would be no abortions. Also, the man would know when he “donated” that he was doing it to start a life so there’d be no more women carrying a baby without some sort of aggreement with the father.
How about all of those fertilized eggs in freezers? If they are never used or die during thawing (approx 20% do), is that abortion, murder, morally wrong, etc.?
Christina. The position I ascribed to you was an extrapolation from a direct quote ‘A) Abortion is murder’, which I then rebutted. Apologies if I misunderstood the context.
The rest of your last post I completely respect. My expectation is that when women are supported to make their own decision they will most often choose to keep. I think society directs far too much energy toward discussions of the benefits of prohibition, and far too little toward working out how to make it easier for women to make the right choice.
“and hey, pro-lifers, if abortion is murder, do you believe that women who take the morning-after pill should get the chair? (or life in prison if you don’t believe in the death penalty)”
All hormonal birth control methods work in two ways. The prevent ovulation and they also prevent fertilized eggs from attaching to the womb. That means they are abortificants. This is a point loudly made by those who oppose any birth control besides natural family planning.
The Morning After Pill is nothing more than a couple of higher dose birth control pills (that cost $55 at Planned Parenthood). It’s much cheaper and less traumatic to just take hormonal birth control.
Of course a lot of girls I know go with option C. Once you find out you’re pregnant you party like a rock star and hope for a miscarriage.
Anonymous, or we could just remove every penis from every man until he is of a prescribed age and then have it surgically replaced. That sounds better to me.
I was like Christina when I began having sex (did I say that??). Anyways, I counted the cost, knew that I would consider an abortion, but that is only because I knew that the abortion option was available. If it had not been so readily available and pretty much socially-accepted, I would have thought twice about having sex at all. But there were alternative solutions out there, so why not do it?
My point is, if the optin wasn’t so easily available to all women, then there would be less of a necessity for it. Of course, that is my belief. Others may believe differently.
May I pose a thought? The decline of a society is directly effected by the decline of the morality of the women in that society.
“The decline of a society is directly effected by the decline of the morality of the women in that society.”
Yep, cause men all already immoral dogs
(sorry could not resist)
Michael,
No morality is not definable by technological innovation. Ending a human life is always wrong.
Just where we define human life is defined by our knownledge/technology (and it always has been).
If you define human life begining at conception, then anything that ends that life is wrong.
If you define human life after 25-27 weeks of development, then anything after that is wrong.
I choose to define human life after 25-27 weeks of development, you choose differently.
Lee:
‘No morality is not definable by technological innovation. Ending a human life is always wrong.’
This is where things go awry. If it’s always wrong to kill people under any circumstances, society becomes unable to defend itself. Quite a few people were killed by revolutionary soldiers in the War of Independence, for eg. Were they wrong to do so, no matter what?
Ms. Dani,
Your comment reminded me of Chris Rock’s latest HBO special. He joked that he liked to pick up women at abortion rallies, “Because you know they’re fuckin’.”
If we are going to allow abortion to remain legal, then shouldn’t we at least say “you must go through a rigorous process of interviewing and counseling before we’ll agree with your decision”? What would be wrong with that, especially in the cases of young adults?
Ms. Dani. Who is “we” that gets to decide whether they agree with someone’s decision?
Michael,
Yes. I do.
Jerry,
What you have done is commendable, to be sure. But do you expect everyone to make the same choices as you?
“Rights are rights, regardless of who is your caregiver. How can the ability to have Grandma watch over you suddenly give you ‘rights’?”
It doesn’t. I think rights and an understanding of the responsibilities attached to them grow together. If babies have rights in the same sense as you or I, then why don’t they vote? Why do we hold their parents laible for things that they do? The fact is, they require some sort of caregiver to act as stewards to this understanding. We grant children rights while holding that their caregivers are the ones who are responsible. That caretaker doesn’t need to be the mother.
And actually, I believe in limited exceptions to the relationship between rights and responsibilities–the relationship between the two is very different in my opinion for people with developmental handicaps for example, in the same way I grant that children have rights and the burden of the responsibility is placed on the caregiver.
Scared Stiff, I think I know where you might be going with that question. I don’t want any more regulators or “professionals” than you do. But my response is, I don’t know who, maybe a certified counselor, someone who would specialize in that area of expertise???
I would think that a better solution to this issue would be to make it a non-govt issue, but that’s not going to happen. My statement before was somewhat hypothetical or more accurately just thinking aloud.
Abortion Weekend in DC
Here’s Radley’s take on this weekend’s protests in DC. Radley has always had, in my view, very reasonable takes on this emotional issue. Here is a similar take by Saint Paul from Fraters Libertas. In my local paper, editorialist Lewis
The obvious question is ⦠Do the proponents of Abortion believe that Morality is Subjective or Objective?
If morality is Subjective then it is just as âmoralâ to abort your fetus as it is to not abort your fetus. Similarly it is just as moral to euphanize your elderly grandmother with Alzheimerâs disease as it is to not euphanize grandma.
Coversely if morality is Objective then whether Abortion is moral or not would depend upon the nature and source of the Objective morality (i.e. the Source of the Objectivity).
i don;t have a lot to add to this discussion as you all have hashed it out well, and all points have been made clearly. i am on the pro-choice side but do feel like most that 2nd and 3rd trimester abortions are wrong. that however doesn’t mean i think it is right for someone, anyone, to tell a pregnant woman what she can do with something, a-little-person-soon-to-be actually, that she and someone else she presumably loves and respects, has knowingly created. may i pose this hypothetical-should abortions be banned, and all women who ever become pregnant in the future, are forced to carry the fetus til birth, where upon at that time they could keep or have be adopted(sorry for the bad grammar) the baby, what do you s’pose would happen to most of these newborns? adopted by middle class families that will provide for them and love them well? surely those of you who are staunchly pro-life don’t think that a woman who does not want to carry a child to term and raise the child, is always going to be the best person to take care of the baby? i at one time felt much more strongly about this topic, but i think on this issue there are a lot of factors to consider. jiminy i am almost sorry i am hitting send as i can feel the harsh criticism but this is a really really tough issue. for me anyway. michelle
oh, wanted to add i am one of those people who would give consideration to adopting. i’m not there yet (parenting, whoa-huge huge huge) but i think it would be a very fulfilling experience. k, that’s all of my personal info and opinions for today, y’all know way too much! michelle
michelle:
right on.
Oh how quickly we carriers of the Libertarian banner will throw it to the ground and tread all over it in defense of governmental legislation of morality; so long as we are in agreement with the moral position taken.
Grant Gould says,
“I think that really that’s the true abortion debate: People utterly convinced that they can definitively answer a vague, ill-posed, and thorny moral question, versus the rest of us”.
A perfect description of the intellectual problem if there ever was one. The question is, if there is a reasonable doubt that human life is at stake, how do we resolve it?
The answer for me has always been to weigh the costs of protecting human life versus the benefits of doing so.
If we ban all abortion(and I’d go for the ectopic pregnancy exception)to protect human life and it somehow turns out that was “wrong” what have we lost in the mistaken pursuit of protecting human life? Answer: the least desirable and medically recommended form of birth control. Instead of 57 ways to avoid child-birth we’d only have 56.
If we DON’T ban abortion and the PL’s are right-what have we lost? I’ll let your own conscience answer that question.
Another thing someone said(I think it was Brooke) is that it is inappropriate to take a vote on this.
I disagree in the strongest possible terms. If anything, a popular vote is THE most appropriate way to deal with this issue. We are the only sentient creatures qualified to put a value on human life. If a majority of us don’t think that human life is valuable enough to protect in this manner then guess what?
It isn’t.
I will only be satisfied with an up or down vote of the majority on this issue and yes, I’d go for a state by state decision.(for whatever it’s worth I probably WOULD relocate depending on how the vote went in my state if only to peacefully disassociate myself from those who make the PC calculation)
While I do not think that my premise is “wing-nut”, I’ve got no problem admitting that my conclusions are quite extreme.
On this issue, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
brooke,
“Someone on Tim Lee’s blog asked me if that meant I wouldn’t let menopausal women vote on it or if I would let 14, 15, 16 year old girls vote on it. But what it means to me is that NO ONE should be voting on it.”
What should people be voting on, if not the lives and liberty of other individuals?
“My basic supposition is that the early term fetus–my opinions change drastically and rapidly as we discuss abortions past the first trimester or when the fetus might reasonably survive outside the mother’s womb–simply isn’t human, simply doesn’t have the rights that non-slaving holding abolitionists were trying to defend. Anti-abolitionists believed that the slaves had human rights, and part of being a rights-bearing individual is that you are also responsible for not violating the rights of other rights-bearing individuals. A fetus can’t by its very nature respect the rights of a mother who doesn’t want it there.”
Suppose a mother takes her infant swimming. She swims out 100 feet from the shore where the water is 20 feet deep. They are alone.
At this moment the child is no less dependent on the mother for it’s life then it was as a fetus. And (except in the case of rape) the mother was no more forced into this situtation than she was forced to bear the fetus. Both situations are a consequence of her voluntary choice.
Suppose in the middle of the lake the mother decides she doesn’t want the child, she doesn’t care to support it in any way. Does the child have a right to safe passage back to the shore at her expense?
I don’t see why being outside of her body would produce such a right.
Most here, Radley included, miss the point. It’s not about whether or not you believe in abortion - many pro-choicers themselves never had one, never will, or never would. The march and pro-choice movement is about believing that the government doesn’t have the right to make the choice for an individual.
I don’t like to use the term “contract” between mother and child because I don’t think a child is capable of entering into a contract–certainly a fetus isn’t.
But I think once the relationship is voluntarily assumed (and I think that viability is a reasonable point after which which we can assume the relationship is voluntary), it is certainly appropriate for society and for the law to expect that the mother won’t simply default on the responsibility she has voluntarily assumed. If she wants to pass the responsibility on to someone else, that’s one thing, but killing the child (or in your example allowing the child to die while it is in her care) is quite another.
“But I think once the relationship is voluntarily assumed (and I think that viability is a reasonable point after which which we can assume the relationship is voluntary),”
It seems reasonable to me to recognize the relationship as voluntary after consensual sex, the fetus did not arise as the result of any act of aggression, it arose as the result of free choice.
But if you’re not going to assume the relationship is voluntary at that point I don’t see why you must assume it at viability.
“… it is certainly appropriate for society and for the law to expect that the mother won’t simply default on the responsibility she has voluntarily assumed.”
Why? If she produced the child why should anyone else have a vote?
How is the social interest angle compatible with libertarianism?
Posted by: on April 29, 2004 04:23 PM, says,
“Most here, Radley included, miss the point. It’s not about whether or not you believe in abortion - many pro-choicers themselves never had one, never will, or never would. The march and pro-choice movement is about believing that the government doesn’t have the right to make the choice for an individual”
Oh really!!
A blog full of libertarians here and you think we miss the point?
Honey, I’m afraid it’s you that misses the point. When YOU are the one on the receiving end of the scalpel, then you can complain about the government making the choice for(what would otherwise be) your mother.
Those of us who are pro-life are viewing this as a protection of third party rights.
We want to use government to prevent A contracting with B to slice and dice “C”.
This debate is about whether or not the target of abortion has rights and is therefore a victim.
It is not about whether or not abortionists “love freedom” more than the rest of us.
I apologize for being so blunt, but your comment implies that the polite language used throughout this thread has failed to make that point to you. I hope this helped.
Again, my apologies.
Discussion
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