I have no interest in whether the fetus is a person. I do not think that a person has any more right to enslave, or have others enslave on its behalf, someone than a clump of cells has that right.
I am an adult person, fairly well functioning, and I don’t have the right to enslave you. If your choices were either to submit to being enslaved or to kill me, I think you’d be completely justified in killing me–an adult person. Why would I give more rights to a fetus?
Julie
Fair enough. I’m generally not opposed to the death penalty, but this is probably the only valid argument against it. Making DNA testing a standard part of the investigation process coul solve this problem rather easily.
**
Without opening up the rape/incest/saving the life of the mother can of worms, which would be a debate in itself, I would have to say that (barring those rare instances of failed birth control, which is yet another can of worms), “forcing” a woman to bring a pregnancy to term is not a form of enslavement. She chose to engage in activities which she knew could result in her becoming pregnant. There’s a difference between slavery and taking responsibility for the results of your own freely chosen actions. Abortion is the willful killing of another human being in order to avoid that responsibility. To say that a human fetus is not a human being is a denial of reality in order to rationalize murder.
**
Neither do I. One is the murder of an innocent human being in order to avoid the responsibility of caring for it. The other is the just removal of a known murderer from society.
BTW, I only favor the death penalty in extreme cases, such as the murder of a child or if there are multiple victims (serial killers, mass murderers, the murder of a pregnant woman, in which case there are not only two victims, but also a child murder involved).
In a single “crime of passion”, I think the killer should be imprisoned for a long, long time.
I am pro-choice, against the death penalty. Unfortunately, I didn’t come to my position with a particular moral standard against which I measured both of these things. I make emotional decisions. When I think of the horrible things an unwanted kid can be put through, and the sort of people who are still capable of breeding, I hope that abortion will always be available and hopefully able to prevent some even worse things. As for the death penalty, I’m not always so firm. I guess I do believe that there are people out there who are evil and will never be otherwise. On the other hand, what’s worse? Death or life in prison? Life in prison seems worse to me, if we’re just talking punishment here.
Heck, I’m pro-choice and though morally I have no problem whatsoever with the death penalty (I’d even pull the switch myself in some cases), I’m against its return to Canada on purely practical grounds. For the minor sense of satisfaction we might get from putting a murderer’s lights out (and were we to follow the model of most American states, we won’t even get the satisfaction of a painful messy splattery death, but the cold sterility of lethal injection), we’d end up having to ludicrously and expensively expand our criminal justice system to install an endless appeals process.
Personally, I think we could better spend the money elsewhere.
The average time a criminal actually spends in prison in the United States for murder is 96 months, for manslaughter: 49 months.(Bureau of Justice Statistics, Trends in State Parole 1999-2000, USA Today, October 24, 2001, page 1)
Is 4 or 8 years behind bars for murder a “long, long, time”?
I have to put these few words in: I don’t think it is right to term a person who is pro-choice as “pro-abortion.” While I will grant that there may be some few outer fringe types who believe that abortion is a good thing to be sought after, and might even be in favor of compulsory abortion in some cases, those types are very, very rare. Every rational pro-choice statement I’ve heard is in favor of abortions being rare, not a routine form of birth control, and certainly not compulsory.
I would hazard a guess that most rational people would prefer that the death penalty not be necessary either, but in my opinion there are some cases that simply cry out for it.
I note with some amusement that it is a self-identified “bleebing heart commie baby killer” poster who used the term “pro abortion”.
Heh.
TL: *Without opening up the rape/incest/saving the life of the mother can of worms, which would be a debate in itself, I would have to say that (barring those rare instances of failed birth control, which is yet another can of worms), “forcing” a woman to bring a pregnancy to term is not a form of enslavement. She chose to engage in activities which she knew could result in her becoming pregnant. There’s a difference between slavery and taking responsibility for the results of your own freely chosen actions. *
Sorry, but that automatically opens up those other cans of worms. If the anti-abortion stance is about the sacredness of fetal life, as many seek to claim, then whether or not the woman had any choice in the activities that led to her pregnancy is totally irrelevant. If it’s the so-called “wilful killing of human beings” that you find unacceptable, then I don’t see how you can say that it becomes acceptable just because the woman didn’t freely choose to have sex.
Abortion is the willful killing of another human being in order to avoid that responsibility. To say that a human fetus is not a human being is a denial of reality in order to rationalize murder.
Nope. Many of us quite sincerely and quite logically believe that the status of human personhood is not something that a fetus acquires all at once or instantaneously, either at the instant of conception or the instant of birth or any other instant. The process of conception and fetal development starts with individual cells and ends up with a baby. It’s not “denying reality” to maintain that the attainment of personhood is a gradual process paralleling the gradual process of fetal development. In fact, it seems to me like a very accurate view of reality (much more realistic than maintaining either that a fertilized egg is a full-blown person or that a baby about to be born isn’t a person at all).
That means, to those who hold that view, that the fetus’s human rights start out as non-existent and grow with its development. That means that early in the pregnancy, the embryo/fetus’s right to live doesn’t outweigh the woman’s right to exercise control over her body, including choosing to terminate the pregnancy. It also means that late in the pregnancy, the fetus’s right to live does outweigh the woman’s right to choose an abortion, unless continuing the pregnancy is seriously endangering her life or health.
Most of the current laws on abortion more or less reflect this position, and deal as well as they can with the tricky question of exactly when the fetus’s right to life begins to outweigh the woman’s right to choose an abortion. The pro-choice stance is not about “rationalizing murder”; it’s about balancing the competing claims of conflicting rights.
As for reconciling that view with an anti-death-penalty stance, it’s simple: it just involves believing that the right to life of a human who has already attained full personhood status is inalienable, even if they’ve committed terrible crimes. Being pro-choice doesn’t logically require you to be anti-death-penalty, but there’s no logical contradiction between the two positions.
(Personally, I’m pro-choice according to the principles described above. I’m also anti-death-penalty, primarily on a utility basis: I can’t see that killing felons really does anything significant to fight crime, and I think it’s terribly counterproductive both because of the risk of executing the innocent and because of the intrinsic brutality and vindictiveness of it. Perhaps paradoxically, I kind of support a sort of “voluntary death penalty” option for certain kinds of criminals serving life sentences with no possibility of parole. If we’re telling some felons “you are pathologically, intolerably dangerous to society and there’s no way we’ll ever again trust you with any opportunity to hurt another human being for the rest of your life”, and they say “in that case, I’d rather be dead”, then I think it’s only fair to give them that option.)
Nevertheless, legally you have to put that line somewhere. When do you stop allowing an abortion? The law says that it’s the third trimester. Seems an arbitrary assignment to me, if what you say is true. Why not the instant of conception? Because if that were the line then there would be no abortion? Why not birth then, when you know damned well that the thing is 100% human and not some fraction, as an 8 month old fetus is (developmentally). Why not half way through pregnancy? Obviously the third trimester was a compromise between the pro-lifers and the pro-choicers, which means it was political choice and not practical at all. Anyway, your point is moot. A line needs to be drawn. I say it should be conception. Most obviously have a different opinion.
I fail to see how the two are contradictory, frankly.
First point. I don’t consider an early term fetus to be something that can seriously be considered the equivalent to a born human. You’ll find that the people who do believe they are are generally in the pro-life camp. As the majority of people who believe that a woman should have a legal right to terminate a pregnancy do not consider a fetus to be equivilent to a fully born human, there is nothing contradictory about affording them different rights and degrees of importance.
Secondly. I’m not spouting some “right to life” about the death penalty. My objections are as follows:
I find the idea that killing someone to drive home the point that killing someone is wrong to be laughable.
Statistics do not in fact back up the claim that it has any dramatic effect of lowering crime rates.
I do not believe we should lower ourselves to a system of “justice” based on vengeance. The people who protest the loudest about how that isn’t what the death penalty is about always seem to be the same ones who talk about how we need to kill these criminals to give the families of the victims closure. That sounds like vengeance to me.
Actually, I managed to leave off one more point.
The justice system is wrong sometimes. Innocents get convicted. I think applying a sentence that can not be dropped if a mistake is discovered is too great a risk.
As to how I reconcile that with the “innocence” of the fetus, see above where I address the fact that I don’t consider that to be the equivilent of a born human. And that someone else does in no way negates that as a point.
p6: Nevertheless, legally you have to put that line somewhere.
Right, as I mentioned in my previous post: “the laws … deal as well as they can with the tricky question of exactly when the fetus’s right to life begins to outweigh the woman’s right to choose an abortion.”
When do you stop allowing an abortion? The law says that it’s the third trimester.
Well, it’s more complicated than that: there are usually some restrictions on abortion within the second trimester as well.
*Seems an arbitrary assignment to me, if what you say is true. *
Sure. All attempts to impose legal precision on the imprecise natural processes of human life require some arbitrary assignments (e.g., when is a person “mentally competent”? when is a person “adult”? when is a person “dead”?).
*Why not the instant of conception? […] Why not birth then […] *
Because neither of those arbitrary assignments adequately takes into account the gradual nature of the development of the fetus’s human personhood, so they do a lousy job of balancing the conflicting rights that are at issue.
Why not half way through pregnancy?
That’s better than your other two suggestions, although of course, as you point out, any such absolute dividing line has to be arbitrary. Which is why the law uses not just one dividing line, but a whole spectrum of restrictions on abortion that increase with the duration of the pregnancy.
Obviously the third trimester was a compromise between the pro-lifers and the pro-choicers, which means it was [a] political choice and not practical at all.
All legal decisions on culturally contested issues are to some extent political. That doesn’t necessarily make them impractical or wrong. In this case, I think that the current laws on abortion do a pretty good job of balancing the conflicting rights at issue: an instance where political compromise manages to reflect fairly successfully the reality of the situation.
Well, we have to let the killers go so we can make room for all those evil marijuana smokers, don’t we.
No, 4 or 8 years is not a long, long time.
40 or 80 years is a long, long time.
If you insist on basing morality in literature, how about viewing Shakespeare as the moral compass of western society instead?
Our contemporary Othello slays Desdemona, then proceeds to hire Johnny Cochran to defend him in court. The Macbeths of today face mere prison terms if they are cornered outside a “barbaric” country. Pretty anticlimactic justice if you ask me.
Justice is about justice. Not about what makes the showiest end.
One more Pro-Choice / Anti Death Penalty checking in.
At first this position might seem contradictory… but its all about practical aspects. Like others mentioned before its all about not having Government and bureaucrasts making decisions for us:
If you ban abortions people will do illegal abortions. Less but not much less. So the law just creates useless angst, suffering and a many adult deaths. While the babies get aborted anyway. Add to the fact of making women slaves to their bodies… no thank you. I live in a country with stupid laws against abortion. You certainly don’t want to have them.
The death penalty might be emotionally right but morally doubtful. It is very dangerous once you start using it as election ammo and kill blacks with bad lawyers. The way they were lining them up to be killed in Texas was a scandal. In dollar terms more is spent with the justice, lawyers and appeals system than keeping the prisoners in jail for life. Its pretty barbaric too in my view.
I want to see ProLifers who are Pro Death Penalty explain their contradictions.The Tolkien quote pretty much sums up my opinion on capital punishment. beyond that, I don’t think it’s an effective deterent, and while I don’t have a cite, I’ve heard that it’s no less expensive than keeping someone in prison for life(can anyone confirm/deny?).
I’m pro-choice because, as others have said, I don’t consider a fetus a person. To argue against that requires a fundamental disagreement that renders debate useless. You can’t argue the other side without disagreeing to a point that it is far too improbable that there is any chance of convincing the other side.
Because Shakespeare is from the 16th Century and Tolkien from the 20th Century ? Much closer to modern moral compass.
Never mind that some are using the 2000+ year old bible for moral compass. The bible is full of some pretty atrocious stuff that is done for some “crimes”.
True - it is well-established that the costs of the legal processes around the death penalty exceed the costs of life imprisonment. Lots of cites here.
I am pro-choice (BUT I would never have one and wish no one ever had to have one) and anti-death penalty. I don’t even bother to get into the moral morass that inevitably arises when trying to discuss either of these issues. They can both be easily (for me, at least) decided, at least on a public policy level, by simple economics.
Abortion: In an ideal world, there’d be no need for abortion; however, while it is a terrible thing to have happen to a fetus and to the mother (I don’t know anyone who gleefully had an abortion with no twinge of emotional pain), it is unavoidable that some women will get pregnant who cannot have the baby for whatever reason. The fact is, the women with money will get the abortions, either here or in other countries, while the poor and the young will be forced to have that baby.
I’ve seen too many unwanted kids to advocate taking away a woman’s right to refuse to go through with a pregnancy. Does the world need another poor, neglected baby? Even if this woman gave the baby up for adoption, she’d have to go through the financial (not to mention emotional, etc.) burden of carrying a baby to term. I don’t think it’s right to create a public policy that will further harm people of low SES in this very fundamental way.
I’d be pro-life if any woman who got pregnant could be guaranteed a fully funded pregnancy, no harm to her present or future income, adequate nutrition and medical care before, during, and after the pregnancy, no social stigma from being an unwed mother, free and safe child care while she works, and a clean, safe home for her and her baby. Since these things are not remotely forthcoming, I feel it’s better to let a woman decide that her fetus would not be coming into a situation that would be at all conducive to a happy, healthy life for her or it.
Death Penalty: It costs more to keep a man on death row, and give him the necessary appeals, than it does to keep him in prison for life. I could offer a cite but you can find one for yourself. That, and it’s statistically proven NOT to be a deterrent. Therefore, it only feeds some folks’ irrational need for state-funded revenge, and I don’t want to put my tax dollars behind that. Also, there have been an unacceptable number of innocent men executed, and rather than take that risk, I say throw 'em in jail for life. It’s cheaper, and to my mind, it’s worse punishment anyway.
Those are my stated reasons for being pro-choice and anti-death penalty. Debate away, but I’m highly unlikely to change my mind on either.