Those states banning abortions made sure to pass laws supporting single mothers, right?

Great Debates
1

Let’s start with a few obvious fixes to the current “system” for single mothers.

a. Child support payments. Why do the states not help single mothers who can’t get these payments? The father could be dead, in jail, unknown, could have lost his job, or simply not make enough money to afford adequate payments to remotely cover the cost of taking care of a child.

An obvious fix would be for the states - especially these “pro life” states who want to force all their citizen women to have all their babies - to be the one making the child support payments. Which should be indexed to inflation, zip code, and actual costs of a child, not some nominal made up number. And then the state can put a heavy tax on the income of the fathers, but not interrupt the payments to the mother if something happens to the father’s ability to pay.

b. These states offer free college for a bachelor’s degree in a valuable subject or trade school, which is basically the bare minimum for decent paying, sustainable employment to all children of destitute mothers, right? I mean that would be the minimum thing to do if people were “pro life”. It’s not very pro life to have most of the citizens in the state condemned to near poverty all their lives because they can’t pay the tuition and fees needed for employment in a decent job, right?

c. They fund medicaid for these single mothers as well as they fund medicare, right? I mean, surely the state’s newest citizens are worth at least as much to the state as citizens who are on their way out, right? Surely they don’t underpay doctors and hospitals with stingy payments, ensuring that children on medicaid get poor quality or nonexistent treatment, right?

d. Housing. Surely these states don’t deliberately underfund police and schools, creating “bad areas” of town where violence and drug abuse is endemic, right? And thus make it where all these single mothers who couldn’t get abortions are forced to live there, right?

I mean, surely pro-lifers care about the consequences of their desired laws, and they have made sure to use taxpayer money to fully pay for them, right?

2

I reject all of these arguments. I’ve always hated them.

Let’s say I have a 2 year old kid. I’ve decided he’s a lot more trouble than he’s worth. And, for some strange reason in my city the law says you’re allowed to strangle your kid to death before the age of 3.

You think this is horrific and the law is horrific. Murder is wrong. But whatever. It’s within my power and my right to murder this kid, and I’m going to do it.

Now - you’re against this, of course. Are you willing to take my kid in? Raise him as your own, feed him and clothe him and provide him with education and all his needs for the next 16 years at least? Let’s say in this case you’re not - as many people would not. Does that make you a hypocrite?

You can believe that murder is wrong, and yet still feel no obligation to personally take care of someone whose murder you prevented. People who are against abortion believe that a fetus is a human life, and therefore it’s murder. They can be against that murder, just as they’re against most or all forms of murder. And yet that gives them no logical or moral obligation to then take care of the person who now lives because they were able to effect a change that prevented that murder.

All of the things you propose simply change the scenario from “are you willing to raise my kid personally?” to “are you willing to collectively raise all of these kids with your tax dollars?” - fundamentally it’s morally similar, it’s just a matter of scale.

Now - all of those things may be good policy for one reason or another, and you can criticize someone for not supporting those policies. But it does not follow that because someone wants it to be illegal or otherwise wants to prevent someone from being murdered that this person then has a moral obligation to take care of the person who would’ve been murdered.

3

Furthermore, I feel like almost all of the arguments made about being “pro-life” as a term to try to find hypocrisy are disingenuous. The reality is that it’s a two word identifier for your position on abortion, not a verbose description of your entire moral philosophy. So when people say “how can you be pro life and yet support a war? Hypocrites!” I find that to be rather childish and not really in good faith. I’ve even seen a vegan try to make the case that people who claim to be “pro-life” yet aren’t vegan are hypocrites. Really?

“Pro choice” is similarly a simple identifier. I’m pro-choice on civilian machine gun ownership. I think people should be able to make their own choice about whether they want to own a machine gun. You aren’t? I guess you’re not really pro-choice are you then? Hypocrite! See how dumb that sounds? Saying calling yourself “pro-life” means you have to support life in every instance as just as stupid as saying calling yourself “pro-choice” means you have to support choice in every instance.

We’ve come up with simple labels to identify two positions on a contentious issues. Trying to apply those simple labels outside of the context of the issue they’re meant to identify on is not really acting in good faith, they’re just trying to invent and contrive hypocrisy.

4

This is a bad argument. When I say “pro lifers are hypocrites” I specifically mean they are up in arms about non-sentient lumps of human tissue but don’t give a shit about living babies, living small children, or living young adults living in squalor. I charge that this is hypocritical and a nonsensical position only a moron could take. Or, well, someone trying to pass a law that ignores the separation of church and state.

I don’t extend this to “well if you are pro life you should be vegan” necessarily…though to be fair, this is not a totally bad argument like you claim. A living cow or chicken is a mentally more sophisticated, complete living animal. If a pro-lifer really cares so much about a fetus they shouldn’t be ok with chowing down on a cow or sheep or other large animal that has an enormously larger brain, actual peers and memories and complex behavior, and so on. Versus a fetus that does little more than twitch occasionally as the really advanced stuff isn’t ready yet.

As for your machinegun analogy: let’s suppose you are “pro-choice” for owning machineguns. Cool. But you support banning of body armor being sold in stores, which would be pretty damn useful if everybody has a machinegun. I would say you’re being a hypocrite and not supporting laws consistent with your own claimed position.

5

I think it’s as simple as they see abortion as murder because they see a fetus as human. They may not care what kind of environment the fetus is born into, but they don’t believe it should be legal to murder it. I assume they would be equally against parents legally murdering their children.

They may not give a shit whether or not the person lives in squalor, but they don’t support what they see is murder.

6

I would be open to forcing the father to contribute. I believe those laws are already on the books. The problem is, the father is not necessarily identified, or might be dead or unable to afford payments. Society has little pity for a deadbeat dad, even if there’s nothing he can do.

I might be open to having the states assist single mothers, but I could also imagine myself arguing against the same unless the baby was a product of rape.

~Max

7

First, what does “little pity for a deadbeat dad” have to do with anything? I’m saying that the government can obviously get the money from the dad if the money exists. But for all the cases where it doesn’t exist this month, it’s wrong to make the mother and child suffer because you didn’t allow the mother to have an abortion.

Similarly, your “argument against” is what, a free will argument? That young women have the “free will” to not have sex at all until they are too old to reproduce? What percentage of women are able to do this? (or men, following their own role in things)

How do you think nature actually functions? What do you suppose evolution would have done with the women who had the “free will” to avoid kids? (I guess most pro-lifers don’t believe in evolution…)

Now, yes, those women should have been responsible and been on birth control, which is the most reliable way to reduce abortions. But when the birth control is very expensive, due to a shortage of doctors and medicine, another problem caused by the State…

8

Not to side-track the debate, and maybe it deserves its own thread, but I’ve always felt that in a logical world it would be the atheists against abortions and the theists disinterested in the matter. If you believed all aborted babies went to heaven, you would have to be a really evil person to bring any baby into this world were they’d have even a slight chance to be tortured for an eternity. If atheists believed in the humanist position, they would probably be against abortion as without restrictions you would have the right to end an otherwise viable human life regardless of its condition… but I digress.

9

There is nothing at all that requires that if you oppose the murder of fetuses, that you must therefore be willing to support those fetuses. This is your own value judgement. These are not necessarily linked.

Do you think it should be legal to murder homeless people? No? Then you must support requiring the government to build nice new McMasions for homeless people, or confiscate homes from anyone who owns more than one and gives them to homeless people, right?

No, of course not. Those things are not intrinsically linked. You can oppose the murder of all human beings - include homeless people - and not give the slightest shit about homeless people and wanting to help them. That’s completely logically and morally consistent.

People who are pro-life nominally believe that a fetus is a human life as much as a toddler or a homeless person or you are a human life. As such, it has a fundamental right to life, just as any of those things do, and so they believe it should be illegal to murder them. It’s super simple.

The abortion argument is the most intellectually dishonest argument I’ve ever popularly seen from both sides. Both sides deliberately misunderstand each other, hide their own motivations, and lie.

On the pro-choice side, you have asinine hypocrisy hunting like that in this thread. You deliberately misunderstand the philosophical position of your opponents, failing to understand their fundamental simple premise - that a fetus is a human life, which qualifies it for all of the rights inherent in that. And you attempt to find hypocrisy by demanding that those who do believe that a fetus is a human right therefore must be consistent and be willing to support those human life with whatever social program you deem necessary. But that’s simply not logically connected.

On their side of things, I suspect only about 20% of “pro-life” people actually sincerely hold the position they claim. Most pro-choicers believe that number is zero percent, but I have absolutely no doubt that there are some people who simply have the value and moral conviction that a fetus is a life. Where they go wrong, and their motivations become clear, is that you could ask them - if you want to reduce abortions, then that must mean you support contraception and sex education, which has been proven to reduce unwanted pregnancies, which in turn reduces abortion. And if they say no, they oppose those things, then they’re hypocritical pieces of shit, because what they actually believe is that sex is bad, and having an unwanted baby is your punishment for having sex, and abortion is cheating your way out of that punishment.

But the degree to which people on both sides of this issue talk past each other, argue in bad faith, mischaracterize their opponents position, fail to state their true motives, and otherwise argue in bad faith is staggering. Easily greater than any other common debate issue in the public conciousness.

10

The counterargument is that killing the fetus is more wrong than letting the mother and child suffer.

Yes.

Don’t bring nature into this debate. Nature would let all the single mothers and their children fend for themselves.

There are people who think birth control is immoral, too; that people who cannot support children should just not have sex, and when they do, that’s on them. I personally think we can help out, be it via charity or state assistance, that’s why I said I would be open to your suggestions. But there’s nothing inherently wrong with the opposing argument.

Without charity or state assistance, if the kid isn’t getting enough support, the state takes custody and possibly prosecutes the mother for neglecting her child.

~Max

11

This is not necessarily true. It is possible to both believe fetuses have rights and that non-reproductive sex is generally bad, see for example the Catholic Church.

~Max

12

Similarly I believe the Catholic faith has aborted babies going to limbo or hell because they are unbaptized. Also it counts as a grave sin for the parents and doctor. If I remember correctly, current doctrine puts babies that were supposed to be baptized, but died too soon, in heaven. It is the intent that counts.

~Max

13

Hmm… so the unborn baby’s external future depends on the parent’s intent of said baby. Man, some lives had 0 chance in making it in to Heaven. That’s what maximum cruelty looks like. God made all of us, true, but some of us were made to be tortured for eternity.

14

I’m exceedingly uncomfortable with any abortion argument that is about the potential child. I think it’s very problematic to talk about whether or not a life would be worth living, or to suggest that it’s not fair to a person that they should have to take responsibility for their kid.

Abortion is about pregnancy. Men don’t seem to get this, and honestly, I didn’t get it either until I had a baby. I really, really noticed this when I was first pregnant: men, including my husband, heard “there will be a baby in the fall!”, like I was announcing a future event. Women heard “I am pregnant right now!”, which is what I wanted to convey. The now was overwhelming in and of itself–the future would have to wait. Generally speaking, men, even pro-choice men, seem to hand-wave away this part of the process, to think it’s a debate about whether or not women should be forced to “have children” they don’t want. That’s not the issue. The issue is carrying the child. Under what circumstances can a woman be forced to go through an invasive, dangerous, painful physical process to protect the life of a fetus?

Any argument that ignores this part risks running afoul of some pretty solid arguments on the other side. But all that is irrelevant. You can’t force a DEAD PERSON to give up so much as a fragment of skin to save the life of their living child, let alone compel a living person to give blood, bone-marrow or any other tissue to save the life of their own child. But you can compel a woman to be pregnant for nearly a year and risk her life in delivery and be on the hook for tens of thousands of dollars in bills–and two years of postpartum hormonal chaos–and that’s something she should accept as the natural order of things and that a “normal pregnancy is uneventful and not that bad”

A better question would be if the state is going to pick up the bills for the pregnancy and delivery, the lost income for whatever period of time you are unable to work, the follow-up visits, etc.

Abortion isn’t about babies. It’s about pregnancy.

15

Awesome post.

I agree that the focus needs to stick on pregnancy. Because pro-lifers will just argue that if a woman is too poor to raise a baby, she can turn the baby over to an adoption agency and walk away. No woman is obligated to raise a baby she doesn’t want to raise, so a woman who chooses to keep the baby is choosing to accept all the hardships associated of keeping the baby.

So I think if pro-lifers wanted to win hearts and minds over to their side, they would be pressing for free health care for pregnant women as well other benefits (high-quality subsidized housing, free childcare, free counseling). And there would be no question that the the guys who knocked them up with be on the hook for child support from day the pregnancy is detected–and the state would be prepared to pick up any slack. Child support payment could not only help a pregnant woman prepare for the baby materially, but it could also cover the costs of transportion to and from doctors, extra groceries, and lost work hours (it’s hard to work when you’re yakking every ten minutes).

I am not a sociologist, but I’m guessing one of the top reasons young women (teens) abort their babies is due to the perceived and real lack of family support. Parents do a great job of instilling the fear of God into their daughters that they “better not show up here pregnant”, and girls hear horror stories about their friends and classmates being kicked out of the house for doing just that. Perhaps if pro-lifers could direct some of their sanctimonious messaging to the kind of families that shame pregnancy, then girls wouldn’t find it necessary to get abortions. Make being pregnant something to be proud of instead of a mark of shame. It’s too bad so many pro-lifers are big believers in shaming both pregnancy AND abortion.

16

I’m going to play Devil’s Advocate: why should states support single mothers? If the state wants to discourage women from becoming single mothers, then surely not supporting them is one way to achieve that? Let their poverty and distress serve as a warning to others. This would be pure social engineering.

Now, my answer to that question in this case would be, “The state is forcing me to keep the child, so it should be forced to pay for its upbringing.”

17

As I have friends and even siblings who are at the financial mercy of the deadbeat dads of their children, this is something that I have proposed and certainly endorse.

Regardless of your position on abortion, it does make far more sense for the state to administer the child support that is needed to support the child, and then use the resources of the state to collect from the father.

Hard part is, of course, identifying the father, but, as the “pro-life” contingent does not believe that anyone has a right to medical privacy in regards to abortion, a pro-life state can also get a genetic sample from every male resident, and match the children to their fathers.

Once again, a good idea, whether or not the state is also removing a woman’s right to bodily autonomy.

Don’t forget prenatal and postpartum care for the mother.

They can try to give their kid up for adoption to some nice deserving wealth christian (white) family.

Of course, if their kid isn’t cute (white) enough to be selected for such a status, then back to the slums for them.

No, pro-lifers only care about ensuring that women do not get a choice in how their bodies are used. As SenorBeef explains, “Pro-life” is a name that they have chosen for themselves, not a description of their views. I get it that it is a bit confusing that they have chosen a name that is diametrically opposite of what their actual views are, but that is because they are dishonest in their goals and objectives, and want to try to get people on their side through dishonest rhetoric. As long as they call themselves “pro-life” they can call their opponents “anti-life” and no one wants to be anti-life, do they?

18

These laws are being passed to create a challenge that will be elevated to the Supreme Court in an attempt to overrule Roe v. Wade.

Questioning the morality of anti abortionist so is pointless. Like most conservatives they have no Morales

19

Been listening to George Carlin?

20

Not necessarily torture, limbo is not torture. I believe Dante’s outer ring of hell was an apt illustration of limbo.

~Max