There were women willing to stage a sit in and be arrested for trespassing to demand that a politician vote against Kavanaugh. It was basically getting arrested as political theatre. There is a long and storied history of people being arrested to promote their pet cause.
But “Pro-Life” people won’t get arrested to literally save the lives of children scheduled to be murdered. The jerks in PETA are more directly active to save the lives of lab rats and mink than pro-lifers are to save actual human children.
In my understanding it does dissuade/intimidate some women from going to clinics (hence the need for clinic escorts – which, IMO, is an incredibly honorable and decent way to volunteer to support women).
Here’s the part you’re missing. In this case, the adults are protected by the full power of the state. If I interfere with them, I will be killed or go to jail for most of my life. The question then becomes not “is this murder?” but “am I willing to die or be jailed for the rest of my life to save this kid?”
Saying “no” can just mean you’re not a hero, that you’re not willing to pay with your life to potentially save others, not that you weren’t sincere in thinking killing the kid is murder.
By saying “I will only believe that you believe that abortion is murder if you go out and start killing abortion doctors. Otherwise you don’t really believe it’s murder or it’s a hypocrite” is deeply flawed, because it insists that the only reason people aren’t murdering abortion doctors is an insincerity of belief, when the truth is that there’s a much larger possibility - that most people aren’t willing to lose their own lives to fight what they see as an injustice. The impossibly high standard you set - the false dichotomy - is designed specifically so that you can call people hypocrites.
It fails exactly as much as saying “oh so you think meat is murder? why aren’t you out there killing slaughterhouse workers? I guess you don’t really believe that” or “you think drone strikes are murder? why aren’t you out there shooting down drones and killing drone operators? I guess you don’t really believe that”
So to alter your analogy to fit the situation: a state-run death squad is about to kill a 4 year old. You can intervene, but they’ll kill you. So you don’t. I guess you don’t really think that what they’re about to do (kill a kid) is murder, because you weren’t willing to die to try to stop it.
But, pro-life people do get arrested protesting and blocking abortion clinics.
Not most of them. But I bet most women who disapproved of Kavanaugh didn’t get arrested, and most animal-rights believers don’t either.
Also, there’s the issue of time. I bet those women won’t stage a sit in every day that Kavanaugh sits on the bench. Abortion has been the law of the land for decades. Pretty hard to motivate people to go do the same protest they’ve been doing for decades with limited results.
It may not get them shut down, but it may dissuade women from going there, which is the entire point.
To go back to my analogy of your neighbor killing children and getting paid for it, at the very least, you would follow him around, warning everyone to stay away, similar to the protestors.
I’ll grant that the protestors that are outside of abortion clinics every single day probably consider it to be murder as well.
Right, the abortion doctors are actually performing the killing. Gun manufacturers just provide the tools. There’s a light year of difference in proximity there.
If my neighbor was killing 4-10 ten year olds every day, and getting paid to do so, then I would most certainly do something about that.
Kim is out of my league. I could not get there, and if I could I couldn’t get close to him, and even if I did, he’s got all kinds of security and stuff. I have no option except to plead to my political leaders to do something about him, as it is out of my power to do something myself.
The abortion doctor, or the guy killing ten year olds next door, is much more accessible.
Murder is already illegal. When someone commits murder, society does what it can to track and punish. It creates disincentives to murder already. What discencintives are there legally to prevent abortion?
Right, a very small subset that actually believes that abortion is murder. The rest just say that hyperbolically in an attempt to sway people on an emotional level.
Can you please give your definition of murder then? Because the actual definition of murder is the unlawful killing of an other human.
To say that you think that it is murder is to say that either you think that it is illegal (which I know you know it is not), or that you think that it should be illegal.
You cannot hold the position that you think that it should be illegal, and still be pro-choice. That’s just a complete logical contradiction.
Is your definition of murder any homicide that you find to be immoral? Or do you have a more specific definition that you are operating under?
You guys genuinely cannot conceive if a person who legitimately thought abortion was murder, but was not willing to themselves commit murder, going to jail for the rest of their life, and possibly being executed? That hypothetical person cannot exist? Every single person who thought abortion is murder is willing to die, tomorrow, to live up to their beliefs?
Is everyone a hero in your worldview? Every single person who has a genuine conviction is willing to get themselves jailed or killed every day in order to act on that conviction? No cowards? No people who have decided that they have 3 kids themselves and they can’t abandon their kids to go off and kill abortion doctors and get jailed for the rest of their lives? Nothing like that?
None of that is possible, it’s just straight “if you don’t kill an abortion doctor right now, clearly you don’t believe abortion is murder”?
It’s such a ridiculous position that I have no idea what to do with those of you who simply keep repeating it over and over again as if it were obvious.
We’re talking millions of people – sure, individuals can believe all kinds of things and behave in all kinds of ways. But in my understand of humans, most are relatively morally decent, and most wouldn’t be able to live normally and comfortably and happily and neighborly if they truly believed their neighbors were regularly slaughtering children. But most humans are indeed capable of occasional hyperbole for things they think are important. So hyperbole seems more likely to me, for most folks who identify as pro-life, than that most of them really, truly, believe that their neighbors regularly are slaughtering babies.
But they’re not saying “if 5% of people who claimed to be anti-abortion would bomb abortion clinics, I’d believe the whole group” - they’re saying that if anyone isn’t personally willing to give their life, and abandon their families, in a quest to end violently end abortion, then they don’t really believe the beliefs they claim to have. That is a ridiculously high standard we wouldn’t really apply to any other issue.
Murder is an intentional killing that is not morally justified. Plain and simple.
Morality cannot be legislated. Morality is a code of conduct that is kept by individuals. Legality enters into it when laws are passed to prohibit or demand some sort of behavior of individuals for the common good.
As it stands today, abortion is legal on demand. I believe it should remain legal because banning it would cause deaths.
Women would die seeking illegal abortions.
Now, privately, I believe that the only morally justified abortion would be to save the life of the mother as in an ectopic pregnancy. No other reason, not rape, not incest, not disability of the child, not poverty, not cultural gender preference, etc, is a morally justified reason to terminate a pregnancy. Because my personal conviction is is that life begins at conception.
Everyone deserves a chance at life.
Law and legality have nothing to do with anyone’s personal moral code. A person’s moral code is developed over a lifetime.
Their integrity to it is entirely up to them.
For example, if I were raped, and became pregnant, I would feel compelled to bear the child, even though abortion is available.
Because I believe abortion would be wrong. Killing the child would not be morally justified to me. To me, it would be murder.
But someone else’s morality may allow them to get an abortion in the same situation. I believe that they should have that choice available to them.
That is why I’m pro-choice. Abortion should be a choice according to conscience.
There are other situations involving killings that may or may not be classified as murder. Assisted suicides for instance. Capital punishment. The list goes on.
I mean, with that attitude, sure. Have you even tried? Maybe looked at some maps of river crossings into North Korea? Practiced with a sniper rifle? Do you really care about those murder victims? Put in a little effort, man. Your claim is that every anti-abortionist who’s not out there stalking abortion doctors is a moral fraud but you’re not even willing to try smuggling some weapons into a ship off the north coast of Japan. Sounds to me like you don’t really believe that killing North Koreans is murder.
Wait, are we talking about moral absolutes, or convenience?
Yeah, but what are you doing, personally?
What about when it’s really clear that someone did the murder but they get off on some technicality. You gonna go be the executioner?
You’ve imagined a scenario in which you get to be a white knight by righteously murdering your evil neighbor, but somehow can’t find a single injustice in the real world that you feel strongly enough about to act on.
And here’s what I say to that: That’s ok. I don’t take that to be an indication that your moral claims are not sincere. Just like people can think abortion is morally equivalent to murder without picking up a gun and hunting abortion doctors.
Because surely you do think that there’s evil in the world. But since none of it is literally next door to you, it’s ok to feel like it’s someone else’s problem, or to feel like the whole thing is too hard or too complicated or impossible to stop. It’s ok for people with moral views you disagree with to feel like that too. It’s just as incorrect to view their lack of action as hypocrisy as it would be to view your lack of action, or mine, as that.
Do you really believe that every woman who seeks an abortion deserves to go to prison or be executed?
Did you know that pregnancy can endanger a woman’s life? That she could die from it?
What do you think about a woman who does not want to be pregnant but was made so by incest or rape? What if she does not want to carry and deliver?
Did you know that there are many parents who have chosen to terminate a pregnancy that they very much wanted due to a tragic diagnosis of fetal defects? I’m talking about defects that are so severe that even if there is a live birth, the baby would not live for long, and during that time it would suffer horribly. http://www.aheartbreakingchoice.com/
Have you heard of Savita Halappanavar, who died after being refused an abortion for a fetus that was already dying?
What do you think of El Salvador’s laws, which outlaw abortion for any reason?
I’m bringing up these points to remind you and everyone that it’s not just a simple case of “she wants to murder her baby.”
Why would they have to do all of that? They could just take some of the strawmen that you have built and use them to bolster their protest numbers. Why would I believe the whole group based on what 5% says? That’s the definition of broadbrushing.
Why would someone have to give their life and abandon their families? Over a third of murders go unsolved, and it’s not that hard to make it a bit harder.
Maybe it isn’t that I’m a hypocrite here, maybe it really is that they don’t consider “murdering” hundreds of “babies” a year to be really all that bad.
I’m not saying that they don’t like it. I am sure that many anti-abortionists are there because they don’t like abortion. But, they don’t actually believe that it is murder on par with killing say, a ten year old child.
Okay, thank you for giving your definition of Murder. It is not one that I would use, and it is it not one that is used in the legal system, and I don’t think that it is all that widely used, but it is a definition. Though, since morals are relative, I think that you meant to say that “Murder is an intentional killing that I do not think is morally justified.”
Which is why you should only judge yourself by your morals. Judging other by your own morals will alway leave others lacking, in your eyes.
I agree it should remain legal, but more than just out of the physical harms that re-criminalizing it would cause, but also the harm it would cause to women in general in having the government have a say in what medical procedures they are allowed to receive.
I believe that life begins at conception, too. In fact, when did life ever end? You had a living egg and a living sperm merge together. There is no interruption in life, there is not a thing that wasn’t alive that now is. Really, it is a continuation of life from that first bacteria that swallowed that first mitochondria, and even further back than that. Life began at abogenisis, conception is just a new combination.
And it is unique, it is different, and it is a living being that the universe will never see again. It is a loss to the world if that unique creation never gets to see its full potential.
But it is not unique in being unique. Every sperm cell, and every egg is also unique, and every possible combination that could have been made is unique. This is true of all animals, not just humans. It’s also true of all life, and even of non-living things as well. There was a book in the Library of Alexandria that was absolutely unique, the only copy in existence, and it burned with the rest of them.
If you gave me the choice of saving a zygote or one of the books out of the Library of Alexandria, I’d choose the book.
This is an opinion. I think that everyone deserves a chance at living a full, productive and enjoyable life, but people rarely get what they deserve.
Law and legality are the development of society’s moral code, which is a reflection of many individual moral codes. How do you justify having any laws, if we do not collectively agree that some things that are “bad”?
And you can hold yourself to that moral. If it makes you feel better about yourself, if having an abortion would make you feel poorly about yourself, then follow that. It would not make sense for you to make a decision that you think is the wrong one.
I believe that they should have that choice, and I also do not judge them for making it.
I agree. There is only one person who truly understands the details and reason behind an abortion, and unless you are the one getting the abortion, then that person is not you.
I would not consider assisted suicide murder, assuming that the person really did want to die, and was not forced or pressured into it. Capital punishment isn’t murder. It’s a very ineffective tool for a justice system, and I disagree with it, but I don’t consider it to be murder. Stand your ground, most of the time, I wouldn’t call murder, but in some cases, like the recent shooting over a handicapped space, is considered murder by not only myself, but by the prosecutors. The Trayvon Martin case, OTOH, I do consider to be murder, and there is quite a bit of disagreement on that.
So, our definitions clash, I consider murder something that either our legal system agrees is murder, or it is something that I think our legal system should agree is murder. Your definition of murder is anything that you don’t like is murder, even if you don’t think that it should be addressed by the legal system. Your is the non-standard definition, and so, before declaring that abortion is murder, you should explain what your definition is to prevent this sort of confusion.
I’m not even sure what you are on about now. You expect me to mount a one man assassination on Kim? Have I ever expressed that I feel that strongly about what happens in North Korea that you somehow think that I am not being consistent if I don’t attempt to assassinate him? I’d like to see the country improve, but I am not calling him a murderer, I am not calling for his regime to be made illegal.
Please find a place where I have made that statement. No, I don’t.
I was never talking about moral absolutes. So, there is only one other answer to your question since you have excluded the middle.
I pay my taxes so that we can have a trained staff of people who work to hunt down and deliver criminals to the justice system for the punishment aht society says that they deserve.
If they are announcing that they are planning on going out and killing someone else tomorrow, then yeah, probably.
What a white knight made out of straw.
And once again, lots more straw. Have I not said, only a few posts ago, that someone who is protesting every day is probably of a similar conviction.
Yeah, that’s pretty natural. Proximity is important. For instance, you might feel hungry, but you have no compulsion to feed someone that is starving on the other side of the world. It puzzles me that this puzzles you.
For instance, in the second amendment solutions thread, there were several gun advocates who said that they would come to the aid of a minority group that was being targeted by the government. They didn’t say that they would come to the aid of a group that is being targeted by another government, which is obvious, as there are those that exist, and they are not coming to their aid.
But you seem to be calling them all out as liars. That if the government started rounding up Muslims, for instance, they said that they would use their guns to defend against that sort of action, even laying down their lives. Are they hypocrites because they don’t lay down their lives to fight governments owned by drug cartels in south america?
You have hit me on proximity and convenience, which I agree, are two very important things, that are important to any and every human. By pointing them out, you are not calling me a hypocrite, you are calling me a human. Things that happen closer to me I care more about, and things that I can do something about I care more about.
You have not even come close to responding to the quantity. The magnitude of the “murders”. There were over 600,000 abortions in 2014 (the last year I could find stats). That’s far more than Kim has killed. That’s far more than Police have killed. Even OJ Simpson hasn’t killed that many people. We are talking over 42 million since 1970, in the united states alone.
You are telling me that, if there was a legal program to kill ten year olds, and it killed the best part of a million every year, that you would not be stopping the perpetrators of that?
Not even extreme disability or defects? Not even the kinds that would only lead to a brief existence of suffering for all concerned?
See a few examples here: http://www.aheartbreakingchoice.com/Default.aspx
I’m trying to point out that it’s natural and easy to remain inactive even in the face of evil. And that you can’t draw conclusions about our beliefs by looking at that.
I chose Kim and North Korea not because you made specific statements about him, but because it seemed like a convenient example that I figured basically everyone could get behind. He’s a murderous dictator. And yet we collectively do nothing.
Because it’s really hard! How do you even accomplish that? Obviously I was joking by suggesting that you should be training as a sniper or smuggling in guns.
If there was a legal program to kill ten year olds and it killed a million a year, what chance do I have of stopping it? I’d have better chances mounting a one-man Kim assassination campaign. It seems to me my options are:
Work in the system to try to change things. Vote, vote, vote.
Maybe kill a few people and then live in a cage for the rest of my life (best case).
Does #2 actually help anything? It seems to me that it doesn’t. Furthermore, it makes me into a murderer, and I have strongly-held beliefs that we shouldn’t kill people. And also the prison thing. No thanks.
Very few people choose option #2. Lots of people choose #1.
So, what conclusion can you draw from my lack of violent action? You can’t conclude that I want 10-year-olds to be murdered, or that I don’t really think they’re full people, or any of the bullshit that people are claiming about anti-abortionists who don’t murder their enemies.
That’s my whole point: The only thing you can conclude from a lack of violence is that most people are not willing to use violence to accomplish their aims. You can’t conclude anything about whether their beliefs are sincere.
The stuff about North Korea is to try to provide an analogy where we’d all agree on the fact that mass murder is being committed.
I think it’s not so obvious. Even for people who hates it, abortion is part of the general picture, it’s a relatively normal thing that has been around for all their life. So, I think that indeed very few people react emotionally to abortion as they would to the killing of a newborn. They’re desensitized to it. But they still might judge intellectually (and honestly) that it is murder (and have some level of negative emotional reaction to it).
For instance, while the overwhelming majority of people nowadays would be horrified at the thought of newborns being killed, I’m convinced that if we had somehow kept the roman custom of killing or exposing babies when they’re unwanted, very few people would be. But many could still honestly be arguing that it’s murder.
We (almost) all live normally and comfortably and happily despite knowing there are children tortured in Syrian jails, genocide being committed, people starving and dying of preventable diseases, and doing either very little or simply nothing about it. We don’t even give the very large share of our income that one logically should expect us to contribute if we were that bothered about all these horrific deaths. I honestly see no difference with the abortion is murder thing. They aren’t that bothered about it, like you, me, and the rest of us about our own pit peeves. But it doesn’t mean that they don’t believe what they say.
(On the other hand, I must admit that I’m constantly amazed that there aren’t vastly more people planting bombs, trying to assassinate politicians, or in this case killing abortion doctors. There are so many loons and extremists passionate about a cause, not even counting actually crazy people, out there, that I would expect that say, at least 0.01% of the population would engage in such things, which would result in such events happening hundreds of times every day. But for some reason that I can’t fathom, not even that, not even remotely.)
Syria isn’t our neighbors. If our neighbors were torturing our children, starving, dying of preventable diseases, etc., at anything close to the rate in Syria, I’d expect that we’d react quite differently.
My conclusion is that it is not considered an evil that is worth taking action about.
Actually it is that we are collectively doing something about him that I do not feel the need to individually do anything. There are people who are aware of the situation and much better equipped to deal with it.
You have a very good chance of stopping a small bit of it, and saving at least a life or two. And you chances of being caught, if you take any sort of precaution, is actually quite low.
It helps the ten year olds whose lives you saved. If you could end up in a cage the rest of your life, but in the process, save maybe 4 ten year olds, would that not be worth it? Ten, fifty, a hundred? How many lives would you have to expect to be saving before you are willing to act?
You also have once again ignored option 3. Protest, protest protest. Every day that the ten year old death squad is on the street, you follow them around, screaming that they are murderers and that any parents should get their ten year olds out of the area.
People in the 2nd amendment thread were very adamant that they would do exactly #2 if the government started sending kill squads for minorities. I may need to revisit and see if any of them actually have strong feelings about abortion.
Yeah, I noticed. That is what we are talking about. That people claim that abortion is intolerable, and yet tolerate it.
I can conclude that you don’t really feel that strongly about it. That if you are up in my face, screaming that it is murder, you are just engaging in emotionally manipulative hyperbole, not saying what it is that you actually believe. You are confronting me, to try to convince me that you really want to confront them.
As stated numerous times, there are other options, but you are correct, most people do not feel strongly enough about their convictions to actually act upon them.
I agree that there is a humanitarian crisis going on over there. Complicated and messy. But, if you believe that killing a fetus is equivalent to killing a ten year old, then we have a humanitarian crisis of at least an order of magnitude greater.