Well, if the development of fetal personhood is a continuum like the development of other fetal characteristics, as I argued at the top of page 2, then selecting any point in that development as the official dividing line between legal personhood and non-personhood is fundamentally arbitrary. But the line has to be drawn somewhere. I don’t have a problem with the fact that drawing that line somewhere before the end of pregnancy means that there will be some legal restrictions on late-term abortions.
Not really. The article states that conservative states donate more to religious causes and liberal states to non-religious causes. How much donations to the Mormon church (for example) results in health care for pregnant women and children is questionable at best, especially when compared to Medicaid and ACA.
While I for one readily accept that many conservatives are sincere in their belief that abortions kill children, nonetheless there are some glaring inconsistencies in the way many conservatives present that view: inconsistencies that may encourage the perception that their belief is not sincere but just an excuse for misogynistic domination or whatevs.
Namely, we often see conservatives failing to support a consistent concept of fetal life as equivalent in importance and value to other forms of human life. For example:
-
Accepting exceptions to abortion bans in cases of rape or incest. Surely, if you consider an embryo or fetus a child with rights fully equal to those of a born child, you wouldn’t believe that its right to life is in any way contingent on the circumstances of its conception.
-
Delaying legal recognition of individual personhood until the moment of birth. If an embryo or fetus is an individual child with rights fully equal to those of a born child, why are you okay with not having the government recognize and document the existence of that individual in its pre-borm state? Why don’t censuses and tax codes count embryos/fetuses as separate individuals? Why aren’t all forms of termination of pregnancy a matter of legal record, not just deliberately induced abortion?
-
Indifference to the appallingly high rates of natural death of embryos/fetuses. It’s estimated that anywhere from half to three-quarters of all fertilized eggs never progress to birth. If you really consider every embryo/fetus from the moment of conception to be morally equivalent to a born child, this fact ought to rank with you as one of the greatest tragedies of our current condition. You can bet that if natural causes were killing half to three-quarters of, say, all toddlers every year, not only their parents but everybody else would be shaking the skies with lamentations and demands for vastly improved research and treatment to combat this terrible scourge.
But the fate of the millions of pre-born “children” who die unperceived every year without being “murdered” doesn’t seem to provoke more than a collective yawn among even the most fervent “pro-life” advocates. Why are those “children” less deserving of massive research and public health initiatives to protect their existence than, say, infant polio or measles victims?
These are the sorts of lapsus logicae that give rise to suspicions that many conservatives who identify as “pro-life” don’t actually consider pre-born lives equal in value or rights to other human lives, except when they get to denounce and vilify somebody for “murdering” one.
You’re unaware that much of those contributions are by religious zealots to their own churches, I take it?
Take away the religious contributions, and the bulk of the giving turns out to be in that bastion of liberal godlessness, the Northeast! 
And religious organizations, thus enriched, will use it for their own purposes which may have nothing to do with the community, and when they do, will often include opposing women’s rights, gay rights, and other matters of dogma.
To be fair, churches and religious organizations sometimes do genuine charitable work. Yet I can’t help but be reminded of one such authentic organization, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an organization of Catholic nuns that does much good work combating poverty and economic injustice. They’ve been in the news for a couple of years now because they were severely reprimanded by the Vatican and put under a formal investigation for, among other things, spending too much time combating poverty and economic injustice and womens’ rights, for the sin of supporting health care reform under the ACA against the wishes of the church, and for failing to vigorously condemn abortion and SSM as required by church dogma.
Color me a cynic, but such are the perils of religious charities far too often.
No, some people just recognize that private charities are just a drop in the ocean compared to what’s required to provide health care and the basic necessities of life to a large number of children. Why do you think major federal programs like the Children’s Health Insurance Program, Medicaid, SNAP, and so many others exist in the first place?
Excellent point – to which I would add just the simple fact that the US has one of the worst infant mortality statistics in the industrialized world, largely due to lack of universal health care coverage. Let’s see how much conservatives care:
The ACA is a major step in correcting that situation, and conservatives oppose it so vehemently that they’ve tried to repeal it, what, something like 50 times now? Expanded Medicaid coverage was another direct step to providing improved coverage and health care, yet every single state that had a Republican governor or legislature rejected it, even though it was essentially free; IOW, they basically rejected a life-saving federal health care measure out of ideological spite. Oh yeah, conservatives also opposed CHIP – the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
Quite correct, and something I noted earlier.
That’s reaching, since it’s of so little consequence compared to just not having them killed. One step at a time, the might say.
Maybe conservatives don’t approve of government sponsored research the way that liberals do. Once again, this is applying the standards of liberals to conservatives, and asking why aren’t conservatives more like liberals. I’m not aware of conservative “lamentations” about the lack of medical research for any problem, so this particular issue doesn’t stand out as anything unusual.
I don’t think I said “directing”, did I? If you’re making the case that Conservative politicians (I’d say with the possible exception of some Libertarians) disapprove of DEA home invasions and drug/ alcohol checkpoints, please fight my ignorance with some cites. If you want to suggest that many Democrats are hypocrites, and engage in the same authoritarian tactics as Republicans, I already agree.
John, pro-choice politicians seem to be willing to compromise in this way to avoid the most extreme versions of “look at their little fingers and toes” counter-tactics from the Pro-Life side. Similarly, Pro-Life advocates appear to budge toward “except for rape and incest” exclusions from any abortion ban. That gives them a less radical, right wing footing, and alienates fewer fence sitters and uncomfortable moderates.
These compromised positions make perfect sense in a political arena. I find the whole thing disingenuous. I respect (though I disagree with) a staunch NO abortions platform. I really never see that. Instead I see: Abortion is MURDER … MURDER!! … unless rape or incest is involved, then it’s OK. Weak.
Cite please? Wiki says miscarriage rates are 10-15%
Not necessarily true. Lamentations and demands don’t have to go to the government, nor does Kimstu mention that they should. If a large sub population believes that embryo loss is loss of their children’s lives, and truly has a big problem with it, that should create market demand for medical research.
Maybe Kimstu can provide better numbers, but from what I see the numbers can be all over the map, depending on when you measure from (fertilization vs. implantation, for instance) and what sources you use. But it’s certainly higher than 10-15% from fertilization – looking at some of the numbers from this source, 22% of fertilizations fail to implant, and then a further 31% end spontaneously after implantation, making a total of 53% pregnancy loss rate if you measure from the earliest detectable point (i.e.- fertilization), many of which may go unnoticed without sensitive detection and thus contribute to a perception of a lower rate. Other numbers put the total miscarriage rate as high as 70%.
I dunnabout “OK”, I’d say it was more a case of trading off one wrong against another - because of course it is monstrous to force a woman to conceive against her will, and it’s possible to consider that this wrong is more monstrous than killing something before it can be born, and so permitting one wrong is less evil than tolerating the other. I’m not especially arguing for this point or any particular other, but it’s not automatically inconsistent.
Terr, are you aware that when a woman is pregnant, there’s a person there who isn’t a fetus whose needs should be considered? Many on the right seem to miss this crucial distinction, I just wanted to make sure you were aware. Because your posts seem to indicate that you aren’t. That the only thing that matters is the fetus. That’s how you end up with insane laws like that one on the books in Ireland that leads to doctors valuing a non-viable fetus over the mother.
But isn’t that what all anti-abortion laws are fundamentally about? Isn’t that what all the self-styled “pro-lifers” want? What makes it less monstrous to force a woman to carry to term and give birth against her will when it **wasn’t **rape, but there are emotional, medical, family, personal, or economic issues indicating that carrying the pregnancy to term will create grievous personal harm for mother and/or child and perhaps, down the road, for society?
My further ruminations here are not directed at you but are just my general thoughts on this whole matter.
This is what astounds me about the stock answers we get from the “pro-life” side: because “it’s murder”. So here we have an issue that is clearly complex and divisive, on which there is clearly a range of deeply held opinion, by everyone from the man and woman in the street to the highest levels of the judiciary. The pro-choice side – and indeed many courts – show all these personal and social harms that come from prohibiting abortions. The other side is deaf to all arguments yet has none of its own, and can show no corresponding harms that come from liberalizing or rescinding abortion laws – they just keep shouting “it’s murder” and insisting that their position is the only right and true one and must be the uncompromised law of the land because… because… Because what? Five pages of argument later and we still don’t know what the “pro-life” side is about; all we have is a bumper-sticker slogan. Really, after all this discussion I think post #2 got it exactly right.
And let me be clear here: I am not “pro abortion” in the sense of believing that abortion is a terrific thing to do. It isn’t. It’s just sometimes the least tragic and least evil of all possible outcomes in a sad situation, and that makes it an option that constitutes a fundamental human right. This argument isn’t about championing abortion, it’s about the worse evils of unthinking blanket across-the-board laws banning it, and depriving women of access to that right.
I reject your argument that it’s not inconsistent to say that a specific procedure is murder, unless the person being murdered is the child of a rape or incest. If an unborn child is as much a person and due the rights and protections of any other person, as is claimed (do you deny that?) by Pro Life advocates, then consider this: a two year old is the child of a rapist or a father/sibling … is it allowable to murder that child? If it’s allowable to abort a fetus conceived in the same circumstances, then these two children are not equal as persons and do not enjoy the same rights and protections.
Just because it’s a necessary compromise politically doesn’t make it less inconsistent.
It’s not a question of the inequality of the personhood - if we have deemed it monstrous to force a woman to carry the child of incest or rape to term then we have to accept the lesser wrong of permitting it to be killed; we have to choose one way or the other. But once the child is born and especially once it has lived to the age of two, killing it will achieve no good end that cannot be just as well served by less extreme means.
I do have a problem with this – decisions about her body, even late in a pregnancy, should be made by a woman and her doctor, not the government.
It absolutely is an inconsistency. You’re simply stating that you’re willing to accept that inconsistency. Laws are full of compromises. This is a compromise.
If the government would stay out of a woman’s private business, this wouldn’t come up. Earlier, someone said that it’s the government’s business because a child is being murdered. If that child were the result of rape or incest, it would be as dead after an abortion.
" … we have deemed it monstrous to force a woman to carry the child of incest or rape to term …"
Fair enough. I think it’s equally monstrous to tell a woman she must proceed with a pregnancy, since she wasn’t raped or molested by relatives.
It’s either murder or it isn’t. Double standard is double.
I am definitely aware of that. One person has “needs”. The other loses his/her life. When weighing the two, I go against the “needs”.
You can’t even bring yourself to write that she has needs without the quotes. That shows how much you are “aware”.
So, who else has a responsibility to sacrifice their “needs” to ensure someone else can live? If you submit a blood sample for routine test and it was tested for compatibility with a kidney recipient by accident, should you be compelled by law to give them a kidney because it’s just your “needs” but their life? Ditto for the O negative blood owner? How about if your employee’s child has cancer and is uninsurable elsewhere (pre ACA days), but you want to fire this employee? Should your “needs” for profit, by law, take a back-seat to this child’s life? A dead person doesn’t even “need” their body in any meaningful way of the word, so we should force the harvest of organs and tissues? That will save many, many lives.