Okay, but most abortions aren’t “later term” at all, so there is again little incentive for investigation. Just as it’s possible that my coworker’s SIL killed her husband but it’s more likely she didn’t, I would think investigators would make the same judgments about miscarriages.
I just can’t see police departments making things harder on themselves than they have to, and since proving there was foul play would be incredibly hard, the likelihood of aggressive investigation seems very low.
Mind you, I am so pro-choice I startle the neighbors, but I just don’t see this as a very viable argument. “Think what would HAPPEN!!11” Outlawing abortion in and of itself is bad enough. We don’t need hyperbolic rhetoric and hysteria.
My worry is that it will be very selective enforcement and investigation. I’d agree, though, that the arrest of women for having abortions is low down on the list of reasons to oppose the criminalization of abortion.
You mean like all other crimes? Yes, it would almost certainly be selective and political and affect minorities disproportionately. The rich would have visits to Europe. The poor would still have abortions, but with less medical oversight and more room for error. Throw in more babies born to the people least able to care for them and ta da! It’s a miracle of modern politics.
Evil Captor, cyberspace is big, and no cause is so righteous that you can’t find a whackjob endorsing it. Up to now you’re really struggling to find anything that can be read as “Punish the slut!”, which I should have thought would be as easy as pie if it was as big a factor in pro-life thinking as you and the excellent Der Trihs like to claim.
Your “conservative commentator”, by the way, thinks that abortion on demand is an enabler for those who like to have sex without being bothered to think of the consequences. He doesn’t claim that this describes all women who like to have sex, although he certainly thinks there are a lot of irresponsible people around, and he still didn’t say anything about punishing sluts who have sex.
As to that “somewhat long” blog entry:
Why yes, that’s quite synonymous with “punish the slut for having sex”. Imagine it - being urged to consider before having sex that a life might result from it, and decide where you’re going to go while you’re still cool-headed and not driven frantic because you suddenly have an unplanned pregnancy to deal with! Whatever next? :rolleyes:
2/10, and that’s generous. Go away and try harder.
If we can assume from any bill proposed in a state house that is eventually withdrawn in disgrace that such a bill represents a powerful political trend, then I’ve got *lots *of scary things to tell you!
My point was simply that such mindsets exist and laws treating miscarriage was a possible criminal offense have been introduced. This is not a fringe thing tens of millions believe this and are working to establish the zygote as a person with full legal protections.
Do you really believe if religious conservatives obtain more power that more of such laws will not be forthcoming? People have tried to “adopt” frozen embryos that belong to couples who want them to be destroyed after in vitro.
Here’s what I believe: the view that all miscarriages ought to be investigated by the police will never be sufficiently popular in America to become law.
Sorry, you haven’t come CLOSE to proving that tens of millions of people believe that because a fetus is a person, every miscarriage should be investigated. Your entire paragraph suffers from the fallacy of equivocation. The subject you’re addressing changes as you move through the lines.
When we take them rigorously, the flimsy structure distintegrates:
Such mindsets exist (that all miscarriages should be investigated). - RIGHT
Laws treating miscarriage as a possible criminal offense have been introduced. - RIGHT
This is not a fringe thing - WRONG.
tens of millions believe [that all miscarriages should be investigated] - WRONG
and are working to establish the zygote as a person with full legal protections. - RIGHT, but unrelated to the subject of investigating all miscarriages
I am not old enough to remember before Roe v. Wade, but my understanding is that it was typically doctors who were held responsible for abortions, legally speaking, not the women who procured them. This is why they were hard to get, because doctors didn’t want to get caught performing them.
The sheer number of miscarriages that happen would preclude them from being investigated as a matter of course. I don’t think that there’s any way that the American public…even the most ardent pro-lifers…would want to allocate the amount of resources it would take to even begin to investigate them all.
Icerigger is taking a big leap, here, I think. Even if it’s true that tens of millions of people want to establish zygotes as persons with “full legal protections,” it doesn’t necessarily follow that this means that all miscarriages would be investigated. As jsgoddess points out, even deaths of already-born people aren’t investigated if the circumstances of the death aren’t unusual. She gave the example of her husband, who has health problems. But even with, say, my husband who has no known health problems, I’m not sure it would be investigated if he had a sudden heart attack. He’s young for one, so MAYBE the doctor might poke around to see what might have caused it. But, on the other hand, my husband’s dad had a bad heart, so they might just chalk it up to genetics and bad luck. Oh well. The deciding factor as to whether it was investigated would probably be me or another close family member…if I thought it was suspicious enough, I might be able to get the cops to look at it. Otherwise, why would they bother?
With my experience with the medical field (and this isn’t a slam) the first, obvious thing is going to be what they go with. If there’s something common that could cause the problem, they will assume that it did cause the problem.
I simply don’t think people, in general, are looking to borrow trouble. It’s too much, well, trouble!
Do you not agree that such a view puts the mother’s right to *choose * above the baby’s (declared) right to live? What, then, *does * the word “murder” mean to those who insist that abortion is murder?
Yeah, I’m not buying that logic either. An “innocent life” is an innocent life, and it doesn’t become not innocent because of the circumstances of its conception.
It was my impression that most pro-life people who make the “rape and incest” exception have either:
Not really bothered to think through that position logically,
or
Are making a deliberate political compromise to take the lesser of two evils. They know a complete ban isn’t a viable platform (at least not now), and figure that making abortion illegal with the rape/incest exception is still better (in their pro-life minds) than the current situation. They probably figure that they’ll work on getting rid of those exceptions at a later date.
There does seem to be a significant amount of focus in the pro-life community of chipping away at the current abortion law one bit at time rather than thinking they could get a complete ban in one fell swoop. So-called “partial birth abortion” bans, making paternal notification a requirement (or requiring paternal agreement to have to procedure), parental notification in the case of minors… All these things are in flux and often can get pretty wide support among Americans who are uncomfortable with abortion, but don’t want a complete ban.
It’s a smart tactic, politically, even if it exposes some logical inconsistencies. And I suspect we’ll all go to our graves with this issue still a major topic in American politics…
Which is why those of us on the other side get so impatient when told that the various incursions aren’t a big deal. If they weren’t a big deal, the anti-abortion side wouldn’t be for them!
On the other hand, I think the abortion genie is out of the bottle for good. Abortion could be outlawed, certainly, and I’m passionately opposed to that. But I also think that it wouldn’t accomplish anything. That doesn’t mean I want to try it to see if my prediction is true.
When is murder not murder? We find it necessary to draw the line all the time, even when dealing with those who are already born; we might make exceptions for killing innocent parties on the grounds that the killer had every reason to believe he was acting in self-defence, even though the facts of the case were that he was not. As to the innocence of the unborn, the pro-lifers would surely agree. They might say to you “Our natural inclination would be to urge the mother-to-be to have mercy on the blameless creature inside her, despite having been given no choice in its conception. However, we must necessarily clench our teeth and hold our peace, for the same sense of justice that obliges us to offer this post-conception choice in such tragic circumstances instructs us to place no coercion on the chooser, lest we take away with the left hand that free choice which we give with the right.”
It is difficult to weigh the right to live against the right to choose to conceive. The right to choose is very precious, and we must consider whether it is right to offer to restore it in those cases where that right was forcefully taken away at conception. But it does not therefore follow that even to make the judgement is to set the right to live at naught.
Yes, it would almost certainly be selective and political and affect minorities disproportionately. The rich would have visits to Europe. The poor would still have abortions, but with less medical oversight and more room for error. Throw in more babies born to the people least able to care for them and ta da! It’s a miracle of modern politics.