IWLN, it’s clear we’re talking past each other, and I don’t think it would serve any purpose, as far as our exchange goes, for either of us to restate our positions again. We’ve already done several circuits on this merry-go-round, and that’s enough for me.
Thanks. Merry Christmas.
Dude, you have got to be kidding me. If this seemed like a graceless dogpile, you little hothouse flower you, then I strongly suggest you stay out of GD before something gives you the vapors.
Tell you what, why don’t you report it to a mod? I bet they’ll be just as shocked and outraged. :rolleyes:
So why isn’t your behind on a plane right now to help the poor oppressed people in any of a number of nations where human rights are routinely and egregiously violated?
Certainly it can’t be that you don’t think there are countries right now torturing and killing innocent people. Check Amnesty International’s site if you have trouble coming up with one. How can you stand idly by, calmly chitchatting?
Thanks Stratocaster. It may not seem like it, but I do appreciate the chance to “argue” about this issue. It helps me recognize some of the inconsistencies that I do have and I learn from it. I’d like to make one point, since I know I was vague at best, on other solutions for non-legal intervention. My husband and I provide regular monthly support for a co-op run by four retired nuns, in Mexico. We send our money directly to them. They currently have 25 women and 100 children. They are providing for their needs and helping them learn to take care of themselves. When a pregnant 14 year old shows up at the door, she has a home until she can take care of herself and her baby. A lot of the children there would already be selling their bodies in order to eat, if it were not for this help. They give these women options to abortion and non-judmental help. We also skipped the gift part of Christmas this year and sent the money to them. Save the sarcastic eye rolls. I’m not telling you this because I think I am so self-righteous or anything. Far from it. I am humbly grateful to be able to help and grateful too that I was born into circumstances where my options weren’t so limited and desperate. I wish we could do more, but money is usually pretty tight for us. This is our way of putting our “behind on an airplane.” My point here is if you truly wish to limit abortion, you will help on a more personal level and not just make a law. Again, thank you for sharing your views with me. Merry Christmas.
It is more wrong to bring an unwanted child into the world. There are too many possible cites to even begin the argument.
Oh, go on, give it a try. Show us the cites that prove that abortion is, on balance, a better alternative, particularly from that unwanted child’s perspective.
BTW, is it more wrong to let an unwanted toddler live, or should we euthanize?
Tell you what. You bring me every “unwanted” newborn you can get your hands on. I guarantee you I can find a loving home for them. I can provide cites if you’d like. This is a lame, overused justification.
The unwanted child is actually a secondary justification. The primary, I’ve always felt, is that it is wrong to force a woman to remain pregnant when she doesn’t wish to be. The fact that a fetus dies in the process is irrelevant.
I will go on record with this:
Debates about whether abortion is absolutely “right” or “wrong” are beside the point. It can not be decided absolutely, IMO. If it could, we’d have an answer by now, instead of increasing mountains of invective, which is all I ever see in abortion debates.
There is exactly one person who knows for sure whether a particular abortion decision is right or wrong, and that is the mother. Evolution has placed all the burden of gestation on the female, and therefore only she is capable of being qualified to decide to complete the process or not. To argue otherwise is to argue that women are somehow inherently unable to decide how to run their own bodies. I don’t think the human race would have gotten this far if that were true.
There has been abortion for as long as there have been humans, and there will always be abortion. The woman with the fetus in her has always made the final choice as to whether a deliberate end is made to a particular pregnancy or not. There will always be people who disagree with a particular decision, sometimes vehemently so.
The debate is not really about whether it is right or wrong, it is about who gets the legally-recognized authority to decide what gets put into someone’s body and what gets taken out (or left in). I have yet to hear a convincing argument that says it’s about something else.
There are several positions taken in this thread that strike me as irrational – and not all of them on the same side.
First, let’s examine the embryo/fetus. There is in my mind no question that it is an organism with human genes, which in the absence of less-than-likely natural causes or of human intervention will eventually become an independent adult human being.
But it is not one yet.
There is a distinction between child abandonment and putting a child up for adoption – the first is the criminal act of leaving a child which cannot yet care for itself without adult care and support; the second is abdicating one’s rights and responsibilities to that child in favor of another willing to assume them.
However, prior to the third trimester the embyo/fetus is not capable of life outside the womb, with another caregiver providing for it. It therefore becomes the responsibility of the woman carrying it to devote her life to its nurture and care, abstaining from what would harm it.
Now, it’s my personal view that terminating its existence by removing it from its natural support mechanism, the uterus, is nearly always wrong – and while we can all manufacture the rare exceptional circumstance, allow me to make that a generalization with unspecified exceptions recognized. Terminating a pregnancy in and of itself is not wrong; what is wrong is allowing the potential human being dependent on that pregnancy for its life to die, and we have no means of keeping a fetus-outside-the-womb alive in our present state of technology unless it is capable of surviving as a preemie. While this may sound like a pointless distinction, it may in the future prove to be a valuable one, as technology improves, and it sets the stage for a point I want to make that is to me important.
I draw a libertarian distinction between holding a person responsible for his or her acts which violate another’s rights, and compulsion on any person to commit a particular act. The first is part and parcel of an ordered society; the second is domination of individual rights by that society.
I believe that, in general, it is the moral responsibility of a woman, having gotten pregnant, to abnegate those elements of her life which would harm the child and to devote her life to the nurture of the child until it is capable of living without her support (which may mean adoption as a newborn).
But, in keeping with the principles above, I believe that deciding whether or not to accept this responsibility is her moral choice, a decision that must be made by her and her alone, in recognition that she alone has control over her body.
I do not believe that we may by law violate the autonomy she has over her body.
And therefore, while anti-abortion, I am pro-choice.
**Undeniable. But can I ask you to clarify? Is the fetus “not one yet” because it is dependent and not an adult? Or is it also not a human being? I’m not sure if you answered that with the phrase “organism with human genes.”
**Can you expand on this? What principle specifically drives you toward the idea that the mother alone has control over her body? How do you with reconcile this with “holding a person responsible for his or her acts which violate another’s rights,” part of the foundation of an ordered society? Thanks.
Well, it is mostly what I am trying to do for a living, but the short answer is: a) these people are not close by to me, not part of the community of laws and politics for which I am more directly responsible b) I don’t care as much about human rights abuses as I do about genocide.
Because none of these things are going on nearby, in a community and country I represent and have more direct power to do anything about. As bad as dictatorships in foriegn lands are, and indeed I do care and do try to help in my way, they are well outside of my ability to do anything about, unlike if women were taking 5 year olds to have their bodies torn apart daily right in my neighborhood.
I am of course, questioning whether these sorts of reasons are legitimate, and I’m starting to learn towards the view that they aren’t. But then, this issue also really isn’t about me. For all you know, I could enjoy mass murder, and that wouldn’t make much difference either. The question still remains to be put to those who think it really is full-fledged murder: would you really react in the same fashion if adult human beings were being killed by doctors in the same numbers as routinely, defended and abetted by your own state?
I may or may not be willing to agree with your conclusion, but I also have problems with describing a “moral” choice as belonging to a single specific individual. To me, that pretty much calls into question the idea of morality in general, whereby duties are universal, not specific. If it is wrong for a mother to choose to kill her baby, then it is right to oppose her doing so. There may be a greater duty which outweighs that one to be sure, and autonomy may be it, but I still would be uncomfortable with language that implied that a moral choice can be exclusive to a single person.
To put my own position more plainly for the wider debate:
So, “in general”, ignoring the legal issues for a moment…you then believe that women who have abortions are behaving morally irresponsibly then, correct?
**And you infer that from a pro-life perspective abortion is genocide? Huh?
**Nonsense! Absolute twaddle. Bud, let me clue you in on a little invention: airplanes. They have rendered the world a very small place indeed.
And what does the fact that something is nearby and in your country have to do with the type of moral outrage you seem to find lacking in pro-lifers? You pooh-poohed the thought that someone who believed that fetuses were deserving of human rights wouldn’t be appalled to the point of action–violent action, I presume.
There are people, right now, being killed and tortured. Go save them. Even if you fail in the attempt, at least you won’t be a hypocrite. Unlike your hypothetical (“What if these fetuses are adults”), you needn’t wonder. Right now, this very day, there are adults being killed and tortured. Go get 'em, bud. Let’s see what your response would be. Oh, wait. I guess we have already.
Most certainly on the same level. You’re the one making the faulty inference. I was here responding to someone comparing abortion to human rights infringements, given the assumption that abortion is tantmount to normal murder. I don’t consider the mass murder of a particular category of humanity to be equivalent to supression of the free press, thuogh both are bad.
No, actually: taken quite seriously as an objection to Unger’s and Singer’s arguments for our obligation to help everyone in the world regardless of distance. While I am coming around to the view that distance doesn’t make a huge difference, surely you are not going to simply dismiss the concern period.
Mere physical distance is not the only relevant factor.
To shrink things down a little: let’s say that there was a police brutality case in Botswana. Would you really feel JUST AS compelled to do something about that as you would for a similar case in your home town? What about if it happened on Mars? In another galaxy? Once you admit that distance plays some role, then we are haggling about degree, not principle, and your “absolute twaddle” becomes a ridiculously dismissive overreaction.
At the very least, it can certainly be argued that a mother of two here can do much more good fighting against drug dealers in here own community than she can if she suddenly rushes off to a plane to East Timor where she neither speaks the language nor holds any sort of special position that would allow her to be anything more than another body among the throng in the midst of ongoing genocide (a greater harm than drug dealers).
Yes.
I’m sorry, but these situations are not equivalent. I may be amendable to the view that they are in theory, and later reconsider how that would change practice, but that is not the view we are consideirng. We are considering the reaction of the average person, who, for better or ill, doesn’t take as seriously harms done in distant lands outside their own citizenship and community, but who would indeed be outraged to the point of rebellion by it going on in their home town, tolerated by the civil authorities that are supposed to represent the control of violence in our civilization.
Furthermore, we are not talking about a person merely considering a hypothetical (to them) harm. We are hypothetically considering the case of a person who TRULY BELIEVES that abortion at any level of development, even a clump of implanted cells, is a terrible harm.
There are people dying everyday in Iraq. U.S soldiers…civilians…women and children.
These are folks whose “human being-ness” is beyond dispute.
I see lots of folks on the boards who express opposition to the war in Iraq. If they are not…what was that word…oh yeah “appalled” to the point of “violent action” against the war…if they are not getting themselves jailed for civil disobedience (at the least) …I take it we can consider them hypocrites as well, huh? They must not really think that the war in Iraq is such a bad thing.
There are plenty of places to do acts of civil obedience (or even better…violent disruptions of military actions) in just about every town in America. Hell, I’d reckon there is some sort of army depot, national guard building or arsenal within an hour or two of everybody. Surely all of the outraged people concerned about the daily deaths linked to U.S. policy can put their actions where their board posts are?
This reminds me of a Pit thread awhile back…here. A poster there took the same tack as you…that if pro lifers were not willing to commit all kinds of acts to disrupt abortions…we must not really take the problem that seriously. When I asked about what he was willing to do to stop the killings in a war he opposed so much…He won my irony post of the decade:
It’s the same lack of consistency in thinking that Stratocaster referred to earlier. Plenty of laws in our current legal system are flawed and incomplete with varying degrees of exceptions or loopholes added on year by years. When it comes to abortion though, many pro choice folks keep insisting that pro life folks come up with some airtight legal strategy to address the problem…that address all possible future pregnancy scenarios…a theshold that they don’t bother to apply to other laws already on the book.
Apos (and other posters) is doing the same thing here…using a “test” to measure the sincerity of pro lifers beliefs…a test that convienently doesn’t get applied to plenty of other areas of public policy.
To say abortion is wrong, illegal, but we’re not going to punish you; we’re only going to make it really hard for you to get one, is contradictory. If you are pro-life and you are unable to commit to putting into law a definition of the crime and also a fitting punishment, then you are a hypocrite. You can’t be anti-abortion and pro-choice either. I would not hesitate to agree that my neighbor who kills her toddler should be punished. But I do an amazing emotional, over-rationalized, convoluted thought process to justify allowing my neighbor to kill her unborn child and do nothing. That makes my actions(or lack of them) pro-choice, even though my core beliefs are pro-life.
And I would have to admit, Stratocaster, you’re right. That fence I’m sitting on gets pretty uncomfortable sometimes. I do wonder if, at times I can see you on the same fence, just a different section?
Let me elaborate. when you kill in self-defence, the idea is to save your own life FIRST and whack the other guy SECOND, so your INTENTION is preservation, the means (which you did not want) are unintended yet unavoidable…
In life-of-the mother cases, your intention is to save mum, so given that, you should choose the means that cause less damage. If you have (and you always have) the choice between directly killing the baby and indirectly doing it, you should try for indirectly, In the future we may save a baby , let’s say, 4 weeks into the oregnancy, so when the techonology comes you don’t have to change yourr morality.
Even in self-defence, there are limits, you can’t blow a building, killing 1 000 people in self-defence.Unavoidable does not mean intended. My car pollutes, that’s unavoidable, but it is unintended by me (I don’t drive my car saying “let’s contaminate!!!”)
As an indirect analogy of means. Let’s say you’re going to your wife’s room to have her “unplugged”, she wanted you to perform the euthanasia. Let’s say, 10 seconds before this a guy came and shot her, wouldn’t you be angry? The result was the same, yet, 10 seconds made a lot of difference.
**First, I have no means of getting to Mars, wouldn’t you agree? Bringing locations into the discussion where it is absolutely impossible to interfere for good (and where there currently doesn’t seem to be a strong need) is just a bit of a red herring, dontcha think?
Second, why would the proximity of this earthly “evil” be a material factor when one could get on a plane and be virtually anywhere in the world at will? Let’s keep the discussion limited to Earth, okay? Sorry to be so parochial.
**No, actually quite specifically we were considering your reaction to perceived evils. This was in reaction to your dismissal of pro-life beliefs based on the idea that pro-lifers weren’t currently storming abortion clinics with violent opposition. It was the specific question I posed to you. Nothing theoretical or speculative about it.
You can talk around and around this as much as you like, but it won’t change the fact that you are guilty of what you see in others. The only real difference is that you don’t craft the non sequitur for yourself that this must necessarily mean your core beliefs are a mirage. If you bring distance into the equation, then you have the same “apathy” that you see in pro-lifers; at that point you are merely able to have irrelevant discussions about degree. Again, you could be on a plane today, if only you made the decision to do so.
If you feel human rights are being egregiously violated, even to the point of death, in the world today, and you do nothing about it (despite the fact that you could do something), how is this in any material way different than what you perceive regarding pro-lifers? Again, no hypothetical here either. There are adults being tortured and killed this very day.
And yet you do nothing.
And Dave was absolutely on point, as usual.
**