Texas women are inducing their own abortions

Great Debates
61

Fascinating. I hope you submitted this information to the Washington Post to correct their article, and to the relevant medical journals where researchers have been working on this problem for years and for some reason reached the opposite conclusion of the one that you apparently got from Fox News. :rolleyes:

This is a great example of spinning a kernel of truth into a hugely distorted and incorrect claim. Black mothers are not “twice as likely” to have these issues, they are only at a moderately elevated risk of infant mortality from preterm-related causes, 45.9% for blacks compared to 36.5% for the general population. And the issue itself is likely related to factors caused or exacerbated by poverty – socioeconomic factors that then put even normal babies at substantially increased risk, such that black babies really are twice as likely to die in their first year than those of the general population:
Each of the three variables that predict much of the differences between groups—maternal marital status, education, and age—is strongly related to income and poverty. If whites had the distribution of these three characteristics found among the groups with the highest infant mortality rates, then the white infant mortality rate would increase by nearly 2 deaths per 1,000. This estimate represents a substantial fraction of the infant mortality rate for whites and the infant mortality rate gap for blacks, Native Americans, and Puerto Ricans. An additional analysis that compared the unpredicted gaps in infant mortality to the unpredicted deep poverty gaps suggests that an even larger role for socioeconomic status might be uncovered if more comprehensive measures were available on birth certificates.

The most important conclusion to be drawn from the data is that in spite of some very remarkable declines in infant mortality at all class levels since 1960, there continues to be a very clear and pronounced inverse association between income status and infant mortality. Indeed, the evidence indicates that the relationship has become stronger over the years. These observations are applicable for both sexes, for whites and nonwhites, for neonatal and postneonatal deaths, and for both major cause of death groups.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.132.3086&rep=rep1&type=pdf

So the question again is, why don’t the anti-abortionists put any effort at all into dealing with a real problem that affects real babies and real human lives?

62

We have already seen that they do.

Regards,
Shodan

63

Oh, well, then that settles it!

64

Looks like a circular argument to me.

65

I strongly agree that this is a good question. However, it’s not an argument against banning abortion.

66

The U.S. Friggin’ Constitution, that’s what. Texas is bound by it. It’s the supreme law of the land.

Just as Texas may not deny the rights of blacks under the Constitution, it may not deny the rights of women who want abortions.

67

Uh, no. If pro-lifers crisis pregnancy centers are created and maintained as part of their efforts to discourage women from choosing abortion—which they openly acknowledge that they are—then their concerns are still focused on abortion. The fact that these services can also be used by pregnant women who are already committed to not choosing abortion doesn’t change that fact.

To take a parallel hypothetical, if I claim to believe that dogs and cats are entitled to exactly equal rights with human beings, and I open a string of no-kill shelters because I’m trying to reduce the number of dogs and cats being “murdered”, that’s not inconsistent with my professed belief.

But if I express no objection to all the other ways in which dogs and cats are denied their deserved rights, such as not being allowed to vote and being enslaved by humans, etc., etc., then that is inconsistent with my professed belief. If I mutely and meekly go along with all aspects of society’s constant denial of cat/dog rights, except for the one situation of cats/dogs being put down in shelters, then that strongly suggests that I don’t really, consistently believe that dogs and cats are entitled to exactly equal rights with humans.

And that inconsistency makes me a hypocrite. The fact that my shelters are also open to taking in dogs and cats from people who already happen to agree with my extreme position on cat/dog rights doesn’t change the inconsistency or the hypocrisy.

I do own it. That’s why I have no moral objection to the position that most embryos and pre-viability fetuses, whether genetically flawed or not, should not be considered entitled to full human rights.

The people who are hypocritically refusing to confront this issue honestly are the pro-lifers who claim to consider every fertilized ovum morally equivalent to a baby when abortion is involved, but ignore all the moral, legal and practical issues of what it would really mean to consider every fertilized ovum morally equivalent to a baby in all circumstances.

68

That’s like asking “what specific actions do you think the cat/dog-rights advocate in the analogy in the previous post can take to ensure that dogs and cats get to vote?”

The fact that that particular goal is so glaringly impractical and so difficult to actually do something about means that the people who claim to advocate it should re-examine whether their professed belief in it actually makes sense. It doesn’t mean that I should stop pointing out the inconsistency between (1) the extremely broad implications of their professed belief and (2) the extremely limited circumstances in which they’re willing to act upon it.

Yes, I know that it would be extraordinarily difficult and probably entirely infeasible to set up a system in which dogs and cats can meaningfully vote. That’s one of the reasons we generally don’t consider dogs and cats entitled to full human rights.

If you set up a no-kill shelter explicitly on the grounds that dogs and cats shouldn’t be murdered because they’re entitled to equal human rights, and then just wave away questions about dog/cat voting rights with a dismissive “oh well, my activism can’t be everywhere at once”, you are hypocritically refusing to confront a major inconsistency in your professed belief.

Similarly, I’m well aware that most fertilized ova, blastocysts etc. are barely detectable clumps of cells that exhibit an extremely high rate of irremediably fatal genetic flaws. They’d also be a logistical nightmare to document and identify as officially recognized human beings right from the moment of conception. Those are some of the reasons we generally don’t consider them fully human persons.

If somebody opposes abortion explicitly on the grounds that everything from a fertilized ovum on up should be considered a fully human person, and then refuses to address any of the practical implications of that radical position except for the ones involving abortion, they are refusing to confront some severe logical difficulties with their professed belief. And that’s being hypocritical.
See what I mean? The immense surreal impracticality of what it would take to really treat all early-term pre-born lives as fully human persons, except in the one very limited context of declaring that they can’t be deliberately killed, casts serious doubt on anybody’s claim to sincerely believe that all pre-born lives are fully human persons.

Claiming to profess a very radical and biologically counterintuitive belief, and then refusing to address any of the huge logical and pragmatic problems with it but instead just insisting on one comparatively simple and straightforward implication of it, is a pretty clear sign that either you don’t really understand what you’re claiming to believe or else you don’t sincerely and consistently believe it.

69

Oh, and before I stop hogging the microphone here, I should point out that of course:

A. There are plenty of perfectly good logically consistent reasons to oppose elective cat/dog euthanasia without asserting that dogs and cats are entitled to exactly equal rights with human beings.

B. There are plenty of perfectly good logically consistent reasons to oppose elective abortion without asserting that all pre-born human life is entitled to full legal rights and personhood from the moment of fertilization.
But in either case, if you are espousing such a sweeping and radical assertion as a justification for your position, then it’s on you to consistently confront the whole implications of what your professed belief would logically entail. You don’t get to duck the issue by conveniently restricting your attention to one particular implication that happens to be relatively simple and straightforward.

70

But we shouldn’t need an argument against banning abortion – although there is no shortage of arguments in terms of the mental and physical health and rights of the mother and the future of a potentially unwanted baby. The nature of a free society is that it must always be incumbent on those advocating a ban on something to justify their reasons, not the other way around.

And the only reason that the self-styled “pro-lifers” offer for their position is their belief that the various stages of fetal development constitute “human life” from the moment of conception and therefore abortion is “murder”. This is a position that is not – and cannot be – objectively supported by medical science since there is obviously no sentience in early stages of development and science cannot rule on when, if ever, during fetal development a fetus can be deemed a “human being” because it’s fundamentally a moral and philosophical and not a scientific question.

So the best that can be said for pro-lifers is that they espouse a sincere belief that is either based on personal morality or on the teachings of their religion – i.e.- it is figuratively or literally a religious belief. And in free societies we don’t have the right to impose our religious beliefs on others through force of law. We call those kinds of societies “theocracies”.

The utility of my rhetorical question is that it addresses the bit of wiggle room the pro-lifers might have, that their position isn’t religiously motivated at all but is a sincerely held secular moral view that society would do well do adopt. It highlights the fact that the vast majority of these folks are affiliated with political movements that are callously uncaring of the welfare of infants after birth, exposing their position as flagrantly hypocritical and neither sincere nor genuinely moral. It highlights the fact that these folks are actually theocrats in disguise. If we’re really concerned about the moral betterment of society, we’d focus on the health and welfare and upbringing of real infants growing up to be real people, not on legal machinations to curtail female reproductive rights.

71

Uh, yes. You have to produce evidence for your assertions if you think they should be taken seriously.

Then, as mentioned, you need to address what I pointed out - that pro-lifers provide pre-natal services in cases other than abortion. Therefore their concerns are not hypocritical - they are concerned about fetal life in all cases, not merely as a result of their opposition to abortion.

Of course it changes it. Providing services to all pregnant women demonstrates the concern for all fetal life that you claimed didn’t exist.

I am not aware of any pro-life groups that think that fetuses should be allowed to vote. Unless you can come up with a cite for such, your analogy is rather off the mark.

Regards,
Shodan

72

I did address it. As with the no-kill shelter analogy, the issue is not whether or not the people the activists provide services to already agree with their professed beliefs. The issue is that they are refusing to confront a vast amount of immensely unrealistic and unethical consequences of their professed beliefs, so the sincerity (or at least the clarity) of their beliefs is called into question.

[QUOTE=Shodan]
I am not aware of any pro-life groups that think that fetuses should be allowed to vote. Unless you can come up with a cite for such, your analogy is rather off the mark.

[/QUOTE]

No, you just got a little confused about it. The analogy is between the hypothetical cat/dog-rights people claiming to believe that dogs and cats should have exactly the same rights as humans, and pro-lifers claiming to believe that fertilized ova should have exactly the same legal rights and full personhood status as born babies.

Both of those beliefs entail a bunch of pragmatically impossible and morally dubious consequences if they were actually implemented (e.g., trying to get dogs and cats to vote, trying to include fertilized ova in censuses and fix their health problems, etc.).
It is dishonest (or at best, pretty muddleheaded) to insist that embryos shouldn’t be deliberately killed on the grounds that embryos are full human persons just as much as babies are, while refusing to confront how unrealistic and nonsensical it would be if we actually did treat embryos as full human persons in all circumstances.

**If you’re claiming that all fertilized ova are entitled to full human personhood, you need to own all the consequences of that, not just the one carefully cherry-picked consequence that abortion thereby becomes equivalent to murder. **

73

Literally nothing you’ve said in this post addresses the arguments people have made against your position. You’ve continued to provide no evidence to support you sweeping generalizations or to support your factual assertions. You have made factual claims, back them up, or be disregarded in this.

74

But you haven’t pointed out any glaring inconsistencies in the pro-life position, since none of them AFAIK are saying babies should be allowed to vote.

What are the rights that you think demonstrate an inconsistency? Pro-lifers certainly believe that babies shouldn’t be killed - I think you would agree with that. The right to receive medical care? If you want to define that as a “right”, then we have already seen that they work for that “right”, for mothers contemplating abortion as well as mothers who are not. The right to be supported? Pro-life activists do a lot for adoption as well.

The only one that occurs to me is that a person’s legal birthday should be considered to be at conception, so that people could vote when they are seventeen years and three months old instead of eighteen. If you want to consider that as a major contradiction that invalidates the whole pro-life position, go ahead, but it seems a little petty to me.

‘You don’t want people to be killed, but you don’t do anything to change the date on their birth certificate. HYPOCRISY!’

Sure, whatever.

Regards,
Shodan

75

:confused: But I just carefully explained to you, again, that the analogy doesn’t depend on anybody saying that babies should be allowed to vote. I don’t know how to explain this to you more clearly if you’re still not getting it.

[QUOTE=Shodan]
The only one that occurs to me is that a person’s legal birthday should be considered to be at conception, so that people could vote when they are seventeen years and three months old instead of eighteen. If you want to consider that as a major contradiction that invalidates the whole pro-life position, go ahead, but it seems a little petty to me.

[/quote]

Wow, you are seriously underestimating the government’s responsibilities toward its citizens, especially the helpless infants it has a compelling interest to protect. Let’s look at a few of the things you missed.

In the first place, concealing the occurrence of a birth is a crime in many states. If we are now shifting the acquisition of full human personhood and individual identity from the moment of birth to the moment of fertilization, that means that official notification must be made of a conception. That’s going to be tricky, especially since it’s generally the case that nobody involved is physically aware of the exact moment when a conception occurs, but if that fertilized ovum is indeed a fully human individual, then the state is bound to acknowledge and protect it. The courts, perhaps with the assistance of presently undiscovered technology, will have to sort out exactly what the individual’s mother’s responsibilities are in this case.

Similarly for the deaths of all those fertilized ova and embryos occurring from unexplained causes with no attending physician present. In most cases, getting a death certificate is going to require the involvement of a coroner. Yes, again, the logistics will be tricky, but a fully human individual person who dies from unexplained causes is entitled to an investigation of their death, and the law requires an official record of death for all such persons.

Hmm, parental negligence. The law is pretty tough on parents who neglect or abuse their children, and if full human personhood is acquired at the moment of fertilization, that means the state has a duty to the well-being of those children from that moment onward. There are a lot of things that pregnant women can do that would constitute an “act or failure to act which results in death, serious physical […] harm, […] or an act or failure to act which presents an imminent risk of serious harm” to an embryo, to quote the federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act wording, and all of them are literally criminal behavior if we’re now considering the status of “child” to embrace any human life from a just-fertilized ovum on up.

And the list goes on and on. “Petty” my foot: if we really decided that our legal and social structures should endorse the belief that full human personhood and rights begin at the moment of conception, it would have huge and drastically invasive impacts on our society as a whole.
And yes, I know that all these requirements are ridiculously impractical and unethical given that fertilized ova are mostly undetectable clumps of cells. That’s why we generally reject the position that those undetectable clumps of cells should be considered fully human persons with the same legal rights as babies.

Don’t blame me for demanding that the “abortion is murder” pro-lifers concern themselves with irredeemably unmanageable consequences of their professed belief: blame the “abortion is murder” pro-lifers for claiming to profess a belief whose irredeemably unmanageable consequences they refuse to confront.

Like I said, people who claim to believe that fertilized ova have the same moral status and human personhood as born babies need to accept all the logical consequences of that belief. Not just the one about abortion being equivalent to murder.

Well, actually, all of it does.

The problem is that while you and a couple other posters do recognize that it’s absurd and unworkable to actually construct consistent social and legal policy on the notion that fertilized ova have full human personhood from the moment of conception, you mistakenly think I’m the one at fault for demanding that pro-lifers devote themselves to such absurd and unworkable schemes.

But in fact, it’s the pro-lifers who are at fault, for using a premise with absurd and unworkable consequences to justify their opposition to abortion, without honestly confronting the fact that their premise is drowning in absurd and unworkable consequences.

76

Actually, it depends people saying that dogs and cats should vote. Which is silly, and not because arranging the franchise for Fluffy is impractical. It’s silly because no pro-lifer is suggesting rights for babies that should not be extended to fetuses.

Notification of birth isn’t based on any right held by the baby/fetus. And the acquisition of personhood and individual identity does not occur at birth even now. According to the Supreme Court, it happens at viability. There is no law requiring notification of viability, so I don’t see why notification of conception would be needed.

Can you demonstrate that the right to an investigation of death is a right of a person? IOW what way is a dead person deprived of his or her rights if he or she is simply declared DOA, as my mother-in-law was when she died unattended?

Then by all means name a few, and show how pro-lifers oppose them for babies but allow them for fetuses.

Do you mean something like second-hand smoke? If so, feel free to show cases where a mother was prosecuted for smoking in the presence of a baby, where pro-lifers opposed the prosecution. Because remember, you are trying (IMO not very successfully) to show hypocrisy in the pro-life movement, because they don’t support the same right to life for babies that they do for fetuses.

Regards,
Shodan

77

Cite? I know that the Court has ruled that viability (or some legally defined approximation to it) is when the state’s interest in protecting the fetus overrides the pregnant woman’s right to choose an abortion, but ISTM that the full-individual-identity thing is still birth-dependent. I’m not sure because IANAL, but then, NAY.

[QUOTE=Shodan]

Can you demonstrate that the right to an investigation of death is a right of a person? IOW what way is a dead person deprived of his or her rights if he or she is simply declared DOA, as my mother-in-law was when she died unattended?

[/quote]

It’s not just about the rights of the individual but also about personhood. The law requires that official cognizance be taken of the births and deaths of human persons. If we’re declaring that full human personhood begins at conception rather than birth, then to be consistent with that principle, we should scrutinize the conception and death of the pre-born as rigorously as we now do the birth and death of the born.

You seem to be trying to get around this by arguing for a special definition of “fully human personhood” that only applies to the pre-born, who are thereby exempt from the standard procedures for other human persons that involve tracking when they come into existence and when they depart it.

But this is trying to have it both ways. You’re saying that the rules for society dealing with fully human persons apply to the pre-born when you want them to (i.e., can’t murder them), but don’t apply when you don’t want them to (i.e., don’t have to bother trying to keep track of their existence).

[QUOTE=Shodan]

Then by all means name a few, and show how pro-lifers oppose them for babies but allow them for fetuses.

[/quote]

Some of the activities that can be significantly dangerous to embryos/fetuses if engaged in by pregnant women are smoking, drinking alcohol, overheating so as to raise their body temperature, and coming into contact with certain kinds of pet feces.

Do pro-lifers advocate making these activities illegal or restricted for women who are (or might be) in early stages of pregnancy? If not, then they are condoning risk levels of negligent or abusive harm to embryos/fetuses that the law does not allow for born children.

You still aren’t understanding my argument. I’m saying that the “abortion is murder” position is hypocritical (or at best confused) because advocates of that position aren’t seriously advocating a consistent policy of treating an ovum/embryo/fetus like a fully human person.

78

You need to show that pro-lifers want to restrict these activities for pregnant women but not mothers in general. Otherwise yo haven’t identified any hypocrisy. You also need to show that the opposition is not due to the special circumstance of pregnancy and its necessary direct connection between the fetus and the mother’s body.

No, I am understanding it just fine. You just haven’t demonstrated anything of what you allege.

Regards,
Shodan

79

Because no one believes that every death involves murder. Intentions matter to people and the law.

80

I don’t think you quite understand the concept of “parental abuse and neglect”. What’s considered an act of parental abuse or neglect is defined not only by the specific action of the parent, but also (and primarily) by the level of harm or risk that action poses for the child. Naturally, that means that whether a specific act is neglectful/abusive depends partly on the child’s age and competence.

Case in point: If your typical approach to feeding your three-month-old is to put a sandwich on the dining-room table and yell to the child in the next room to come and get it, that’s neglect. But it wouldn’t be neglect if your child was a teenager.

Similarly, it’s criminal neglect to leave an infant alone in a hot car and not come back for several hours. Leaving a teenager alone in a hot car, with full ability to control the temperature and/or get out of the car if they’re uncomfortable, is not neglect.

In the same way, the mother of a three-year-old who spends her afternoons in the sauna while her daughter’s over at Grandma’s is not endangering her child. But a pregnant woman who does the same thing may be seriously endangering her fetus. If both the three-year-old and the fetus are considered equally fully human persons, then the three-year-old’s mother is not guilty of abuse, but the fetus’s mother is.

So if you claim to believe that the pre-born are fully human persons who deserve the same protections from harm as born children, then to be consistent, you should support punishing parental actions that cause them harm or serious risk of harm, just as the law punishes parental actions that cause harm or serious risk to born children.

Well, this thread has made it clear to me that instead of “hypocrisy” I ought to have been saying “hypocrisy and/or confusion”. I think that a lot of abortion opponents who claim to believe that the pre-born are fully human persons, but don’t actually support implementing legal and social structures to consistently treat the pre-born as fully human persons, are not so much deliberately trying to deceive others about their inconsistency as just failing to think through what their position logically entails.