I am taking my cue from this article at The New Republic. It is best if all concerned go there to read it and the first response to the article as it is not long and I cannot copy enough here to make sense without violating fair use rules.
I will summarize here though:
A pro-lifer cannot logically hold a position that abortion is murder unless they resort to far more violent actions to stop those performing abortions.
The argument goes something like this:
Imagine someone in your neighborhood is murdering people. As people walk by that person’s house they kill some and continue to do so day after day. For whatever reason the police cannot/will not stop the person. This person is responsible for thousands of deaths. If this were the case would you be able to stand idly by and let it continue or would you and your neighbors take matters into your own hands and forcibly stop the murderer?
Since the vast majority of pro-lifers do not resort to violence (be it killing abortion providers or burning down their clinics or what have you) these pro-lifers simply cannot truly buy into the notion that abortion = murder.
As noted the argument is more concisely put in the link above. I thought it interesting enough to be worth debating.
Notes:
FTR I am pro-choice personally.
I DO NOT advocate violence in any form as regards this. This is purely meant as a basis for debate and should be taken as an intellectual exercise only!
I’ve seen this argument before, and think it to be an excellent one to bring up with strong pro-life advocates. I think that if you truly believe that human life begins at conception, and that each and every human life is equal and blessed, then there is a huge disconnect between this belief and the lack of pure outrage. Why there is no massive coordination to engage in civil disobedience to stop abortion wherever it is known to occur is beyond me. The only reason I can think of is that abortion is really not as big of a deal as they make it out to be, they want to use the issue to leverage politicians of their ilk into power in order to enact legislation that has nothing to do with abortion and/or they use the issue as a substitute for some other issue they have that they’d rather not be front and center in the discussion.
I’m decidedly pro-choice, but this argument is pure bullshit. Bad shit happens every day, all over the world, and we only have so much outrage in us. You might as well say that no one really cares about anyone or anything, else we’d all devote our lives to a cause.
So because people are not murdering people to stop the murders they don’t care enough about it? Their religion ALSO says to obey the laws of their country. They also view violent overthrow of the established order as something not to be taken lightly.
Whack-a-Mole Congrats on making an entire thread dedicated to a strawman. Kudos!
You must not be really against Genocide because you haven’t organized to invade Darfur!
I do not need to hold that unborn children have the full rights due a newborn baby or a child or an adult - we recognize in our law that certain rights accrue to a person at various stages of their development.
This would fully permit many customary practices in our society and in our law - like not generally having funerals for miscarriages and the like. That being said, though, it is pretty clear that from the outset an unborn child is fully human and that the characteristics that make it a separate person from the mother develop quite early.
Given this, a certain amount of respect for this life is due.
I think there is a greater disconnect on the other side, frankly. Pro-choicers will happily gush over an unborn baby if it is one that is anticipated and appreciated. It will be named, called always the “baby” and large sums of money will be spent planning for its arrival. If the baby is not wanted it will be labeled a “fetus” and the essential humanity of it will be denied all the way to the clinic door.
Killing an abortion-provider wouldn’t necessarily do anything to reduce the number of abortions. I’d expect (read: guess) that the current limiting factor is the number of women who seek an abortion, not the number of provider-hours available to perform those abortions. So unless you killed and intimidated enough abortionist-providers that there weren’t enough provider-hours available per year to provide all abortions sought, women seeking an abortion could just go to someone else.
I was going to make the same arguement. I don’t see embryos as human life but I do consider the people of Darfur human lives. However I’m not about to catch a flight over there to intervene. Does that mean I dont think genocide = murder because I’m not doing anything about it?
But people do devote themselves to causes all the time. And many people who are rabidly pro-life have already devoted themselves to this cause. And in places throughout the world where there are legitimate crises involving human lives, people tend to become even more radical and devotional to the cause (see: Buddhist monks during the Vietnam War, Palestine/Israel, US Civil Rights Movement, US slavery, Struggle for Indian Independence, etc.). Hell - the US Civil Rights Movement pales in comparision if you take the word of your average pro-lifer (if you go strictly by the numbers) - yet we aren’t seeing any organized actions on the scale of that Movement by any stretch of the imagination whatsoever.
Throughout history people have laid down their lives to save others. That level of sacrifice just hasn’t been seen surrounding this genocide (to borrow a term from the pro-life side).
Bull. Some would have us lose both ways - say we don’t really care because we’re not ready to kill to defend babies, and then if some nutjob actually does do that they’d use that incident to brand the entire movement as a pack of murderous zealots.
Very few people have that level of dedication. I’m not sure that the percentage of pro-lifers blockading clinics is signifcantly smaller than the percentage of believers in Civil Rights who actually got off their asses and marched.
Let’s not cede the term “pro-life” without question; that usage is an obvious debate-framing tactic, and so is calling a fetus a “baby” or a “person”. That’s a way of assuming the conclusion. Now:
An anti-abortion advocate cannot think the product of rape or incest is a “person” either, not if she is willing to allow those as exceptions to an anti-abortion law. Yet permitting those exceptions seems pretty common. Why is that?
I specifically used the term “civil disobedience” to avoid this. Resorting to violence and murder would be against, for instance, Catholic just war theory as it doesn’t meet the requirement of being action by a sovereign nation.
Quite possibly true. But if the percentages are close, then the pro-lifers are doing a pretty pathetic job of it. I see more outrage and disobedience at yearly G20 summits.
When you have Obama (the apparent ring leader of abortions throughout the country*) giving the commencement at Notre Dame and only a few dozen students boycott the ceremony, and all the truly dedicated can do is manage a few mobile billboards of mutilated fetuses, then I’m going to question the pro-life side’s true level of outrage.
*Sorry - I don’t want this strawman phrase to be my argument. But all the literature I saw the weeks leading up to that graduation ceremony would lead a Martian to believe that Obama himself was going out and tearing babies out of women.
This evades the moral equivalence pro-lifers like to draw that abortion = murder.
Either that is pure rhetorical bullshit and they do not really believe it or they do believe it.
Now imagine you honestly believe that babies are being murdered. Seriously. Not some issue over a Spotted Owl you never see but rather you know that in your country, perhaps down the street, there is a building where they take babies and stick an awl through their skulls. They do this daily and kill hundreds or thousands per year.
Remember, this is murder. Their words, not mine. If the above were really happening (for the sake of argument) you are telling me it is something you just couldn’t really get in a fuss about because there are other bad things in the world too and you can only divide your attention so much?
I call bullshit unless you are a seriously malfunctioning person. If there was a place that was murdering babies like that I cannot believe you’d sit idly by and let it continue (remember we are presuming the police cannot stop it for whatever reason).
The argument in the OP seems to be that if you oppose position X, but are not sufficiently energetic in your opposition to satisfy those who support position X, that therefore your opposition is invalid, is wrongheaded. It gives a veto on my opinion to those who oppose me, merely if they don’t think I’ve done enough to support my position, and who could ever meet that criteria?
You may hold this view but many on the pro-life side make no such distinction. Human life begins at conception (in their view). Period. If anything this position of yours hews more closely to a pro-choice view.
Conferring different rights at different ages does not apply here. At least I am unaware that shooting a 1-year-old and shooting a 50-year-old carry any distinction under the law. Murder is murder. If anything society would view the murder of the 1-year-old as a more reprehensible act and the person who shot the child would (I am guessing) be more likely to see a maximum sentence for murder and less ability to get out on parole as it is considered a more depraved act.
I think you meant “I see more outrage and disobedience on television at yearly G20 summits.”
Starting during the GWB era, when anti-American/anti-globalization protests have been a staple telegenic affair, yes, they are widely publicized, because many in the mainstream media shared (and I share too) anti-GWB sentiments. Few share anti-abortion sentiments, so if a million people marched to the Mall in the March For Life in January, there is no reason to believe that you would see a commensurate amount of mainstream media coverage. When they had the first Earth Day revival back in the '90s, the Wa. Po. ombudsman eventually issued a mea culpa after pro lifers complained that Earth Day had drawn roughly as many, if that, attendees as the March For Life, but had received something like fifty times the column inches. The ombudsman frankly admitted the inescapable [paraphrase]“This is not unrelated to the fact that many at the Post knew people who attended Earth Day, but few if any knew people who went to the pro-life rally.”
And, the polling (which note, I do not substitute as validation vel non of a moral issue, but rather as of potential successful influence by the anti-abortion movement) shows significant recent trends toward opposition to abortion, so don’t be so sure that the opposition to abortion has been “pathetic.”