I agree completely … except that I believe “protection of innocent human life” needs to be carried to their 18th birthday. We need improvements in our foster care system, better adaption services and by all means we MUST fully enforce child support laws. Perhaps then we can address “Roe vs. Wade” with more clarity.
Re: We need improvements in our foster care system, better adaption services and by all means we MUST fully enforce child support laws. Perhaps then we can address “Roe vs. Wade” with more clarity.
I agree, I’m not optimistic that the laws are going to change anytime soon. Opinion about abortion has mostly been at a stalemate for 25 years, though who knows what the future may bring. I think increasing working class wages and expanding the welfare state (free child care, financial support for mothers, improving the job market, etc.) might do a lot to lower the abortion rate, though. Economics is a powerful effect on people’s reproductive decisions.
The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology count? (PDF link)
If a physician’s refusal to perform an abortion would negatively impact the woman’s mental health, the physician should be compelled to provide the abortion. There is no weighing of interests. There is no waiting for a referral. No second opinion.
I do not need to negate the idea of fetal personhood in order to be absolutely pro-choice.
I think the thing to “attack” is the idea that IF the fetus is a person then, gee, abortion is therefore wrong and should be illegal.
Yeah, it’s alive, it’s human, and the act of aborting it can be reasonably described as “killing”. That doesn’t make it murder. Not all intentional killing of human life is murder. We have identified and acknowledged several categories of such killing that we accept are occasionally necessary. We don’t designate all of our soldiers as “murderers”. (In fact we often celebrate them as heroes). So here’s another special category wherein killing human life isn’t murder.
Admittedly, we don’t have many such situations or categories. And each one is a bit different from the others. Killing in war isn’t the same as killing in self-defense which is yet different from capital punishment. Abortion isn’t “just like” war, or self-defense, or capital punishment. It is its own thing. But first and foremost, yeah, it is “like” them in the sense that it is sometimes necessary and it isn’t murder, but instead is another exception to the general rule that we consider killing other people to be murder.
You know the specifics: a person is pregnant and deems it necessary to end that pregnancy. That’s far from random killing, it’s a situation as circumscribed as war or any of the others, and it is indeed a special circumstance. And if we were to ask who, of all people, would be least cavalier about deciding whether or not the act is necessary, well of course is is she, herself, the pregnant person. If she’s of sound mind you would not consider forcing her to abort against her will, that would be horrifyingly intrusive and coercive and cruel.
Well, she gets to decide.
Re: And if we were to ask who, of all people, would be least cavalier about deciding whether or not the act is necessary, well of course is is she, herself, the pregnant person
Why would I agree with that? People make bad decisions about their own lives all the time. And what we have here involves two lives. Specifically, in some cases the mother would have strong reasons of self-interest to have an abortion (because she wants to maintain her personal freedom, because she doesn’t want a kid, because she wants to finish college) that would weigh against the interest of the child. That makes her much less reliable and objective a judge about whether an abortion is ‘necessary’, not more so, and I absolutely wouldn’t trust her to make the right decision.
Re: It works if you think people should be allowed to choose their religions. Our constitution specifically forbids the government from taking a religious position
‘Personhood starts at conception’ is a philosophical position, not a religious one. The government is supposed to be neutral between different religious views (and between religion and atheism) but the problem here is there is no neutral position on when life and personhood begins.
I’ve talked with a lot of radical anti-abortion people, and I’ve heard things that just make me wonder. In my last talk, I was told “The woman accepts responsibility for the person using her body when she lies down and has sex.” Okay, so do you support abortion in cases of rape? “Why should the baby suffer?”
I actually heard one say in front of a woman going into the clinic with her two toddler daughters “Don’t go in there. They murder children in there.” I consider that child abuse.
Nobody should have the right to use your body without your permission. The anti-abortion people want to give a fetus rights that no other person has. Is that right?
Why are you arguing this point with me? I made my opinion clear. I have no interest in compelling doctors to perform abortions.
Got it – you think the government can make a better decision for some people. I don’t. I think the individual patient and her doctor always are better equipped to make decisions about the patient’s health and medical situation than the government and/or other strangers.
I listed several examples in the post you are quoting.
Sorry, to me that is just begging to be a slippery slope to forcing women to stay pregnant no matter what, like the incident in Ireland - or me the third time I was pregnant and knowing it was a matter of time before my kidneys would shut down [after the second time they shut down in my second pregnancy I was informed that I will die, not might die if I try to go through with a third pregnancy.] If I was effectively locked in prego prison to force me to carry, I would die. That simply is not fair to any female. It is also not fair to force a pregnancy to term when there are kids needing to be adopted and this would be yet another kid dumped into the foster system for not being wanted by the woman. If the infant was the result of rape or incest, it is not fair to the woman who didn’t want the pregnancy int he first place to be forced to carry [especially if birth control becomes forbidden for religious reasons, either on the part of the government or some fuckass of a pharmacist who refuses to dispense and there is no other local source.]
Nope, I among others will fight to the death to prevent the making of laws to forbid pregnant women from any personal and legal choice available to any nonpregnant woman. That idea can die in a fiery hell. Why do you think people are fighting so hard to prevent the whole abortion law changes that are trying to slide shit back to the hellish past.
Re: I think the individual patient and her doctor always are better equipped to make decisions about the patient’s health and medical situation than the government and/or other strangers.
I don’t. So we’re at a stalemate, like before. This is why I’m not optimistic about the contours of the debate changing any time soon. People on the pro-choice side consider arguments about fetal personhood to be missing the point, and people on my side consider the arguments about ‘autonomy’, ‘it’s my body’, etc. to be trivial compared to preserving the life of the embryo/fetus/zygote.
Re: Nope, I among others will fight to the death to prevent the making of laws to forbid pregnant women from any personal and legal choice available to any nonpregnant woman. That idea can die in a fiery hell. Why do you think people are fighting so hard to prevent the whole abortion law changes that are trying to slide shit back to the hellish past.
I’d equally fight to the death to bring back restrictive abortion laws, if I thought there was any chance of success. I don’t really think there is, though.
Re: I actually heard one say in front of a woman going into the clinic with her two toddler daughters “Don’t go in there. They murder children in there.” I consider that child abuse.
I wouldn’t call it ‘murder’, that requires the element of intent, and I think (hope?) that most people who have or perform abortions don’t really think what they are killing is a human being. I do hope to raise my future kids to be the kind of people who would not have an abortion, though, unless in a medical emergency. So yea, I expect to tell them that ‘they kill children in an abortion clinic’.
Hector_St_Clare, when you use the term “revealed truth”, what exactly do you mean?
The key words in your quoted text were, “in an emergency”.
An elective abortion is not an emergency.
That’s not an inference.
I also don’t quite get the association of free will and immaterial soul, or why one needs the other to be “meaningful”, but that’s another issue.
Does this protection extend post-partum ? I mean, if protecting Life™ is the most important thing, maybe you should campaign to ban everything even mildly dangerous, to anyone.
S’not all that complex, mate, unless the concept of tabs and slots angers and confuses you 
Nonsense. The soul isn’t observable because it isn’t real. If it was real there’s no reason to think that it wouldn’t be observable; in fact, it should be observable if it was real. A real soul should produce some effect on the brain, it should result in different effects from brain damage than what we see.
And again; souls are irrelevant to the question of whether or not something is a person.
If it doesn’t affect the body then even if it exists it doesn’t matter, it isn’t us; we are our brains. You are describing a supernatural parasite, something that just sticks to us and contributes nothing.
And, “free will” as commonly conceived of (something that is neither random nor determined) isn’t meaningful with or without a soul; the concept itself is incoherent.
The “right” decision according to you in this case being to be a walking womb, a brood mare. You are outright acknowledging in this argument that you care nothing for the welfare of the woman; if her life is ruined, too bad for her.
No, it’s based purely on religion. It goes against everything we know about the human mind, and goes against the fundamental way we define “person” in law. There’s simply no reason to believe it except as part of the religious crusade against abortion.
I’m going to use your quoted post here to make my point, but my point is really a larger one and not specifically directed at you.
The question of fetal personhood is ultimately philosophical and/or religious and therefore a very personal one not subject to either scientific or objective ethical definition. The only reason this is an oft-raised topic is because of the question of how it should treated in law, and I would think that the very fact of its elusiveness to any kind of objective resolution provides the obvious answer for how it should be treated in law: it shouldn’t. I’ve always found it supremely ironic that the same politically conservative factions who are always railing against “government overreach” in regulatory and financial matters have no problem at all with that same government reaching right in to a woman’s uterus.
The basis of law should always be objectively rational. We know why we have laws against theft and murder; society would cease to exist if these activities ran rampant. But no one has ever been able to provide a rational basis for ideologically inspired dogmatic abortion laws. I live in Canada where there are no abortion laws at all (though you would be hard-pressed to find any physician willing to perform a late-term abortion without medical justification). I haven’t seen any signs yet of the end of civilization.
I don’t think “conception” means what you think it means, then. It is indeed pretty complex, and does take hours, and sometimes happens days after intercourse is done.
I completely agree … I really don’t want government fiddling with a woman’s uterus.
Countered, and used to support personhood of fetuses:
So life is in the breath and life is in the blood - both biblical. Woman breaths in breath, that is transferred to her blood, then to the fetus via the placenta.