i didn’t ‘switch’ my viewpoint. i originally said that i am for those things. then i said if i was around when those laws were passed i may not have supported them. i support them now because they guarantee rights to people who i believe should have rights. i still don’t think a fetus should have rights. and i still don’t think government should impose its will over an unwilling majority.
One error that I keep hearing from various people is the notion that a pro-lifer is trying to grant the fetus all the rights of a woman or man. However, this doesn’t have to be an “all or nothing” type of arrangement. The question in my mind is not whether or not a fetus has all the rights of a human person, but whether it has the singular right to life. It seems to me that this is the most basic, and possibly a necessary right, to be human. The argument is not “who has more rights”, but weighing the conflicting rights.
For example, I have the right to drive my car in whatever fashion I deem. However, because there are other people on the road whom I might be endangering, my right is superceeded by the right of other individuals to reasonable protection. Whether we live in a complex or simple society we give up certain rights in order to protect the rights of other people.
In the case of abortion, after all this discussion, I would have to hold that if the fetus is a human, it must have the simple right to continue living and simple protection from harm bestowed on it from another person excersising their “right”. I do not believe it has all the rights of a fully developed human person, these rights come with development. However, by virtue of its humanity, life must be granted. The right of another person to choose whether or not they birth that child cannot overcome the simple right to continue living.
Would it be fair to say that their are a heirarchy of human rights? When one of these rights conflicts with another right, we protect that right which weighs in with more importance. The question would then become which right is more basic of humanity. I don’t know…I am positing a thought here, I am definitely open to your opinions.
So, I guess my overall question would be as follows: are we to determine the morality of abortion by who has more rights(the mother or the child, which is obviously the mother), or by which of the conflicting rights is more basic to humanity (the right to life or the right to choose, in this case favoring the fetus)?
Looking forward to your responses.
the right to choose doesn’t determine morality, just legality, unless you feel that allowing people to make their own moral decisions is itself immoral.
in any case, i think the morality of abortion is determined by who you think has more rights. who actually has more rights under the law (which, as you pointed out, is currently the mother) is, again, a question of legality, not morality.
Which I think is valid because making a law against abortion is introducing or asserting a public right over a personal right and needs extreme scrutinizing for this reason. This would-be prohibition has many implications, as we have discussed, including the good faith argument of government intent towards education and prevention and the good-faith demand of government assistance in child-raising. However, lacking these good faith provisions, I am left to posit that the people behind outlawing abortion may have more than one social agenda. I believe that besides a weak social poverty agenda, (to make huge masses of people poor and to validate doom and destruction, as willed in scripture) these groups also seek to enforce a strong personal punishment agenda on the public.
Look at the historical evidence of most ultra-conservative hot-button issues: anti-needle-exchanges, anti-AIDS funding, anti-public healthcare, pro-capital punishment, pro-child-spanking, anti-abortion, anti-welfare, anti-medical marijuana, pro-nuclear arsenal, etc. It is a long record of adding insult to injury. In other words, ultra-conservatives are advocating PUNISHMENT as a sociology. I claim that their chief demand in abortion is that if a women gets pregnant, then she should receive punishment for it, and this may even include the baby in a pro-shame environment (perhaps). There are many psychological reasons that may contribute to this mindset, but I think undemocratic religious principles has alot to do with it.
or, more specifically, whether you think the fetus has the right to life or not, except for cases where the pregnancy endangers the life of the mother, in which case you have to determine whose right to life takes precedence.
You are correct. The right to life is the most fundamental right of all. All other rights are derived from this one.
There are no circumstances wherein the mother’s “rights” can trump the right to life – except those rare situations wherein the mother’s life itself is imminently endangered. Even then, an ethical physician should do everything possible to save both mother and child. It would not be enough to simply say, “Well, the mother might not survive, so I think I’ll just abort this baby right now.”
The right to pick your mate, breed at will, and decide how many children one will have, easily trumps the imagined right to life of an unwanted fetus. Society already guarantees the right-to-life outside of the mother, with often disasterous results, sometimes including the waste of spending a million dollars in selective healthcare to “save” a severely birth-defected baby with mental retardation using precious life support while many brain-healthy kids go without needed surgeries. Not to confuse the above argument, but I discount any right-to-life arguments until I see universal health-care for all. There is a broader arrogance to this argument when it gets into life-sanctity issues and avoids gender control issues.
NOTHING trumps the right to life, except another person’s right to life – and even then, only in specialized circumstances.
The “right” to pick one’s mate, breed at will, yadda yadda are subordinate to one’s right to life; after all, without life, one is unable to enjoy these choices! It makes no sense that these lesser, subordinate, derived “rights” should be considered more valuable than somebody’s very life.
BTW, the whole “right to pick your mate” issue is anothe red herring. Getting pregnant doesn’t mean that you must marry the father of your child, and I don’t know a single pro-life agency that claims otherwise.
BTW Jubilation, Brian Bunnyhurt’s post about ultra conservative punishment motivations has reminded me…
Our membership committee has asked me to remind you that your Hester Prynne Society dues are late…please pay up … 
snicker
Please charge my dues to Mr. Hawthorne’s tab. Thank you.
Brian: For the sake of your statement, I must ask if you believe that a human being’s most inherent right, that is, our most basic right, is that of life. Since you have been with me throughout this conversation, remember that I want to assume for the sake of debate that the fetus is a human. If you accept these two premises then it follows that the fetus does not have an “imagined right to life”. Also, I would be interested in exploring your “good faith” programs of the government which must be put in place. What happens when a woman decides to keep have her baby and raise the child on her own? However, one year into raising the child, she realizes that she does not love the baby and that she would rather be without it. It is still dependent on her and there are no sufficient programs to help that child grow. Do we then allow the mother to abandon the child, or worse yet (as some have done), kill the child? If we were to assume that the fetus is a human, where would the difference be? Why this great change in how we protect this human life? Finally, I am really not interested in the right wing conspiracy theories which seem to argue on a basis of sensationalism and move away from what I was hoping we could concentrate on (such as the facts).
I should point out that the overwhelming majority of abortions are not performed because the fetus is “severely birth-defected.” It is therefore disingenuous to “discount all right-to-life arguments” due to a lack of health care for those with severe birth defects.
Slaquer,
Right-wing lunacy is not fiction, it may have more to do with this debate than meets the eye. Also, the greatest right cannot be the right to life, because the implicit assumption is that someone is bestowing you this right and that is problematical by definition of rights. What are rights? These are domains you claim for yourself before someone else claims them for you. The range would entail responsibilities. (ASSUMPTION: We do not have a responsibility to breed outside of some feudal perceived religious control mechanism that survives today.)
As such, the greatest right is the absolute right to decide what your human rights are in the first place, limited only by an absolute majority (not just seasonal voters either). This implies awareness, education, traditions of freedom, democracy, free-speech, etc. If the greatest right was the right to life, then by extension we would all conceivably be forced to be pacifist vegans. If someone is a pacifist vegan, that is their right, see what I mean? My rights include your right to limit the scope of your own rights, but not your right to limit the scope of my rights, thanks anyway.
To state this even more forcefully, since that is what it is really all about, the greatest right is NEVER the right to life. Rather, the absolute greatest right in life is the right to KILL for the right to claim one’s rights. Difficult to swallow sometimes, but entirely valid, or this converstation would not be taking place under your definition of absolute pacifism. What is that cliche again, something about freedom not being free?
As for those good faith provisions, they must be supplied before the fact, not after. If conservatives care so much about abortion, they need to prove it by paying people to sterilize themselves to avoid this “sin” otherwise people like me will always assume they are just trying to limit my freedom and destroy my hopes for a better managed world.
DECLARATION: If abortion is made illegal, I reserve the right to seemingly contradict myself. I reserve the right to withdraw my support for the right to marry, the right to choose a mate, or the right to self-breed. I reserve the right to support a system that prevents any conception from ever taking place without a government license. This makes sense under the hypothetical circumstances, to help combat what I see is a phony Christian attempt to impoverish the globe. Thanks.
Jubilation,
That’s why I believe that the right to self-breed, etc., trumps the right-to-life, because if the right-to-life is so legally special for a fetus, then we need to prevent the government planned “mistakes” (by default) that flow from this third-world management system. By the way, I never said marry a mate, I said pick a mate, huge difference. Thanks.
Jubilation,
Your last post completely missed the point. The point is, that it is disingenuous for ultra-conservatives to claim right-to-life when people are allowed to die from lack of the same degree of medical often gauranteed a brain-dead baby with adequate insurance. I blame ultra-conservatives for this double-standard system I am describing, so their arguments for right-to-life are a sick joke on society.
Nothing disingenous about that. Pro-lifers also believe that more medical care is necessary; however, the inadequacy of medical care is NOT an excuse to abort healthy babies.
At best, your argument only means that perhaps we shoudl abort those with fatal deformities. It by no means justifies abortion on demand.
(As an aside, I don’t think that aborting deformed babies is justified either. In part, this is because pre-natal tests for deformities are by no means 100% reliable. Additionally, abortion is not the only solution available for such. One could always deliver to term, for example, and then see if the baby survives. Either way, an abortion is both unnecessary and a display of reckless disregard for human life.)
“Government-planned mistakes”?
That’s just absurd. You are focusing on the decidedly rare instances of fetal deformity, even though the vast majority of abortions have nothing to do with such. Sure, the health care system stands to be improved. Sure, when resources are limited, there may need the need for triage – deciding which babies to save and which not to. However, abortion on demand is NOT the solution. There is no need to abort healthy babies, simply because other babies are incapable of surviving.
From the context, I assumed that by “mate” you meant “spouse.” If you didn’t, then your statement makes no sense! Prohibiting abortion still does nothing to prevent you from choosing whichever mate you want – spousal or otherwise.
Jubilation,
We have two serious disconnects here. “Mistakes” only referred to unwanted babies that the religious right insist on being born, even though they apparently don’t really want to help raise them either (“gov’t planned failure” referred to their plan to fail individuals and society).
Also, I never used a medical argument to abort fetuses from where you were quoting from. In those posts, I was squarely referring to a right-to-life after birth, which is evidenced by the fact that even IF the baby is horribly deformed, this r-t-l guarantees SOME babies heroic measures despite no heroic measures made for uninsured. The insurance argument won’t go away. I suggest ultra-conservatives help give everyone insurance, and then argue their right-to-life scheme.
The difference between my argument and yours and Slaquer’s is that I don’t ASSUME that WE should make any of these decisions to abort a fetus, for or against, while both of you have claimed this condescending right over parents, when the government hasn’t earned it with good faith (Christians absolutely don’t deserve any such right-to-power, they are a threat to free government and their right-to-life is mocked by their religious wars and witch burnings, and low expectations for the future).
The sheltered worldview that Christians can actually pretend to prevent abortions in a free world astounds me, but I have seen some weird arguments, like the first prohibition on alcohol which was an arrogant failure and created the modern mafia. I hope Christians realize that when they abandon religious freedom and enter politics with their dogma, they are just another political party, which come and go and die all the time.
Witch burnings eh? Which century are YOU living in?
Which religious wars have I started? Where have I stated that I have a low expectation for the future? Oh thats right, it’s convienent to lump all Christians together. (and of course all pro life folks are Christian right…?) You’ve now lumped all Christians (including pro life and pro choice, among other differences) into one conspiratorial mess…lovely
So the government is planning to fail individuals and society? Talk about caricatures! Talk about conspiracy theories!
FTR, the religous right DOES attempt to help these allegedly unwanted babies, as evidenced by the HUNDREDS of crisis pregnancy centers, adoption agencies, and church-operated hospitals across the nation. Even if it didn’t, that would merely indicate a lack of consistency on their part, or a lack of resources. It would NOT automatically mean that the pro-life stance is invalid.
Suppose that your neighbor was abusing his children. Would you be justified in protesting this grave injustice? Or should you only do so if you are personally prepared to adopt these children as your own? The failure to help all these deformed children does not mean that pro-lifers have no business protesting their abortions.
First of all, the right to life does not guarantee heroic measures for those babies. It only demand heroic measures IF NO OTHER BABIES would lose their lives in the process. Because life is sacred, heroic measures are warranted whenever they’re available. Unfortunately, when resources are limited, sometimes lives will not be saved.
And second, your argument does NOT mean that heroic measures should not be taken whenever possible. One could just as easily use your argument to fight for better health care so that NONE of those babies have to die needlessly.
So tell us, now. Do you believe that babies, the most innocent of human beings, have the right to live?
I can’t help but wonder how you would feel if YOUR child were at imminent risk of dying. I hope that you won’t be cavalierly dismissing the right to life then.
**
Wrong. The courts have ruled that abortion is a right of privacy that one has in this country. That right cannot be overstepped, or it is unconstitutional. And an unconstitutional law is not a law.
Certainly, the court could go on to reverse Roe v. Wade, or make some other rulings which circumvent it in some ways which would make legislation outlawing abortions within the Constitution, but those are a lot of assumptions and until we have a court which says those laws are not unconstitutional, a law put in by the majority cannot infringe on a minority.
If you don’t like the system, start a thread about it. But the FACT is that saying majority wants abortion so it should be so is NOT the way this country works.
Period.