I don’t think it’s riskier to go fight ISIS, nor that it would have much less impact (killing political revolutions is in general a good way of suppressing political revolution). The reasons most pro-lifers don’t engage in political violence is exactly the same reason they don’t go fight ISIS, because the risks would be very great and it wouldn’t accomplish all that much.
Also, as a matter of principle a lot of people believe political violence is the rightful monopoly of the state, not private individuals.
Abortions don’t happen because abortion doctors sneak into unsuspecting pregnant women’s bedrooms and force them to have abortions.
Again, what are your political views? Do you believe that climate change is going to lead to crop failures and wars? Then why aren’t you shooting at Exxon executives? Why aren’t you blowing up gas stations? Why aren’t you slashing the tires of all the cars on your block? Why aren’t you murdering anti-nuclear activists?
I’m sure you have plenty of reasons for why you don’t do those things. So why can’t you understand why pro-life people don’t do those things?
You’ve created a straw man, and now you’re complaining that people don’t act like you expect your straw man to act.
Of course you’re correct that pro-lifers don’t really think that abortion is murder, not really, because they focus on punishing the abortion providers and not the women who get the abortions. I mean, during the Ceausescu Romanian dictatorship women who were discovered to have had abortions really were jailed, so it’s not impossible.
But in general pro-lifers don’t advocate treating pregnant women who have abortions exactly the same as women who murder their children. So they don’t really think abortion is murder, not exactly.
But so what? That doesn’t mean that they don’t think abortion is wrong. And not violently preventing abortion doesn’t mean that they’re wrong to think abortion is wrong, neither does it make them right. Willingness to murder people to enforce your moral beliefs is not a measure for how right those beliefs are, or how strongly you believe in them.
Murdering abortion providers makes it harder to get an abortion, but it doesn’t stop abortion, because abortion is legal. So if you want to stop abortion, what’s the point of murdering the doctors?
I think you guys are taking the OP too lightly. We’ve had this debate before on this MB, but think of it this way. Suppose that the government instituted a policy that any parent could bring a minor child into a clinic and have that child “put down”. Suppose that this was happening at a rate of 1M children per year being killed. Wouldn’t you expect there to be some significant armed resistance to such a policy?
Or, what if the government decided IT was going to select the 1 million children being killed, based on… it doesn’t matter what it’s based on. Let’s say the lowest scoring students on standardized tests.
If someone truly believes a fetus is a child, what’s the difference?
Talk is cheap. People spout all kinds of grandiose claims about how, faced with some particular situation, they would do this-and-such. Thankfully, most people are full of shit in this regard.
In America there’s been 58 million abortions since Roe v. Wade. It’s the greatest genocide in world history, to hear pro-lifers tell it. If the government were killing a million American adults a year I’d expect more of a push back. Then again, maybe not. We’re a pretty passive society. Our idea of “doing something” is waving signs around, boycotting restaurants, and signing internet petitions. I doubt I’d start burying weapon caches in the woods or learn how to make bombs, but I know I’m a coward.
A network of a couple thousand terrorists would barely dent American energy, unless they could blow up a refinery maybe. Even then, it would be a temporary setback. The system is huge, employing millions of people and enormous amounts of distributed infrastructure.
There’s only a couple thousand doctors in the entire country who perform abortions. If they started getting systematically assassinated there’d be an immediate chilling effect. This has already happened in the past, with just a couple well known murders. Some states only have a couple of clinics. In all of California there’s only like 500 clinics.
Got it in one. I know a lesbian feminist who is pro-lifers for the same reason she us anti-capital punishment and a total pacifist: she thine killing a human is always wrong.
Absolutely not. There is nothing “reasonable” about letting millions of innocent children be killed each year. Was it “reasonable” for good Germans to just let the Nazis kill all the undesirables? Do we not laud the resistance fighters over the “go along to get along” types?
And good for her. But most pro-life people are not strict pacifist that way.
I mean, maybe the 20% or so who believe abortion is murder and that there should be rape exceptions really are saying rape is worse than murder. But I highly doubt it. I suspect that, instead, they do not consider abortion to be the equivalent of killing a living child.
The abortion exception isn’t preventing rape, that was just shorthand on my part.
What you imagine them to be saying is that avoiding bringing to term of their and their rapists’ offspring is worth killing an innocent five-year-old. I very much doubt that any of them would say that.
It is logically possible that this subset of pro-life folks do not believe that killing a 20-week-old fetus is the same as killing one-day-old baby. Lots of pro-life people do believe that, but maybe you’re right that the subset who support rape exceptions are not among them.
That said, my vague recollection is that the vast majority of pro-lifers support rape and maternal health exceptions. So I would be surprised if your supposition is true.
But you’re absolutely right that we have to be careful since these labels are very broad and actually encompass many different beliefs about abortion.
But it’s true that we have all kinds of gradations of murder. If you kill a man who you just caught fucking your spouse, we count that as lesser murder than killing an innocent child (which is itself sort of messed up, but that’s a different matter).
It is entirely logical to think that killing a fetus is, like, fifth degree murder. I’m just not so sure that’s empirically what’s happening.