As wrong as all of these things are, 17 attempted murders (I think it’s like 7 actual deaths) in 30 years is like 1 every 2 years. I’m sure dentists or janitors get as many.
The numbers, as big as they may be (they should all be zero), should be compared against something, especially consdiering the incredibly complex issue at hand.
Just so there are no confusions ALL OF THOSE INCIDENTS ARE WRONG
The OP is trying to discredit the pro-life position by introducing a fallacy. It reminds me of a anti-environmental bumper-sticker: “Save the planet: kill yourself.”
You haven’t gone to house and killed him, therefore you don’t really disagree with him; you’re just pretending to.
How many janitors are assassinated for being janitors ?
It’s not a complex issue at all. There are the good guys, who want women to to be free to choose what they do with their bodies; and there are vile woman haters and religious fanatics who want to reduce women to brood animals or corpses.
You know, Der Trihs, I really, REALLY do not appreciate you calling my father a “vile woman hater and a religious fanatic.” Because he is anything BUT. He simply believes that it’s wrong.
The world is not so black or white as you seem to think. Not ALL anti-abortionists are anti-birth control, and believe woman should stay home and take care of the kids. Stop with the generalizations.
Interesting how when someone brings up “pro-lifers” like that, it’s almost always someone I have no way of knowing what they are really like. And typically a father or sister or something like that, so the poster can claim to be offended.
How many? No freaking idea. I’m sure that even if I found the answer your phrase “for being janitors” gives you plenty of leeway to say “well, that’s not for being a janitor”.
Would “lawyers being killed because they helped child-rapists get away without punishment” fit the bill?
You can’t see that it is complex? Even if what you say is true, don’t you know that people on both sides of the issue have a more nuanced view?
Except that the other side is utterly wrong, besides being ill-intentioned.
And there are good guys who think that when someone creates a living human being by virture of a deliberate, conscious act which they voluntarily undertook to engange in, they bear the responsiblity for the creation of that life and that they have no right to end it. It’s not about telling women what they can or can’t do with their own bodies; it’s about protecting a separate and viable life that they created and which is merely housed temporarily within their bodies.
Babies are killed by the thousands in this country every day that, if born at that same stage, would survive and go on to live a normal life, and there are those of us, good guys all, who find that appalling.
And not only that, but these babies are sometimes killed in ways that are nothing short of painful and horrific, and which would be viewed with shock, horror, disgust and disbelief if perpetrated upon premature infants of the same age and development in a hospital nursery by some homicidal crackpot.
All this talk about pro-lifers wanting to keep women in their place or punishing them for being dirty sluts and so forth is typical left-wing hooey intended to marginalize and minimalize pro-lifers’ true and genuine concerns about abortion in order to further its belief that people should be protected, to the greatest extent possible, from the consequences of their own actions. They do this by framing the argument in terms that are intended to inflame and outrage women and convince them that the pro-lifers want to punish them or teach them some lesson or try to tell them what they can and can’t do with their own bodies, when the truth is that the great majority of those pro-life concerns are baby-centric, and not woman-centric at all.
I personally am not all that concerned with the abortion of fetuses that are little more than nondescript blobs of tissue; but once they reach the stage that they have developed consciousness and they react to pain and other stimuli, they have crossed a boundry and have become human beings which no sensible person could argue are any different than other babies born at that same stage of development and thriving in hospital nurseries.
So you are quite wrong Der Trihs, (and Pit-worthily so, if I could be arsed), in your allegations that pro-lifers are vile woman-haters and religious “fanatics” who “want” to reduce women to this or that or anything at all. Again, it isn’t about women; it’s about babies!
Maybe because it’s the truth. You can’t possibly know every single solitary pro-lifer in the world. Generalizations are usually wrong. (And before you accuse me of being some anti-woman religious fanatic, let me inform you that I pro-choice, as anyone here can vouch for.)
Starving Artist-I believe that most later term abortions are done in emergencies-when the mother’s health is in danger, or there’s something wrong with the pregnancy. Most of these are WANTED pregnancies-but there’s usually something wrong.
Starving, for the most part, I agree with you. But I just can’t let you get away with saying this: “and which is merely housed temporarily within their bodies.”
I’ve never had a baby, but I know dad-gum well that a fetus is never “merely” anything inside a mother. It is not just a separate entity in there – a couch potato, sipping beer, watching SEC football and checking the clock from time to time. For starters, this baby is affecting her entire system hormonally. It will change the woman’s body forever.
Pro-lifers are aware that women now have options other than the envasive procedures provided in a clinic. There is medication that causes the woman to abort. There is also the morning after pill. There is just no way to cover all bases. It is out of the control of the pro-life supporters.
I also believe that most people who are pro-life are consistent enough in their belief in life that they do not want to take a life. That too is murder. (I can’t believe I’m having to spell out something so obvious.)
I guess that’s why it doesn’t pay to generalize about pro-lifers. There is so much more to people than the labels we give them.
Finally, a nitpick: Weston used the term " Violent, civil disobedience." Generally, one of the features of civil disobedience is that it is non-violent.
Well, there are a lot of abortion doctor murders and other violence. http://msnbc.com/modules/clinics/ Over 1,700 attacks in the 80s and 90s. So the basic premise is wrong.
And I also disagree about the motives of the fellow travelers of these terrorists. They want to invade the privacy of others and force an anti-woman morality on them by means of law. These people have not adequately separated legitimate legal and political action from personal privacy and morality. They are all entitled to their opinion and to voice those opinions, but the failure to condemn abortion clinic violence makes them, all of them who won’t condemn, terrorists who revel in the power of their terror.
Abortion in this country is legal and a constitutional right. Silence in the face of thousands of instances of violence undermines civilization itself. The campaign of violence against women’s health clinics demands that all non-terrorist conservatives prominently identify themselves as such in all discussions of this kind.
Well, not to burst your bubble or anything, but it turns out living human beings, in the sense you mean, aren’t rare enough or special enough that a society has to protect them all. In a country the size of the U.S., a million a year can be tossed, yet the society itself doesn’t descend into barbarism or extinction or even an excess amount of unpleasantness.
In other words, they look upon women as slaves, as brood mares, as wombs with legs. They look upon a woman and see something of less value than a mindless lump of flesh inside her.
In other words, they are NOT “good guys”. They are vermin.
Oh, garbage. The vast majority of abortions are of early term fetuses.
Again, garbage. They are perfectly happy if the baby dies one second after it’s been born, as long as they can inflict the degradation of forced birth upon the woman. Or even better, kill her. They have no interest in anything from prenatal care to child welfare; just in forced breeding and the suffering of women.
And such late term fetuses are seldom if ever aborted, except when they are unable to survive or highly dangerous to the mother. You and your fellow pro-birthers of course don’t care in the slightest about that; if a woman you force to give birth dies, it’s a victory for you.
Nonsense. They’ve never shown any concern for “babies”.
You are assuming that said pro-lifers are OK with killing to prevent murder in other cases. This is assuming facts not in evidence, as it were.
FTR, I am probably the least pro-life person on this board, but I do not agree that it would be immoral not to kill abortionists even if you thought it was murder - fallacy of two wrongs and all that.
Arguing that people are here because abortion wasn’t illegal is ridiculous.
How many people are here because abortion was legal? How many woman had abortions because of their circumstances, and then went on to have other children? How many woman would have ended up single welfare mothers or tied to abusive men instead of educated and better providers for their children?
Expecting women to have children for other people to adopt is very very very wrong. People who inssit on adopting newborns when thousands of older children languish in foster care are ridiculous.
Anti-abortionists do target OB/GYNS. These people are performing a legal act on patients who want it, and the anti-abortionists treat them like criminals.
If you don’t like abortion, work at changing the laws, not the people who have or provide them.
The majority of people in America barely even notice, let alone grieve over it, when millions of people in Africa die of AIDS or thousands of people in Bangladesh die in a typhoon. I guess that means that those people’s lives weren’t worth anything either, by your standard.
I don’t believe that a person’s right to life is based on anything as arbitrary as whether the society around them misses them.
Me too. So what? I’m happy to be around, but if I never was, I wouldn’t have missed it.
–Cliffy
I am a pro-life woman. I am also a physician. When I have kids, I plan to have my future husband be a stay at home dad while I continue to work as a doctor.
Have I just blown your mind? 
There was recently an article in the news about a 23 week old fetus who was born alive at an abortion clinic and then left in the garbage to die. Here is what a 23 week old fetus looks like. It looks an awful lot like a baby to many people.
Can you understand why someone might be horrified at the practice of killing 23 week old babies? If you can, then maybe you can start to actually understand pro-lifers instead of just guessing at their motives.
I think Lemur866 demonstrated how fallacious it is to think that anyone who believes that unjust killing is going on will then be compelled to murder someone over it. That’s basically terrorism, and terrorism doesn’t have a good track record for actually leading to meaningful social change!
Not everybody thinks that the most effective way to stop violence is with more violence. Even if you personally do, that doesn’t mean that everyone out there shares your morals.
You might just as easily ask “Why doesn’t every vegetarian firebomb a slaughterhouse if they really think that meat is murder?” or “Why didn’t black people in the 1960s just start killing every white person they could find if the way white people treated them bothered them so much?” or “Why don’t people who are against the death penalty kill anyone who is involved in executions until everyone is too afraid to execute any prisoners?” 
I’d say their value to American society is fairly low, judging from the lack of impact to that society at their loss.
Good for you, but it turns out that not only does society not miss them, society overall is perfectly content with them being gone (and a sizable chunk of that society, a million pregnant women, wants them gone), effectively blunting any emotional appeals that abortion makes a society evil. If it does, surely American society is tremendously evil. Except it isn’t, really.