Incoherent rage re: El Salvador and abortion

[Pazu]

@gigi

I don’t think you would characterize the outcomes as evil if the intent is to act in the neutral way. It’s an unintended “bad” outcome, but not evil. You were describing the fetal death as the action and that’s not the case.

No, I thought I was saying that I was looking at it from the “result” angle, not from the “action” angle, and I was trying to figure out how far you could separate an action from its consequences, especially if the latter is inevitable. In effect, I’m asking whether an action really can be morally neutral if it has an inevitable “evil” outcome.

In your example of an intruder, the action you are taking is to save your wife, not to kill the person. Once you have them subdued and tied up, there’s no need to kill them because the action you have undertaken has been completed with no “evil” outcome.

A lot of this argument depends on how precisely you define the initial “action”. In the intruder example, you have defined the “action” as “saving my wife”. I could just as easily say that I define my action as “making sure this particular threat is removed as permanently as possible” (I specified “stalker” to imply an ongoing threat) and therefore, simply subduing and tying them up doesn’t fulfill the intent of my action.

Turn the desert island example around; maybe the moral thing to do is kill yourself to allow the other person to have a chance at life. Then is suicide immoral?

Beats me; but I don’t consider suicide to be a priori immoral anyway. Amoral, maybe.

[Pazu]

@Maureen

Unfortunately, there is no possibility of saving the fetus. Once you accept that, it’s clear that forcing the pregnant woman to wait for either the fetus to die or for her fallopian tube to burst is not only unnecessary, it’s torture.

You’ll get no argument from me on that score. It’s a barbaric practice.

[Lemur866]

Of course it’s wrong to wait for the fetus to die before taking action, and the El Salavador law is inconsistent with Catholic teaching, and not even Bricker supports the law.

Why did they pass a law inconsistent with Catholic teaching? Maybe “no abortions ever, ever, ever” was an easier law to write than a law that actually followed Catholic teaching. Maybe there’s a heaping helping of male supremacy involved.

Is the crux of your argument that the El Salvador law is what Catholics secretly want, they’re just lying when they say it isn’t consistent with Catholic doctrine? Or that most pro-life people don’t really want anti-abortion laws that have exceptions to save the life of the mother, they just pretend to?

[Syntropy]

@Lemur866

Is the crux of your argument that the El Salvador law is what Catholics secretly want, they’re just lying when they say it isn’t consistent with Catholic doctrine? Or that most pro-life people don’t really want anti-abortion laws that have exceptions to save the life of the mother, they just pretend to?

To which of us are you directing these questions?

[Gorsnak]

@Lemur866

Is the crux of your argument that the El Salvador law is what Catholics secretly want, they’re just lying when they say it isn’t consistent with Catholic doctrine? Or that most pro-life people don’t really want anti-abortion laws that have exceptions to save the life of the mother, they just pretend to?

Go back and review my post 178, to which no pro-life poster has responded, and get back to me on the matter.

[Der_Trihs]

@Lemur866

Is the crux of your argument that the El Salvador law is what Catholics secretly want, they’re just lying when they say it isn’t consistent with Catholic doctrine? Or that most pro-life people don’t really want anti-abortion laws that have exceptions to save the life of the mother, they just pretend to?

Yes and yes IMHO.

[Mr.Moto]

I really don’t want to bump such an old thread, but this was a heated argument and there is some important new information to consider.

The original Times magazine article is badly flawed. The subject of the piece was not convicted of aborting her baby - indeed, she tried to use abortion as a defense. The court in El Salvador found her guilty of killing an infant after it had already been born.

All of this was in easily obtainable court transcripts that the Times reporter never bothered to read.

Link to the story by the New York Times public editor.

[Kimstu]

@Mr. Moto

[…] there is some important new information to consider.

The original Times magazine article is badly flawed. The subject of the piece was not convicted of aborting her baby - indeed, she tried to use abortion as a defense. The court in El Salvador found her guilty of killing an infant after it had already been born.

Good catch on the additional info, and shame on the mag and the author for not catching this error in advance. But what do you mean, “the subject of the piece”?

The piece in question was a large-scale article on many aspects of El Salvador’s severe laws criminalizing all involvement with abortion in all circumstances. The particular case of Carmen Climaco, who was convicted of infanticide rather than of abortion as the author wrongly stated, took up less than a page of the 9-page article. She was certainly not “the” subject of the article, and while the reporter’s description of her case is indeed badly flawed, as you state, it doesn’t necessarily invalidate any of the other statements in the article.

[Homo_Ergaster]

It always amuses me when a bunch of (as a majority) US people talk about Latin America like we live in a place where the Neolithic revolution has just happened and not in the civilised world like you when you know squat. an article on the NYT is hardly proof (BTW, how many pages on the March of Life did it have?)
Most “assume” what the Catholic church is doing there and even criticise it for asking for the law to be changed when, it’s my WAG, most would criticise her for trying to change it in any other way.

I was surprised about the “actively seeking” and found that it was just 100 INVESTIGATIONS (not even convictions) a year. I live in Peru, 28 million people. Abortion is illegal; the penalty for the woman is at most 1 year ( in Peru means probation, you don’t get jail time under 4 years) although the doctor or, more commonly, the non-doctor doing the abortion can get more if the mother dies. “Save-the-mom” or “abortion due to rape” gets you no time. There are, according to pro-abortion numbers, 400 000 abortions a year (a number I doubt). If El Salvador is similar that would mean more than 100 000 a year there. 100 investigations don’t look like much.

No woman in Peru has ever been charged with abortion and the few people who are, are generally people who force an abortion or practise it in unsafe condition. There are many places, in public, that promise to “fix you period” so it’s not even backalley.

The Salvadorian law is bad, but when outside people want to impose THEIR morality on us, it’s usually not very nuanced, more like ABORTION ALWAYS FOR FREE!!, not even safe-rare-legal.
I’m pro-life, but know that most abortions (at least here) are basically against the mum’s will. It’s usually a dad/boyfriend/lover/husband saying “abort of disappear!!” hardly a woman’s right to choose, more like a man’s right to not be bothered. I’d never send a woman to prison for an abortion.
A good reason (for use pro-life guys) to keep it in the books (with unenforced tiny penalties) is that if it weren’t illegal, it would soon be required for the state to pay for and we don’t want that.

[hijack] Where’s the outrage at FORCED abortions in China? Even if you’re pro-abortion, forcing one can’t be good.[/hijack]

As to to post 178, the answer is that usually the choice is between an old, and not very good law, that is against abortion AND a law that makes it totally legal. Single cases are ad populum at their worst.

[Syntropy]

sigh…
And here I was hoping it’d be allowed to sink to the depths.

It was never about abortion (although several in this thread tried to make it about abortion). It was, and is, about women being forced to endanger their health because of an inflexible law which prohibits physicians from performing measures to relieve a tubal pregnancy. As a result, those women, if they survive, are rendered sterile. It’s unnecessary and cruel.

[eleanorigby]

I know of no pro-choice person or group that supports or advocates forced abortions. IMO, they are as deplorable as forced pregnancies.
The whole thing is moot, anyway, because the topic was El Salvador’s position on ectopic pregnancies…oh, never mind-what Maureen said.
I am not at all sure about the one year old not being self aware–all of my kids recognized themselves in a mirror before one year…(no I really don’t want to debate it, just sharing).

[Homo_Ergaster]

@eleanorigby

I know of no pro-choice person or group that supports or advocates forced abortions. IMO, they are as deplorable as forced pregnancies.
The whole thing is moot, anyway, because the topic was El Salvador’s position on ectopic pregnancies…oh, never mind-what Maureen said.
I am not at all sure about the one year old not being self aware–all of my kids recognized themselves in a mirror before one year…(no I really don’t want to debate it, just sharing).

That may be true, but they praise China’s one-child policy like crazy and then don’t own up to the fact that it’s enforced brutally. Supoorting directly, no…not really big on attacking the way the policy is brought into being,yes.

[GIGObuster]

@Homo Ergaster

That may be true, but they praise China’s one-child policy like crazy and then don’t own up to the fact that it’s enforced brutally. Supoorting directly, no…not really big on attacking the way the policy is brought into being,yes.

Who are they who are praising that, amigo? In any case, this is not a thread regarding that subject.

[eleanorigby]

@GIGObuster

Who are they who are praising that, amigo? In any case, this is not a thread regarding that subject.

Exactly. I am pro-choice and find the one child policy despicable, so I don’t know who “they” are. Also didn’t China loosen this policy last year? (not about to waste my time looking).