I’ve been lurking for a while, but I’ve only posted a few messages. Hi, everybody
I didn’t want to post this in “Abortion Part Deux” because, while it has to do with abortion, it didn’t really have much to do with that thread.
So…on with the real question.
I don’t understand a few things…
Most pro-lifers think abortion is immoral because it ends a human life. Most of them believe human life should all have the same protection, zygote to senior citizen.
Most pro-lifers (that I am aware of) publicly disagree with clinic bombings, physical assaults on women seeking abortions, etc.
If most of the pro-lifers saw someone trying to kill a child/woman/elderly man/othertypeofperson in a parking lot, would they disagree with someone who used violence to prevent violence against the innocent party?
I’m not really interested in the “Is abortion right or wrong?” debate right now. I just know that if I thought the organized, government sanctioned, immoral killing of my fellow human beings was going on in medical centers all over the place, I would definitely be prepared to take whatever steps were necessary to stop it. I would consider the people killing the murderers to save hundreds/thousands of lives heroes.
I guess this is directed at a limited number of people. The people who feel that harming/killing a person in the name of self defense and self defense of a third party are justified…?
…for the record, I’m not, in any way, trying to encourage clinic violence as a way of proving your loyalty to The Cause or anything of the sort. That behavior disgusts me. I just don’t understand why the pro-lifers seem to feel the same way.
(Sorry if this is sort of jumbled. If I need to clarify anything, please let me know.)
I had a thread a couple of months back that dealt with this. It was called “is it wrong to bomb an abortion clinic?” look at it and see if you answers are there. It got into a nasty debate on abortion.
There is a subtle but important difference between killing someone to prevent a murder and killing someone for some personal gain. The first has the possibility of improving the gene pool, while the second will probably diminish it.
That being said, there is also a difference between abortions and murder of human beings. By law, a fetus young enough to be aborted is not a human being, therefore an abortion is not legally the murder of a human being.
If I saw someone being attacked in the carpark, I suppose the use of force against the attacker to protect the victim may be appropriate, but I would have a very hard time justifying lethal force being used against the attacker. I believe that if you are in a position to kill the attacker, you should also be in a position to disable him/her, and that disabling should be sufficient if your goal is just to end the attack.
Just so you know, I’m not pro-life, I’m pro-choice. I don’t believe a first trimester fetus is a life, which is why I have a problem with killing a person who has been born, but not with abortion - not to bring this in to the debate, but to try to clarify my position for you.
Ethilrist, I think you’re missing the point. If I understood the first post correctly, BonVivant intended to assume for the purposes of this question that the fetus IS, in fact, a human being in the moral and ethical sense. The legal definitions are irrelevant, as is the morality of abortion itself. Those are very messy debates that have been done to death, and I suspect BonVivant was trying to avoid them.
So, as far as I can tell the question is… IF abortion is killing a human life, do you think killing is permissible to save other lives, and isn’t killing abortion providers morally permissible at minimum, and maybe even obligatory? You may think the premise is incorrect, but ASSUME for the sake of this post that a fetus IS, in fact, morally a full human being.
Now that I think about this, it really is a troubling question. By all rights, if I knew that a given individual murdered innocent people on a regular basis… egh.
I’d have to say… well, yes, honestly. Killing a known mass-murderer is not only moral, but probably heroic.
Fortunately, I hold the view that a fetus–at least early in the pregnancy–is NOT morally the same as a child, or a fully-grown adult, therefore I myself do not feel obligated to go out and murder abortion providers. whew
Tabris’ post summed up my original question quite nicely.
I guess I could follow up, to some extent.
I’m pro-choice and don’t consider a fetus the same as a child, either. That’s why I don’t consider abortion providers mass murderers and that’s why I am opposed to threats and acts of violence directed towards them.
If I considered a fetus to be the same as a child, I have a feeling I’d be “one of those people” we hear and read about who organize clinic bombings and kill providers. C’mon folks, we’re not talking about individual murderers who aren’t recognized as murderers until after a lengthy investigation, in most cases. These are organized, relatively visible “perpetrators” who will likely perform hundreds of abortions each year.
Sadly, I must admit that have at least a little respect for “those people”. I have a certain level of admiration for anyone who takes a stand for what they believe in (and does so in an effective way to meet their goals). Bombing clinics and shooting providers seems to me to be a fairly effective way to reduce the number of abortions. There aren’t many people clamoring to be abortion providers, there aren’t that many clinics in most areas and many women are scared to go to clinics because of the violence they might encounter.
To move beyond simply offing providers and bombing clinics, what about kidnapping women, dragging them out to privately owned locations in the middle of nowhere, preventing them from harming themselves until they deliver and simply dropping them off somewhere? There’s a ton of issues right there. Not quite as violent, though. Pro-lifers?
I’m honestly not trying to talk anyone into committing violent acts or calling anyone a hypocrite, without knowing the particulars of their situation. I’m just curious how the lifers work this out in their heads.
Well, since we’re starting from an unrealistic premise, I’ll dredge up the unrealistic solution offered in a previous thread.
Register all the right-to-lifers. When someone shows up with an unwanted pregnancy, pick a RTL randomly and execute him/her. Use that person’s assets to provide for the unwanted baby.
If a RTL is willing to commit murder to protect an unborn fetus, that same person should be willing to sacrifice life and limb to do the same.
Not necessarily. You might have brought your gun with you but left your non-lethal rubber bullets at home. The amount of force necessary to guarantee that you’ll instantly down a man is not that much less force than the amount that will kill him.
“Register all the right-to-lifers. When someone shows up with an unwanted pregnancy, pick a RTL randomly and execute him/her. Use that person’s assets to provide for the unwanted baby.”
Aside from being exactly opposite from the stated priciples I support, I might volunteer. Assuming I actually had assets to use.
Tracer, I know it’s not always going to be the case… I guess I’m trying to say to avoid lethal force at all costs. I understand it may not be possible to bring down the attacker without killing him, but I would be uncomfortable with the idea of anyone making a choice to kill him to end the attack. If non-lethal force was attempted, but the attacker was accidently killed, that would be somewhat different.
I guess in this debate, that would translate to doing everything possible to have the clinics shut down, short of actually killing to achieve that end.
Ethilrist - wasn’t that a Wildest Bill suggestion? Wow. Can’t believe I’m seeing a Wildest Bill suggestion offered here by someone who isn’t Bill!
Well. If I have to pick a side in the Great Abortion Debate, it has to be “pro-life”. Not necessarily on religious grounds (though I am a Christian) so much as the feeling that human life should not be destroyed, and the feeling that the definition of “human life” should be as broad as possible, for safety’s sake.
Having said this, neither I nor anyone I know with similar views would support any act of violence against abortion providers. Why not? Because two wrongs don’t make a right. I have an obligation to respect the laws of the society in which I live; if I disagree with them, there are legal means through which I can try to effect change.
Also, I strive for some modicum of intellectual consistency: if I am opposed to abortion because I feel life is sacred, I should logically be opposed to the death penalty on the same grounds. And I am. I do not see anything “heroic”, or even acceptable, about the killing of murderers - or anybody else.
Many people with roughly my take on matters are campaigning - within the limits of the law - to have the law on abortion changed. I, personally, don’t even go that far. What I would like to see is better sex education, more reliable methods of contraception, and a raft of social measures (fundamentally, the elimination of poverty) which would make every child a wanted child - a situation where we wouldn’t need laws on abortion, because (except for medically necessary cases) there wouldn’t be any. Personally, I think that’s a goal worth striving for… and, if we do manage to eliminate poverty (and why the heck not?), there would be any number of additional benefits that have nothing to do with abortion.
But, until that happens, I will be staying within the law. (Come to think of it, I’ll be staying within the law afterwards, as well…)
I’m not sure what you mean in your first paragraph. Which part is unrealistic?
I’m only going to address the last part of the quoted material, though:
Personally, the difference between risking life and limb and using lethal force to protect someone from immediate and/or certain death and simply killing yourself so that someone can take advantage of your assets is too great for me to understand the connection. Is it mentioned in the previous thread about bombing abortion clinics? I’m going to read that right now.
I disagree with your implication that it should be easier, or safer, to disable rather than kill. Preferable, certainly.
Disabling someone requires a significant amount of skill, strength, willingness engage in hand-to-hand distance encounter (even if you have a baseball bat), and practice. Otherwise, you’re just giving the attacker another body to pummel on. Admittedly, it might make the original attack less severe, or slow the attacker til the authorities arrive, but it puts the intervener terribly at risk.
If I saw, for example, a knife (or even a baseball bat)attack, and I had a choice of shooting or wrestling the attacker, I’d shoot. I don’t have a gun, so it’s not likely a choice I’ll ever make.
And I HAVE intervened in assaults twice in the past, and have scars (70 stitches once) because of it. In one of them the guy pulled a knife AFTER I intervened, and that was NOT the assault that got me all those stitches. The stitches came from a Wilson T2000 tennis racket, of all things.
These violence of things can escalate unbelievably fast. If you decide to intervene in an assault, your and the victim’s safety are numbers 1 and 2. The attacker’s should be a VERY DISTANT number 3.
Frankly I think comparing abortion with the use of deadly force in defence of somebody on the street is an apple-orange thing. Actually, it’s worse than that-- at least apples and oranges are both fruit.
Actually, we’re comparing violence against providers/women getting abortions with self defense of a third party.
Other than that, I agreed with your points about self defense. I don’t even want to know how you ended up with 70 stitches from a tennis racket, but I believe it.
I could see why prolifers wouldn’t want to bomb an abortion clinic. I think THAT would make them a hypocrite. They don’t want anyone dead period. That would mean, someone who is born, a murderer, anyone.
I think an there is an important distinction between thinking someone deserves to die and personally carrying out the execution.
IF we assume that a fetus is a living being at the moment of fertilization (which I don’t think is the case), then I would agree that abortion providers are mass murerers and should be stopped. But I would have to consider 2 things: first, the people who are doing this don’t believe that they are commiting murder. That alone I think exempts them from death by my hands. Second, there are judicial courts whose job it is to sentence people for a reason. Citizens are not supposed to go around offing anyone they want to, no matter how good the reason. If I met a true to life mass murderer, I wouldn’t take on the responsibility of executing him, but I would do everything in my power to prevent him from killing anyone while I etained him and got hold of the proper authorities.
I have a slightly less unrealistic variation on your idea: Instead of being killed, the right-to-lifer could offer to adopt the baby (having been previously screened to ascertain physical/psychological/financial fitness for parental duties). If nobody is available, the woman may proceed to have an abortion. How does that sound?
I vaguely recall a Pit thread which described a teenage girl who was vehemently pro-life until she herself became pregnant, at which time she had an abortion.
It’s easy to want someone to carry a pregnancy to term if you’re not the one who will be changing the diapers.
In terms of the argument I hear, that pro-lifers who support the death penalty are hypocrites, there’s one important note to add: often times Pro-Lifers (or anti-abortion, your choice) feel that it is wrong to take an innocent life.
It’s immpossible for an unborn child to have done something wrong, therefore it is wrong to “kill” it.
Someone who gets the death penalty has done something wrong (we hope) and therefore their lives are forfeit.
Now, using all that as the proposed morals of the person in the parking lot, if someone is getting ready to snuff the life of a fellow human and you had a chance to do something to prevent this you would have two options from what I can see:
You can kill the guy, as a last resort, because you are protecting an innocent life.
You can’t kill the guy because you feel that the taking of human life can only be sanctified by a higher authority (not necessarily God, but a court of law or a military action, etc.)
Hmm. I see the dilemma. If you go with the first one then you can use the same reasoning to kill abortion doctors (unless I’m missing something, which I might well be doing).
But if you go with the second one you’re going to let a presumably innocent person die.
Geez, I can see where the dilemma would come in, but I think that Steve Wright answered the question nicely: abortion is legal and there are legal channels that can be accessed in an attempt to change the situation. Stabbing someone to death in a parking lot however is not legal and thus not subject to the same preventive actions as abortion is.
Anti-abortion and anti-capital punishment BTW.
Nice question BonVivant. Definitely a thought provoker.
