By any means necessary they should offer to adopt or support children conceived by people who are stopped from abortion. The should gladly pay for them. Their housing, schooling and any medical care. Some will be expensive because a few will be from junkies and alcoholics.
I was referring to the screeching inherent in the overblown rhetoric of extreme anti-abortion rights advocates.
Yes, you’re a “pro-abortionist”. :rolleyes:
Would you say the same about people who oppose, say, child abuse? Or child abandonment? Should they gladly pay for the care and raising of these youngsters?
Are these people obligated to personally care for all of these abused or abandoned children, simply because they choose to speak out against these heinous deeds? If they fail to do so, does this somehow invalidate their stance, or demonstrate that they don’t really feel that abuse and abandonment are wrong?
Because preventing pregnancy in the first place is better, from a medical perspective, than even an early term abortion, I suppose.
But primarily to minimize abortion as a subject of debate. If I believe that the fetus doesn’t have a greater value, morally speaking, than a piece of gravel on the road, it’s still no skin off my back if we can reduce the number of abortions without increasing the number of births that are unwanted by the biological parents. And if it makes the pro-lifers happy - which it should - then why not?
As it turns out, that isn’t how I feel. I do regard the fertilized egg, embryo, fetus, whatever, as having greater moral worth than a piece of gravel. During the first trimester, I see the moral value of the life of that entity as being somewhat less than that of the life of a household pet - much less, if we’re talking early enough. And if you don’t want your household pet, you can take it to the animal shelter where it will likely be put to sleep. By the last couple months of pregnancy, OTOH (when, IIRC, abortions are rare already), I see the moral value of that life converging on that of an already-born child.
Which seems to me to be a solid basis for actually preferring that abortions be “safe, legal, and rare.”
Now like I said, making abortions “safe, legal, and rare” should be viewed as substantial progress by the pro-lifers. If there were only 100,000 abortions each year in the U.S. rather than the current 1.3 million or so, the “holocaust” of abortions would be a much smaller holocaust. I know they want a total ban on abortions, and on means of birth control that they believe kill fertilized eggs. But until whatever time they achieve such a ban, they share responsibility for the size of the ‘holocaust’ because people on the pro-choice side have been willing to work with them, for decades now, to reduce its size.
The main problem is, there’s no one on the pro-life side to talk to, that has any clout. The movement, by and large, wants no abortions, no birth control, no sex ed, no nothing. While I know there are sincere pro-lifers, the bulk of the movement is a movement that opposes anything that might remotely encourage or inform about sex outside of the bonds of holy matrimony.
Just as there were antislavery forces in the U.S. (e.g. Abraham Lincoln) who were willing to limit the expansion of slavery, while tolerating its presence in the South, as a first step towards slavery’s ultimate abolition, it would be good if there were substantial pro-life forces who were willing to go along with a program to substantially reduce the perceived need for abortions as a first step towards abolishing abortion altogether. But the nature of the movement, which is much more about sex than life, prevents that.
Hey, keep those rolling eyes to yourself. Would you rather he were an amateur-abortionist? Nothing but trouble there. 
Of course.
I don’t believe that having concern about child abuse means you should have to adopt a child, but yes. As a society, if you want to stop child abuse, you have to provide shelter for the children. If you want to make sure children survive, you have to provide the means for the care and raising of them. If the kids are important, you provide those means gladly–not necessarily through adoption, but through generous donations and willing taxation.
Ah, but we’re not talking about society, are we? We’re talking about individuals.
Suppose that you lived in a society where child abuse was tolerated. Would you be justified in speaking out against child abuse? Or would this only be justified if you were willing to personally pay for the care, feeding and shelter of these young people?
(I’m assuming, for the sake of argument, that you do indeed oppose child abuse. Please correct me if I’m wrong in that regard.)
You may be. I’m not. I’m talking, sure, about individuals making up a society. I expect all individuals to put their money where their mouths are, not to the extent of adopting a child (since adopting a child out of obligation is a horrible fate for a child), but for paying for all of the consequences of the laws we enact.
I reccommend a huge program for people to drop off children they can not take care of. or they do not want. It should be financed completely by anti abortionists.
Do they really believe or is it lip service. Robertson and Fallwell should start and finance it . If it is a deep and abiding religious drive that is their belief. If they really care about the children ,then it should be no problem.
But saying I do not believe in abortion ,therefore you should not have one is bs.
I remember having this argument on an earlier abortion thread. The response was that the morality was so important that consequences don’t matter and even acknowledging that consequences exist was tantamount to arguing for the selective reduction of children, because apparently there’s no difference between a fetus and a child.
Basically, the person I was arguing with concentrated on minutiae to avoid being pinned down.
Wait, abortion is legal in this country. So if things were up to you, we’d stop public funding of education, we’d stop subsidizing child care, we’d stop providing food for needy children?
You think we–as a society–should care for needy children, right? Or should every parent who will give birth to a needy child have an abortion? Should they be required to have an abortion? If they don’t have an abortion do you then wash your hands of the child, and let it die in the streets unless Christian abortion opponents take care of it?
And you do know that there are all kinds of Christian charities that help care for needy children, right? Not that I’m a Christian, but to complain that Christians don’t lift a finger to help needy children despite opposing abortion is silly. They do help needy children, and abortion is currently legal.
The thing I hate most about these abortion debates is the unwillingness to take moral and practical objections to abortion and the raising unwanted children seriously.
If children don’t have human rights and can be tossed in a dumpster unless a Christian anti-abortionist can be found to adopt them, then under what theory do adults have human rights? Under what theory do the handicapped have human rights? What sorts of entities have a right to life? What sorts of entities have an unambiguous right to life, what sorts of entities have certain rights but not others, and what sorts of entities have no rights?
Human rights aren’t handed down from God, they are an agreement between all of us about what sort of society we prefer living in. The fact that your political opponents don’t have a coherent solution to a problem doesn’t give someone the right to gleefully wash their hands of the problem. Of course criminalizing abortion won’t solve anything, but that doesn’t mean we live in the best of all possible worlds today. And changing medical and genetic technology will sharpen some aspects of the abortion controversy while softening others.
I agree, there is a difference between a somatic cell, a fertillized egg, a developing in vitro embryo, a fetus, a 7 month old unborn baby, a baby, a child, a teenager, and an adult. To expect clear cut lines in nature is folly, no such lines exist. But antiabortion activists aren’t the only ones who pretend there are clear cut lines.
So we are talking about individuals, then.
Again, I ask… Should i dividuals only speak out against perceived abuse if they are willing to personally care for the abused? Are you only allowed to speak out against child abuse if you are willing to personally pony up the funds needed to care for those children?
Saying “Let society take care of them!” is dodging the issue. What if society disagrees with your viewpoint? Does that obligate you to keep silent on this matter?
Personally pony up every cent? No. Absolutely stop bitching about the cents that are required to do the things wanted? Yes.
In other words, if your taxes go up 500% because of policies you want, suck it up.
[Bolding mine]
I don’t think people are saying that all humans, even ones that have already been born, are equally worthy of saving, no matter what life stage they are in.
If there is a burning building with a five year old boy and a 95 year old man, I think most would opt to save the 5 year old boy, if they could only save one of them.
Unless of course, the 5 year old boy was dying of leukemia or some other incurable disease, in which case you would save the 95 year old man.
Basically, the burning clinic example fails because it makes an invalid assumption.
You’ve missed/dodged the key element already in example to address this question, which is that we can have up an infinite number of embryos in the vat. Sure, you might have reasons for picking one person over another, but what happens when I can play with the scales? You’d really save one 5 year old over a MILLION 95 year olds? You’d save one family grief at the expense of millions of them?
The point is that I’d save the kid, and I think most people would save the kid, almost without thinking or hesitating, against even an effectively infinite amount of embryos.
A lot of people here would very very much like to dodge the logical implications of morality on their own obligations to act. That’s alright, because I think this is pretty common, and is really sort of side debate.
But as I noted, what happens when we’re just talking about the morality of what another person has done. Forget the question of your own obligation, and just consider the actions of another based on the stated rhetoric of pro-life advocates: whether they are morally justified or not.
I guess I was being a little sloppy and colloquial, but I’ve heard the terms used interchangeably. The correct legal term is “alter ego defense” not self-defense. However, you’ll still find that this often falls under the general heading of “self defense” in many places though. This is because the standard for defense of others is basically “would the person you see under threat have the right of self-defense if they could act to save themselves” (i.e. its an act of self-defense performed on behalf of a person who could not defend themselves)
Time for thought and/or hesitation might be the key element in the decision, though. In the hypothetical you describe, I would instinctively grab the child. Why? Because it’s an emotional response that I am making in the moment. Obviously, it is easier to relate emotionally to a child, and it IS part of our instinctive nature to protect children (as opposed to embryos, which we cannot relate to instinctively, especially outside the womb, given that embryos outside the womb did not exist until 20 or so years ago). In addition, you are potentially talking about intense suffering on the part of the child, whereas the embryos would never know what hit them.
Having said that, given a situation where I could literally save 10,000 embryos that are GAURANTEED to be implanted and be born (waving aside the issues of implantation, and that fact that it can’t be gauranteed to be done successfully), I would seriously have to consider that in making my decision. I would, given that set of premises, indeed feel that I had sacrificed 10,000 peoples’ lives for the life of one, having saved the child instead of the embryos.
Emotionally, this may seem wrong. But we can’t always make decsions about right and wrong based on our emotions.
You raise a good point.
After thinking about it for a few minutes, I think the way I would look at it is as follows.
If the clinic had fetus incubators that could carry a fetus all the way to birth, then, how many fetuses I would rescue vs the 5 year old boy would depend on how far along in their development the fetuses were.
So, for example, if the fetuses were 2 days old, I’d probably save the 5 year old over 100,000 such fetuses.
If the fetuses were 3 months old, maybe I’d save the 5 year old over 1,000 fetuses.
If the fetuses were 6 months old, maybe I’d save the 5 year old over 10 fetuses.
If the fetuses were around 9 months old, and ready to be born, then I’d guess it would be close to one to one.
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The numbers above are just examples. Let’s not get too caught up in the exact values.
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I think a similar “discounting” would happen at the other end of the life spectrum, but, definitely not as huge as the discounting as we approach the moment of implantation of the embryo.
Now, I’m not sure how I would explain this discounting, and have no theory under which all this would comfortably fit, but I think this is how a lot of people would behave.
To hear some pro-abortion people tell it, the fetus is nothing until it exits the woman’s body, it’s just a bunch of cells that can be discarded without a problem. For these people, in my example above, they would have to choose the 5 year old over 100,000 fetuses around 9 months old and ready to be born. I think that is unrealistic, and most people would not act this way, which shows that they do put some value in fetuses before the moment of birth.
Well, isn’t that relevant to moral choices? Shouldn’t it be? It seems to me that most pro-life people seem to be completely unaware of what morality is for. It’s just a set of rules: if someone is genetically human, they’re in, if not, they’re out. Why? Them’s the rules I guess. But why?
Whereas, I can’t see how it could NOT be relevant. Embryos are functionally no different than bacteria in virtually every relevant respect. Treating them in any way like they are equivalent to even a fetus seems, frankly, morally outrageous to me. It’s like walking into a factory of people building submarines with screen doors.
Why?
Fair enough. You really would? And I assume that an effectively infinite number of embryos which would later be available for implantation would make it not even a hard decision at all?
True, though often our emotions can draw out things we don’t like to admit about our more abstract convictions. And since morality has to ultimately have SOME root in some sort of sense of value, when we find ourselves doing things so radically out of whack from what our emotions suggest, it’s a at least a worthwhile signal that some more introspection is needed.
Embryos are functionally equivalent to bacteria?
Not really.
I know this might seem a pretty trivial nitpick, but it just goes to show the fundamental ignorance about biology that is rampant on all sides of the abortion debate.