No, the only thing that works is to overpower them in the court of public opinion and the law and forcibly keep them from imposing their malice on everyone else. Again, they’ve had decades to be persuaded, and it never happens.
Reason and appeals to empathy never work with the Right. Didn’t happen with race relations, didn’t happen with same sex marriage, and isn’t happening with abortion.
In general I hold towards DMC’s POV but there’s a bit of an excluded middle there. One thing a faction of the religious folks believe is that when is something is illegal it simply doesn’t happen.
So in that mind, banning abortion means whammo, there are zero abortions and so what they think of as fetus-murder simply stops occurring. Total success. Easy Peasy.
All that other squishy stuff like education and contraception don’t have that clean direct “Pass Law A, Get Total Result B.”
Now that’s monumentally stupid non-thinking, but in that crowd belief overcomes thought every time. The belief that making it illegal makes it disappear is enough to give them the psychological satisfaction they crave.
It also, in their minds, moves the laws of man closer to the laws of god as they think of them. Which is, by their lights, inherently Good. Again it’s wrong; dangerously wrong. But it can be sincerely wrong, not merely cynically wrong.
…what?
Don’t they also want adult-murder to be illegal? But it’s not like, whammo, zero murders take place hereabouts, where it’s illegal; they know full well that adult-murders haven’t simply stopped occurring. You don’t need to explain to them that adult-murder still happens from time to time; they can presumably tell you about a time when an adult got murdered, and the police showed up to investigate, and there was an arrest and a trial and everything, and, long story short, there are murderers behind bars right now! No, really: there are people who knew it was already illegal to murder an adult, and yet they did it anyway, because, well, mere illegality doesn’t result in an easy-peasy total success; it results in the like of homicide detectives and prison guards not being out of work!
Of course it’s ridiculous cognitive dissonance. The real world is just as you describe. The world in their head however …
No, I mean in all the years — decades, even — that I’ve heard people say stuff, I don’t believe I’ve ever met one who has any cognitive dissonance on this point; they don’t want to make something illegal so it’ll zero out, they want to make something illegal so it’ll then get treated like other stuff that’s been made illegal. They don’t figure on a 100% success rate when it comes to making arson or burglary or, again, murdering adults illegal; and, as far as I can tell, nobody says “I want to make fetus-murder illegal, and I expect a 100% success rate to ensue.”
Abortion-is-murder isn’t really a belief. It’s an emotion. Not susceptible to logic. Throw logic at it and nothing will stick.
One way to relate to why some people want the abolishment of abortion is to consider your feelings towards something like infanticide. Although they’re not exactly the same, they are both ways of dealing with unwanted or unsupportable offspring. Infanticide has been a long and widespread part of human history and still goes on today. Some cultures still practice it, while others will take matters into their own hands. Even in your own community, you may see stories from time-to-time of newborns found in trash. If there was a sub-culture in America which practiced infanticide, I suspect most people–including pro-chose people–would want that practice stopped. I think most people want infanticide to be abolished and made illegal because it emotionally feels like the killing of a person. We want it abolished for the same reason we want all killing to be abolished. So to better understand why some anti-abortion people try to stop abortion, consider why you might want to stop infanticide. For the people who feel emotionally the same about a fetus and a newborn, they want to stop abortion for the same reason they want to stop infanticide. It feels like murder to them and they want murder to be abolished.
this is not even close to being true. There are sound biological reasons for considering a fetus a distinct (living) human being from the mother. And it follows that if it is a distinct living human, the ending of its existence is a killing of a human.
Right. I think this is what motivates the vast majority of rank and file anti abortion people. That’s why the billboards targeting them show a baby and say “hold my hand instead of taking my life” or whatever. If the true goal of the masses was to impose control over women, how would that billboard appeal to them?
I’m not sure what you mean by this. Sure, it’s a belief based on emotion. So is the idea that murder in general is bad.
From a purely utilitarian framework it’s trivially easy to come up with examples where we make everyone a bit better off by murdering someone. But most ethical systems don’t allow this. And when you drill down enough, you tend to find that the reason for this is some kind of “murder is wrong” first principle, which is not based on logic. No first principles can be.
Those that say it’s to control women are also diminishing those women that are against abortion. And there are many. The most ardent vocal anti-abortion people in my wide circle are women. They are religious but not meek women controlled by their man.
I’m not saying there isn’t a logic to believing abortion should be treated like murder. I’m saying that logic isn’t what is being used to believe it with. It may be topdressing, later.
If we were consistent in applying the Murder Is Wrong idea, there would be no death penalty (which by the way the Catholic Church is also strongly against), and no wars. But humans are not, because it’s a lot more complicated than any one statement can be.
Doesn’t “overpowering them in the court of opinion” mean peeling off some of their supporters who might be on their side because they really like guns, or they really hate abortions, or they really want lower taxes, rather than being fascists?
Right now half the country supports Trump. That could be for two reasons:
I’m not talking about convincing fascists to stop being fascists; I’m talking about making idiots who get all of their information from rotten sources realize that they don’t want to support a fascist after all.
Fortunately or unfortunately, we live in a democracy, so unless we do a coup of our own, winning in the court of law will first require substantial victories in the court of public opinion. Especially when you consider the fact that they’ve taken anti-democratic steps to stop us making progress, meaning we need even stronger public support to get anything done.
So unless our side is gonna do a coup or a civil war, if we plan to work within the system, we have to win over some portion of people who currently support Trump and the Republicans.
Then we need to get more creative in our political messaging. If we can’t effectively sell our objectively correct policy to people who don’t have a college degree, that’s a problem.
geez, it must be nice to be able to divine the true motivations of a huge, diverse group of people and (bonus!) dismiss them at the same time
Killing someone is easy. Getting an abortion can be hard.
First, I am not dismissing them. I don’t know where you get that idea. And second, I am only speaking of the people who I know, generally Catholics, who believe abortion is murder but have no corresponding strong opinions about supporting children, or preventing pregnancies. They really just have this one emotional thought. There are plenty of political opportunists, theological thinkers, and all kinds of others with the same belief, but I’m talking about this one group, which, yes, I believe to be one of the largest anti-abortion groups.
Logic is also not what is being used when we believe that non-fetal human life, IE kids and adults, has sanctity. Or that a woman should have the right to choose. Or that humans should have any kind of self determination in general. Or…
The point is, morality isn’t purely logic based. You have first principles, which are not based on logic, and once you have those figuring out how to apply multiple potentially conflicting principles at once is a logicial exercise.
But my point is, saying that “abortion is murder and always wrong” is emotional rather than logical is not a point against it, because so are all first principles in mortality.
Then you are complaining about the way they rank competing moral priorities, not about whether their moral first principles are based on logic or emotion.
I held this belief, I’m nominally Catholic. Around half my life, this was my opinion. I did not rage about it, or protest, or even question it. That has changed.
I used condoms, though. The slippery slope puts me well within the “evil and going to hell partition of humanity” whereas I put myself on the “let’s have sex but be a bit cautious” end.
And on the end of it, there IS a plan B, it is going to be fucking traumatic, relationship-fucking-up, totally life-changing, a fucking horrible time…
It is abortion.
And it saves lives.
I still disagree with abortion - I can’t help the indoctrination. But if a lady close to me - my ex-wife, my daughter, my friends - asked me to help, I would be in my car, and into the clinic ASAP, and on my phone to support groups so that they can help soften the extraordinary horror of that experience.
There are some that genuinely believe that life begins at conception and that abortion is a moral evil. I disagree, but I respect this viewpoint. It’s maybe 10% of the population, but Republicans learned that paying lip service to banning abortion gave them a bunch of easy votes. These Republicans personally didn’t give two shits about the issue other than it gave electoral victories. I think for a lot of them, if you told them “what are you going to do about the abortion bill?” would say “I already paid it!”
I’ve always thought a lot of the opposition is an attempt to keep poor people poor. What better way to do this than to force them to pay to raise children that they can’t afford? Even more effective would be to deny them contraception. You can’t stop them from having sex, but you can force them to “pay the price” and keep them to rise in economic status. The fact that many of the poor are minorities is the frosting on the cake- anti abortion and anti-contraception laws keep those “other” people in their economic place and out of your neighborhoods and schools.