Please do not turn this into a debate about abortion.
What are the non women-hating, that is to say reasons that aren’t about giving a “just result” to the woman, reasons for having a different view on abortion in cases of rape or incest?
This probably belongs in Great Debates.
But I will go out on a limb here and say there are no reasons beyond slut shaming and other abuses against women.
Well there is maybe one reason, the “whole sanctity of life” issue. But I don’t think we have to take that seriously as long as the anti-abortion movement is so caught up in slut shaming, the bizarre purity movement with their pervy purity balls, and a total wish to have a pervasive sex police.
As for the sanctity of life, I would strongly recommend reading the relevant sections of Singer’s Practical Ethics and James Rachels’ The End of Life to understand how early term fetuses do not meet the usual criteria we apply when we say it is wrong to take life.
I always saw it as an example of “Politics is the Art of the Possible.”
When people try to get a law passed to ban all abortion, they are less likely to succeed, than if they try to get a law passed to ban abortions, except in cases of rape, incest, or danger to the life or health of the mother. These clauses make the law more acceptable to large numbers of people. They are an example of political compromise, which is often necessary. If I can’t have 100% of what I want, but can have 75% of what I want, is it really wise for me to reject the deal…and end up with 0% of what I want?
(I am attempting to answer the question in general terms, as a political science treatise, without engaging in specific issue-oriented debate. However…this should probably be a “Great Debates” thread anyway.)
<moderating> Yes, I do believe that this is GD territory, rather than GQ. Moving thread.</moderating>
Lynn
This I think. Instead of trying to go for the whole thing at once, instead they first outlaw abortion except for those exceptions. Then they start whittling away at the exceptions. It’s about tactics, not their actual goals.
Though not specifically mentioned by the OP, a “danger to the life of the mother” exception could be in line with a self defense theory. Even if the fetus has no intent, under certain circumstances it may be endangering the life of the mother. (Ectopic pregnancy, placenta previa, placental abruption, or other maternal illness for which treatment must be delayed due to pregnancy amongst various possible medical issues.)
If you extend that to a “danger to health of the mother” exemption then you can argue about whether being forced to continue a pregnancy resulting from rape or incest would be a seen as a danger to the mental health of the mother.
Now at the danger of raising the spectre of Todd Akin, a pregnancy due to incest might be less likely to be carried to term naturally. This has to due to the greater chance of fetal and maternal homozygosity of various MHC and HLA complexes.
Rape may be considered so psychologically damaging to women that they’d suffer irreparable harm carrying a fetus to term. Nothing other than rape, which of course is the worst thing that can ever happen to a woman (note: I don’t believe this, but it’s common conservative Christian thinking, and there’s a large overlap in the Venn diagram that is anti-abortionists), is bad enough to give her a pass.
Incest can be argued to be more likely than non-incest to produce infants with birth defects…but then you open to door to allowing abortion in case of birth defects, incest or not. So maybe we should stick incest in with rape as the worst thing that could ever happen to a woman/girl, so bad that it’s the one/two thing/s likely to cause devastating emotional/psychological trauma should she carry the fetus to term.
(Please don’t ask me to defend these points of view any further than this; I don’t think I can. It really takes a stretch of my imagination and compassion to come up with this much.)
I wouldn’t say that. If you believe in the sanctity of life then, probably, you believe in God. If God isn’t wholly benevolent, then he’s at least supposed to be good to you if you’ve been good, and bad to you if you’ve been bad. Finding ways to demonstrate that you’ve been bad, and thus leading to your getting raped, helps to maintain their image of God. It a defensive measure against cognitive dissonance.
Even taking God out of it, people still want to view the world as sensical. Things happen for reasons. If I dress modestly, stay away from drugs and alcohol, etc., then I don’t have to worry about being raped. If I want to, I can choose a world where I am safe, because there’s nothing random about life. Thinking of the world in this way is very comforting. If I see someone who dresses modestly, doesn’t party, and yet still was raped, well darn it, they must have done something to ask for it, because otherwise, oh shit, I’m at risk as well.
I think - if you believe abortion is murder and a fetus is a human being, then ANY abortion is murder. Fortunately, that’s not what I believe. SOmetimes, it really is better that someone not be born…
The logic (I assume) is that rape is conception without consent. Any person old enough to legally consent to sex knows that babies are a consequence. (I hope!) Therefore, if a pregnancy is a consequence, it was implicitly consented to by the woman, and she cannot then demand an abortion for her (or their, or his) negligence or bad luck.
Rape, however, is not consented to by the woman, by definition. Therefore, no implied consent. Incest is usually rape; even if there is consent, usually, the participants are in an unequal position and there is an element of coercion or exploitation; plus, the much higher risk of recessive genes causing damage.
How anti-abortionists reconcile that with the mantra “abortion is murder” I don’t know.
Abortion is permissible if the child threatens the life of the mother even in the most ardent anti-abortionists’ views (I hope). The way a Catholic activist explained it to me once, a life-threatening pregnancy is like a moron or hallucinating person attacking you with a weapon. You have the right to defend yourself, and if it means killing that person, even if they had no capacity for intent, you are still justified. Generally, such conditions also mean the fetus will die anyway, also. Thus, you are at least saving the mother’s life.
Whether the “justifiers” then twist this to say an pregnancy without consent is like an outside attack continuing - I don’t know.
People without strong committments, who mildly feel “abortion is wrong”, probably still believe it is acceptable in such extreme cases; these are likely the same people who change their tune when their 14yo turns up pregnant and abortion is suddenly a much more convenient option.
IMHO, I suspect it’s more a matter of political pragmatism. To ensure the support of those people and avoid being an extreme minority, some anti-abortionists are willing to make an exception.
IIRC, at least one such state law recently attempted said the abortion had to be preceded by criminal charges that proved the exception was valid. I suspect there are some like Akins that believe there are no such pregnancies so the exception will not need to be made.
I believe that killing people is wrong, but I’m not necessarily a pacifist. Sometimes war is necessary, even though I’m against it in general principle. That’s not inconsistent. And neither is believing that abortion is wrong, but in some limited cases is the lesser of two evils.
Very few people seem to believe that abortion is actually murder; those that do call for murder-like sentences to be imposed on women who have an abortion. Most seem to think it’s a really bad crime, but not a crime as bad as murder.
It’s perfectly plausible to think that forcing a woman to carry her rapist’s child is also a really bad thing to do, and to think that forcing a woman to carry a child resulting from consenting sex isn’t a really bad thing to do (note that I don’t hold the last view, so don’t attack me for it). In that case, you might declare that the evil of forcing a rape victim to carry the child is greater than the evil of aborting a fetus.
If your viewpoint is anti-abortion : The two choices are “kill innocent child” or “carry rapist’s baby to term”. I’m not sure how the latter would be “lesser of two evils”, but I suppose someone could convince themselves that. However, when the basic tenet of the argument is “human life is sacred from the moment of conception”, it is a stretch.
It’s a reflection of a different balancing of interests resulting from the different circumstances. Any pregnancy/abortion decision represents a clash between the infringement on the woman’s autonomy interest from carrying the fetus and the infringement on the fetus’s life interest from having an abortion.
Under ordinary circumstances, a typical pro-lifer will value the fetus’ life interest above the woman’s autonomy infringement. But in cases of rape and incest, the infringement upon the woman’s autonomy is significantly greater, to the point where, for those who those who recognize the exceptions, it exceeds the fetus’s life interest.*
It’s the same manner of thinking as in Roe’s shifting balancing of interests at successive points in the pregnancy, just obviously with very different relative weights.
*Of course it’s possible to recognize a life interest without believing that it’s absolute. Soldiers are unquestionably living beings, yet there are circumstances where we send them into situations that will almost certainly sacrifice their lives, in order to vindicate some other societal goal.
Rape is the closest analog to the violinist argument. That is, imagine there is a world-class violinist who has a rare disease and rare blood type. You are the only person who can supply that blood. One night, you’re knocked out and wake up with this violinist attached to your blood supply – people would be OK with you disconnecting that line, so go ahead and abort the violinist.
However (and, here is where I don’t agree with the argument) – if you consent to sex, even with precautions, etc., you’ve invited the violinist in and now it’s not reasonable for you to disconnect him (or her, of course).
Ross Douthat recently used this argument in a NY Times blog post or column or something.
ETA: I can’t think of any good reason for the incest argument, unless the incest is due to rape, but then it’s already covered. I guess in real life, almost all incest is due to rape (father/step-father - daughter, uncle - niece), so it’s really just a rape exception with a different name. It can’t be due to the higher probability of birth defects because no pro-lifers talk about abortion Down’s Syndrom fetuses, or other fetuses with birth defects.
I’m just speculating, but the non-rape incest exemption must be grandfathered in from back in the days when such a thing was considered “an abomination” and that any fruit of that union would produce an unspeakable monster.
Because, really, incestuous mating only produces a slight increase in birth defects unless it is multi-generational.
The exemption based on increased probability of birth defects is a post-hoc, hand-waving, pseudo-scientific justification that ignores the prohibition of abortion when a known, serious birth defect is present.
Oh, and I’m not getting the reason why the OP thinks there are woman hating reasons for the exemptions. What does hating women have to do with allowing them to abort a fetus that was the result of rape? Am I read the OP correctly? Because it seems like the woman-hating reasons would be for the other types of abortions, assuming that is actually the reason.
I’m not the OP, but my interpretation is that, if you have an exception for rape, then the other restrictions must be women-hating. So:
- Abortion is murder
- Rape is bad
- Abortion for rape is still murder
Why have a rape exception? Well, maybe:
- Women who get pregnant deserve it for their shameful acts, so abortion should be banned
- Raped women didn’t do those shameful acts of their own free will
- Ergo, abortion is OK for raped women
So, that reasoning is hateful towards women, perhaps.
Some of this thinking comes through with the “forcible rape” or “legitimate rape” legislation and comments. I’ll leave it there in order to avoid hijacking this thread into an abortion thread.
I generally don’t like to posit any firm conclusions about the abortion debate. It’s too contentious; individuals on both sides tend to insist that the truth is just obvious and any disagreement must be due to malevolence. No one should take anything I say as an endorsement of the views expressed. But I’ve certainly thought about the issue.
A view I’ve considered, but haven’t seen, is the possibility abortion might be wrong but less wrong than murdering a fully-developed child. Moral judgments in other areas admit of degrees; lying to a child about Santa Claus isn’t a big deal, but lying to a spouse about cheating behavior is. Steal a quarter, who cares; steal a widow’s life savings and you’re an asshole. Why should murder be any different? A quarter is money just the same as a widow’s life savings; so a fetus could be a person just as you or I. But a fetus hasn’t had a chance to grow, to form bonds, to build an existence much worth mourning. So maybe murdering a fetus is just not as big a deal as murdering me.
If something like that is the case, then it becomes easy to see why a rape exception could be defended: allowing a minor evil permits avoidance of a plausibly greater one.
I’d quibble with that as a paraphrase of the RC teachings on abortion. What you’re saying is true as far as it goes; you hold the right to defend yourself even when the offender lacks the capacity to understand her actions. The salient point isn’t that the aggressor is unwitting, however, but rather that defending yourself has the unintended (but here foreseen) consequence of causing harm to the other party. In terms of the abortion debate, the fetus isn’t seen as an aggressor; sometimes it’s just in the wrong place at the wrong time when a life-saving procedure is performed on the mother. Look up the doctrine of double effect.
What about women who are married? Did they get pregnant through “shameful acts”?
Seems to me this is just a big false dichotomy. Or excluded middle, or something.
I’ll try again. It’s hard for me to explain, because I really don’t agree with the pro-life position at all – I’m trying to put forth their position in a way that is sympathetic towards their world view.
If the pro-life position is hateful towards women, then abortion restrictions could be seen as punishment for them engaging in those acts, married or not. They must carry to term, even if it will endanger their health, financial well-being, whatever. However, since you can’t hold a woman responsible for a rape, you don’t need to be punished for that.
However, another view is that, when you consent to sex, you invite the violinist in, and can’t really justify killing him. However, when you’re raped, you don’t invite him in. Same result, less hateful-seeming. That is, you’re not responsible for his life, and may free yourself from that connection. When you consent, you are responsible, even if you used condoms, BC, etc. – the act may bring responsibility if conception takes place.
Douthat discusses it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/opinion/sunday/douthat-the-democrats-abortion-moment.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
Certainly there are some pro-lifers who want women who get abortions prosecuted for murder, but I think they’re a distinct minority amongst the pro-lifers. Most I think would go after the doctors.
Back when abortion was illegal I think it was almost always the doctors who were prosecuted, not the women.