Not true. Feminists for Life did not. Neither did Democrats for Life. Nor the Pro-Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians.
Ask people who were born from an unplanned pregnancy, or who had a troubled or impoverished childhood, “Do you wish you were dead, not in a figurative sense, but literally?” I am betting that in over 99% of the time, the answer will be, “NO.”
Besides, whatever happened to “choice” and “the right to control one’s body”? Seems to me that the pro-choicers who use that argument to advocate abortion are also depriving others of their choices, and their alleged right to bodily control.
Another national pro-life organization that did not endorse George W. Bush for president: Americans United for Life.
I dunno, Bob. It sounds like you think if you act condescendingly to me long enough, you’ll make me lose my cool and thus “win” the argument.
HA! I say, HA!
I’m not sure YOU understand, but that may be my fault for failing to make myself clear. There are any number of laws on the books that are very difficult to enforce but (critical point coming) we keep those laws anyway because we have decided that the crime is heinous enough that law enforcement should at least TRY to fight the losing battle. Law enforcement becomes most difficult in so-called “victimless” crimes (gambling, personal drug use, prostitution) because, by definition, there is no victim that can file a complaint or have their story told in court. So long as many people view a fetus as not the equivalent of a person, abortion will remain viewed by many as a victimless crime, and in many states, it’s not even a serious enough “crime” to bother legislating, even if Roe v. Wade vanished.
Now, you can choose to define abortion as sufficiently heinous to require legislation, but I don’t, and I don’t think many Americans (I’m Canadian, by the way) do, either. At least, there’s not yet been a sufficient populist groundswell to pass a constitutional amendment on the issue, making Roe v. Wade moot.
Thus is the basis of my argument:
[ul][li]Laws that restrict abortion are intrusive by nature. Even if no travel restrictions are imposed, you are in effect forcing a woman to have a child against her will.[/li][li]The loss of a fetus does not strike me as sufficiently compelling cause to create or enforce such laws. This is obviously a point of major disagreement between us, and calling my position arbitrary doesn’t make your position any less arbitrary.[/li][li]Given that the benefit offered by a ban (saving some unwanted fetuses) does not outweigh the intrusion into civil rights, I advocate that no ban be imposed.[/li][/ul]
I hope THAT clears it up. Laws aren’t bad just because they are unenforcable. Laws can be bad if they hurt individual freedom more than they benefit society. I’m not convinced that any significant benefit exists.
Darn. I was planning to use that line myself, but you beat me to it.
I never lose sleep over stupid ideas. Sure, your proposed ban could close clinics and punish some gynecologists and make it more difficult for a woman to get an abortion, and some of those women who can’t overcome the barriers you have imposed will be forced to carry their children to term. But I think the idea that most, or even many, women will carry an unwanted child simply becuase some politican says they have to is utter bullshit in the first degree. Most (I believe) will view this intrusion as a blatant restriction of their civil rights (or they’ll just consider it none of the god-damned government’s business) and, I fear, many will take dangerous alternatives to the safe surgical abortions currently available. If a woman dies from a botched post-ban abortion, she is a victim and the ban will be proven unjust.
I wouldn’t give the ban idea enough credit to call it evil. I’d rather just call it stupid, unworkable and unnecessary. The reason I keep repeating the “unenforcable” argument is because your “counter-argument” repeatedly dismissed my point without any good reasons. Is inability to enforce completely irrelevant in the passing of laws, now? Personally, I’d like to know how you go about setting up a “sting” operation to trap an abortionist. If a pregant undercover policewoman walks into a clinic and asks for an abortion, then arrests a doctor who begins the procedure, doesn’t that create a defense case for entrapment? And if you rely on electronic bugging or eyewitness accounts (as from nurses, etc.) doesn’t that destroy medical confidentiality?
I just have to come back to this point, then: Is forcibly bringing a few unwanted babies into the world sufficient cause to give law enforcement this much power over women? I don’t think it is.
But others may disagree.
And ask any aborted fetus if they had wished they had lived, and you will get deafning silence.
Goo, I am very interested in your point of view on this as it differs from most of the more conventional pro-choice views I see posted here. Another similar thread terminated before I got you opinion on a few points.
If you agree that the fetus is fully human, how is abortion not depraved indifference, and wouldn’t the argument that it is not right to force the mother to keep the child alive open up the possibility that killing could be justified when the continued life of the victim would place an undo harship upon the the one who kills them?
I guess you may say that it has to do with specifically legislating what she can do with her own body, but some previous points left the question open enough I wanted to ask.
I must say that your viewpoint does have a benefit over some other pro-choice views that I am sure at least the two of us can agree on: It allows someone who injures a pregnant woman to cause a miscarriage to be charged with murder.
**Hey, watch the HA’s, fella! OK, you seem to be a reasonable chap. Apologies for any condescension.
**I do understand that. I was reacting to your posts that accepted as a given that your axiom should be “truth.” I believe that human beings have the right to live. You have categories of human beings you do not assign that right to. Any argument you or I make based on our personal axioms will not stand up for the other, not until we’ve overcome this difference. That’s all.
**And yet, that was largely the circumstance prior to Roe v. Wade, at least in much of the U.S. Yes, it’s a different world, but this ain’t utter bullshit to be dismissed out of hand.
Don’t inject morality into an abortion debate, eh? Gotcha. That’ll keep things focused.
I don’t believe one can donate something one has a moral obligation to provide. A guardian does not “donate” room and board to his children. And I’m not sure how that would render the mother unequal. Can you clarify?
Unlike, say, murdered adults (assuming you believe they had a right to live), who would undoubtedly stand up and strongly complain.
**You can continue to spin things this way, but what I am actually saying, whether you choose to acknowledge this or not, is that your distress does not justify killing an innocent human being. That is NOT the same as saying I have no compassion for your distress, though I realize it’s very convenient for you to frame things in this manner.
My biggest problem with outlawing abortion is this.
Right now, my body-like everyone else body- is my body. There are a few regulations about what I can buy and sell to put in my body, but for the most part even drug laws are about pocessing and transfering drugs, not actually using them. I can get it tattooed. I can injure it or I can annoint it with oil. I can feed it junk food or I can take good care of it. I can choose to seek or not seek any medical treatment I might need. It is fully under my juristiction.
But if abortion were illegal, my body would no longer be my body. If you can prevent me from abortion a fetus, where does the line get drawn? What if I want to smoke or drink or do heavy arobics? What if I want to eat a lot of fennel, drink pennyroyal tea and fall down a few flights of stairs? More realisticly, what if I need to take medication that will have dreadful effects on fetuses? What if I am suicidal?
These are real concerns. I know personally that in the mental state I am in, I would not be able to deal with the mental, physical and hormonal changes of childbirth without using phychiatric drugs that would most likely cause severe birth defects in the future child. Nobody else can tell this. Nobody else can decide for me if I can or cannot carry a baby. I know this in my heart and I really really do not ever want this tested because the world would pretty quickly be short one even sven.
The idea that something would be happening to my body that I could not change- that I would have to give up the sovereignty of the bounderies of my body- is abhorrant to me. I know things about this body that nobody else knows. I know the right and wrong thing to do. And I am the only one that knows. It makes me literally sick to my stomach to think that in the near future if I should become pregnant my body would no longer be my own- it would belong to the fetus under the governership of the state. I could become a slave just like that, and there is nothing I can do about it despite that it’s my flesh that feeds it, my mind that reels from it and my body that is filled with surges of hormones that change it forever.
Ok let’s look at a way of solving this debate. First let’s look at our sides:
1.) We have pro-life people who just care about saving the life of the (insert your term of choice for the “unborn”) and what happens to them after that is someone elses problem
2.) We have pro-choice people who don’t wish the responsibility of (insert your term of choice for the “unborn”) and doesn’t care what happens to (insert your term of choice for the “unborn”) to get this done
Now currently we have Roe v. Wade in favor of the pro-choice but if it was done away with it would then be up to the States to decide on their stance on this issue. So we’ll bring them into this as a 3rd party interested (as most political structures are) in their own self interest.
Now what I propose is a program (& facilities) for the rasing of unwanted children. These programs will raise the kids as wards of the state til age 18 unless adopted. Now you have the child alive (pro-life) and not ruining some womans life (pro-choice). The woman must still go thru the pregnancy, this will be the price for not watching you birth control better, but will be paid for by the state. Now the obious question is how to fund all this. Well for this we will split it 50% state (their price for anti-abortion laws) and the other 50% will be donations from the people of the state. Like the presidental fund donation on your tax return. This could even be made into a tax instead of a donation. The pro-life get to ease their morals knowing they are saving lives and the pro-choice are getting out cheaper than raising a child for 18 years. Now if it is a donation, the pro-choice people who do not donate will not be allowed to use the program and must have and care for the child. However I think the tax is more fair. As this really affects everyone.
Well that is my solution, anyone think it is not a good start?
Jagang, I think just about any pro-lifer would love it since that is what they are asking for, but not so for pro-choice. You fall into a problem I recently encountered. The issue for many pro-choicers seems to be that the state is telling them what to do with their own body. Though I fall on pro-life I agree that your own body is yours to do with as you choose. Drugs and prostitution should be legalized from this stance as it is your use of your own body.
The problem is that pro-choicers say that the rights of the fetus to live supersede (at least for the duration of the pregnancy) personal freedom much as the right of adults to live limits the personal freedom to swing baseball bats around wherever you wish. Pro-choicers on the other hand say that the rights of the fetus (whether human or not depending on who you talk to) do not. The rest of what you say is a necessity if abortion were to become illegal, but the pro-choicers do not say that it is enough to remove their rights of sovreignty over their bodies (correct me if I misinterpret anything).
So you “compromise” will win over almost all pro-lifers and maybe two or three pro-choicers in the country.
Well our current foster care program is one of the worst programs ever perptuated by the state. Really it’s hard to overemphasize just how bad the situation is. Many if not most children in foster care today grow up inches above the poverty level, without any sort of love or family (foster families often will cut off all contact when a foster child turns eighteen, even if that child is still in high school) and with little hope for the future considering they have no one except an overworked case worker to see that they are clothed and taken to school, much less guided away from trouble, encouraged to go to college and generally “raised up right”.
There are many wonderful foster parents out there, and I applaud them. But the foster care system on the whole is a very very broken system. We can’t even handle the kids we have, and those that we do handle get screwed in some of the worst ways possible.
Oh, and Jagang, even though most unwanted pregnancies come from poor birth control you are probably going to get flamed for a crack like “The woman must still go thru the pregnancy, this will be the price for not watching you birth control better…”
OK, make the obvious corrections to pro-choice and pro-life in my earlier post.
even, though foster care undoubtedly sucks, if the child were given up at birth they would much more likely find an adoptive family not a foster family. Foster care tends to be a problem more for older children. I know that anywhere in the country a healthy caucasian baby will go to one of the people on the huge waiting lists of adoptive parents. There is more of a problem for minority babies and those with handicaps but I do not know the statistics. My point is that [Jagang**'s idea is not flawed on those grounds, but on the grounds it really doesn’t satisfy any pro-choicers.
Yes I know the state of foster care. But I have yet to hear a pro-life person state anything about what happens to a kid after birth. So I decided they would not care about this, it’s alve and that should be enough for them. As for pro-choice, I’m offering this as an alternative to total ban. They as well should not care of the treatment of the child after birth due to they were not going to have it anyway. Though I am curious if the view changes as they watch the child from afar as he/she grows. However the idea of adoption is just an option in this idea as I expect most of the kids to remain where they are and be raised by the state. I personaly think part of this system is in place in some states.
[Let me explain, off topic]
During my teen years I was diganoised as bi-polar. At the time I was living with my mom in Tennessee. When off my lithium I was a bit of a rebelious child. I found out the hard way that in the state of Tennessee all a parent has to do is walk up in front of a court and say "My child is ‘unruley’ " and you become a ward of the state. I spent the years of 15-18 as a Ward of Tennessee state. A juvinile prisoner if you will, though I had broken no law or gone thru any juvinile court for such. All it took was a mother saying “I can’t control my child.” So for the next 3 years I bounced around state controled group homes, detention centers, and half-way houses used for juvinile law offenders as well as kids waiting for a home. The only difference was I was a state ward of DCS (Dept of Child Services) and they (the law breakers) were state wards of DCC (Dept of Child Correction)
[End Rant]
Back on topic
Point being, I have heard no argument for the childs welfare from the sides other than it’s right to live.
For this line I was speaking from the stance of a pro-lifer who thinks 90% of women are out being careless due to they can just have an abortion if something goes wrong.
BTW I should point out I am a male supporter of pro-choice. The only issue I have with abortion is where the male has no option in this choice. I speak on this from terms of a child support point of view. What if you are a man who does not want the child and wishes the woman to abort but she has it anyways and your forced to pay for it. On the other side, if the woman doesn’t want this responsibility she has the choice to abort. On that subject I think a guy who wants a woman to abort shouldn’t be held liable for child support. Now before anyone flames me on the above point, I may be pro-choice but I am also the father of 3 children who live with their mother and me. I love them dearly but I would of supported any decision my wife would of made.