Via Brutal Women, I found some fascinating information about “Jane”, the Abortion Counseling Service which helped women obtain abortions in pre-Roe days.
What struck me most was the way women working for Jane could be emotionally and philosophically disturbed by the human appearance of the fetuses they removed, could consider abortion to be some kind of excusable homicide, and could still be so committed to letting women make the choice themselves that they were willing to break the law to make it possible.
i’d like to see a good philisophical foundation become a loud part of the pro-choice position. Myself, I think I have a decent understanding of biology and would say that anything which has never been conscious doesn’t get all the human rights, but in general, I don’t see this kind of thing in the debate. I see one side say it’s murder, and the other side say it should be a woman’s choice. That’s a bad argument for us pro-choicers. We have to explain why it isn’t in fact murder. I’m sure some people are taking away from the debate the idea that our side doesn’t strenuously contest that it’s murder, but that such murder should be a choice.
Steve, when men go around every day explaining why killing Iraqis isn’t murder, then maybe you have a point.
Men make the decision to kill every single freakin day of the year. Sometimes many times in one day. Sometimes they even kill children.
I think I left that link in the comments at Brutal Women – it’s a fascinating first person history of what criminalized abortion did to everyday men and women, and how willing they were to become “criminals” to help out complete strangers. Ironically, it gives me a lot of hope to read things like that – it seems like when you push people hard enough, they’ll fight like hell for their rights, and it’s good for me to remember that right now, because the apathy that surrounds me depresses me to death.
Those women with Jane epitomize what “pro-choice” means to me. You don’t have to agree with the choice someone makes to support their right to make a choice.
I know a couple who were unfortunate enough to have an anencephalic conceptus. The rostral neural tube in the embryo never closed properly, which meant that the skull didn’t fully form, and the brain never developed. This couple chose to carry the pregnancy to term, deliver, and stay with the conceptus until it died.
To me, this is absolutely ghastly and unspeakably gruesome. A conceptus without a brain isn’t a “baby” to me – they don’t live more than a few hours outside of the uterus. There isn’t even a brainstem to regulate autonomic functions – it’s just a body with no brain. To treat that like it’s a “baby” is really sick to my way of thinking.
But my opinion in this particular case is worth slightly less than a wooden nickel. It wasn’t my body, it wasn’t my pregnancy, and it wasn’t my family. If they want to treat a brainless, baby shaped blob of tissue like a baby, then more power to them. I respect and admire them for having made a difficult choice (any choice made in that situation would have been difficult) and then lived by the strength of the conviction that informed the choice. What goes on inside a woman’s body is her inviolable choice, and I give that choice the greatest respect.
I just ask the same in return when I, if the fates should put me in the same situation as that woman, make the opposite choice.
Q Grrl, sorry, but that’s entirely irrelevant.
I think Steve is right. In particular, I think prochoicers need to explain why reverence for life is compatible with the prochoice position. In fact I will have a go myself, as soon as I have time, which I don’t right now.
Well, of course the removed fetuses looked human. They were human fetuses, get it?
I know a couple who were unfortunate enough to have an anencephalic conceptus. The rostral neural tube in the embryo never closed properly, which meant that the skull didn’t fully form, and the brain never developed. This couple chose to carry the pregnancy to term, deliver, and stay with the conceptus until it died.
To me, this is absolutely ghastly and unspeakably gruesome. A conceptus without a brain isn’t a “baby” to me – they don’t live more than a few hours outside of the uterus. There isn’t even a brainstem to regulate autonomic functions – it’s just a body with no brain. To treat that like it’s a “baby” is really sick to my way of thinking.
I like the dehumanizing term “conceptus.” Would you use it for a child who is hopelessly retarded for some other reason? How retarded? A Downs baby? Where do you draw the line?
It isn’t a baby to you. However, he or she was a baby to his or her parents. Good for them, that’s what I say.
Can we all differ (that’s what “choice” is supposed to mean, right?) without calling each other “really sick”? I wouldn’t have done what this couple did, but I can understand and sympathize with it.
NEWS FLASH. “Choice” doesn’t just mean making the choices you approve of. It means making the choices that seem right to the people involved.
Susan, did you read the rest of her post? The part where she says she respects the couple for living by the strength of their convictions, and the part where she says that her opinion is completely irrelevant?
I remember visiting the home of a couple who had had a stillbirth. They had photos of their dead baby, which was quite obviously dead in the photos – it was undeveloped-looking and dark red- black – in standard newborn poses (dressed up and so forth), on their living-room wall. Now, that threw me for a loop – I found it exceedingly gruesome – but I would never say anything to them regarding how I felt about it: it was their business. When Jillian states her feelings about the couple she knows and their anencephalic baby, she’s not implying that she should be the one to determine the proper course of action in the circumstances.
It is my impression, by the way, that a baby can be considered anencephalic even in the presence of brainstem. The condition is entirely hopeless and always ends in death, and I cannot consider it a bad thing that it does.
Sorry for not reading the entire post, you’re right, Leasmom.
However.
Calling this baby a “conceptus” is uncalled for. As is calling the couple “really sick.” As is your calling your friends’ pictures of their dead child “gruesome.’
There’s this thing about choice. If it means anything, it’s got to mean respect. Not just pretend respect, wherein you think, “oooo gross!” but don’t say anything. Real respect for the baby, respect for the parents. The other side can fling names around and call names, because they come from a position of Absolute Morality.
Choice doesn’t have that basis. Choice, if it means anything, means respect, including respect for people whose decisions differ from our own. (This is harder by far, I realize, than calling names.)
I don’t think I would have carried an anencephalic baby to term. (One never knows what one would really do until confronted with the situation.) To me it just seems like a way to make the mom as miserable as possible. But I can recognize and honor people who feel differently.
We have to do that. Or we’re just totalitarians, but on the other side.
You’re assuming that there was a lack of respect. I don’t think it’s possible to contemplate these ghastly situations – anencephaly, stillbirth – without considering how one might deal with the situation oneself; I cannot imagine dressing up a dead baby and photographing it. The thought of it gives me the shivers. I would guess that the thought of carrying an anencephalic fetus to term has much the same effect on Jillian. The same feelings might arise in contemplation of different cultures’ burial customs. I doubt most inhabitants of the U.S. could muster a lot of enthusiasm for having Grandma’s dead body eaten by vultures. I myself regard the embalming and cosmetic retouching of corpses as gruesome. These personal feelings have nothing at all to do with the way I would treat the bereaved relatives, nor would they affect my respect for same.
Let’s really respect one another, instead of just pretending?
The baby (yes! baby!) who was born without a cerebral cortex or much of its brain was still, to the parents, a baby. Don’t call it a “conceptus.” Even here, to us. It was a baby. It was meant to be a baby, and something went horribly wrong. We can grieve without calling names.
The baby born dead was a baby. Born dead. It isn’t “gruesome” to take pictures. That’s all the parents had. That it gives you the shivers is irrelevant. (It gives me the shivers too – equally irrelevant.)
A rose by any other name, anybody?
It is possible to respect people while viewing their choices as gruesome or off-putting.
But this is just the same problem you had in the date-rape thread done w/ different words. So, people? There is no point in continuing this line of conversation w/ Susan because there can never be agreement her and you about whether or not you respect those whose choices squick you.
Actually, the account drew a distinction between what was removed in a very early abortion and didn’t look human enough to trouble anyone and the intact fetuses from slightly later abortions, which did look worryingly human.
It mentioned, I believe, that they preferred D&Cs to induced miscarriages for much the same reason – the intact fetus delivered after induced miscarriage was more disturbing than the remnants of a D&C.
Jake, your charm and charity and receptivity are much appreciated on this end. I’m interested to learn that there is no point in discussing things with me. Two questions come to mind: (1) Is this an attitude that respects other peoples’ choices? (2) Why do you bother to answer my posts at all, then?
Certain heroic women have brought anencephalic babies to term as organ donors for other, normal babies. This comes to mind here as I read that there are twins in Arizona who need heart transplants. I’m pretty sure I couldn’t manage to do this, but I have to admire it.
[snicker] The woman who’s so much of a bull in a china shop on this blog that she makes me look like Dr. Joyce Brothers wants us to “really respect one another.”
Jillian went out of her way to explain that her opinions were subjective. No more, no less. It was a fine post. I don’t know what your problem is, considering that you practically blew a gasket on one of the rape threads not long ago when several posters here wouldn’t deify your own subjective opinions on your college experiences– at least not enough for your liking.
Susan, go look in the mirror before you wag your finger at others to practice “respect.”
Lu wrote:
Because… why, exactly ? Because only men have the right to make life-altering, or life-and-death decisions ? Are these purely masculine perogatives that the delicate and poorly-formed female soul is incapable of handling ?
Please.
Actually, I’ve long had an idea that what really crawls up the nose of so many patriarchs when they espouse pro-choice views– aside from the sexual aspect of procreation, of course, is the very thing Q mentions: In calling for their right to kill something that eventually grows into a baby, women who abort are usurping the sort of masculine perogatives that make war such a central part of our culture (and others, of course). In fact, the parallel is unmistakeable in the link that started this thread: People were willing to risk being branded as criminals to do something they thought was a moral imperative. Isn’t that an echo of what at least some soldiers relate when they talk about their motivations for signing up ?
mmm, Jake, “open” forum. But only for people who agree with you.
Susan, if you hurry over to ebay, you might be able to find a sale on violins. Bring a nice one back here pronto and we can all take turns playing it for you.
alsis39,
I post on a number of blogs. I hardly ever agree with anyone, since I do actually think for myself. I’m pretty much persona non grata everywhere. Orthodoxies (of whatever variety) and I don’t get along very well.
However, I’ve seldom or never encountered the level of hostility and name-calling that I’ve found here, even on the most otherwise angry blogs.
I disagree with you on some points. OK? (Actually, not, apparently.) Not everyone agrees with you on every point. Or with me. Such is life.
There are differing levels of tolerance for different voices on different blogs. This blog enforces a more rigorous level of “orthodoxy” than any I’ve ever encountered.
News flash. Not everyone agrees with you-all on every point. Since you are not interested in hearing the views of anyone who disagrees with you, carry on.
Well, of course the removed fetuses looked human. They were human fetuses, get it?
Actually there isn’t necessarily a direct connection there. To say something is a human fetus does not automatically mean it looks human. To me most early term fetuses look extremely alien and not very human at all.
The baby (yes! baby!) who was born without a cerebral cortex or much of its brain was still, to the parents, a baby. Don’t call it a “conceptus.” Even here, to us. It was a baby. It was meant to be a baby, and something went horribly wrong. We can grieve without calling names.
I don’t see this as calling names, it’s technically an accurate description. And while baby might also be technically accurate (depending on definition), it is sort of hard for me to figure out how to reconcile a fetus with no brain stem as actually being human. Something that cannot regulate any body functions is, in my mind, simply dead, something that could never regulate any of its body functions was, again in my mind, never alive in the first place. I have a very hard time labeling a collection of cells that never had consciousness and never had the potential for consciousness a baby.
I don’t think the original commenter was out of line. For one thing she never said that the choice made was gruesome in any objective sense, she said it was gruesome to her, that acknowledges differences of opinion and different emotions about the situation. And she acknowledges that her opinions and emotions are irrelevant. Would it have been more “respectful” had she not acknowledged the fact that it squicked her out and merely pretended that the choice made by the couple, a choice she fully supports their right to make, was something that she herself would have also been perfectly comfortable with? I don’t see how chastising someone for their emotional response to a situation is respectful on your part.
Susan wrote:
Perhaps you’re persona non grata because you like to subtly insult your opponents with such passive-aggressive insults as “I do actually think for myself.” The implication being that the rest of us are the equivalent of Moonies. (Hmmm… “Ampies.” It’d look great in lights, doncha’ think ?)
Frankly, I wish I had five bucks for every time you’ve whined about “orthodoxy” since you got here. Maybe I could’ve taken an extra month off work, or at least treated myself to a couple of large steaks.
If this is the angriest internet site you’ve ever participated in, I envy you. You’ve lived a pretty sheltered online life, I’d say.
KA-CHINNNNGGG !!!
Anyone up for steak ?
I try to confine my internet brousing to sites inhabited by adults. But occasionally I make mistakes.
No, no, Susan, you never make mistakes. The problem’s all with us, as it always is. You are the universe, just like Camille Paglia. We are mere motes. Or mere mites. Whatever.
You know, a mere mouse-click away is the thread about the demonization of Black feminists by Black men, in which you will find –among other things– a pretty spirited disagreement between La Lubu and Sydney. As far as I know, neither of them has ever been asked to leave this space. Both are pretty respected, I think, though I see LaLubu around a bit more than Sydney. That’s just one example which goes against your contention.
So I don’t think the problem is with disagreement per se. I think the problem is that you are incapable of disagreeing with anyone without coming across as a whining narcissist twit.
Q Grrl’s mistake is that one unjustified act does not excuse another. “Choice” does not overcome “murder”. We need to explain why abortion is not murder. Right now people are getting the mistaken impression that we just think choice is more important than murder. That’s not a winning argument. We need to broadcast our explanations of why it’s not murder. Q Grrl says we don’t, because some people (presumably she is talking about Iraq or the Death Penalty) justify murder all the time. That dog won’t hunt.
I’m getting tired of posting things on Democrat sites, because when I try to suggest a possible flaw responsible for the Dems being so powerless and unsuccessful, people quickly point out some flaw on the other side, and think that nullifies what I said.
My aim is to figure out why we liberals are failing to make good arguments, connect with people, win elections, and influence the country. Pointing out that the other side is defective or wrong might make you feel good, but it doesn’t accomplish that.
Perhaps it’s because liberals spend too much time apologizing and being sheepish. Frankly, it gets on my nerves, which is why I beg to be excused from the group “we liberals.” As with at least some others here, I’m sick of trying to accommodate pro-lifers. They will not be won over, and talking more and more softly and gently and apologetically to them accomplishes exactly nothing– except to embolden them. I don’t want to win them over, I want them to get the hell out of my face.
And I don’t want to debate them on their terms. Their terms are a crock of shit.
There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of posts on this blog and other feminist blogs that would explain exactly why many feminists do not regard abortion as murder. Why don’t you go look some of them up ?
If you want to write the “Why It’s Not Murder” piece, write it. Who’s stopping you ?
The most dogmatic pro lifers (and also the most politicaly active) don’t want to make abotion rare unless it’s through AO sex education. This makes it hard to find any common ground with them.
Susan said:
Susan, I looked that term [conseptus] up. It means “: a fertilized egg, embryo, or fetus ” or “The product of conception at any point between fertilization and birth. ” How is that dehumanizing? It’s a new word for me. I rather like it. It sounds like an objective term for all those emotionally charged words folks use in abortion discussions: embryo, fetus, baby, pre-born, etc… Why do you dislike it?
Why is abortion not murder? Because no life-form, human or not, has any right to survive at another’s expense. Privelege, yes–a fetus can be given life support by its mother, but it has no right to that support from an unwilling person.
This is echoed elsewhere in life. A person experiencing kidney failure can be granted the privelege of recieving a kidney by a willing donor, but does not have the right to get a kidney from an unwilling one. A child in the foster-care system can be taken in by a family, but cannot force a family to care for him.
No court in the country would allow a kidney-failure patient to find a person with a genetic match and then sue him for one of his kidneys. There is even less reason why a fetus whose “personhood” has not been proven should be allowed to spend nine months living off whatever woman is unlucky enough to be pregnant against her will.
Picture, if you will, a person who decides eating and breathing for himself is too much trouble, and so sets up several IV lines between himself and another person. He sits in a wheelchair attatched to this person and lets them pull him around. He doesn’t need to eat or breathe because he gets oxygen and nutrients from this other person’s blood. Meanwhile, the other person has to breathe twice as fast and eat twice as much because his hanger-on consumes half his nutrients and half his oxygen. Now. Can he do this? The obvious answer is, only if the other person lets him.
Duh.
Jake, your charm and charity and receptivity are much appreciated on this end. I’m interested to learn that there is no point in discussing things with me. Two questions come to mind: (1) Is this an attitude that respects other peoples’ choices? (2) Why do you bother to answer my posts at all, then?
Actually, I hadn’t really answered your post so much as warned those trying to explain to you that your opinion about what constitutes respect isn’t the only way to be respectuful that you would never concede an inch. That, in fact, you would get angry and upset and whine about “prevailing orthodoxy” while ignoring every kindly-worded, patient re-wording of what they are trying to say to you – as amply demonstrated in the “About Amp” turned rape thread. In future, I will not respond to your posts except to point out to others the futility of trying to have a reasonable discussion with you if your subjective experience/opinion differs from theirs.
One last thing…
mmm, Jake, “open” forum. But only for people who agree with you.
I wasn’t trying to stop you from writing your mind, merely to warn others what type of interaction was ahead for them if they continued to try to explain their meaning to you.
You may be the most obtuse (and possibly intentionally, but I’m not sure about that) person that I have seen post on this site. It’s not that you skip away from questions & discussions, it’s your inability (or refusal) to understand the difference between objective & subjective – your inability to understand that there are many different ways to act/speak/write that do, in fact, show respect – your inability to concede that you may be (not are, but may be) wrong about something. You have proven impossible to have a discussion with and, so, I will not interact with you in the future. I will, as I have said, continue to warn others of the sort of interaction they can expect to have with you anytime I see a repeat of the rape thread or, now, this “respect” tangent on this thread.
Damn. Left the bolding open. It was supposed to end just before the close parentheses. Pardons all.
You may be the most obtuse (and possibly intentionally, but I’m not sure about that) person that I have seen post on this site.
This is undoubtedly true. Anyone who disagrees with you will soon cease from posting, as I now will.
mousehounde, the word “conceptus” was used in the offending post to describe a baby who had already been born, althought born in a condition not to the liking of the poster (the parents had no such objections). In some sense both you and I are “concepti” but no one so describes us. We are persons, usually.
Many blogs are interesting forums for the discussion of ideas among people who do not necessarily agree from the get-go. Such blogs can be the way that people on both sides learn a great deal. The initial presumption is that people don’t necessarily agree, but that civility will be maintained, in the interest of mutual learning.
This blog does not qualify. Anyone who disagrees with the prevailing orthodoxy, even to ask questions, is immediately set upon. This is of course your right, subject to the indulgence of the host.
Do not, for God’s sake, listen to anyone who disagrees with you on any topic, no matter how trivial. You might have to listen to someone else, and maybe even change your own views.
Right now people are getting the mistaken impression that we just think choice is more important than murder.
Well, some pro-choicers do feel that way. When I was pro-choice, I still thought that a fetus was a person, or a potential person; I certainly thought that an abortion killed a human life. I just thought that a woman’s right to choose was more important. Plenty of other people feel that way; whether it’s a minority or majority view I don’t know.
I don’t get it. What’s NOT gruesome about displaying photos of a dead body, of any type, in your living room? If I thought someone displaying photos of their dead grandfather laying in the morgue was rather odd and that the practice was extremely gruesome, does that mean I have no respect for people with dead grandfathers, my own dead grandfathers, or for old men in declining in general? No! It’s not generally socially acceptable in our culture to display pictures of dead bodies, especially ones that are gruesomely disfigured or obviously suffering the effects of decay or deterioration, in spaces such as a living room. That doesn’t mean people aren’t free to do whatever the hell they want in their own living rooms. But to expect most people to think of this as normal behavior and NOT gruesome is unreasonable.
And dishonest. For crying out loud. That’s what gets me. This is all just empty rhetoric. If Susan walked into my house and I had put up several tastefully framed photographs of relatives and pets, post-mortem, I bet she’d be just as taken aback and disgusted as any of the eeeeevil pro-choicers on this blog.
I am reminded of the photographer I read about years ago in the New York Times, who kept his deceased cat in the freezer for a while and would occasionally take her out and photograph her in different settings. She was frozen in, I think, a standard cat circle. Apparently she was good for several hours before she started to defrost.
He did eventually bury her.
While I was visiting the family of a former boyfriend, he pointed out the “family pictures” on display in the hallway. As well as pictures of various family members at their weddings, christenings etc, there was one photo of the lavish grave of the deceased mother. He said something like “And that’s a family photo too, of a sort.”
I thought it was rather weird, and I doubt I would have a photo of a grave on my wall, but if that was how they wanted to honour their mother, why the hell not? My reading of the “gruesome” comment was something in a similar spirit.
That hasn’t been my experience: my views on artificial wombs didn’t fit the prevailing orthodoxy and all I received was polite and well-reasoned dissent.
I think you’re flogging a dead horse with this, and you’re certainly filling the thread with what is little more than noise. If you have anything to say on the subject of the original post, I encourage you to say it; otherwise I’d be grateful if you bowed out of the discussion.
Myself, I think I have a decent understanding of biology and would say that anything which has never been conscious doesn’t get all the human rights, but in general, I don’t see this kind of thing in the debate.
Geez, this argument gets made all the time. Perhaps it’s just that on a feminist blog that discusses these issues again and again in various contexts, we presume that the basics don’t need revisiting. Or every comment would have to be a treatise. Meh.
Yes, a ball of cells doesn’t have a brain. And a young fetus can’t feel, let alone think. And probably pretty far along in pregnancy, there’s sensation and reflex but no consciousness. Where you draw the line between “prehuman” and “fully human” might or might not correspond with the age of development at which you were no longer comfortable killing a premature or aborted fetus, and might or might not make a compelling case for somebody whose line fell somewhere else…. [and more blah blah here.]
I see the point of the people who are asserting that if you don’t believe that abortion is murder, you need to stick with that as your talking point.
Saying, “why is abortion so bad when war is OK?” makes the assumption that everybody who opposes abortion supports war. There are plenty of people who oppose both (and oppose the death penalty, too).
If you limit your sample to the people in political power, the vast majority of pro-lifers are both war hawks and pro-death-penalty. They’re also mostly very stingy when it comes to programs to help poor families economically, giving rise to the criticism that pro-lifers value fetuses until birth and don’t give a crap what happens to them after they’re born.
I realize that not all pro-lifers are like that – certainly you’re not. But virtually all the pro-lifers who have any actual power are like that, and I think that makes the critique at least somewhat legitimate.
Except that this was not Q’s point, nor mine. Q’s point, I believe, is that men make decisions relating to life or death every day when they justify the waging of war. There of plenty of people who regard life and death decisions as masculine perrogatives, and thus either accept any justification for them that a man makes or who never expect justification for these decisions to begin with. A man is left alone to do what he will, a woman is hounded constantly with questions for choosing the same right to make life or death decisions. At least that’s what I got from it.
I see acm’s point, and LAMom’s. I just don’t agree. It’s also worth noting that most old-school patriarchs who think women should be compelled to breed every time we are pregnant don’t think we should be in combat, either. Again, because we don’t have the mental and/or moral capacity to determine what it is to “do what must be done.”
In fact, it’s been a hard pill for a peace-lovin’ hippie to swallow, but I’ve realized that I must support women who want to be in combat for the same reason a lot of devoted mothers must support my right to remain childfree through abortion– if necessary. I want to respect an adult woman’s choice, even if in my heart, I think it’s the wrong choice.
I hope this makes at least a little sense. It’s early.
That should read, “I don’t agree with LAMom’s point. ” Yeesh. Sorry. :o
Yeah, alsis, you’re reading me correctly. I find it interesting that they guys don’t get it though. Quite dismissive to demand that “we” defend against verbal assaults and the calling of our choice “murder” but then flapping the figurative hand at us and saying “that dog won’t hunt.”
Listen up guys: this is why it is about CHOICE. My choice. Alsis’ choice. Any woman’s choice. Because as long as men ACTIVELY CHOOSE to take human lives then they can go fuck themselves over the abortion issue. Until you guys can prove to me that you are so morally superior that you can EVERYDAY CHOOSE to take human lives (and lets not discount the taking of lives through pollution, poverty, or preventable diseases) and that somehow your CHOICE to KILL gets coded as war, or death penalty, or government sanctions, or Monsanto, then you can again GO FUCK yoursevles. If Scotland Yard can order “shoot to kill”, then any woman anywhere can decide to abort her conceptus, her fetus, her developing child, HER BABY. Whatever. You, men that is, don’t get to kill each other and then ignore it.
If you are going to demand that “we” prove it isn’t murder, then you have to fucking prove why you don’t call yourself a murderer. And then you’re going to have to, one by one, list all the ways in which you take other people’s lives and justify, one by one, why each is called ANYTHING but MURDER. Christ. It really is that simple guys.
It’s your dog that won’t hunt Steve, ’cause I shot it.
Alsis and Q Grl have hit on something I have thought about a lot- that many people have no problem with the moral ambiguities of war, and what a man has to do sometimes, while having no tolerance whatsoever for the moral ambiguities of abortion, and what a woman has to do sometimes. I have even heard childbirth compared to a battlefield, and let’s not forget that women used to routinely risk their lives everytime they got pregnant.
There is another moral ambiguity people accept which paralells abortion, and that is eating meat. I do eat meat, and I know full well that the animals I eat suffer indescribably in slaughterhouses and their living conditions. I love animals so I have no notions that they can’t think or don’t fear their own deaths or feel pain. Yet I eat them. I live in a society in which I could not eat them if I went to the trouble, yet I also recognize that nature set things up so that we humans have to kill to live. I know most pro-lifers would be affronted at the comparision with animals right to life and our acceptance that they be sacrificed, but there it is.
And, Susan, respect doesn’t always mean admiration. Thinking something is gruesome is allowed.
…Nor does respect mean uncritical agreement. This is a discussion. That means that people respond to points made, and rebut them where they see weakness or inaccuracy. There’s nothing disrespectful about that; we assume that’s what people come here for. It is extremely disrespectful to act as though everyone here is brainwashed simply because most of us agree on a few current points, namely that there’s nothing disrespectful about communicating personal aversion to dressing up an anencephalic stillborn baby for portraiture.
I’m shocked — shocked! — to learn that articulated views on abortion can be so divisive. When I saw that there were 45 comments, I had hoped that y’all would have resolved the issue by now.
could consider abortion to be some kind of excusable homicide
There isn’t any excusable homicide. When you hear people advocate excusable homicide, it’s not an enormous leap to recognize that they may assist those who happen to terminate people.
I didn’t say Q’s contrast between men’s “right” to make war and women’s abortion rights was irrelevant because I am one of Alsis’s
but because I didn’t think the analogy between war and abortion was valid.
But now that I come to consider it… every day we hear the Iraq war and/or the so-called War on Terror cast as “defending our freedom” and “defending our way of life.” Now, I don’t necessarily buy these characterizations, especially in the case of Iraq, but in terms of how (a lot of) men think of war and how (many, maybe most) women think of abortion, hmm, maybe that analogy is pretty good.
However, Steve is also dead on in saying:
Granted, we’re never going to change the minds of hard-line prolifers. But there is a huge squeamish middle out there made very, very uncomfortable by hearing prochoicers implicitly equate a conceptus (in the sense of any entity between a fertilized egg and a full-term baby) with a tumor. I realize that no one really means to do that, but saying “it’s just a ball of cells” sounds a lot like it.
Just for the record, btw, I am a woman.
Lu, I appreciate that you figured out that I wasn’t out to get you or something. However, I stand by my conviction that it matters not one iota whether or not I change my manner of discussing abortion to try and convert “the mushy middle.” After listening to some permutation of what that “middle” is about– more or less constantly over the past twenty-odd years, I can honestly say that I just don’t care all that much about marketing choice so they can like it better.
Folks like La Lubu have pointed out previously that choice IS the middle– the only one that should matter. What does it accomplish for me to pretend that the discomfort of others over an issue that I’ve personally made peace with should be grounds for ME having to soft-peddle my beliefs ? I believe that this is what Steve is asking for, and I won’t play. It’s demeaning, and besides, it doesn’t work.
If I tell the “mushy middle,” for the sake of some bogus concept of “bridge-building,” that “Yes, it’s more than a glob of cells,” what is this but another pointless blast of hot air ? It changes nothing. I’d still abort tomorrow if I found myself pregnant. I would still make a point of not interfering with the woman next to me and her, “glob of cells,” “future Rams quarterback,” “three-legged dancing purple hippo” or whatever she wanted to call it.
If, however, I do concede that it’s “murder,” my voice is lessened, and the pro-life extremists are emboldened. Sorry. I don’t like extremists and I don’t have all that much patience for “mushy middlers” that can reach my age or older and still muddle about these issues claiming that they “can’t decide.” Considering the statistics that say about 40% of all women will at some time in her adult life have an abortion, I’m guessing that an awful lot of “middlers” are very capable of making a firm decision behind closed doors regarding how they feel about abortion. Their public face may be something else again. You go talk to them. I’ve got better things to do.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The liberal in the street makes no progress because his/her masters are selling him/her out every time they take a breath. If there really is such a thing left in the House or Senate as a liberal, they are failing because they are being sold out by the majority of their colleagues. Because of the constant dilution of the rank-and-file’s message and the ruination of their stated desires by oligarchs who hold the purse strings and the ballots, you will always appear to stand for nothing.
There is no “we liberals,” as you are defining it. You don’t have a damn thing in common with Dean, Reid, Clinton, et al aside from your country of residence. You care about these issues, but the oligarchs don’t care about you. As long as you continue to trust in them, they will continue to undermine and to rob you, because they feel every bit as much contempt for you as Bush feels for the Bible-thumping foot soldiers who think that bullying gays is more important than a living wage. They use you. They are insulated from any negative ramifications of their callous disregard for the crucial issues you care about. You are a pawn, and pawns are not permitted to stand for anything except for the de facto superiority of he/she who moves them across the chess board.
That is the crux of your problem, Steve, and it’s about more than abortion.
If “choice” is the middle, then where’s the extreme? If you have a middle, then by definition you have at least two extremes. I know where the pro-life extreme is; a couple different ones, in fact. Where’s the pro-abortion extreme?
The other extreme would be forcing women TO have abortions against their will. You’re trying to force women to NOT have abortions against their will, so you’re the right-side extreme. The middle says “let them do as they please, be breeders or not be breeders”. The other extreme says “no one should be able to choose to have a baby if they cannot support it.”
There are people who do say the latter… but the extremists who say the former seem to be all but overwhelming our nation, thanks in no small part to constant propaganda campaigns by American Imams… er, Preachers.
I think an extreme on the pro-abortion side would be things like forced abortion. When Americans use the term pro-choice, it is understood that the one doing the choosing is the pregnant woman. If some other entity, like the government or a woman’s employer, were granted the right to choose that a pregnancy should be terminated, that would be an extreme pro-abortion position.
Robert;
China and Darfur are the extremes.
So who in OUR society is on this forced-abortion extreme?
It just seems like this is a construct designed to improve a rhetorical position (“look how moderate we are”) without usefully describing reality.
I’m pro-gun in the sense that I think that people ought to be able to have the choice of whether to own guns, generally. So I’m the “moderate”, and the extremists are people who want gun control laws, and the other extremists are the half-dozen selectmen in that little town in New England who passed the law requiring everybody to own a gun.
How is that a useful construction of our positions, that describes something real?
Elena said “And, Susan, respect doesn’t always mean admiration. Thinking something is gruesome is allowed. ”
Indeed. If Jacqueline had told the parents in question that she found their photographic display gruesome and had urged them to take the photos down, THAT would have been disrespectful. The fact that she felt that the photos were gruesome is merely her personal opnion, which she is entitled to.
How about the politicians, “blue” and “red” who think it’s peachy-keen that foreign factory owners who receive U.S. dollars can force their laborers to abort just so the factory can keep spewing out goods at a breakneck speed and at rock-bottom prices ? How about the local industrialists that support such policies and who bankroll the politicians who support them ? How about the pro-life organizations who turn a blind eye to them– because sure we want more White babies– but the rest ? Oh, heck, abort away !!
I’m guessing that if radfem were here, she’d want to chime in about U.S. policies in the past and present that rope women of color, but not Whites, into using birth control or into being sterilized. That’s a related issue, since it involves robbing citizens of their right to reproductive freedom.
You know damn well that even the most impassioned pro-choicer here does not want a law requiring every pregnant woman to have an abortion. For once, would you just lay off the disingenuousness ?
Now please read the following carefully, Robert. I’m only going to say it once, and I’m not interesting in jumping through any more of those hoops which you love to use in your customary obnoxious word-games:
These are not Pro-Choice policies. They remove women’s right to choose. The Pro-Choice POV, by definition, is the cornerstone of a moderate movement.
Now go ahead and grumble that I’m not talking about “reality,” even though the situations in my first paragraph have been raised on this blog and others before. Someone else can deal with you. I won’t have either the time nor the energy today to bother doing it.
Robert: I think there is a well-documented history in the US of poor and black women having abortions/hysterectomies against their will.
Q Grrl, yes, indeed there is. Wonder how that fits into the pro-life ideology?
Personally I wish they’d just be honest and admit that they’re advocating eugenics. And yes, Robert, I know that comment will offend you, and no, I don’t care.
Robert – actually, I consider the argument you made about being a moderate on the guns issue to be exactly correct. I am also in favor of gun ownership rights but would call ridiculous any law that required everyone to own and/or operate a gun. Likewise I stand firmly against prohibition of guns because they make some people squeamish, and cause “innocent deaths.” I consider myself to be a moderate on the issue, but in America’s environment of increasing calls for gun prohibition, I wind up being the “wall” keeping the choice open to the free peoples. I personally love guns even though I do not own any, nor have I ever (unless you count paintball guns) owned one outside the military.
In this exact same vein, I have never had to deal with abortion on a personal level– the one time I had a girlfriend get pregnant, we went the adoption route. Even to this day, I volunteer with an adoption agency in Oklahoma to ensure that this *choice* remains available to all women who feel this is the best situation for them, as my mate did then. I personally love abortion and think that it would be what I would choose if I were a female facing that situation. I consider myself to be a moderate on the issue, but in America’s environment of increasing calls for abortion prohibition, I wind up being the “wall” keeping the choice open to the free peoples.
Are you following me, now?
I do feel, in the interest of honesty, that I should note that I do have a bit of personal experience with abortion… I have had to drive three of my female friends a total of four times to an abortion clinic; and in one case help her cross a picket line, all because their families/boyfriends/etc would not help them. They’d have gone through with it alone if they had to, but it pains me to think that they’d ever have to.
I’ve also gone with a female friend to Houston to have her breasts augmented (and successfully convinced her to choose smaller cup size on the way!). In this case, however, the only reason her boyfriend couldn’t go along was that he was deployed for his two-week Marine Corps Reserve summer training. Funny how that works.
I may be getting my legal terminology wrong, but I was under the impression that excusable homicide was the term for things like killing in self-defence. The account didn’t actually use the term, it was my shorthand summary of the views presented.
The legal terminology in the U.S. for a killing in self-defense is justifiable homicide. Both are problematic terms. In my opinion, there is no justification or excuse for causing the death of another, but there is pardon. Excusable homicide, in American parlance, is rather like how a PLO sympathizer would view suicide bombings in Palestine, or how a white militia member would view the Oklahoma City bombing.
I trust your summary, and my view is that that participants in JANE believed that they were committing necessary murder.