WTF, do you stand by every person who checked “Democrat” on their voter’s registration card?
So it’s not about protecting fetal life at all, really. If you didn’t choose to have sex but were forced to have sex, then you don’t have to take any responsibility for the life you unwillingly created, and that life doesn’t have to be protected if you would prefer to kill it.
Fine, but in that case the whole argument that “you have to take responsibility for the life you created”, because “it’s a human life” and therefore mustn’t be killed, simply collapses under the weight of its own self-contradiction.
And the anti-abortion position stands revealed as being not about the “right to life” of the unborn, but rather about the aim of making people “take responsibility” for potential consequences if they choose to have sex.
If that’s your belief—that people need to be required to accept the potential consequences of choosing to have sex, even to the extent of carrying to term an unwanted pregnancy and having to support an unwanted child—then okay, it’s your right to believe that.
But don’t try to paint over it with a false facade about defending the unborn’s right to life. You’ve already made it clear that you don’t think the unborn has a right to life as long as its mother didn’t consent to sex.
It’s just a trap question and one that legislatures should deal with. I personally would weigh the terrible options and believe that a woman should be able to terminate that sort of pregnancy, even though the human life inside her did nothing wrong. It’s a terrible choice, but one that the people, IMHO, should allow. There is no constitutional right to such a thing. That’s ridiculous, IMHO.
The only way a question can be a “trap” is if you don’t have a way to answer it honestly and consistently.
Again, you’re making the rights of the so-called “human life” of the embryo/fetus dependent on what “sort of pregnancy” it is: i.e., whether or not the woman consented to sex.
You can’t get out of that inconsistency just by wringing your hands and lamenting that all the options are “terrible”. What it boils down to is that you think a woman’s freedom to choose an abortion should be dependent on whether or not she has a “responsibility” to accept the pregnancy, i.e., whether or not she consented to the sex that caused it.
Okay, but that has jack-shit to do with any inherent or inalienable “right to life” on the part of the embryo/fetus. Can’t have it both ways.
Yes, people can and do have it both ways. Laws are almost never consistent, but they are the judgment of the people. Constitutional law should have a principle it is based upon.
You know as well as I that if I came here and said that even if a woman was viciously raped, she should carry the baby to term, you would have a different section of paragraphs for me, no?
No, but if the party as a whole is wrong, I’ll fight (and vote) to fix it. My party used to be where the racist southerners hung out. We let them know they were unwelcome, instead of just shrugging our shoulders. Your party as a whole is fighting birth control access, comprehensive sex education and just about everything else that would reduce abortions and just tries to outlaw them instead. It’s not some lone, unstable, howling Republican in the corner, it’s the party as a whole.
What’s “a different section of paragraphs”? Saying that you think a pregnant rape victim shouldn’t be allowed to get an abortion, because the embryo/fetus has an overriding right to life, is at least consistent with the “pro-life” position that claims to oppose abortion to defend the rights of the fetus.
I disagree with the belief that an early-term fetus should be considered a fully human person with a right to life that overrides the right of a woman to bodily autonomy, as I’ve said. But at least it’s consistent with the stated principles of the “pro-life” movement.
It would also be consistent to oppose abortion except in cases of rape or incest, on the grounds that you believe consent to sex implies consent to pregnancy but a non-consensual pregnancy may be terminated. But, again, that position is not consistent with the claimed “pro-life” principle that an embryo/fetus has an inviolable right to life from the moment of its conception.
Personally, I don’t care which of those two anti-abortion positions you hold: I don’t agree with either of them, but I accept that other people can believe things I disagree with.
But I don’t accept the bait and switch of your asserting one of those positions and then trying to justify it by asserting the other. They are mutually contradictory, and you don’t get to claim both of them.
That is why it is the “trap” question. It’s not consistent with an overall world view. I concede. You have destroyed my argument. I resign.
But those are things people do. Is it morally consistent from God to say that I can have 3 beers and drive home but not 4? Drive 70, but not 71? We make choices as a people, and they may not be right.
Sure, we do all sorts of things that are arbitrary. For example, it is hella arbitrary for me, in my belief that human personhood is something that a fetus acquires gradually in the course of development, to draw a line where it’s okay to abort a 20-week fetus at will but not a 26-week fetus. All the binary rules we make about continuous processes and situations are by definition arbitrary.
But IMHO we don’t have to tolerate outright logical inconsistency to the same extent we do arbitrariness. If we’re defending a position by appealing to a particular principle that we’re willing to just abandon when it suits us, I think we have to acknowledge that that weakens the position we’re trying to defend.
I acknowledge that the rape exception weakens the pro-life position.
-snip-
I believe this could only hurt your case as demonstrated and revealed in the Bible; God is the one that opens and closes the wombs as ‘He’ wills. And choses to do so often in Scripture and talks about it often enough, to be as to be like Chic-Fil-A’s hours of operation at to when it’s open or closed. It is obvious that God has such a right, and also the wisdom of who should be allowed to enter the world.
When we get involved we are aborting people who God intended to be here. We are playing God, and diminishing us all as those peopel were important and were murdered before they could contribute to human society. Which justifies why anyone should be able to sue anyone who is helpful in this murder. As once the baby is born, and ever if the moment after birth is murdered, no one can say that this person didn’t fulfill their purpose towards humanity, so no one should sue unless they can demonstrate they were personally hurt. However if the baby was murdered before they came into the world, their purpose could not be fulfilled, so it is a great loss to humanity, every human can sue for the loss, as the loss is known to have happened.
Sort of having fun with this by taking it too fa in the second paragraph, , but the first paragraph was more to the point, God decides and has always decided who comes into the world, that does not justify that we should, so your point is moot.
How much energy does it take to say “I’m not actually pro-life, I’m generally anti-abortion because I’m OK with the state using compulsory childbirth to punish women for consensual sex?”
Mental gymnastics requires a lot of energy. Honesty does not.
That makes no sense whatsoever; even assuming we posit such a God in the first place. How would you, or anyone, have any way of knowing what that purpose was? Maybe the person murdered as a born infant had a purpose for their later life, and that purpose was thwarted. Maybe the aborted fetus’ purpose was to cause the mother to be at the abortion clinic instead of being run over by a car somewhere else, and therefore the abortion fulfilled its purpose.
And are you seriously claiming that the society as a whole shouldn’t, or doesn’t, prosecute the murder of children after they’re born? In practice, that’s done all the time; and nobody claims that the police or the DA have to prove they were personally injured.
Maybe, Maybe, maybe, that proved my point, no one can claim that baby did not fulfill its purpose, it’s all maybe. But if the child was murdered before they came into the world, the child could not have fulfilled it’s purpose in the world, therefore we know for sure. It’s not a maybe anymore.
We don’t prosecute someone for murder for the loss to humanity of that soul, we prosecute to maintain a society of laws to try to establish some degree of fairness. Historically some forms of what we would call murder today was legal in the past. It’s an attempt to establish rules for a society. And by your contention If we did we should reward rapist who impregnate their victims as that produces another member of society.
Sure it could. I gave an example as to how.
True. Because we’re a secular society, and don’t prosecute for not conforming with unprovable religious ideas.
Would not it require personhood to contribute to society? If not a person then I can’t see how one can make such a claim, if a person then deserves protection that we grant a person.
Like selling alcohol on Sunday Mornings or polygamy, yes we are not there yet, let us not kid ourselves.
I’m totally OK with selling alcohol any time of day or night, or any day of the week.
As for polygamy - as long as everyone is fully adult and truly consenting I’m OK with that, too.
You didn’t say ‘contribute to society’, you said “fulfilled it’s [sic] purpose”.
And the existence of food to eat contributes to society; in fact is essential to it.
And if what you mean by “contribute to society” is to actively help others, a just-born infant doesn’t “contribute to society” – it’s the other way around.
O.k. I LOL’d. I needed that in this thread.
Stop calling it pro-life. It is anti-abortion. The “pro lifers” don’t care about the baby after it is born.