1.5M abortions is hardly “few circumstances”. You have to be a moron to think that it is. And yes, it’s a common liberal trait to think of “the American people” as morons. But they aren’t.
“A few” refers to the number of circumstances, not their prevalence. If the response was “rare circumstances”, you’d have a point, but it wasn’t.
Whatever makes you feel better about that poll.
Not surprisingly, you’re wrong about “common liberal traits”. But in any case, you don’t have to be a moron to not be an expert on abortion statistics, and you don’t have to be a moron to recognize that vague descriptors like “few” can mean very different things to different people, especially when there is no option between “few” and “most”.
Like many things, polling results on abortion can vary widely depending on how the question is asked.
An example of how polling results can vary: from this poll (early 2013, a few months before Terr’s link), a majority want abortion legal in all or most cases.
Different questions result in different answers. This poll gives the following choices and percentages:
Always legal … 31
Legal most of the time … 23
Illegal, with exceptions … 35
Illegal without any exceptions… 9
Not sure … 2
Quite different from Terr’s link. In addition, my link mentions a Pew survey in which a whopping 63% do not want Roe v Wade reversed.
Very persuasive.
You just changed the meaning of the word. We were talking about categories or kinds of circumstances, not the individual numbers of instances of those circumstances.
Only a few circumstances can still encompass millions of instances.
Really? Then by that logic, every teenage boy who wanks in the shower should be tried for genocide. The girls only kill one a month.
I’d say a doctor’s word would be sufficient to attest that there is a substantial risk of serious, permanent health consequences to the mother. I’m aware that that’s a subjective assessment, and that in lots of countries where abortion is only legal for health reasons, doctors are very liberal about making exceptions. So an abortion ban with medical exceptions will only really work in an environment where you have a broadly pro-life culture (which is one of many reasons that I think my side should focus on changing the culture before changing the laws). I would rather err on the side of allowing ‘medically necessary’ abortions in borderline cases rather than prohibiting them, but hopefully if we have strong cultural and moral norms against abortion, doctors will hesitate to certify abortions except where it’s really necessary.
Every sperm is sacred, every sperm is good…
I hope your side focuses on changing the culture too – because your side has been really, really bad at changing the culture over the last several decades.
Are you saying that the girls only kill one sperm a month? Or one baby?
Has the random disposal of 50,000 potential people made you feel confused or guilty? No need to worry because you didn’t fertilize any eggs.
The only way to “change the culture” is by appeal to fundamentalist theology, because they sure aren’t going to get any support from science or normative ethics. And if fundamentalism takes hold, we can expect to see a lot of other societal advances go down the toilet, too, like gay rights and stem cell research.
Actually science and technology are showing more and more that human babies develop much more rapidly than has always been presumed and that even at five month’s gestation a human “fetus”, is virtually identical to a full term baby and not the indistinguishable “mass of tissue” the pro-abortion contingent would have us believe.
Science and technology do not show this, unless your definition of “virtually identical” means “significantly different”.
Well, no heart, no lungs, no liver, no brain, no muscle groups, no bones…and incapable of independent life, being absolutely inviable by any useful definition…but otherwise, gosh, so very, very much like a newborn baby. They have the same DNA, after all!
Yes, and, unless you go and deliberately kill it, it will be a baby. You have to kill it in order to prevent it from being a baby.
You seem obsessed by this point, which to begin with isn’t true anyway – as discussed earlier, the majority (well over half) of pre-implant fertilizations self-abort anyway, since they’re basically just a precarious microscopic collection of chemicals. But these are still fully and completely defined DNA sequences – in your terms, a “kid”.
But that’s just a side issue. The central point is that most of us define what it is to be human in terms of concepts like sentience, consciousness, awareness, intelligence, and the set of experiences that makes us unique. We have an ingrained will to live and it’s immoral to take that away from anyone. But to start working backwards and applying that morality to a lump of goop characterized as a “potential” rather than an actual human being has no moral basis; it really just begs the question of what constitutes human life instead of addressing it in any meaningful way. Which is the basis of the humor in the Monty Python “every sperm is sacred” song.
It wouldn’t matter so much if abortion wasn’t such a major tradeoff against the wishes and emotional or physical well-being of the mother. But it is.
Cool. You have someone in a coma. He has no sentience, consciousness, awareness or intelligence. Just a body laying there. Doctors tell you that they are pretty sure that if you leave him alone and don’t do anything, he will come out of the coma in several months. Do you think you should be allowed to kill him because he has no sentience, consciousness, awareness or intelligence, and only a “potential” to have them in the future?
Do you think it’s OK to kill someone in his sleep? Same answer.
The more pertinent analogy is whether it’s OK to pull the plug on someone in a comatose vegetative state with no brain function. A body that once had the attributes I listed, but no longer does, and has no hope of regaining them. If you remember from the Terry Schiavo situation, many conservatives were falling all over themselves in their insistence that it would be “immoral” and “murder” to terminate life support. A great many of them were the same pro-lifers arguing against abortion at any stage. But the science told us that there was no meaningful life there.
In the case of an embryo, I’d be the first to agree that its termination would be sad and its potential shouldn’t be dismissed as meaningless, but its significance at this stage is to the parents who wish to have the child that it might become, not in the abstract. Regarding it as a “human being”, at least in the earlier stages of gestation, with rights that have to be defended at all costs, has no basis in fact and no support in science or ethics. Honestly, it really diminishes what it means to be an actual human being.