Kimstu mentioned treating a fetus as a person with the same rights as the rest of us from the instant of conception. You’ll notice the NYS law doesn’t treat the fetus the same as a person until after the 24th week of pregnancy and in fact, the definition uses “person” and “unborn child with which a female has been pregnant for more than twenty-four weeks” as separate categories.
abortion before 24 weeks or to preserve the mother’s life is a “justifiable abortional act” and no crime at all.
Like Kimstu said, I can’t believe them because their actions are totally inconsistent with their goals.
If I were anti-abortion and the reason I was that is because I think fetuses have rights from the moment of conception, I would reduce abortion not only be trying to criminalize abortion, but also to reduce the number of unwanted conceptions that may lead to that. If I were anti-abortion and wanted to save babies, I’d do all in my power to ensure that babies and their mothers are properly supported when they are born so women who are poor would not have to make that choice. Again, if I were anti-abortion, I’d make sure to educate kids on what causes pregnancy, how to prevent it, and how do have sex safely.
Let’s turn this around a bit. If I were anti-abortion but also hated women, I would do all in my power to punish women who have abortions while doing nothing to reduce their numbers other than criminalizing it even while knowing that women will get abortions anyways in back alleys and at home, and many of them will die. If i were anti-abortion and hated women, I would prevent kids from being educated on the subject of sex, dismiss their questions, tell them “just don’t do it”, scare them by saying premarital sex is against god, even while knowing that most kids will do it and without proper education, many will result in pregnancies. If I were anti-abortion and hated women, I would spend all my time telling women about the wrath they will incur if they step out line sexually or medically, but do nothing to help them once babies are born. I would cut funding for women’s health, take a patriarchal tone on women’s bodies, and make sure that any women who steps out of line suffer from lack of available and affordable health care.
Now which one of these things is happening right now? THAT is why I ascribe anti-choice people with the beliefs I think they have.
I’m not unreasonable though. If you are anti-choice but aren’t doing it because you hate women, its easy to prove to me. Support women’s health care, make contraception available and for free, educate kids on sex as early as possible. Help fund daycare centers, health care for the poor, and free clinics. That’s how you prove you’re not a woman hater
Most states have a law against something euphemistically known as “mayhem.” It means mutilating someone, or causing them to be less whole than they were. If your beating causes someone to lose sight, hearing or a limb, it’s mayhem.
I think causing a woman to lose a pregnancy ought to be mayhem. It recognizes the loss, the seriousness of the crime, and what pro-choicers have always maintained-- that the fetus is part of the woman’s body.
It’s true that you can’t grow a new arm, and the woman can get pregnant again, but the woman can’t get pregnant with* that particular fetus *again.
I’m saying the same thing. But you’re questioning their beliefs based on their actions, and I’m questioning their actions based on their beliefs.
And some of them do that. Don’t paint them all with a single brush. And as I already noted, some have other reasons for opposing some of those that have nothing to do with “hating women.” For instance, one can oppose making contraception free because they don’t think things should be just handed out for free, regardless of what they are.
I wouldn’t say they want to “help babies,” so much as that they want babies to be born. One might call them pro-natalists. They’re just obsessed with babies being born. That doesn’t mean they want to punish women.
None of the above. They don’t “know” that women will get abortions in back alleys and at home and die. They think if they can criminalize abortion, all these evil men getting these poor innocent girls pregnant then cruelly abandoning them will instead be forced to “man up” and marry them, and everyone will live happily ever after in a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence, 2.5 kids, and a golden retriever. They don’t “know” that most kids will have sex even if you tell them to abstain, they think they’ll listen and not do it. (Or they don’t care because they’re so pro-natalist that even if the kids have sex and get pregnant, babies will be born, which is the greatest thing in the world.) And I think you’d be hard pressed to find any significant number of people telling women they will “incur wrath if they step out of line sexually” or “taking a patriarchal tone on women’s bodies,” compared with the number telling men they will incur wrath for violating one of God’s precious unique snowflakes.
Exactly. The whole “anti-abortion” movement has nothing to do with abortion. Which is why their statements and positions make no logical sense. They are actually trying to control the sexuality of women. They don’t give a rat’s ass about fetuses being killed. They want to punish women for having the audacity of deciding to make choices about their lives. How dare they act like actual human beings. Punish them for not cowering in the kitchen, pregnant and barefoot, getting raped regularly and not complaining.
If you were really opposed to killing fetuses, you’d be pushing contraception and sex education. Free vasectomy clinics on every corner. Over the counter free birth control pills. IUDs for all teenage girls. These measures actually work.
Let’s turn the tables. If one feels so strongly about abortion rights, why don’t George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates start an organization that takes women to states where abortions are easy to get, finances the educations of doctors that specialize in abortion, and funds free abortions. Abortions average $600 to $3000 here in Los Angeles. For a lousy billion dollars, you could get over 300,000 abortions. Why doesn’t Hillary Clinton ask one of her Wall Street buddies to start a company that provides low cost loans to finance the abortions? Have an abortion and Disneyland! Pro-choice people shouldn’t be such cheapskates. Don’t wait for government to do it.
:dubious: I.e., only about four or five months’ worth of all abortions in the US.
Even seriously wealthy people aren’t in a position to fund pregnancy termination options on a national scale, at least not for more than a very short time. When it comes to major long-term public-health requirements, the government has to do it, because no other entity has the resources and the longevity to take it on.
And, of course, that’s leaving aside the fundamental issue that terminating a pregnancy (early-term) is a right, according to constitutional law, and should not be wilfully obstructed by unnecessary obstacles. A non-wealthy working woman typically doesn’t have the luxury of scheduling her abortion needs around a vacation trip to fucking Disneyland, even if George Soros happens to be paying for it.
Meanwhile, pro-choice people actually are putting their money where their mouth is by donating to organizations like Planned Parenthood and promoting sex education and access to birth control. It’s abortion-rights opponents who tend to be so illogically committed to obstructing the sensible and effective public-health measures that reduce the incidence of abortion.
What punishment, if any, should there be for a person who commits simple assault not knowing a woman is pregnant and causes a miscarriage? First trimester. Seems to me that simple logic says no extra punishment at all.
I wouldn’t agree. If I hit you and, unbeknownst to me, you have an eggshell skull and the blow causes much more severe injury than I might have expected, or even death, I’ll be charged with the offence reflecting the outcome of what I did - not simple assault but assault occasioning serious harm, or murder, as the case may be.
Part of being a grown-up is accepting that you are responsible for the consequences of your actions, even if they are not the consequences you desired or foresaw. And that’s a principle which we generally import into criminal law.
So, if I assault a woman and cause her to miscarry, and if we accept that inducing the miscarriage of a (wanted) pregnancy is a serious form of harm, then I don’t think the criminal consequences should depend on whether I knew she was pregnant or not. Arguably, if I did know she was pregnant and I deliberately chose a mode of assault which I knew would imperil her pregnancy (out of sheer malice, or because I don’t want to be on the hook for child support) that’s an aggravating factor which should be reflected in sentencing. But the basic crime is the same whether I knew she was pregnant or not.
You’d have to have a new category of crime then. It can’t be equivalent to rape, since you can’t accidentally rape someone. It can’t be murder, since the fetus isn’t a person.
Whether the fetus is wanted is irrevelant as well. Personhood is a function of how advanced the development of the fetus is, not whether it’s wanted.
You can regard inducing an (unwanted) miscarriage as an injury to the mother. Then an assault which induces a miscarriage falls into the category of assault resulting in injury, or assault resulting serious injury, rather than simple assault. (Most jurisdictions have graduated offences, under one name or another, for simple assault, assault resulting in injury, assault resulting in serious injury, under one name or another.) All you need is legislation specifying that an induced unwanted miscarriage is an injury, or a serious injury, for these purposes.
Alternatively, you can create a distinct offence of assault resulting in miscarriage, if you feel the need. And, if you want to, you can assign to this offence a penalty which is in the same range as the penalty for rape, or the penalty for murder.
None of this depends on foetal personhood or - unless you choose to legislate for this - on how far advanced the pregnancy is. Nor does it depend on whether the assailant knew of the pregnancy or not.
And whether the pregnancy is wanted is very relevant. Unless you’re trying in a roundabout way to criminalise medical abortion, you need to make sure that doctor administering an abortion to a patient is not committing the offence.
You’re really pushing a lot of logical consistency onto them. It’s unjustified.
Most Americans believe in Hell. But do they really? If they really believed that being a bad person resulted in infinite, eternal suffering, don’t you think that people would be a little more… pious?
Logically, we might conclude that these people don’t really believe in Hell. And yet they say they do, and some of their behaviors (like fear) are consistent with that.
The reality is that people don’t always think through all of the logical consequences of their beliefs. Or the consequences are so horrifying that they actively avoid thinking through them. Regardless, their actions appear inconsistent because they simply haven’t bothered to figure out what the properly consistent action would be.
It’s the same with abortion. I’d agree that their [some pro-lifers] actions are more consistent with misogyny than believing abortion is murder. But I believe them when they say they are the latter, simply because I also don’t think they’ve really thought through their position. Between dishonest/logical vs. honest/illogical, I assume people are the latter.
Is it a serious injury though, assuming she loses the fetus but no other serious injury results? Also, what kind of penalties are there for serious injuries? If I suffer a spinal injury as a result of a fight which inhibits by ability to walk(without actually paralyzing me totally), what kind of penalty can the perp expect?
You can obviously do whatever you want as a legislator, but once you establish that kind of moral importance to a fetus, then it becomes harder to argue that it’s not a person. Which is why NARAL tends to get queasy about such legislation, while reluctant to oppose it entirely as long as it doesn’t acknowledge fetal personhood.
Fair enough, but I think that when people are advocating drastic changes to law and even constitutional interpretation based on their personal beliefs, they have an obligation to be rather more conscientious about their logical consistency.
Sure–I totally support calling out any inconsistency, publicly when possible. I just can’t get behind ascribing the worst motives to people on the basis that they’d have to believe X if they were being consistent.
Unless power and/or money are involved, of course. Then I’m happy to assume the worst :).
Some of them have actually admitted they have a completely different agenda: Pro-Lifer Admits Regulating Women's Sexuality, Not Abortion, Drives Planned Parenthood Attacks
The primary concern is clearly all about punishing/controlling women-there might be a few who are truly pro-life, but the majority are not. If you were really, truly, concerned about protecting fetuses, you would not do any of the following:
Block or restrict access to contraception
Block or restrict access to sex education
Make women seeking abortions undergo completely unnecessary, painful, and humiliating medical procedures before being given an abortion
Provide any kind of exceptions to bans on abortions (aka, rape, incest, medical reasons)
Propose to punish women for trying to get/have an abortion
I know how to reduce abortion rates to near-zero: teach kids about sex education. Put free vasectomy/birth control clinics on every corner. Anyone of any age can pop in and get an IUD, a box of birth control pills, a pack of condoms, or a vasectomy, no questions asked, no shame, no hoops to jump through. If most teenage girls had a Mirena IUD inserted at age 15, bye-bye teenage pregnancies. Of course the “pro-lifers” are bizarrely opposed to IUDs.
More women are pro-choice than are men, and that is not a coincidence. The last Gallup poll found the majority of women are pro-choice and the majority of men are not.
“Serious” is a value-judgement, obviously, so it’s a serious injury if we choose to regard it as a serious injury. But I don’t think we’d have any difficulty in making that choice. I think you will know the grief and trauma that a woman can suffer if she experiences an unwanted miscarriage. Now magnify that to reflect her awareness that her miscarriage was caused by a criminal assault upon her. Yes, the injury to her is a very serious one; you’d have to be singularly heartless to think otherwise.
What kind of penalty? Depends on the laws and practices of the jurisdiction concerned. In a jurisdiction with which I am familiar it goes like this:
Assault: Max. penalty 6 months.
Assault causing harm: Max.penalty 5 years. “Harm” would include any injury to body or mind, and would include short-term pain or unconsciousness.
Assault causing serious harm: Max. penalty life imprisonment. “Serious harm” would cover substantial risk of death, serious disfigurement, substantial loss or impairment of mobility of the body or of the function of any particular organ.
(These are all the statutory maximum penalties. Obviously in practice sentences will be nearly always be lower than the max, depending on the circumstances of the case.)
On this particular scale, an assault causing a miscarriage would be an assault causing harm. But if the will was there, the definition of “serious harm” could be expanded to include inducing a miscarriage. That’s a societal judgment; I don’t think you could say a priori that it would be right or wrong to expand the definition in that way.
I think that’s the problem with much of the rights-based discourse about abortion; it’s really polarising, forcing people into extremist positions, and working against anything that recognises there can be two or more competing values that both have some claim to respect.
I consider myself pro-choice, but I’m deeply uncomfortable with a position that seeks to minimise or discount the harm done to a woman upon whom an (unchosen!) abortion is forced by violence. If you do that, you’re ignoring the direct and immediate character of this act, and it’s effect on an actual woman who is pregnant, on account of the indirect, distant implications you think it might have for a hypothetical woman who might want an abortion. I think there’s something unbalanced there. At the very least, you’re elevating the rights of women who choose to have abortions over the rights of women who choose not to have them. How “pro-choice” is that, really?
ah, this old one. Who is going to adopt the baby? There are, right now, over a million children available for adoption in the US. No one wants them. If we somehow magically stop all abortions, that’s around 300,000 new unwanted babies every year; since Planned Parenthood is being shut down and it prevents 500,000 abortions every year, we get a new 800,000 unwanted babies added to our million that we already have. After ten years we have a total disaster of 9 million unwanted kids.
And that’s completely overlooking the fact that for many women seeking abortions, the pregnancy and the childbirth itself is just as big a problem as ending up with an unwanted baby. Let’s say you are poor, and really need your three part-time jobs in order to feed the two kids you already have. How are you going to keep working them all while heavily pregnant?
Being pregnant is not a pleasant, benign experience. Even the least complicated pregnancies and childbirths inflict permanent damage on a woman’s body. Even with the best of care, some women still die.
It shouldn’t be. All this talk about fetuses, and when does life begin, and are they people and oh the poor babies is all a smokescreen. The issue of being pro-choice or anti-choice comes to one, simple, straightforward question:
Do you believe women have rights?
The most fundamental right a person has is to control what happens to their own body. Pro-choice people believe women have rights. Anti-choice people are stating that women do not have rights.
Did you go out and donate bone marrow yesterday? I didn’t. Have you donated your spare kidney? Me neither. And guess what, several children died due to our failure to use our bodies to support their lives. If some male politicians passed laws mandating that all adult women be forced to donate a kidney and donate bone marrow every year in order to save children’s lives everyone (at least I hope everyone) would be truly outraged by this massive violation of women’s rights. There is absolutely no difference between mandating that women use their kidneys and bone marrow to save lives and mandating that women be forced to use their uteruses to save lives.
Do women have rights or not? That is the only question that is under debate.