After reflecting, I realized that the questions I really wanted answered kind of got lost in the shuffle. As I really am interested in answers, I thought I’d cut through the stuff and put the questions in a nutshell.
Question one: Under what grounds can we justify banning abortion as a medical procedure to some women who may need it strictly for that purpose? [If you’re outlawing abortion, you’re outlawing abortion. Period.] Can abortion be outlawed without also paving the way for medically necessary treatment to be banned for other sex or race segments of our society?
Question Two: First, why is the life of the mother held to be less than that of the child by many pro-choice advocates; and
Part (A) of Question Two: Assuming that we make abortion illegal, and are willing to impose legal strictures for women who get illegal abortions and those who perform them, what legal strictures will simultaneously be put in place to force responsibility on the part of the fathers of said children?
And Part (B) of Question Two: What form of responsibility will be deemed to be adequate on the part of the father, and how do we avoid the pitfalls which already exist with regard to inadequate support by fathers?*
Okay, so that’s considerably more detail than I went into with the questions before, but that’s what I was getting at.
Sorry for the extra post, but I thought that might clarify things. And I really am interested in the answers.
By the way, there are just as many deadbeat mommies out there as deadbeat daddies, and child support laws are far from fair in many states.
Waaaay back in the OP Autz asked this question (amongst many other) and many people strongly disagreed with it. I agree with it.
A lot of people would still behave in the same way, I’m not denying that. But some would alter their behaviour if abortion was unobtainable. I know, because I’m one of them.
No, I don’t use abortion as my primary birth control. Fortunately I haven’t had to resort to it, yet. But I do make my contraceptive decisions, based upon the fact that abortion is available, should I fall pregnant. I’m sure many others do, too.
Again, that’s not necessarily true. You’re making claims about what the laws would say, when those laws have not even been drafted yet. There is no reason why a post-abortive woman would not face a lesser charge, such as wrongful death, with commensurately lower penalties.
I am quite fine with this, as I’m sure that the majority of women who seek abortions do so out of panic or desperation. I will not condone such an act, but I do recognize their troubled circumstances, and I believe that the law should do so as well.
Yes, I understand that. However, the enactment of laws is certainly part of the societal consequences – as evidenced, for example, by Blalron’s claim that hordes of women would be charged with first-degree murder. (A charge which simply does not follow, BTW, for reasons that I’ve already given.)
However, in response to some of your more specific questions…
Based on the evidence at hand, no. Child abuse increased dramatically after Roe v. Wade. Some like to claim that was merely the outcome of stricter child abuse reporting laws, but such laws were not enacted until the 1980s.
Possibly. This is one reason why the adoption process needs to be streamlined. The expenses and bureaucratic problems involved right now are well known. In any event, this is still a far better solution than condeming an individual to death.
I’ve addressed this question many times before, as pro-choicers continually insist that people will turn to back-alley butchers for abortions. Suffice to say that [url="http://www.roevwade.org/illegalmyths.html"this is a myth. Planned Parenthood’s own then-president, Mary Calderone, is on record as having stated otherwise. In addition, one of NARAL’s own founders, Dr. Bernard Nathanson, attests that the claim of multitudes dying from illegal abortions was nothing but a lie – a pure fabrication.
Well, I’m not sure of any such thing. Desperation, maybe, but panic? The woman can take several days or even several weeks after finding out she is pregnant to make her decision, and she’d still have time for a safe first-trimester abortion. What is the effect of the law recognizing “their troubled circumstances”, anyway? A panicky woman can get an abortion but a calm woman who has taken several days to weigh the decision cannot? If the woman has to wait several days before an abortion can be arranged (as with any non-emergency medical procedure), does she have to prove she remained panicked the whole time? What is the practical difference between the panicky woman and the woman who makes the decision thoughtfully (or even cold-bloodedly) that now is not the time for her to have a child?
Does a woman seeking an abortion have to prove her circumstances are “troubled”? By what standard? Do they have to shed a few panicky tears at the interview? Is there a mechanism to trap women who fake panic and desperation? Is a judgement call required on the part of some government official who decides if a woman is desperate enough? What kind of law did you have in mind, anyway?
To my mind, Bryan, the woman doesn’t have to prove that she is “troubled.” It could be that a particular woman who seeks an abortion is truly cold-blooded and heartless, but that’s unlikely.
Also, panic can take many forms. It doesn’t necessarily mean immediate action. Heck, a person can be panicking over the course of days, as the full magnitude of one’s circumstances becomes more and more evident.
Ultimately, that’s beside the point. The law does allow for different degrees of murder and related charges, depending on the circumstances. A man who shoots his own spouse is likely to receive less punishment than someone who brutally guts her and chops her into tiny pieces. Similarly, I think the law can naturally be more lenient to someone who kills a being hidden away in her womb, as the unseen nature of this being makes it easier to rationalize its killing.
I have far less sympathy for the physicians who conduct these acts, however, as they should know better. Thankfully, some of them do come out of that industry, after they can no longer stomach what they do – people like Eric Harrah, Bernard Nathanson, Anthony Levatino, and former clinic owners like Carol Everett. I am currently working with a pro-life organization with a former abortionist on its board of directors, and he himself attests that he has a lot of healing to go through.
I looked over your link and found it suspect. The relevant passage on the linked page (to be fair, I didn’t go hunting for other pages from that site) reads:
The study that produced the 500% figure isn’t named, nor are the studies showing that women who have an abortion are more likely to abuse their children. The crazy straw-man speaks for itself. In addition:
I don’t know what to make of this. So women should produce more unwanted children, then abuse them to bring the 91% figure down to a more equitable level? Spluh? In any case, how you can form an argument out of this mess escapes me.
How clunky is the adoption process, anyway? As I understand it, there are infertile couples who have been on waiting lists for years and a healthy baby introduced into the system can be adopted almost immediately. The only real stumbling block is the revocation period during whch the biological mother can change her mind, and while this varies by state, the trend has been to cut the period down as much as possible. Are you in favour of California’s proposed bill 104, making the period a mere 72 hours?
Besides, it wouldn’t matter if the adoption process was extremely streamlined, to the point where a woman would deliver and all her legal and emotional ties would be snipped along with the umbilical cord. A major reason to get an abortion is because women don’t want to be pregnant, with all the physical and economic hassles that entails. Find a way to remove a fetus safely from a woman and transplant it into someone else or an artificial womb for the remainder of the nine months, then start campaigning for the rights of the fetus.
So? Personally, I think the idea of a back-alley “butcher” to be overstated. The most likely practitioners of abortion in a post-ban America would be the very people who are performing abortions right now. They would just be a lot quieter about it. All that really happens is that you’re forcing people to lie in order to conform to a law that many will find intrusive and pointless. All they have to do is write “she was raped” or “her health is endangered” (wink, wink) somewhere on the medical record, and now the burden is on you to prove otherwise. Also, you haven’t stated how you’re going to stop the inevitable rise in black-market RU486-type drugs.
Regardless of the moral elements of abortion, morals alone don’t make for easily-enforceable laws. Nothing I’ve seen in this thread suggests a practical method for enforcing a ban, nor any way to address the problems a ban would create, nor any reason to assume that such problems would be outweighed by the alleged benefits: i.e. the births of a million unwanted babies every year. Maybe they can all stay at your house.
Well, yes, it is beside the point, which is why I don’t understand why you brought it up in the first place. Is there any practical difference between:
[ul][li]Woman A: misses her period, takes a home pregnancy test, realizes she is pregnant, goes into a stereotypical hysterical fit of absolute panic that lasts for two days, is finally calmed down enough by a friend and driven to a gynecologist where she waits for her appointment in a barely-controlled state of terror, to be followed by a weeklong depression ; and[/li][li]Woman B: misses her period, takes a home pregnancy test, realizes she is pregnant, says a quiet “Damn” and calmly reaches for the phone to book her OB/GYN appointment, goes to it and shows up at work the next day as though nothing had happened?[/li][/ul]
Is Woman B somehow more “criminal” than Woman A because she doesn’t meet the stereotype of how you think a woman with an unwanted pregnancy should behave?
Anyway…
Well, good for them but… so what? Is the emotional status of some former abortionists relevant to a general ban? There are other stressful life-and-death professions that cause some practitioners to suffer nightmares and such, but I don’t think it’s a valid reason to disband the police, fire departments or the military.
If the law is lenient to women, but harsh with physicians, what about women who use a black-market version of mifepristone or similar drugs? If no physician is involved, who takes the blame? I find your willingness to absolve the woman of most of the blame disturbing, since it suggests she’s just a cog in the process intead of its instigator. It’s condescending, and dodges the idea of a woman who realizes she is pregnant and makes a well-reasoned decision to abort. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the vast majority of woman suffered a brief twinge of panic at the moment they realize they have an unwanted pregnancy, but I think most of them are capable of overcoming such fears and making hard, well-reasoned choices. At least, I have no good reason to assume otherwise. They don’t have to panic, since safe abortions are available. After a ban, though, the problem becomes “how do I get a safe abortion while avoiding the cops?” and that could be panic-worthy. The ban ends up aggravating the problem it was meant to solve.
Because it is in fact difficult to do so? Because REALITY intrudes here, the reality that there is a difference between a fetus and a baby, and it’s a matter of organic development. There’s already a defacto recognition of this, which is why third trimester abortions are so hard to get. I know you don’t want to accept that reality, but it is true.
You just can’t accept that since the woman is the one who gets pregnant, she should have the power to choose whether or not to bring a baby to term, and that her health is a legitimate concern. As has been pointed out earlier, despite all your protestations, anti-choice people give merry fuck-all about the mother.
Why should “human life” begin at different times in different doctors offices? This is a variant of the core question, I guess. It seems like you are saying that the fetus is what we think it is, that it has no objective existence apart from the intent of the mother and the advising doctor. I gave up on philosophies that said objects have no existence outside of my mind’s perceptions almost the second I heard them. A tree does make noise when it falls in the woods, regardless of whether anyone is around to hear it. It is possible that a fetus could be alive, regardless of the mindset of the mother and her doctor.
I’m dealing with reality. Your maunderings about forests and trees hardly constitutes a sound basis for superceding the rights of the mother.
Bryan, thanks for your response. Good hearted people can disagree. Assuming people with whom we disagree are evil is effective for motivation, but doing so is usually (I say usually) not based in truth. Usually people work to a greater good. When we understand what motivates our enemies, peace is easier to negotiate.
I’m not indifferent to it. I lament it and wish it weren’t so. I just feel compelled by morality to allow it because it is the lesser of two evils. Performing moral calculation and accepting the results does not mean the results are enjoyable. I’d love to have other peoples money, but I have to go through all this career hardship to get money instead.
In an academic discussion, it can sometimes seem that direct dealing with hard issues is indifference to their consequences since it slows the discussion to pause and express outrage to every evil at every turn. But I must remember that people with personal interests are debating here, and that few detached academics are debating here. On this issue, at least, many are not seeking the straight dope, but are rather expressing their emotional take on the issue.
Agreed. The question is whether this is self-defense or merely transferring of a harm from one innocent to another innocent (which our society traditionally frowns upon–we typically let harms lie where they occur, and deal with them as we can, where they are, unless they can be transferred to a more guilty party). I did deal with this a bit in an earlier post regarding “hijacking”.
For that analogy to work, the vampire must have nothing to do with creating the situation in which his fangs are attached to your body, AND, the vampire must possibly be a full human being for the moral dilemma to be complete. For example, either he was placed on your neck without his consent (rape) or you rolled some dice knowing that with one roll you would get a night of ecstasy but with another roll you would get a “vampire” on your neck. Either way, the human “at your neck” has no culpability in his positioning or his requirements for nutrients.
I suppose if a live human could be made to depend from another human in some fantasy world, we could hold the actors responsible. For example, if the “host” caused it, we could force the host to rectify the situation by satisfying the dependence the host created. If the dependency were formed by an act of violence of a third party, we could treat it as an effective murder, remove the dependency (thereby killing the dependent party and releasing the host), and then charge the responsible third party with murder. However we resolve it, killing the human who was made dependent without his consent should not be an action chosen lightly.
But I wasn’t talking about a fetus. I was trying to lay out some common ground between us. I hoped we could agree that bearing an unwanted pregnancy was a lesser evil than killing an innocent child (not a fetus, a born child). I know Blalron thinks it is ok to kill children, but I didn’t think other pro-lifers thought the same, and I wanted to stake out that common ground. Of course, you can see where I’m going, but why don’t we wait until we get there to disagree?
What matter of organic development occurs between a 9 month fetus and a 1 minute old baby? Seems the biggest difference is their location, which is a non-organic development, which is my biggest stumbling block to drawing the line there.
I’m missing your point, I think. You seem to be saying that there are more differences between an early stage fetus and a late term fetus (thus the distinctions in the law resulting in difficulty in procuring late term abortions) than there are between a late term fetus and a baby (thus the similarities in how difficult it is to terminate each of them), but I suspect that is not your point.
Actually, they do, by analogy, since only the rights of a second human being can supercede the rights of the first human being, and my comments about forests are to show that the second human being may be there regardless of what we decide about the second human being being there. You are the one who is saying that reality depends on human perception and understanding, not I. I am the one who is saying that reality exists regardless of our perception or understanding.
An interesting question lies in the effect on the legal system.
You have a situation where a large number of people - even people in the law enforcement system - favor something that is banned.
One reason, for example, alcohol prohibition failed was that juries were often unwilling to convict. Now, make abortion illegal and what will happen? If I were on the jury, there’d be no chance I’d vote ‘guilty’ and I’m far from being the only one.
The vampire bit was a touch facetious, but a more plausible scenario could describe a person who is dependent on a sibling for regular blood transfusions or bone marrow transplants. If the sibling decides not to cooperate, is he/she committing a crime?
Your proposal is troubling (and poorly worded), because if this interpretation is correct:
[ul][li]If a woman got pregnant through her own voluntary actions, she should be forced to carry the child, and[/li][li]If a woman got pregnant through rape, she can abort and the rapist should be charged with murder[/ul][/li]…then you’ve created a situation where every woman who wants an abortion need only claim she was raped, and that she can’t identify her attacker (it was dark, I was drugged, etc).
Besides, what is a “lightly” chosen action? If the woman takes thirty days or thirty microseconds to decide to abort, are the decisions fundamentally different? Are you proposing mandatory counselling or waiting periods or something? The net effect is to delay an abortion, possibly into the relatively dangerous second trimester.
I think that any abortion law would make some allowances, and the most likely exception would be to allow abortion when medically necessary to save the life of the mother (e.g., due to some complication). It does seem to me that that is the most obvious and reasonable area in which to make an exception, and I suspect most pro-lifers would agree. At that point, we are choosing between terminating one of two lives, not between terminating a life or causing harm to another life. Accordingly, I would expect that an abortion law would not create a precedent for banning medically necessary procedures to save lives.
But, I admit to not having given this particular issue great thought, so I welcome fellow pro-lifers to offer constructive criticism and I welcome pro-choicers to point out any inconsistency they feel this creates in my position. I actually do learn from these threads.
The life of the mother is not held to be less than that of the child. The problem is that pro-lifers value both lives equally, which creates a dilemma in which we have rights of two humans conflicting, and a resolution must be discerned. The child’s rights trump in most cases (i) because it is less culpable for the situation than the mother in the case of voluntary sex, or (ii) because it is equally culpable (e.g., both are totally innocent) in the case of rape, and there is no justification to transfer a harm from one innocent party to another innocent party.
Your later questions require more thought on my part. I certainly support holding men responsible for their actions.
In cases of rape, I think the issue is straightforward, and I would be very harsh.
In the case of consensual sex, there are several issues. [ul]First, what is the father’s civil responsibility to the mother (and I think there could or should be some–perhaps 50% responsibility), and how much is that responsibility nullified by “assumption of the risk” by the mother, and does that responsibility change if the mother procures an abortion, with or without the man’s consent.
Second, if we give a man any responsibility over the pregnancy, how much control should he then be given over the pregnancy. Typically, pro-choicers opt for full responsibility for the woman so that the women have full control. That argument may be the persuasive one. There are threads on this board which deal with such things.
Third, what is the man’s criminal responsibility if the mother procures an abortion, with his consent or responsive to his encouragement, or without his knowledge or consent.[/ul]
There was a thread a few months back which dealt solely with the type of punishments that we impose on any parties involved if abortion is outlawed. (I’ll try to remember to do a search later.) As I recall, to the extent that one could say there was a concensus, abortion providers would be punished most severely, mothers marginally, and I don’t know about the fathers. I suppose a charge could be created for them if they conspired to procure or otherwise cooperated in effecting the abortion.
Two cases: First, if the “host” sibling voluntarily participated in an act which created the dependency, then yes, the host sibling must cooperate. The second situation is more difficult if the host sibling was put in that position against the host sibling’s will. Generally, the host sibling is clearly harmed. The question becomes, can teh host resolve it’s own harm by further harming the dependent sibling. My default position is no, for the reasons mentioned in this post below, but I will consider it further. Your analogy gives me the most pause yet; I must determine why.
Indeed, that is a troubling problem in the flow of the analogy as presented, so I would have to return to my default position that abortion in the case of rape would be an unjust conversion of a first harm (rape and pregnancy) from one victim (the mother) to a second harm (death) of another victim (the fetus).
Sloppy word choice on my part. I was talking about now, before the situation arises, we should not lightly decide that it is allowable. I was making no statement about mandatory counseling. I would hope that everyone would decide their morality before they are faced with difficult moral decisions.
Hey, I think that makes me the “Good Totalitarian Cop”! Wahoo!! In your face, JThunder!!
(Does that mean I can’t vote Libertarian in the next election?)
Actually, I’m surprised there are only two prolifers continually taking up the torch in this thread. But, I can only do this every few months anyway. Too time consuming.
I won’t agree with that. I don’t care if it is my own mother stuck in my womb. I need to have control over the destiny of my body, and I cannot agree to any situation where another entity can have greater control of my physical being when I have committed no crimes. We have a word for when a government permits another entity to be in control of a human’s body. That is slavery. And slavery is never permissible, even if subjecting a few people to slavery (and hanging the threat of slavery over an entire population) will save any number of lives.
That’s also my POV when abortion remains legal…
We are already becoming less human since 1973…
Many people see the embryo as less than human to justify their right to abortion. I believe the human race has already become a little less human.
humanize - 1. To make human or humanlike. 2. To make humane; civilize.
(Sounds similar to pregnancy, but not abortion)
dehumanize - 1. To deprive of human qualities such as individuality or compassion. 2. To render mechanical or routine.
(Some will say that being pregnant agains one’s will is dehumanizing, others will say that aborting the fetus is dehumanizing…you draw the conclusion)
Autz asked this question (amongst many other) and many people strongly disagreed with it. I agree with it.
Hey, I think that makes me the “Good Totalitarian Cop”! Wahoo!! In your face, JThunder!! 