If it becomes indisputable that one’s sexual preference is indeed genetic in origin, will it be a hate crime to abort a fetus just because it is gay? Just sort of wondering what that will do to the Pro Choice position of many gay/lesbian groups. And why are gay and lesbian differentiated at all.? Aren’t lesbians gay? If there is a word that identifies male gays separately, I am unaware of it. Why do lesbians need their own designation? Is it a women’s rights thing?
3cushion
what a great thread
According to the OED, 'gay" in the sense of homosexual is used both in senses which include lesbians and in sense which exclude them, but the usage regerring to male homosexuals is more frequent.
So if an organisation or movement simply described itself as ‘gay’, there might be some doubt about whether it embraced female homosexuals. Adding an explicit reference to lesbians removes that doubt.
This could be a historical thing. It may be that by now the term ‘gay’ is predominantly non-gender specific, but that this was not always so and, in particular, it may not have been so when various gay and lesbian organisations named themselves. Sort of an NAACP thing.
Sexual-orientation abortion would be a hard pil to swallow for pro-choice people, but they’d would have to accept it…woman’s body and whatnot.
This is a very interesting question. It creates something I call a hypocrisy paradox (in my own big noggin). The people most inclined to get rid of a fetus for being gay are also likely to be pro-lifers. I’d be curious to see how many of their heads would explode.
Seriously though, except for those in extreme denial, I think unquestionable proof of a genetic basis for homosexuality would lead to greater acceptance of gays. Without the stigma of it being “unnatural” hanging over them, I doubt most parents would be motivated to abort a perfectly good fetus. In other words, nothing would really change in the long run.
Don’t pregnant women (“they are not mothers because there is no baby yet” and “parents don’t abort, it’s the woman who has 100% control of her body”) usually abort perfectly good fetuses?
AFAICT, no, at least not in the early stages of pregnancy. Fetuses in the early stages of development are not persons, and hate crime legislation applies only to actions against persons.
For late-term fetuses that do have some rights of personhood, though, “fetal homicide” crimes might also be considered hate crimes if they were deliberately committed for the purpose of harming fetuses known to carry the hypothesized “gay gene”.
However, IANAL and my legal opinion on this matter is worth exactly what you just paid for it.
As far as I can tell, it won’t change it any more than the practice of sex-selective abortion (i.e., aborting female fetuses because you only want sons) has changed the pro-choice position of feminist groups such as the National Organization for Women. NOW, for example, strongly condemns the practice of sex-selective abortion, but maintains that a woman’s right to choose an abortion in the early stages of pregnancy remains valid no matter what her motives are. In other words, aborting a “gay fetus”, like aborting a female fetus, would be harshly criticized but ultimately protected under the aegis of the woman’s right to choose.
Historical accident. The term “lesbian” has been used to refer to women who have sex with women for over a hundred years. For most of that time it has coexisted with the use of the word “gay” to mean sexually promiscuous and/or homosexual, applied to both men and women, though more usually to men. Sorry, but historical language development doesn’t necessarily follow logical patterns.
No, the use of “lesbian” for homosexual women long antedates the current women’s rights movement.
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Why limit this to how gays and lesbians will feel? Conservatives will have a double whammy to reconcile. First, they’ll have to try to bridge the differences between the anti-abortion and anti-gay members of their movement. Second, they’ll have to rethink their long held belief that homosexuality is a choice people make.
No, I don’t think it would be a hate crime although certainly hateful. It would not change my pro choice position at all, any more than women who chose to abort babies with Downs syndrome make me want to change my position. I’m thankful there isn’t a test for sexual preference while in utero.
Not unless you do it to a woman against her will.
Another point to be made is that if sexuality is purely genetic ( and not, for example, due to the environment in the womb as well ), you could select for it at the conception stage if you are using in vitro fertilization. And you wouldn’t be restricted to eliminating homosexual embryos, although that’s the scenario that pops into most people’s heads. You could also select FOR homosexuality, or bisexuality. Homosexuals who want to keep homosexuality from being genocided by the fundies might choose that, for example.
IMO, a woman should be able to abort for any reason. That includes douchebaggy reasons.
Limbaugh once noted that if they can ever test for orientation in utero, there’ll be a major conflict within the Left on orientation-selection abortion.
I don’t think there’ll be that much on a conflict on the Right because most of us will just deny the biological determinism of orientation. Many of us who do think there is a bio factor in gayness still don’t believe it’s THE determining factor, and the religious among us can also see it as part of innate falleness/“original sin”.
Not really. They pretty well accepted that race was genetically determined, but that didn’t prevent them from supporting racism.
And from the other direction, it’s clear that a persons’ religion IS a choice, but we still protect it in anti-discrimination laws.
This.
And I totally support the idea of having more queer babies.
I’d ask for a cite, but I know you don’t have one. For the record, THIS conservative pro-lifer has nothing against gays at all. I’d definitely condemn a woman for practicing orientation selection. Those two issues are not linked. That is, one does not cause the other. If a gay gene were found, I’d suspect that the issue stances would cease to be correlated.
Pro-lifers are, in my experience, religious conservatives and big fans of the idea of Free Will, and would likely give little credence to any procedure that purported to determine a fetus’s “gayness.”
I could see the fundies going ahead and having the gay or lesbian baby but giving it a sex change at birth.
Then again they might not like the idea of raising a transsexual, so maybe they’d keep and raise their gay kid but constantly remind it, “you’re going to hell, you’re going to hell”
There was a movie that actually dealt with the issue of “would you abort a fetus you knew was going to be gay?”
The Twilight of the Golds
Brendan Fraser’s in it and it’s quite a good movie.
Let me clarify so that even the people who can’t rest unless they’re nitpicking, whining, or otherwise bitching and moaning can understand.
The point I’m trying to make here is that the overwhelming majority of pregnancies that are not lost to miscarriage end in the birth of a baby. MOST women don’t abort their potential offspring for being gay or anything else. That’s why there are too damn many people on this rotten flying dirtball.
Corollary question: does the woman’s right to choose because it is her body include prostitution and drug use?
Pro-choice - isn’t one of those choices life?
3 cushion