"Pro-life" and "pro-choice" are both stupid expressions

Great Debates
261

[QUOTE=Stratocaster]
The statement “there are similar percentages of legal and illegal abortions, if we roll up the world totals” is not AT ALL the same as saying “whether or not abortions are legal, women will obtain them at similar rates” or “Women are just as likely to get an abortion in countries where it is outlawed as they are in countries where it is legal, according to research published Friday” or “experts also found that abortion rates are virtually equal in rich and poor countries.”
[/quote]

Got counter-evidence? Please, lay it on me.

Or not. :smiley:

262

Bryan, I’d like to clear up something from the earlier part of this discussion. Ignoring spaceships and viruses and other analogies, and also ignoring the vagueness of what the hell a 1-day embryo is, I am curious as to your position on aborting a fetus a few hours before birth.

I don’t know the status of a 1-day old embryo, but in my opinion, a fetus 1 hour before birth is equivalent to a fetus 1 hour after birth. They are both fully human.

One of them, though, is inside a woman, while the other is not.

If I understand your position on abortion correctly, you will have no problem with a woman deciding, for any reason whatsoever, to abort her fetus an hour before it is born.

Is this a correct interpretation of your position? If not, what is your position on a woman who wants to abort her fetus one hour before birth?

263

[QUOTE=Polerius]
Taking an average and then declaring “Abortion rates same whether legal or not” is a dishonest (or blatantly stupid, showing no understanding of statistics), summary of the results.
[/QUOTE]
Take it up with MSNBC. The conclusion of the summary remains, though - even in places where abortions are illegal and unsafe, women will get them. In fact, places where abortions are illegal and unsafe tend to be places with crushing poverty and low female life expectancy, because while wealthy women can skirt the laws and safety issues, poor women cannot. Are you disputing the claim of 70,000 deaths and 5 million injuries? Banning abortion looks fine and moral and just, on paper. I’m just trying to get pro-lifers to face the reality of their views being put into law. Harping on claimed statistical flaws is a convenient stalling tactic.

I guess I’m going to have to acquire a copy of the original study, since MSNBC’s summary is so contentious. I see registration at the website of The Lancet (the journal that published the study) is free. Can we agree The Lancet is not an “axe-grinding organization” and accept its articles as reasonably authoritative? Before I go digging through their archives, I’d like to know my cites, pro or con, won’t be casually dismissed. By the same token, I won’t casually dismiss cites from The Lancet that view abortion bans positively.

In the meantime, I’ll gladly, cheerfully, eagerly stipulate that the MSNBC cite was wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong and that I’m an evil lying bastard for inflicting it on this fine message board and I’ll gladly accept without argument any personal abuse heaped upon me as a result, if a pro-lifer will address the following request I’ve made several times already in various forms:

Please give in broad general terms the abortion ban you would like to see created [for extra clarification, I should specify that I envision this ban taking place somewhere abortion is currently legal, as in Canada or the United States], how it would be enforced, what the penalties would be, how effective the ban would realistically be and what problems may arise as a result.

264

[QUOTE=Polerius]
If not, what is your position on a woman who wants to abort her fetus one hour before birth?
[/QUOTE]

Well, it’s not a mystery, since I stated it as much earlier when asked what I would hypothetically do if I were a doctor confronted with such a patient. I don’t think of this as a major acid-test of my views, since I doubt any doctor would comply. I can easily imagine a woman making such a demand in the later stages of labour, but I also consider the very extreme physical discomfort she is likely in at this point, and prone to say just about anything.

To avoid beating around the bush on this, no, I don’t have a philosophical problem with an elective abortion at the 8.999-month stage. I’m also not troubled by this, because it’s extremely rare that a woman would calmly make such a demand and even rarer for a doctor to fulfill it. In any case, one of the compromises I’d be willing to make is a ban on abortions after the eighth month (with usual provisions for the woman’s health) if I was confident there’d be no effort to set the ban earlier. I can agree to this because I’m confident that the only reason abortions happen at this late stage is because the woman is at risk (which incidentally is why I think so-called “partial-birth” abortion bans are a joke) and I can live with the idea that the woman’s personal choice is being denied because she’s already had at least six months to make that choice. Since I don’t believe pro-lifers will be satisfied with this, I have to remain opposed to the idea.

Incidentally, is it even possible to abort a 8.999-month fetus with less risk to the woman than a standard C-section or conventional delivery? Let’s assume it is and something akin to a safe D&C procedure is available right up to the moment of birth. No, I still don’t have a problem with it (that is to say, I have a greater problem with the alternative). Were I a doctor faced with such a demand, my hesitation would stem from reasons other than my view on abortion.

I don’t know what this proves or disproves, though. Feel free to share.

265

Incidentally, I was musing on the extreme-case pro-choice hypothetical, and this is what I have so far:

Sally Goodheart lives in the poorest section of the Ozarks. Though many of her peers have succumbed to meth and/or Oxycontin addictions and wasted their lives, Sally worked hard to get straight As and extra credit all through school, despite the distraction of the regular beatings and sexual abuse from her perpetually drunk father. The one time she tried to tell her mother about the abuse, Mom (herself a lush) got angry and burned Sally’s arm with a cigarette. Sally is now seventeen and has worked so hard that she has an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy, the first in her family to aspire to higher education, and she looks forward to defending America from all enemies. In celebration, she spends the night with her high-school boyfriend, Johnny Goodloving. Sally is smart and uses two kinds of contraceptive. Sally is also unlucky and the small but inescapable failure rate of these methods gets her. With four months to go before shipping out to Annapolis and leaving this life of grinding, soul-crushing poverty behind forever, Sally takes a home pregnancy test and the result, for Sally, is a problem. If she does not abort, she’ll be visibly pregnant by the time her Academy year starts and they frown on that sort of thing. She will certainly lose the appointment and remain financially dependent on her abusive parents. Sally wants children, lots of them, but had planned to start after her six-year hitch in the Navy when she’d likely be in a solid marriage and would have marketable job skills, so financial needs would be met. While she takes a few days to mull this over, boyfriend Johnny is tragically killed in a car accident, struck by the drunken brother of the Governor of Arkansas who has a history of this sort of thing. Johnny dies without even knowing Sally’s state. Sally finds out after his death that he was suffering late-onset cystic fibrosis (up to now, she’d assumed his wheezing was due to his smoking, which he started at the age of 12) and since Sally also has a family history of this, there’s a good chance she’s a carrier and their child will have the disease. So, will Sally stay in her dirt-poor town, pregnant and single, with abusive parents that she honestly thinks might prefer to kick her out instead, and raise a possibly gravely ill child with any hope of escape to a better life extinguished, gradually sliding into despair and alcoholism? Or could she instead live her dream of getting a college education, defending America, and having a family later on with the confidence of knowing she can provide for their glorious futures of getting college educations, defending America and generally living the good life with their happy, healthy, well-educated, well-provided for, America-defending children?

Sorry, Sally. I guess you and your future child are stuck in poverty for the next few decades, though maybe in 17 years, the kid will have a shot at getting out, unless the child gets hooked on meth or Oxy, and unless the child’s a girl who unluckily gets pregnant, too, extending the cycle another generation. Meantime, I hear Wal-Mart is hiring, but don’t expect health benefits.

So, Polerius, are you prepared to look Sally in the eye and tell her this is for the best?

266

[QUOTE=Bryan Ekers]
Got counter-evidence? Please, lay it on me.
[/quote]
Read your own cite, brother. Are you under the impression that I’m obligated to find evidence to counter your non-evidence in support of your contention? I don’t think so.

By the way, after reading your last post, I’ll also add that for someone who found emotional appeals so distasteful, this write-up was a doozy. After she is in the Naval Academy, is she also going to end up inventing a time machine, going back in time, and killing Hitler? Then after that, setting up a charitable fund to place orphaned puppies? (I guess I wasn’t done with you.)

Given your stipulation, I’ll respond to this:

I would expect the ban to be such as the ones that existed prior to Roe v Wade, enforced similarly and with similar penalties (which is to say, directed mainly at doctors). Not sure how effective it would be, but I expect it will reduce abortions. It will produce similar problems to the ones created prior to Roe v Wade. Pharmaceutical options will make enforcement more complicated, I will acknowledge. IOW, if the concept of a ban seems so farfetched, we needn’t wonder about how it would work. It already did work, once upon a time.

267

[QUOTE=Bryan Ekers]
So, Polerius, are you prepared to look Sally in the eye and tell her this is for the best?
[/QUOTE]

I never said abortion was never an option, given the right reasons.

What I do object to is a combination of the following

  1. Abortion too late into pregnancy
  2. Abortion “for any reason whatsoever”

The earlier the abortion is, the more comfortable I am with abortion for any reason whatsoever. The later the abortion is, the more I would like to see compelling reasons like risk to the health of the mother.

At the two extremes

  • For a 1-day embryo, I don’t mind the abortion, no matter what reason the mother has
  • For a fetus one day before birth, I do mind the abortion, and only serious risk to the mother’s life would justify it.

For all other points in between, it gets grayer and grayer as you get away from the two extremes.

If we have a “justification scale” where 0 represents “no justification needed” and 100 represents “only serious risk to the mother’s life”, everyone has a “justification requirement timeline”.

I start out at 0 (just after conception) and end at 100 (just before birth), and slowly move from 0 to 100 as the months tick by, with probably a step up on the day the heart starts beating and when the nervous system is developed. I probably reach 100 a few months before birth.

  • Some people start at 100 from day 1 and stay there,
  • Some people start out at 0 and jump to 100 on a particular arbitrary date they set for themselves.
  • Some people start out at 0 and stay there right until the moment of birth.

You seem to be in the latter group.

I think that most people have a more complex “justification requirement timeline” than just all 0 or all 100.

Going back to your example, if Sally is just about to give birth in 1 hour, then, no, her situation is not sufficient to have an abortion, and to have one, is equivalent to killing her baby one hour after birth. But, if she decided to have an abortion early enough, her situation would justify it. Now, I don’t know how you would legislate this, or even if it is possible to legislate it, but I am just talking from a moral point of view, not a legal one.

268

[QUOTE=Stratocaster]
By the way, after reading your last post, I’ll also add that for someone who found emotional appeals so distasteful, this write-up was a doozy. After she is in the Naval Academy, is she also going to end up inventing a time machine, going back in time, and killing Hitler? Then after that, setting up a charitable fund to place orphaned puppies? (I guess I wasn’t done with you.)
[/quote]
That was in response to the “one-hour before birth” question asked of me, which I assume was supposed to represent an extreme test of one’s pro-choice stance. Actually, what I described was a lot more plausible than someone seriously considering a last-hour elective abortion - a young woman with a good shot at college and making something of herself, and escaping the cycle of poverty that her family and peers are stuck in. Does this seem science-fictiony to you, or something? Drop all the flag-waving elements and the shot at Wal-Mart (which I admit I threw in for laughs) and what I described is actually pretty common in inner-city areas and small towns throughout the United States - a pregnant teenager with a tough choice and perhaps not a lot of parental or peer support, nor financial stability. It doesn’t require embellishment involving time machines and such and it’s frankly rather immature of you to introduce them as though they represented a flaw in the illustration. Please do some reading about the realistic problems faced by teen mothers, including missed educational and employment opportunities.

Well, you made a fair attempt at meeting my request so I completely repudiate the MSNBC cite. I would like to point out, though, that when it “worked”, it was on a much less mobile population, with less access to education and information, so to make it “work” now, you may have to restrict American women of childbearing years from crossing the border into Canada, and censor websites describing drugs and herbs and whatnot that have the secondary effect (now considered highly desirable) of interrupting pregnancy. A ban that only partly works will lead to partial enforcement, i.e. where the pickings are easy. This will be in poorer areas where doctors are rarer and thus access to them is more easily monitored. Imprison a doctor for performing an abortion, and you may very well deprive a poor area of medical care entirely (also not far-fetched; I’ve seen reports of efforts to drive abortion clinics out of rural areas that are then left with no gynecological services at all).

I’m a little confused by no mention of punishments for the woman, the instigator of the now-criminal act. Can you expand on “directed mainly at doctors” to talk about what will not be directed at doctors? What’s a possible punishment for a serial self-aborter, a woman who uses medications to routinely abort her own pregnancies?

I guess it will reduce abortions, by denying them to the women too poor to get them. The side effect is that enforcement requires some loss of freedom (pregnancy checks for women leaving the country and upon their return? The opening of medical records to ensure every reported miscarriage was a natural one?) and a fair increase in misery among women who already have plenty of problems, more children born into poverty with some abandoned in dumpsters and such and others growing up with a higher risk of involvement in crime and drugs, all because a young woman who might have had happier more secure children later, was rushed into things because of bad luck and remedies denied to satisfy the morality of other people far away. If there really are a million elective abortions a year in the United States, would you prosecute (assuming adequate resources) a million murderers? If that seems silly, how so? Every one of them is equally guilty, aren’t they?

269

[QUOTE=Polerius]
For all other points in between, it gets grayer and grayer as you get away from the two extremes.
[/quote]
That’s morally understandable but legally unworkable. It requires an arbitrary judgement on what is “reasonable” which unfortunately means what a local district attorney and judge think is reasonable. Given that, a woman can venue-shop and travel to areas where prosecution (assuming a national ban is in place) is either lax or nonexistent.

Or at least wealthy women can. I don’t want to keep harping on this point, but the effect of abortion restrictions is disproportionately suffered by poor women, who already have enough problems without additional children they don’t want and can’t support.

I understand completely and I won’t make a fuss about this. I just don’t personally separate the practical issues from the philosophical ones. I don’t think Sally’s situation needs to “justify” it because you can take the more sympathetic elements away one by one and yet have no clear line where Sally’s situation doesn’t “justify” it. What if Sally’s not about to go to college? What if she’s older than 17? What if her family’s not poor or abusive? What if she’s not especially bright or ambitious? At what point does enough of her sympathy evaporate that BAM! it’s no abortion for her! If it’s a crime, her being sympathetic shouldn’t give her a free pass. Faced with this reality, I oppose using a justification basis, for reasons I described earlier. If Sally needs a justification, Sally will lie, and I can’t blame her one whit. She was raped by a stranger after a night at a bar when she suspects she was slipped a roofie and woke up the next day with no memory and didn’t even know she had been raped until she missed her next period nearly a month later. Is that a justification? It’s not a crime that can be prosecuted in any reasonable way, even if the father could be identified through DNA evidence collected from the fetus, because the key witness can’t remember (or at least claims she can’t remember) the circumstances. A law that can be evaded with a simple lie (as was the case in divorce courts 50 years ago) is a useless law. It’s a bad law because it forces people to break it, or suffer.

270

[QUOTE=PBear42]
IMHO, one cannot be pro-choice without having made (and be ready to defend) a value judgment that abortion is an accepable choice.
[/QUOTE]

My point was that I hear VERY FEW people ever argue that it is a desirable thing. A common argument is that an abortion is preferable to bringing an unwanted child into the world, but I virtually never hear it argued that abortion is good per se. It goes without saying that a pro-life person finds abortion more abhorrent than a pro-choice person, but it’s quite a distortion to conclude from that that the pro-choice person thinks it’s good.

271

[QUOTE=Sarahfeena]
I don’t know why…he basically advances the same argument.

[/quote]

Now you’re being dishonest. I never at any time equated abortion to “having a wart removed”, and that isn’t even CLOSE to being the same as any argument I ever made.

That’s very, very, very poor debating form on your part. Boooo!
[note: I am attacking the argument, not the person]

I do not think that person believes it true that “killing a kid” and “having an abortion” are synonymous. But if you find that “funny”, that’s your prerogative. I do not find it so.

272

[QUOTE=lowbrass]
It goes without saying that a pro-life person finds abortion more abhorrent than a pro-choice person, but it’s quite a distortion to conclude from that that the pro-choice person thinks it’s good.
[/QUOTE]

True enough, I guess, as abortion often represents the least bad choice. I have to admit, though, sometimes it’s the very least bad choice, in the sense that a safe, simple, early abortion may not have any lasting negative effect at all, and only a few short-term negative hassles like having to travel to a clinic (if local pro-life efforts have shut down nearby ones) and run a gamut of protesters and sit through mandatory counseling and other hoop-jumping. It’s practically the neutral option, among various bad ones.

Of course, if one assumes the woman is going to have a chance to mull over her decision to abort when she’s burning in Hell, I guess one should factor that into one’s moral calculations.
By the way, I’ll equate abortion with having a wart removed, or more accurately, I’m not scandalized in the least by women who get an abortion with this analogy or something similar in mind (i.e. that this pregnancy is merely a medical inconvenience to be dealt with as quickly and smoothly as possible). I’m not upset about them not being upset.

273

[QUOTE=Polerius]
Now, I don’t know how you would legislate this, or even if it is possible to legislate it, but I am just talking from a moral point of view, not a legal one.
[/QUOTE]

Of course, the law has to switch from 0 to 100%, as there’s no such thing as a prorated abortion. But I think the restrictions on late-term abortions are an attempt to acknowledge your grey scale. Here in Illinois, it takes two doctor to agree that a fetus is not viable* if a woman requests an abortion in the third trimester. If their professional opinions are that the fetus likely cannot survive on its own, then an abortion may be performed; if it likely can survive, an early term c-section can be done and the infant put into protective services and adopted. Makes sense to me - if a fetus can exist on its own without using my body as its life support system, then I do believe its right to live - as evidenced by its, y’know, *living *- is as absolute as mine is. Which is to say not really absolute at all, but not something I as a private citizen am allowed to legally take away.

A fetus that can’t live on its own has no right to life at all simply because it can’t live. A parent has to choose to put a child on life support and can withdraw it at any time. I don’t see why it should be any different because the life support system is my uterus instead of the expensive machines.

None of us have the right to fly without aircraft, simply because we physically can’t. If a fetus physically can’t live, how can it have a right to life?

BTW, when I was working with a practicing herbalist, I received at least three requests a month for information on herbal abortifacaents. Desperate women will find a way. Apathetic ones won’t. Isn’t it significant that the women who don’t give a shit will be the ones to become parents under pro-life law?

*'though opinions on what “viable” means differ, in this day of heroic medicine. Is an infant viable if intensive care and lifesaving operations are required? Opinions and policy differ.

274

[QUOTE=Stratocaster]
I don’t worry about nebulous characterizations like “personhood.”
[/QUOTE]

Well, there, we differ…see below.

[QUOTE=Stratocaster]
The fetus is a human being, and as such is entitled to certain rights IMO.All rights exist until they’re interfered with. The point is that I can interfere with your right to personal property, but your right lo live would still exist. Not the other way around. There is no more fundamental right in that sense. (Seems inarguable to me.)Yes, as noted above.I stated my assumptions: all human beings are endowed with certain rights, a circumstance I find absolutely axiomatic. If the right to live can be dispensed with so easily, no right is meaningful.
[/QUOTE]
Well, we differ fundamentally - I don’t believe in inherent rights, I believe rights are granted by Society. I believe those rights adhere to persons, as societal actors, but exist only in as much they are exercised i.e. I don’t think they are “always on”. It might even be better to find a different name for what I believe in - instead of rights, let’s call them"privileges" instead. The privilege to be allowed to continue living is one of many, but until it comes up, it doesn’t interfere with the free exercise of other privileges like choice. To me, if you can be killed when you attempt to exercise choice, clearly the privilege of choice didn’t exist, not that it existed but was overridden.

While I’ve come around to belief that a late-stage foetus can in some circumstances be a limited societal actor, I still think weighting should be towards the full actor (the Mother). In case you ask, no, I don’t believe all societal actors are equal.

275

After skimming this thread I have a couple of things to say.

Most people here seem to be in the pro choice camp. Because of that there seems to be lots of pointing out contradictions to prove their whole side wrong. Like ‘why do they make concessions for raped women if they’re pro life?’ Which seems like a ridiculous point to make, as they’re simply respecting the victim with their views.

While I’m more on the choosing side, I don’t like how this stance often applied. Here most fuss made about abortions is to do with repeat abortions, and the expense to the taxpayer. I think that most women who are under 20-24 and get pregnant out of marriage are expected to have an abortion. In this context, pro choice quickly becomes no choice, just like the pro lifers, because apparently the woman would just be throwing her life away, wouldn’t be able to provide a decent life for her child, and would be a drain on the taxpayer.

276

[QUOTE=lowbrass]
Now you’re being dishonest. I never at any time equated abortion to “having a wart removed”, and that isn’t even CLOSE to being the same as any argument I ever made.
[/QUOTE]
I know you never used those words, however, I don’t think Der Trihs actually believes that wart=fetus in a biological sense. He is talking about moral equivilants. Anyone who thinks there is no moral issue with abortion is essentially saying the same thing.

I do believe it is true. So if I say it, am I being dishonest? :dubious:

277

[QUOTE=Stratocaster]
Who suggested such a thing?
[/QUOTE]

Every anti-abortion person who talks about adoption being a God given way to give a wonderful family the gift of life and love.

Adoptions are not always the best thing. Adopted babies are tortured, abused and killed. Adopted children have no sense of their biological family and grow up with a huge piece missing. A woman who has an abortion has closure. A woman who gives up a child for adoption will wonder for the rest of her life how it turned out. She gets “thrown out with the bathwater.” Once the adoption is finalized, she is expendible, and is treated like she is dead.

In his book “Mind Hunter” John Douglas, FBI serial killer expert, writes “Berkowitz, like a number of serial killers, was raised in an adoptive family.”

278

[QUOTE=Annie-Xmas]
Every anti-abortion person who talks about adoption being a God given way to give a wonderful family the gift of life and love.

Adoptions are not always the best thing. Adopted babies are tortured, abused and killed.
[/QUOTE]
So are biological children, sometimes.

Which has not been shown to be necessarily harmful in any way.

Not true. There are open adoptions, if the birth mother prefers it.

Again, anecdotal evidence.

279

So if a woman who is pregnant can’t raise her child and doesn’t want to have it adopted, what would you recommend.

Anti-abortion people have to portray adoption as this miraculous la-la land where everything is wonderful and nothing goes wrong. It isn’t, but for a pregnant woman who is not in a position to raise her child, it has to be portrayed as a utopia.

280

[QUOTE=Annie-Xmas]
So if a woman who is pregnant can’t raise her child and doesn’t want to have it adopted, what would you recommend.

Anti-abortion people have to portray adoption as this miraculous la-la land where everything is wonderful and nothing goes wrong. It isn’t, but for a pregnant woman who is not in a position to raise her child, it has to be portrayed as a utopia.
[/QUOTE]
I never said that nothing ever goes wrong. But given the option to be dead or to be adopted, I’d take adopted every time.

For a pregnant woman who is not in a position to raise her child, it may not be utopia, but it’s a reasonable option, despite the way you attempt to portray it.