No, you’re wrong.* The abortion debate hinges on one side’s belief that personal bodily autonomy is the most basic and fundamental of rights, not to be abrogated, and the other side’s belief that it’s perfectly acceptable to take over someone else’s body against her will as long as she’s female.
Only as long as we let the anti-abortion folks define the debate to their specifications, which ain’t gonna happen.
*Sorry, but my definition is every bit as valid as yours. Part of the problem with this issue is the fact that the two sides can’t even agree about what issue they’re debating.
What purpose does it serve? If it’s the furtherance of society at the expense of the majority of the members of society, then shouldn’t law be abolished in the interests of society?
Anyway, I’m marginally anti-choice (despite considering myself a feminist… I know…), but I like to think of myself as an ally of perhaps Maya Keyes or Christopher Hitchens on that point rather than Santorum. I’d far prefer to discuss the issue with Peter Singer or Noam Chomsky than Rush Limbaugh. In fact, the latter’s virulent attacks on women probably serve to silence anyone that could form a half-coherent objection to (say) late term abortions.
Trying to communicate why pro-choice is not necessarily pro-abortion to some pro-lifers, I came up with this analogy. It is by no means perfect, and presupposes some things that they would expect but the pro-choice contingent here would not necessarily accept. But for the purposes of posing the two questions it ends with, I think it works.
For the purposes of this hypothetical, your mother is deceased, your siblings if any rlsewhere and disinterested in helping. Your father has suffered the last and most devastating of a series of strokes, one which has left him conscious and alert but unable to talk or to volitionally move most of his body. He can smile, he can twitch a few muscles, and you and he have evolved a “20-questions” mode of your determining his needs and wants. You now live in his home; the level of care he needs is more than a nurse’s aide/CNA is capable of but you have learned it over the years as he has had one stroke after another. Much of his pension was lost in the AIG/Shearson-Lehman fiascos, and with your skill set, you do not stand a chance of earning enough at a workplace out5side the home to afford the level of care he needs from a professional nursing caregiver. But between his Social Security, what is left of his pension, and what you can earn in a work-from-home part-time position you’ve landed, you can make ends meet. But he needs you there 24/7/365 – while you can have friends in, you can never go out while he remains alive and at home. And he’s vehement, by gesture and frown, that he does not want a nursing home.
Your questions:
1 Do you have a moral duty to take care of your father, being the only affordable source of the care he needs. so that he can live with dignity in his own home?
Does the state have the right to mandate that you do so?
My answers: 1. While there is room for debate, for me and many others, yes, there is a moral obligation there. 2. No, the state has no such right.
Well, I’d say that for some people the answer is that the question is undecidable. I don’t consider a woman who takes the position that she would never abort a fetus, even one that is the product of rape, as wrong or stupid, because that is her decision. That is quite different from how I feel about someone wishing to teach Creationism, which is also religiously based. I hope it is clear that I’m not equating positions on Creationism and abortion, but distinguishing between them.
If you believe god instills each fertilized egg with a soul, well and good. But if you want to force me to act as if I believe it, then God should come down and let us know.
BTW, we don’t have laws about robbery for the victims of robbery, but because we are all the potential victims of robbery. Since none of us are the potential “victims” of abortion, it is not a good analogy.
I can think of plenty of crimes that I’m not a potential victim of, but which laws I think should continue to exist. I’m not a minor, but I support child abuse laws. I’m not a dog but I support animal cruelty laws.
I would say that I have a moral duty to see that my father is cared for, but, alas, I know I’m incompetent to do it. I could fake it, but that would simply be another way of denying him the care he needs. I’d have to end up punting it to a hospital emergency room (leaving him on the doorstep like a foundling…) But, yes, it is “my problem,” and it is morally up to me to do something. If all else fails, well, I’ll buckle down and do the best I can.
And, definitely, no, the state should not enslave/conscript/mandate me to do it.
Damn good questions; you’ve made me feel remarkably uncomfortable! (No, no, that’s a good thing!)
Yes, precisely. The prolife side believes that personal bodily autonomy is the most basic and fundamental of rights not to be abrogated to the person’s mother, and the other side’s belief is that it’s perfectly acceptable to take over someone else’s body because it can’t express its will, as long as the overtaker is a pregnant female.
OK. We have laws against killing the profoundly mentally retarded. None of us are profoundly mentally retarded, but we do not say, “Hey, if you don’t want the retards killed, don’t kill them, but leave me alone to do as I wish.” We have laws that forbid cockfighting, even though none of us here are roosters. We cannot be thwarted on those laws by a participant who says, “Hey, if you don’t want to watch roosters fight to the death, don’t watch them. Buut leave me and my fighting birds alone.”
In more general terms, we don’t have a limit on laws that says we must be personally affected by them before we can support them.
Hi, Brick. IIRC, you’re the asshole who blathered on and on and on about how wrong we were to impugn your hero, Karl Rove, without ever condescending to read the charges levied against him in the OP. :smack:
Yeah, I think we already know what we need to know about your “intellect.”
I’ll admit to being saddened by your performance in that thread: Prior to that you had seemed to be about the only right-winger at SDMB with even a soupçon of intellectual honesty.
At one point, in that thread, you admitted that you’d been babbling on and on without ever reading OP but, rather than admitting you were wrong, or saying a Roseanne Roseannadanna “Nevermind!”, you continued your case, despite that its ground had vanished.
I was truly disappointed. I’m afraid I will give little, if any, attention to your future posts.
Okay, those are better examples. Now, what do you think about laws forbidding the eating of pork passed if a majority of people were convinced that pigs were conscious entities? My main point, which you ignored, was that the correctness of the position that a fetus is a person is undecidable.
Now I admit that my pig example is weak because pigs do have brainwaves and pigs are not resident inside of those who are persons.
Do you have a link to that thread? Bricker may be right-wing, but I have no doubts about his ‘intellect.’ Every once in a while his preoccupation with tangential matters make me wonder if he’s just arguing as an exercise or because he really holds the opposing view, but he’s smart and actually communicates with other posters - not across them.
That’s a good point, and, if I understand correctly, is the main thrust of the Roe v. Wade decision - we just don’t know if the fetus is a person, therefore, we can’t put its rights on a par with the mother’s.
Except studies have shown that medical ultrasounds, even ones that describe the anatomy of the fetus in specific terms, do not cause women to change their minds about abortions.
That’s because women aren’t having abortions because they don’t know that they’re carrying a fetus with the start of a brain and arm buds and even a tiny beating heart. They’re well aware. The majority of women who have abortions in this country have already had at least one child. They know what it means to be pregnant and they know the end result of pregnancy.
Women have abortions because they can’t afford to be pregnant, they can’t afford to miss work be forced to quit altogether. They can’t afford to miss or quit school. They can’t afford to feed, clothe and care for a child. They have abortions because they are too young or too old to properly care for an infant. They have abortions because they cannot safely take on additional familial obligations. They have abortions because they don’t have safe places to live. They have abortions because they’re in abusive relationships. They have abortions because their health cannot handle a pregnancy or the rigors of parenting, especially a newborn. They have abortions because they’re concerned that the medications that keep them healthy will have deleterious effects on a developing fetus.
None of those circumstances are magically altered by an ultrasound, forced or otherwise, or a description of the fetal physiology or the “potential medical consequences” of the abortion procedure.
Women are not having abortions because they don’t know the things that these so called “right to know” bills assert that they need to know, it’s because they know that those things don’t matter a damn bit, not in the short term of 3/4 of a year of pregnancy or in the long term of 18 years of parenting obligation.
And all clinics in Texas have been following this law for the last *44 *days. And none have reported anyone suddenly being so newly enlightened with the information garnered from the ultrasound that she has cancelled the abortion as a result. Not one. Because it just doesn’t happen.
Nonsense. The anti-choice side (they are NOT “pro-life” in any sense and care nothing for the life of the “unborn”) is concerned with oppressing and brutalizing women, and cares about the fetus only as a weapon with which to do so.
I never have, don’t attribute to me a belief I never supported. Women have always been some of the most enthusiastic oppressors of women, just as men have been of men. For that matter, all religious and political persecution of humans has been by other humans; belonging to a group doesn’t mean you are going to be nice to it. It just means you are probably going to exempt yourself from whatever persecution you are indulging in; anti-abortion women will generally cheerfully have an abortion of their own then go right back to ranting about how evil it is and how any women who wants one is a slut. But not them, of course.
What do i think? I’d be opposed to such laws, personally, but if they were passed by the requisite majority process I’d acknowledge their legitimacy. That’s how our system works, right? Since the question is undecidable, neither side can point to objective justification.
But you’re right that the question of abortion has an aspect not present in cockfighting or pork eating: that the law imposes a burden on one person to support another for a period of time, in ways that can be hazardous to her health.
Laws can compel a man to pay for the support of a child even if the child is not his. The rationale behind those laws, as I understand it, is that it’s a societal interest that someone support the child.
What if there were a law forbidding devotions to the Blessed Virgin, the Blessed Sacrament, etc.? Now, this does not impinge on your choice of faith because one can be a Catholic without engaging in such devotions. To me, it seems like an open-and-shut case that such laws would violate the Free Exercise Clause – but I can see people arguing otherwise. Would your devotion to the principle of presumption of constitutionality for any legislatively adopted law lead you to abide by this, and to call for the prosecution of those who do not?
Though posed a bit polemically, this is not rhetorical – I’m sincerely interested in how you’d resolve the dilemma here.
People who so proudly call themselves pro-life are often completely pro-death in so many other circumstances. They’re often pro-death penalty, anti-national health insurance and firmly against helping anyone who isn’t in the womb. One of my neighbors exemplifies this stance to me. At any given time she has half a dozen pro-life stickers and signs in her front yard. But she also periodically posts signs indicating that she opposes any and all efforts to increase funding for the local schools. I had to instruct eldest child to avoid going anywhere near her ever again when the bitch handed my daughter a nasty right wing pamphlet instead of Halloween candy.
