It would also seem fitting if another Pope Urban II arose and called a crusade to defend our innocent brethren in the womb. If the Church can call Christians to arms to drive out the Islamic hordes who were murdering innocent Catholics, why shouldn’t it call to arms a defense against the wholesale slaughter of innocent children? If anything, this would be a more justifiable war…not that the Vatican believes there is such a thing.
Whatever the case, the praticality of such action would be very difficult to guage. I’d like to hope that the fact that the pro-life side doesn’t have a reasonable chance of success would be the only disqualifying factor…
Steve Skojec, writing in the comments at Amy Welborn’s blog.
I don’t think Mr. Skojec’s pro-violence position is the norm among pro-lifers (the fellow who responded to Mr. Skojec, arguing that pro-lifers should not resort to violence, is much more mainstream). But we should remember that there are folks like Mr. Skojec out there..
I would like to be clear on my position – I do not advocate violence per se, however, I do think that the issue of abortion is every bit as dire, if not more so, than the issue of slavery – which prompted the Civil War; or the issue of the Holocaust, which was integral to the second World War.
If you view an abortion as the murder of an innocent child, as pro-lifers do, then it is only natural that one would be moved to be willing to take up arms in defense of that life. I don’t see this an intellectually inconsistent position.
That’s essentially my point. If this is the great injustice that the pro-life cause believes that it is, then why is there such restraint on the moral outrage and subsequent action on our part. It would seem that in times when consciences were less deadened by relativism, this would bring our country to the brink of war. Instead, it merely acts as an abstract catalyst for public debate.
I do not advocate the indiscriminate or personal violence of individuals against those involved in the abortion industry. I do, however, believe that there would be, at least in theory, sufficient moral impetus for a civil position to form, declaring the unwillingness to abide a government whose laws sanction such atrocities, even though that position may entail military reprisals from said government.
I’d rather not, when history comes to pass, be lumped in with those Germans who sat idly by while fellow human beings were exterminated in concentration camps, and did not speak out for fear of suffering the same fate. But for there to be any efficacy in such a statement, it must bear the weight of numbers. That is something I do not think will ever be supplied, so the point remains in the abstract.
I’d like to remind all “Alas” readers to please keep responses to Steve (or any other pro-lifer who posts here) civil. I’m cool with people attacking pro-life positions, but please attack the position, not the person.
Steve wrote: If you view an abortion as the murder of an innocent child, as pro-lifers do, then it is only natural that one would be moved to be willing to take up arms in defense of that life. I don’t see this an intellectually inconsistent position.
I don’t think it’s an intellectually inconsistant position, either. However, despite the frequent rhetoric, I’m not sure that most pro-lifers do view abortion as the same thing as the murder of a one-year-old child.
For instance, no seriously proposed pro-life law calls for either life in prison or the death penalty for abortionists. Nor do most of the proposals I’ve seen call for punishing the mother at all – only the doctor is punished.
This is not consistant with the claim that there’s no difference between an abortion and child murder. (Would anyone suggest that the murder of a one-year-old doesn’t deserve the same penalty as any other murder; or that if a child’s mother pays someone else to do the murder, she should therefore not be punished at all?)
As you say, IF one accepts that there is no moral difference between the Holocaust and legal abortion, then it becomes difficult to resist the conclusion that a call to arms is justified. However, the vast majority of pro-lifers not only resist that conclusion, they reject it entirely. To me, this suggests that at some level, they do recognize a difference between fetal life and an actual person.
hey, that’s cool. see, i’m one of those weird liberals who believes in the second amendment and actually knows how to fire a weapon. (spent almost three years in the army, too, so we’re not talking just .22s here.) if these nutcases think this is no different than the holocaust, they obviously also believe that pregnant women do not have the right to their own bodies, and that right is something i’d be willing to kill to defend, if it came down to it.
i don’t mean i’d go to clinics and shoot anti-choice protesters, but if they wanted to start a war, they just might find some of us shooting back.
i also think it’s very telling that these bozos only believe abortion is evil when women make strides towards having equal rights. if we just sit down and shut up and take the abuse, on the other hand, they always look away from those of us who choose to end our pregnancies. why do you suppose that is?
Ampersand wrote: I’m not sure that most pro-lifers do view abortion as the same thing as the murder of a one-year-old child.
For instance, no seriously proposed pro-life law calls for either life in prison or the death penalty for abortionists. Nor do most of the proposals I’ve seen call for punishing the mother at all – only the doctor is punished.
This is not consistant with the claim that there’s no difference between an abortion and child murder. (Would anyone suggest that the murder of a one-year-old doesn’t deserve the same penalty as any other murder; or that if a child’s mother pays someone else to do the murder, she should therefore not be punished at all?)
You make an excellent point – the very thing I was trying to underscore in my original post at Amy’s blog.
Contrary to what logic would lead us to deduce, I think the majority of pro-lifers do in fact place the life of a 2-month-old child in the womb on a par with a 1-year-old child who is in the world, so to speak.
And that’s the fundamental problem. We believe this, but we don’t act like we do. Why? Because we’ve had our hands tied for so long, we’ve become forcibly desensitized. If we read in the paper tomorrow that across the country, thousands of infants were being murdered every day, and their parents were getting away with it – we’d be outraged to an extreme degree. But we know that every day in this country, thousands of abortions are performed, yet we don’t blink an eye.
You know what I think about in the morning when I wake up? I’ll give you a hint – it’s not how I can save some babies today. It’s usually along the lines of “Should I have oatmeal or eggs for breakfast?” or “I really wish I had gone to bed an hour earlier last night.” I hate that despite what I believe, I am capable of putting it out of my mind. And yet I seem to have no recourse.
This is because of two things:
1.) The weak position of our moral leadership.
2.) The consequences we will suffer in society for taking action – no matter how peaceful – against abortion.
The first cause is something I see as endemic, and it causes me no small amount of headaches in many issues not directly pertinent here. Suffice it to say that we are bound by our own moral leadership because it has confused charity with pacifism, where previous generations did not make that mistake. There are justifiable causes which necessitate violence, though they are never desirable. I feel as though current Christian leadership, particularly Catholic (which affects me directly), might as well be Quaker for how they view this. It’s a fundamental failure to understand that if you want peace and justice, sometimes you have to fight for it.
The second cause gives rise again to my analogy with Nazism. The pro-life position, far from being insubstantial, has simply lost the propaganda war. The pro-choice side employs every trick, semantic and otherwise, to keep veiled the subject of the hallowed “choice” they seek to promote. The very term pro-choice is a manipulation of language, because the term “choice” refers to something specific – something not as easy to stomach if reflected on.
The pro-abortion (for that is the choice in question) position views the fetus as something other than a human life. In ampersand’s post, this philosophy is echoed – “they do recognize a difference between fetal life and an actual person.”
This is the same language used by the Nazis to describe the Jews. Hitler, in a Nazi propaganda piece, phrased it this way:
“The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human.”
This rhetoric is compatible with the current variety on abortion: “The fetus is undoubtedly a life, but it is not human.”
In the rare case that pro-abortion rhetoric attempts intellectual honesty, it is largely ignored by the majority of abortion advocates. A perfect example of this is the article written by Naomi Wolfe – an icon in feminist circles – entitled, “Our Bodies, Our Souls”. In the article, Ms. Wolfe depicts her own experiences with abortion, and paints as disingenuous any attempt to deny the humanity of the fetus. She posits:
“Abortion should be legal; it is sometimes even necessary. Sometimes the mother must be able to decide that the fetus, in its full humanity, must die.”
Her attempt to be truthful about a difficult subject is laudable – but the horrific implications of such honesty don’t help the propaganda war. Because of this, her article didn’t get nearly as much attention as it otherwise might have.
As the pro-abortion position continues to marginalize even its own shining stars who attempt to view honestly the humanity of the preborn child, it is evident that they have effectively made the subject taboo – a foregone conclusion that does not make for socially acceptable discussion and debate. As long as the truth can be kept quiet, the industry can go on.
And in the end, that’s what abortion is about – money. Like slavery before it, it’s a federally guaranteed “right”, ratified by the supreme court and treated as the law of the land.
Because of this, there is a psychological disconnect for all of us on the reality of what abortion entails. I think that’s the reason why my side is so numb. I think that’s the reason why those on my side – even those who get it – propose legislation that penalizes those involved with procuring abortions on a far gentler scale than homicide. Because they realize that people don’t get it. To use the words of Christ, “Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.”
If I could have it my way, I’d convert every last one of my opponents. The only real way to eliminate your enemy is to make them your friend. And on a personal level, that’s the approach I take. I’m not going to condemn anyone.
But on a broader, more abstract level, I really think a time will come when people finally put their foot down and say, “I’m not paying taxes to a government that sanctions murder.” And that’s when things will get dicey. That’s the kind of thing that starts a civil war. And the thing is, the pro-lifers probably wouldn’t stand a chance – modern military technology makes Jeffersonian revolutionary ideas sort of obsolete. But when it comes down to it, it’s a justifiable position, in my view.
And I think that’s what I’m getting at.
I don’t have time to address everything you wrote right now, Steve, but I’ll return to it later.
For now, though, a few brief notes.
1) I appreciate how polite you’re being; trust me when I say that not all my pro-life visitors here are so polite. However, since you say you want to “convert every last one of my opponents,” may I make a suggestion? You might have a better chance of winning some hearts and minds if you’d refrain from calling people you disagree with Nazis quite so often.
2) Even more importantly, I think you should consider refraining from criticizing the alleged bad motives of people you disagree with. Not only is doing so rude, it’s irrelevant. After all, if it turns out that the vast majority of pro-choicers have good motivations (however mistaken they may be), and are not motivated by money, would that make abortion more acceptable, in your view?
If your answer is “no, it wouldn’t,” then it seems to me that you should consider the motivations of pro-choicers irrelevant.
3) You wrote: The pro-abortion (for that is the choice in question) position views the fetus as something other than a human life. In ampersand’s post, this philosophy is echoed – “they do recognize a difference between fetal life and an actual person.”
In this and a couple of other places in your post, you seemed to assume that the words “human” and “person” are interchangable. They are not. I view the fetus as human life; I do not view a fetus as a person. (Certainly not before the 24th week or so, and probably not even after the 24th week).
More later.
Of course they don’t really believe that fetuses are people. They only pretend to believe that, in an abstract sense, for rhetorical purposes. When the discussion turns to the real-world implications of their claimed belief–such as that abortion should be criminalized as the crime of murder, or that abortion should be criminalized even in cases of rape, or that women should be prosecuted even for the use of an IUD or the morning-after pill or RU486–they get all wobbly and try to come up with excuses for actually treating abortion as if it’s about as serious as jaywalking. The whole anti-abortion movement suffers from this form of cognitive dissonance. They want to believe that abortion is the equivalent of murdering a child, but in the end, apart from a few of the most extreme fanatics, they just can’t persuade themselves to accept that absurd proposition.
And then they wonder why no one else is persuaded, either.
[preface: i realize i’m rushing in foolishly here; i’m agnostic on the abortion issue, seeing both sides, and as a male i tend to leave this to others, however:]
i’m no expert on crusades, but i suspect that, like jihad, a crusade is about struggle, and does not need to be violent. a crusade based on nonviolence and satyagraha could be as cost effective as other means. there’s some precedent, dr king, tolstoy, suffragettes, thoreau, jesus, christians versus lions.
the idea of a tax strike is a good one. i’m not sure how president kerry would respond to a pope calling for a tax strike. while just war theory might (might) justify violence in the name of baby-protecting, that’s no reason to opt for violence if non-violence gets the job done.
ghandi said something like, it is better to resist injustice by picking up a gun than to do nothing. better still to resist nonviolently.
If you oppose abortion as the taking of human life, then you have to 1) Oppose the death penalty and 2)Oppose war of any kind. Anything less is intellectual hypocrasy. So, when I see the leading lights of the pro-life movement in the forefront of protests against the death penalty and writing letters denouncing the war in Iraq, I will begin to pay more attention to their opposition to abortion.
However, I will also need to see them selling their goods and chattels to eliminate children dying of hunger and disease anywhere in the world. It is galling to listen to pro-life adherents arguing against family planning and abortion in Third World countries when it is more than likely that the children conceived and carried to term will die before their fifth birthday. Personally, I think it is more humane to abort a 24-week old fetus than it is to watch a five year old starve to death.
Now, I know that it is not as likely that an unwanted child will starve to death in this country. However, if you oppose abortion here, to maintain your credibility, you have to oppose it everywhere.
I have much more to say about this, but I will wait for another time to continue this discussion.
Steve, where do pregnant women – specifically women like me who need the option of abortion to potentially save our lives and continue to parent the children we have – fit into this model?
Is my human life not fit for saving?
And that’s the fundamental problem. We believe this, but we don’t act like we do. Why? Because we’ve had our hands tied for so long, we’ve become forcibly desensitized.
Can you explain how having your “hands tied” makes you “desensitized” to the difference between a two-week-old fetus and a two-year-old child? I see the assertion, but not the explanation, and I’m a little baffled. After all, if you were really desensitized, you wouldn’t even say a two-week-old fetus was a human life; you’d say something about “potential life” or “kind of like a baby.”
ampersand is correct in that the rhetoric of abortion-rights opponents doesn’t match the philosophy. You would never see a law permitting consanguinity between mother and father as a defense to a mother’s killing her infant, or allowing “The pregnancy was a result of rape” to excuse a mother’s paying someone to kill her five-year-old. Yet the majority of abortion-rights opponents cherish exemptions when the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest.
What’s really happening is not desensitization, but unpopularity. Simply defining a fetus as human from conception would be easier than a patchwork of laws against abortion; but the average person really doesn’t want that definition. It would mean no more Pill, no more IUD, no more morning-after pill for rape victims, criminal charges against pregnant women who have a drink during pregnancy, forced C-sections when a doctor believes it would be in the fetus’s best interest even if it would harm the mother.
First, I want to thank everyone for being so willing to actually discuss this. The fact that this all started because I was being made an example of – in a pro-lifer willing to use violence kind of way – means this could have been ugly, but it hasn’t been, and I am grateful for that. I’m hardly a fanatic, but I do believe that intellectual consistency on this topic requires a certain willingness to put one’s money where their mouth is, so to speak, hence my comments about civil war.
Arbitraryaardvark put it best I think – it’s better to resort to violence to fight injustice than to do nothing, but there’s no reason to opt for violence if non-violence gets the job done. That’s pretty much how I feel.
Ampersand, I understand your point about not calling people Nazis, and I’m really not interested in epithets – I’m simply pointing out the congruities between the philosophy of the Nazis on human life and the philosophies of the minds that move the abortion movement. There were direct connections between developers of Nazi eugenics programs and the founders of Planned Parenthood. Lorthrop Stoddard, an original member of Planned Parenthood’s board, actually went to Nazi Germany to discuss with Hitler the methods the Nazis were using to purify the race of imperfections.
So I am not saying, to all those who profess a belief in the right to abortion, “YOU are a NAZI!” Rather, I’m saying, to all those who profess a belief in the right to abortion, “Are you aware of how closely aligned your beliefs are to those of the Nazis?” I think it bears consideration, and I’ll not flinch away from it, because I honestly think most people who are for abortion really think they are doing something good. They need to think about it.
This is why I think your point about criticizing alleged bad motives kind of misses the mark. I’m sure I didn’t make myself clear – I was in a hurry when I last posted – but I do not believe that most of those I disagree with on this subject believe what they do out of malice. I believe, as I mentioned before, that they do so out of ignorance. I’m sure that will provoke some ire, but either its malice or ignorance – if I think abortion is murder, I can’t really offer many other options for why it’s not as obvious to others as it is to me.
I do, however, believe that many of the elites who promote the abortion industry, and in particular those doctors and nurses who are most intimately aquainted with the haunting reality of the childrent hey dismember in the womb, are not ignorant. They know the stakes. And for them, it really is about money. It’s not just speculation – there are a number of doctors who have had a change of heart and switched to the pro-life side. They’re more than willing to share their stories on motivation.
So while the question of motivation doesn’t change how I feel about abortion – evil is evil, no matter why you do it – that doesn’t mean I don’t care about motivation. Because something is allowing millions of people every year to do something that, to me, is so obviously wrong. I want to get at the root of that tree. Why? Because I’m not actually going to start a war, and I give a damn about the people on the other side.
I don’t have time to get into the distinction between human life and person – and it’s a philosophical discussion that would likely only lead us off track. But I’ll get to some more comments after I get to work. I’ve got to go.
Don P is right on the mark when he says most pro-lifers are suffering cognitive dissonance. Part of that comes from the fact that the whole abortion issue is ultimately just a rallying flag anyway, an easy target for moral posturing that has been magnified into an “atrocity on the scale of the holocaust” (a comparison that always offends my Jewish friends) by regressive-reactionary leaders in order to stimulate their supporters.
Such supporters are only too willing to be whipped up into a frenzy, because let’s face it, people love to feel righteous. Issues like this give them a sense of easy black-and-white purpose, a cause much less messy and complex than taking care of the poor for instance, and the vicarious sense that they are a faux rebel minority.
Such soundbyte morality is cheap and adictive. If these people and their catspaw ever succeed in enforcing a criminalization of abortion and homosexuality they will simply move on to a new “outrage”. Perhaps the fact that divorce is legal will become an “outrage” in such a world, or the practice of religions other than the state mandated one. The quest for scapegoats and a simple sense of purpose is neverending.
Well, steve has just hit upon all the things we already discussed in countless posts just before the march in April, and I’m getting that exhausting sense of deja vu. Amp, is there any way we could copy-paste the arguments that were had with Joe M., Annie, and Pangloss to save ourselves the trouble of repetition?
I generally agree with the tenor of comments regarding the cognitive dissonance among anti-abortion activists — they rely on the RCC’s concept of natural law to define personhood as flowing from the moment of fertilization of an ovum by a sperm, but they cannot possibly bring themselves to accept the consequences of that position as it might affect legal precepts on contraception, infertility treatment, and so on, casting into doubt (and I mean deep doubt) whether they really accept the underlying premise at all. And if they don’t, why should I or anyone else?
The truth, as I see it, is that a majority of people do see abortion as a moral dilemma, but they also see that the question of when “life” begins can actually and reasonably be subject to different conclusions by different people of good will — life being properly understood to mean when human cells should be accorded the same respect under the law as a human who has already been born. They are therefore willing, up to a point, to accord each individual the right to determine for themselves the outcome of that moral inquiry, until such time as a clear majority no longer disagree that what is at stake is the life of a person. I actually think this is a pretty fair compromise of the issue, especially since, in this moral calculus, it appears that very few would ever argue that the life of the fetus should be deemed to be as if not more important than the life of the mother at any point along this continuum.
What pro-life groups (most of them) don’t want to admit is that they too are engaged in an exercise of line drawing (as most would not make contraception or infertility services illegal, and even approve of abortion in the case of rape or incest) and they don’t like where the majority of people currently seem to want that line to be drawn — somewhere between 18 weeks on, with exceptions based on the health of the mother or grave defects in the fetus.
What is most obnoxious is to assume as Steve does above, that anyone who disagrees with this disjointed, not to say incoherent, set of “pro-life” principles is proceeding from bad faith, likely because of an economic stake in maximizing the number of abortions and just as evil as the Nazis. Steve, your views may indeed consistently track the “a life is a life is a life” view of natural law, but we are all thinking people and we can see that most of those who call themselves pro-life do not. In other words, they want to be able to assert the inviolability and gravitas of the natural law principles, just so long as they get to decide when it’s okay to chuck them overboard. Why do you think this may seem to be unacceptable to the rest of us?
So I am not saying, to all those who profess a belief in the right to abortion, “YOU are a NAZI!” Rather, I’m saying, to all those who profess a belief in the right to abortion, “Are you aware of how closely aligned your beliefs are to those of the Nazis?” I think it bears consideration, and I’ll not flinch away from it, because I honestly think most people who are for abortion really think they are doing something good. They need to think about it.
Steve,are you aware that under the Nazi regime women had no reproductive rights at all? Our lives weren’t worth anything–unless we were white, then we were valued as breeding mares for the White race. And God help a woman who didn’t want to do that.
From the Holocaust Learning Center:
The state encouraged matrimony through marriage loans, dispensed family income supplements for each new child, publicly honored “child-rich” families, bestowed the Cross of Honor of the German Mother on women bearing four or more babies, and increased punishments for abortion [emphasis mine].
Do you realize that most neo-Nazis are against abortion? That most neo-Nazis are against access to contraception? That most neo-Nazis are against any kind of reproductive rights for women?
Do you realize that when you take away those rights from women, you are putting our lives in danger?
I’m saying, to all those who profess a belief in the morality of restricting reproductive rights, “Are you aware of how closely aligned your beliefs are to those of the Nazis?” I think it bears consideration, and I’ll not flinch away from it, because I honestly think most people who are against reproductive rights really think they are doing something good. They need to think about it.
Wow. There’s so much here that I want to address, and no way to do it succinctly.
So at the risk of abandoning certain points that should be responded to – because I simply can’t get to all of them – I’ll focus on the big ones.
My point since this whole discussion began is exactly what many of you are pointing out. The pro-life side is riddled with cognitive dissonance. There are exceptions for this and exceptions for that. There’s an unwillingness to have a comprehensive view.
In my honest opinion, the only tried-and-true pro-life position is that of the Catholic Church. That’s because it’s the only position willing to go the whole nine yards. No exceptions for rape, incest, or life of the mother. No artificial birth control or IVF. No mechanical tampering with the process of creating life, or letting it grow once it has been created.
If the pro-life side is unwilling to hold these positions, it is disingenuous at best, and none of you, to answer Barbara’s question, have any reason to accept it as legitimate. It’s almost more insidious for a “pro-lifer” to say that the fetus is a human person, then make exceptions for when it may be destroyed, than it is for someone to say, “I want abortion on demand, because it’s not a kid.” This is my problem. This is why I made my original post at Amy’s blog. Because so few people realize the implications of what we say we believe.
But I DO belive that the pro-life cause is more than a rallying-cry. There may be far fewer of us who really view it as the evil I’m saying it is, but we not only exist – many of us are capable of doing our own thinking as well.
Everyone keeps bringing up the legislation issue. The reason that the penal legislation proposed by the pro-life position is so lacking in teeth is because, quite honestly, of compassion. Pro-lifers understand that the majority of those who are involved with abortion on a personal level don’t think that what they are doing is wrong. Honestly, we tend to view the mother as a victim as well. Having known women who’ve been down that road and later had to deal with their consciences, I know their struggle. They were made to believe it was their only option. Truth is, it wasn’t. So, when it comes to putting a mom in jail on first-degree murder charges because she has an abortion, there are ethical difficulties. Doctors, on the other hand, have no excuse. In my view, every abortion doctor is a serial killer – and they have the medical knowledge to know that what they are doing is destroying a human life. They see the bodies. They know the toll.
I also think that drugs like RU486 should be outlawed. Any contraceptive that acts as an abortifacient should be.
The desensitization that has taken place in the pro-life movement has to do with knowing that abortion is an evil but having our laws and popular culture tell us there’s nothing we can do about it. It also has to do with the cognitive dissonance we’ve discussed, because there are many in the pro-life camp who undermine our efforts by being hypocritical when it’s convenient. So in the end, guys like me – married working stiffs with families – can’t do too much but talk about it with people. When you’re faced with something like murder, but you have no recourse, nothing you can act upon, you learn to suppress your emotional response. Eventually, you become kind of numb. Eventually, that’s why you lose.
Lastly, I’d like to address the idea that to be pro-life is to be anti-war and anti-capital punishment. That’s a non-sequiter. There is a fundamental distinction between the taking of innocent life, and the taking of the life of a combattant or guilty criminal. All killing is bad, but in war, or in execution, there can be justification for it. There can never be justification for the destruction of innocent life. In his article entitled Abortion vs. War, Fr. Frank Pavone delineates this distinction:
Lastly, I must admit I find the question of women needing to destroy their children to save their lives to be a paper tiger. It is EXTREMELY rare that a procedure like this is medically necessary. But beyond this, what mother wouldn’t step in front of a bullet for her child? Isn’t that what motherhood is? To give life? To lay down your own life for your children?
We’ve lost our sense of heroism when we have to ask these questions. I can’t help but feel taht it’s symptomatic of a narcissistic culture when a mother cares more about herself than her child.
“In my honest opinion, the only tried-and-true pro-life position is that of the Catholic Church. That’s because it’s the only position willing to go the whole nine yards. No exceptions for rape, incest, or life of the mother.”
Wow. That’s very, very scary and I can’t begin to tell you how glad I am that this view is held by only the tiniest minority. No exceptions for the life of the mother? Close to 20 years ago a friend of mine wrote a comic SF serial in which cause of the young of the near-future day was fetal rights at the expense of the mother. That is to say that the fetus holds more value than the mother. I can tell you with no hesitation whatsoever that if my wife was pregnant & her life was in danger if she did not get an abortion that both of us would want the abortion. How grotesque and nightmarish that somebody outside of our family would make the choice that my wife should die so that a potential life MIGHT be born. Are you aware of the condition of most fetuses in cases where abortion is called for to protect the life of the mother? Would you not think that in the case of the danger to the life of the mother that abortion would be considered self-defense? Just like what happens if you kill somebody who was trying to kill you?
Scary, scary stuff. You have succeeded in scaring the pants off of me.
I wish I were more competent with tags, but here goes. First, Steve, I will say that you at least appear to have the courage of your convictions — that, indeed, you are willing to state that there should be “No exceptions for rape, incest, or life of the mother. No artificial birth control or IVF. No mechanical tampering with the process of creating life, or letting it grow once it has been created.”
But allow me to express an oh so gentle sense of disgust at your patronizing view about women who undergo abortion, that, “Pro-lifers understand that the majority of those who are involved with abortion on a personal level don’t think that what they are doing is wrong. Honestly, we tend to view the mother as a victim as well.”
Steve, if they really and honestly don’t believe that what they’re doing is wrong, why do you think it is up to you to decide this issue for them? Well, it’s clear, in fact it is quite illuminating that you justify your position by denying that women are capable of understanding and exercising moral judgments, instead, they are victims incapable of truly exercising moral free agency. It’s all of a piece, isn’t it, the view that you need to make the moral, not simply the “physical” choice for this woman — because she is herself unable to.
It is true that there are some women who cannot come to terms with having had an abortion, but most women realize over time, if not immediately, that they made a difficult choice likely under trying circumstances, and they made the best choice they could given the information they had. It’s downright insulting, in this light, to be viewed as a victim because of one’s inferior reasoning capabilities. It doesn’t strengthen your case at all.
At least you admit that the “cognitive dissonance we’ve discussed” exists, “because there are many in the pro-life camp who undermine our efforts by being hypocritical when it’s convenient.” But I would suggest that it is much more than that. I would suggest that the visceral feel of right and wrong is just absent for many people when it comes to early term abortion, not because they are “hypocrites” but because they assert an underlying premise without understanding or believing it. And it would drive the debate way forward for people like you to be unsparing in your moral judgments, as you have, and for other pro-lifers to be equally honest in theirs — which they frequently will not do, for whatever reason. Instead, they, like you, rely on the idea that “It is EXTREMELY rare that a procedure like this is medically necessary.” Therefore, they hope that their views won’t really cause the kind of extreme hardship that extreme views usually do. Believe it or not, I know women who have faced this. It isn’t nearly as rare as you think it is.
Finally, to impose “heroism” on individual women is simply obscene. Heroism, to be truly so, must be chosen, otherwise, a woman in this situation is simply society’s sacrificial victim.
Jake, Steve’s views are less scary when they are set forth as they really are — because what is happening currently is that people with those views are in fact “hiding” them whilst trying to sound reasonable to the rest of us. Like I said above, most of those who assert the “natural law” position don’t really believe it because they have no idea what its logical consequences really portend. In order for them to understand this, it needs to be spelled out for them in all its scary detail by true believers like Steve.
The notion that an abortion is the euqivalent of murder of a child is ENTIRELY a post-Roe v Wade invention. Back when abortion was still illegal in most US jurisdictions, it was not regarded legally or in the minds of the general public as murder. The common law rule, dating back as long as we have records of anyone addressing the subject, is that life begins with birth (How old are you? Do you count from your birthday, or from you conception day?).
“Life begins at conception” was a concept developed purely to enable the anti-abortion types to argue that there is some other “person” besides the mother whose rights must be taken into account in any constitutional analysis.
The thing about war is that it doesn’t just kill combatants, but usually harms and kills large numbers of non-combatant civilians as well, including children. So a truly pro-life position really would have to be anti-war as well. Even if the war would overall be predicted to save more lives in the long term than it took, it still wouldn’t be a pro-life position. For example, a strict pro-lifer wouldn’t say you could abort one fetus to enable the mother to go on to have more children, therefore giving a net “gain” of lives, because end doesn’t justify means. The same would seem to apply to the death penalty, and the argument that executing one criminal might save the lives of several potential victims.
It seems to me that there are two options – either it’s wrong to kill anyone, ever, for any reason, from fertilisation to natural death. Or society can set out certain strict laws designating the situations where killing someone is allowed. That usually includes war situations, self-defence, sometimes even defence of property (!) (and if your body isn’t your own property then what is? But that’s a different argument…). Other situations may be the death penalty for certain criminals, and the unique situation of a pregnant woman, where from the pro-life point of view you have one person inside the body of another.
I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable to say that abortion shouldn’t be on the list of lawful killings. You might of course disagree, and I guess we all have different opinions on where to draw the line. But it’s no more illogical or unreasonable than any other form of lawful killing, even if you consider the fetus to be deserving of “personhood.
“Rea” should do a little more research on what the law used to say:
Blackstone said: “Life is the immediate gift of God, a right inherent by nature in every individual; and it begins in contemplation of law as soon as an infant is able to stir in the mother’s womb. For if a woman is quick with child, and by a potion, or otherwise, killeth it in her womb . . . this, though not murder, was by the ancient law homicide or manslaughter. But at present it is not looked upon in quite so atrocious a light, though it remains a very heinous misdemeanor . . .”
And then this:
In other words, it is absolutely false to say that the “common law” always thought that life began at birth. That just isn’t true.
I think Kasasagi brings up a really good point. Much of the distinctions being made between the decision to go to war and the decision to terminate a pregnancy centers on who makes the decision — and much of the discomfort with legalized abortion, in my very humble opinion, is the exercise of self-determination in adjudicating the moral interests at stake. It’s not a reflection of the notion that life is always so sacred that no competing interest can ever get in its way. That the determination is being made by women makes abortion conceptually even more difficult to accept. This is reflected in Steve’s statement that the women involved are “victims” who “don’t believe what they are doing is really wrong.” Ergo society must step in and exercise control.
I think if society were unified in its view on the beginning of “personhood” then I think the rules over abortion would not engender much fuss. That society is not unified results, for most people, in deferring to individual judgment, because we place a very high value as a society on liberty and freedom of conscience. Those who would outlaw abortion would never admit that they do not value these things, but it is clear that they value them far less than they value social control over moral decision making.
Lastly, I must admit I find the question of women needing to destroy their children to save their lives to be a paper tiger. It is EXTREMELY rare that a procedure like this is medically necessary.
Sometimes it is to save the mother’s life (although the pro-lifers seem to have an elastic definition of risk when it comes to this topic). Sometimes it is to save the quality of her life–some pregnancies can and do result in prolonged health issues and disabilities.
But beyond this, what mother wouldn’t step in front of a bullet for her child? Isn’t that what motherhood is? To give life? To lay down your own life for your children?
Would you mind telling me how it’s beneficial to a mother’s other children–who need their mother–to have her sacrifice her own life?
And frankly, I think it’s awfully easy for you to decide that mothers should lay their lives down. Maybe a woman would like to live. Perish the very thought that the perfectly natural instinct of self-preservation sets in! These terrible, selfish women, wanting to live.
We’ve lost our sense of heroism when we have to ask these questions. I can’t help but feel taht [sic] it’s symptomatic of a narcissistic culture when a mother cares more about herself than her child.
It’s hardly heroic for someone who’s not in the situation to foist a choice upon someone else. That’s oppression, actually, not heroism, and that’s not going to convert me to your side. I can’t help but feel that it’s arrogant and misogynistic to dictate to women that we should be willing to die for a fetus, that our lives and well-being mean nothing, and that we are mere breeding mares.
Joe,
Your first example hearkens back to the idea of quickening — the point at which a woman “feels” a child inside — hardly at the moment of fertilziation, indeed, often not until week 20 or even later depending on how the placenta is situated.
Your second example regarding the “testator’s” children is similarly inapt, such a child would not be considered the testator’s issue if it were never born alive. The key there is “born alive” no more than nine months after the testator’s death.
Neither of these demonstrate that, at all stages of development, for all legal purposes, has the fetus been given the same consideration as humans who have already been born.
Rather, I’m saying, to all those who profess a belief in the right to abortion, “Are you aware of how closely aligned your beliefs are to those of the Nazis?”
Tsk. As I’m sure you know, the Nazis were fervently opposed to abortion–for “Aryan” women, anyway.
Judaism holds that abortion is permissible in many circumstances; the Talmud says that a fetus is ‘like water’ for the first thirty days of its existence. Care to explain again how close those views are to those of the Nazis?
To get back to your earlier point on blaming women for choosing abortion, you have the moral calculus exactly backwards. An abortion doctor is, in your universe, like a hired hit man. She kills strangers for money. Whereas the mother is deliberately seeking out and paying a killer to murder her own child. How can you possibly say that the mother is “a victim” led astray? Not only has she conspired and directed a murder, but it is the murder of her own child–a child she should, as you say, be willing to die for.
Seeing such women as “victims” is the same cognitive dissonance you earlier decry. Yes, it’s more comfortable to look at a friend, or wife, or sister, and think, “She’s not really a murderer; she didn’t know what she was doing.” But it’s neither principled nor correct. At best, you are patronizing and dismissing the woman’s moral agency; at worst, you are cynically soft-pedalling the woman’s crime in order to gain popular support.
We have reached that inevitable point in the discussion where further debate is fruitless.
The failure to distinguish the humanity of fetal life from some sort of cancerous growth or abstractly potential human biological amalgomation is disturbing to me. It’s also disturbing that no distinction is made between the innocent child, whose presence may endanger the life of her mother, and a criminal or enemy combattant. Innocent lives may incidentally be lost in war, but are never to be deliberately taken – if they are deliberately targeted, it is every bit as much of a crime as abortion is.
But, as I mentioned before, an abortion deliberately targets an innocent child. I do not care to “foist” heroism on anyone – merely to limit a kind of self-obsessed cowardice which treats a human life as disposable.
For Christians, it is the ultimate paradox. We learned from Christ the value of life because he was willing to lay it down. “This is my body, which will be given up for you.” Now, everywhere I turn I hear, “This is my body, I’ll do whatever I want with it.” When we collectively reach the point that we can’t recognize the valor in the sacrifice of one’s life for another, and that failure to do so is an act of weakness and selfishness, not love, then we have lost our humanity. One doesn’t need to be a Christian to see the nobility of such sacrifice.
The worship of autonomy – call it freedom if you wish, but it’s not real freedom if it only enables us to be slaves to our own vices – has become a catalyst for endemic perversion in society. I know that probably most of you think that I am wrong. I only believe men are truly capable of righteous self government when they themselves are virtuous. Otherwise, we have traded monarchical tyranny for the tyrrany of the many – either system can be equally corrupt.
If you want to know why there’s so much war in the world, why there is rape and murder and torture and child abuse and every evil thing – it’s because we’ve lost our sense of the dignity of the human person. We objectify each other. We seek the satisfaction of self over the good of others. You can’t have peace if youd don’t work for justice – and justice is for everyone, no matter how small or irrelevant.
That’s something I’ll hold to, and many of you will not. In the end, we’ll find out who was right. For the moment, I can’t justify spending any more time going around in circles about this. I know what you think of my positions, and you know what I think of yours. Time will tell what all of this will bring.
We have reached that inevitable point in the discussion where further debate is fruitless.
I guess that would depend on what ‘fruit’ you’re trying to harvest from the discussion.
Just a couple of points for Steve:
I don’t “fail” to distinguish the humanity of fetal life from some sort of cancerous growth. I just happen to think that it is legitimate not to view every stage of developmental potential as being equivalent to the completed whole.
It’s also disturbing to me that authorities are so willing to turn the concept of intent upside down when it comes to the “incidental” killing of noncombatants during wartime. Normally, under the criminal law, engaging in force that you know will result in death is sufficient to be charged as murder. Why isn’t it here? It’s not that I think it should be, but it is clear that, under certain circumstances, we more or less target innocent life with impunity and without conferring consequences on the culpable parties. That it may be considered “just” is itself a commentary on the matter.
I don’t think time will render a decision. It hasn’t yet. Evil and good have co-existed from the beginning of time. Neither has definitively triumphed.
As to the rest — as I always say to my father-in-law when he gets too nostalgic, the “good old days” were alot better for some than for others.
mythago says:
“I guess that would depend on what ‘fruit’ you’re trying to harvest from the discussion.”
He’s not here to discuss, he’s here to fish. Under the pretense of a “debate” that will leave no mark on his viewpoint whatsoever he is casting out rhetorical soundbyte lures to try and hook fence-sitters who might be susceptible to dramatic sounding innacuracies and theocratic grandstanding. Once he feels that the pond here has wised up to him he will simply move on to another message board and repeat the exact same points.
We’ve seen this a hundred times before and we’ll see it a hundred times more.
In fairness to Steve, Ampersand initiated the thread with reference to comments Steve made on another pro-life blog. He only came over here, I suspect, because his comments were being commented on. I’m guessing he’s not a trawler.
If you want to know why there’s so much war in the world, why there is rape and murder and torture and child abuse and every evil thing – it’s because we’ve lost our sense of the dignity of the human person. We objectify each other. We seek the satisfaction of self over the good of others. You can’t have peace if youd [sic] don’t work for justice – and justice is for everyone, no matter how small or irrelevant.
Oh, yes, because before abortion was legal these things never happened.
I love how pro-lifers try to blame women for all of the evils in the world.
Reread your history books. As I pointed out before, the Nazis that you like comparing us to criminalized abortion and they hardly respected the dignity of people.
Remember the Inquisition? That was not exactly a paragon of “our sense of the dignity of every person.” And it was brought to us by the Catholic Church, the same institution that supposedly loves life–or at least loves fetal life.
Slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, strikebreakers, legalized marital rape, child labor and exploitation, indentured servitude, civil and world wars (that featured rape, torture, starvation, bombings, and murder). . .all took place when the so-called evil of abortion was illegal. These are hardly examples of a society that respects life, but they are examples of a society that objectified others and sought the satisfaction of self over the good of others. No convienent scapegoat of abortion to blame then.
But hey, if it makes you feel better to tell women that it’s all our fault, you go on ahead. But don’t give me the song and dance that you love life after telling women that they should gladly die for a fetus.
Although I would never put it quite like Sheelzebub, it does sometimes seem like “autonomy” and “liberty” became vices at approximately the same time that women and other disfavored groups were finally permitted to exercise them. Sort of like the Pope discovering that women were likely to be the victims of oppression related to male sexual opportunism at approximately the same time birth control became widely available, and finding a link between the two. Like said phenomenon was a new chapter in human history.
It’s one thing to praise the heroic mother who does step in front of a bullet for her child. It’s quite another to pass a law saying that she *must* do so, or be guilty of murder. Especially if we don’t require the same sacrifice of non-mothers.
Joe M.–your second-hand quotes from Blackstone’s 18th century treatise in fact show the very opposite of what you claim they prove. Blackstone cites a bunch of instances in which unborn fetuses are treated differently from children born alive, and you somehow conclude that means that the common law treated life as beginning at conception?
Not to mention, Blackstone’s reputation as a historian of the common law being rather less well regarded nowdays than it was a century or so ago . . .
Jeez, 3 years at a “top 5” law school, 25 years in practice, and I get to have some layperson tell me I don’t know as much about the law as I ought, because he read some out-of-context quote from an old treatise on an anti-abortion propaganda site . . .
In light of Steve Skojec’s statements, it’s worth remembering that anti-abortion fanatics such as Paul Hill and John Salvi (a young, conservative Catholic man) had a history of making public statements to the effect that violence against abortion providers is “justified” prior to actually committing their crimes. Both men are convicted murderers (Salvi, I believe, subsequently committed suicide in jail).
Since 9/11, and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the federal government has stepped up its surveillance of possible terrorists threats, including domestic terrorism. This surveillance includes increased monitoring of anti-abortion groups and activities, such as public websites frequented by anti-abortion extremists who promote the same kind of “violence against abortion providers is justified” sentiments espoused by people like Hill and Salvi.
Such individuals may become suspects in incidents of criminal anti-abortion activity, especially those that occur close to where they live. This includes not just acts of direct physical violence against abortion providers and abortion clinic workers and clients, but things like vandalism, bomb threats, stalking and all the other types of criminal act that anti-abortion activists have a history of perpetrating.
Barbara says:
“In fairness to Steve, Ampersand initiated the thread with reference to comments Steve made on another pro-life blog. He only came over here, I suspect, because his comments were being commented on. I’m guessing he’s not a trawler.”
Hmm, true, I’m probably being unfair as to his initial motivation, but such things can shift given the opportunity. I still doubt very much he’ll walk away a changed man.
Rea says:
“Joe M.–your second-hand quotes from Blackstone’s 18th century treatise in fact show the very opposite of what you claim they prove. Blackstone cites a bunch of instances in which unborn fetuses are treated differently from children born alive, and you somehow conclude that means that the common law treated life as beginning at conception?”
Joe has a strange tendency to shoot himself in the foot that way. On a different thread he once complained that greedy abortion doctors were pushing the law so that their “unqualified” assistants could perform abortions, thereby increasing “production”. He linked to a court case where a pro choice organization defended a doctor’s assistant against a pro life activist motion as proof of this sinister “agenda”. Trouble is, even a cursory reading of the case he linked to revealed that the doctor’s assistant had already been legally performing abortions for some 20 years because otherwise the isolated and besieged clinic would not have been able to keep up with the demand. The case was actually an attempt to curb the endless illegal harassment and terror tactics that pro lifers had been using against the doctor.
Joe M.–your second-hand quotes from Blackstone’s 18th century treatise in fact show the very opposite of what you claim they prove. Blackstone cites a bunch of instances in which unborn fetuses are treated differently from children born alive, and you somehow conclude that means that the common law treated life as beginning at conception?
I didn’t say that the law historically treated life as beginning at conception, as any literate person would see. Instead, I was refuting your claim that “dating back as long as we have records of anyone addressing the subject,” the rule has been that life “begins” at birth. Not only is this scientific nonsense, it is plainly false. As I already showed, even if the old law didn’t treat life as beginning at conception, they most certainly didn’t pretend in every instance that it began at birth. Rather, various legal authorities recognized at least some protection for pre-birth life, and at least some capability of property ownership there as well.
Nice try, though.
Rather, various legal authorities recognized at least some protection for pre-birth life
Your example of estate law doesn’t prove your point. It recognizes that a pregnancy may result in a potential heir, and vests possible rights. Not at all the same as “rights” in the way we are talking about–the right to life, to avoid harm, to have interests that outweigh the pregnant woman’s.
By the way, insults about ‘any literate person’ neither advance your point nor refute rea’s.
Mythago: You are quite correct that a right to own or inherit property isn’t the same thing as a right to life. Still, your point is completely irrelevant. “Rea” had falsely claimed that every legal source back to the beginning of time treated life as beginning at birth. Now plainly if fetuses can inherit property, they must have been seen as alive in some sense. Even if this isn’t the same thing as a right to life, the fact that fetuses could own property refutes “Rea.”
“Rea” had falsely claimed that every legal source back to the beginning of time treated life as beginning at birth.
Er, no, as rea referred to “the common law rule”–meaning, to a lawyer (as rea says she is), English and American common law. That leaves out quite a bit of jurisprudence, but as America’s legal system originates in English common law (heavily modified by the Constitution and subsequent law), we can probably leave out the Code of Hammurabi and the Talmud.
It’s quite true that the common law recognized that a fetus is alive in some sense. That’s why there were laws about inheritance, the custom of a pregnant woman “pleading her belly” to avoid execution, and quickening (fetal movement) as the point at which a fetus was considered alive.
But the law never recognized a fetus as having personhood. Noboody is really saying a fetus isn’t alive–zygotes are alive, so are amoebas–but whether it’s a person, a human being, and therefore invested with rights as a born person is. The law has never* granted citizenship based on where you were conceived, counted age from conception, or treated an abortion to save the mother’s life as murder.
*Except for a recent court case in California, where a judge has held that if a fetus is an “unborn person,” USCIS cannot deport the pregnant mother since her fetus was conceived here, and thus he would be deporting a US citizen.
Joe, fetuses have never inherited property. That is not what the text you copied said. It said that a person who is born live nine months or less after the death of the testator will be considered to be among his heirs. Live birth is essential.
Steve’s comments are consistent with authoritarian Catholicism, that espoused by Antonin Scalia and Sean Hannity.
However, his support of the death penalty clashes with that of a somewhat influential Catholic – Karol Wojylta, aka Pope John Paul II.
Quoting from the Pope’s 1995 encyclical, Evangelium Vitae (which is the most recent papal screed against abortion):
It is clear that, for these purposes to be achieved, the nature and extent of the punishment must be carefully evaluated and decided upon, and ought not go to the extreme of executing the offender except in cases of absolute necessity: in other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society. Today however, as a result of steady improvements in the organization of the penal system, such cases are very rare, if not practically non-existent.
Excerpts
Full Text
It seems that Steve doesn’t really go in with the doctrine of papal infallibility, at least when it involves the death penalty or the concept of just vs. unjust wars.
And I don’t consider myself hypocritical for citing a Papal encyclical, as I’ve voluntarily left the Church, never to come back unless there’s a Second Reformation.
Mythago says:
“Noboody is really saying a fetus isn’t alive–zygotes are alive, so are amoebas…”
Don’t forget sperm and eggs ;-P
Save the pre-conceived babies!:
http://geocities.com/preconceivedbabies/index.html
At the risk of promoting my own blog, last night at http://vark.blogspot.com i wrote about a chance encounter with the folks from http://www.soulforce.org. They do a much better job than i was doing of communicating the philosophy and tactics of satyagraha and ahisma
(soul force, truth force, nonviolence, prolife.)
It disappoints me that the commenters here attack a strawperson, assuming that all opposition to abortion is authoritarian and anti-feminist. There are valid antiauthoritarian profeminist objections to abortion that aren’t being respected in this discussion. e.g margaret sanger’s views.
This same dynamic has been an issue in the libertarian party, where i’ve invested a lot of my life’s effort. the dominant view is that libertarian theory supports abortion on demand, while an embattled minority keeps fighting for the position that the party platform should recognize diversity of views on this point, that some thinkers are consistently both pro-life and pro-liberty. abortion isn’t an issue i choose to work on, but i see it as part of the spectrum of violence in our culture, along with child abuse, taxes, war, violence against women, violence against animals, torture in prisons, and a general lack of respect for both life and liberty. the soulforce page makes the point that our enemy is not each other, it is untruth.
now, i haven’t fully sorted out whether steve is a creative thinker or a raving loon. i’m aware some here consider me in the raving loon camp, and i’m ok with that. my views are far outside the mainstream, and i’m not skilled at expressing them well. but i did enjoy his krispey kreme art, and the way he has conducted himself in this thread. i think he’s right that we’ve reached a point where we’ve moved from arguing to bickering, and i should let it drop and get to work. but i wanted to share last night’s experience, and i’m pretty good at work avoidance.
Steve’s is the argument from fanaticism, that you are right solely because you are really, really sure that you are right.
Suppose that I believed (as I do on my worst days) that the Catholic Church is an evil institution, one that has held back the progress of humanity for nearly two thousand years, that has subverted the noble teachings of Jesus for the sole purpose of holds its followers in thrall (and that the existence of so many Catholics of the highest moral caliber demonstrates the capacity of human goodness to triumph over evil institutions). Would I be justified to demand unremitting war against the Catholic Church? No, I would not. Being really, really sure that you’re right is not sufficient grounds for war.
When we revile those people in the Middle Ages who burned witches at the stake for imaginary crimes, we do so not just because they were wrong in a matter of fact (for who has never been wrong in a manner of fact?), but for their _hubris_, their refusal to be humble in the face of their own ignorance. It is one thing to be really, really sure that you are right, and it is another to _know_ that you are right. Surety is a matter of belief, while knowledge is a matter of objective truth. Refusing to distinguish one from the other is not an error, it is arrogance.
There are valid antiauthoritarian profeminist objections to abortion that aren’t being respected in this discussion. e.g margaret sanger’s views.
I don’t know what this means. What are these supposed “valid antiauthoritarian profeminist objections to abortion?”
This same dynamic has been an issue in the libertarian party, where i’ve invested a lot of my life’s effort. the dominant view is that libertarian theory supports abortion on demand, while an embattled minority keeps fighting for the position that the party platform should recognize diversity of views on this point, that some thinkers are consistently both pro-life and pro-liberty.
I don’t think libertarianism is a coherent political philosophy to begin with, but it does seem especially incoherent to claim to be both a libertarian and opposed to the right to abortion.
Don P. has trouble with the concept of libertarians who are against abortion. But it’s easy:
1. Government should do nothing except protect human beings from harming each other.
2. Given 1, libertarianism is the proper philosophy about restricting the role of government.
3. But abortion is precisely an example where human beings do harm each other. The fetus who is killed never gets a chance to have a life. If it’s not murder, this is at least some form of harm.
4. Therefore, government can properly restrict the availability of abortion consistent with 1.
That’s a perfectly respectable way to reconcile libertarianism and pro-life views. Not that all libertarians subscribe to it, but it’s not contradictory or incoherent.
Joe M:
Government should do nothing except protect human beings from harming each other.
In that case, libertarians should have no objection to a woman removing a fetus from her body. Under your stated principle above, the government should not compel women to act as a life-support system for another “human being.” Thus, a pregnant woman may refuse to allow her body to be used to sustain the life of a developing fetus (for the sake of argument, we’ll assume the controversial claim that a fetus is a “human being” is true).
Conversely, if your definition of “harm” includes the refusal to provide life-sustaining services for another “human being,” then the government may legitimately require people to do anything else that is required to sustain another “human being’s” life–food, clothing, shelter, health care, etc., etc. That is a very bizarre conception of libertarianism.
One key distinction that Don P. seems to miss: Failing to provide some other person with food, shelter, clothing, etc., is not the same thing as poking scissors into the back of their skull and suctioning their brains out. In the first case, person A may be simply leaving person B alone. But in the second, person A is deliberately killing person B.
That’s what abortion does: The abortionist doesn’t just leave the fetus alone. He deliberately kills it by pulling off the fetus’s legs and arms, or suctioning its brains out. Libertarians could quite easily be against that form of deliberate killing.
Joe M:
One key distinction that Don P. seems to miss: Failing to provide some other person with food, shelter, clothing, etc., is not the same thing as poking scissors into the back of their skull and suctioning their brains out. In the first case, person A may be simply leaving person B alone. But in the second, person A is deliberately killing person B.
You’re not listening. If a woman is not required under libertarian principles to sustain a born human being’s life by providing it with food, water, shelter, etc., why is she required under libertarian principles to sustain an “unborn human being’s” life by providing it with food, water, shelter, etc. using her uterus?
Joe M. says:
“But abortion is precisely an example where human beings do harm each other. The fetus who is killed never gets a chance to have a life. If it’s not murder, this is at least some form of harm.”
All together now: You can’t regret having never existed.
Joe M. says:
“Failing to provide some other person with food, shelter, clothing, etc., is not the same thing as poking scissors into the back of their skull and suctioning their brains out. In the first case, person A may be simply leaving person B alone.”
I love your “leaving alone” as a euphemism for “neglecting” and “turning a blind eye to” the plight of others. I’m starting to understand the Reagan ideal.
All together now: You can’t regret having never existed.
So what? Even for adults, you can’t regret having been killed after the fact, unless you are assuming that you somehow continue to exist on a ghostly plane where you are capable of regret. That doesn’t mean that killing adults is ok.
“Having never existed” — a very odd way to put it. If the baby doesn’t even exist, abortion would be impossible by definition.
If a woman is not required under libertarian principles to sustain a born human being’s life by providing it with food, water, shelter, etc., why is she required under libertarian principles to sustain an “unborn human being’s” life by providing it with food, water, shelter, etc. using her uterus?
It’s Don P. who isn’t paying attention. I already explained the obvious distinction between (1) leaving someone to their own devices, and (2) having them killed on purpose.
Put it this way: For the sake of argument, assume that all the inhumane things said by pro-choicers are true. That is, the fetus really is nothing more than the equivalent of a malicious trespasser who can be thrown out. Well, yes, I may not have to provide food and shelter for every homeless person who wanders across my land. But that doesn’t mean that I have the right to kill a homeless person by smashing his skull. Even if I’m a libertarian. The most that a libertarian should properly say is that if it’s my land, I have the right to eject a trespasser. But not to kill. That’s another matter entirely.
Is there a form of abortion wherein the abortionist simply removes the baby alive, whole, and in one piece, and then waits to let the baby live or die? If not, Don P.’s post is irrelevant.
Joe M:
It’s Don P. who isn’t paying attention. I already explained the obvious distinction between (1) leaving someone to their own devices, and (2) having them killed on purpose.
That distinction is irrelevant. The death of the fetus is an effect of depriving it of the life-sustaining services of the woman’s uterus. Just as the death of a born human being would be the effect of depriving him of the life-sustaining provision of food, water, etc. If libertarian principles do not require a woman to sustain another human being’s life in the latter case, why do they require it in the former case? Answer the question.
Put it this way: For the sake of argument, assume that all the inhumane things said by pro-choicers are true. That is, the fetus really is nothing more than the equivalent of a malicious trespasser who can be thrown out.
I see no one claiming that the fetus is “malicious.” I consider it entirely innocent of wrongdoing. Just as a born child who is dependent on someone else to sustain its life may be completely innocent. If libertarian principles do not require a woman to sustain the born child’s life, why do they require her to sustain the “unborn child’s” life? Answer the question.
Well, yes, I may not have to provide food and shelter for every homeless person who wanders across my land.
Then why does a woman have to provide food, shelter, etc. to a developing fetus?
But that doesn’t mean that I have the right to kill a homeless person by smashing his skull.
But I’m not saying you have the right to “smash his skull.” If you have the right to refuse to provide the homeless person with life-sustaining food and water, why doesn’t a pregnant woman have the right to refuse to provide a fetus with life-sustaining food and water?
Joe M:
Is there a form of abortion wherein the abortionist simply removes the baby alive, whole, and in one piece, and then waits to let the baby live or die?
I don’t know. But if one human being has a right to refuse to provide life-sustaining services to another human being, why doesn’t a woman have a right to abortion using this method?
Your position now seems to be degenerating into the claim that it’s not the death of the fetus that you object to, but merely the method by which that death occurs.
That distinction is irrelevant.
Really? You don’t see any difference between (1) the guy who just walks by a beggar on the street without giving him any money, or (2) the guy who takes a hammer and smashes the skull of the beggar on the street? Wow. That’s a little frightening.
Let me just say that in a criminal prosecution, the second guy would NEVER be able to defend himself by saying “Gee, the beggar was starving and he was going to die anyway, and smashing his skull was just the same thing as not giving him food.”
But I’m not saying you have the right to “smash his skull.”
Well, you’re obviously not talking about abortion, then.
If you have the right to refuse to provide the homeless person with life-sustaining food and water, why doesn’t a pregnant woman have the right to refuse to provide a fetus with life-sustaining food and water?
Even if libertarians believe that, that would ONLY mean that a woman could have an abortion where the abortionist did NOTHING other than remove the baby alive, without ripping off its limbs or suctioning out its brains or any of the lovely things that abortionists do.
Joe M:
You don’t see any difference between (1) the guy who just walks by a beggar on the street without giving him any money, or (2) the guy who takes a hammer and smashes the skull of the beggar on the street? Wow. That’s a little frightening.
Of course I see a difference between those situations. But the distinction is irrelevant to the question I am asking you. Here it is yet again: If you have the right to refuse to provide the homeless person with life-sustaining food and water, why doesn’t a pregnant woman have the right to refuse to provide a fetus with life-sustaining food and water?
Well, you’re obviously not talking about abortion, then.
Yes, we are talking about abortion.
Even if libertarians believe that, …
Well, you said that the libertarian principle is that “Government should do nothing except protect human beings from harming each other.” So do you understand that to mean that one human being has the right to refuse to provide life-sustaining services to another human being, or don’t you?
… that would ONLY mean that a woman could have an abortion where the abortionist did NOTHING other than remove the baby alive,
But, assuming the fetus is pre-viability (as it is in 99% of the abortions performed in America) “removing the baby alive” would cause it to die just as surely aborting it using some other method. And if the fetus is anaesthetized or otherwise incapable of experiencing pain, what difference does it make, anyway? And for mature fetuses, removing the conscious, living fetus from the woman’s uterus and allowing it to die a lingering “natural” death from suffocation or hypothermia would be far less humane than alternative methods of abortion that reduce or eliminate its suffering.
And for mature fetuses, removing the conscious, living fetus from the woman’s uterus and allowing it to die a lingering “natural” death from suffocation or hypothermia would be far less humane than alternative methods of abortion that reduce or eliminate its suffering.
How would you know? Ripping off limbs is more humane? Really?
Joe M:
How would you know?
From reading, mainly:
Ripping off limbs is more humane? Really?
If the fetus is unconscious or otherwise incapable of feeling pain, yes, it would certainly be more humane than allowing the conscious fetus to die a lingering death from suffocation or hypothermia by removing it alive from the woman’s uterus and allowing it to die a “natural” death. But the vast majority of abortions do not involve “ripping off limbs,” anyway.
I’m still waiting for your answers to my questions.
walt: fiawol. fandom is a way of life. fan = fanatic.
don: the ‘left out’ site, prolife.liberal.org, and the sojourner article that amp cites above, seems like a good place to start.
joe: you might want to take your discussion with don elsewhere. i think he’s just baiting you.
if this is good advice, i should follow it myself and go elsewhere for a few days, especially until i get some work done.
The irony is, Joe seems to be arguing that there’s something particularly cruel about the “ripped limb from limb” scenario. And yet, the vast majority of pro-life legislative efforts for the last five years have been “partial-birth” abortion bans intended to FORCE doctors to rip the fetus apart in the womb, rather than using methods that draw the fetus out relatively intact.
* * *
Joe M: In general, abortions which include deliberate compression of the fetus’ head (either by draining it or by crushing it) are relatively late-term abortions. The purpose of compressing the head is not to kill the fetus; that’s a side effect. The purpose of compressing the head is to make it smaller, and so avoid injuring the mother.
As I understand most libertarian philosophy, there’s a distinction made between deliberate harm caused and harm caused as a by-product while pursuing legitimate self-preservation. It seems to me that compressing the head, since its primary purpose is to enable the fetus to be removed with the smallest possible chance of injury to the mother, falls into the latter catagory.
* * *
Sometimes it seems to me that there are really only two abortion arguments.
1) When does personhood begin? (Put another way, when should civil rights begin?)
And 2), can a pregnant woman justly be forced by the government to give birth against her will?
I really don’t see how libertarians can favor #2.
Let’s try a classic example: Suppose Bob wakes up one morning and finds he’s been connected through various life-support machines to a famous violinist. The violinist has a rare blood disease AND a rare blood type; the only way the violinist will survive is if he’s plugged in to Bob for most of a year. The process is uncomfortable to Bob but only mildly dangerous – Bob has a 999 chance in 1000 of surviving, if Bob lets the process run its course.
Should Bob be legally forbidding from ripping out the tubes connecting him to the violinist? (Remember, if Bob rips out the tubes, that will kill the violinist).
Ahh, the old “violinist” argument. Quick reason why that analogy doesn’t work at all: Bob didn’t cause the violinist’s disease. Whereas unless the mother was raped, it was a deliberate act of hers (and the father’s) that caused the baby to come into existence. That’s why fathers can be tagged with child support, even if they would rather the kid be dead.
So a better analogy would be this: Bob’s son is a violinist. One morning, he deliberately injects the violinist with a poison that might cause a rare blood disease. (In other words, it was Bob’s own purposeful action that caused the violinist to be in that condition in the first place). Sure enough, it DOES cause the blood disease. Then he not only refuses to donate blood to his son, but instead chops the violinist into pieces with an ax. That would more closely approximate what happens during an abortion.
Joe says:
“So what? Even for adults, you can’t regret having been killed after the fact, unless you are assuming that you somehow continue to exist on a ghostly plane where you are capable of regret. That doesn’t mean that killing adults is ok.”
But an adult has existed and would be very unhappy to learn they are about to die. A fetus has not, and cannot therefore regret (or feel/think anything for that matter) if it is aborted before it can. See below.
Joe also says:
“Having never existed” — a very odd way to put it. If the baby doesn’t even exist, abortion would be impossible by definition.”
Don’t be deliberately obtuse Joe, it’s very unbecoming. You know exactly what I meant. A person isn’t just a body and its basic physiological functions or what others hope to get out of it, it’s a personality, aspirations, memories and the emotions associated with them. A fetus has none of those things, and to value it more that the woman carrying it is to value a blank slate more than a hand-penned manuscript.
You accuse us of valuing life too cheaply. I say you are the ones who cheapen it, by flattening away the importance of individuality and experience as the central parts of personhood.
Amp says:
“Sometimes it seems to me that there are really only two abortion arguments.
1) When does personhood begin? (Put another way, when should civil rights begin?)
And 2), can a pregnant woman justly be forced by the government to give birth against her will?”
As noble as arguing against no.2 is, it simply holds no weight against the dedicated pro-lifers. No.1 is much more effective, as in the end it always comes down to this: Either you face facts and admit that the fetus is not a person by any reasonable secular measure of humanity, or you claim some sort of religious explanation, in which case you cannot impose your religious beliefs on others anyway.
It’s so self evident that pro-lifers who are really motivated by religion regularly disguise themselves as “reasonable” purveyors of pseudoscientific myths to project credibility.
Joe, did you notice that there was an entire rest of my post, which you somehow missed responding to?
Anyhow, you’re now arguing (if I understand you correctly) that the issue is that the woman committed a deliberate act which as a side effect led to pregnancy, and therefore it is justified for the state to use force to make her go through with childbirth. If she was raped, on the other hand, then killing the “baby” (as you call it) with an abortion is morally justifiable.
Before I go on, is that a correct assessment of what you’re now arguing?
Joe M:
Ahh, the old “violinist” argument. Quick reason why that analogy doesn’t work at all: Bob didn’t cause the violinist’s disease. Whereas unless the mother was raped, it was a deliberate act of hers (and the father’s) that caused the baby to come into existence.
But if she was raped, it wasn’t a deliberate act of hers that caused the baby to come into existence. So if Bob has the right to disconnect himself from the violinist, why doesn’t a rape victim have the right to an abortion?
And if the rape victim has the right to an abortion, the primary motive for denying abortion in non-rape cases cannot be the protection of life, since the life is the same regardless of the circumstances of its conception. The only difference is the involuntary nature of the sexual act in the case of rape.
And if the rape victim has the right to an abortion, abortion cannot be even remotely as morally significant as killing a child, unless you would also permit infanticide in cases of rape (until I hear otherwise, I’ll assume you wouldn’t).
But an adult has existed and would be very unhappy to learn they are about to die.
Ah, so I see. If you kill an adult all of a sudden, or someone who is sleeping, that must be fine, according to your logic. After all, they won’t be able to dread the event, and they won’t regret it afterwards.
it’s a personality, aspirations, memories and the emotions associated with them. A fetus has none of those things,
I wouldn’t be so sure. Fetuses come out of the womb knowing how to recognize their mother’s voice, knowing how to recognize pieces of music, and so forth. They have more cognitive abilities and personality than you might think.
and to value it more that the woman carrying it is to value a blank slate more than a hand-penned manuscript.
Who said anything about valuing a fetus “more than a woman”? No one. Now if a woman’s life was on the line, and I said that the fetus’s life should take precedence, that would indeed mean I valued the fetus’ life more than the woman’s life.
But I don’t say that. Instead, all I’m saying is that in the normal run of events, the reasons people have for abortion are things like, “My boyfriend doesn’t want a kid,” or “I don’t feel ready,” or “I’d hate to miss a semester of college,” or the like. I say that the fetus’s right to keep living is more important than reasons like those.
That does NOT mean that I value the fetus per se “more than the woman.” It means that I value the right not to be killed more than the right not to offend one’s boyfriend or the right not to miss a semester of school or the right not to be inconvienced with an adoption when one doesn’t want to rear one’s own child.
Joe M:
If Bob has the right to disconnect himself from the violinist, why doesn’t a rape victim have the right to an abortion?
If you have the right to refuse to provide a homeless person with life-sustaining food and water, why doesn’t a pregnant woman have the right to refuse to provide a fetus with life-sustaining food and water?
The rape exception isn’t germane here. What I was doing was showing how bizarre and irrelevant the old violinist argument is. It just doesn’t map onto the situation involved with pregnancy. In saying this, I logically have to make an exception for those who were raped; but otherwise, no one just wakes up to find that they are pregnant for no reason. If a woman is pregnant, it is because she and the father deliberately chose to have sex on her fertile days without using enough protection. (You can probably come up with oddball examples where someone got pregnant even after the man had a vasectomy, or whatever, but those are the exceptions.)
That said, here’s how I would handle the rape situation: Abortion would still be illegal, because it’s not the baby’s fault that her father was wicked. On the other hand, if the woman gets an abortion, she wouldn’t be punished. It would be kind of like killing in self-defense: Killing is still wrong, but if you have a compelling motivation, we’ll let it slide.
As I said elsewhere, I don’t necessarily think that killing an embryo is as bad as killing a born human being. But homicide law recognizes all kinds of variations already: Killing in self-defense is ok; killing in the heat of passion is better than killing in cold blood; killing a police officer or FBI agent comes in for harsher penalties; killing out of “hate” also is treated more harshly in many jurisdictions.
So homicide law needn’t treat abortion as nearly the crime that first-degree murder is. The law could make distinctions here, just as it always does. But I don’t see why killing an embryo or fetus shouldn’t be treated with at least the same sternness as killing a cat or dog, which will get you from one to ten years in jail in most states. (See here).
Come to think of it, this is a good question for Don P.: Why should it be a felony to kill a cat but a constitutional right to kill a fetus? Isn’t there something about the fetus’s life that is at least as valuable as a cat?
Oh, I know what the response will be: It’s all about the woman’s own right to eject the fetus from her body, even if that involves hacking the fetus to pieces. OK, then what about the homeowner’s right to eject the cat from his or her property? If that happens to involve cutting off the cat’s head in the process, so be it. Right? So why shouldn’t THAT be a constitutional right too? After all, the Constitution at least mentions property.
Joe says:
“Come to think of it, this is a good question for Don P.: Why should it be a felony to kill a cat but a constitutional right to kill a fetus? Isn’t there something about the fetus’s life that is at least as valuable as a cat?”
Oh dear Joe, there you go being deliberately obtuse again. The differences between a cat and fetus are obvious, starting with just two of the most important ones:
A) A cat is an independent being.
B) As primitive as it is, a born cat still has personality, experience, intellect, etc. which a fetus does not.
Of course bringing this up at all is absurd anyway. We still slaughter cows, chickens, pigs and dozens of other animals by the millions in this country every day, and aren’t they worth a cat? All you’re doing is highlighting the capacity for nonsensical arbitraryness in our value system, which is hardly supportive of your case.
Why should it be a felony to kill a cat but a constitutional right to kill a fetus?
If I take my aged, sick cat in to be euthanized, neither I nor the vet is guilty of a felony. Ditto if the cat is feral, or if I persuade the vet that there is some other reason the cat should cease to be.
So it’s simply false that it’s a felony to kill a cat. Or a dog, or a cow, or a marmot.
Refresher course: Roe v. Wade only permits relatively unfettered abortion in the first trimester.
Joe M:
The rape exception isn’t germane here. What I was doing was showing how bizarre and irrelevant the old violinist argument is. It just doesn’t map onto the situation involved with pregnancy. In saying this, I logically have to make an exception for those who were raped;
The rape case is germane because a rape victim isn’t any more responsible for her pregnancy than Bob is responsible for being connected to the violinist. So again I ask, if Bob has a right to disconnect himself from the violonist, even though the violinist didn’t do anything wrong, why doesn’t a rape victim have a right to an abortion?
That said, here’s how I would handle the rape situation: Abortion would still be illegal, because it’s not the baby’s fault that her father was wicked.
But it’s not the violinist’s fault, either, that someone connected him to Bob or that he will die if he is disconnected. Both the violinist and the fetus are innocent of wrongdoing. But if Bob has the right to disconnect the violinist, why doesn’t a rape victim have the right to abort the fetus?
On the other hand, if the woman gets an abortion, she wouldn’t be punished. It would be kind of like killing in self-defense: Killing is still wrong, but if you have a compelling motivation, we’ll let it slide.
This is incoherent. Killing in self-defense is not illegal. Killing in self-defense is a legal right protected by statute. So if aborting a fetus conceived through rape is morally equivalent to killing a person in self-defense, why isn’t it also a right that should be protected by law?
Joe M:
Come to think of it, this is a good question for Don P.: Why should it be a felony to kill a cat but a constitutional right to kill a fetus?
There is no general constitutional right to kill a fetus. That is why states can and sometimes do prosecute people for killing fetuses. There is and should be a constitutional right to have an abortion. The constitutional guarantee of liberty encompasses the right of a pregnant woman to choose not to use her body to sustain the life of a developing fetus.
There may also, by the way, be a constitutional right to kill a cat for various reasons or under various circumstances (for food, to prevent the transmission of infectious disease, or whatever). I don’t know if it’s ever been tested.
Isn’t there something about the fetus’s life that is at least as valuable as a cat?
If the fetus is sufficiently developed, I would say so, yes. Of course, I would also say that a woman has the right to refuse to act as a physical life-support system for a cat, if such a bizarre situation ever arose.
Oh, I know what the response will be: It’s all about the woman’s own right to eject the fetus from her body,
Yes. A woman has a right to refuse to act as a physical life-support system for a developing fetus. Just as Bob has a right to refuse to act as a physical life-support system for a violinist. Just as a person has a right to refuse to provide another person with a life-saving organ or tissue.
OK, then what about the homeowner’s right to eject the cat from his or her property?
A homeowner certainly has a right to eject a cat from his or her property. People do it all the time.
If that happens to involve cutting off the cat’s head in the process, so be it. Right?
No, of course not. It is obviously not necessary to cut off a cat’s head in order to eject it from one’s property.
Joe M:
So you seek to punish women who have an abortion with a prison sentence of one year or more.
I’m glad we’ve now got you on record with that. It demonstrates just how extreme your views are. No serious real-world proposals for criminalizing abortion include any punishment even remotely as harsh as a year in prison for women who have an abortion. Most of them don’t include any kind of criminal penalty at all, not even a fine, not community service, nothing. Even before Roe v. Wade, in states where abortion was criminalized, women were virtually never incarcerated for having an illegal abortion.
Ironically, though, the fact that the magnitude of the criminal penalty you favor for abortion is in the range typically associated with the criminal killing of an animal, rather than in the range associated with murder or manslaughter, also gives us a pretty good idea of just how much less you value fetuses than children. If killing a fetus is more like killing a cat than killing a baby, it’s pretty dishonest to keep going on and on about “unborn children,” isn’t it?
By the way, does your proposal include women who destroy a fetus by taking the morning-after pill, or by wearing an IUD, or by undergoing IVF fertility treatment?
If ejecting the cat from your home could only be done by cutting it’s head off, or if that was the only humane way of doing it, I guess it would be justified. Fortunately there are simpler and more pleasant methods, such as putting on a strong pair of gloves, picking up the cat and putting it outside. For most people, in most unwanted-cat situations, this method is sufficient!
Sadly, removing an unwanted fetus from your body isn’t so straightforward. I also don’t believe you can equate a house with a person’s body in that way. The analogy works up to a point, but only so far. It’s really a unique situation, the concept of a person existing inside another person’s body, and while analogies like the cat-in-house one are useful, they can’t be used as direct comparisons.
I’m also surprised to see JoeM suggest that a fetus has more in common with a cat (for example) than with a born human baby. That doesn’t make a great deal of logical sense, especially for the later stages of fetal development. What magically changes at the moment of birth to make the fetus’ life worth so much more, to change the charge from animal abuse to homicide?
I notice that in an earlier post it was “embryos” that you were assigning a lesser value to, so presumably you mean an earlier stage of development, but later you refer to the “fetus” in comparison with the life of the cat. So I don’t quite understand your reasoning.
Assigning a lesser or greater value to the fetus depending on its age/stage of development is rather problematic, because it means drawing an arbitrary line, where the fetus/embryo is non-human/person one day, and suddenly human/person the next day. It makes more sense to me to consider the woman’s right to bodily autonomy, or, if you prefer, a person’s right to decide whether or not a second person living inside their body stays there or leaves. That way it doesn’t even have to be gendered!
It would of course be preferable if it was possible to remove the fetus without causing it harm, however this is usually not possbile. In the very late stages of pregnancy, where it would be neither safer or less painful and traumatic to deliver the baby alive than to perform an abortion, there isn’t much of a case for abortion. However this isn’t really an issue, as abortion is not performed for this reason, and few doctors would be willing to do so, especially as it wouldn’t even be in the interests of their patient. Late-term abortions are generally only performed when the fetus is so “deformed” (don’t like that word, but can’t think of a better one right now) as to be unable to survive. Sometimes the fetus is already dead, and it is considered more humane to remove it than to force the woman to remain pregnant and labour to birth a stillborn child.
I’m also surprised to see JoeM suggest that a fetus has more in common with a cat (for example) than with a born human baby. That doesn’t make a great deal of logical sense, especially for the later stages of fetal development. What magically changes at the moment of birth to make the fetus’ life worth so much more, to change the charge from animal abuse to homicide?
I notice that in an earlier post it was “embryos” that you were assigning a lesser value to, so presumably you mean an earlier stage of development, but later you refer to the “fetus” in comparison with the life of the cat. So I don’t quite understand your reasoning.
Assigning a lesser or greater value to the fetus depending on its age/stage of development is rather problematic, because it means drawing an arbitrary line, where the fetus/embryo is non-human/person one day, and suddenly human/person the next day. It makes more sense to me to consider the woman’s right to bodily autonomy, or, if you prefer, a person’s right to decide whether or not a second person living inside their body stays there or leaves. That way it doesn’t even have to be gendered!
It would of course be preferable if it was possible to remove the fetus without causing it harm, however this is usually not possbile. In the very late stages of pregnancy, where it would be neither safer or less painful and traumatic to deliver the baby alive than to perform an abortion, there isn’t much of a case for abortion. However this isn’t really an issue, as abortion is not performed for this reason, and few doctors would be willing to do so, especially as it wouldn’t even be in the interests of their patient. Late-term abortions are generally only performed when the fetus is so “deformed” (don’t like that word, but can’t think of a better one right now) as to be unable to survive. Sometimes the fetus is already dead, and it is considered more humane to remove it than to force the woman to remain pregnant and labour to birth a stillborn child.
I’m also surprised to see JoeM suggest that a fetus has more in common with a cat (for example) than with a born human baby. That doesn’t make a great deal of logical sense, especially for the later stages of fetal development. What magically changes at the moment of birth to make the fetus’ life worth so much more, to change the charge from animal abuse to homicide?
I’m not “comparing” a fetus to a cat, in the literal sense of saying that its character, personality, and intellect are as limited as the cat’s. I’m just saying that we most certainly do make it a crime just to kill a household animal because you want it dead. That being the case, why couldn’t there be at least some form of protection for the fetus, even if we’re not willing to treat it as harshly as homicide?
DRA: The wrongness of killing can’t depend on “intellect” or “personality” anyway. If that were the case, it would be perfectly fine, let’s say, to kill someone who is in a coma and who has none of those things at the moment. Or it would be fine to kill the severely retarded, who don’t have much intellect.
Don P. — Oh, stop pretending to be shocked. All you ever do is debate about abortion, so you can’t really be surprised that someone would propose a very slight penalty for abortion.
I forgot: You also manage to criticize me for not making the penalty harsher. OK, then. An appropriate sentence for abortionists would be life in prison. Only fitting for someone who makes money doing this sort of thing.
By the way, you keep harping on this sacred duty to refuse to give anyone else food or water. Strange for a supposed liberal to praise selfishness and neglect to such an extent, but typical in this context. What you didn’t seem to know is that it IS a crime to refuse to give your own children food and water. You can’t just turn them out in the street.
Here’s a California law that criminalizes EXACTLY what you say everyone has a right to do. And the penalty is about what I proposed as to abortion:
I’m just saying that we most certainly do make it a crime just to kill a household animal because you want it dead.
Joe, again: this isn’t true. Repeating it won’t make it true.
Are you proposing that people who take elderly cats to be euthanized be jailed for a year? Or that people who drop animals at shelters–knowing that animal will almost certainly be euthanized–should be jailed?
Or perhaps you’re suggesting that veterinarians, and the veterinary techs who perform euthanasia at the dog pound, be jailed.
(I can see it now. “What you in for?” “Puppy-killing.”)
Joe says:
“DRA: The wrongness of killing can’t depend on “intellect” or “personality” anyway. If that were the case, it would be perfectly fine, let’s say, to kill someone who is in a coma and who has none of those things at the moment. Or it would be fine to kill the severely retarded, who don’t have much intellect.”
I guess I’ll stop telling you to drop the obtuse act since it is apparently an integral part of your technique. People in comas are not the equivalent of fetuses because they had personality and experience before the coma and stand a chance of recovering it. The severely retarded are not the equivalent of a fetus because they still have personality and experience regardless of their intelligence (notice I’ve NEVER mentioned intelligence as a criteria). Unless they are complete vegetables they are capable of perceiving and recalling significant stimuli and arranging it into a personhood.
You have a lot of gall calling the violinist example bizarre only to turn around and deliver the equally bizarre comparison above.
Joe M:
I’m not “comparing” a fetus to a cat, in the literal sense of saying that its character, personality, and intellect are as limited as the cat’s. I’m just saying that we most certainly do make it a crime just to kill a household animal because you want it dead.
I see nothing in the statutes you cite that make it a crime to kill a household animal “because you want it dead.” In fact, few or none of them seem to make the act of killing an animal in itself a crime at all. The conduct they’re criminalizing is cruelty or abuse of animals. Thousands of household animals are legally killed every year by private animal welfare agencies and government animal control agencies because there is no one willing to take care of them.
But this is all irrelevant to the central point, anyway. The fact that you seek to treat abortion as roughly equivalent to killing an animal, rather than as roughly equivalent to killing a baby, shows just how little you really value the lives of fetuses.
Joe M:
so you can’t really be surprised that someone would propose a very slight penalty for abortion.
I forgot: You also manage to criticize me for not making the penalty harsher. OK, then.
Yes, your position is just an incoherent mess. On the one hand, you claim to believe that abortion is a terrible, awful, profoundly immoral act. You routinely compare it to the killing of a child. But when it comes to how you would actually treat abortion, you propose to treat it as about as serious a crime as killing a cat. The huge gulf between your rhetoric on abortion and your policy proposals on abortion is a reflection of your cognitive dissonance on the issue.
But at the same time, even the punishment you do seek to impose on women who have an abortion (a year or two in jail) is far harsher than any serious real-world proposal from the anti-abortion movement. It’s far harsher than any penalties that were imposed on women who had an illegal abortion before Roe v. Wade. Even the “partial birth” abortion ban, and existing state bans on third-trimester abortions, generally impose NO criminal penalties whatsoever on women who have these types of abortion. So the fact that you seek to throw women in jail for a year or more even for having a very early abortion demonstrates just how extreme you are even compared to your fellow anti-abortionists, let alone compared to Americans in general. You’re a true fanatic.
Joe M:
By the way, you keep harping on this sacred duty to refuse to give anyone else food or water.
I’ve said nothing about any kind of “duty,” let alone a “sacred” one, to refuse to give anyone else food or water. You keep attributing to me statements and positions I have never expressed. You really should try to read more carefully.
Strange for a supposed liberal to praise selfishness and neglect to such an extent, but typical in this context.
I have not praised it. I’m not a libertarian. As I said earlier, I think libertarianism is a pretty incoherent political philosophy. I was responding to your claim that there is nothing inconsistent between libertarian principles and the criminalization of abortion.
What you didn’t seem to know is that it IS a crime to refuse to give your own children food and water.
No kidding. Fortunately, our laws are not based on libertarian principles. The Libertarian Party has very little popular support.
generally impose NO criminal penalties whatsoever on women who have these types of abortion
That’s because, as Steve illustrated for us, the anti-abortion movement does not treat women as fully adult moral actors. The moral responsibility is shifted to the abortion provider, with the poor li’l innocent woman being forgiven, because she was clearly led astray by the evil fetus-killing Satanists of Planned Parenthood.
This is a bizarre view that isn’t reflected in homicide laws; if I pay a hit man to kill my child, not only am I guilty of murder, but I probably will be given more moral blame. The hit man, after all, is merely a mercenary. I, on the other hand, have betrayed my own child with malice aforethought. If I tried to explain to a jury that it was the hit man’s fault for not telling me what happens in a murder, the jury would be outraged.
You can’t justify excusing abortion-seeking women unless you shift the moral blame–and you can only do that by assuming women are rather stupid.
joe – see my may 2nd post “the war with the mice”
at http://vark.blogspot.com. unfortunately the permalinks don’t work. it’s as close as i’ve come to a pro-abortion post. generally, my views are similar to yours, although i see less value in trying to discuss them with a mostly hostile audience. abortion, like anarchism or filesharing, is a topic where most of us have strongly held emotional positions such that no degree of logical argument is going to change our positions, so extended discussion tends to just antagonize. i see more value in focusing on topics where we share core values but have different life experiences and can learn from each other. amp, for example, knows more about wedding planning and cartooning than i do, so i’m open to learning from him about that, and maybe there are some things i know about where i can share my perspective in a useful way, but abortion probably isn’t one of those.
and yes i realize this is my 3rd post in this thread, and i’m still avoiding work that needs doing now. it’ssort of like a train wreck where i can’t look away. i’ve been thinking i may have some unresolved issues about my partner’s miscarriage, or it might just be that abortion raises the issue of who is an “other”, when it comes to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
On the other hand, back in the mid-1980s, I was pro-life, and I changed my mind. So it’s not absolutely the case that no one ever changes their mind.
It is the case, I suspect, that very few people change their mind in the course of a single argument. Rather, if they change their minds at all, it’s due to an accumilation of arguments taking place over a long period. Furthermore, the change of mind may be quite gradual.
Amp says:
“It is the case, I suspect, that very few people change their mind in the course of a single argument. Rather, if they change their minds at all, it’s due to an accumilation of arguments taking place over a long period. Furthermore, the change of mind may be quite gradual.”
Probably the wisest statement to come out of this thread. I’ve been thinking about this very fact a lot lately as I’ve mulled over my abrasive argument tactics.
I too am tired of hearing this patently false claim to the effect that “no one is ever going to change their mind on abortion/the death penalty/gay marriage/whatever so there’s no point in debating them or trying to persuade your opponents that they’re wrong.” The fact is that public opinion on these and other issues does change over time. Many people do change their minds.
Ampersand — If I might say so, your last post is the most interesting thing that you’ve said on this subject, although other posts are close. So you actually changed your mind on this most heated of subjects? And yet now you are so vehemently pro-abortion, i.e., throughout the 9 months, if I recall.
What made you reverse course so entirely? Arguments? Pictures? Descriptions of scenarios in which women said that they had really wanted an abortion? People like Don P.? It couldn’t have been scientific knowledge, because the advances there have all pointed in the opposite direction (i.e., more advanced ultrasounds, more research showing the fetus’s advanced ability to think, etc.) So what was it?
it’ssort of like a train wreck where i can’t look away.
Won’t, not can’t.
How do scientific advances lend support to the anti-abortion position? It seems to me that the opposite is true.
And yet now you are so vehemently pro-abortion
Tsk. I don’t think you want to talk about “pro-abortion” unless you’re happy being called “fetus-hugger.”
I was also pro-life at one time (parents left my religious education to my grandmother–long story). I changed my mind for a couple of reasons.
One was that it was that particular, widespread brand of opposition to abortion based on the sexual behavior of the mother and a lot of myths about women who seek abortion. You know–abortions in the case of rape and incest are OK, but not for those awful single women who sleep around and never bother to use contraception. (Needless to say, the responsibility of the father never came up.)
The other is that, from the point of view of the religion I eventually adopted–Judaism–a fetus is not a baby. It’s ‘as water’ for the first thirty days of its existence, and after that there is a vast gray area as to when, and whether, abortion is acceptable.
FWIW, the Talmud holds that a fetus endangering the mother’s life is a “pursuer” and that an abortion in such cases is justified self-defense.
Mythago — an interesting journey you describe there. Thanks for sharing.
By the way, though, why do pro-choicers get so antsy about the term “pro-abortion”? Abortion is exactly what they’re defending, after all, not “choice” generically. It would be as if I spent my life campaigning for property rights, but got all mad whenever someone said that I was “pro-property.” Imagine that I said, “No, no, I’m NOT pro-property. I’m just pro-CHOICE on whether people should have property rights.” Wouldn’t that be a little weird?
Fact is, people who don’t like the term “pro-abortion” must know, deep down, that there is something wrong about abortion. If they really thought that abortion was perfectly legitimate, they wouldn’t mind the term “pro-abortion” one bit.
Amp — you haven’t said what changed your mind. Facts? Arguments? Hanging out with a new set of friends? Hearing people’s stories? Pictures? Any chance of an answer there?
Joe M:
“By the way, though, why do pro-choicers get so antsy about the term “pro-abortion”? Abortion is exactly what they’re defending, after all, not “choice” generically. It would be as if I spent my life campaigning for property rights, but got all mad whenever someone said that I was “pro-property.” Imagine that I said, “No, no, I’m NOT pro-property. I’m just pro-CHOICE on whether people should have property rights.” Wouldn’t that be a little weird?”
Ok, now you’re being childish, as I KNOW we’ve explained this to you before. The term “pro-abortion” implies that we are in favor of the proceedure, not the option it provides. “Pro-abortion” implies we want as many abortions to take place as possible, which is only true in the collective fantasy world of ghoulish black and white simplicity that pro-lifers like you share.
If we were “pro-abortion” we would be forcing women to have them against their beliefs with threats of bombing. No my annoying friend, we are only in favor of the choice, which every woman has the right to make for herself.
Ooops, and I forgot that no takedown of the sillyness Joe M just dribbled would be complete without the classic “partisan turn around”:
“By the way, though, why do pro-lifers get so antsy about the term “anti-choice”? Forced pregnancy and parenthood is exactly what they’re defending, after all, not “life” generically.
Fact is, people who don’t like the term “anti-choice” must know, deep down, that there is something wrong about puritanically forcing women to conform to the beliefs of others. If they really thought that banning abortion was perfectly legitimate, they wouldn’t mind the term “anti-choice” one bit.
“Pro-abortion rights” is possibly a better way of putting it, or “anti-abortion rights” for the opposite point of view. Of course that doesn’t completely define everyone’s position, but maybe is a little more specific than “prolife” or pro choice”. But I don’t think that “pro-choice” is any more vague or euphemistic than “pro-life”. They’re both just convenient terms to use, and most people understand what is meant by them.
Pro-abortion, on the other hand, is just inaccurate, as DRA said above. I don’t consider myself pro-abortion. I don’t think abortion is a good thing, or a desirable thing, and I’m sure no woman who has had one would say so. It’s just that I think forced pregnancy and birth is even worse.
By the way, though, why do pro-choicers get so antsy about the term “pro-abortion”?
Same reason you folks get antsy about terms like “anti-choice” or “pro-birth.” Y’know, it’s not as easy to do the eye-batting innocent look on the Web, so you might as well come clean: the term “pro-abortion” is meant to suggest that people who favor abortion rights think abortion is a fantastic thing.
Well, some people do think that abortion is a great thing. Not that it should be forced on anyone — contrary to DRA’s simplistic exaggeration — but that it is a positive good that can improve at least some people’s lives. If they themselves were advising a pregnant woman, as many of them do, they positively recommend abortion as the most valuable option for many women.
In other words, it is NOT the case that they just content themselves with sitting back and telling all pregnant women “Do whatever you want; I have no opinion except that it should be your choice.” No, they literally recommend abortion as the best option for many circumstances and many women. For people like that, “pro-abortion” is the only accurate term.
Why isn’t “anti-choice” equally appropriate? For the same reason that “pro-choice” is inaccurate. In the literal sense, no one is in favor of all choice and no one is against all choice. “Pro-choice” means abortion, and “anti-choice” is used only to mean that someone is against abortion. Given that abortion is the real subject on everyone’s mind, why pretend that the real issue is something else? Why so desperate to avoid the very word “abortion”?
Look, if the debate was over property rights, it would be plain silly to use the terms “pro-choice” and “anti-choice,” as if no one dare use the word “property.” No, “pro-property-rights” and “anti-property-rights” are much more informative.
And to repeat my earlier point, it would be VERY odd if the people who agitated in favor of property rights kept on insisting that they didn’t really like property and that they thought it should be rare and that how DARE anyone use the term “pro-property” instead of merely “pro-choice.” That would be very evasive, at the least. Why be ashamed of being “pro-property” unless you really think that property is somehow wrong?