I think he is saying that it is inconsistent to care for the life and health of those who are out of the womb without having any concern for those taht are still within the womb.
I can’t say I entirely agree but I thiknk that is what he is saying.
No, no – nothing of the kind. That might make sense if I were a legislator trading votes; here, for discussion purposes, that makes no sense.
I’m simply saying that a country has no business spending its citizens money on health care for some of the population while at the same time allowing others of the population to be killed at whim. It’s simply inconsistent.
No. Don’t ascribe a position to me I have not taken. This has nothing to do with punishment.
Hesitantly yes. There are other things a country could do that would invalidate the offering of UHC – genocide against segments of their population, for example, or perhaps involuntary human medical testing, something like that. In fact, perhaps that makes my position clearer? If the country offered UHC, but also had a policy of forced sterilization for a despised minority population, you can see how foolish that would be, yes?
So it’s not ONLY abortion that flies in the face of UHC, but abortion is (I think) the only thing on which there’s widespread disagreement. Most societies agree that forced sterilization is evil.
Capital punishment is a tough one. It’s a clear wrong, a clear evil, but it happens so comparatively rarely that I can’t justify tying it to UHC. Obviously it doesn’t make sense to provide UHC while at the same time deliberately killing some of our citizens, so capital punishment should be ended… but the numbers don’t match up.
For abortion, they do.
Poverty? No, especially since one clear way that poverty harms the physical well-being of individuals is lack of access to health care, which (obviously) UHC would solve. So the existence of poverty is NOT a reason to stop UHC.
I’ll say that your position is more logical than it appeared to me at first, and I understand it better now. But I disagree. Offering UHC would be a good thing, even if a country has other practices that are human rights violations (e.g. forced sterilization for a despised minority population.) In that case, one should do whatever is possible to stop the “wrong” practice, but still encourage the “good” practices.
So, let me ask this. Suppose the US outlawed abortion. No more legal abortions in the US. Would you then, as a matter of policy, champion the cause of UHC and argue for its inclusion in our laws, or would you merely not oppose it And why?
I’m just not seeing the linkage. Why would it be wrong to offer UHC if a country had forced sterilization of some group? The forced sterilization is a policy decision completely apart from UHC.
We already have a situation in the US where federal $$ cannot be used to finance abortions. So there is no mixing of the two. Abortions are legal, if privately funded. So, if UHC is a good, it should be a good regardless of the legality of abortion. Unless, of course, you believe in collective punishment. The US is a wicked, evil country for allowing abortions, hence its people (including those who passionately campaign to make abortions illegal) do not deserve health care as an entitlement.
Well doesn’t the rights you correctly apply to medical practitioners also depend on the cooperation of law enforcement ?
Presumably we don’t have the right to force the police to work for free or at a loss, or to give away their supplies without compensation.
So that makes the right to security not inalienable, but conditional ?
Your position is logically incoherent, I was offering a sane, if stupid way to justify it.
Are you suggesting that your motivations aren’t sane? Because you being bitter and petty is about the only possible way to frame this as something wretched and misguided, but not completely irrational.
Most people don’t agree that a first trimester fetus is a person. All people agree that a janitor with stage III liver cancer is a person. The only inconsistency here is that you care more about unthinking fetuses than Janitors.
See John Mace’s concise reply in post #36.
If the Pope thinks it’s a right he must understand that UHC is a tax funded program. He should liquidate the wealth of the church as a pro-offered luxury tax and then pay property taxes on the remaining assets.
In addition to taxes assessed on income and property he should promote taxes on direct labor for those who do not generate enough income to tax.
I’m more interested in your take on it.
Do we have an inalienable right to security?
Except it isn’t a system of providing health care to only some people. Every version of the health care bill that’s been proposed has included pre-natal care. The fact that abortion is allowed is an injustice, but it’s a completely separate injustice, since all pregnant women have access to medical care for their fetuses if they seek it. Now, obviously, some pregnant women (presumably including those who are aborting) won’t seek access to that medical care, but they still have that option: Surely you wouldn’t argue that medical care should be compulsory?
I guess the answer would depend on why we outlawed it, but under most versions of that event, yes, I’d say we had a moral responsibility to offer UHC, and I’d affirmatively support it.
Why don’t we have a moral responsibility now? There is no connection between abortion and UHC. Why do we have a moral responsibility to prevent slavery, since we allow abortion?
But fetuses are not persons and the distinction is by no means ridiculous.
I don’t regard HC as an inalienable right, but I would support society providing it “in the main”. If there are limits to our abilty to provide HC universally, they should parallel the limits of personhood.
On the front end, a fetus has not yet arrived at personhood, so no personhood was lost in the event of abortion. On the tail end, very elderly or teminally ill patients have reached the limits of personhood, so little additional personhood would be sacrificed by withholding treatment. In neither case is death as great as tragedy as when the patient is in the prime of life.
Witholding treatment from those unable to pay is much more arbitrary.
Abortion is not a “system” or a government program in the same sense that UHC would be, so that’s apples and oranges. Abortion is society recusing itself from getting involved and leaving the decision to the individual.
If a pregnant woman comes in for pre-natal care, the “system” will help her in investing in what will eventually become a person. The “system” is not going to kill the fetus or withhold treatment with the expectation that it will die.
If a pregnant woman decides that she doesn’t want to create a person, then the “system” does nothing and she’ll go to a place where she can pay for an abortion on her own.
Please dial back your rhetoric. Even phrased as a hypothetical, this is a personal attack on Bricker. The post that led to this wasn’t really phrased as an “offer,” either.
[click]I have set my rhetoric-pump back to neutral. My bad.