Actually it doesn’t. It shows us that Governor Palin saw the choice as hers; it does not establish that her daughter submitted to pressure, nor that the daughter disagrees with her mother’s position. She may well have wanted the baby–because she was lonely, because she loves kids, because she wanted to stick it to Mom, because she wanted her breasts to get bigger. Teenage girls do many strange things.
No they don’t.
What does that mean, she’s “accepted” it? What would be the alternative to “accepting” it?
Nobody has any trouble believeing that.
There is nothing special about not aborting a DS baby. Most people don’t/ Most pro-choice people dn’t. I’m not giving her a cookie for making the same choice practically everybody else makes. What annoys me is that she doesn’t want it to be a choice for anybody else.
So what if it’s consistent? It’s consistently extreme, bordering on sociopathic. The problem is not that it’s an inconsistent position but that it’s a psychotic and heartless position.
What’s admirable about being consistently wrong?
She BELIEVES that life begins at conception. How is that belief wrong? You can’t disprove it. It may not be what you or I believe, but that doesn’t make it wrong.
I do** not **believe that life begins at conception, which is why I have no moral objection to abortion. But the exact point at which life begins is a matter of opinion.
I have admiration for her position because at least she is true to it. I have a major problem with those who state that they believe life begins at conception, so therefore abortion is immoral…but it’s okay to kill that life if the father is a rapist. If you believe an embryo is a life, then how is that life any less worthwhile if it was conceived via rape? Apparently Palin believes life begins at conception and her actions and policies are consistent with that belief, which imo is admirable.
ETA: this is the ONLY pro-life stance that I respect. I don’t agree with it, but I respect it.
I wasn’t talking about the belief. I don’t care about the belief. What’s she’s wrong about is that she wants to use the power of the state to impose a mandatory adherence to that belief on everyone else. She’s wrong on what the law should be. Her personal beliefs have no relevance to me.
You’ll have to define abortion rights a bit more precisely before I can answer this question. unless we read additional facts into the question in the OP, then my opinion remains the same. Killing the fetus in this case would represent a monstrous failure of emmpathy and would be evidence of a horrific personal ethos.
The analogy is flawed, but even so I disagree. A person who made that choice would indeed be a monster.
Your logic is flawed. Taking specific and deliberate action to end a life is not equivalent to “[doing] the utmost to prevent the death of every other person in the universe.”
What is meant by “ending a life.” Everybody ends millions of lives everyday. Taking a shower ends lives. Taking antibiotics ends lives. Eating food requires ending lives. Framing it in terms of “ending a life” is loaded, BS language which avoids addressing the real dilemma. What it should really be about, in my opinion, is making a choice abbout what kind of law will cause the least human suffering. A embryo can’t suffer. A blastocyst at the “moment of conception” (not that there really is a single “moment”) cannot suffer. A 14 year old rape victim sure as hell can suffer and forcing her to bear the child of a rapist aggravates that suffering to an inhuman degree.
Any woman who could blithely ignore the emotional agony of her own child and force her to undergo such an ordeal, for the sake of something that can’t suffer is morally depraved. The purely religious and scientifically utterly unsupported belief that zygotes are imbued with magical fairy spirits making them “persons” is not a justifiable excuse for imposing this decsion on other people.
Legal abortion causes less human suffering than illegal abortion. It’s that simple, and no one has to get one if they don’t want one.
Thou shalt not kill, but need not strive officiously to keep alive.
Don’t buy it, never have.
Sorry - I missed the edit window. To continue…
Re Spiritus Mundi’s Acts and Omissions Doctrine…
You can save a life for a very small amount of money. An amount that for many of us causes no reduction in our life style. A person who chooses not to save that life, condemning a child in Africa, for example, to die from preventable disease, unnecessary famine, or other poverty related conditions, is not a “monster” in that situation. A 14 year old girl, raped and pregnant, who choses to terminate her pregnancy, is a “monster.”
Even if I grant full equal rights to the fetus that I do to the (unnamed) African child, I still would not claim that one person is a monster in this situation, and another isn’t.
Under your analysis, Spiritus Mundi, a person who choses not to forgo a single Starbucks Grande Skim Mocchacino a week in order to prevent a child suffering an abhorrent death is not a monster, where as a girl who choses to not go through the personal risk and psychological trauma of pregnancy after a violent rape, possibly one by a family member, is a monster.
I am not a big fan of your ethical calculator.
Would you say that those people who choose to keep their child with Down’s Syndrome also effectively abandon said child while they take a job requiring them to work long hours and travel extensively for at least 4 years, while their spouse works on either an oil pipeline or a fishing boat? Family values, indeed!
It’s over 90% in Europe. I couldn’t find any stats for the US, but I’d be surprised if we were so different from them as to be lower than 50%.
If one really believes that it is “murder”, then imposing this “belief” on others makes perfect sense.
Why shouldn’t someone committing “murder” be restrained by society’s laws? We don’t allow other murderers to argue that “your personal views that murder is bad have no relevance to me”.
The argument is exactly over this “belief”. If one “believes” that a fetus is a “person” then it follows inevitably that you can’t kill it for your convenience; if one believes that it isn’t, as I do, then there is nothing wrong with disposing of it for any reason at all.
Murder may be unique in this, as society must provide voice for the “victim” who by definition isn’t around to argue for themselves.
That emoting, not arguing. You disagree with her; well, so do I. But unlike you, I see no need to assert that those who disagree with me are morally corrupt. They may be, but the mere fact that they disagree isn’t proof of it; and indeed, consistency on the hard questions is I think a virtue.
That’s ten years old and it’s Europe. I still don’t even think I believe it. I would be surprised if it’s even a single percent point in the US.
Oh the irony, it burns.
Not when that belief is rooted in an unproveable religious assumption. If I believe that “meat is murder,” does that mean I would be justified in imposing that belief on everyone else.
Because you’re using a religious definition for “murder.”
Those who have no empathy for suffering are morally corrupt.
Dont’ buy what? These words exist only in your post, and I’m not clear what concept of mine you imagine that they represent. My statement was that taking specific action to kill one person is not ethically equivalent to failing to take every possible action to preserve the life of evrey person.
My statemetn is true. Your shopping preferences notwithstanding.
No. I cannot. I can make a donation to any number of funds, and that donation has some statistical chance of benefiting a child. If you can point to a specific child in the underdeveloped country of your choice and demonstrat that my decision to keep a dollar in my pocket will certainly and incontrovertably end that child’s life - then you will have drawn a somewhat parallel situation.
But you can’t. You don;t seem to be very rigorous in presenting these analgous models that you imagine demonstrate your osition, so perhaps it would be best if we just used teh specifics at hand. I mean, it isn’t like the hypothetical facts in question are that confusing or convoluted. Why not just make your case directly, instead of trying to argue through strained metaphor?
Well, that’s because you imagine that the situations are ethically equivalent. Unless the inescapable and proximate result of the decision to not send money is the death of a specific child, the 2 cases are not analagous. It is not, so they are not.
You are incorrect, but I suppose it would be too much to hope that you would actually repond to my argument rather than the straw man you have constructed. It would be correct to say, based upon what I have written, that if one accept the initial proposition that conception represents the boundary line of human existence then I would not consider drinking a Mocchachino to be ethically equivalent to having an abortion. As a matter of fact, even without that caveat I will argue that having an abortion is not ethically equivalent to having a cup of coffee.
As another matter of fact, the idea that you find the two actions to be morally equivalent is one of the sadder things I have read today.
Fair enough - I’m not a big fan of yours, either.
I don’t buy that cite.
Here’s a 2007 study:
Termination rate from a retrospective review of pregnancies affected by Down syndrome at Strong Memorial Hospital of the University of Rochester from 1997 to 2005: 73%, which is significantly lower than other studies, but still quite high (see fig.1).