I was supporting what he said, from a liberal perspective. While I don’t want to register my firearms (which would be expensive, considering how many I own), I would gladly do it in exchange for universal health coverage. My right to privacy in that regard is nowhere near as important as a healthy populace.
As to how many of my gun rights I’d trade for UHC (as an example), I don’t know.
It’s inevitable that for any given issue on which the population is roughly evenly divided, one of the two major political parties will come out on each side of it. If both parties agreed, then one candidate could pick up a huge number of votes by switching positions. So any question of “Why did party A pick up position X” can be answered with “because party B didn’t”, and a full answer has to address both parties.
Shrug It’s simply murder. Murder is muder, whether it’s an intelligent person or not, baby or not, fetus or not. Human life has no other natural or sensible boundary other than, and if you are going to start splitting hairs over it, then I expect and demand consistency. Everyone’s moral worth should be evaluated in the same way. Peter Singer* is wrong, but he at least is honestly wrong.
For me, life is life. I do not assign “values” to human life of varying kinds, and note that people who do always somehow wind up assigning a much higher value to whatever class they personally belong to and/or admire. From the very moment of conception, a new being is born, one which develops at an absurdly rapid pace.
This being begins swiftly to have thoughts, dreams, experiences - and is in every way a moral being to me, with standing to claim rights, which we as members of the moral community must not violate. It is a human being, flesh of our flesh, part of our spiritual universe. It is a unique creation of God, endowed by him with the ability to choose. Even retarded or very stupid humans have made choices and continue to make them. Sometimes, of course, a human being is so damaged he cannot actively choose (and with modern medical teechnology we may have the ability to keep them alive somehow), but they are part of a moral community of humanity.
This is in contrast to animals, which can not and can never be part of the moral community. They do not make moral choices. They live without guilt and without sorrow or joy. They do not, apparently, particularly care for their children - even species which take care of theirs do not mourn their dead. Humans do, even if we sometimes must close off those feelings to function. We care.
An ethicist* who argues that moral standing is based, mor or less, on intelligence, and that intelligence defines moral standing. A baby is worth less than a man to Singer, and a retarded person worth less than a normal person. He would consider a normal animal sometimes more than a very stupid or “defective” human. He has, IIRC, no problem with abortion, because he considers unborn children to have no intelligence and effectively no worth or moral standing.
*Ethicist: A man who talks about morals without believeing in them, making rules he doesn’t follow, on principles he doesn’t believe in.
And I do separate abortion from anti-conceptives. They’re not the same. The one is a casual, banal horror humans casually inflict upon themselves daily. The latter is not good, but not evil (at least not in the same way). The former is actively doing evil; the latter is preventing great good.
I do consider the “morning-after” pill to eb int he same moral category as abortion. It acts to deliberately destroy an unborn, if very small, life. The fact that it technically does this before that life attaches to the uterine wall is morally irrelevant, though scientifically interesting.
The quote is from the 21st chapter of Exodus, not the 22nd not that that’s important. What is important is the ambiguity of that particular scripture and the distinct differences in different translations. The King James Version (which I prefer, and which was considered the standard until very recently) says:
The context and the content make it abundantly clear that this part of the Mosaic law is dealing with civil damages…ordering monetary compensation to a man for damage to his property. Since we no longer consider a woman or a child to be a man’s property I don’t think the old testament law applies in this case. At any rate, it’s a very weak argument against abortion.
As to your speculation that babies have to be born and (apparently) reach the age of accountability before they are elgible to reach heaven, I know of no doctrine that makes that statement. Is it just a hypothetical that you made up on the spur of the moment?
So result of rape/incest/whatever, it’s all the same? You would force a woman to carry an unwanted child of a rapist to term?
According to Mike Huckabee’s appointee as head of the Arkansas Department of Health, pregnancy rarely if ever results from a true rape. Dr Fay Boozman referred to this phenomenon as “God’s little shield” (also “RapeShield Hormones”); and he should know, being an ophthalmologist who served on the medical advisory board for a crisis pregnancy center.
have you heard of the courts forcing men to support children born to prostitutes they patronized? Or to their girlfriends who lied about being on the pill? Is it more fair for a man to support such a child for 18 years than for a woman to carry an unwanted baby for 9 months and then giving it up?
Life is not fair. Life is not nice. Shit happens, and the extra X chromosome of the victims involved does not necessarily entitle them to every possible accommodation they may see fit to demand to redress their suffering.
Addendum to my previous: a woman I worked with in theatre was raped, and she and her husband decided to raise the resulting child themselves. I’ve lost track of them in the meantime, but since it’s been nearly thirty years I rather imagine that their daughter knows her origins. I’m even more sure that she knows how much she’s loved.
But if Dr Boozman had tried to pull the bushwah on them that it wasn’t really rape because she got pregnant, he would have left the room on a stretcher (if not in a box).
Sorry, but there’s a big difference there.
Men patronizing prostitutes/knocking up their lying girlfriends involves (presumably) consensual sex. Furthermore, if the men really were concerned about not having to pay child support on an unwanted “product” of their fling, well, no one forced them not to use a condom, right? (I assume no one forced them to visit the hooker, either).
Rape is not only not consensual, but I don’t think there are too many instances of rape where the woman has the opportunity to exercise responsibility by using a contraceptive before-hand. So, yes, in the case of rape, I think that the victim DOES deserve more consideration than the person who just forgot to use that dang rubber.
then there are women who manage to obtain that condom after the fact and use the sperm or sabotage the condom during the act http://www.lemondrop.com/2010/11/11/sperm-hunting-woman-breaks-condoms-to-get-pregnant/
Regardless of the degree of deceit or violence involved in making that unwanted baby, you are still not entitled to murder it, according to a widespread opinion amongst Republican voters. Even if you really, really, really don’t want it and the big belly for 3 months looks bad with your new coiffure. I kid you not, that’s what a lot of people think 
Condom sabotage still doesn’t make the sex act as non-consensual as rape. Both parties still have the option to say no before the act.
And you’re never going to get everyone to agree on what constitutes “murder” when there are so many personally held opinions on what “life” is anyway. I think in the case of many rapes, the response time for terminating any unwanted pregnancy would fall within the period when emergency contraception is still effective, and I’d wager that even a few Republicans don’t have an issue with prevented implantation of the zygote. I know that if I were raped, one of the first things I would do, after going to the police, would be to get some Plan B.
TBH, I don’t see any but the most fringe social conservatives arguing that rape/incest are not acceptable grounds for allowing abortion. Some of the more recent cases of legislators taking out (or trying to take out) the rape/incest provision in abortion statues have been opined as purposely setting up court challenges that might ultimately lead to a challenge of Roe v. Wade if the case got high enough in the courts. I think, for the most part, that the anti-abortion crowd cries for more personal responsibility on the part of people (especially women) having sex, and this doesn’t really apply to rape victims.
are you serious about the “fringe” bit? Is that based on polls of actual people who claim to oppose abortion on religious grounds? Or is it more of a survey of actions of the I-will-die-triangulating politicos?
We still demand monetary compensation for injuries inflicted do we not? Thus in our society damages would be paid directly to the woman.
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No, it is just an argument I’ve hard.
Why do we kill the baby not the rapist? If the police so much as lay a hand on the rapist the thousands of ACLU lawyers in this Republic will be having a field day and issuing a cause celebre.
Again, I’m not talking about abortion in general here. I’m talking specifically about the rape/incest provisions. And I’m speaking more from the standpoint of what I hear politicians actually trying to get legislated. That’s more along the lines of what the OP asked, anyway.
The arguments that I hear from many in the anti-abortion crowd seem to emphasize personal responsibility for one’s actions and accepting the risks of sex and especially unprotected pre-marital sex. IOW, abortion shouldn’t be a “cop out” for someone who got themselves into an inconvenient situation. That whole argument kinda hits a brick wall when you start to consider rape and incest victims - people who can’t in the majority of cases be held personally responsible for their pregnancies. To that end I think that politicians don’t often touch on rape/incest provisions - not when there are targets which more people might agree with them on, such as late-term abortions and requiring parental consent/consultation for abortions performed on minors.
that’s what I am talking about. Allowing abortions in cases other than saving mother’s life may be “fringe” among politicos. It is not fringe among their voters. Because, like many people already said in this thread, being pro-life is not about “punishing” the woman for her indiscretions or plain bad luck. It’s about saving the life of the child, even if the child is literally a son-of-a-bad-guy.
Does one murder justify another? Is the father’s guilt transferred to the child? I don’t see how I force anyone to do anything. I do, however, demand that they ackowledge what they are, in fact, doing. To destroy your own child - no matter how it came about - is hate turned against an innocent object.
I’m glad you admit it’s just an object. Case over, next debate please.
I know that case. It turns out the girl grew up she was driving drunk and ran into a bus load of Nuns. I’m even more sure that those Nuns were on the way to warn people in New Orleans of the vision they had of the coming Katrina disaster. Tragic case all around.
What, you’re saying that the ACLU is against arresting rapists? C’mon, that’s ridiculous, even coming from you.