It’s not as arbitrary as you imply. I compare societies where women can’t control the number of children they have versus socieities where they can, and the latter are better off in a number of ways. Similarly, if I’m to be convinced by an argument that abortion needs to be criminalized, it’s going to need some solid reasoning. Simply changing the labels won’t do it.
I can imagine a possible scenario where I agree abortion had to be banned or heavily restricted. In the meantime, I don’t see the compelling state interest in intruding into this very personal matter.
I am pretty sure we all understand that is some persons’ views. In fact, it is my own view. Life really does begin at conception.
So what?
No.
This is a bit of an equivocation. Accepting that life begins at conception is not the same as granting all human rights to a zygote. Accepting that a three year-old child is a person is not the same as granting all adult rights to that person. If you restate your hypothetical without equivocation we are right back where we started, which seems to be the nearly-unanimous position that we will never make progress on this topic through direct debate.
Count me in the people whose views on abortion you should skip as well then. Der Trihs is right here.
I can’t see anywhere I can compromise with the pro-life movement, because a significant portion of that movement believes in the salami tactic - giving them an inch will truly lead them to seek a mile, whether in one jump or in incremental inches.
And that applies even where I think a restriction isn’t particularly problematic. If mandatory counselling would get the anti-choice people to hush, then great. But it wouldn’t. They would use that as a stepping stone to mandatory parental notification, or whatever the next step in their campaign is.
I don’t trust them, and I cannot compromise with someone I do not trust.
It’s not that simple. You are fine with your belief because it doesn’t involve killing people. If a group of people decided that they believe that people that are shorter that 5 feet tall are not actually people and they should be allowed to kill the shorties whenever they felt like it, you’d obviously have a problem with that. Granted, that example is grossly exaggerated, but the point I’m trying to get through to you is that I cannot sit by and let what I perceive (again MY perceptions) to be killing innocent humans go on without attempting to stop it.
I don’t harass women that have abortions, I don’t go blowing up clinics, I take part in the democratic process that makes this country great and vote for what I think is right. You are entitled to do the same, and thus the abortion issue will never be resolved.
I fully respect your position. Convincing someone that abortion is acceptable or not is probably the hardest thing to do, as it requires that the person change their fundamental belief structure one way or the other. I avoid trying to convince people to agree with my beliefs, since religion/lack thereof is a very personal thing. However, when it comes to human life I am willing to step into the uncomfortable area of trying to force my beliefs on others to save what I perceive to be lives. I don’t try to convert people to Catholicism, I don’t try to get people to go to church, but I will vote in opposition of abortion because I believe fetuses are living humans.
I’m done replying to this thread, since I’ve made my point. I have had many debates with pro-choicers (namely with my parents) and I have learned that there is no way to end such a debate…which was my original point in this thread.
I’m pretty much a pro-life liberal and I’m not trying to argue, these are just my feelings, ok guys?
But I feel that if a woman is going to have an abortion, the potential father should at least be notified and give permission to have the child aborted. Since it is half his child. I never understood the whole “it’s my body” argument. Yes, it is your body, but there is another body that has part of the father’s DNA growing inside you.
You may be the vessel, but you aren’t the only occupant.
It would be like a aircraft carrier captain saying, “it’s my ship, so I can sink it.” Even though there are 6000 people aboard?
Where do you live, that allows you to kill a guy because they didn’t leave when you asked them to? Is that how you get people to go home after a party?
Assuming for the moment that the other person does not pose an immediate threat to your health (as would be the case for elective abortion) you don’t get to just kill the person. You call the cops, who will escort the person out.
This is important because when you get a late term pregnancy, the fetus is viable outside your body, it doesn’t need you to live, it just happens to still be inside you. At that point, what gives the you the right to order the fetus killed, instead of ordering it removed?
The problem here is that you are giving an absolute veto to the father, and it won’t work in practice, just like rape exemptions won’t work in practice.
What woman who wants an abortion, when the person who provided the sperm does not want an abortion, will tell the doctor who the father is?
Ideally, the male half of the genetic equation should be involved; but without a veto. And you certainly can’t legislatively require it.
Human life started way before conception, it is in the man’s sperm,so each little sperm that doesn’t connect with an egg is a little human life dying?
Bilologically then, if you crack a chicken egg that has been fertilized and eaten you have killed a chicken?
Even if you believe the Genesis story you would have to admit human life was passed on from generation to generation. It is not a matter of life but of birth of a person and personhood is the right thing to discuss not human life. There is human life in your liver, heart and brain.
Some religions belive life begins at conception but if the sperm was dead there would be no conception.
I can understand that it’s more comfortable to dismiss someone’s disagreement as a matter of “fundamental beliefs” (i.e. purely arbitrary and unprovable), but I can actually support my position by comparing relative rates of poverty and literacy and such. It’s evident to me that a woman who wants to secure a better life for herself can more easily do so if she is able to control when and how often she has children.
It may be an arbitrary belief that women not being poor is a good thing, I admit. If the alternative can be presented in a positive way, I’m prepared to change my stance.
I understand the basis of beliefs that murder is occurring and such. I only ask that those who are willing to “step into the uncomfortable area of trying to force [their] beliefs on others” consider the effects of such steps. What law enforcement measures are justified? What penalties should be involved? What is the societal benefit of forcing unwanted children into existence? These are not moral questions; I’m asking about economics and police powers. Banning abortion is indeed an uncomfortable step, because it forces several dozen even more uncomfortable steps, including imprisoning doctors, keeping women in poverty, restricting access to certain information, creating a black market for abortion services, etc.
If anything, I find the pro-life stance to be a very short-sighted one. Before any kind of compromise can be reached, I’d need to know what exactly they have in mind when they propose banning or restricting abortion and what consequences they’re prepared to face.
You conceive of conception and pregnancy, obviously, as separate events.
They are linked events- one causes the other.
You are not recognizing the assumption of risk argument.
By your own analogy, that if you leave your doors open no-one has the right to enter your house without permission- it is not that fetus that has entered, it is the sexual partner, and they have changed something. That something is self-correcting, and you are claiming that the change itself is intrusive, even though you knew it a possibility when inviting them in.
What you perceive as an intrusion, and an isolated event, other people view as your responsibility for accepting it might occur, because you willingly took the risk.
The only counter-argument is rape, and rape does not constitute the majority of abortion cases- consequently, it does not justify them not falling under assumption of risk. The morality of purely elective abortions is one thing, the morality of abortions from rape is another.
This is an argument in favor of better education and contraceptives more than one for abortion, it seems. Again, where in your purview does accountability for action come in? If a woman wants to secure a better life for herself, should she be engaging in risk-behavior? To what point does society have a responsibility to protect them from themselves?
I’m asking this in a broader sense than abortion. If she becomes a drug addict, do we owe her rehab and a job, or to give her the opportunity to clean herself up and move up?
IMHO, one of the fundamental liberal-conservative divides regards the concept of liberty: To a conservative, it’s the ability to reap what you sow, with freedom provided to sow one’s own preference. To liberals, it is protection from one’s own stupidity as well as the vagaries of life.
The problem is that helping other people out is helping ourselves. In a broader sense, someone who becomes a drug addict may pretty much drop themselves right out of society. We don’t get to reap the benefits as a society at large from her tax money, whatever work she might do. And for each person that falls, there’s a good chance they’ll then take people down with them, or end up leeching off family members or friends, harming their contributions to society. And in the case of drug addiction, all that money and effort is being switched to going into dealer hands, and criminality in general.
Protection from one’s own stupidity as a notion is something that only works if the person is entirely individual from everyone else. But we’re a society, and we are all connected. If a stupid decision affects only the maker - fair enough, perhaps. But if a stupid decision affects all of us at large, it only makes sense for us to try and solve the problem. The concept of liberty you describe above only rings true if we close our eyes to the ties that bind us.
Most anti-choice people (Sarah Palin and a few other nuts excepted) believe that pregnancies caused by rape should be an exception to abortion restrictions, and this brings up more privacy issues.
If abortion is only legal if you were raped, there WILL be more false claims of rape to justify it (if there are thousands of women desperate enough for an abortion that they’ll risk their lives, there will be plenty willing to lie about being raped). How are we to determine who gets to have an abortion or who doesn’t then? There’s a spectrum of options.
If a woman claims to have been raped at the time she seeks the abortion, it should be allowed.
If a woman filed a report saying she was raped at the time of the rape (how soon after to be legal?) she is allowed an abortion.
If the rapist was named and indicted, the woman is allowed an abortion (and what about stranger rapes or rapes where the woman was incapacitated and cannot identify the rapist?).
If the rapist is convicted, the woman is allowed an abortion.
If the rapist is convicted and has exhausted his appeals, the woman is allowed an abortion.
This is the type of problem with banning abortion that most anti-choice people don’t seem to ever acknowledge or even consider - the consequences of these bans. A few extra million babies being born every year? Somebody elses problem. Women dying from back-alley abortions? Somebody elses problem. Birth control failures? Somebody elses problem. Somebody has sex and doesn’t want to have the baby? It’s the responsibility of society to make sure that she doesn’t get an abortion.
And if abortion is banned, how are we going to treat miscarriages? If Jane tells her friends she doesn’t want to have a baby, that she’s considering going to Canada to have an abortion, and then she loses the baby, is that cause for a legal investigation?
This is silly and distortive. It is the rare individual that supposes people should somehow be isolated from their own mistakes. I know of none, but I’m sure there are some out there. That is not an accurate assessment of any “liberal” policy I can think of. It might be said–not a phrasing I would choose, but it might be said–that liberal policies are meant to mitigate the cost of mistakes when those costs are out of proportion to the mistake, especially if mitigating the cost is well within the individual’s or society’s grasp. The cost of failing to pay attention for a moment while driving may be death, which is wildly out of proportion to the sin of failing to pay attention for a moment in almost every other case; thus, we should probably all wear seatbelts and promote safety regulations (society’s cost) and/or require people buy insurance (individual’s cost at society’s cost of enforcement). The cost–to the mother, father, and child–of unwanted pregnancy is wildly out of proportion to having sex, especially since sex serves other purposes besides procreation, especially in (or perhaps partly because we are) a species that does not go into heat.
I’ll gladly argue for better education and contraceptives anytime you want. They are related to the abortion issue, but they are not a substitute for the abortion issue.
I don’t see why getting an abortion to end a pregnancy is not being accountable. It’s acting in a manner to solve a problem. Truly not being accountable, it seems to me, would be doing nothing about the problem until it grows into a much larger problem forcing the intervention of others.
How are you defining “accountability”, anyway? If a person has a problem that can be treated by minor medical intervention early on, how is it better to wait until later when a far more complex solution is required?
Well, we have the means to let people secure better lives for themselves and engage in risk-behaviour. There may have been a time when this particular personal sacrifice (i.e. abstinence) was necessary, but such time has passed and I don’t know the benefit of bringing it back. If you can describe such a benefit, please do so. If it’s a valid benefit, I promise to take it into account when forming a possible compromise on the issue.
Can you expand on this, give some specifics? Who exactly are “them” and how is “them” not protecting “themselves”?
Simple cost/benefit analysis tells me the opportunity should exist in the form of a social safety net. Throwing junkies out into the wild to fend for themselves creates problems for the simple reason that the junkies will not politely vanish from existence. Rather, they’ll turn to crime to support their habits. There are several possible responses to this:
[ul][li]Once the state labels a person a “junkie” (or whatever the relevant status is), that person is efficiently executed.[/li][li]If the state does not wish to engage in casual execution, it can label the person a “junkie” (or, again, whatever the relevant label) and, if the junkie harasses a non-junkie citizen, that citizen can kill the junkie without repercussions, in the manner of private pest control. If the junkie can somehow eke out an existence without antagonizing any citizens, they should be left alone.[/li][li]If this is unacceptable, the state could decide to deal with the complaints of non-junkie citizens by sending out law enforcement agents to arrest and temporarily imprison junkies so citizens are annoyed less by the junkies’ thievery and antisocial behaviour.[/li][li]While the above solution is common in western societies, they are also gradually deciding that with some minimal effort (and these societies are sufficiently productive that enough surplus wealth exists to try), some junkies can be salvaged and made into non-junkies, leading to a long-term savings. Naturally, not all junkies are willing or able to make this transition and we’re back to the previous solution.[/ul][/li]
That’s a fine bit of vague (and inaccurate) philosophy, but do you have any specifics in mind on the wording and day-to-day application of a possible compromise abortion law? It turns out that in order to make an individual woman reap what she sows (i.e. keep an unwanted pregnancy going), society ends up paying as well (because of the million or so American woman with unwanted pregnancies every year, a disproportionate number are poor and undereducated, which likely means their children will be as well, and that’ll end up costing society more in the long term).
If we’re going to talk in stereotypes, doesn’t the rugged individualist (conservative?) stance suggest that an individual who solves her problems quietly and efficiently is better than one who waits until she needs social assistance? And isn’t the wimpy social-minded (liberal?) stance one where the individual should turn over these decisions to the state and be dependent on the state for all support? I’d’ve thought the conservative stance would be pro-choice and the liberal one anti-choice. Oh, well…
If a fetus is given human rights and the woman has a miscarriage, it will have to be investigated. Maybe the woman took an asprin washed down with coffee, remarked she didn’t want the baby or even “thought bad thoughts” that might have killed the fetus.
All unexpected and unexplained deaths have to be investigated to determine if it was accidental, suicide, or homicide.
And if you were right, we’d be like cows and generally conceive after one or two sex acts. Sex is NOT just intended for reproduction for humans; it’s social intercourse as well as physical intercourse.
It’s not absurd; I recall a thread some time back on this board where several women talked about how being pregnant creeped them out, regardless of how much they liked the end result of a child. And feel quite certain that a lot of impregnated rape victims feel that way.
No, because all that would prove is that “life” as defined by the person performing the proof isn’t worth preserving.
You can call a fetus a human life, or call it a blob of flesh, but that won’t change what it is. Demanding that it be called a person won’t make it one. All that claiming that a fetus is a “human life” does is lower the value of “human life”, not raise the value of a fetus.