In a move that anyone with a brain could have predicted, it turns out that when abortion clinics are regulated to the point of not being able to operate in most of the state, tons of women and girls try to abort their pregnancies by themselves.
Bad and completely unsurprising move, Texas. Some women will decide that their pregnancies must end, and they will take action to do this, whatever the law is. This will always be so. There are many reasons that abortion must remain legal, but this is one of the most important, in my view – women and doctors must be able to perform this procedure when they deem it necessary, without interference from government.
That argument can be made for anything that is illegal, so in and of itself it’s not very persuasive. It has to be weighed against the illegal activity and if you that activity is murder, then what are you supposed to do-- condone murder?
And also not John’s point–arguing something should be legal because people will do it regardless is, as he said, something you can say about any crime. Murder, rape, etc. Those will always happen, too, regardless of their legality.
Again, It’s not illegal, it’s just been made very difficult to access. So now there are possible health consequences as we go back to the “good old” days of back alley abortions.
The argument isn’t whether it should be legal in Texas. The argument is about access.
Shifting to that, could one reasonably make the argument that abortion must continue to be legal because of health risks to the mother? I believe all abortion law currently carries health of the mother exceptions now. What about that argument do you find objectionable?
First of all, I’m about as pro-choice as you can get. BUT… if you believe that abortion is murder, then I can see where you might approve of it in case of risks to the life of the mother, but not to something as vague as “the health” of the mother.
I don’t know why it’s so hard to understand that many, many people think abortion is murder. What exceptions would you make for murder?
To begin with, I don’t let other people define the word so loosely as to make it meaningless.
Yes, many people think abortion is murder. They’re wrong, just as wrong as their close allies who don’t believe in evolution, or their less-close allies who think that butchering animals for meat is murder.
We don’t turn over the job of legislation to private parties.
It’s not hard to understand, but it’s often rather hard to believe.
Partly because most people who genuinely care about the lives of others not only don’t want them to be murdered, but also don’t want them to die prematurely from other causes either. If, say, there were an epidemic killing over half the population every year, most anti-murder people would be up in arms demanding drastic measures to do something about it.
But AFAICT, most self-professed “pro-life” advocates don’t seem to give one single solitary crap about the fact that about 50-70% of all fertilized human ova (you know, the ones that they insist are fully human persons from the very instant of conception) are estimated to die of natural causes before they have a chance to be born. Where’s the outcry? Where are all the “pro-life” people grieving this massive ongoing humanitarian disaster and devoting huge sums of money to increased medical research to save the innocent lives of these fully human persons?
They don’t care because they don’t really, fully, consistently believe that fertilized ova and embryos/fetuses are entirely equivalent to fully human persons. They may think they do, but the only time they actually act on their alleged belief is when it gives them an opportunity to interfere with women’s reproductive rights. All those vastly greater numbers of non-aborted ova/embryos/fetuses can just go right on dying, as far as the so-called “pro-life” advocates are concerned. It doesn’t bother them one bit.
True, but it exposes the flimsy arguments used to overregulate clinics into oblivion, with the stated purpose of being for women’s health (e.g., requiring admitting privileges at a nearby hospital, ca complete BS technical maneuver. )
Furthermore, the law in the US is that abortion in the first trimester is NOT murder. You’re free to hold your opinions, but until you change a SCOTUS decision, you can’t use the murder argument on legal grounds. Or we’ll come take your guns away!
What strawman arguments? John Mace noted that many people say that abortion is murder. And I pointed out that those people’s behavior is generally not consistent with a genuine belief that fetal lives are fully equivalent to other human lives, which is what they allege as their reason for considering abortion to be murder.
They’re only wrong from a legal standpoint. They’re fully within their rights to think it’s morally murder, and to try to change the laws (and Constitution) so that they’re legally right.
It’s not just a semantic question., and there isn’t only one correct answer, unless you’re only discussing current law.
