I am thinking about it, but you’ll need to help me understand how they are mostly right. (Unless of course you just mean about the giving ground part.)
Let’s start with the position that abortion is murder. Why should one compromise about murder?
Why is the murder of an innocent person sometimes okay and sometimes not? Or to put it another way, what did the unborn baby resulting from a rape do to make him or herself different?
If abortion is however not murder, or not always murder, then the entire debate becomes very, very different.
This is the exact description my college Morals & Ethics agreed most accurately describes the anti-abortion-except-for-rape&incest position. The key to understanding the hypocrisy is that they’d allow abortions because the woman “didn’t do anything.” Once you explore “do what?” and wwhy that should be punished, the whole position falls apart. Total anti-abortion, no exceptions for rape, is a consistent and defensible position…leaving aside the rightness or wrongness of it, I just mean it’s defensible in debate.
That’s exactly right. I hate the idea of rape/incest exclusions. The thing that bothers me the most about it is that it sets up pregnancy and babies as punishment. THAT’S what we need in the world, are more mothers who resent their children. Personally, I think that the pro-life movement focuses far too much on legalities in the first place…we would be far better off, IMO, to work on changing circumstances & attitudes so that abortions are not desired in the first place.
Agree with both of these. Exceptions for rape and incest make restrictions a bit more palatable for some – but also back up this idea that women should ‘pay’ for their sin of having sex, that being forced ot have a child will ‘show them’ or perhaps turn them into gentle domestic creatures like something out of a dated rom-com.
It never fails to fail to amaze me how the people most vehemently aganst every type of abortion are unwilling to support cheap/free and accessible birth control. The pill, condoms, EC (not RU-486) – every step a woman might take to prevent abortion. It doesn’t add up.
C’mon. Even if it is always murder that wouldn’t change things much. The law classifies a murder many different ways, and may punish it in as many ways - or not at all, if it was found to be a justified homicide.
The latter is important, since the law finds in many cases that a person was responsible for killing another, but justified by the law for doing so. Now, the law makes no moral justification in these cases usually, and they often engender some debate when they occur.
Now, the law does not treat an abortion as a murder at this time. But it used to consider it somewhat akin to one. And the moral questions that attach to a justified homicide can certainly attach here as well.
I did just mean to apply the “mostly right” thing to the fact that they’re giving ground and compromising.
It isn’t sometimes okay and sometimes not. The anti-abortionists think that since a blanket abortion ban is impossible to enact, they’re trying to save as many babies as realistically possible.
Enacting a partial abortion ban actually is a realistic political goal, and I can see how they would think it was a victory for their side if it happened.
You’re trying to confuse the circumstances of the act of the homicide. But which definitions of legal homicide depend upon who the victim was?
Different circumstances might involve taking into account what the person who was killed did or did not do that mitigate the responsibility of the person who committed the homicide. That gets us back to my question about what the unborn baby might have done to differentiate themselves from other unborn babies.
I’m disappointed that so far no one besides the OP has used the term “rape babies”. I was hoping that that’s what we were going to call them from now on.
Please tell me how this falls apart, she willingly took a risk that may create life, once that life is created (due to it being human life), there is a moral responsibility she now has to the fetus - as that fetus is human. In the case of rape, though it is still a human life, the woman never accepted that risk of that life creation, and that fetus has no moral right to develop there. The woman has a right in the case of rape to have this human removed from her and allowed to die, cold - yes, but it is her choice to make.
By that argument, if the woman used birth control, she was refusing the moral right of the fetus to dwell in her womb and she should have the right to an abortion.
Engaging in sex could have a possible outcome of creating a human life, by willing engaging in sex you are running that risk, and IMHO responsible for that life if it is created - Sex is the consent by the woman for the fetus to take up residency. The act of consensual sex itself is moral permission for that fetus - use of contraceptions reduce but don’t elimate this risk, so permission for that fetus is still morally there (again IMHO)
I wonder if the exception for rape would cover a woman who drank until she blacked out, and had sex with a man at a house party? What if she crawled naked into some man’s bed after the party? How about a woman who does this every Saturday night? How about a woman who had six drinks in an hour before she said “yes”?
No, pregnancy is a possible outcome of sex - one that I would guess occurs in a minority of instances of having sex. Consent to have sex is just that, not a declaration of a desire for pregnancy. I could list a whole encyclopedia of events that sometimes occur when you do something, and ask if you “consented” to have that happen. It wouldn’t make sense in any of them (e.g. Did your decision to drive mean that you consented to getting rear ended? Did plane crash victims consent to dying in a plane crash? Did the victim of a mugging consent to being mugged because he walked downtown?)
Did the victim in any of these examples give “moral permission” for the event to happen to them, even though those outcomes are known to happen in a minority of those circumstances?
More to the point, where is the moral permission to murder one unborn baby over another?
Wouldn’t that suggest that, since by going outside of her house a woman has a higher chance of being raped, she is essentially taking the risk that that will happen when she does so?
)