Esp. for pro-lifers: What would happen if abortion were outlawed?

Great Debates
61

What exactly is this mysterious sexual responsibility? I do not see cosenting, informed sex to be in any way irresponsible. STDs suck, but few things in this world are without risk. Far more people die or become a burden to society through car accidents than STDs. You take your life in your hands when you drive to work every morning. Pregnency is pretty easy to avoid, and with legal abortion, there is almost never any need to bring an unwanted child into the world. So what is sexual responsibility? If it translates into people not having sex unless they are in some situation that you approve of, I’m really really going to have to disagree with you. And as far as this whole business of introducing new “consequences” to punish “irresponsibilty”, well, I’m sure I don’t have to explain my objections.

My main objection to banning abortion it is downright creepy that I may well not own my body. If I should get pregnant, my body would no longer be mine for nine months. It will, by government mandate, belong to the fetus. Thats creepy sci-fi territory there, and I don’t like it one bit. I am a human being, not a walking incubator. I personally might have to decide if I want to stop taking drugs that maintain my sanity and in all likelyhood keep me from being suicidal, or keep taking them and know that everytime I take a pill I am causing horrible birth defects in a baby that I am forced to carry and give birth to. That scares the hell out of me. And I am sure that plenty of women out there have their own- very personal but very real- reasons why they cannot have a child. I’ll leave that up to them, their doctor, and their God.

62

I posted my earlier remarks in a dozen other Abortion-oriented threads, & nobody ever had the conjones to reply. Hint, hint, hint…

63

I only said “potential adult” as a way of assuming humanity without having to state the definition every time (e.g., a complete and unique set of human DNA with only nutrients required for full adulthood, special cases aside). I thought “potential adult” implied all of that, and excluded things like sperm, which some people have difficulty differentiating from a zygote. Thus, a potential adult is actual life. As I outlined above, I don’t think there is any such thing as a “potential life”. Either something is a human life or it isn’t.

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Hi Bosda, are these the remarks of which you spoke?

I’m not sure what response was required. It is a comment on how difficult it would be to enforce the law, and I have no information that challenges what you say. I do wonder how effective these plants are, and why they aren’t used now. But regardless, assuming the factuality of what you say, which I have no problem doing for this discussion, I don’t see how the morality of the issue is altered at all by such facts. We can just add those facts to the list of post-illegalization problems.

65

I am adamantly pro-choice. However, I do agree that it would be a wonderful idea for those who want to reduce the number of abortions, which I hope includes both pro- and anti-choice people, to reduce the need for them. This means, obviously, education and the availability of sound birth control measures, and whatever support it is possible to provide to those facing unwanted pregnancies. It’s quite likely that if better support were available, more women would elect to carry an unwanted pregnacy to term, and this would be fine.

This would never eliminate all abortions. No birth control method short of removal of the ovaries or the uterus is without its failures. Much as we try to eliminate it, the evil of rape will always be present to some degree. There will always be a number of cases of severe birth defects detected in utero. There will always be some women for whom pregnancy is a life- or health-threatening event. There will always be some women for whom pregnancy is anathema for some reason, and who become pregnant despite all reasonable efforts to the contrary. It is for these reasons that abortion must remain a regrettable but safe alternative.

66

It’s only irresponsible if you pretend the risks of STDs or pregnancy aren’t there, or if you otherwise aren’t willing to live with the consequences of your own actions. We all take risks, and we do so responsibly if we are willing to live or die with the consequences. It is only when we act like consequences have no meaning that we are being irresponsible.

I agree with this factual statement. The problem is, that I and others believe that killing an innocent person is not a legitimate way of escaping responsiblity for a night of sex. If the fetus is not a person, there is no problem with abortion as regards killing a person, of course.

Actually, no. It translates into people not having sex unless they are willing to live with the consequences of the sex without killing people.

My views are quite libertarian. People can do whatever they want in whatever situation they want as far as the law is (or should be) concerned…as long as they aren’t harming any person without that person’s consent.

67

JThunder,

I’ve often read your take on abortion and I know you are pro-life. Could you please answer the OP? I would be very interested to hear your thoughts.

68

If these common plants can achieve this, then the law is effectively unenforcable.

An unenforcable law brings all laws into contempt & public disrepute. Remember, Bonny & Clyde were viewed as heroes during Prohibition–an equally unenforcable law.

Pro-lifers might be wiser (& more effective) to attempt to create incentives for having a baby, rather than punishment for not.

69

I don’t have time for a thorough reply right now (perhaps later today), but in brief, I expect that the law would be enforced the way it was prior to Roe v Wade, with the penalties leveled (primarily, if not exclusively) against the ones who perform the abortions. They are, after all, the ones who can not appeal to extenuating personal circumstances – unlike, say, a panicked and troubled woman. The law already draws distinctions between first-degree murder, manslaughter, wrongful death and the like, and so there is ample precedent for such.

I do NOT expect that the law would require the uprooting of all plants that can be used to induce abortions. That is ridiculous. There are many plants which can be used as poisons, yet the laws against murder do not call for their uprooting.
More about this later today, I hope.

70

My question is not how the law would be enforced, but just what the societal consequences (both positive and negative) would be.

71

Hi Bosda,

Aahhh. I think I see your point now.

Here is how I would make your pro-choice argument:

Under a strict cost benefit analysis, a law should cause more good (or prevent more harm) than the harm created by the passage of the law, if any (and there is always some resulting harm of every law).

Pro-lifers believe that saving millions of lives is a great good. They believe this good is so great that the law is justified even in the face of great, but lesser, resulting harm (which is well publicized by pro-choicers and which has been discussed in this thread). And, as long as the resulting harm remains lower than the resulting good, the pro-lifers have a point.

So to attack the pro-life position, one must assert that the end harm of the law is greater than the end good of the law. There are two ways to do this: Assert the harm is too high, or assert that the good will not be realized to a sufficient extent and will be too low.

Most pro-choicers take the first approach, and emphasize the harm to the mothers that would result. To that, I respond by saying, “Yeah, but the good of saving millions of lives is so great that it outweighs any harm identified to date of such a law, so we must act anyway.”

But you are taking a different tact. You are saying that millions of lives won’t be saved (because of all these plants growing everywhere), so my proposed good (saving millions of lives) won’t be realized, and if the good of the law is reduced to an amount less than the harm it will cause (e.g., to mothers), then the law shouldn’t be passed.

Now there is a pro-choice argument we can sink our teeth into!

If this type of cost/benefit analysis controls the debate (as opposed to a religious morality analysis), it all comes down to how effective these plants are, how common they are, and how easy it is to make them into an effective abortion composition, and how likely people are to use them. Unfortunately, I don’t know anything about any of that. I tend to think that an abortion ban would save at least tens of thousands of lives, if not hundred’s of thousands, and that’s a pretty great good in the face of inconvenience, ostracization, abuse, etc. resulting from unwanted pregnancies. I’m not sure such plants will be effective to cause 1+ million abortions a year. Any data or conjecture on the possibility of that?

72

Which would imply that all abortion laws were unenforceable pre-1973. Unless you are arguing that the hawthorne plant was unobtainable before that. And all that stuff about coat-hangers was just a blind.

FWIW, I think it was irresponsible of you to post what you did. I have visions of some dim-bulb teenager reading it, finding out she is pregnant, brewing up a gallon of tea without reading the book, and poisoning herself.

It verges IMO on giving medical advice.

YMMV.

You think Bonnie and Clyde are proof that laws against bank-robbery are impractical?

From the pro-life point of view, having a baby is not a punishment. Preventing crimes against children (which is what pro-lifers consider abortion to be) is hardly a punishment for having children.

Even if my kids get on my nerves, I am not allowed to kill them. This is not exactly a punishment for having them.

If you see what I mean.

Regards,
Shodan

73

Shodan–I think Prohibition was unenforcable. I also think that contact with the criminal underground community, necessary just to get a lousy beer, caused many people who would ordinarily support the community’s laws to cool that support considerably–even, in some cases, admire the outlaws. Gangsters were chic, in the Prohibition Era. A lousy idea, dangerous, even–but it was a common view at the time.

Much of our current organized crime problem today dates from those days.

il Topo–No. You missed the point entirely. Go & re-read my post. :smack:

74

How can common plants cause this so easily? If so, then why do people pay hundreds of dollars to have traditionaly D&Cs when they can go brew up a pot of herbal tea? Why would there be concerns about more abused and unwanted children if ‘herbal’ abortions are easily available? Why the concerns about ‘back alley abortions’ if common plants can cause abortions?

75

Sorry, Bosda! :smiley: Didn’t you like my pro-choice argument that was prompted by your post, though? :slight_smile: I find it an intriguing and legitimate approach to the issue, if somewhat unconvincing to me personally because of the facts as I perceive them…but I had such fun typing it out. :cool:

So, we are back to the simple argument that “passing an unenforceable law causes respect for laws to be lessened, so we shouldn’t pass unenforceable laws.” Is that it?

I generally agree with you regarding prohibition and organized crime. Do you think abortion would be worse than today’s war on drugs in this regard?

It occurs to me that the same moral calculus may not apply to both prohibition and abortion. Prohibition attempted to stop people from taking a drink–by itself, a fairly harmless action. It didn’t attempt to stop people from killing other people. The prohibition analogy works if you don’t feel like the fetus is a human life (with rights). So why don’t we revisit this point after you convince me that the fetus isn’t a human life?

To make another analogy–which everyone hates–I’m not sure you could convince me that slavery should be legal even if banning it would be unenforceable, as it surely would have been short of a war, which did occur. Should we not have tried to tackle that issue due to the evils that resulted from attempting to ban it?

By the way, don’t you hate typing in your user name every time you log in. That’s a doosey of a long name.

(Oh, crap, I forgot. We are supposed to hate and disrespect each other because we disagree on abortion. Please feel free to ignore any friendly comments I may make.)

76

okay, some things are coming clear for me now. il Topo, by “responsible with sexuality” you mean “willing to have a child should birth control fail”, right? Well, a hundred years ago, there pretty much wasn’t effective birth control (not what we’d consider effective today, anyway). If you were married and didn’t want kids, you either used the rhythm method and hoped it worked, or you tried to get rid of unwanted pregnancies. Sound familiar?

By the above definition, there are a lot of us here who aren’t, and have never been, sexually responsible, myself included. I’m married, have had one sex partner in my lifetime, and have always, always, always used birth control. However, I am never, under any circumstances, willing to have a child should birth control fail.

If abortion is outlawed, something’s going to have to give for people like me. Either it’s going to have to get a hell of a lot easier to have elective sterilization done on young, nulliparous women, we’re going to have to take our chances with illegal abortion should our birth control fail, or we can never have sex with our husbands again and put our marriages under terrific and wholly unnecessary strain.

I don’t really buy your cost/benefit analysis, either. I don’t see the benefit of banning abortions really, because I don’t consider anything to be “killed” or “saved” in either scenario. Just as you don’t see the costs of unwanted pregnancies the same way I do, I don’t see the benefits of bringing unwanted pregnancies to term the way you do. Until the pro-life movement finds some benefit that people who don’t believe it’s a baby or a life or a person will find compelling, you’re never going to sway us.

77

Then you have a consistent viewpoint, which is refreshing, even if I disagree with it.

Yeah, I probably don’t see the costs as being as great as you do, but I don’t pretend those costs are negligible. On the contrary, I still view them as quite significant and painful. At least at that level, I understand why a large pro-choice movement exists to prevent such costs. My personal pro-life position is a difficult one because of this, and it causes me to change how I would otherwise live my life so that I can prevent suffering certain consequences without having to seek an abortion. It ain’t easy being me! :wink:

The benefits of bringing unwanted pregnancies to term is simply that the unborn are not killed–nothing more. If you are correct that the unborn are not alive, then I would agree that there should be no law prohibiting abortion. (Sure, some pro-lifers would continue to fight abortion for reasons other than that it is murder, for example, based on a religious aversion to birth control, but at that point it becomes purely a religious issue instead of a “protect the children” issue for me, and freedom of religion principles would trump.)

That’s why this is such a difficult issue.

Surprisingly, however, there are many pro-choicers who think a fetus is alive, but they reason, somehow, that they cannot tell others not to kill. If they can be persuaded that it is reasonable to tell others not to kill (after all, we do it all the time), the pro-life movement may indeed make some progress.

78

What benefit is there to someone who does not want to be pregnant?

For someone who absolutely positively in no way shape or form ever wants to have a kid, it’s not ‘help’ if there’s a law against abortion and a program to make it easier to have the kid.

That’s like ‘helping’ fish by making swimming illegal and providing a support program to get them free bicycles.

If you want to ‘help’ a woman who does not under any circumstances ever want to carry a pregnancy or have a baby, you can’t rationally say that the ‘help’ will come in the form of ‘We will make it easier for you to have a baby.’

It’s not about whether people want to ‘comply with the law’. It’s about people deciding for themselves whether or not they will reproduce, which if you look at the thread regarding legally limiting how many children people can have, has been denounced many times as an infringement on a person’s basic rights. Would you say that when slavery was legal, the abolitionists who ran the Underground Railroad were merely ‘people who don’t want to obey a law’?

If nothing else I hope you understand from my posts that women like me, who would abort even if it were not legal, are not motivated by a desire to be criminals. I wouldn’t like having to break the law, but I would do so if I were put in the position of being trapped and desperate. Remember that the only reason I’d be desperate is that the very same people who claim they want to ‘help’ me are the ones who made it illegal for me to get the help I need from a doctor.

If you put a person in a situation in which you try to force them to do the things you want, don’t be too surprised if they don’t consider it ‘positive’ that you’re patting yourself on the back for ‘helping’ them out of a situation they’re in because you put them there. Don’t throw people overboard and toss them cement blocks so you can jump off the ship to ‘rescue’ them.

79

I don’t want to have a cavity. Sometimes I eat candy, but I try to be careful and brush my teeth, because I may have to have my teeth drilled. Crap, I have a cavity. I can have my teeth drilled without anesthetic or I can have my teeth drilled with anesthetic. One is more helpful than the other, despite the fact that I “absolutely positively in no way shape or form ever wanted to” have my teeth drilled.

Granted, that is not a perfect analogy for the entire abortion fact scenario, but it does demonstrate how helping someone when they are faced with an outcome they did not desire is actually that: helpful, in however a small way.

It’s like helping the fish get oxygen in its blood when the fish does not want to be out of the water but is required to be out of the water by law. Again, another bad analogy from my perspective, since I don’t consider the fish out of water to be appropriate, but hopefully you see my point regarding “at least some help and not no help.”

Well, they were at least that, but not merely that.

Of course not. Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that.

And I recognized that some people would do that. Some people would not, and for each that would not, one or more lives would be saved (from my perspective).

Actually, two reasons, the other being that you had voluntarily had sex (or you were victimized by a sexual predator) and you wanted to terminate the fetus (i.e., kill an innocent) because you did not want to accept the consequences of your voluntary actions (or because you wanted to transfer your victimization to another innocent victim).

I don’t expect pats on the back from mothers who have to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term. They have enough problems to be putting on awards ceremonies. I do expect pro-life organizations to help those mothers, regardless of the accolades involved. It is only proper.

80

Except that the side of the coin you’re offering is, to women like me, the ‘Let’s drill this bad boy without any novocaine’ side.

No, your position still sounds like ‘Since you’re already in a bad situation, I’m going to do what I can to make it worse.’

Your perspective has no bearing on my life. Just because you think you’re saving the life of a fetus does not mean you’re doing a bit of good to the woman whose free will you’re trampling.

I accept the consequence that I might, against my wishes and efforts, get pregnant. I will deal with that by aborting, which does not victimize anyone or kill any ‘innocents’ since there is only one person involved in that scenario. You, however, seem to see it as your duty to punish my irresponsibility. It is not, and never was your place to do that.

They have enough problems of their own. Why do you insist on adding to those problems by denying them the opportunity to help themselves in the manner that is best for them simply because you don’t like abortion?

You want to help them? Leave them alone to make their own decision, and support them no matter what they decide. Forcing them to do what you want them to is not help, it’s coercion.