I should have resisted, but I got sucked into the tedious argument about whether or not abortion is moral in the thread at TPMCafe. The “I’m pro-choice but I think abortion is wrong” thing crops up a lot in these discussions, and while I understand the urge to feel like a complex person that lays behind it, I seriously don’t get why people think that it helps anything to hand wring about how terrible abortion is if you’re supporting the right to have one. Suggesting that abortion is immoral just reinforces the anti-choice claims that abortion should be banned and it strongly reinforces the anti-choice notion that women who get abortions are moral children who are too stupid to know what they’re doing. The belief that women are too stupid to really understand what they’re doing is evident in anti-choice measures like requiring sonograms and requiring that women spend a day to think it over before they get an abortion.
Having the notion that women are moral midgets and that abortion is an evil, even if you think it’s one that should be tolerated, being reinforced by pro-choicers does the pro-choice argument no good. So I’d like to argue against it. I think that abortion is not only a good thing, but I’d like to posit that it seems to me that in the vast majority of abortions, the choice made was the most moral choice for that woman.
To see that abortion is moral, you just need to look at women as human beings with lives that have value. When a woman chooses abortion, she’s not indulging some guilty pleasure, like sneaking in a round of adultery at lunch, to bring up a genuinely immoral action that should not be criminal. She is probably thinking about her family’s well-being and yes, her own well-being. Taking your own well-being into consideration is called “selfish” by anti-choicers, but I think valuing yourself is a moral good, even if you are female. In fact, especially if you are female, since you live in a world where having self-esteem can be an act of moral courage that requires some defiance. If I got pregnant, I wouldn’t even have to suffer much mental strain to realize that abortion would be the best choice for myself, my family, and my relationship. Abortion, not just the right to abortion but the actual procedure, is a moral good that helps women and families and should be honored as such. Women who get abortions should be recognized as people who can accurately weigh their choices and make the most moral one.
Updated to add: Also, saying that abortion is morally questionable, even if you’re pro-choice, is a huge insult to the brave men and women who risk life and limb to perform them. Being an abortion doctor is a pretty thankless task, because a bunch of “Christian” men who have emasculation issues are gunning to kill you in hopes that brings their huevos back. Meanwhile, other anti-choicers are running around claiming that being an abortionist is like this super great career that people only indulge in for the money. This is horseshit and pro-choicers need to push back and remind everyone that abortionists are heroes, who put up with all sorts of abuse because they want to help women.
Agreed.
Oooh… I am so linking to this in my blog… [/feigned outrage]
Nice post.
My favorite thing in these debates is to announce loudly that if I got pregnant, I’d have an abortion, and watch people’s heads explode on BOTH sides of the argument.
Spot on, Amanda.
Pro-lifers are probably doing more damage to the moral fabric than anyone else. They work on the premise that one half the population should not be responsible for their actions because they are genetically wired to fail (men) and the other half cannot be responsible for their actions because we won’t let them (women). Pro-choice is moral because it places all responsibility on the people involved.
You’re making will saletan feel all icky inside, and that’s highly immoral.
Amanda- you’re correct, as usual. Women need to be trusted enough to make good decisions for themselves and their families.
Human- I do the same thing, only I admit to actually having had an abortion. Kerfuffles inevitably follow since I’m not penitent enough about it to please either side. You’d not believe the amount of flack I’ve caught from so-called feminists for not properly acknowledging that abortion is a “tragedy.” As if me hemming and hawing about how dreadful it was and how bad I feel about it (when I don’t and never have) would be doing our side any favors?
I don’t know why so many progressives are so willing to let anti-choicers take the moral framework of abortion without a fight. It drives me up a tree.
Great post as usual.
I wrote on the same subject for Blog for Choice Day, in the unlikely event that anyone cares.
I get sick of people insisting that abortion is an “unfortunate necessity” and soforth. Abortions are no more or less unfortunate than appendectomies. It’s too bad, in one sense, that it’s sometimes necessary to remove your appendix, because it’s a major invasive surgery, and going through major invasive surgery sucks. But it’s surely a positive good that the surgery is available.
To see that abortion is moral, you just need to look at women as human beings with lives that have value.
You also just need to look at embryos and fetuses as things without moral agency and values … that’s another facet to this, too, I think, is that if you even start to concede that yes, abortion should be legal, but it is WRONG, or yes, abortion is the best of several evils but it still is a sad thing for the poor baaabies, then you’re assigning moral agency to a fetus, which leads to the kind of thinking that abortion is still somewhat wrong and women who have abortions still guilty … which is why all the recent democratic concessions about when and where and under what circumstances etc. abortion is okay is a bad path to start down, I think. It’s given anti-choicers an in. It’s certainly bad framing.
I think too many times, the desire to appeal sensitive and compassionate overrides many pro-choice people’s desire to appear logically or theoretically consistent, which is why they concede to these kind of arguments. But I’d say it’s also a very moral and principled position to say that both a) women are human beings whose lives have intrinsic value of their own, and b) fetuses are not moral beings, and their lives do not have intrinsic moral value.
(sorry, that was kinda long and rambly)
Thank you. I’m pro-choice and pro-abortion.
Correct as usual Amanda. My belief is that if something is inside your body, attached to your body and sharing your blood supply, then it belongs to you and you control what happens to it. If you are pro-life, DON’T GET A FUCKING ABORTION. If you beleive in ancient superstitions and have an imaginery friend named Jesus, that is fine. However don’t force your silly beliefs onto someone else.
I’m sorry, Amanda, I have to disagree. I have no uterus, so my opinion means somewhere between jack and squat, I admit. I just cannot endorse abortion as a positive moral good. Like war, it is sometimes a drastic last resort but a necessity due to circumstances. I feel it behooves us to minimize these circumstances, via diplomacy for war, via education, contraceptive access, rape prevention, domestic violence prevention, etc. for abortion. I wouldn’t dream of excoriating you or any other woman for deciding it’s necessary in your circumstances. But I can’t see it being a moral good. Just my $.02.
The statement that you “understand the urge to feel like a complex person that lays behind ambiguous feelings about abortion” is interesting; you are talking about my mother and my father, may he rest in peace. Good people, both of them - totally ok with women making their own choices on abortion, but still kind of revolted about the whole idea of it.
As long as a person has the view that human beings have a basic right to privacy, I am not sure I am ready to condemn them or be condescending about what I think is their “need to feel complex” …. I mean if you respect the basic human right to privacy, then I don’t care what you think about someone’s private choices.
Perhaps I am being naive because I have never been pregnant in my 38 years. I have never thought about the morality of it, I think about it as part of the greater issue of the right of all human beings to privacy and primacy over thier bodies.
I have to disagree. I’m Pro-Choice and Anti-Abortion, and I think that what you’re saying gets in the way of the real argument here: Should people be allowed the choice to abort or not.
America is built on individual rights and freedoms, and although I may disagree with what you say or do, I defend your right to do.
Imagine, women as moral agents with lives of value. What a shocking concept. Next you’re going to be claiming that women’s sexual pleasure is a moral good. Egads, where will it end?
My grandmother was married in the 1920’s to my grandfather, and abortion carried the death penalty in those days in Tennessee (way to respect life, Vols!) My grandmother wanted a family, but she wanted a family that she and her young husband could actually care for, rather than the huge, starving ones that were all too common in those days. She also knew the risks involved in giving birth, and the possibility of death that childbirth carried. So, she acquired a medical textbook with a detailed explanation of the abortion procedure, something that it was also illegal to have in Tennessee at the time, and made sure that she had children when she and her husband were able to feed them and care for them.
Many women knew that she was planning her family, but no one turned her in. In fact, she was asked for that book many times, and I have no doubt that she saved many lives by lending it out whenever she felt that she could trust the lendee.
Abortion, like all other means of family planning, is a good option to have, because without it, you have people who are already born suffering and dying because of those who are not.
That argument really was tedious. I liked your note on how the discussion about faith veered into reproductive rights.
I agree that it’s completely senseless, and damaging to the pro-choice movement as a whole, when someone claims to be “pro-choice” but says that he/she does believe it’s the killing of a human being and therefore morally wrong. However, I disagree with this statement: “Abortion, not just the right to abortion but the actual procedure, is a moral good that helps women and families and should be honored as such.”
The right to abortion is a moral good. However, the procedure itself is not a “moral good.” It’s very much like no-fault divorce. The right to have a no-fault divorce is a moral good. The actual divorce is a failure of a marriage, which is not a “moral good.” It’s not a “moral evil,” either. Abortion (elective abortion) is a failure of less medically invasive, less expensive, less time-consuming, less physically painful methods of birth control. As with divorce, having one can be a huge relief and can be the most moral option in the situation…but in order to classify something as a “moral good,” I think it needs to be something that everybody should strive to achieve. I think it’s a lot more accurate to classify abortion (and no-fault divorce) as moral *options.* You are not immoral if you have one. But whether or not you’ve had one really doesn’t say anything one way or the other about your moral goodness without a lot of context, which is why the procedures themselves aren’t “moral goods.”
I also disagree with this stance: “You also just need to look at embryos and fetuses as things without moral agency and values … that’s another facet to this, too, I think, is that if you even start to concede that yes, abortion should be legal, but it is WRONG, or yes, abortion is the best of several evils but it still is a sad thing for the poor baaabies, then you’re assigning moral agency to a fetus, which leads to the kind of thinking that abortion is still somewhat wrong and women who have abortions still guilty … which is why all the recent democratic concessions about when and where and under what circumstances etc. abortion is okay is a bad path to start down, I think. It’s given anti-choicers an in. It’s certainly bad framing.”
For many women, the embryo or fetus is something that they wanted and were anticipating the future child it would become, and it is very sad for them when they don’t achieve that…it’s just as sad as a miscarriage, in which situation nobody would stalk up to a woman who just had one and say, “oooh, what, you’re sad about your miscarriage because of the poor baaaaby.” But apparently that’s okay if the woman had an abortion and is sad about that instead..? And we should be doing that so we don’t give pro-lifers any credence? If the pro-choice position isn’t strong enough to acknowledge that it can be a sad thing for a woman to have an abortion, because she wanted the baby that embryo or fetus would become but for reason couldn’t carry to term, then there’s something wrong with the pro-choice position. (And I don’t believe there is–I’m 100% pro-choice. I just believe there’s something wrong with that attitude.)
Great post.
also
Abortion is an expression of respect toward motherhood (by which I mean both pregnancy and childrearing). Motherhood is a vocation. It’s hard work. It’s very important that it be done well, and you really need to have your act together to do it well.
(The same could be said about fatherhood.)
The woman who gets an abortion is acknowledging that pregnancy is an important responsibility.
The anti-abortionists who claim an unwanted pregnancy is just an inconvenience, churchladies I’ve read about who tell pregnant women having a baby will be easy, are really disrespecting mothers.
I think it was Katha Pollitt who said, “if an unwanted pregnancy is just an inconvenience, what’s a wanted pregnancy?”
All beings have “moral agency.” Animals, humans, fetuses.
The question at hand, I think, in an abortion situation is whether the fetus is better off dead, or in the care of someone who would only resent their existence. As the victim of a bipolar, narcissistic mother who got pregnant with me only to get my wayward father to come on home, I’d say death isn’t such a bad option if a baby will only be in the care of someone who wouldn’t want them, anyway. That’s why I personally call it a “neccessary evil.”
But just as meat-eaters who remove slaughterhouses to the outskirts of town are being dishonest by pretending the horror of slaughter isn’t, well, a horror, so is it disingenuous to say that the human being, with her/his unique capacity to love and care, isn’t doing something tragic and ugly by cutting a fetus out like a tumor. Especially with so many loving and gentle people desperate to conceive…or ADOPT.
It reminds me of the death penalty, somehow. Here in Louisiana, it’s done in the middle of the night and in camera-free silence, so that the pro-death people are as insulated from their “morality” as possible.
I think meat eaters should face first-hand the pain, terror and filth that is the staple of their diet. Some bravely do, and are just fine with it. The death-penalty people should look into the eyes of those they electrocute, hang, shoot or inject. Some could do it with a smile. And those who choose abortion should likewise know just what they are doing, in a moral sense, as well as a medical sense. And, like Ms. Marcotte does, they should face it with the neccessary callousness.
The only reason I’m not jumping on the ITA bandwagon is that, following ellis’ analogy (correlation?), it feels weird to me to call *any* medical procedure a “moral good.”
I guess, as a scientist and a historian of medicine, I see medical procedures as morally neutral, like . . . oatmeal.
Is oatmeal a moral good? I had it for breakfast, and it was good, and it’s good for my health and well-being. But it’s doesn’t seem like a *moral* good because oatmeal isn’t morally good (or bad) in itself, it’s human choices that have moral qualities.
Similarly, while the ability to choose and obtain abortion is a moral good, the abortion itself is just a procedure. Like any other medical procedure, like oatmeal, the morality lies in who makes the choices and how and why.
All beings have “moral agency.� Animals, humans, fetuses.
So, fetuses are capable of making moral choices and taking action based on those choices? You must have a different understanding of “moral agency” than the rest of us.
I’m not just pro-choice but pro-abortion: I think it should be marketed to people who are too poor, young or emotionally dysfunctional to have children. This means pretty much anyone below $40k/yr, 28-30 years and most of the rich kids I went to high school with. I don’t think people in such situations should have children because children need good homes. I’m not intending to be coercive about this, so do restrain yourselves from pointing out the obvious elitism here: we may be coming from different philosophical standpoints. I don’t believe anyone has a “right” to have children, though I don’t think abortion should be forced upon anyone. I would like to see contraception become the overwhelming norm in our society and I’d like to see the idiots who speak out about contraception gagged. Fertility should be a choice one makes after establishing oneself professionally and dealing with one’s emotional issues. For the record, I also think that pre and post natal care ought to be paid for in its entirety by the state, as should all medical care, and that education from pre-K to Ph.D. should also be of the highest quality and free of charge. Abortion is just one of those medical services, and it ought to be provided free of charge or guilt. I also think anyone with more than three kids is an oxygen-wasting douchebag.
But my political positions are generally unpopular.
Amanda, I agree that there is a need to counter those who call abortion immoral, but it seems dangerous to put a new comprehensive label on it (which the post title does, though you qualify this in the body of the post). Isn’t this just playing the same moralizing game as abortion opponents? Morality strikes me as something that is highly subjective and individualized.
I am squarely in the pro-choice camp, but I don’t want to minimize the decisions that women make. For many, abortion is no more of moral choice than clipping their nails. For others, it is a complex moral decision, and I want to respect that.
That said, I agree with you that the moral voice is dominated by pro-life Christians, and there needs to be a greater emphasis on the morality of affirming the life and the choice of the woman. Also, our society also needs to stop thinking that conceiving and bringing children into the world is always the right thing to do–sometimes it’s downright cruel and selfish.
MAJeff:
My definition is related to karma, which is probably too dogmatic to have included in a post so short. Please disregard it.
you hit the salient point directly in your post amanda.
very well thought out post and realized facts.
glad to know you are here.
What about women who don’t get abortions? Have they also accurately weighed their choices and made the most moral one? It seems weird to me to say that this is a moral question and at the same time say that nobody faced with it ever chooses wrongly.
It seems to me that in the vast majority of cases, abortion is a morally neutral choice.
One thing I’ve found talking to people about this is that there’s a direct correlation between squirminess at the idea of a woman having a one-night stand and discomfort with abortion. Could be a wild coincidence, but for some reason, I don’t think so.
Next you’re going to be claiming that women’s sexual pleasure is a moral good.
Exactly. It is. Pleasure is a moral good. I think people who oppose pleasure are the real anti-lifers, because what’s life for if not for living it?
Amanda, per usual I agree with you. By constantly apologizing for abortion, we diminish women’s agency and give precious ground to anti abortion rights foes just waiting for an opening. Women are complete moral actors (though the law in many states tries to minimize that through waiting periods, “informed consent” provisions, etc., as you indicate), and have the wherewithal, maturity, and intelligence to weigh all of the factors and make a reasoned decision. Calling abortion “wrong but necessary” paints the women who, after weighing those factors decide to have an abortion, as immoral or as failures. That’s not the message I want to send.
I also wholeheartedly agree with Isabella that abortion is a moral good because it respects the importance of motherhood, the difficulty and dangerousness of pregnancy (that it is, as Isabella says, much more than an inconvenience). To really respect the lives of women and the lives of children, we need to affirmatively support the right to abortion and access to that right, and to stop shaming the women who exercise it.
Sure, Brooklynite, but people don’t question women who make the “right” choice to embrace their assigned gender role at any point in time. What you’re asking is similiar to asking, “Is marriage a moral good? Are housewives making the correct moral decision?” It goes unquestioned.
If I may add something that everyone else probably thinks too obvious to bother with…Abortion good, birth control better, birth control+abortion best. Abortion is minor surgery–less serious physically than an appendectomy, in fact– but it is surgery and has risks. (Medical abortions have about the same level of risk.) Birth control is less risky (except for rhythm method/NFP, which actually has such a high failure rate that it is more risky due to pregnancy related complications than simply using abortion as your birth control method), but fails sometimes. The absolutely safest form of birth control is barrier protection with abortion as a backup if it fails. The most dangerous? Using none at all. Because pregnancy isn’t “just an inconvenience”, as the anti-choicers say. It’s a life threatening condition.
The tone of this post seems a little heavy handed to me. I don’t think it is an unusual position to be be FOR women making their own choices about this, yet PERSONALLY unsure about how to feel about the entire process as an entity. I don’t go around preaching or even opining on it. Perhaps your point rests on if people are loud and vocal about this ambivalence, but I won’t be shamed into denying my own thoughts on it. Nobody can rule on that but me. And I have family members who needed this option and I understand why, and I take no issue with that, nor feel any judgment. I would never side with men who feel the need to enforce their ambivalence or even disapproval of the process on women. But neither will I lie about how I feel to make anyone happy.
She is probably thinking about her family’s well-being and yes, her own well-being.
If this is to be a rational discussion—that is, based on reason—we don’t need to consider what the woman is “probably” thinking. Because then we open the door to the opposition bringing up cases where the woman wasn’t thinking of positive things, or a case where a woman misuses the process. I think the weight should rest here, as commenter elyzabethe wrote (i tried to link to her comment, but as the preview shows me, your blog does not allow this??):
[To see that abortion is moral, you just need to look at women as human beings with lives that have value.]
You also just need to look at embryos and fetuses as things without moral agency and values
A woman has a life. She is the agent of control of her life. She comes first in her life. She is a live human with consciousness and the ability to choose what is best in her life. That is my take on it.
Now, perhaps my opinion means nothing as a man, though I disagree, when it might come to an individual case in my own life where (for example) a woman I would be involved with might have to consider it. Then I think, perhaps, my opinion should be weighed. To what extent, I can’t say. But that is the only case I can think of where my opinion might matter a bit. (Note, I didnt’ say ‘my opinion should decide the case.’) Anyway, that’s just theoretical here.
I am not saying I see abortion as “wrong” or as a “necessary evil,” but I won’t say I see it as a decision or issue that is simple, clearcut, and easy to rule on. That said, I don’t see it as my business to rule on it. But this:
The “I’m pro-choice but I think abortion is wrong� thing crops up a lot in these discussions, and while I understand the urge to feel like a complex person that lays behind it, I seriously don’t get why people think that it helps anything to hand wring about how terrible abortion is if you’re supporting the right to have one.
seems unnecessarily nasty. I don’t have these feelings to entertain some “urge” to feel “complex” or appear that way! Is it really that clearcut in your mind? My motivations? No. You have no idea of my internal workings. To say as much really doesn’t help the discussion, in my mind. I have my feelings because i AM a complex creature. Humans are, you know. And I don’t base that on just this opinion! Most of my feelings and thoughts have “flipside” considerations. If not, I would be a 2D character, like many extreme Right thinkers, to my mind.
I think we mostly agree. But not fully. And that is okay. I’m just not sure how I feel about it in its entirety. I am sure, tho, that I do not feel comfortable going around campaigning against abortion, yelling about my ambivalence, or ever trying to stop a woman or Women from having one. I only voice my opinion now because your post invites as much.
The “I’m pro-choice but I think abortion is wrong� thing crops up a lot in these discussions, and while I understand the urge to feel like a complex person that lays behind it, I seriously don’t get why people think that it helps anything to hand wring about how terrible abortion is if you’re supporting the right to have one. Suggesting that abortion is immoral just reinforces the anti-choice claims that abortion should be banned and it strongly reinforces the anti-choice notion that women who get abortions are moral children who are too stupid to know what they’re doing.
Speaking as someone who comes from a religious tradition in which abortion is often considered immoral (but sometimes is considered a moral duty: i.e. one is religiously obligated under some circumstances to have one), while I agree that sometimes the “I’m pro-choice but abortion is wrong” argument is being made by people who just wanna feel complex and intelligent and sensibly moderate, and is even more often made by people who think abortions are icky and think they are wrong because they are icky, there are some of us who feel sincerely do take the side you eviscerate: and, as to the politics of the situation — how does suggesting that abortion is immoral lead inevitably to a suggestion of a ban? Whatever happened to a line between Church and State? For example, my religion teaches that it’s immoral to eat blood (not just that it, like eating pork, is an un-kosher thing to do — as far as Judaism is concerned, non-Jews have no obligation to obstain from pork, etc., but blood is something different entirely), but I don’t think we should ban blood sausage.
Of course, it’s usually easy to tell whether someone is suffering from the urge to be complex or feels abortion is wrong because it is icky based on what compromises they are willing to make. For instance, those who have such positions on abortion may be willing to say “well, we can at least ban ‘egregious’ abortions like ‘partial birth abortions’ and make sure innocent teens have their parents’ permission”, whereas for those of us who come from traditions that consider (some) abortions immoral, these cases are often the most clear cut cases for the abortion in question being morally acceptable and possibly even morally mandated! That’s the problem, though, with legislating morality — perhaps it’s better the law be morally good than morally neutral, but if you get it wrong, rather than the law being morally neutral, the law force people to be immoral!
Thus, making abortion a moral rather than legal question may not be such a bad idea after all — as long as people can manage to remember the benefits of separating Church and State. Alas, since our country’s not seen the downside of that wall being breached (and people here don’t learn, e.g., about the 30 Years’ War, etc.), perhaps people would think that if something’s immoral why not make it illegal.
OTOH, for someone like me, while the duty-based system of Jewish law usually translates well to secular, rights-based laws, in a few cases it does not. The most notable is, FWIW, abortion: I fail to see how to even translate an abortion restriction that passes muster in Jewish law into something that’s secularly justifiable. Which makes me wonder how someone can be both Jewish and “pro-life”: except I know how — they either don’t understand the Jewish law or (more typically) they understand neither how secular law works (i.e. that you cannot just make laws willy-nilly but that we have a constitution, hence which misunderstanding is very odd considering how it’s the same in Judaism vis-a-vis the Torah) nor what Christian pro-lifers really are after (i.e. most “pro-life” Jews don’t realize that pro-life Christians find abortion to always be problematic, even if they would consider it allowable in the case where a woman’s life is at risk — whereas in Judaism, such an abortion is mandatory as saving a life is mandatory!).
and i hope i have done so with the respect due your blog and yourself.
All beings have “moral agency.� Animals, humans, fetuses.
What about plants, bacteria, fungi? Or individual cells in a multicellular organism or organs? Or non-living entities such as computers, cities, or airplanes? Do you see any distinction between animals that pass the “rouge test” (ie have self-awareness), which include humans, dolphins, chimpanzees, and elephants, and other animals? Just curious. Disregard if you think that this is getting too far from the point of the post.
(emphasis added.) That’s exactly the point. We are all responsible for living our lives. We
While I’m with ya all the way on the pleasure as a moral good–be that pleasure sexual or a lovingly prepared dinner and amazing conversation with loved ones–I still maintain, however, that blowjobs are men’s work. But that’s a different thread altogether
Not here, it doesn’t. And shouldn’t.
But since you mention it, I think I would place the decision to have an abortion or not on the same plane as the decision to get married or not and the decision not to work outside the home or not.
In each example, if I happen to have have an opinion on someone’s choice, it’s far more likely to take the form of “that’s a good idea” or “that’s a mistake” than “that’s a virtuous decision” or “that’s immoral.”
oops..i took out the emphasis i added…oy. These new pills my doctor gave me are fun
It seems perfectly understandable to me that people are conflicted about abortion. You feel sympathy for a person who wanted to bring their pregnancy to term and instead needed an abortion. That cluster of cells with proper time and attention has the potential to be a person. So does every egg you choose not to fertilize.
If you think people are inherently evil and need firm guidance, you are going to look at an abortion and see an evil person rejecting life. If you think people are inherently good you are going to see an abortion as a necessary choice.
I think that we tend and have been encouraged to make a judgement call on abortion that we are not qualified to make. A woman and her doctor are the best judges for each individual circumstance. Why is this a political issue for people who will never be faced with the question? Because people are conflicted on whether or not a potential person is alive. The myths on that have completely swamped peoples common sense.
While I think they are stupid to claim it, I think what some people are saying is that they want to choose and they want others to be able to choose but they, themselves will not have an abortion because it is wrong. They may or may not be telling the truth, but it creates conditions whereby they can feel self-righteous.
It really is a lot of hairsplitting and rationalization for those who do not see it as a simple obvious choice.
“And those who choose abortion should likewise know just what they are doing, in a moral sense, as well as a medical sense. ”
how do they not? the only people with true, firsthand, explicit knowledge of what an abortion entails or what it feels like or what it looks like are the women who GET abortions.* they ARE meat eaters who are aware of the “pain, terror and filth” that accompanies a hamburger.
*and doctors. i guess.
I agree with you 90% of the time, but not this time. When I hear about abortion, I definitely feel a twinge. Maybe I wish I didn’t, but it’s definitely there. And I do think there are situations in which it’s wrong to get an abortion. (Of course, I don’t think there’s any situation in which it’s okay to prevent a woman from getting an abortion who’s decided on one. But still, I don’t think it’s bad to acknowledge that it’s a serious and difficult choice to make.)
I’m trying to clarify my thinking a bit, here. It seems to me we’re talking about different categories of things.
One set of moral goods is (are?) things necessary for human health & happiness.
Sexual pleasure is necessary for human health & happiness, full stop. Therefore it is a moral good.
Oatmeal is in the set of things that are not necessary for HHH, but can enable or encourage it.
Appendectomy and abortion are in the set of things that are occasionally or situationally necessary for HHH.
Birth control is in the set of things that are usually necessary for HHH.
Birth control, then, is more of a moral good than abortion. But we should view abortion like oatmeal or appendectomies: with a presumption that they are being used to advance HHH.
I have serious doubts about squeamishness about abortion correlating with squeamishness about female sexual pleasure.
Morality is totally subjective. You will never get everyone to agree on the morality of anything. However, human rights are less negotiable. Either we humans have a right to privacy and supremacy over our bodies or we don’t. I don’t care if you THINK what I do with my uterus is moral or not. You just really don’t have a say, one way or the other.
Making arguments about the MORALITY of abortion is just jumping into the anti-abortion folk’s turd strewn arena. Choice is NOT about some funky assed personal morality, it is about non-negotiable human rights.
Yeah I get irritated with the unproductive equivocating on abortion. “I hate abortion and think it is murder, but a woman has a right to choose murder if she wants.” But saying that people who are pro-choice but don’t think it is a good thing are just “trying to look complex” is just as unproductive.
What Lisa KS said. To the word.
What you’re asking is similiar to asking, “Is marriage a moral good? Are housewives making the correct moral decision?� It goes unquestioned.
Seriously, what the hell kinda BS is that? My mom quit her job as an architect to be a “lowly housewife” and got shamed for it for years. Perhaps in more conservative parts of the country nobody questions those two revered institutions but where I’ve been they’re far from automatically accepted.
…while I understand the urge to feel like a complex person that lays behind it..
I don’t exactly understand where you would get off writing something like that. Certainly one can hold the belief that fetuses have some value outside of the urge to “feel complex”. It’s so goddamned trite and dismissive at once.
It’s one thing to ask people in the middle or who have doubts to be quiet. That I actually agree with. It’s another to take their personal and spiritual life experience and reduce it to something like cheap sentiment.
Nezua, when I say “probably”, it might be more accurate to say, “From what I’ve read and been told by actual women who’ve done it.” I don’t see any reason to assume that people have medical procedures without considering the options. Again, abortion is not pleasurable, which is generally true of “sinful” things people indulge though they know better.
Nice to see someone take a hard line on this (as I do), but I think your characterization of the “I am pro-choice but I think abortion is wrong” position as anti-feminist and insulting is pretty unfair…
Because of my background committments to the philosophy of political liberalism, a claim like “I am pro-choice, but I think abortion is wrong” is positively admirable for me, because it indicates a willingness to allow different people to have different conceptions of the good. For example, my position on eating meat is “I think people ought to be able to eat meat, but I think it is morally wrong.” I recognize that my reasons for believing meat-eating to be morally wrong are not accessible to everyone. Therefore, as a political liberal (in the philosopher’s sense) I would oppose any law prohibiting meat-eating.
Likewise, any good political liberal who believes abortion is wrong for religious reasons (whether those reasons are a simple belief that “God says abortion is wrong”, or a logical deduction from the premise “personhood begins at conception”) ought to oppose laws that force these values on all citizens.
And I do think there are situations in which it’s wrong to get an abortion.
I agree. A healthy woman carrying a wanted pregnancy with a healthy fetus should pretty much never get an abortion. Even if she is of the “wrong” age, race, marital status, etc to be having children. But it’s certainly not pro-choice to try to force abortion on anyone. That’s more something a “pro-life” regime, like, say the one Germany had in the 1940s, would do.
Lisa:
I have serious doubts about squeamishness about abortion correlating with squeamishness about female sexual pleasure.
I don’t. What kind of info would we need to prove which of us is right?
We’re not saying that all people who squeam about abortion also squeam about the idea of women actively seeking sexual pleasure, just that they correlate.
Dianne:
At the risk of being made fun of…yes, plants, bacteria and fungi have something like moral agency. It’s hard to explain to westerners–it took ME a long time to get it–but every living thing, conscious and not, is in the situation it is in due to karma.
I am a Hare Krishna, first of all. That means the very first thing I was taught by a spiritual guide (Guru) was that I am not my body. My body is not the end-all and be-all of my “me-ness.” It is a temporary vessel containing my soul. I may have been short Chinese man in a past life. Or a tall black woman. Or a dog. Or a king. Or a fly. Or a rat. Only my soul has not changed. We are conditioned by the world so that we come to identify ourselves with our body, leading to all kinds of misery and ignorance and cruelty.
BUT! the consciousness–ESPECIALLY human consciousness–affects the soul’s progress. If the body is used for the pleasure of God (Krishna), the soul migrates “upward,” closer to God. The soul trapped in a body and mind used for un-godly purposes migrates away from God.
Animals are relieved of having the complete moral agency that humans have because their consciousness is not on the same level as ours. But they are living as they are as a result of their karma. The souls of animals migrate naturally upward because they live according to “dharma,” which is the natural duty of any being. A wolf is allowed to kill and eat meat because that is his dharma. A human should refrain from killing and eating meat because that is NOT her dharma.
A being following dharma goes up, a being violating it goes down. “Up” and “down” are terms relative to consciousness. A tree is less conscious than a dog. A dog less so than a human. Our future bodies are determined by thought and action patterns now, our karma carrying us where we “desire” to be. An old Hindu saying about someone who dresses immodestly is that he or she will be reborn as a tree, so that they can expose themselves completely all the time.
To cut to the chase: beings are making decisions and having conditions forced on them all the time. How they react determines where they end up in this life and the next. The fetus on the end of a scalpel may have aborted a being in her last life, just as the slaughtered cow may have been a hunter in his past life.
And the Bhagavad-Gita tells us that one who fully realizes the lack of identity with the body “sees all beings as equal.” And by that is meant their spiritual worth.
*Braces for the responses*
nezua limón xolagrafik-jonez wrote, “I don’t have these feelings to entertain some “urgeâ€? to feel “complexâ€? or appear that way! Is it really that clearcut in your mind? My motivations? No. You have no idea of my internal workings. To say as much really doesn’t help the discussion, in my mind. I have my feelings because i AM a complex creature. Humans are, you know. And I don’t base that on just this opinion! Most of my feelings and thoughts have “flipsideâ€? considerations.”
Amen to that, brother.
Regarding the murdering in abortion: Every American who’s paid taxes has murdered. Those taxes pay for soldiers and executioners to commit murder. However, there’s another type of murder: murder by omission. We all know that folks are dying of dysentary and starvation right now. So, I believe that buying a mocha is murder by omission. I assert this horrible thing because some folks believe that because they’re anti-abortion, they’re not Ladies MacBeth. Metaphysical blood stains all our hands. We all choose a more comfy and secure life over life for others. In one way, I don’t differentiate the commission of murder and the omission of murder.
Something else that complicates abortion for me is there are far too many of us. Global warming, the oil wars, and other environmental degradations are due to our swarming. More babies will mean more dying, more warming, more oil craving, more degradation.
Hi Amanda.
Nezua, when I say “probably�, it might be more accurate to say, “From what I’ve read and been told by actual women who’ve done it.�
That’s cool, I get ya. But I think the more important part of my statement there was that we (meaning those of us who are pro-choice and pro-abortion) should not rest the defense on what a woman is probably thinking or even definitely thinking. Right? The argument is stronger if it rests on a woman’s rights, human rights. Those cannot be countered by what other anti-abortion women might or definitely were thinking. Just a point of logic.
I don’t know that I agree with this post. For one, I feel that it reflects somewhat negatively on women who think long and hard before they decide whether or not to terminate their pregnancies, even if they know it’s not an ideal time or situation to bring them to term.
I guess my opinion on it is that I don’t think it’s necessarily stupid to think a fetus has some value, I just think it’s beyond ridiculous to try and compare its “needs” to those of the thinking, feeling, sentient person who’s carrying it.
Holly, do you really think there are too many of us? The world is so big. I happen to think there are too many of us in too few locales with too many machines running that consider mother nature far too little. But I am no expert on these things. Just thinking.
Scott the obscure, Jeff: I think there’s some confusion going on with respect to what “moral good” means. “Moral good” doesn’t mean you’re having fun — it’s more like saying “morally appropriate.” I think what Amanda’s saying is that we should embrace the position that an abortion, rather than being a “necessary evil” or whatever else people want to call it, can definitely be the morally appropriate choice for a woman to make. Put another way, I think she’s pointing out that this kind of “abortion as necessary evil” rhetoric that sometimes floats about in pro-choice discourse gives the putative interests of the fetus a moral value and significance that (a) doesn’t necessarily exist and (b) begins to overshadow the moral value and significance of the interests of the woman and of her existing family members.
To that end, I agree with Lisa KS on the moral value of abortion — on its own, it’s neither desirable nor undesirable from a moral standpoint.* But I have to disagree with you, Lisa, on the rest of your post. If a woman wants a pregnancy and loses the fetus, that’s one thing. If she didn’t want the pregnancy and she decides to terminate, that’s entirely another thing. A woman who wants to start a family in the future shoudn’t have to mourn the decision to terminate a pregnancy that has come up at an inappropriate time, any more than she should have to mourn her period. The only time, I would think, that your “abortion is like the miscarriage of a wanted pregnancy” position would apply is in those circumstances where the woman wanted the pregnancy but, for some reason relating either to her own health or to that of the fetus, had to terminate.
*At the same time, I think one can be 100 percent pro-choice and still want to decrease the number of abortions. Though abortion may be morally neutral, it’s still a medical procedure with concomitant costs and risks (though nowhere near the risks that anti-choice advocates claim). With that in mind, it’s perfectly consistent with a pro-woman position to want to find ways to decrease a woman’s need to rely on abortion as a means of fertility control.
I’m really glad that you’ve taken up this position, because it needs to be argued more often. It’s not exactly the same as mine; a little between this and Dr. Science - abortion itself is neutral, but has potential to, in our society, and in general, serve mostly good purposes.
Most pro choice folks seem to be afraid to stake out that territory for fear of being seen as whatever it is the antichoice folks see, but then, they see that anyway, no matter what you say, so why hedge?
Next you’re going to be claiming that women’s sexual pleasure is a moral good. Egads, where will it end? - MA Jeff
Actually, it’s in the Torah. The euphemism used is usually translated as “ointment” (insert tasteless joke here): a man must provide his wife with sexual pleasure. Also a man must cleave unto his wife.
Interestingly, that same “Old Testament” series of books which the religious right always claims as the source for their more obnoxious ideas (I guess so they can blame the Jews if things go wrong for them?) also pointedly does not consider a fetus to be a person.
Interestingly, even if a fetus were considered a person, it still doesn’t imply abortion is murder or even should be illegal. If someone stuck a tube in you and was feeding off of your bodily fluids and sapping your energy, shouldn’t you have a right to disconnect the tube? Even if it means that person dies? It may or may not be moral to do that, but I fail to see how you legally would not have that right … so why should it be different if the person were living inside of you as well.
I really feel like the “pro-choice but anti-abortion” thing encourages unnecessary guilt in women who have had abortions. Specifically, I think it makes one wonder if you really deserve the abortion. If you weren’t raped, then maybe you don’t deserve it. If you didn’t use HBC then maybe you don’t deserve it, if you didn’t seek out EC then maybe you don’t deserve it, if you’re just a big old slut who got pregnant having fun sex then maybe you don’t deserve it. Women shouldn’t have to feel guilty about having an abortion or about getting pregnant by accident in the first place.
I would love to see a world were, when a pro-choice political candidate speaks on abortion, he or she doesn’t feel the need to add all sorts of “safe, legal, and rare” caveats. Abortion should be safe, legal, and available whenever a woman wants it for whatever reason.
And I feel perfectly comfortable with this because I know women to be rational grown ups who aren’t going to wait around until they are 8 months pregnant and then say “you know what would be fun? An abortion!”
Oh also, I want people to stop acting like every abortion is some horrible, invasive surgical procedures. Objectively, getting mife/miso is only slightly more cumbersome than getting HBC. Except for the politics that shut down the clinics providing it, and the heaping pile of guilt that it usually comes with.
However, there’s another type of murder: murder by omission.
Opposing legal abortion and failing to provide aid that would allow poorer countries to provide safe abortions to those women who want them is an example of murder by omission.
I am starting to think that Darryl X. is Eric Schaeffer. That tendency to use Bhagavad-Gita as a tool for wanton douchebaggery is a dead giveaway.
Thanks, Amanda. I really needed to read this today. I do escort service for Planned Parenthood every thursday, and today I was told that my hands were stained with blood and that I protect people who kill children. I’m so tired of this rubbish.
I think abortion is wrong but I’m pro-choice. This isn’t about the urge to ‘feel like a complex person,’ because this position is not complex: I personally believe that many things – and these things are done by both women and men – are wrong, but that morality can’t be legislated. Abortion is unique to women, but most of the things I’m against are not – so no, I don’t think women are any less capable of moral agency than men.
As to abortion being a moral good, I disagree. I think some women choose abortion as the lesser of two evils, certainly; but I don’t think any woman chooses abortion because she sees the act in and of itself as a desirable thing. She may see ‘not being pregnant’ as a good, but she likely won’t treat abortion as preferable to not having become pregnant in the first place. It isn’t, as you say, some guilty pleasure in which women indulge.
Here is why I think abortion is wrong:
–The acceptance of abortion is neither good nor evil, in my opinion; but the encouragement of it – as in when a woman discovers a “defectâ€? in an otherwise wanted fetus – creates a consumerist attitude towards life. People (or potential people) aren’t valuable in and of themselves, but merely for what they can provide to the culture in which they’re born. (The mirror of this attitude can be found in the abysmal state of senior and palliative care in some places.)
–It’s rare, but abortions – here, defined as the act of killing an otherwise viable fetus - can be performed until late in a pregnancy. The line between abortion and murder appears to be only a few inches of skin thick: before birth, and after. Peter Singer, my favorite whipping boy, raises this against objections to his positing infanticide as morally permissible.
–Being poor not only limits access to abortion, but also to its best alternatives. People in poverty may not see abortion as a choice, but as a necessary act to preserve themselves and their families. Our society’s allowing poverty to reach a level where it can coerce in that way is not pro-choice; it’s anti-choice.
Here is what I think true pro-lifers should “do about� abortion:
–Stop talking about abortion. Abortion in and of itself is not the problem.
–Advocate good sex education.
–Make contraceptives easily available to anyone who wants them.
–Advocate universal healthcare so that a disabled child may not be denied coverage because of a “pre-existing condition.â€?
–Help people meet their basic needs for food and shelter.
I mostly agree, but I’d like to dissent from some of your terminology, at least.
In ethics, to say that something is a ‘moral good’ is to say that it should be pursued, that (other things being equal) the more of it the better. I think that describing abortion as a moral good is therefore too strong: wouldn’t it be preferable if (a) all pregnancies were welcomed (i.e. those who would find one unwelcome were able to avoid one via good contraception) and (b) there was a lower incidence of defects leading to abortions by women who would have carried the foetus to term had the defects been absent? Saying pleasure is a moral good is fine - the more of it the better (other things being equal). Abortion doesn’t seem to be in the same bracket.
My quibble may be merely terminological, though, if all you mean is that sometimes having an abortion is the right thing to do, morally - not wrong but permissible, or the lesser of two evils, but right.
One more bit of terminology from ethics, for those discussing ‘moral agency’. You don’t have to be a moral agent to be worthy of moral concern. Many animals, including some human beings are not moral agents, but they may nevertheless be moral ‘patients’, i.e. their welfare is something that moral thinking should take into account.
nezua limón xolagrafik-jonez wrote (If I knew how to do the cool blocking that some of you do when you quote, I would.): “Holly, do you really think there are too many of us? The world is so big. I happen to think there are too many of us in too few locales with too many machines running that consider mother nature far too little. But I am no expert on these things.”
I love when people admit their failings, so I’ll return the kindness: I’m no expert either, but experts have argued for years that we’ve already exceeded the carrying capacity of the Earth. It frustrates me when carrying capacity, the emptying of the oceans, widespread extinctions, and so on aren’t part of every abortion discussion. You can squeeze out 14 babies and say, “That’s natural.” or “That’s God’s intent,” but nature is about to bake us slowly, while it withholds food and water and unlimited fish and loaves seem unlikely to fall from Heaven.
As Dianne noted, a lot of babies born to poor mothers are damned to prematurely die by dysentary, starvation, and of thirst.
Well, here’s the thing. I think you’re saying that the necessity of the action makes it a good action.
That is something I can’t agree with. It might make it the *right* action, make no mistake, but it doesn’t make it a *good* one.
If someone tries to kill me, and lethal force is the only way for me to stay alive, then using lethal force in my own defense is an acceptable choice, and probably the right one, but not a good one. (Herm. I should make that “steal a loaf of bread from a wealthy baker to feed my starving child” to avoid the whole “killing” debate, but I don’t have time to rewrite.)
I agree with you that this is a much weaker argument, and it puts the pro-choice side on weaker footing… but i also think it’s unavoidable.
More later, if I get to it.
I happen to think there are too many of us in too few locales with too many machines running that consider mother nature far too little.
Actually, people who live in densly populated areas have far less negative impact on nature than those who live in less densly populated areas. For example, if NYC–the classic example, at least in the US, of too many people in too little space–were a separate state, it would be 51st in per capita energy consumption. When people live close together they can share resources (public transportation, heating, washers, buildings, etc) in ways that people who live further away from each other can’t. And one can more easily appreciate nature in Central Park than one can while driving one’s SUV through the exurbs. (/off topic rant).
I stand by Amanda in her pro-choice stance. I think all women should have the choice of whether to have a child. I just happen to believe that the woman makes the “choice” the moment she has consensual sex.
I think Amanda’s argument that pleasure is a moral good is more than a little off the mark. After all, Jeffery Dahmer took pleasure in slaughtering 17 people and then even eating parts of some of them. Using her argument, his actions were a moral good.
I think most people, to include Amanda, are pro-life. The argument is simply where the person believes the life begins. This is certainly a valid debate. Just to cover all of the “life” issues, I am pro-choice, anti-abortion, and pro-death penalty.
Ms. Marcotte:
The comments here are evidence this post has created division.
If you were to reframe the words “abortion rights” as “reproductive rights,” then you could have a more unifying conversation.
Would you support a federal law that dictated a “baby license” for all Americans of reproductive age? Say, If you don’t qualify for a baby license, then you can’t have a baby. Enforcement is carried out by the FBI and the Marshal Service.
I’m guessing you’re against, because you have an emotional reaction that your body is yours, and you have some form of birthright to reproduce. That emotional reaction is two-poled. For many women, abortion is a trauma, though they suffer it in anticipation of a greater benefit.
To acknowledge, in one context, that the Fed has no reasonable right to restrict the reproductive birthright based on cohort definition, and, in another context, to acknowledge the emotional suffering of many women who have elected to claim the benefits of that first acknowledgement is not a contradiction, in argumentative terms.
Some speaker whose alignment you reject may have engaged in intellectual dishonesty by foisting the pro-choice/anti-abortion conjunction. But the dishonesty of that speaker does not indict the particular argument.
Nor do arguments for absolute morality of reproductive rights issues unify an American audience toward actionable legislation.
Let’s say that, regardless of anecdotal appeal, many women feel real regret about their choices, but that regret, even in the aggregate, is not a license for the fed to start criminalizing the decision process that results in a baby.
In other words, keep choice, but acknowledge those women who in fact possess the moral depth you wish acknowledged.
Rush:
I think Amanda’s argument that pleasure is a moral good is more than a little off the mark. After all, Jeffery Dahmer took pleasure in slaughtering 17 people and then even eating parts of some of them. Using her argument, his actions were a moral good.
No, as iain said, pleasure is only a moral good *all things being equal*. Pleasure is a moral good in itself, but like other goods it can be outweighed by bad stuff it comes bundled with by particular people.
Someone almost touched on this above and I thought it was an interesting change of perspective.
If the ability of a woman, when she finds herself to be pregnant, to carefully and thoughtfully evaluate of what is best for her and her family, taking into account her personal values, ability to support a child, etc. to choose to have an abortion is to be considered a moral good — which I believe is the case. What is to be said of the other side of the coin? If a woman finds herself to be pregnant and considers none of the ramifications of carrying the fetus to term. If she brings a child into the world without the interest or ability to provide a minimum quality of like to him or her, wouldn’t most folks consider this to be a moral wrong? — And wouldn’t abortion be a moral way to prevent something demonstrably more immoral (the imposition of a untennable life on the child to be) than the procedure itself?
Darryl X. - regardless of the differences in our beliefs, I think a bigger problem involves the meaning/understanding of “moral agency”. Wikipedia, for a lazy example, says it’is “a person’s capacity for making moral judgments and taking actions that comport with morality.”
Whatever one believes about the transmigration of souls(or their very existance), it seems entirely reasonable to assume most animals (and indeed, all fetuses) simply do not have the capacity to make moral judgements, at least in anything like the sense we usually use the term. Indeed, you seem to inherently acknowledge as much in your remarks on how “[t]he souls of animals migrate naturally upward because they live according to “dharma,â€? which is the natural duty of any being.” However, as Dianne references, some animals may have at least a degree of moral agency, due to such a capacity.
The argument is simply where the person believes the life begins. This is certainly a valid debate.
No it isn’t. Life began in the Precambrian era and all life has come from other life since then. Spontaneous generation just doesn’t occur under current conditions on earth. (Yes, I know that’s not what you meant, but I couldn’t resist.)
Nolo said: “But I have to disagree with you, Lisa, on the rest of your post. If a woman wants a pregnancy and loses the fetus, that’s one thing. If she didn’t want the pregnancy and she decides to terminate, that’s entirely another thing. A woman who wants to start a family in the future shoudn’t have to mourn the decision to terminate a pregnancy that has come up at an inappropriate time, any more than she should have to mourn her period. The only time, I would think, that your “abortion is like the miscarriage of a wanted pregnancyâ€? position would apply is in those circumstances where the woman wanted the pregnancy but, for some reason relating either to her own health or to that of the fetus, had to terminate.”
I think you misunderstood what I was saying; what I was saying was not that any woman should *have* to mourn her abortion. (gad, what a nasty idea, though certainly it’s one that our society in general has bought into wholesale.) I was saying that some women are sad about their abortions–not *mourning* them, which implies that they’d do it differently if they had to do it all over again, and that usually isn’t the case–they’re just sad about whatever circumstances let them to having it. It is quite possible to have a wanted pregnancy and to terminate it for reasons other than your health or the embryo/fetus’s health, and for that to be the best and most moral choice, and yet for it to still make a woman sad, as the pregnancy was initially wanted and the potential resulting child much looked forward to. My major point was, there’s nothing wrong with that, like there’s nothing wrong with being sad about your no-fault divorce that you initiated, even if it was the best and most moral choice.
Off Topic: Can women be Hare Krishna gurus? It seems like they’re all men.
Dan:
I know you’re right, whcih is why I admitted a post or two later that “moral agency” is probably too strong a term for what I meant. “Perceptive sentience” might be a better way to put it.
I was thinking in terms of repercussions from the past, not choices for the future.
In other words, I goofed.
This is an awesome conversation, by the way.
In most European countries, abortion is morality neutral. It is a medical procedure as far as the state is concerned. Whether some woman agonizes over it or not is her business. I think I like that model.
Ugh - I couldn’t get through all these comments so forgive me if I’m repeating.
I am pro choice and neither for nor against abortion itself. The procedure. Just like I’m pro-health care but neither for nor against appendectomies. Uh, if you need one, get one. That’s all.
So to call abortion a “moral evil” is wrong for reasons that don’t need to be reiterated here. But to call it a “moral good” strikes me as wrong too, albeit to a lesser degree. Things that are moral goods should be encouraged - giving to the poor, recycling, exercising integrity - everybody should do these morally good things. Having an abortion procedure should not be encouraged or discouraged.
If you need one, have one.
Anna:
Yes. Urmila dasi is a guru.
And some of our scriptures were written women. Google “The Teachings of Queen Kunti” for an example.
And, of course, God is one-half female. Krishna is God’s “enjoyer” principle, Radha is God’s “enjoyed” principle.
By the way, we are taught that all souls are female in relation to Krishna.
If being pro-life was all about conciousness-raising I might be pro-life but because its mostly about enacting laws to interfere with women’s right to privacy, their medical decisions and their safety I am adamantly pro-choice.
I agree that abortion can have positive effects on the lives of women and their children but the act itself is still killing. We can all get into the argument about the relative value of blastocysts and fetuses yet again (clump of cells? house cat? toeheaded toddler?) but that does not really change the nature of the act. As pointed out earlier killing can sometimes be necessary but it is not good in and of itself.
wow, you people would’ve made good nazi’s. you don’t have the right to destroy human life. you made the descison to have a baby when you laid down.
take a look, and then let me know if you’re still for abortion
http://www.priestsforlife.org/images/index.htm
Yep, still for abortion. Thanks, though.
I’m pro-choice, and I think abortion is often a symptom of social failure. Not necessarily an immoral choice, but wrong in the sense that in an ideal world, it wouldn’t happen.
We cannot afford to cede the moral ground to the anti-woman side in this debate. So as much I want to say, I’m pro-choice and wouldn’t have an abortion because I think it’s wrong to kill a living thing, I don’t take that position because it’s unproductive. Not untrue, unproductive.
Further, one of my closest friends is a provider. She’s been stalked, threatened and followed. She has chose not to have children of her own for many reasons, but one of them is that she would feel compelled to end her involvement in abortion services if she had responsibility for a child. I coudn’t disagree more with your suggestion that she’s being insulted when I say I believe that abortion is killing; in fact, that is what she believes as well.
What separates us from the pro-forced-birth position is that we’re both clear in our minds and hearts, philosophically and ethically, that some decisions about killing can be a part of living a full life as a moral agent. Her patients have to make the choice for themselves.
Darryl, so to be female is to be enjoyed, rather than to enjoy? A passive object?
Same shit in different buckets, if you ask me.
Actually jasper, we would have made particularly bad nazis, they believed that the State had an absolute right over the bodies of their citizens. We believe that it is the individual who has to make their own choices and live with the consequences. The State’s power is reserved for when the decisions of one can make a distinct impact on another- rape, murder, tearing down a person’s neighbourhood so that the Walmart has a bigger parking lot and so on.
jasper,
Yeah, I’m still for abortion. Do you have an argument of some kind? That might be a little more impressive.
I can see how people can support abortion rights and never personally want an abortion. I do agree that saying “I support abortion, even if it’s a necessary evil” is stupid and pointless. Frankly, that approach will not appeal to those who are against it. Saying “It’s bad but it should be legal” isn’t a real compromise, and those who are anti-choice are smart enough to see that (not that they’re interested in compromise or anything like that).
I’ve been doing a lot of reading on Right Wing Authoritarians lately, being in a house with one. It’s rather interesting in how they can accept such contradictory viewpoints together at once. And how little thinking they actually do. A psychology professor in Canada did an experiment where two groups participated in global simulations. One group scored high on an Authoriatian test, one group scored low. The low scoring group survived 40 years, with only 400 million lost unnecessarially (famine) but all ecological and war-related deaths were avoided. The high scoring group with through two nuclear holocausts, effectively killing the whole planet twice over (but the people who ran the simulation allowed them to take back their nuclear actions) in total 8.7 billion people died.
You can read more of the professor’s work if you’d like, it can be found here: http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/
No Hawise,
Hitler believed that unwanted, impefect people do not have the right to live.
America will not reject abortion until it see’s abortion.
go look at the images and tell me your still for abortion. I already know that Erin is a godless creature….
http://www.priestsforlife.org/images/index.htm
MissPrism:
It’s an imperfect translation of sanskrit terms:
“Prakriti” and “Purusha.”
Krishna is God’s Prakriti energy. But one could put any term there. “Seer.” “Hearer.” “Feeler.”
Radha is Purusha. “The seen.” “The heard.” “The felt.”
There is a sect of Vaishnavs called sahajiya–heretics, really–who describe it in sexual terms. Krishna is the one who penetrates, Radha is the one who is penetrated.
But together they are a complete whole. One no more nor any less than the other.
“Good nazi’s” what? Jasper? For love of the FSM, please read (and try desperately to comprehend) a grammar book before you try to insult anyone. It’s excruciatingly painful reading your posts, and while my Nutjob-to-English translation system works just fine, it starts to fizzle a bit whenever you appear.
Thanks, darlin’.
Yep, I’m still for abortion too.
i’m pro-life and pro-porn - even abortion-porn. thanx, jasper.
you don’t have the right to destroy human life. you made the descison to have a baby when you laid down. - jasper
And if you didn’t lay down?
Seriously, though …
You do agree then, that in the case of rape abortion would be ok (”made the decision” is key to you?). What about when a woman’s life or health is in danger?
Anyway, what do you mean “you don’t have the right to destroy human life”? Would every single soldier make a good Nazi? After all, they have a right to destroy human life (in combat)? Do you not support the troops?
A person has every right to destroy a human life under certain circumstances. Whether or not such a thing is “good” depends on how you define “good”. And we may differ as to the circumstances, but to say such a right never exists is bizarre.
And of course, that assumes. a fetus counts as a human life, which, Biblically, it does not. Of course, from a Biblically-based point of view, abortion is often considered immoral, but because you are (1) destroying a potential for life and (2), pace StotheL, the converse of “if you need [an operation], have one, is considered as much a part of “Old Testament” (as to the Christian Bible, doesn’t “judge not lest ye be judged” somehow apply here?) Biblical morality (the sanctity of the body) as that statement itself: if you don’t need to have someone cut into your body, you ought not to have it done, e.g., on a whim.
So is the state gonna ban or restrict plastic surgery based on the morality of it (and it kills human cells)? If not, then on what basis can a secular state restrict abortion other than to regulate it to make sure it’s being done safely, etc.?
“I’m pro-choice, and I think abortion is often a symptom of social failure. Not necessarily an immoral choice, but wrong in the sense that in an ideal world, it wouldn’t happen.”
This is the pro-choice stance that I disagree with and think is damaging to the pro-choice movement. In an ideal world, abortion would still be a very necessary option and it would still happen–as a matter of fact, it would be impossible to have a utopia without the option of and right to abortion.
Hey lucizoe,
look, don’t lecture me about you’re stupid gammar and spelling remarks. go look at the pictures and tell me your still for abortion.
Lisa:
Wouldn’t a utopia have people being in complete control of GETTING pregnant? Full-proof birth control?
“you made the decision to have a baby when you laid down” No, when I laid down I was getting laid.
Interesting how value neutral jasper is about the sperm injector.
Lisa,
what is that “social failure”, please explain.
thanks
*facepalm*
Is anyone else really hungry now? ‘Cause I am.
*wanders off looking for some fried chicken*
“No, when I laid down I was getting laid”
then be prepared to have a baby. Don’t blame it on the baby by killing it because you were irresponsible and un prepared…
Abortion will never be as ‘moral’ as agreeing to kill already born children because GWB and Dick told you there were WMD’s in Iraq!
Or should we call such actions by the US military ‘post-birth abortions’?
It’s my duty as a catholic to tell you the truth about the horrors of abortion, for the baby and the mother. Please, this is a very evil act and woman deserve better
http://www.silentnomoreawareness.org/
Darryl: what you just said reiterates exactly what I was complaining about. Maleness is doing, femaleness is being done to, oh but it’s not sexist because they are complementary and neeeeeed each other…
Where have we heard that before?
“i’m pro-life and pro-porn - even abortion-porn. thanx, jasper.”
that was a buddy typing for me and being an ass.
i’m pro-choice and pro-porn.
No, when a woman lays down she’s agreeing to a little rumpy pumpy, not a baby… particularly if birth control is used.
When I call and order pizza and specifically say “I do not want any sausage on my pizza”, there’s of course a chance that I’m going to get sausage on my pizza anyway. That doesn’t mean I’m obliged to accept it when the delivery guy shows up with it.
Yep, Jasper, still for. And kind of hungry, too.
Perhaps for some pie.
Holly, do you really think there are too many of us?
I can’t speak for Holly, but I’d give that an emphatic yes: If there aren’t too many human beings, there will be.
While one can respect nature, it is not omnipotent and it’s not infinite. It’s showing many signs of stress cracks from our lifestyle already; from vanishing species and habitats, to global warming and ocean acidification. Much of our quality of life now comes from energy sources that are finite, non-renewable, and capable of completely altering the biosphere.
While there is much we can do both as a society, and as individuals to reduce our footprint on the environment, simple reduction of numbers will allow for more room per person. One man peeing into a river makes little difference; a city of people doing the same will turn it into an open sewer.
And finally, size is also deceptive. As long as the population continues to double, we use up the remaining space a LOT quicker than expected. David Suzuki gave the example of a bacteria that doubles every minute. At 56 minutes the test-tube they live in is only 1/16 full. 56 minutes times a 16th of a tube… well, it might seem like the bacteria have almost another 15 hours before they take over the entire tube! But because the population doubles every minute, in another 4 minutes they’re taking over the entire tube, and there’s nothing left for them to live on, or live in.
Ultimately, there’s no choice in this matter. We either make the choice ourselves to have less children, and retool our economies to thrive without population growth, or we have the choice made for us in the form of global pandemics, wars for increasingly scarce resources, or famine and collapse from the loss of the environment that sustains us.
Jasper:
Why is having a baby supposed to be punishment for women? If people should be punished for sex, then should all mens cocks fall off when they engage in “Teh Immoral Act”?
Don’t forget to pick up your dick on the way out.
‘Bout F’n Time:
americans killed by Iraq war: 3,100
americans killed by abortion: 47,000,000
Persons killed by Iraq war: 56880 to 62613
Persons killed by abortion: 0
jasper, why should a picture of an abortion make me change my mind? i deal with bloody crap coming out of my vagina every single month. just because looking at blood makes you squeamish, doesn’t mean it affects other people.
Lisa,
It’s not a punishment, just be responsible, don’t blame you’re baby by killing it.
see the evil:
http://www.priestsforlife.org/images/index.htm
having an abortion when you can support a child *is* being responsible.
heh. obviously i mean “can’t”.
MissPrism:
I think you’re kind of missing the point by projecting human definitions. The point is that God is both the doer and the done, the plug and the socket, the wall and the ball bouncing off of it, the Sun and the shadow, the sperm and the egg, the lingam and the yoni.
The point is this: God is no more “male” than “female.” Nor is God any less.
No one involved in militant bodily identification, be that person sexist or feminist, will understand this.
anna is my hero.
Dennis: Off topic again, but…”Persons killed by Iraq war: 56880 to 62613″. This figure is the number of people verified as having been killed by two media outlets, ie a very conservative, passive collection system. It is almost certainly at least an order of magnitude too low, based on information about the expected efficacy of passive data collection and the two Roberts et al papers. I can’t quibble with your second figure, though.
rachel,
it’s not bloody crap (somtimes it a baby instead), a woman’s body is special and beautiful. it shouldn’t be degraded by satan (abortion).
Thanks
Brooklynite:
if I happen to have have an opinion on someone’s choice [regarding abortion or lifestyle], it’s far more likely to take the form of “that’s a good idea� or “that’s a mistake� than “that’s a virtuous decision� or “that’s immoral.�
That turns on an interesting point of terminology.
In ordinary language, we don’t normally assign positive value to things that are morally right - they’re just expected. So, you are “immoral” for telling a lie, but we don’t usually bother to say you are “moral” for telling the truth - we just expect you to do it. Philosophers use the term “moral good”, however, in two ways: to denote things that are positively required by morality, or merely to denote things that are morally justifiable.
Using the stronger sense, some philosophers think there is a moral right and wrong to most situations, and you are required to do what is right - thus, making a sub-optimal choice, even about things we consider “your own business”, is immoral. From this perspective, it is a moral good to have an abortion in circumstances where it is moral to do so and the best choice for the woman in that particular case. She would be wronging herself not to have an abortion in that case. (And in that case, if her decision is a “mistake”, it’s probably also not morally good.) Although “virtue” has a different meaning for moral philosophers, it does tend to imply that there is one right way of acting, and in that sense abortion is virtuous only if it is a moral good for that woman in that situation.
In the weaker sense, abortion is morally good simply because it is in the range of things that are morally permissible, even if there is more than one thing in that range. (In this sense, many things that are morally good are not morally required.) From this perspective, a woman for whom abortion would be justified could probably also choose not to have an abortion; either decision would be morally justifiable, or morally good in the weak sense. Here, we would probably not say either decision was “right” or “mistaken”, or “good” or “virtuous” - they are merely among the things that are justified at bottom, among which she can make a free choice.
I don’t think Amanda was endorsing a strict interpretation of “moral good” in all uses, but I do think she was suggesting that in many cases the decision to abort is more than just “OK” - it’s the objectively right thing for many women to do in their given circumstances, and thus morally good, not morally neutral. It’s morally good because it solves an important problem in their lives, and brings considerable benefits. It’s not just a tossup between that and not having the abortion. (This, in fact, is a necessary logical point: if it’s not a moral good to have an abortion, it’s not a moral harm to prevent someone having one - though that could still be wrong, for instance as a violation of autonomy.)
Defenders of abortion rights, I think Amanda is saying, have to move beyond just playing the defensive game, making the negative argument that abortion cannot be banned because women have rights of non-interference (though that is true). We should also make the positive argument that their abortion is an important positive good in the lives of most women having them. (It’s a positive good even if the circumstance in which you have it was not desired. Nobody wants to have an abortion for its own sake, but they want it for the benefits it brings, and in that sense it is a very good thing. It’s a good like having a needed appendectomy is good, or like having needed heart surgery is good. Nobody wants them, but they are very good things to have when you need them.) This is true, and therefore worth saying, but it also shifts the balance of the debate, and that is useful as well.
I think she’s right in this.
Jasper, look at these picture and tell me if you’re still pro-appendectomy.
http://www.med.uiuc.edu/m34/clerkships/surgery/OSCEPathSlides.htm
well-said, KTK.
I do not think that abortion is a moral question. I do not think that a potential is equivalent to a reality. No more is the potential for a seed to sprout equivalent to a healthy plant than the potential for a blastocyst to thrive equivalent to a person.
If you are going to take the position, which some do, that women have a moral obligation to produce babies, the only person you have a moral right to impose on is yourself. Morality does not provide for the imposition of your moral code on others. In fact, that imposition would be immoral.
Lisa, your perfect world doesn’t include all women having access to contraception that has no failure rate?
Mine sure does. I think it’s a significant social failure that a society providing straight women with 17 kinds of ever-better cling wrap to keep their leftovers fresh from fridge to microwave hasn’t provided y’all with better technology to prevent unwanted conceptions; that this is not a failure of science but a symptom arising from values that despise women, and you know what I blame for that mess.
And with that, I’m bailing out of this troll infestation along with whoever that was above: Jasper, scary looking stuff (clots fibroids and lots of blood) comes out of my hooter about every 40 days. The ick factor convinces no one.
Won’t somebody please think of the blastocysts! Somebody? Anybody?
Oh, poor lil’ jesus dude. It must be really tough being a dying breed. Last dying gasp of the patriarchy and all that. It’s sort of charming that he thinks he’ll change anyone’s mind. Sad, but charming.
*apologies, everyone else, for my part in the feeding. Ceasing now*
i really think that for those of us who have to go through childbirth, the bloody fetus pro-life pictures are just gratuitous and ultimately ineffective.
for the other gender who sits around armchair-quarterbacking about abortion all time- it must be nice to influence public policy on something you have a limited knowledge of.
I see God is both the brick wall and the head banging against it, both the point and the missing of it by miles.
Hysterical Woman,
I didn’t see any human beings in those pictures.
Thanks
It’s my duty as a catholic to tell you the truth about the horrors of abortion, for the baby and the mother.
And we have a responsibility to take you seriously? Nope, don’t think so. And your belief in superstitions means I’m that much less likely to take you seriously.
I already know that Erin is a godless creature….
You say it as though being godless is is a bad thing. Your belief in fairly tales doesn’t make you morally superior. Got that?
Bluefish A,
I think you are absolutely right. The ick factor is for the men and children, they are squeamish and have trouble accepting icky things as perfectly normal results of biological processes.
“having an abortion when you can support a child *is* being responsible”
give it up for adoption
There are two kinds of utopias, so far as I can tell — perfect-people utopias, and perfect-system utopias.
In a perfect-people utopia, there would be no abortions, because everybody would always use infallible birth control and nobody would ever face a situation in which they had reason to abort a pregnancy that had originally planned.
In a perfect-system utopia, there would still be abortions, because birth control would still fail and circumstances would still change.
I find perfect-system utopias much more interesting than perfect-people utopias.
MAJeff,
“I already know that Erin is a godless creature”
I shouldn’t have said that, your correct.
Left_Wing_Fox, I second your “emphatic yes.”
Jasper, if those 47,000,000 fetuses had developed into people and been born, and they then lay and procreated and their progeny did the same, eco-collapse would come that much sooner. Do you understand that at our current rates of consumption and growth, the oceans will be nearly emptied in 50 years? Australia’s Great Barrier Reef will be bare bone in a generation. And Australia already has towns that are closing down: due to the drought predicted by global warming scientists. If global currents shut down, that will be very, very bad.
This might seem off-topic, but it’s about wanton, profligate procreation and how we’re killing ourselves, ecosystems, and other species because it feels good to make mini-me’s.
Jasper, truly, if you’re so concerned about kids, do you know how many already suffer in America? They are so accessible to you. Please go and serve them. They are living and breathing and suffering.
Jasper, if you’re a pro-life Catholic, why don’t you minister to your fellow Catholics? Right now THEY have a higher rate of abortion than the general population.
Until Catholics have an abortion rate of 0 (’you shouldn’t even have an abortion to save your own life’ - that’s what I’ve read in Catholic pamplets), you folks aren’t being the “Light of the World” Jesus is calling you to be, you know, the whole “lead by example” thing, instead you’re being hypocrits trying to force on us, what you can’t even do yourself (despite your faith).
PS - If I show you enough “icky” pictures of women who’ve died in childbirth will you become pro-choice?
“Jasper, if those 47,000,000 fetuses had developed into people and been born, and they then lay and procreated and their progeny did the same, eco-collapse would come that much sooner.”
Ok, lets start killing people to save the eco-system.
A fertilized egg has the potential to become a human being. (If it was a human egg and sperm. If chicken egg and sperm, not so much.)
But potential is all it has. The process of turning fertilized egg into human being requires immense effort from a woman for nine months: an effort that uses the whole of her body and can temporarily or permanently damage her health.
A society that requires this effort from a woman and does not permit her to refuse it is a society that has re-instituted slavery, albeit of a limited and time-limited type.
Slavery is a moral wrong. Opposing slavery is a moral good. Provision of safe legal abortion to all women to be used at their choice is therefore a moral good.
“Ok, lets start killing people to save the eco-system.”
Oh, I knew we’d find some common ground! *hugs jasper to massive bosom*
But you still need to work on your contractions.
(All right, NOW I’m done. I’m late for work. I love Pandagon!)
JASPER:
For the love of God, please learn the difference between the plural of a noun and its possessive form. You might also want to brush up on proper verb conjugation, among other things.
If you’re - that is, you + are - serious about preventing abortion, try formulating an argument rather against it than bombarding this thread with poorly written one-sentence posts.
As to the porn you’ve provided, that won’t change anyone who believes abortion is morally neutral. A lot of things, from appendectomies to septic tanks, are “gross.� That doesn’t make them wrong.
Thank you for making ‘our side’ look foolish, and also for your use of a disgusting euphemism – i.e., “laying down� – to describe sex.
if you divide us states into “more restrictive” and “less restrictive” catregories when it comes to abortion (obviously they are all restrictive, but if you think in terms of degrees…), you’ll find:
compared to states that are “less restrictive”, “more restrictive” states have:
-higher infant mortality rates
-higher child malnutrition rates
-higher geriatric malnutrition rates
-a love of executing people
pro-life states are also pro-death states. that’s just how they roll.
“Jasper, if you’re a pro-life Catholic, why don’t you minister to your fellow Catholics? Right now THEY have a higher rate of abortion than the general population.”
Yes, I do.
“Until Catholics have an abortion rate of 0 (’you shouldn’t even have an abortion to save your own life’ - that’s what I’ve read in Catholic pamplets)’
not true.
“you folks aren’t being the “Light of the Worldâ€? Jesus is calling you to be, you know, the whole “lead by exampleâ€? thing, instead you’re being hypocrits trying to force on us, what you can’t even do yourself ”
yes, you have a point
“PS - If I show you enough “ickyâ€? pictures of women who’ve died in childbirth will you become pro-choice?”
this is a very, very small percentage. There are exception when a womans life is at stake.
Amanda is my hero. She is the high priest of the blood sacrifice at the altar of pleasure.
America will not reject inappropriate apostrophes until it see’s inappropriate apostrophes.
Just a couple of thoughts.
On a level of crass strategy, how does this play out? Reproductive freedom is by no means secure in this country. Which would be bigger risk to it — (a) the message that some supporters of reproductive freedom have personal moral qualms about abortion, the arguable risks of which are discussed by Amanda, or (b) the message that you should just support reproductive freedom and shut the fuck up, and that if you have moral qualms, you are wrong and should keep it to yourself? I don’t think you should underestimate the tendency of the second message to deter people from standing up for reproductive freedom. Ideological purity is swell, but it can get lonely.
Folks are human, and react like humans. If they are told their opinions are shameful and harmful, well, they may not act with spite, but they may not feel like turning out or marching or donating, either.
When I was in college I joined a pro-choice group. Early on ideological and linguistic purity became an issue. You couldn’t call the other side pro-life or even anti-abortion, you HAD to call them anti-choicers, and if you didn’t, you were hurting The Movement. I wasn’t the only one who stopped showing up.
Here’s the other thing. Amanda’s argument assumes — correctly, I think — that the way we treat language and ideas has an impact beyond the immediate. For instance, Amanda believes that qualifying support with reproductive rights with a personal opposition to abortion undermines reproductive rights. But I think that the it’s-all-or-nothing approach also has its risks in terms of meme promotion. It promotes the notion — usually seen on the other side of the aisle — that if one finds something objectionable or distasteful or immoral, it is therefore natural and correct to make it illegal. That’s a notion we see about speech, about sexual conduct, and about any number of other things. Do we want to promote the notion that our subjective moral position on a thing and our right or obligation to prohibit it are linked?
The Devil’s Advocate,
“If you’re - that is, you + are - serious about preventing abortion, try formulating an argument rather against it than bombarding this thread with poorly written one-sentence posts”
yes, your correct, I’m not a very good writer.
“As to the porn you’ve provided”
this is not porn, this is evil
“that won’t change anyone who believes abortion is morally neutral.”
yes, it will and it does
Jasper:
I hope you never have cancer; you’d be unable to accept surgical, radiological, or chemotheraputic cures, all of which would destroy human life.
Oh, wait, you mean “you can’t destroy *special* human life.”
And I agree, you can’t destroy people without justification. But personhood requires a certain level of development. You can’t squeeze personhood into a single cell.
Once that level of development has occurred, yes, you need more justification. That’s where the wisdom of RvW really shines; by outlining that, yes, abortion is a right early on, and is a right when necessary to protect health later, it balances the idea of developing personhood to objective reality, in large part.
i’d never give up my child for adoption.
you want to talk about immoral behavior, let’s talk about adoption. nothing pisses me off as much as rich, white people who think they have an absolute right to another woman’s child due to their own infertility. you want to convince me that adoption is moral, show me all the people who claim to want a child and end up adopting a mixed race 8 year old. and no, your one or two anecdotes of your brother’s girlfriend’s aunt do not count.
I get sick of people insisting that abortion is an “unfortunate necessity� and soforth.
It *is* unfortunate. A pregnancy is a viable possibility, a whole set of futures showing up. Abortion closes that down, and that’s sad - not too sad, but sad. Melancholy at what might have been doesn’t seem inappropriate
That doesn’t make it immoral, though.
EX-FED:
So pro-choicers can cultivate the illusion of unity and ideological purity to the detriment of genuine debate? No thanks.
“I hope you never have cancer; you’d be unable to accept surgical, radiological, or chemotheraputic cures, all of which would destroy human life.”
no, not a good analogy
“Oh, wait, you mean “you can’t destroy *special* human life.â€?
And I agree, you can’t destroy people without justification. But personhood requires a certain level of development. You can’t squeeze personhood into a single cell. ”
yes, I agree, 20 week old unborn babies are not just “cells”
“Once that level of development has occurred, yes, you need more justification. That’s where the wisdom of RvW really shines; by outlining that, yes, abortion is a right early on, and is a right when necessary to protect health later, it balances the idea of developing personhood to objective reality, in large part.”
RvW is a joke, bad law. Ask Justice Ginsberg.
Yes it is. The Church teaches that women “shouldn’t” (not “morally can’t” or “will be excommunicated if they do”) have an abortion even to save their own lives. If you’d like I can pick up the pamplet when I go to church Sunday and mail it to you (if you’re interested, email me a mailing address to send it to: imnotathome AT gmail DOT com ).
jasper,
1. Learn you’re vs. you are. Or stop talking.
2. There are exceptions for a woman’s life? Oh, so let’s just start killing “people” to save people. You don’t believe in that, remember? You believe in THE BABIES. LOOK AT THE POOR DEAD BABIES. fuck the environment, the women, the consequences - it’s all about the (non) babies.
(troll snack)
Jasper,
If a new, unique, human life begins at fertilization, when egg meets sperm, then what happens to the souls of the (minimum) 40% of fertilized eggs that never implant in the uterus and are flushed away? Or the (minimum) 25% of implanted blastocytes that terminate naturally within the first four weeks of pregnancy?
Do those “human lives” not count? Did God screw up and asign souls to the wrong blastocytes? Maybe God really just doesn’t care about unborn babies as much as you do. Or mabye God is an asshole who likes to condemn 40-60% of the souls he creates to Hell with no saving throw?
Or maybe, just maybe, “human life” doesn’t begein at fertilization, and maybe God waits until there’s enough brain present before he sends down a soul? I don’t know the answer.
All I know is that I can not follow a god who tosses away unique human lives so carelessly.
A being following dharma goes up, a being violating it goes down. “Up� and “down� are terms relative to consciousness. A tree is less conscious than a dog. A dog less so than a human. Our future bodies are determined by thought and action patterns now, our karma carrying us where we “desire� to be.
Negative: The only religious doctrine that seems sillier than the Big Sky Fairy.
Big, big Positive: I don’t see any Hare Krishnas or Hindus attempting to impose laws based on karma or reincarnation on other people. Promoting vegetarianism and handing out flowers doesn’t quite cut it in the “taking the country for Christ/Allah” stakes.
RACHEL:
Hubby and I want to adopt, and specifically a kid with “special needs.” There’s a particular seven-year old with disabilities in whom I’m interested - not because he’s seven and disabled, but because he has a good personality from what I can tell: Kind to animals, empathetic, just the right amount of mouthy and temperamental.
But adoption ain’t easy, not leastwise because older kids in the system “came from� someplace – and usually that was someplace bad. For people like us who have no parenting experience, the idea of going from “no kid� to “hyperactive kid with psychiatric problems who likes to destroy stuff because he was beaten so bad around the head he no longer has good impulse control� is like going from driving a peddle car to piloting the space shuttle.
We don’t avoid the latter kind of child because we feel entitled to something better, but because we’re not physically capable and nor are we sufficiently experienced to care for a child with such high needs.
(We were hoping to have our own kids, regardless of the high potential for serious genetic anomalies, but that looks like it won’t be an option.)
But I’m getting off topic.
When I saw the title of this post, I assumed the moral good would be not bringing unwanted children into the world. Birthing a child that you do not want, when you are aware of and have available to you choices, is immoral. And no, adoption is not an alternative-we have far too many children without families. When they are all adopted, we can discuss adoption vis a vis the well-being of children. I think that caring for actual humans is a prety important goal. In any event, I do not thing an abortion is morally good-or bad-however, the choice to have one can be a morally sound choice. I cannot think of an example of when it would be an immoral choice. When is having an appendectomy an immoral choice?
1. Learn you’re vs. you are. Or stop talking.
yes, I’ll try to do better. let’s stay on topic though, don’t let my poor writing take away from the larger issue here. I know you can do it.
2. There are exceptions for a woman’s life? Oh, so let’s just start killing “people� to save people.
com’on now, get serious.
fuck the environment, the women, the consequences - it’s all about the (non) babies.
No, I didn’t say that.
woman deserve better than the big lie.
Devil’s Advocate:
“So pro-choicers can cultivate the illusion of unity and ideological purity to the detriment of genuine debate? No thanks.”
Isn’t that exactly what we are talking about? I’m not suggesting that Amanda should not say she thinks abortion is a moral good or that people who think abortion is immoral are wrong. I’m questioning whether it makes good sense to try to deter people from stating personal qualms about abortion.
Jasper: “Ok, lets start killing people to save the eco-system.”
We are the eco-system. Killing the eco-system kills us. Choose your poison. Choosing between abortion/contraception and wanton procreation is akin to choosing between chemo and radiation. Chemo is poison and radiation kills cells. Abortion and contraception both clip potential life, whereas wanton procreation brings about a slow, steady, and terminal suffering for millions of people.
These are hard choices. I could ilnk to photos of dying children with flies swarming on their faces where humans swarm and eco-systems have buckled, but I won’t. Emotive photos suck the juices of reason.
nothing pisses me off as much as rich, white people who think they have an absolute right to another woman’s child due to their own infertility. you want to convince me that adoption is moral, show me all the people who claim to want a child and end up adopting a mixed race 8 year old. and no, your one or two anecdotes of your brother’s girlfriend’s aunt do not count. - rachel
OTOH, there are people who get pregnant and cannot afford to raise a kid should they carry a baby to term. Are you suggesting that such people ought to abort because it would be evil to feed the adoption machine? And there are people who cannot conceive: it sounds better to me that the twain should meet than for the infertile couple to spend thousands of dollars trying to conceive (which money they could otherwise have donated to charities helping the underprivaleged maybe?) whilst a pregnant woman feels she has no other choice than to abort because she doesn’t want a child to come into the world motherless.
Of course, the question is who gets adopted. Too often those infertile couples only want a perfectly healthy and white baby (or else will go oversees). But rich white folk are not the only faces of adoption. I know this falls into the “one or two anecdotes” category, but my gf (not rich and not white) has adopted a mixed-race baby, as have a few of her friends (of various races and economic statuses — stati?). She’s upper-middle class enough (a judge) and white (1/2 Hispanic and 1/2 Cajun), but one of my cousins is married to a woman who adopted two mixed-race kids (not as babies, but young enough to be converted to Judaism using the same protocol for converting adopted babies).
So yes, I know the plural of anecdote is not data, but how is adoption per se evil (as opposed to the attitudes of those who propose women with unwanted pregnancies should give up their babies for adoption even as if they were infertile they would only want perfectly healthy, white babies rather than any kid who needs a loving home — those people are an equivalent of a chickenhawk: they want others to have babies they wouldn’t raise themselves!).
Well, I looked at the pictures and I’m still pro-choice (and godless!).
However, I am now convinced: appendectomies are objectively evil.
Well, but I think the argument could be made that, if you believe that a fetus is equivalent in every way to a born human woman, and if you were in the position to choose one or the other, that you ought to go with the fetus. The woman’s already had some life outside the womb already, no? So let’s be fair about it, since everything else about the two is exactly the same.
It’s not my position, but why should the fetus come out ahead in every other scenario but this one? If they’re exactly the same, I mean.
jasper,
you can’t just say “get serious” here.
you continually state that abortion is “evil”. if abortion is, in fact, evil, how can there be exceptions (as you claim)?
if you wife’s (sister’s, mother’s, etc.) life were in danger via pregnancy, shouldn’t you just show her some gross pics, remind her who jesus died for, and ask her to do the same?
either your use of the word “evil” is just you being dramatic and heavy-handed or you condone particular forms/justifications of evil.
Mandolin, you can come sit in the godless corner with me. We have nachos over here.
It *is* unfortunate. A pregnancy is a viable possibility, a whole set of futures showing up. Abortion closes that down, and that’s sad - not too sad, but sad. Melancholy at what might have been doesn’t seem inappropriate
Oh please. And it’s unfortunate every time my wife and I have sex but use birth control, or every time we could have had sex but choose not to. Just think of all the possibilities we had to bring a new life into this world. I’m getting melancholy just sitting here thinking that my boys could be making a baby right now but are going to waste instead. Who knows, maybe I’ve got the next Einstein in my left testicle?
Used to be that infanticide wasn’t even thought about that often in a negative. If you had a baby you couldn’t support, you left it out and let nature take its course. Abortion is much more humane.
Until reading Kevin T. Keith’s post about it, I was all set to disagree with the main post, but yeah. My opinion was changed. Good discussion, trolls aside.
see the evil:
http://www.priestsforlife.org/images/index.htm
Mmm, tasty. Pass the ketchup.
Sorry, EXFED; I had a brainfart. I agree with you.
I think the argument could be made that, if you believe that a fetus is equivalent in every way to a born human woman, and if you were in the position to choose one or the other, that you ought to go with the fetus. - Erin
It could be made. OTOH, an argument could be made that the fetus, even if it has no ill-intent in doing so, should receive less consideration as it is sucking the life out of the mother-to-be and not the other way around; thus the fetus is at fault, even if not guilty by reason of not being capable of upholding the law. That argument, however, barely holds water in “legalistic” Judaism and certainly is un-Christian, though.
DAS and Devil’s Advocate, there’s a world of difference between “i want to adopt but for xyz expense/legal reason” and “you can’t have an abortion so just give it up for adoption because there’s sooooooooooooooooooo many people who want your child and it’s your duty to give it to them”.
in a perfect world, i doubt that adoption would exist. contraception would prevent the vast majority of unplanned pregnancies. for those that snuck by, either social services would help provide child care and healthcare, etc for women who needed it or women would abort judgement free. i have a hard time believing that in the presence of available services to help you raise your child in a society that doesn’t castigate you for terminating, legions of women would choose to give their child up. those that do, fine, whatever. but no one has a right to parent another woman’s child. no one gets to raise someone else’s kid just because society failed to give them a living wage or affordable health care.
Mandolin, you can come sit in the godless corner with me. We have nachos over here.
Yay! Freethinkers have all the best snacks.
(Probably we fun-gineer it with our evil, evil science.)
Just think of all the possibilities we had to bring a new life into this world.
I’ve used a similiar comment myself. My only point is that an actual pregnancy makes these sorts of choices just that bit more stark, that’s all.
Darryl X–yes, utopia would include people being in complete control of getting pregnant and fool-proof birth control, and that would eliminate all the abortions obtained for unwanted and unplanned pregnancies. However, not all abortions are of unwanted and unplanned pregnancies. A woman who decides that she does not want to carry her pregnancy to term, regardless of whether or not she initially wanted it or planned it, and is forced by law to continue it to term and deliver it anyway, is not living in a utopia.
jasper Feb 22nd, 2007 at 12:10 pm
americans killed by Iraq war: 3,100
americans killed by abortion: 47,000,000
So we don’t get to count the Iraqis killed by sanctions or war?
But you do get to count the zygotes that never attached to the uterine wall?
YIPPEE!
You win!
Not.
nothing pisses me off as much as rich, white people who think they have an absolute right to another woman’s child due to their own infertility.
Well, you’re living a sheltered life if you’re not aware of greater evil than stupidity among (some) adoptive parents. Not that you’re not entitled to choose an issue that infuriates you more than anything without examining the context, just that if you do look at the context, what’s so deeply wrong is asserting a connection between forcing women to birth unwanted children and adoption.
Also, please note that (progressive) adoptive parents are not the ones bringing adoption into arguments about abortion.*
Could that be caused by our deep experiential knowledge that the two things have nothing to do with one another?
*Yes, I have encountered a few pro-forced-birth, save-the-bay-beez-for-me adopters, to my eternal sadness. For some reason they seem to avoid conversations with people who don’t agree with them. My theory is that even THEY know they sound selfish and immature.
Devil’s Advocate: No problem. I probably wasn’t clear enough. I’m a venal adoptive parent, after all, and probably suffer from a host of issues.
That’s a great point, Erizzle.
“you continually state that abortion is “evilâ€?. if abortion is, in fact, evil, how can there be exceptions (as you claim)? ”
because another life, mothers (primary) is at stake.
“if you wife’s (sister’s, mother’s, etc.) life were in danger via pregnancy, shouldn’t you just show her some gross pics, remind her who jesus died for, and ask her to do the same?”
yes, I did. my wife is pro-life now (i hope!), I’m not sure about my mom. My sisters are pro-choice (I think).
Note: my mother almost aborted me (she told my wife over the phone recently, I never knew about this (I’m 39)).
big deal. she didn’t. and if she had, you’d never know it.
“So we don’t get to count the Iraqis killed by sanctions or war?”
yes, we do, please count them. i don’t know how many lives we lost worldwide by abortion.
“big deal. she didn’t. and if she had, you’d never know it. ”
how do you know?
omg, 47,000,000 American women have died of abortion?? come on now…I agree that that would be a truly terrible thing, but I’m thinking that the first inkling of this hideous death toll would not be revealed to us by a blog troll.
Of course that must be what that statistic means, as American citizenship is not conferred before live birth. And men don’t die of abortion. So…anybody else heard of this horrific massacre by abortion of American women?
RACHEL:
True.
To be fair, however, I’ve made the argument that adoption is a good alternative to abortion; not because infertile rich white people deserve someone else’s kid, but because I think abortion is morally wrong for the reasons I stated earlier in this thread.
I don’t maker the mistake of thinking adoption is an easy choice for women; but for those who are accidentally pregnant but disagree with abortion, it is a good option.
Hard, but good.
my mother almost aborted me (she told my wife over the phone recently, I never knew about this (I’m 39)). - jasper
My mother was almost aborted (and if abortion would have actually been readily available at the time, maybe she would have been), but that doesn’t stop neither my mom nor I from being pro-choice.
You know.
I get to the point where I don’t care what men think about abortion.
I mean, I appreciate reading (many) of the men on this thread and all, but this is still a world in which people are trained to look at the world from a male perspective. Therefore, the exercise of empathy involved in really, deeply looking at what pregnancy looks like from the perspective of somoene *going thorugh it* is a big leap, and it’s one many men seem unable or unwilling to make.
We talk in other threads about how men and whites and heterosexuals and so on feel entitled to redescribe the realities of women and black people and homoseuxals and etc, because the priveleged classes have been taught that their opinions are objective and valuable.
I think this is another case where many men would be best advised to sit back and keep their own counsel and listen rather than speak.
Showcase 1: Mr. Jasper-See-It-Looks-Like-A-Hand (and brains are in hands, right??!) who feels entitled to dictate his wife’s political leaning — at least he hopes he has! Cuz otherwise, what if she made a decision for herself, and it wasn’t him-approved?
‘cause you’d be dead, jasper. and then you could cuddle with jesus all day long! too bad she didn’t, huh?
I, like most post-puberty males, have killed multitudes. All those tissues, gym socks, etc., represent incredible numbers of lost potential human lives.
I’m going to report myself to the police. I suggest all you other males out there do the same. We must end this holocaust…!
Dang it, you stole my idea. Well, I guess I should be glad there are other sane people in the world.
I’m not only pro-choice; I’m also pro-abortion. In fact, while I see the political need for that euphamism, I resent it; I totally, unapoligetically support abortion. If, for instance, a fifteen-year old, impoverished girl gets pregnant, there is no choice!! I don’t mean in the sense that the government should force her to have an abortion, but just as a person, I cannot fathom why–why why why–she would even CONSIDER having the baby, and I would heartily encourage to have an abortion instead.
I seriously don’t understand what’s so “pro-life” about creating a system that encourages unwanted children, who are more likely to be abused, abandoned, or impoverished–not to mention teenaged girls whose entire lives are destroyed because of one stupid, youthful transgression dangerously mixed with overbearing, irrational “morals”.
“woman deserve better than the big lie.”
Women deserve better than what exactly? Civil rights? Privacy? Individual autonomy? Health care?
[…] Amanda Marcotte smacks it right out of the park with this post: The “I’m pro-choice but I think abortion is wrongâ€? thing crops up a lot in these discussions, and while I understand the urge to feel like a complex person that lays behind it, I seriously don’t get why people think that it helps anything to hand wring about how terrible abortion is if you’re supporting the right to have one. Suggesting that abortion is immoral just reinforces the anti-choice claims that abortion should be banned and it strongly reinforces the anti-choice notion that women who get abortions are moral children who are too stupid to know what they’re doing. The belief that women are too stupid to really understand what they’re doing is evident in anti-choice measures like requiring sonograms and requiring that women spend a day to think it over before they get an abortion. […]
“We talk in other threads about how men and whites and heterosexuals and so on feel entitled to redescribe the realities of women and black people and homoseuxals and etc, because the priveleged classes have been taught that their opinions are objective and valuable”
who does race and sexuality have to do with this?
jasper: I think you should read Holly Capote’s post a couple of times, quietly to yourself. (you’reself?)
I am completely serious. If you believe a fetus is a person, and killing people is easy, then how can you just assume that the Sophie’s Choice between woman and fetus goes to the woman, every single time? How could she live with herself knowing that she was a filthydirtybabykiller, even if it did save her own life?
And it’s just the life of the woman that warrants exception, right? Not the health? By that logic, healthy adults should be forced to donate their nonessential organs to adults who need transplants for survival. The being which needs another’s healthy body to survive is more important than the healthy life-provider, no?
So I’m just going to go ahead and assume that you’ve donated a kidney, part of a liver, a lung, an eye, and any other non-essential organ to a needy person already, or that you’re on the donor list just waiting to be asked to give.
“Women deserve better than what exactly? Civil rights? Privacy? Individual autonomy? Health care?”
Thinking for themselves rather than letting Jasper think for them.
“Big, big Positive: I don’t see any Hare Krishnas or Hindus attempting to impose laws based on karma or reincarnation on other people. Promoting vegetarianism and handing out flowers doesn’t quite cut it in the “taking the country for Christ/Allahâ€? stakes.”
Maybe not in this country, but the Hindu caste system was pretty craptastic.
“who does race and sexuality have to do with this? ”
First of all, I’m going to assume you mean “what.” Communication is aided by actually using words you mean to say.
Secondly, they are examples of how people in a priveleged class think they understand and should have power over the realities of the nonpriveleged class. Men are priveleged over women. Whites are priveleged over brown people. Heterosexuals are priveleged over homosexuals.
If you don’t know what privelege means, or you don’t understand the relations of classes as opposed to individuals, then I suggest you do some reading about social justice — if helping the oppressed is something you actually care about, rather than merely giving lip service to.
But, you know, it might not be as exciting to have to shut up and listen to other people before you give them political support, rather than jumping in with photographs to defend brainless creatures that can’t tell you when you’re being a jackass.
“jasper: I think you should read Holly Capote’s post a couple of times, quietly to yourself. (you’reself?)”
where is it, I’ll read it.
“I am completely serious. If you believe a fetus is a person, and killing people is easy, then how can you just assume that the Sophie’s Choice between woman and fetus goes to the woman, every single time? How could she live with herself knowing that she was a filthydirtybabykiller, even if it did save her own life? ”
I don’t think killing unborn babies is easy. If a woman life is at stake (very low percentage, let’s not divirge), then the woman life must be saved.
“And it’s just the life of the woman that warrants exception, right? Not the health? By that logic, healthy adults should be forced to donate their nonessential organs to adults who need transplants for survival. The being which needs another’s healthy body to survive is more important than the healthy life-provider, no? ”
the “health” is a red herring, this is a stretch…
Done volleying with jasper, for the moment. I want to reframe abortion for a moment. Let’s talk about pregnancy, not abortion, as the choice in pro-choice.
Choosing to be pregnant - either to get pregnant or remain that way - is a major medical decision. A woman who chooses to remain pregnant is putting her body through an unmatched trial, one that impacts every organ from skin to brain, changes body chemistry forever, wreaks havoc on the emotions. It can be a beautiful trial, a wanted trial, a joyful challenge whose result is the child she’s always wanted. But it’s never easy, never neutral.
This is why “adopt!” is not an argument against safe and legal abortions. If people really care about the fetuses, blastocycsts, BABEEZ, whatever, they should funnel their resources into finding a way to remove a blastocystfetusbaby from one pregnant woman and implant it into another to full term. Then anti-choice women could really put their money where their mouth is and adopt a blastocyst right into their very uteruses. No more dead “babies”.
And I wouldn’t worry about population control in this scenario. Once we found out how few women actually want to be pregnant against their will - even anti-choice women - the moral landscape would begin to shift, I think.
Is an abortion morally good?
Is having a baby morally good?
I’m not clear on what the definition of ‘morally good’ is, but do not think either one is immoral in itself.
I think it is immoral to push the logical fallacy that:
A fetus is a baby-
A baby is a human-
Therefore a fetus is a human.
Just like:
Nothing is better than a million dollars-
Twenty dollars is better than nothing-
therefore twenty dollars is better than a million dollars.
“Pleasure is a moral good. I think people who oppose pleasure are the real anti-lifers, because what’s life for if not for living it?”
Pleasure can’t be a moral good. Here’s why. Pleasure can accompany both good and bad actions. For example, if someone receives pleasure from fantasizing about torturing people, that fantasy is immoral even though it is accompanied by pleasure. in fact, most people would think that the consequence of receiving pleasure from the evil thought contributes to the egregiousness of the experience. That is, the absence of receinving pleasure would seem to diminish the severity of our moral judgment. On the other hand, suppose someone jumps on a live grenade to save a group of innocent people. Suppose the hero fails to land directly on the grenade and that it still goes off, all the innocent people are killed, but the hero survives as a paraplegic. We would consider the act moral even though it resulted in a reduction of net pleasure.
Holly Capote’s post is, duh, in this thread. I’m not going to copy it for you.
And you didn’t address my main point: why does the woman’s life trump the fake baby’s? Why?
P.S. Health is not a red herring if it’s your health at stake.
Jasper, I think Mandolin’s referring to the fact that the people not on the short end of the stick (whether that stick is race, gender, religion, sexual preference) tend to believe that they are capable of, in a position to, and well within their rights to make decisions for the people on the short end, and that they don’t need any input from those people to do it, either.
Which really is what you seem to be doing here.
Note: my mother almost aborted me (she told my wife over the phone recently, I never knew about this (I’m 39)).
“What if my mother aborted me” seems to be one of the big bugaboos for anti-choice folks. I don’t think they like thinking about the nearly accidental, and almost completely contingent, nature of their own existence. From an existential standpoint, though, “What if my mother aborted me” is on a par with “what if my parents never met,” or (even better) “what if my parents hadn’t f**ked at that *exact* time, in that exact position?” If you had been conceived a day earlier, or a day later, or maybe the next month, you woudn’t be you, you’d be someone else.
jasper, 10-25% of all clinically-recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage (also known as spontaneous abortion) and it’s believed that 50-75% of all pregnancies end this way before the women carrying them even realize they’re pregnant. The number of pregnancies terminated on purpose dwarf in comparison.
Making fate/circumstance the world’s most successful abortionist. Unless you think some kind of deity rules the day-to-day happenings on earth, in which case… OH…
I sense another Back to the Future movie.
Jasper, I think Mandolin’s referring to the fact that the people not on the short end of the stick (whether that stick is race, gender, religion, sexual preference) tend to believe that they are capable of, in a position to, and well within their rights to make decisions for the people on the short end, and that they don’t need any input from those people to do it, either.
Which really is what you seem to be doing here.
Exactly. Thank you.
I haven’t had a chance to finish this entire thread, so I hope I don’t repreat a previous post, but this jumped out at me…
What exactly is a misuse of the process? If a woman terminates a pregnancy, then she is correctly using the process of abortion. Or are we dealing with personal squeamishness that a woman may opt to have more than one abortion, or rely on abortion in the absence of other forms of birth control? In which case, I say that it is still not a misuse of the process. Do you want these women to give birth to any babies they do not want, for whatever reason and no matter how much you object to the circumstances of their abortion?
I see this as exactly what Amanda is getting at. No matter your personal opinion of the circumstances of abortion (and I agree with previous posts that the procedure itself is morally neutral), in the cases where the option is exercised, it is a moral good for the individual and the society because it means that the children being born are wanted and (hopefully) supported.
This is why I get so tired of the “necessary evil” arguments- it is too often used as an excuse for Democrats to support legal provisions that, when added together, create a de facto ban on abortion for many women. My opinion, either you support abortion in all cases (even the ones that seem objectionable) or you don’t.
Thank you for posting this. There’s a piece on CommonDreams by sociologist Michael Schwalbe, “Reproductive Freedom 101,” that I was really affected by, for Schwalbe challenges that attitude you mention (”Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare”) for it reinforces the stigma surrounding abortion, making it all the harder for women to exercise the reproductive freedom. Here’s a line from the end of his essay, which can be found at http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0411-34.htm
“When middle-class and upper-middle-class women do not defend public funding of abortions for low-income women, they are one step closer to losing their own reproductive freedom. When some women say, “I believe in choice, but /I/ wouldn’t have an abortion,” they make it harder for other women to choose abortion without being stigmatized. When women in liberal states do not defend the rights of women in regressive states like South Dakota and Mississippi, the rights of women everywhere are on shakier ground.
Women’s freedom is likewise at greater risk when men who claim to believe in gender equality remain silent because they think abortion is only a women’s issue.”
Joy that’s bad logic. That’s kind of akin to saying that the number of people killed deliberately in the world pales in comparison to the number who die by accident. (so the ones who die deliberately aren’t that big of an issue)
Of course, intent is the difference between involuntary manslaughter and 1st degree murder when it comes to killing someone.
Why no distinction between someone who has a spontaneous miscarriage and someone who plans to abort?
The point is that God is both the doer and the done, the plug and the socket, the wall and the ball bouncing off of it, the Sun and the shadow, the sperm and the egg, the lingam and the yoni.
Fantastic.
God is both the spaghetti and the meatball, the garlic powder and the oregano seasoning, the boiling water and the salt. God is bouncing in the wind and rolling in the scissors. God is the purple monkey dishwasher.
“God is the purple monkey dishwasher.”
Band name?…
“Jasper, look at these picture and tell me if you’re still pro-appendectomy.
http://www.med.uiuc.edu/m34/clerkships/surgery/OSCEPathSlides.htm”
HystericalWoman, that’s a great response (to jasper’s attempt to gore us into believing his line). Next time, I see those ugly picketers with their abortion=holocaust placards, i’ll try to come prepared with my own gory signs.
“Next time, I see those ugly picketers with their abortion=holocaust placards, i’ll try to come prepared with my own gory signs.”
Too bad there are no photographs from the Spanish Inquisition or Salem witch trials.
Maybe mutilated children from Iraq or Vietnam?
(Reading further:)
Adoption is immoral in the specific case of pedophiles seeking dependent children to abuse.
Check with your local state social services, there are over 100,000 children waiting for an adoptive home in this country. Nobody wants these kids, everybody wants a healthy infant. A quick google brought up these sites.
http://www.adoptuskids.org/
http://www.adoptkckids.org/
After the children already born are taken care of - then you can whine about the ickyness of abortion.
There’s no way I could get through all the messages, so apologies in advance if this has already been said:
I think Lisa KS gets to the crux of the issue when she talks about having an abortion and possibly being sad about it. The issue of “potential life” seems to be the root of this possibility for sadness, and it is also the cornerstone of the Roe decision, via Griswold. Yet, an emotional tripwire is activated when talking about aborting an embryo/fetus that doesn’t get touched when talking about contraception.
I think what’s happened is that the propagandist images of young fetuses from twenty years ago or so have become accepted wisdom: An embryo/fetus looks like a baby right from the get-go, so it *is* a baby. Therefore, if you have an abortion you’re killing a baby.
I think we need to push back by saying and repeating the phrase “clump of cells”. What’s the difference between having this clump of cells removed and having an appendectomy? The argument may go: The clump of cells will become a person if left alone. Here’s where Griswold comes in. If you don’t stop sperm from entering the womb, or prevent eggs from developing, some of those cells will become a person if left alone, but banning contraception would be ludicrous. Please note that this argument is for “pro-lifers” who think abortion is icky, not the anti-sexers who *would* like to ban contraception.
Does “clump of cells” seem rude, or shocking? Yes. However, I think it’s short enough and accurate enough that it will force people to reconsider their paradigms.
(As an aside, one commenter on Amanda’s TPM Cafe post mentioned that Roe was a “sloppy” decision. I’ve heard this before, but never understood why it would be considered so. When it’s simply a clump of cells, the woman’s decision is paramount. When that clump of cells can survive outside the woman, it can’t be thought of as just a clump of cells and therefore has rights. Hence, no restrictions on first trimester abortions. Why is this so hard to swallow as a matter of jurisprudence [i.e., putting aside one’s personal views on abortion]?)
jasper Feb 22nd, 2007 at 1:29 pm
i don’t know how many lives we lost worldwide by abortion.
Nor do you know how many lives were saved by abortion, literally or otherwise.
Do you?
By your logic, John List was doing a moral thing when he slaughtered his entire family. After all, he agonized about it and prayed about it and concluded that it was the best thing for everybody involved.
Interesting company you choose to keep.
That’s it. I’m going to have to second SlotheL’s grammar point from upthread.
Jasper, you’ve come into a blog community that’s utterly opposed to your point of view (note: as with “its,” “your” is the possessive in English. “You’re” is a contraction for “you are.”).
There are only two possible reasons for doing that: either you sincerely want to try to convince the folks here that you’re right and they’re wrong, or you’re a jerk and like making people angry. I’ll be charitable and assume it’s the first.
If you’re trying to argue a point in writing, it behooves you to express your point of view in clear, correct writing. Everyone will forgive an occassional typo, but so far I doubt you’ve written a single sentence correctly. Your errors would frankly be annoying from a ten-year-old, and they’re shocking from someone who claims to be 39. For example, you seem to only intermittently begin sentences with capital letters. We’re nearly the same age–didn’t you at least watch The Electric Company as a child like the rest of us?
Your behavior is the equivalent of not showering for two weeks, putting on clothes that you’ve kept in your cat’s litter box for the occassion, and then witnessing for Christ. You’re confirming every stereotype of pro-life fundamentalists as unlettered fools. If that was your goal, congratualtions. Otherwise, you might want to improve your writing skills before attempting to carry on a written debate.
Christina Feb 22nd, 2007 at 2:31 pm
By your logic, John List was doing a moral thing when he slaughtered his entire family. After all, he agonized about it and prayed about it and concluded that it was the best thing for everybody involved.
Interesting company you choose to keep.
Wasn’t there a character named God who made that decision about his kid, Jesus?
Some fairy tale like that or something.
Or maybe I’m thinking of that character, Abraham, and his kid, Isaac.
So many child sacrificers in mythology, it’s hard to keep them straight.
But you do get to count the zygotes that never attached to the uterine wall?
YIPPEE!
You win!
Not.
Ummm…if it didn’t attach to the uterine wall, a woman wouldn’t be pregnant, and there would be no need for an abortion.
Mandolin:
“I get to the point where I don’t care what men think about abortion.”
effin’ word. to all of you pro-feminist men who sympathize and support us, thank you for your empathy. but i honestly think that those who are incapable of pregnancy and childbirth really don’t have much of a leg to stand on when they start screaming at me about all the precious little people inside my body that i intend to kill with my callous, pro-choice ways.
wasn’t it gloria steinem who said that if men got pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament? pro-life men are the equivalent of chickenhawks, imho.
nolo:
From an existential standpoint, though, “What if my mother aborted me� is on a par with “what if my parents never met,� or (even better) “what if my parents hadn’t f**ked at that *exact* time, in that exact position?�
but i thought “back to the future” was a documentary.
Ummm…if it didn’t attach to the uterine wall, a woman wouldn’t be pregnant, and there would be no need for an abortion. - saucysaucy
But if life begins at conception, it’s still a loss of life and hence to prevent implantation, according to that crowd, is tantamount to abortion.
Thanks to those who have more experience with the philosophical technicalities about terms like “moral good” (although HHH sounds too much like Hubert H Humphrey to me) but whatever we want to call it, I agree with Amanda that we need to be wary of rhetoric that is shaming to women about their rights to make decisions about their bodies. As we know, making abortion illegal and unsafe does not end abortion; it means women will have unsafe abortions and many will die or be maimed in the process. This was true before Roe v. Wade, and is true all over the world. Ready, affordable access to safe and legal abortion—which is unavailable now in many parts of the country due to people trying to force women to bear children against their will—is a moral good, in my view, because it means that fewer women will risk their health and lives to end unwanted pregnancies, and those who are faced with the need to terminate wanted pregnancies because continuing to be pregnant would kill or maim them will be able to receive the care they need.
Interesting point about adoption — nobody ever mentions the adoptees. We grow up, you know. Some of us wind up in the situation of having to deal with this kind of stuff ourselves, and some of us think about it.
Here’s what gives me the crawling horrors: Abortion was not legally available where and when I was born. Apparently I was not a “wanted” baby, since my biological mother elected to give me up for adoption. THEREFORE, I am the product of slavery. That is not a nice thing to have to live with, which is why I am unapologetically pro-abortion.
Protestant Man: ” Those Catholics, they think every time they have sex, they have to make a baby.”
Protestant Woman: “Well, dear we have two children, and we’ve had sex twice.”
Protestant Man: “That’s not the point.”
(Sorry, couldn’t resist. Every sperm is sacred, and all that…)
I think we should just be able to kill anyone who makes our life inconvenient.
HA ha ha. HA ha HA ha ha.
After all, that would give me pleasure. And pleasure is a moral good!
Ha ha ha. HA ha HA ha ha.
I’m pro-choice, but blanket statements like “abortion is a moral good” harm more than help the position.
Each of us (even you, Amanda) were a potential abortion at some point. Every abortion is a negation of potential humanity. Sometimes abortion is the the correct thing to do, but to treat it as a self-affirming event is repellent. Try crawling out of your own navel (or, to continue a theme, your own vagina) some time.
Why is this so hard to swallow as a matter of jurisprudence [i.e., putting aside one’s personal views on abortion]?) - NY Expat
From a pro-choice POV, the problem is that the issue is not privacy per se but rather the ability to make your own decisions regarding appropriate medical care. The reason why the state ought not to be able to forbid you from getting a vasectomy is not because such a forbiddance would interfere with your right to keep such a decision on your part private, but rather because simply the state has no business forbidding that operation in general: the gummint can’t make laws forbiddin’ you to do things that can positively affect your health without a damned good reason to do so.
OTOH, we pro-choicers need to learn to embrace the reasoning of Roe v Wade, even if we don’t like it, ‘cause Roe follows so closely from Griswold v CT that any attack on Roe is effectively an attack on Griswold. And while the fundie community is united in opposition to abortion, Griswold is very divisive for them. Most Catholics understand that we non-Catholics accepts contraception (they just don’t want it “shoved in their faces” — whatever that’s supposed to mean) and have other concerns about undermining Griswold (or at least those that know anything about Anglo-American anti-Catholicism do: they want to know that if worse comes to worse, they at least have a right to privacy and hence to be Catholics in private) and even many fundie Protestants are like the Blacketts in The Meaning of Life who view their right to use a condom (at least within marriage) as being part and parcel of the Reformation. OTOH, the real looneys wanna reverse Griswold. So if we can manage to change the conversation to the right of married people to use condoms (and steer it away from the “will someone think of the children” gambit bringing the fundies back to the common ground of not “encouraging” pre-marital sex by making b/c available to people who are not married), that’s divisive to a community united against abortion rights.
And as the GOP taught us in its ability to get the “Reagan Democrats”: divide and conquer works!
History_Mom, I totally agree with you.
By the way, for those who want some kind of information about mortality rates worldwide due to septic abortions, you can go here
[…] Updated to add: Also, saying that abortion is morally questionable, even if you’re pro-choice, is a huge insult to the brave men and women who risk life and limb to perform them. Being an abortion doctor is a pretty thankless task, because a bunch of “Christianâ€? men who have emasculation issues are gunning to kill you in hopes that brings their huevos back. Meanwhile, other anti-choicers are running around claiming that being an abortionist is like this super great career that people only indulge in for the money. This is horseshit and pro-choicers need to push back and remind everyone that abortionists are heroes, who put up with all sorts of abuse because they want to help women. ~Amanda Marcotte […]
Each of us (even you, Amanda) were a potential abortion at some point. Every abortion is a negation of potential humanity. Sometimes abortion is the the correct thing to do, but to treat it as a self-affirming event is repellent. Try crawling out of your own navel (or, to continue a theme, your own vagina) some time.
That’s funny. I’d say someone who dislikes abortion because their own special unique snowflake ass might have been aborted is the one who needs to crawl out of their own navel.
my mother almost aborted me
My mother almost didnt’ conceieve me: she didn’t want two kids in diapers at once. My father talked her into having the second pregnancy. Although I’m pleased at how it worked out (not that I’d be displeased if I were never conceived, just nonexistent), but I think that she was right and he was wrong. Both about the timing of children (kids 18 months apart is stressful) and in that he didn’t have the right to try to push her into a pregnancy she didn’t want. And I’m very pro-contraception, despite my brush with non-existence.
Each of us (even you, Amanda) were a potential abortion at some point. Every abortion is a negation of potential humanity. Sometimes abortion is the the correct thing to do, but to treat it as a self-affirming event is repellent. Try crawling out of your own navel (or, to continue a theme, your own vagina) some time.
This is another permutation of what I mentioned before — that people who are queasy about abortion are often queasy about the utterly accidental nature of human existence. Each of us, even me, was (not were) a potential abortion. Each of us was also a potential decision on the part of our parents not to f**K around that night at all. So what? What’s that got to do with the price of tea in china?
Mark’s post highlights another issue, though. Abortion is “a negation of potential humanity” only if you think the fetus, as opposed to the pregnant woman, is a party in interest. Abortion can certainly be life-affirming if the life you value is that of the woman.
Every abortion is a negation of potential humanity.
Every abortion by choice is an affirmation of existing humanity.
I think we should just be able to kill anyone who makes our life inconvenient.
HA ha ha. HA ha HA ha ha.
After all, that would give me pleasure. And pleasure is a moral good!
Ha ha ha. HA ha HA ha ha.
I’m sorry, but you’re not allowed to post on this blog if you’re in need of psychiatric medication.
I don’t know if this has been covered already, but…I would claim that adoption is less of a good thing than abortion because women who give up a child for adoption frequently–in fact, almost always–have lifelong depression and other physical and mental problems after they give up their babies. If I were counseling a woman with an unwanted pregnancy, I would, of course, mention all the options (having the baby and keeping it, adoption, and abortion). But in most cases my recommendation would be abortion. If, knowing the dangers she would face, both risking her physical health completing the pregnancy and risking her emotional and physical health giving up the baby, she wanted to have the baby and let it be adopted, then fine, she should have that option and be supported as much as possible by society and, if known, the potential adoptive parents. But lying to women about how easy and “beautiful” this option is, as crisis pregnancy centers do, is immoral in the extreme.
Amanda, I agree with some of the other posters that you are trivializing the pro-choice but necessary evil position. I think your underlying point that pro-choicers need to articulate their position in a way that does not buy into the pro-life aggression is a good one. Being pro-choice is all about recognizing that women are people capable of making good decisions about themselves, but because that idea is a lot more nuanced than “abortion is murder,” it’s harder to compress into a soundbite. At the risk of sounding like Hilary, I do believe that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare, even though I also think it is a type of justifiable homicide. I don’t think this way in order to be complex; I think this way because I support the concept of separation of church and state.
With regards to mourning periods and abortions, my understanding from friends who have had a hard time conceiving is that you do, in fact, mourn your period, because it means you probably are not pregnant when you want to be. I don’t think every woman should be mourning every period because that means she isn’t pregnant (ooog, could you imagine how weepy this country would be?), but I also think that it’s just as legitimate for a woman to mourn an abortion as it is for her not to - it all depends on where she’s coming from at the time.
The thing is, if we as a society ever get to the point where every single pregnancy is planned and wanted and healthy and every birth is celebrated, how would we *not* feel sad if the pregnancy is not carried to term (regardless of how that pregnancy ended)? How can it not somehow feel like a failure to be pregnant and then not have a baby? Where we are now, due to the wonderfulness of contraceptives, is in a kind of strange halfway house, because the assumption is that women who are pregnant *want* to be pregnant; therefore, getting an abortion (for whatever reason) *is* a failure of some kind. We need to move past that, but I’m not sure how, because it is the natural emotional result of being happy and excited about women being pregnant.
I’d say someone who dislikes abortion because their own special unique snowflake ass might have been aborted is the one who needs to crawl out of their own navel.
Heh. Indeed.
Each of us (even you, Amanda) were a potential abortion at some point
Every one of us, even you Mark, were once potential tampon bait. What if your parents had never met? Or not liked each other? Or postponed having a family? Or decided to have a family sooner and finished childbearing before they got to you? What if the little Mark blastula had failed to implant? What if the forebearer of humanity had been eaten by a lion before she could reproduce? Abortion is the least of anyone’s existential problems.
saucysaucy:
if it didn’t attach to the uterine wall, a woman wouldn’t be pregnant, and there would be no need for an abortion.
An ectopic pregnancy is still a pregnancy, it’s just a fordoomed one. If personhood begins at conception, then ectopic pregnancies are people, too.
And if personhood begins at conception, identical twins are not exactly people, because they separate a few days after conception. If identical twins *are* people in the same way other people are people, then every zygote is (potentially) *two* people.
But identical twins frequently form briefly, and then one twin is absorbed by the other, or the mother, or dies. So are they really separate people?
In other words — from a scientific point of view, no early embryo is a person.
With regards to mourning periods and abortions, my understanding from friends who have had a hard time conceiving is that you do, in fact, mourn your period, because it means you probably are not pregnant when you want to be. I don’t think every woman should be mourning every period because that means she isn’t pregnant (ooog, could you imagine how weepy this country would be?), but I also think that it’s just as legitimate for a woman to mourn an abortion as it is for her not to - it all depends on where she’s coming from at the time.
If I wanted to be pregnant, a period would be sad. But if I don’t want to be pregnant, why would an abortion make me sad?
to all of you pro-feminist men who sympathize and support us, thank you for your empathy
Indeed. Speaking of which, I noticed a strange trend in college. When an ostensibly liberal, pro-feminist man did NOT support abortion rights, he almost always turned into a conservative, anti-feminist man within five or ten years. I concluded that men who didn’t support abortion didn’t really support women very much, whether they gave lip service to equality or not. Possibly their “pro-feminist” stance was simply so that they could get laid more easily. Does anyone else’s experience support this claim?
Still pro-choice. But thanks for the laugh, Jasper!
I agree with “abortion without apology.” I don’t think women should feel sad, guilty, or ashamed. My mom donates to NARAL and PP, but she still thinks that women should be sad and ashamed of their abortions … and I don’t understand that. I don’t understand why a person “should” feel something just because other people are uncomfortable with it. (It’s like the doctor who thought I was mentally unstable because I was getting pissed off about being forced to remain in the hospital. I don’t know how he wanted me to feel, but obviously it was “wrong” to feel angry at being stuck there another week for NO GOOD REASON.)
And that’s why I think that we can’t have “true” pro-choiceness until we get rid of the guilt and shame. How many women are guilted and shamed into having babies they don’t really want? How many women are “pro-choice in theory” but will keep the baby because their religion or social group has taught them that it’s a horrible, shameful, selfish thing to have an abortion? That’s still not “choice.” A “choice” is making your OWN choice based on your situation. Not a choice influenced by some guy bloviating at the pulpit or bad sex-ed.
I was lucky growing up because the primary priest at my church wasn’t a total douchebag (douchebag - n. Something that pretends it’s pro-woman when it’s really not.) like some of the other priests. He was truly trying to live a Christ-like life, so he wasn’t going on about the EEEEVULS of abortion, he was sympathetic to homosexuals, and so on. So I know there are rational Catholics out there, rational priests, and whatnot … I just wish there were MANY, MANY MORE of them. Or at least, that they were more vocal. I know Catholics for Choice exist and that most Catholics in western nations are more “cafeteria” than anything … but then there are folks like Jasper or the icky people who used to get up in front of the congregation and talk about how everyone needs 10 kids like they have. Geh.
I’m probably so behind now after reading 160 comments.
Dr Sci: Then there’s the old hamster egg assay problem. The HEA is a way of checking whether the sperm from a possibly infertile man is functional. The zona pellicula (outer layer) of a hamster egg is stripped from it and it is put in a dish with the sperm to be tested. Usually, when a sperm penetrates the hamster egg, that’s the end of it. It dies. Occasionally, it divides. What would the “pro-lifers” want done with such a conceptus? Implant it? Freeze it? Surely they wouldn’t want to throw this half-human away.
Nolo, if you want to be pregnant and have a baby but have to abort for health reasons, or choose to abort for some other reason, then you might mourn the abortion. I was trying to be too concise.
If abortion is a moral good, then shouldn’t it be imposed, even on women who don’t want them? Either forcably, or with penalties like we have for not wearing seat belts? We imposed sterilization on the “feeble-minded” which included a lot of people with ordinary IQs.
Government is huge, and imposes a lot of “moral good”s. I’ve not known you to argue that in the 99% of other moral goods the government coerces people to do that it ought to stop. So why ought it not start forcing abortion (like they do in China)?
you might mourn the abortion
True.
You might also celebrate your ability to make a choice to live.
The woman’s life must be saved, according to who? Your church? The Catholic Church — which you said you belong to — does not allow for abortion EVEN IF THE WOMAN’S LIFE IS IN DANGER. So you’re going against your church’s teaching by believing that.
Jasper, you said in an earlier comment that abortion = Satan. (Which makes no sense, but I’ll roll with it.) But you’re also saying that there is, in fact, a circumstance in which “Satan” is allowable.
If there’s one circumstance in which you think abortion is allowed, then you’re not actually anti-abortion. You DO realize that, don’t you?
How is it a red herring? We’re talking about reasons to have an abortion — you, yourself, have said that if the mother’s life is in danger, abortion is an allowable choice. That is, choosing to have an abortion in order to stay alive is a reasonable choice for a woman to make.
When a woman’s health is at risk, choosing to have an abortion in order to remain healthy is absolutely a reasonable choice for her to make. Not a red herring.
Original Lee, in an earlier post I mentioned aborting a wanted pregnancy for health reasons as being about the only instance in which I thought it made sense to feel bad about an abortion.
Dianne, I noticed that more often than not, the professed pro-feminist men did so only to enhance their progressive street cred with the other dudes. Far easier to say you’re pro-feminist than to actually let the women speak at the anti-war meetings, or to give credence to any of our ideas, or take the facts we presented regarding the correlation of increased rape to war as anything but “the girls’ issues.”
But if something needed typing or copying, why, then we were needed.
And nolo, re-pregnancy happy, abortion sad - exactly. If I were to get pregnant (leaving aside the fact that said pregnancy would have to be the result of a rape, as hubby has been clipped) an abortion would be the only thing to keep me from killing myself.
So all the godbags can suck it.
ahh, okay then (nolo and original lee)
Nolo, I was sorta kinda trying to go further with that earlier post of yours. With such a long thread, my browser is having trouble keeping up. Sorry.
I agree that someone should not feel bad because someone ELSE feels they ought to. Sometimes people do feel sad because like Lisa KS said, maybe having a kid was something they would have liked to do, but for whatever reason, it is not in the cards right then, so they are kind of sad about the circumstances.
But crying over your clump because the crazy anti-abortion lady said you killed your baby is seriously fucked up.
Btw, this is one of the most amazing conversations on abortion I have followed in a long time (even with the crazy trolls). This website has the smartest commenters I have ever seen in my life, like what Salon and The Well aspire to be but just aren’t. I feel smart by osmosis reading alot of these comments, like I just finished listening to Diane Rehme for several hours or something.
Every one of us, even you Mark, were once potential tampon bait. What if your parents had never met? Or not liked each other? Or postponed having a family?…
None of those things happened. Instead an embryo happened, then a fetus, then a baby, then an adult who actually cares about the health and well being of others.
But this isn’t about me, this is about embryos that might become fetuses that might become babies who might grow up to be caring humans. If you lose contact with that causal chain you become unmoored from the mass of humanity that actually thinks in terms of other humans, instead of the subset who think in terms of what maximally enhances their own abilities to do whatever the hell they want, other potentially interested parties (including but not limited to not-yet-viable-human-fetuses) be damned.
I’m pro-choice, as I said, but being pro-choice doesn’t mean you have to take joy in the death of fetuses. Doing so just throws fresh meat to the less nuanced on the Right.
I am a Pro-Lifer (read Anti-Choice
who beleives that abortion is morally wrong, but still holds that it should be legal. Being an Atheist I don’t subscribe to any form of absolutist moral principals that would make it wrong in every case for a woman to have an abortion. But I would like to take a shot at arguing that abortions are immoral in majority of cases.
Sex is a choice. Pregnancy is a possible consequence of that choice. So in what way is having sex knowing you will terminate a completely innocent potential human being upon pregnancy not a selfish immoral act. The only justification is that you really needed(read wanted) to get laid that night.
Also why is it self evident that “woman who get abortions should be recognized as people who can accurately weigh their choices and make the most moral one”? Everyone makes immoral decisions from time to time some more then others. So why is this very specific group of woman more likely to accurately weigh there choices and make the most moral decision? This claim is not necessarily outrageous, but your refusal to give even a shred of evidence in support of it makes me think otherwise.
I feel as if this whole Pro Abortion issue slanders the good Liberalism is supposed to stand for. I mean you fight so admirable for the rights of those who are already on this earth. Why not fight for human potential as well?
I find it interesting that (from what I could see) everyone on this thread who took issue with Amanda’s statement of abortion as a moral good believes in some supernatural woo-woo or another.
Not surprising, but still interesting.
Ex-Fed, thanks for a post that actually mentions message strategy.
I can’t agree with your characterization that strategy is inherently crass, though. If you want to change people’s minds, you must acknowledge that they hear what they hear, not what you think you said (See jasper, above). Isn’t crass strategy the mechanism of legislative success?
Think through with me your transformation between the original pro-choice spoken/anti-abortion silent conjunction and the result that subjective morality presumes legal proscription.
I assume you would agree that if the PC-spoken/AA-spoken message words are chosen because the speaker wants to validate the reality of women’s conflicting feelings about the decision to abort, those women would feel embraced and validated by the speaker, and consequently more loyal to the pro-choice alignment because of the speaker’s sincerity (and bravery).
It is also likely that people who lack any reason to feel doubtful about the issue would remain unmoved by the presence of this new group of supporters (who moved sideways from the “undecided” column); a situation which would result in a net increase in the number of people who would agree to keeping choice legal and unassailed.
What am I not hearing about your linkage between ideological purity and the tendency to ban? Is message consistency solely a subordinate term of ideological purity?
I don’t beleive in “supernatural woo-woo” BlackBoc and I take issue with what she has to say. Look right above your post.
P.S supernatural woo-woo. LoL.
Amynda, if it’s a moral good to commit an abortion for some women. Why is it not a moral good to commit infanticide in some situations? After all, there are some situations when there might be too many mouths to feed, or when an unexpected event occurs and the standard of living declines dramatically some time after the child is born, or when a woman is experiencing post-partum depression, or simply when a woman changes her mind about her personal self-interest post-birth and decides that giving birth to a living child just wasn’t the right choice for herself or her family after all. It would be wrong for us to question women who decide on infanticide because then we are assuming that women have less value as human beings and that they do not have the ability to decide for themselves what is best, to take responsbility for themselves and their families, and to rectify a possible mistake. Of course, we are also forgetting the tragic circumstances of a young girl - say 13 or 14 years old - possibly raped or abused or simply in denial over the pregnancy, who finally has reality rushing over her when she gives birth to the neonate in the toilet. We have to realize that newborns simply are not the same as women, teenagers, preschoolers and even two year olds. They can’t even talk, and they definitely aren’t as developed in the brain, completely dependent on an adult to survive they are social and familial parasites. They can’t even keep up with the normal upkeep of the home! So..it’s not like we are dealing with human beings who have moral agency or moral worth or anything. Even great bioethicists like Peter Singer believes that infanticide should be legalized. Not to mention the terrible childhoods that would result after the neonate becomes a person and realizes that he may not have been wanted, or may end up being neglected or abused because his parents were forced to keep him post-birth or were just plain neglected (certainly, it would have been better for him if the neonate had been starved to death through neglect than forced to realize later in life that his parents didn’t love him!), or even adopted out to dysfunctional homes. Look at interroblog here, even he wishes that he would have died before coming to the realization that he was a product of slavery. Infanticide - like abortion - has existed in almost every culture throughout history, often for the same reasons (social, cultural, or financial) as abortion has existed…so…why say that women are competent to decide on abortion but not on infanticide? In fact, being pro-woman, (and pro-child incidentally, since no one would deny that it’s better for an individual not to be here than to suffer for being unwanted!) and pro-choice on the issue of infanticide and abortion is a fundamental issue of private property rights. We must never force women to become parents.
God knows that if it were men who were pregnant and had the tremendous burden of child rearing as women have had historically, the right to abortion *AND* infanticide would have been codified in our human and reproductive rights codes a long time ago! How I hate this patriarchal society!
Amanda, I truly don’t understand your line of reasoning. You are totally correct on abortion, but you ignore the evils of these infanticide laws! You ignore women’s rights on this most important of issues and I’m beginning to wonder whether you harbour some latent (perhaps, subconscious?) feelings of negativity and prejudice towards women who choose (by mistake - and we both know that *everyone* makes mistakes) to give birth to the neonate.
But this isn’t about me, this is about embryos that might become fetuses that might become babies who might grow up to be caring humans.
Some of us think this is about women.
I just wanted to say how nice it was to be able to have this type of debate (at least until about halfway through when jasper stopped by). I think Amanda makes good points but my views are more in line with Lisa KS’s. Also, I used to be one of those “abortion should be legal, but I think it is morally wrong” type people, it took some maturity and perspective to realize the flaws in that reasoning. So people like I was need to be confronted about that belief, but not written off (not that I’m saying that anyone was suggesting such a thing).
But the point where I agree the most is that abortion providers are morally good. I have so much respect for these people and everything they do.
As an aside, I’d love to know which pro-”Moral Good” commenters here are also vegetarians of the “meat is murder” variety….
FSM spare us from pro-life atheists.
Has Raving given in to the religious yet so he can preserve his misogyny? Any bets on how long it’ll take TakeItBack to do the same?
“As an aside, I’d love to know which pro-â€?Moral Goodâ€? commenters here are also vegetarians of the “meat is murderâ€? variety…. ”
Are you implying that if they are, they’re being hypocritical? Or if they aren’t, they’re being hypocritical?
Except that I never came to that conclusion. My point was primarily that pro-lifers are really good at ignoring the number of poor itty-bitty nonbabies that die as the result of miscarriage, since feminists and/or sluts can’t be blamed for that.
How many pro-lifers focus on spreading the availability of quality prenatal care? How many fund research on miscarriage?
I’ve seen lots of crosses in churchyards for “aborted babies.” None for miscarriages.
I’m pro-choice, as I said, but being pro-choice doesn’t mean you have to take joy in the death of fetuses. Doing so just throws fresh meat to the less nuanced on the Right. - Mark Poling
OTOH, one could argue that less nuanced on the Right would argue that if you don’t enjoy killing fetuses, why not make that illegal. One could argue the problem with the abortion debate is that there is no real “pro-abortion” position, so when people reflexively search for the middle ground, the middle ground they are finding is really toward the anti-choice side, whereas if the pro-choice side were the middle ground between pro and anti abortion, those same people would be solidly pro-choice.
*
I am a Pro-Lifer (read Anti-Choice
who beleives that abortion is morally wrong, but still holds that it should be legal. - TakeItBack
How is that anti-Choice then? You think people should have the right to choose whether to commit this moral wrong, eh? (and c.f. my comment above about what is the middle ground). Anyway, as to sex being a choice — yes it is a choice (and this assumes, of course, no rape or coersion). But sometimes it is the moral choice. Coming from a religion where sex is a sacred obligation, while I may have a choice to abstain from sex at specific times, it would be immoral for me and my partner to be permanently celebate. But if we couldn’t afford a kid, what else could we do then? Would the fundies say that if you are poor, you are guaranteed then to sin?
Of course, for the Christian fundies, this isn’t a problem: they believe irredemable (except through the blood of Christ Jesus) sin is inevitable. But that makes for bad legislation. You have a system of laws where everyone is guaranteed to commit a felony? That just isn’t right.
rachel:
jasper:
“everytime you evil womens bleed you are killing a baby!!!”
Crystal Lake:
Single cells are not infants.
Every argument proclaiming abortion to be equivalent to infanticide must show some way to equate infants to single cells. It can’t be done. And thus, you can’t compare abortion to infanticide, because there is clearly a change from one state to another during fetal development.
Yes, I know, there are a lot of people who *claim* they believe that personhood begins at conception (”life” begins preconception), but none of them *act* like that’s the case, until they want to restrict the right of women who do not want to be pregnant. So I think their profession of that belief is a self-serving lie, or a self-deception.
jasper is getting close to hoody levels of boring.
TakeItBack
there is nothing immmoral about removing the potential of a human being growing. You think sex must always result in pregnancy? we think otherwise, we think sex should result in, well, orgasms.
do you mourn after every period, or do you have 20 kids, or do you just not ever have sex?
None of those things happened.
Neither did an abortion*, so why are you so worried about it?
Instead an embryo happened, then a fetus, then a baby, then an adult who actually cares about the health and well being of others.
Other things that didn’t happen: Failure to implant, ectopic pregnancy, interuterine growth failure, obstructed childbirth without technical aid, and numerous other problems that can occur between conception and birth. If any of those had occured, with the POSSIBLE exception of the last, you would have been just as never existent as if your parents had never met.
As others have pointed out, if pro-lifers really thought that every conceptus was a baby and were really worried about their deaths, they’d be less interested in abortion and more interested in preventing miscarriage. Up to 80% of pregnancies fail before they are “clinically evident” (ie the woman never misses a period or shows overt signs of pregnancy). If 80% of babies were dying within a few days after birth, I would expect that the vast majority of people would be very concerned and demand a massive research program directed towards finding out the reason for these deaths and stopping them. I wouldn’t expect most people to ignore these deaths, even if there was a high rate of infanticide. Which is what the pro-life movement is doing, if one takes their world view seriously. All of which leads me to believe that they don’t take the claim that a blastula is a baby very seriously either.
*I know this because we are corresponding via the web and while I might believe in Internet access in Heaven (if I believed in Heaven) and would certainly believe in it (Windows Exploder only) in Hell if I believed in Hell, I refuse to believe in the computers of Limbo. Assuming that aborted fetuses go to Limbo with the unbaptized babies in Christian doctrine.
Diane said: “When an ostensibly liberal, pro-feminist man did NOT support abortion rights, he almost always turned into a conservative, anti-feminist man within five or ten years. I concluded that men who didn’t support abortion didn’t really support women very much, whether they gave lip service to equality or not. Possibly their “pro-feministâ€? stance was simply so that they could get laid more easily. Does anyone else’s experience support this claim?”
I fall into this category, and you are right on most of your points. I would offer a few corrections and insights.
I was pro-choice during my teen and college years, because I was told growing up that it is none of my business what women do with their “fetuses.” To suggest a pro-life stance was to invite pointless and poorly-reasoned argument (and it diminished your chances of taking her out or getting laid).
There was no lip-service to equality, because equality means, or should mean, before the law. It does not (or should not) imply that men and women are the same. They are not, but they are complimentary within the structure of a family (obviously a generalization - for those with ill memories of childhood).
The point is that many boys, told what and within what context to think, eventually discern for themselves (as men) that abortion is not a moral deciscion. Many boys never take the time to do this, as evidenced by the fact that men are pro-choice at higher rates than are women. For me, it hit home when they released the statistic a few years back that we have 45 million less people than we should. Men don’t think about it, becuase they are conditioned to avoid it.
Tell ‘em Steve-Dave
TakeItBack:
Could someone please start numbering these? It’d be nice to set up a website where you could direct them to “www.rebuttal.com/tedious/argument/38″
That “completely innocent potential human being” is a single cell at first. Why are you saying that this single cell has more right to invade a woman’s body than she has to refuse to let it to do so?
You might believe that there’s some moral principle that elevates this particular cell over, say, an E. coli cell, but you have to prove that there is more than just your personal opinion driving it before you can make it illegal.
At some point in time, one can assert that the developing fetus has rights. Viability is a good point to do so; if you want to select an earlier point, you’d better be able to establish why that earlier point is necessary.
See, we live in a society in which the government is not allowed to cause us harm without having a real, legitimate cause to do so. That means no punishing people for performing acts that you can’t show cause real harm. That includes abortion, until you can show it causing real harm.
And that requires proof that a single cell is a person… something that’s impossible to do.
Well, Crystal Lake, we understand *your* reasoning, so the lack of comprehension is sadly, one-sided. You can’t tell the difference between a baby and an embryo. I hope that never results in some tragic episode where you try to pull the latter out of a woman’s uterus so you can cuddle it and coo over its cuteness as it…er, oozes slowly and lifelessly (since it died instantly when not completely enveloped by that’s woman’s body and tied to that woman’s bloodstream 24/7) over the tip of your finger, looking like nothing more than a pencil-tip-sized bloody booger.
Crystal Lake:
Please learn to spell “Amanda.” And I think my previous comment about forced pregnancy (CTRL+F “choosing to be pregnant”) might answer your fake question about infanticide. So might looking up the definition of infanticide, wherein a person is killed. A whole, living, adoptable person, not a clump of rapidly developing cells with a parasitical relationship to its host.
oops. I think I’m getting snarky. Time to take a sabbatical from this thread.
Jasper started out boring, whatwith his miscarriage photos and his refusal to accept reality and virtual hugs. How could any straight man not be thrilled with being clasped to my huge tracts of land?
I ask you.
And Steve-Dave, it STILL isn’t any of your business. Look, I’m terribly sorry you don’t have a uterus, but really. Let.it.go.
They are not, but they are complimentary within the structure of a family
Actually, men and women are not “complimentary within the structure of a family” except in the most literal sense. Studies of children of gay and lesbian couples demonstrate that these children do as well in every measurable way as children of het couples. So there is no mystical “need” for both genders in a family: two parents of either gender, if both are committed and interested parents, is more than adequate. One parent will do quite well in a pinch.
I suppose the degree of inhumanity required to call fetal dismemberment “good” and those doing the dismembering “heroes” is the inevitable consequence of postmodernism taken to its logical extreme.
Amillia Sonja Taylor is a person, yet it is asserted that destroying a fetus that remains in the womb even longer than she did is “a moral good.”
May God have mercy on us all.
Studies of children of gay and lesbian couples demonstrate that these children do as well in every measurable way as children of het couples.
Actually, they do slightly better. As a group they tend to be open to and accepting of human difference at hight levels than their counterparts raised by straight folks, and they also report tending to feel more loved and wanted.
I was pro-choice during my teen and college years, because I was told growing up that it is none of my business what women do with their “fetuses.� To suggest a pro-life stance was to invite pointless and poorly-reasoned argument (and it diminished your chances of taking her out or getting laid).
Diane, S-D’s just made a point that I thought was too snarky to make myself. In my experience, a certain number of those so-called “progressive” pro-choice boys in college were just trying to get into the pants of those hippy chicks.
Yow. I just ended up in moderation, I suspect for using the word “h*ppy.”
Or maybe “ch*ck.”
MAJeff: Good point.
Never mind the last post. Sorry.
The Amynda thing is, I think, supposed to be some sort of joke about feminists and feminism, along the lines of woMAN=woMYN. AMANda vs. AMYNda.
It’s not very funny, but it kept happening over and over by different commenters and conservative bloggers, and I think that has to be the reason.
It does make people look like they just can’t read or spell, though.
So true!
I was at a pro-choice thing before the last DNC - we did canvassing, phone banking, petitioning, visibility, the whole nine yards. Anyway, at a debrief, the most rah-rah of them all (and the first to complain about being tired, hungry, etc) confessed “It’s really good to be in a room with people who are with you on these issues, because sometimes I just watn to say I really DONT think it’s good for young girls to just be taking emergency contraception all the time.” To which i had to roll my eyes and think “you really haven’t thought that one out, have you?” It was just so hypocritical - I think all pro-choice people should come to the work with an ethic of non-judgement at the very least.
Steve-Dave: Do you really want 45 million more people?
Especially if a lot of those 45 million are messed up from having been born as punishment to women who were forced to give birth and raise them.
to Dianne:
yeah, i went to an incredibly liberal college and there were a few guys who resembled Steve-Dave’s rather paternalistic view of women.
it was a pat on the head, a “of course you’re equal, sweetie, just don’t go thinking you can abort my potential progeny, darlin’” kind of condescension. and laws was it stomach-turning.
Every abortion is a negation of potential humanity.
Every pregnancy is the negation of at least 12 potential humans…
I am sorry why should we have 45 million more people?
You obviously know nothing about the rate of maternal death in America before abortion was legal (guess what very few death certificates say botched abortion they usually say something else) and you understand very little about who has abortions when and why they have them.
Often times women have abortions and then later in life go on to have more children. If they have the first child before they are financially ready they may not go on to have those additional children at all.
This type of post is not even a serious argument. The central problem with it is that it assumes the main objection to abortion, that unborn children are living human beings deserving the right to life, is irrelevant and therefore does not even begin to address it, replacing it with self-righteous platitudes about “well-being” (not to mention the wild anti-Christian generalizations in the addendum).
The reason pro-lifers and many pro-choicers have qualms about abortion is because of the idea that individual human lives, in whatever stage of development, are worthy of consideration and protection because of their humanness.
Until hard-core pro-choicers are willing to honestly engage that argument, they will be forever dancing the solitary dance of preening moral superiority, unable to understand that to the objective outsider, they come off like Elaine in Seinfeld.
Quite right, of course Diane…”the most literal” sense. Do you mean the complimentary organs, mom teaching boys and girls to be nurturing when the situation requires, or dad teaching sons when nurturing ends and protection/defense/aggression must begin? Snivelry. Male and female are not interchangable. The majority of people understand this to be true, but please continue to deny it.
Lucizoe - lacking a womb does not (or should not) remove a man from the decision to abort his child. Agreed that it is not his to carry, but leaving him out entirely is wrong.
Why?
So Steve-Dave: Correct me if I am wrong, but you spent your college years hiding your misogyny so that you could fuck the shit out of as many women (and possibly impregnate them) as possible. Now for whatever reason, you have become an anti-abortionist, condemning the very same women you stuck your dick into with impugnity in college. They are WHORES and should PAY for opening their WHORE legs.
Makes a lot of sense to me. Douchebag.
And while i’m at it, just glancing at the most recent posts -
Phoenician in a time of Romans makes littel sense. The negation of 12 potential lives by a pregnancy? Well, that assumes you’re going to abort them or freeze the embryos for some later purpose, and that the couple is not using birth control of any kind. It’s the kind of comment that looks clever just after it’s typed, but then fails to impress anyone else because it’s transparently loopy from an objective perspective. I sympathize from all my creative writing classes as a student.
ellenbrenna might want to go back and research the maternal death numbers. Of course the real problem with her argument is that the very context she puts it in is unconfirmable. Apologies for the comparison, but like a good conspiracy theory such arguments rely on evidence that cannot be obtained. The death certificates didn’t include “botched abortion” - OK - how do we know then, beside scatteshot anecdotal evidence that can’t even begin to generate real numbers or proof? As for an extra 45 million people, you miss the point of the pro-life argument. The argument is that we DID have them…and then we killed them. To get to the philosophical point though, why should it matter or not whether YOU want another 45 million people? What should matter is whether THEY want to live or not. Even more crippling to such statements is the idea that 45 million is some sort of magical number - that everyone who had an abortion was absolutely right as a result, even if they no longer think so themselves.
Fiannly (cause I’m out of time) Sabotabby assumes way too much. The kids will all be messed up? Let’s let them find out thank you very much. They’d get the same chance you had at least. As for the idea of childbirth as “punishment,” that beggars the imagination. How about “responsibility?”
I should add as a general point and refutation that most pro-lifers I know are for dead-beat dad laws, for father responsibility, and for punishing males who take advantage of females sexually. Strangely enough, it’s the pro-choice males who women need to watch out for. For many of them, abortion is just another tool in support of the wild life.
The reason pro-lifers and many pro-choicers have qualms about abortion is because of the idea that individual human lives, in whatever stage of development, are worthy of consideration and protection because of their humanness.
Until hard-core pro-choicers are willing to honestly engage that argument, they will be forever dancing the solitary dance of preening moral superiority, unable to understand that to the objective outsider, they come off like Elaine in Seinfeld.
Here’s how I see it:
If the woman inside whose body the fetus exists says ‘It’s a baby,’ then it’s a baby.
If the woman inside whose body the fetus exists says ‘It’s a parasite,’ then it’s a parasite.
The REAL problem is that a lot of people don’t want to give women the right to decide.
Let’s say a woman on her way to an abortion clinic gets hit by a truck and loses the baby.
Can she sue the truck driver for killing her ‘baby’? Yes!
Because until SHE undergoes the procedure, she should have the right to change her mind about whether the fetus is a baby or a parasite.
Religions and governments don’t want to give women that power.
They want ONE definition to squeeze ALL women into.
But that’s just not practical, nor desirable.
Is a fetus a ‘baby’ or a ‘parasite’?
It’s up to the woman.
Or it should be.
Steve “leaving him out is entirely wrong”
So, forced pregnancy is the punishment for being a WOMAN who gets laid, but not for a man (he was just sewing his wild oats, pretending to be a feminist to get some pussy)….however, if he deigns to be so gracious as to decide to assert control over her uterus, he should be totally welcomed.
Um, no.
I’m pro-choice because I respect all the trouble and risk my mother went through to give birth to me, and I wouldn’t want to force it on anyone. I’m also against forced abortion, like they have in China. Even if the women will die, she shouldn’t be forced to have an abortion.
They’re fetuses. They neither want to live nor do they want to die. They’re not capable of wanting anything.
The “45 million more people” trope is such bad logic, since it assumes that every woman who has had an abortion would have had an extra child for each abortion. This doesn’t follow. Simply put, the abortion rate has no obvious correlation to the actual number of children women go on to have in their lives. Like ellenbrenna noted, the fact that a woman has had an abortion doesn’t necessarily change the total number of children she decides to bear in her lifetime. A woman who aborts a particular pregnancy is as likely as not to go on to have children later. She will not, however, necessarily have *fewer* children than she would have had but for the abortion. She may in fact have *more* children than she might have had otherwise, especially in which an abortion saves a woman’s life or fertility, thereby allowing her to bear children that she would not otherwise have been able to bear.
Who, I didn’t say that they would all be messed up. I said that a lot of them would be. They wouldn’t have the same chance that I had, because I was raised by a woman who chose to risk her life and health to have me. I would have to think that my mother, whom I love very much, should be forced into sexual slavery just so that little ol’ snowflake me could have “a chance.”
If you want to talk about “responsibility”: I don’t see what is irresponsible about having an abortion.
Head hurts- infanticide is against the law because in pretty much every jurisdiction on the planet a child becomes a citizen at birth and all the laws as apply to citizens apply to it. That children die of preventable causes is a stain and a hurting upon any civilized nation. That said, a blastocyt is a group of mindless cells without any jurisdictional protections and at the total mercy of its host. That host is subject to a myriad of events that may or may not make allowing the guest a safe haven a positive choice. An abortion can become a moral good because it prevents greater harm.
As with most things, an action like an abortion is moral or immoral based on the harm it prevents. I cannot judge those situations for anyone other than myself and I am pro-choice. Denying people the ability to make a moral choice by instituting laws to prevent that choice causes harm by removing a person’s ability to take responsibilty and so harming all of society and therefore I believe that the pro-life stance is inherently immoral.
Trying to equate infanticide and abortion in a modern, technological world is just stupid.
‘Bout F’n Time - Your premise is totally irrational. The baby is only connected to the woman. Otherwise, it’s an independent life form. You are arguing for definitions based on circumstance, not on factual, objective standards. Can you possibly imagine what a broader legal framework based on that principle would look like?
Such relativism defies the simple and decent premise of fairness and justice. One person gets to decide whether another is human or not because of circumstance? No, the question should be, who are living human beings based on a fair objective standard. Otherwise, maybe someone decides down the line that because you’re their employee or constituent or wife that they can define your humanity and use such a definition to decide whether you live or die.
This is not about withholding some kind of choice from women. It’s about protecting the rights of existing human beings to the most fundamental right of all. That women bear the brunt of childbirth is undeniable, but such a weight does not give them the right to judge the value as a human of the child they carry. That assumption underlies your argument and it is deeply flawed.
Joy wrote - “They’re fetuses. They neither want to live nor do they want to die. They’re not capable of wanting anything.”
Joy - read up a bit more on fetal development and abortion. Yes fetal cognition varies through the process of development but it is there and quite early. Every seen Silent Scream - the fetus in that film reacts to the abortion procedure quite specifically. It attempts to resist. Wanting to live and not be in pain is still a want, even if the cognition is less developed than the supposedly well-developed cognition of the adults performing the abortion. Fetuses do want to live. They connect themselves to the uterine wall for that very purpose.
You are trying to use the difficulty in determining fetal cognition to your advantage, but you miss the point. Pro-choicers ignore the human fetus as human (even determinedly using terms like fetus to avoid inadvertently humanizing a human fetus). The fact remains though that the human fetus is an individual, living human life. It’s rights and needs must be considered, even if it’s specific wants are difficult to discern. The attempt to disregard the humanness and the inherent rights of humans as applied to human fetuses is what pro-lifers are aruging against. your feeble attempt to assert the non-humaness of these fetus is hardly convincing.
Lisa,
I think you overestimate how often anyone was gracious enough to couple with me (always safe, I might add). Besides, they were using me, all empowered and all. I am no misogynist, which implies a hatred of women. Rather, I prefer to see woman and man - equally - bearing, raising, and educating the next generation of Americans. Douchebag indeed.
Please move past the “population bomb” attitudes. The only group at qualifies as being too munerous in this country is the illegal community.
Tell ‘em Steve-Dave!
who:
“That women bear the brunt of childbirth is undeniable, but such a weight does not give them the right to judge the value as a human of the child they carry.”
so therefore the state should force all women who face an unwanted pregnancy to carry it to term and hope for the best?
In the US four children are abused to death every day. In the US the leading cause of death among young pregnant women is homicide.
These are the realities in a country that claims to be a majority Christian nation.
Where do we spend our energies? Disputing the right of a woman to choose.
This is a sad commentary on our society.
So long as women control the means of production, there will be those trying to wrest the control from them.
Why do living men and fetuses get more humanness than women?
and Steve-Dan, exactly how many children have you personally born?
Who,
Look up the definition of individual and you will see that what you are saying is impossible.
sorry, I meant Steve-Dave.
Forced or coerced abortion has also happened under U.S. jurisdiction. See this report for details: http://www.msmagazine.com/spring2006/paradise_full.asp
I still don’t see how abortion is anything other than morally neutral. It’s a form of controlling reproduction. Some forms of birth control are better than others in certain cases. For example high doses of hormones will usually pose slightly more health risks to a woman than using condoms. I’ve never been able to use the pill myself because of a few weird side effects.
An abortion, as in invasive surgical procedure, is usually not a good form of birth control but sometimes it’s the best form. For example, in the case of a friend of my mother’s who had a partial-birth abortion, her fetus had no brain and carrying it to term would have killed her. Contrary to pro-life propaganda, rare partial-birth abortions are the most beneficial and crucial kind of abortions…
Is anyone else enjoying Steve-Dave’s sign-off as much as I am? I think everyone should have one*.
Testify Ilyka!
*not really
Reflexes and unconscious bodily responses have nothing to do with a conscious desire to live. You could just as easily say that the fact that my blood clots when I get a scratch means that I want to live. Except, well, it doesn’t.
BTW, “humaness” has nothing to do with the reality that fetuses don’t care whether or not they’re aborted.
Who
Repeat after me:
A clump of cells is not a human being
A clump of cells is not a human being
A clump of cells is not a human being
Everything you declared is just your own philosophical outlook. A blastocyst attaches to the uterine wall due to a biochemical process, not an act of volition. A fetus cannot “want” anything, and the rest you’re just making up. Silent Scream has its own problems of dishonesty.
The bottom line is that a woman’s body is hers, period. It doesn’t matter if abortion is a moral good or not, a woman’s body is hers. Your philosophy or religion is irrelevant, and has no business being made into law to assuage your version of morality.
Sabotabby - Point taken on the “all” but you don’t really answer the crux of what I’m saying. Let’s put it this way: Which ones will be messed up? Do we say, “OK - rich folk don’t get abortions, but poor people do because, well, hell, we know they’ll be criminals or destitute anyway?” Of course not, and I’m not saying you’re arguing that specifically. However, when you justify the killing of an unborn human on the basis that they *might* be “messed-up” you are delving into the world of broad generalizations. Generalizations are bad things because they assume that something that might be true of some members of a group are probably true of most members of a group. There’s no way to truly know in this case though.
I want to go a step further though. Who gives you or me the right to decide who is “messed-up” or not? How many of those 45 million do you think would have committed suicide? I once had a pro-choice person make the same argument to me and I asked him if he would rather have not been born. He had the audacity to say yes, and I had the decency not to ask why he was still around.
Lastly, you write “I would have to think that my mother, whom I love very much, should be forced into sexual slavery just so that little ol’ snowflake me could have “a chance.â€? This is a huge assumption on your part, in part because your mother, I’m assuming, wasn’t forced into sexual slavery in regards to your birth, yes? Yet, here you are! Also, abortion and preganancy themselves are not sexual specifically, but product of sexual behavior. So it’s a mischaracterization as well. The sex is assumed of course, but if someone forcibly committed surgery on your mother, implanting a zygote in her, would that be sexual too? The use of the words then are desired to have an emotional effect (Who doesn’t recoil at sexual slavery? Wait, don’t answer that…) but they don’t really describe the outcome of a legal regimen aimed at preserving the rights of unborn children/ human fetuses. Even if the notion of sexual slavery in this context bore any resemblance to reality, your prescription for this is the deliberate killing of the unborn child. We don’t even execute rapists in the US any more. How do we square that?
Lastly, you miss the point about “responsibility.” We are legally required to be responsible for our children in all but two cases in the US - adoption and abortion. Both are abandonments of that legal responsibility. One one though is truly responsible, because it at least gives a child a chance.
LCforevah - Repeat after me. The human fetus at its earliest stage of development is an individual life form, contianing human DNA, developing constantly into that which we are both now. It will continue to develop fully if uninterrupted, provided that it is able to attach itself to the uterine wall.
The concept of want is a very tricky one. You and I are also massive complex collections of chemical reactions. Some people would argue that your wants are only different from the chemical actions of that fetus (actions which benefit and continue the life, if you want to think about it from an evolutionary standpoint) in terms of their complexity.
My point was to draw out the philosophical implications of want. Did you answer my post because you “wanted to” or because you are chemically conditioned to do so.
Now, full disclosure, I’m no materialist. However, your characterizations and assumptions regarding “want” and the nature of the fetus are totally self-serving, as the conclusion of your comment, which merely asserts a right, demonstrates. You defy philosophy and religion in the argument but those two little bugaboos are the fundamental basis for all law.
Such relativistic thinking has no foundation then. If we can’t debate the philosophy or the religion or the logic of it all (which those two areas relate strongly too) then it’s just you shouting in your loudest voice, “I’m right and you’re wrong and it doesn’t matter why or if I justify it.”
I can’t imagine a grown-up finding that to be a satisfying worldview.
Phoenician in a time of Romans makes littel sense. The negation of 12 potential lives by a pregnancy?
Who, allow me to introduce you to the facts of life - a pregnant woman does not menstruate. Nor does one breastfeeding.
As a rough rule of thumb, we can guess that each pregnancy means at least a year without the release of an egg from mother’s ovaries. That’s twelve other chances for another human being gone forever. Each person represents the negation of 12 potential lives.
Which all points out how foolish being overly sentimental about “potential” actually is.
Listen YooWho, Not true.
A fetus isn’t a child, nor is it independent. In present society we frown on infancide because a baby is physically separate from the mother and can be handed to someone else who can take care of it.
Fetuses are parasites. Temporary parasites, but still parasites. If we had tapeworms that incorporated sperm DNA and egg DNA together into a zygote, then lived as long as possible within the woman, growing slowly bigger and bigger and leaching off more and more nutrients from the woman, would anyone blink at getting it out?
(I’m so hoping for a uterine replicator to be developed soon, simply for the yowls on all sides.)
therefore, who, do you recommend that the state force every woman who faces an unwanted pregnancy regardless of her circumstance to carry that pregnancy to term and hope for the best?
i’m curious what anti-choice folks think the world would look like if abortion were once again illegal. i mean, would it look like el salvador? where women are criminalized and sent to prison if a doctor finds, upon examination, that she had possibly undergone a past abortive procedure.
would it look like ethiopia? where abortion is illegal, but staggering numbers of women and children are quite literally starving to death.
Who — the fact is a human being does not have the right to live by parasitizing off another human being. You do not have the right to take your mother’s kidney if you need one and she doesn’t want to give it to you. Likewise, a fetus does not have the right to live in the body of a woman who does not want it there.
It’s not about whether or not she had sex. In fact she could have consented to the pregnancy and wanted it, and then change her mind, because the total question is: Does a person have the right to live inside me if I’ve decided I don’t want them there? Does the person have the right to drink my blood and feed on my food like a tapeworm, colonize my body with their hormones, and give me high blood pressure and sugar to increase their food supply (this, by the way, is probably the cause of pre-eclampsia and gestational diabetes, according to the latest research), if I don’t want them to do that? If I have to kill them to make them stop, do I have that right? The answer must be yes or we have nothing. You must own your body, or someone else owns you.
A fetus is a parasite? OMG!
We are talking about a baby here.
If “it” is not a baby, then the woman is not pregnant.
What about a female fetus/baby’s right of choice?
All I read in these posts is that some value convenience over human dignity.
There is solace in knowing that those who hold this position won’t be reproducing at any great rate. It is an evolutionary dead-end.
History, not to mention God, won’t be too kind to those who diminish human life.
a fetus is a potential baby. a baby is a potential toddler. a toddler is a potential kid. a kid is a potential teenager. a teenager is a potential adult. an adult is a potential cancer victim begging someone to give them enough drugs to end their pain.
so. really. we’re potentially preventing a grown, not cute adult from a painful death by cancer. fetuses *want* us to abort them.
ahahahaha!
There’s not even a decent response to this kind of stupidity.
The fetal humanity debate in picture form:
Do you even know how to read? Countless people have pointed out this is complete bullshit. Women who have abortions do NOT have any less children than women who don’t.
Look, I’m terribly sorry you don’t have a uterus, but really. Let.it.go. - lucizoe
Must. Resist. Urge. to. Quote. Life of Brian.
What, no direct linking? fine…
http://img178.imageshack.us/img178/9600/11134f1a87428e3e220203ent1.gif
you know honestly, all squeamishness and moral relativism regarding abortion aside, i shudder to think what life would be like for women if the procedure were straight-up banned.
i mean, folks far more articulate than i have said it before, but i’ll say it again- banning the procedure doesn’t make it magically go away. i’m assuming that even folks who are *pro-life* realize that. so what is the next step then? criminalizing the women who seek abortions as well as the doctors who provide them?
Too true. I have borne none, but am fathering two (and lobbying for more!). This is the part where someone says “you can’t have an opinion on the war, because you never served,” right?
Steve-Dave is a regular character in some of the best movies to be found. Watch your Kevin Smith people!
Disclaimer: Kevin Smith would in no way endorse my use of his character’s name. Kevin would likely engage in long abject apologies and statements of support for Amanda over me.
Thebewilderness - are you suggesting that Christians murder their pregnant wives and girlfriends? Even in a majority Christian nation, there are those who are not. This board is full of them. Most of your post sounds a lot like the old line, “Iwouldn’t ever want to bring a child into this terrible world.” A very defeatist attitude…
You are right, thre are many more visible and prevelant problems, but perhaps none so important as what qualifies as a human (and thus worthy of rights and protections).
Tell ‘em Steve-Dave!
The blastocyst is completely dependent on the uterine attachment. It cannot develop into anything without it. It is not equivalent to a baby, it is NOT a separate life form.
A woman has the right to determine for herself what to do with her body. This is not selfishness, this is one of those inalienable rights that seem to be so pesky to religionists. I am a naturalist. There is absolutely no proof of the supernatural, and therefore I pay no attention to it.
Go feed the poor, tend to the sick, help workers become unionized–in short, do something besides trying to invade women’s bodies with your untenable beliefs.
Go pick up David Eller’s “Natural Atheism”. It’s an investigation by an anthropologist of the history of belief. You’ll be interested to know that most of the world’s tribes and societies have been atheistic and got along just fine without gods and goddesses and the need to worship.
“History, not to mention God, won’t be too kind to those who diminish human life.”
As long as we’re talking about wars and civil rights, I’m in complete agreement.
If you’re aiming that at women who have abortions - bullshit…
Thank you, MikeEss
All I read in these posts is that some value convenience over human dignity.
And a woman’s dignity is…. oh that’s right. Never mind.
History, not to mention God, won’t be too kind to those who diminish human life.
Indeed. Maybe think about that for a minute.
Also: David Eller’s “Natural Atheism�.
Sounds intriguing.
Who – I don’t justify abortion on the basis of who will be messed up. My justification for abortion is bi-fold: First, I don’t believe that the State has the right to control a woman’s body, and second, I don’t believe that a fetus is entitled to human rights that no other human has (the right to use another’s body against her will). I was simply pointing out that many of these 45 million people that Steve-Dave thinks that the earth so desperately needs are likely to have a great deal of issues stemming from the unsavory measures that would be no doubt required to prevent their mothers from aborting them.
The fact that my standards of “messed up” probably differ from yours is also irrelevant. The only person’s judgment required here is that of the mother.
This is a huge assumption on your part, in part because your mother, I’m assuming, wasn’t forced into sexual slavery in regards to your birth, yes? Yet, here you are!
You have missed my point spectacularly. My mother willingly chose to give birth to me. She could have chosen to abort me instead. The fact that she didn’t attests to the fact that she was not forced into sexual slavery.
I am not so selfish a person to insist that my mother should have endured a pregnancy that she didn’t want (especially one that almost killed her!) just so that I could be born. Would you have wanted your mother to endure that for you? Would you want your sister, or your daughter, put through the agony of pregnancy and childbirth, if she didn’t want to endure it? Would you be willing to risk their lives for a fetus that you don’t even know?
If you would put your mother, your sister, or your daughter through that sort of hell, I humbly submit that you don’t care about them very much at all.
Your bizarre hypothetical zygote-implantation scenario makes no sense to me.
We are legally required to be responsible for our children in all but two cases in the US - adoption and abortion.
It’s besides the point, but I’m not American.
Both are abandonments of that legal responsibility. One one though is truly responsible, because it at least gives a child a chance.
By that logic, I am denying a chance to a child every month that I’m not pregnant! Sorry; I don’t owe potential children anything. My only concern is for actual people.
Boy, there are a lot of Sperm Worshippers suddenly on my blog. Anyone who tells me that I was a fetus once wah wah is being an asshole. Anyone who says, “But that’s a potential life!” needs to get off the computer and get to fucking. Your sperm cells and the potential babies from them are dying as we speak, murderers.
In the real world, I—not the potential me, but the real me—am a human being, as is every woman. Why we aren’t a part of the discussion about “life” boggles the mind.
Just kidding, no it doesn’t. There’s a flagrant disregard on all levels in our society for the idea that women are anything but baby machines and sperm receptacles.
Joe:
Regarding the diminuation of human life, and the abortion debate, I discuss that here.
doremi
One of my little jokes when people stutter and ask me, “Are you, are you really an, an atheist?” I put up my right hand and say, “I really am, I swear to God!”
This points out how hard it is to give up childhood conditioning and create a new behavior and vocabulary for an atheistic, naturalist life.
“Natural Atheism” doesn’t just go through an historical rendering of atheism, it also helps the individual establish a protocol for becoming a more natural atheist. Very few books out there help to do that, and as much as I admire Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet, and Sam Harris, none of their works is about helping to become an aware atheist in everyday life. David Eller’s book does just that.
“That “completely innocent potential human beingâ€? is a single cell at first. Why are you saying that this single cell has more right to invade a woman’s body than she has to refuse to let it to do so?”
-LongHairedWeirdo
You just compared pregnancy to an invasion. That is a new low even for a Cynic.
As for your argument my concern was not with whether or not a single cell constitutes a child, because clearly technically it isnt. My concern is with reproductive responsibility. If you aren’t in a position to have and properly care for a child take measures to prevent an unwanted pregnancy. That would be the most selfless moral decision you could make. Sacrifising a small piece of yourself so the tough decision of terminating a potential human life is not necessary. I really do not understand how that idea is something everyone can not seem to agree with. At very least admit that you are unwilling to give up sex for the sake of a human life. If you were being honest with yourself thats what it comes down to.
Again I am an Atheist so please do not suggest that I am forcing my Religious view point on others. This is my personal moral philosophy and all I want is a decent logical rebuttal or maybe some agreement. And please spare me the slippery slope masterbation argument. That is so tired.
You are arguing for definitions based on circumstance, not on factual, objective standards. Can you possibly imagine what a broader legal framework based on that principle would look like?
Exactly!
I am arguing for SUBJECTIVE standards.
Who decides if its a fetus or a parasite?
The woman whose body it’s inside of.
I’d imagine a legal framework based on that principle would look sane.
Who:
No. A single cell is deserving of no consideration or protection by virtue of being human. Period.
Show me a certain level of brain development, and then I’ll admit a moral issue has arisen.
However, if you chopped off my head, and kept the rest of my body alive through a heart-lung machine and some form of artificial nerve stimulus, I would be dead. Anything you did to the the decapitated body would be, at worse, “mutilation of a corpse”, not “murder”.
Just because some self-righteous people have chosen to claim that “humanness” creates a moral issue doesn’t make it true.
Do you mean the complimentary organs, mom teaching boys and girls to be nurturing when the situation requires, or dad teaching sons when nurturing ends and protection/defense/aggression must begin? Snivelry. Male and female are not interchangable
I mean that the genitalia are different and in some senses “matching”. But PVI isn’t the only way to have sex and isn’t even the only way to produce a blastula that might, with a good deal of luck, become a baby some day. In all other ways, individual variation matters more than gender. Just having a dick doesn’t guarentee that a person will be protective/aggressive/etc. Just having a vagina doesn’t make someone submissive and nurturing. Just having opposite parts is not enough to make a couple decent parents. Even if “most people”, including, I suppose, you, believe it does.
Thank you, ‘Bout F’n Time.
no one is saying you can’t have an opinion on abortion, Steve-Dave, due to your gender. after all, opinions are a lot like a certain part of the body, etc. etc.
however, i find it tedious that a good number of the fine folks who are in charge of making public policy decisions regarding pregnancy and reproductive freedom are those who will never in their lives face an unwanted pregnancy due to their own biological limitations.
i made the chickenhawk/armchair quarter analogy upthread and i stand by it. just as a lot of chickenhawks sit around glorifying the war in iraq behind the safety of their computer screens, pro-life men feel as though they can project their own set of morality and beliefs onto pregnant women when they themselves will never really experience what pregnancy and all that surrounds it entails.
it’s risk-free for men to be pro-life- you get the benefit of being all moral without actually having to be faced with the reality of something happening to your body that you can’t control.
just as it’s risk-free to be all gung-ho about the iraq war when you’re a civillian and you know you’ll never have to serve.
Fetuses do want to live. They connect themselves to the uterine wall for that very purpose.
ahahahaha!
There’s not even a decent response to this kind of stupidity.
How about: “Tapeworms do want to live. They connect themselves to the intestinal lining for that very purpose.” Both statements are equally true (or false.)
TakeItBack:
(in response to me, saying “That “completely innocent potential human being� is a single cell at first. Why are you saying that this single cell has more right to invade a woman’s body than she has to refuse to let it to do so?�
No. It’s not a comparison. If a woman does not want to be pregnant, then that cell’s attempting to attach *is* an invasion. She has a right not to be pregnant if she doesn’t want to be; it supercedes the right of that cell (cell cluster, actually) to attach to her.
Your attempt to create an issue out of nothing isn’t going to work with me.
So, for example, use an IUD, which prevents that cell cluster from implanting in the uterus? That prevents an unwanted pregnancy!
Hold the phone! First, you say “prevent unwanted pregnancy”. Now, a woman isn’t pregnant until that “potential human being” implants. Preventing it from implanting prevents pregnancy.
Now, you move the goal posts and are asking me to feel sympathy for an undifferentiated (or “barely differentiated) clump of cells that wasn’t all that likely to implant in the first place. Sorry, no, I won’t.
Sex is more important than the fate of a few clumps of cells dying. You can’t compress personhood into small clumps of cells by any rational basis.
I’m sorry, but you’re being an idiot, atheist or not. You are making a positive claim: that I must be concerned about a clump of special cells, possibly differentiated, but not very. You have to establish that claim; you can’t say “if you can’t prove me*wrong*, you have to accept I’m *right*”.
Until you prove your point - that these special cells are worthy of consideration - you have no basis to make any demands for their protection. That they have human DNA is meaningless… you can scrape human DNA off of my cheek, but it’s not *me*.
Bout F’in Time:
Exactly. I have two children who were very much wanted. However, if I were to get pregnant again, I would run, not walk, to the nearest clinic to get rid of it. Because I do not want more children, and even if I did, I do not want to be pregnant again. I didn’t particularly enjoy the experience when it was something I wanted, I certainly wouldn’t do it for a kid I didn’t even want. Period and end of discussion. The husband does not get any say in this decision, either. We can discuss whether or not to have more children (i.e., adopt if we decide more kids would be good for us), but the decision to be pregnant is mine and mine alone. If he wants more kids that are his, then he can have them himself or find someone willing, because I certainly won’t do it. And if that sounds callous, then oh well, I really don’t care.
And for all the men who think that abortion is wrong or should be illegal or whatever, I say that you don’t get a say in the matter until you grow a uterus, ovaries, and all the requisite plumbing. Otherwise, keep your opinion to yourself, asshole.
Except when the embryo attaches itself to the urterine wall, it’s not even a fetus yet. The image of a clump of cells grabbing on the the uterine wall, consiously, no less, is kind of amusing. Does anyone actually believe this nonsense?
No indeed, the point I was making is that I would prefer that the children took priority over the blastocyst.
This hue and cry over women controlling the means of production instead of being subject to the dictates of the state seems rediculous to me. Particularly in light of the murder rate of pregnant women.
Snort. You are a spectacular idiot, who, I’m guessing, has never been pregnant before. Until the baby is born and the umbilical cord is tied off, a fetus is not independent, it is totally dependent on the woman for its life. It is not merely a connection; it is the entire environment of the placenta in the uterus- the nourishment a woman puts in her body, her body’s ability to pump enough blood, produce the right hormones at the right time and in the right amount, etc.
See, by definition, a fetus is not independent, which is why the conflation of abortion and infanticide fails on a logical level. Sad that forced-birthers see no difference between a clump of cells/fetus and an actually independent, living child. Really, it says so much about the “pro-life” position- they don’t care about actual lives at all.
BTW, are you, perhaps, male?
Well, given that abortion (and other forms of contraception) and infanticide have existed in almost every* culture in recorded history, I’d say that history has decided that the value of human life is contingent upon context.
*I’m am not aware of any society that these weren’t present, but allow for the possibility that there may be at least one society where they did not exist.
Quite right, of course Diane…�the most literal� sense. Do you mean the complimentary organs, mom teaching boys and girls to be nurturing when the situation requires, or dad teaching sons when nurturing ends and protection/defense/aggression must begin? Snivelry. Male and female are not interchangable. The majority of people understand this to be true, but please continue to deny it.
Spare us. Mothers are as responsible for the protection of the family as fathers…perhaps more so, given the relative amounts of time men and women spend in the home.
And the idea that daughters should not be taught home defense skills is simply idiotic.
The world has changed…and as it happens, greater numbers of women are establishing their homes pre-marriage and family. Giving our daughters the skills to defend themselves and their households is the obligation of every parent.
Ha, DAS
“Don’t you oppress me!”
“I’m not oppressing you, Stan. You haven’t got a womb!”
How is this an argument against abortion? An abortion is a measure taken to prevent an unwanted pregnancy- in this case, prevent it from continuing.
Assuming your argument is serious, and not a bad faith attempt to make your forced-birth position seem reasonable, let’s do a little thought experiment:
A heterosexual, married couple are not ready for children- they barely make enough money to pay their bills and afford food- but she is on hormonal birth control (provided by her employee health insurance) and he uses condoms zealously. They never, ever have unprotected sex, but oops, she got pregnant anyway. The woman took all reasonable precaution to avoid pregnancy, but is still in need of an abortion.
Should this woman have a right to an abortion? Or is it your position that this couple should have remained celibate until they could afford children? If yes, do you think that divorce is a more acceptable social problem than abortion?
Let’s take this argument to its logical (and elitist) extreme: Should all poor people, regardless of circumstance, be forced to remain celibate because they cannot afford the expense of a child? if yes, why do you hate the poor?
You do realize that no matter how you answer, you are just a douchebag, right?
…God… won’t be too kind to those who diminish human life.
Anti-choice purple unicorns are upset, as well.
Oh, and didn’t God tell some of his followers to perform abortions?
Take a look at Numbers 5:12-31 if you don’t know your own Bible.
Women accused of adultery are to be forced to drink holy water and, if guilty, their bellies will burst open, regardless of a fetus being inside.
Or does God only kill the women who didn’t get pregnant from their adultery?
There’s more sanctioned fetus slaying in the Bible if you really want me to go into gory details.
“Just having a dick doesn’t guarentee that a person will be protective/aggressive/etc. Just having a vagina doesn’t make someone submissive and nurturing.”
Your low-brow choice of wording aside, I think you misunderstood my point. The primary role of the man is to protect and provide for other members of the family, tribe, whatever. Of course not everyone falls into these roles, but that does not mean they are invalid. I specifically did not say or imply submissiveness was a proper trait for women. I know many men who are submissive to their wives. Hell I am too most of the time. But it is the role of the parent to teach a child what an appropriate response is to a given situation. Boys are less likely to learn defense/agression - which is at times necessary - from mom than they are from dad.
“Just having opposite parts is not enough to make a couple decent parents. Even if “most peopleâ€?, including, I suppose, you, believe it does.”
This is an overly simplified analysis of what I said, which again leads me to believe that you did not understand the point. That is like saying just because someone can buy a car, does not mean that one can operate it safely. How insightful.
Plenty of successful, inteligent people came from less than desireable circumstances, my wife and my mother are two of them. Good parenting transcends sex, and I did not make the argument that same sex couples should not raise children. My original point, if you recall, was that male and female traits are ultimately complimentary. They are not always complimentary right away. Marriage can take time. Sons learn valuable lessons from their fathers (such as, to put themselves in between their loved one and danger), and mothers teach their daughters things that no father could.
Tell ‘em Steve-Dave!
The truth is that there are far fewer differences between the genders than “complementarians” want to believe. In fact, the range of “differences” is greater within the genders than between them.
What is the man protecting the other members of the family, tribe, whatever from?
OK, did I miss it? You can’t do a proper search on this blog without it hosing your browser, so I gave up searching on “jasper” - but did this thread crowd actually miss asking him the obvious question? Or is the obvious question just too done-to-death to provide any entertainment?
Well I’ll ask anyway - Jasper, if women are to be refused abortions for making the decision to have sex, then surely you are in favor of abortion for rape victims, since they did not wish to have sex. If you deny abortion to rape victims then you can retire your “bitch deserves to be punished for having sex” argument.
There’s still the “look at the ugly photos and become anti-abortion” approach.
What is the man protecting the other members of the family, tribe, whatever from?
From the men from other families/tribes/whatever - why do you ask?…
:)
Well to be fair MikeEss, Steve-Dan did say that protecting his family was a man’s PRIMARY role. Attacking another man’s family tribe whatever could be like, his secondary role.
;)
God didn’t seem to be too concerned about the fetuses in Sodom and Gomorrah either. Or all the fetuses in the world except Mrs. Noah’s.
It’s pretty much impossible for an atheist to lose an argument with a believer if he/she simply quotes from the Bible.
The primary role of the man is to protect and provide for other members of the family, tribe, whatever.
You could make a certain argument for “protect”, but actually in the basic hunter-gatherer tribe (ie how people have lived for most of human history), women were usually the main providers of food as they were usually the gatherers while men brought in occasional food by hunting. At least that is what anthropologists currently believe based on available research. i would imagine that quite frequently women participated in protecting the tribe as well. Didn’t Scynthian (?spelling) ride and fight with the men. Certainly, a woman will fight to protect her family or tribe. Some women will even go to war to protect Exxon-Mobile’s profit margin, thus disproving any potential claim of moral superiority that women might ever have aspired to.
Boys are less likely to learn defense/agression - which is at times necessary - from mom than they are from dad.
Want to present any actual evidence of this assertion? Preferably with links to peer reviewed articles, but I’ll settle for wiki.
Sons learn valuable lessons from their fathers (such as, to put themselves in between their loved one and danger),
Because, clearly, no woman would ever put herself between a loved one and danger. Particularly not if the loved one was her child. (/sarcasm)
and mothers teach their daughters things that no father could.
And I’m not even going to speculate about what Secrets That Man Was Not Meant to Know that you think that women pass to their daughters.
You have yet to give the slightest bit of evidence that women and men are not essentially interchangable as parents. I admit that I have been lazy with links, but if you’re interested I’d be happy to provide links to studies demonstrating that outcomes for children raised by gay and lesbian parents are equal or superior to outcomes for children raised by straight parents, if you are interested. And if children raised by two women or two men do at least as well as children raised by one parent of each gender, where is your argument about complementarity?
And, of course, very few men or women in first world countries are called upon to physically defend their families on a regular basis. Indeed, the willingness to get into a fight readily is a negative selective trait in current society. (Men or women who get into barfights and end up in the hospital or jail have fewer reproductive possibilities than those who keep calm and talk their way out of situations. So maybe the “male” role is obsolete. Fortunately, many men are just as capable as women of teaching their children to be sensitive, friendly, and nurturing. Otherwise, they’d be kind of obsolete.
RE: children–apparently Steve-Dave is (lobbying for more!).
So in addition to not respecting your wife’s reproductive agency, you are also nagging her to have more kids?
Questions for the pro-life brigade:
1. What does a man commit to when he decides to have sex. Is he deciding to have a baby, too?
2. You do understand that many, many pregnancies happen even when the partners use birth control, yes?
3. Jasper, until your church supports actual birth control to prevent unwanted pregnancies, you don’t get to say jack sh*t or hoo-haw about the evil of abortion.
Actually, I’m still sitting here staring in awe at Steve-Dave’s first post. It’s a masterpiece of muddleheadedness.
The point is that many boys, told what and within what context to think, eventually discern for themselves (as men) that abortion is not a moral deciscion. Many boys never take the time to do this, as evidenced by the fact that men are pro-choice at higher rates than are women.
It’s hard to even count the number of ways that argument is mad. First he generalizes from himself to “many boys.” Most of his arguments so far have rested exactly on this sort of “me, and therefore everyone else” generalization.
Then he uses the fact that some men have reached the opposite conclusion to argue that they haven’t “taken the time” to think through the issue. This is an incredibly offensive (and, unfortunately, incredibly common) tactic. Stated more bluntly, it amounts to, “if everyone else were as clever as me, they’d arrive at my conclusions. If they haven’t, they’re either stupid, lazy, or they secretly have arrived at my conclusion, and are being intellectually dishonest.”
Now we get into seriously insane territory–the uncited claim that “men are pro-choice at higher rates than woman” is taken as evidence that many men were, as he had been, only pro-choice to please the women in their life. The women who are, apparently, more anti-abortion than the men, unless they’re talking to men, upon which they’re uniformly pro-choice, thus causing everyone else to have had the same experiences as he.
This is the very definition of insane troll logic.
For me, it hit home when they released the statistic a few years back that we have 45 million less people than we should. Men don’t think about it, becuase they are conditioned to avoid it.
Ignoring the “45 million less people” arguement (which others have already addressed–why is this meant to be a bad thing?), we again have “men” (all of them, apparently) conditioned to avoid thinking this by those same perfidious women who are secretly anti-choice in larger numbers than men, but indulge in a grand consipiracy to cloud the minds of men on the isssue.
I wouldn’t feed the Jasper-troll. He tried to leave a comment on my personal blog regarding this thread, although he couldn’t seem to muster up anything beyond “youd make a good nazi.”
[…] “Abortion is Wrong”: A Statement of Null Cognitive Value Amanda Marcotte over at Pandagon has put up a post, provocative even by her standards, that argues that abortion is not only far from a moral wrong, but actually a moral. Amanda’s argument is compelling, but I have my own take on the issue that will no doubt piss off the anti-choicers even more. […]
Jasper’s been banned from Shakes’ Sis under multiple guises. Best to leave him alone, as he’s outed himself as a 10 year old.
Boy, there are a lot of Sperm Worshippers suddenly on my blog.
That describes pretty much any random anti-choice conservative and any MRA and any person with misogyny going full-throttle, so yeah. That describes every single asshole who fed this entire BS with you and Melissa.
So, spermites? Spermatists? Spermatozoans? Spermies?
Yes. I like Spermies.
Spermians. A nod to their simian-level thought process. No offense meant to our intelligent ape cousins, however. Long live the apes! I welcome our new Chimpanzee Overlords.
Okay, I said “more later, if I had time”. I agree with one major part of this thesis (and I think I’m responding to both Amanda and another poster in here, but I can’t remember who). In most cases, abortion is the *right* decision. It is the *moral* decision, insofar as it is the one that is the least bad of bad choices. I don’t think you(generic) should feel forced to back down and say “well, sure, it’s a *bad* choice”, implying that carrying the pregnancy to term is not even worse.
I emphatically agree that you should treat the default case (a generic “woman who has had an abortion”) as a case of the woman having done the right thing. If someone wants to insist “abortions are bad”, let them establish it factually. DO NOT let them frame it in a defensive manner. The legal system of this country is such that we don’t punish people unless we can *prove* they’ve done something wrong. So, unless someone can *prove* that a particular abortion is something wrong (and not just stomp their foot and say “it is wrong because I say so!”), it should be allowed.
I think my earlier response was mostly predicated on a lot of the moral reasoning I’ve been doing. It’s important to define certain things as bad. It’s bad to use force against another human being, always. Okay, but, sometimes it’s right… still, because it’s bad, you still need to use the minimum force you can. Even if it’s right to do something bad, you still minimize the badness.
So I’m extra cautious about any use of the word “good”, and I think that’s where my initial argument came from.
Chuckle. Re-reading this, it sure as heck presupposes that someone cares about my opinion/argument, but hell, it might be interesting reading anyway. And I *do* love to hear myself talk.
[quote]Please move past the “population bomb� attitudes. The only group at qualifies as being too munerous in this country is the illegal community.[/quote]
I can’t believe people did not pick up on this little juicy bit from Steve the Jackass.
Steve, you’re not only a fucking ridiculous douchebag, but one of those anti-immigration people as well! How do you feel about illegal immigrants aborting, since you think they’re too numerous?
The Pro Abortion Position…
Amanda Marcotte, late of the quixotic Edwards campaign, gives us her position on abortion: think that abortion is not only a good thing, but IÂ’d like to posit that it seems to me that in the vast majority of abortions,……
“Folks are human, and react like humans. If they are told their opinions are shameful and harmful, well, they may not act with spite, but they may not feel like turning out or marching or donating, either.”
Ex-Fed, turn that around and think about the other side. I’ve never had an abortion, and I often squirm uncomfortably when some people constantly feel like they have to share all of their qualms about abortion in great detail or qualify when they find it personally acceptable and when they don’t. It feels really intrusive and really judgmental to me, I get defensive, and I can’t even imagine how this type of rhetoric affects the millions of women who’ve actually had abortions. Not only their opinions, but their lives are in some sense being attacked, and certainly dissected. I wouldn’t be all that eager to sign up for “Give money, come march, we want to protect your disgusting, slutty mistakes. It’s wrong but you should still have the right to be wrong and do harm even though you should be ashamed.”
I think the problem with the “I’m uncomfortable with abortion” people is when they start projecting their moral qualms on to everyone else. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard someone say “I’m pro-choice, but you must acknowledge that an abortion involves killing” or “I’m pro-choice but we must stop denying that abortion is always a tragedy” or whatever. We have to acknowledge that there are fundamental differences in the ways we conceptualize abortion, and just because not everyone shares the framework of those who are uncomfortable, well, that doesn’t mean we’re immoral or callous or wrong. There’s really no point in discussing it because we’re not going to agree. If we’re all anti-criminalization maybe we just need to concentrate on that, bite out lips and agree to disagree and not take every opportunity to discuss how awful and shameful it all is, multiple abortions, and everything else that comes up in these discussions.
“Women who get abortions should be recognized as people who can accurately weigh their choices and make the most moral one.”
No, the moral choice would be that if you’re not prepared to raise a child, you should not engage in sex. Weighing the choices AFTER you’ve become pregnant is neither moral nor responsible, it’s selfish and immature. Otherwise, why not just extend your high praise to women like Andrea Yates for having the moral fortitude to kill her five children and get on with the rest of her life? Afterall, she, too waited until after conceiving to decide to kill her kids… she just waited a few years after conception instead of a few months…
“Why, Skilled at Nuanced Verbal Communication, I do declare you’re looking wonderful this evening!”
“Aww, thanks, Superior Spatial Abilities. You’re too kind.”
“No, not at all, Sensitive and Nurturing. Hey, remember back when we used to insult each other? This is far better.”
“I couldn’t agree more, Calm Rational Thought Processes. And to think I used to consider you a sexist prick.”
Okay, I would totally buy a t-shirt that said this.
[…] Amanda Marcotte, late of the quixotic Edwards campaign, gives us her position on abortion: think that abortion is not only a good thing, but IÂ’d like to posit that it seems to me that in the vast majority of abortions, the choice made was the most moral choice for that woman. […]
Amanda,
Sorry to come so late to the party, but on behalf of every provider of abortion care in the country, and for the women who are our patients, thank you. Truer words were never spoken — but of course you knew that when you wrote them.
moiv
dear TexasRainmaker-
please brush up on your reading comprehension skills. if you had come to the discussion prepared, you would have seen that we’ve already been through the having sex doesn’t mean consent to pregnancy discussion about 200 comments ago. see, sometimes contraception fails and unwanted pregnancies do result from that sad fact. also, following your logic wouldn’t andrea yates’ kids have been better off if they had never been born at all- if say she and her husband had used reliable contraception or if she had miscarried or if she had aborted?
In Liberal Utopia, Abortion is a Moral Good…
If I didn’t know any better, I’d think Amanda Marcotte’s blog was a satirical site. I’m actually surprised she got dumped by the Edwards’ campaign, considering she’s so well-versed in the language of liberalism.
I …
I blogged about this on my Blogging For Choice entry, but briefly, I think the question of whether or not the fetus (or embryo, blastocyst, whatever) is alive is not even interesting, much less relevant.
Whether or not it’s a living human being or not, the fact that it uses the body of the woman carrying it for survival, taking nourishment from her blood and housing itself in her uterus, means that if it’s not welcome, there is no reasonable argument that it should have the right to remain against the woman’s wishes.
Nowhere, in any modern, democratic society, do we recognize the right of one person to use the body of another for their own purposes, without permission. The right to bodily integrity is such a fundamental right that it is the absolute precursor to any other belief in human rights: no one can be free if they don’t own their bodies.
Given this fact, it doesn’t matter if a fetus is human or not. It has no right to use the woman’s body for sustenance if she doesn’t want it there, full stop.
“having sex doesn’t mean consent to pregnancy”
Assumption of risk. I may not consent to drowning when I go swimming in the ocean, but I understand the risk is there. The time to weigh the risk is before I undertake the task, not when a rip current is pulling me under.
“following your logic wouldn’t andrea yates’ kids have been better off if they had never been born at all- if say she and her husband had used reliable contraception or if she had miscarried or if she had aborted?”
Been better off if they’d been aborted? Um, no. They’d still be dead.
well in that case, i guess no one should ever swim. or have sex. or go outside. or get pregnant. or eat sushi. or make eye-contact with a stranger.
there’s a difference between a toddler than a blastocyst. kind of like the difference between infanticide and abortion. that, too, was covered 200 or so comments ago.
no more. i won’t feed the troll.
It’s sad when people cannot understand the difference between what one woman did in the throes of postpartum psychosis and what many women have done when they have determined that continuing a pregnancy would not be the right thing. Andrea Yates was not a rational agent, able to weigh her options, and therefore her “decision” to kill her children has less than nothing to do with whether other women are capable of determining whether abortion is the best moral choice for them.
But see, I think you already know that but figured you could throw out something you thought would yield an emotional horror response. I guess you missed the memo that squickiness is not an argument for being opposed to abortion.
i remember yates’ husband was interviewed on larry king directly after the sentencing. king asked him what he regretted most about what had happened. his response?
(paraphrasing) “i regret that andrea and i will not have any more children together.”
yeah.
he went on to marry another woman a couple of years later and i’m pretty sure that they started a family.
andrea yates and her husband (if i’m not mistaken) were also members of a pretty fundamentalist church- church of christ. not only was she suffering from severe post-partum psychosis, but she was also getting the kind of messages from her church that she was a failure in the eyes of the lord if she wasn’t fulfilled in her role and duty as a mother.
real tragic situation the whole way ’round.
Great post, Amanda. I’ve often wondered how medical advances and increasing knowledge about how the brain works might muddy the morality argument (and, in fact, as seen with Plan B, already has). I mean, imagine the most extreme circumstance: A woman discovers she’s pregnant, but she doesn’t want to be pregnant. What if she could just “think” the pregnancy away? What if, through biofeedback training or meditation– no drugs or procedures, nothing external– she could just will herself to not be pregnant, and her period started the next day? What would the people who want to control women’s uteri do then? Would they think it was immoral for her to, in essence, “wish” or, if they prefer, “pray” the fetus away? And how would they legislate against that?
Dianne, sorry, thats a ridiculous argument. I’ve lived in the city for years and in the country for years. You can quote all the stats you want. But the city is the earth buried in concrete and fumes everywhere you go. It’s gas dripping, and stacks of garbage that fill the air with stink, it’s no stars at night, its—i can’t even argue this. Just stand in the woods and breathe deep. There’s your argument.
Damn, i miss NY.
Assumption of risk. I may not consent to drowning when I go swimming in the ocean, but I understand the risk is there.
One assumes that you also want us to outlaw CPR on the grounds that bringing someone back from the dead is against God’s PPlan?
Psst…TexasRainmaker, pissing on reason isn’t “making rain”. Just thought you should know.
rj3000 wrote:
Correct as usual Amanda. My belief is that if something is inside your body, attached to your body and sharing your blood supply, then it belongs to you and you control what happens to it. If you are pro-life, DON’T GET A FUCKING ABORTION. If you beleive in ancient superstitions and have an imaginery friend named Jesus, that is fine. However don’t force your silly beliefs onto someone else.
I completely agree. For the same reason, I think people should be able to sell their organs if they so chose, but there seems to be a disconnect among the left between ownership of one’s body and these two issues.
Fact: If I got pregnant, there’s about a 25% chance my asthma would get worse. I live in a high-pollution area and am barely mobile many days. My husband is working his ass off to try to make it possible for us to move away. Because if I get worse, it could mean permanent damage to my lungs and heart. So yes, a pregnancy could kill me.
Fact: Fetii need oxygenated blood, too. When I have an asthma attack, at the severity levels I have now, I can’t walk because my blood draws to my body core, keeping my vital organs healthy at the expensive of muscle power. Chances are, even if my asthma didn’t get worse, the fetus would be starved of oxygen and die or fail to develop properly.
Fact: Jasper wants me to die.
Because if I wasn’t so evil, nasty pictures would convince me to die to save my bound-to-miscarry-anyway embryo. So, obviously, my death would either save me by preventing my aborting the inner killer, or save the world from my demonic selfishness in valuing my own life.
Luckily, I think between two kinds of (EVIL!) birth control and probable infertility (which would be a sign of a God far more benevolent than Jasper believes in), I probably won’t ever need the operation. But it damn well better be available if I’m wrong.
YAY I READ THE WHOLE THING GIVE ME A MEDAL.
I caught that Steve-Dave illegal immigrant thing. So not only was he faking pro-feminism in his younger life, he was probably also faking anti-racism.
Oh, and since he has two sons, that pretty much negates his wife’s teaching role in the family. After all, she can’t teach them how to protect and attack… so I guess she’s just keeping quiet in the kitchen, or doing laundry, or something.
I wonder where jasper went? Maybe he went to bed… but actually, I think we (I say “we” as if I were participating) were starting to get through to him. Maybe he got scared that we were making sense and shut off his computer in a panic.
Oh, and the whole: men teach their boys to be aggressive thing?
Sure, Dad play boxed with me and my brother growing up. I took fencing in college, came home, and could feint and get through his defenses every time. My brother took philosophy and ethics courses and lost interest in even pretending to fight.
If my brother was being menaced, I’d get between him and the threat. And he’d probably talk down the aggressor. Because love means wanting to protect, regardless of what genitalia one has.
[…] While I utterly deplore the fact that the Presidency has been reduced to mere rhetoric in the largest sense, I cannot say that the President is a man who should be wholly silent. For in representing us as a whole, he in some way moderates the conversation that occurs among us - if there is no moderation, of course, all we will do is shout at each other. […]
Kyle, a quick Google will show you why people are leery about allowing organ selling as opposed to organ donation-
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/2331341.stm
And if “moral Christians” were so interested in preventing abortions they should get off their high horses and do something positive to improve the rates. Where I live there has been an increase in children due to the improved services offered to parents. It costs a bomb in taxes but with a government supported medical system, daycare, generous parental leave for both parents, and elimination of sales tax on infant care supplies, the government has managed to turn around a multi-decade decline in birth rate. Adults do not have children because total strangers want to control their lives, adults want to have children because it is something that they want and can do in a safe and responsible way. It is immoral to have a child just because you can and because it fills some need in you that you cannot quantify. That is why pubescent children have babies, and yes, I think you have to look to pro-lifers to explain the rise in teenage pregnancies. Looking for love in all the wrong places springs to mind.
As for conflating abortion and infanticide or mass murder due to untreated psychosis, that is just sick and twisted on so many levels that I cannot even imagine the slime that resides in a brain that could think it.
I may not consent to drowning when I go swimming in the ocean, but I understand the risk is there.
Therefore we shouldn’t try to save you from drowning if you start to go under because you knew the risks and decided to swim anyway?
Nezua: It’s hard to argue with someone who openly admits that they are abandoning logic, but here goes…So you like living in the country. Great. But living in the country means driving your SUV through the woods, letting off the gasoline fumes you deplore, cutting down the woods to provide you with a home. Using extra electricity to provide you with your own water heater, heating and cooling, etc. If you get sick, you may need evacuation by helicopter, which is a very energy inefficient method of transport. Unless you grow your own food, food needs to be trucked out specially for you (or for you and a few others at the local store), if you do then you destroy even more forest in low efficiency farming. Your presence disrupts the lives of many creatures that live in the woods.
Yeah, NYC could use some improvement. Personally, I’d like to see cars banned from Manhattan and maybe inner Brooklyn/Queens. Studies have shown that driving is often actually slower than using public transportation and it just makes no sense to use cars in such a crowded locale. And the coal burning has got to go. It’s ridiculous. Garbage I’ve never had much of a problem with. A composting program might be nice–they have them in cities in Germany and they seem to work reasonably well. Recycling–which is much more efficient in high population density areas due to a lower fuel use in pickup to number of items collected ratio–also decreases the garbage problem signficantly.
I like the woods too. That’s why I don’t live there. I’d rather see the woods left for woodland animals and trees and people keep to places that they don’t damage the world so much and only visit the woods in a non-invasive, “leave no trace” manner. Not overrun it with SUVs, powered boats, and snowmobiles.
Dianne, I don’t drive a car.
history_mom sez:
hi history mom. for others, for context, here is my full quote:
i agree, that line—misuse of the process—jumps out. it completely jumps out because those words should be in the voice of the opposition, not the author. please allow me to redact it to:
“Because then we open the door to the opposition bringing up cases where the woman wasn’t thinking of positive things, or a case where a woman ‘misuses’ the process.”
sorry about that. i have no argument with your position. i am in agreement.
Amanda, if you’re interested, there’s a really interesting series of entires about abortion on this site:
http://shrinkwrapped.blogs.com/blog/
some very coherent stuff there….
be well!
“Andrea Yates was not a rational agent, able to weigh her options, and therefore her “decisionâ€? to kill her children has less than nothing to do with whether other women are capable of determining whether abortion is the best moral choice for them.”
The comparison is not to focus on the mental state of the mother, it’s to show the inconsistency of promoting the killing of a child in one situation and being outraged about it in another. If a baby can survive, through medical technology or nature, as early as 23 weeks, then how can you say an abortion performed at 24 weeks post-conception is anything different than killing the same child at 3 years post-conception?
“Therefore we shouldn’t try to save you from drowning if you start to go under because you knew the risks and decided to swim anyway?”
If, by virtue of my taking the risk, I’ve involuntarily dragged another human being into the situation, I’m obligated to aid them - not kill them simply because their presence is now inconvenient to me.
The problem with declaring abortion a “moral good” is that it absolves society from dealing with issues that lead to abortions in the first place. Why fight against rape, abuse and poverty if such things lead to a “morally good” thing?
Texas Rainmaker:
Keep this in mind, folks. If TR is ever drowning, *do not help him* or he’ll sic the law on your ass. If he is drowning, it’s his own damn fault and he wants to suffer the consequences.
how can you say an abortion performed at 24 weeks post-conception is anything different than killing the same child at 3 years post-conception? - TexasRainmaker
Because the fetus is still parasitizing the mother-to-be — if the 3 year old were still living inside the woman’s body and parasitizing her directly so that to turn the 3-year old into a baby that the woman could hand off to a family member if she became too ill, either physically or mentally, to care for it, then the woman could kill that 3 year old as well. Of course, the 3 year old is already outside of the woman’s body and she can (hopefully) hand him off to someone in an emergency (we have laws about how such things can be done, no questions asked) — but getting a fetus outside a woman’s body (even if the fetus would be viable outside) is non-trivial, and even more difficult if you wanna make sure the fetus is gonna survive (simple common sense tells us it’s easier to remove something you don’t care about breaking than to remove a fetus and keep its viability intact). Have you ever given birth? As a man, I’ve not, but my mother assures me it’s no walk in the part.
I know I’m violating some pro-choice orthodoxy here but I would agree that by this logic, it would be acceptable to not allow abortions at, e.g., 24 weeks provided (1) inducing labor would be expected to result in no more trauma to the woman than would an abortion and (2) someone else is paying for the cost of keeping the pre-mee alive and healthy as long as needed. If the pro-life movement is willing to cough-up the money to support a pre-mee care fund that’ll pay for the expensive medical care required (call me callous, but I don’t want it coming out of my tax dollars: we have more important things for which to pay), I’d support a law that says “to have an abortion rather than an induced delivery after 23 weeks requires a specific form to be filled out by a doctor indicating that the induced delivery would be significantly more traumatic than the abortion”. Otherwise, if y’all anti-choicers aren’t willing to pay the cost (and the argument you make is only applicable if the pre-mature delivery/c-section aint’ gonna be more traumatic than an abortion, which it most certainly will be: you’ve carried eggs home from the store, haven’t you? ya notice how it’s easier to bring ‘em home if you aren’t worried about breaking them? it’s always gonna be easier to remove a fetus if you don’t care if it survives … so even if that fetus could be viable outside the mother-to-be, it ain’t outside yet, so killing that fetus is different than killing a baby — come-on: don’t the people who want to force “Judeo-Christian” morality on folks actually read any well-reasoned books on the subject — e.g. the Talmud?), why should our society make the laws you suggest we make?
Diane:
Not only that, he shouldn’t try to help himself, nor ask someone to help him.
I’m not worrying about TR; he’s clearly not rational about the subject; he thinks fetuses start at 24 weeks of development. (Or, he thinks talking about a 24 week old fetus allows him to generalize to all states of pregnancy. Doesn’t matter, both positions are stone stupid, unsupported by fact.)
Studies have shown that driving is often actually slower than using public transportation - Dianne
That’s true only if you are staying within the more densely populated parts of the city. If you find yourself commuting between Queens and NJ (because your lease is up in NJ before you’ve graduated from a school in NJ and you’re moving to Queens anyway, so you might as well move sooner rather than later), it’s much quicker to take a car rather than to catch a bus, to catch a subway to catch a train to catch a bus. And it’s actually quicker to go through Lower Manhattan than to deal with the traffic jams that pop up on Staten Island. So I’ll support a car ban in Manhattan provided traffic was dealt with in the ways around Manhattan (e.g. less traffic in the Bronx and Staten Island).
And the time advantage of public transport only occurs in a place like NYC where trains, buses and subways run relatively frequently. Here in Tally the buses only come once an hour (unless you are at a stop on the main drag through town so that each stop has more than one bus route stopping at it).
“Not only that, he shouldn’t try to help himself, nor ask someone to help him.”
We’re not talking about saving the mother’s life here, we’re talking about abortion-on-demand for convenience (remember, amanda’s point that the “choice” is a moral good?)
“I’m not worrying about TR; he’s clearly not rational about the subject; he thinks fetuses start at 24 weeks of development. (Or, he thinks talking about a 24 week old fetus allows him to generalize to all states of pregnancy. Doesn’t matter, both positions are stone stupid, unsupported by fact.)
Yeah, I’m fully off my rocker.
TR- one child in the history of mankind survives at 23 weeks and through a set of circumstances that is best described as unlikely, and upon this all public policy and the lives of countless pregnant women of differing situations must rest. Even if we disregard the peril that this tiny life is still in and will be for some time, and the unbelievable financial and emotional cost of the treatments that have been, are and will be in the future, this is not the basis of sound policy. This is a factor that a fecund woman can add to the long list of elements that go into her final decision, a decision that at day one can be changed by things that arise at week one or after the first neo-natal examine or sonogram or blood test. Life is choices and not all the choices available can be legislated for or against.
TR
Yes, abortion on demand for the convenience of the mother. Her body, her decision. What you keep missing is that you have no say in the matter, and your opinion of her morals does not change her sovereignty over her body.
DAS
Same thing, if the mother wants to give it away it is solely her decision and writing up into law more conditional nonsense once again interferes with one’s sovereignty over one’s own body.
abortion is a medically invasive procedure. there’s nothing “convenient” about it. most women think long and hard about it.
are you, by chance, male?
‘cause if so, it must be awfully “convenient” to so easily judge women and their difficult decisions regarding pregnancy when you yourself will never be in a similar position.
abortion is a medically invasive procedure. there’s nothing “convenient� about it. - bluefish A
And moreover, when it comes to late term abortions, the anti-choice movement tries to have it both ways. On the one hand, they say teh womens are having abortions ‘cause they are so callous and carrying the baby to term is too inconvenient relative to an abortion; OTOH, they ask why are teh womens so evil as to have abortions when the pregnancy is so far along they might as well deliver the fetus and have it be viable?
So which is it? Are late term abortions so evil ‘cause at that point the fetus might as well be delivered without much more of a problem? Or are late term abortions being done ‘cause women don’t wanna go through the mess of childbirth?
“Yeah, NYC could use some improvement. Personally, I’d like to see cars banned from Manhattan and maybe inner Brooklyn/Queens. Studies have shown that driving is often actually slower than using public transportation and it just makes no sense to use cars in such a crowded locale. ”
YES PLEASE!
Texas Rainmaker said:
…which leads me to think that THANK GOODNESS he wouldn’t kill the sorry woman who impregnated herself with his precious essence, who is now inconvenient to him. Because maybe he didn’t use a condom. Or was drunk and thought she was taking care of birth control. Whatever. I can make up a million scenarios, all of which he can disagree with, who doesn’t realise that he is entirely incidental to the pregnancy.Again and again, we have someone who does not bear the burden of birth control trying to dictate what the child-bearer can and can’t do with her body.
On another note… I got my tubes tied last fall. Is that preemptive abortion?
“And moreover, when it comes to late term abortions, the anti-choice movement tries to have it both ways. On the one hand, they say teh womens are having abortions ’cause they are so callous and carrying the baby to term is too inconvenient relative to an abortion; OTOH, they ask why are teh womens so evil as to have abortions when the pregnancy is so far along they might as well deliver the fetus and have it be viable?
So which is it? Are late term abortions so evil ’cause at that point the fetus might as well be delivered without much more of a problem? Or are late term abortions being done ’cause women don’t wanna go through the mess of childbirth?
All abortions are bad because they involving the taking of an innocent life. The pro-abortionists are arguing that it’s solely inconvenient to be pregnant, they’re arguing the inconvenience of having and raising a child. So your example and question are completely moot.
writing up into law more conditional nonsense once again interferes with one’s sovereignty over one’s own body. - LCforevah
I dunno. IMHO, a little bit of casuistry makes it pretty clear as to what it would take for the anti-choice side to be arguing in good faith. If abortion is to be restricted, a little “conditional non-sense” should definitely be slipped in via ammendment to nullify the laws if the anti-choice side turns out not to be acting in good faith but rather only acting to be interfering with the self-sovereignty of women.
“…which leads me to think that THANK GOODNESS he wouldn’t kill the sorry woman who impregnated herself with his precious essence, who is now inconvenient to him. Because maybe he didn’t use a condom. Or was drunk and thought she was taking care of birth control. Whatever. I can make up a million scenarios, all of which he can disagree with, who doesn’t realise that he is entirely incidental to the pregnancy.
Again and again, we have someone who does not bear the burden of birth control trying to dictate what the child-bearer can and can’t do with her body.”
And yet, in our society, the man will still bear the burden of paying for the child whether he wants it or not. Again and again, we have someone who is trying to dictate the fate of another human, conceived involuntarily, for the sake of selfish convenience.
“On another note… I got my tubes tied last fall. Is that preemptive abortion?”
No life has been created. Snarky, but irrelevant.
TR
There is no taking of innocent life. This is factually incorrect–it is an unprovable philosophical point. As a woman, I am darned sick and tired of idiot penises thinking they have any stand at all over my or any other woman’s body. Get. Over. Yourself.
All abortions are bad because they involving the taking of an innocent life. - TexasRainmaker
Taking of an innocent life is necessarily bad? Are you a vegetarian? Oh … but then you are taking innocent plant life or at least tearing plants apart.
And how do you define innocent life? A fetus the carrying of which is damaging a woman (e.g. in gestational diabetes) is innocent in intent, but is damaging the health of the woman nonetheless … what would you councel, TR? And “all abortions”? surely this doesn’t apply when the woman’s life is at risk … after all, wouldn’t taking her innocent life be bad too? Or is she guilty (due to having had teh sex … or due to “original sin” or whatever) and her life doesn’t count?
That’s it — once you’re born, you have original sin and are no longer innocent. The only innocent humans who deserve to live are fetuses. Now I understand the positions of certain people better …
ummm, a lot of guys can manage to avoid paying child support. the court can be tied up for years, it’s a very bureaucratic process.
so pregnancy, childbirth and the subsequent raising of the child generally all fall to the mother. an unwanted pregnancy is far more than an inconvenience for a woman of little or no resources, it’s a life-changing event.
an unwanted pregnancy for the man, on the other hand, is little more than an inconvenience.
besides, what should the state do- force all women faced with an unwanted pregnancy to carry to term, hope for the best and be criminalized otherwise?
should we be locking up pregnant women who are seeking abortions?
“All wars are bad because they involving the taking of an innocent life. The pro-war are arguing that it’s solely inconvenient to be at peace, they’re arguing the inconvenience of having and building a nation. So your example and question are completely moot.”
“All train wrecks are bad because they involving the taking of an innocent life. The pro-train wrecks are arguing that it’s solely inconvenient to maintain safe railways, they’re arguing the inconvenience of having and operating good transportation systems. So your example and question are completely moot. ”
TR- you are a one-trick pony and if the lives and safety of women is not within your mindset, then no one will be able to convince you that the vast majority of abortions are well-thought out decisions that are made based on real world concerns. If you haven’t the empathy to realize that, then I wish you well in the fantasy land that you live in and I hope that none of those real-world concerns touch you.
bluefish A- I realized that this was all pointless a while ago but it helps to keep my head clear. Arguing with TR is beyond pointless, he is a man trapped in a moral ressonance. He doesn’t want a woman flushing away the hard work of his manly man juice but he also doesn’t want to step up and pay half of the bill. He is either 12 or he just stopped growing emotionally then, he is living in a fantasyland where all the women are uneducated virgins, even the widows and grandmothers and all the men are respected for their ability to look at them.
Texas and DAS, my mother almost died in childbirth the first time. Are you suggesting that her having an abortion because her birth control failed is selfish convenience when she already has one child to raise and a husband who would be devistated to lose her? And why are both of you so interested in having the genetic material of many persons too lazy or stupid to use condoms inflicted upon society? That’s a bit selfishly inconveneint for the taxpayers. I have several relatives with a criminal history or who committed suicide and all of them are YOU GUESSED IT the result of unplanned pregnancies. Their parents did a half assed job of raising them, even though they never went without shoes or meals (i.e. nothing the state could get involved with). Of course, the same stupidity that led to the lack of condom use also led to the equally poor decision to not give the babies up for adoption. That is a really hard thing to do even for a smart person with a sense or morals - do you really expect a careless moron to suddenly grow a bunch of brain cells and realize they should go to all their prenatal visits with the doctor and then opt for adoption? I could have done without going to my cousin’s funeral and hearing about why her neice is in jail this time, or my cousin’s drug dealer husband and not feel the least bit sorry about it had they been wisely aborted, thanks. Between all of them the governemnt has spent enough money to rebuild the 9th Ward - not a great use of resources. The only thing that keeps me from open advocacy of eugenics is I hate the use of force or coercion, which is why when a pregnant woman’s brain cells fire long and hard enough for her to realize that motherhood is a super bad idea on her own, I’ll be GLAD to drive her to the abortion clinic and think it’s a moral choice. If you are worried about paying child support go to the sperm bank and then go get a snip job. You can still have kids, you will just need a turkey baster. As a matter of fact, why don’t we require that for every American male as soon as he hits puberty - that will solve this entire problemma for good.
This has to be one of the most tortured uses of logic ever- and completely idiotic to boot. The mental state of the mother has everything to do with this situation- Andrea Yates did not murder her children because she was tired of being a mother and it was convenient- she was mentally insane. Most women having abortions are not mentally insane (except to a misogynist who thinks that all women must be crazy to abort the result of the precious sperm magic). Here in the real world, we can tell the difference between murdering an independent person and terminating life support for a dependent, legal nonperson.
Anyone else notice that this statement is an absolute (”all abortions”)- those slutty bitches who wish to abort, even to preserve their own life, should be punished for trying to extinguish the “innocent” life of a legal nonperson by being forced to house, nourish and bear them. Because, you know, the women are never innocent themselves, they’ve had teh sex.
Before, you were just stupid trying to compare independent persons to fetii and dismissing the difference. Now, you’re just an MRA douchebag bloviating about something you know absolutely nothing about (pregnancy and abortion).
And yet, in our society, the man will still bear the burden of paying for the child whether he wants it or not.
But I thought once a person has sex, they have decided to have a baby, or know that that they might and therefore are selfish and irresponsible if they don’t.
Or does that just apply to the women?
Hawsie, word.
he is the precise reason why more women need to be mobilizing and voting for pro-choice candidates who will not bend when it comes to reprodcutive freedom and women’s rights.
i mean hell, we can’t win with these people. all they care about is shaming women for having the gall to be able to get pregnant in the first place.
maribelle,
actually it does just apply to women. she (the filthy slut) is the one who is taking the risk (pregnancy, everyone will know you dirty whore!) when she decided to have sex (spread her disgusting whore legs) in the first place.
the man, on the other hand, is just doing his manly duty and should in no way be held accountable.
The return of Pater Familias…
After reading this post of Difster’s, I was sickened by the degree of power that the Italian legal system gives parents over their children. I know his main point was about atheism and the morality of forced abortions, but the……
By Texas Rainman-All abortions are bad because they involving the taking of an innocent life. The pro-abortionists are arguing that it’s solely inconvenient to be pregnant, they’re arguing the inconvenience of having and raising a child. So your example and question are completely moot.
“All wars are bad because they involve the taking of an innocent life. The pro-war are arguing that it’s solely inconvenient to be at peace, they’re arguing the inconvenience of having and building a nation. So your example and question are completely moot.�
“All train wrecks are bad because they involve the taking of an innocent life. The pro-train wrecks are arguing that it’s solely inconvenient to maintain safe railways, they’re arguing the inconvenience of having and operating good transportation systems. So your example and question are completely moot. �
Sorry about reposting this but I just realized that I needed to fix the sentence- it would appear cutting and pasting Mr. Lawyerman is a mistake.
Wow, you are one really sick lady…
The genetic material will not be limited to the stupid and or lazy — it will be limited to the poor. People who are unable to fly out of the country to obtain an abortion will be the people who have the children. As the burden of providing for more children than they can afford increases, the people who are rich enough to control their fertility more effectively will find themselves in a very lucky position: They will be able to take advantage of increasingly cheap, unskilled labor from a growing pool of people desperate for work but too poor to go to college or trade school. The gap between the rich and poor will widen exponentially (more than it is now). Lifestyles like that enjoyed in pre-WWI England will begin to make a comeback. The rich will build ever-more-opulant mansions and manors and hire the great unwashed to keep it clean.
It’s what the rich white conservatives want. They pine for it because naturally they picture themselves “on top” not “under the boot.” If you haven’t seen the PBS series Manor House, I highly recommend it.
sorry, that should be “can’t afford” (natch)
Oh the heck with it–let’s just have mandatory sterilization for all guys past puberty. Problem solved.
Why is this debate always so shrill? I’m against abortion, and I’m not a religious nut-job nor am I a misogynist (unless of course being pro-life makes me a misogynist by default) . I also know women who are against abortion and some of them would call themselves feminists. Not everyone who is pro-life is a foaming-at-the-mouth clinic bomber. Many of us are reasonable people who would prefer to err on the side of life.
I don’t know when an egg and a sperm become a person, but I’m sure it is before leaving the womb. I have kids, I’ve seen what they look like at 12 weeks and I’ve heard their heartbeats. Were they little people then? Parasites? Were they going to survive to be born? Were they going to kill my diabetic wife? Life’s risky. Again, I’d err on the side of life.
So define “err on the side of life”? If you promise not to push for legislation that outlaws abortion, I’ll promise not to push for legislation that would have required your diabetic wife to have an abortion because the pregnancy’s too risky and it’s best to err on the side of life. Deal?
hilby- to get why it gets shrill is to get why people hate having strangers make life-and-death decisions for them when they are conscious and capable of reason. Most people have pro-lifers and pro-choice members of the family and they can all get together over the Thanksgiving dinner table and agree to not force their opinions on everyone. The problem comes with the decision to legislate a medical procedure because you, personally, find it repugnant and have never had to face any of the possible complications that make it a viable choice. Since your wife is diabetic, you and she have faced one of the possible complications and made your choice based on your life philosophy and family needs. What is so very wrong with letting others face that moral hurdle themselves?
To believe that it needs to be legislated against is to believe that women with better options in place will still chose it as a first option, or even a second or third. I too prefer to err on the side of life but when it is not my life at stake, I think that the decision is in the hands of the at-risk individual.
Diane,
It’s true that I have provided little evidence to my claims, and others have remarked that my suburban WASP upbringing has likely been the filter through which I have observed these things. I think my mistake was assuming that the readers and respondents to this site have anything in common with my upbringing. Clearly there is little common ground.
I am very interested in the studies that you mention, it is not because I believe them to be fraudulent or poorly researched. I am quite curious about the types of “outcomes” to which they point. Please provide links. I would find it interesting to compare the subjects’ notions of morality, whether it believed to be relative or more absolute.
You are the second person who has read in my posts an attack on same-sex partners that is not there. I am decidedly in favor of two stable, loving, responsible adults (of any sex) raising children. Compared to abusive environments, ongoing foster care, and lifelong dependence upon nanny-state government, two loving adults raising a child seems much better for both the child and society at large.
Finally, on the lessons learned from parents of a particular sex: guilty. I am reaching a bit, perhaps. However, you deliberately left out my mention that a mother’s instinct would drive her to put herself between children and danger. The larger point of that section was that a man should put himself between danger and a woman or any women.
Truly, what would you think of a man who did not do that, and his wife or girlfriend defended him?
Steve-Dave
Surely those who believe in the sanctitiy of human life or see abortion as a human rights issue (all humans have the inherent right to life) have the right to challenge the morality of abortion. And those who praise infanticide as liberation and termination of pregnancy as mere elimination of ‘parasitic’ cells can (and shoulg) be challenged on their viewpoints.
Of course, I must admit to the resident Feministas that I am Right Wing blogger and columnist, (not to mention male) so I must be just a blind victim to a sexist Patriarchal culture tinted with levels of misogyny that brainwashes me to only see women as pleasure objects and chattel to be shackled in the drudgery and monotony inherent with traditional male/female stereotypical marriage roles.
What do you think?
Ponygirl, of course you are right about the poor folk. The stupid rich people will fly their lear jets to Canada where they will have a perfectly safe abortion. Meanwhile, it’s always hard not to be mean spirited about the family members of the pro-lifers who land in the emergency room in their 7th month of pregnancy and have to wait for a judge to allow the doctors to save the person’s life, even though it is impossible to say whether the woman’s fetus can be saved. I think you are on to something about the upstairs, downstairs thing, too. And that is also the reason why fundies don’t want universal health care (now how many lives would that save?). Why spend public money on the health of the bottom quarter of society when they are really quite expendable. When they drop in the cotton field, why there is another batch coming in from Africa, I mean the pregnancy crisis center.
Infidel, if you are a columnist, I am going down to NASA to apply for that rocket scientist job I always wanted. Nothing now seems out of reach.
Dear Infidel Sage,
What do I think? Hmmm, I think that you need to have read the past 400+ comments before jumping in with both feet. I can appreciate patronizing and provocative in a Patriarch but ill-read and impolite are a little much to ask. If you are simply subbing in because one of your compatriots is tired or has other obligations then the reading list still stands as well as all ping backs and most of the commentators recent blog postings ( those with linked blogs, of course). Tiresome links to medical videos that we have all seen are not much appreciated, nor are illogical ‘if this than that’ statements, other than that- welcome to the fray.
Hawise
The larger point of that section was that a man should put himself between danger and a woman or any women.
The larger point of that section was that a man should put himself between danger and a woman or any women.
Why? This is not snarky, SD. I honestly would like to hear your response.
Living in the rural heartland, and raising three stairstep sons in relative isolation, and with a husband on the road two weeks out of four, I can assure you that I was entirely competant to deal with the “dangerous situations” that came our way.
The idea that women must invariably be shielded from ALL danger is “dangerous” in that it is an infantilizing mindset, robbing women of demonstrating their own initiative and courage, undercutting our judgment and denying us valuable experience. Don’t you think?
Steve-Dave said:
I would think that he might be the one in danger, and his female partner is trying to save him. If someone was making to attack my husband, you’re damned right I’d get in there and do what I could.
And if anyone tried to harm my child, I would cheerfully kill them. I mean, I already killed one blob of cells a decade ago, I’ve had the practice.
[…] I’m with Amanda on this one – abortion is, in fact, a moral good. […]
Ahunt and Kitty - you’re still missing it. I am not suggesting that society should rob women of the ability, right, mentality, etc. to defend themselves and loved ones.
I am saying that IF a man is present, a civilized man will always try to protect any women nearby. You are giving examples that do not apply. I am glad that you (Ahunt) are capable of defending yourself; everyone should be so empowered.
Civilized men will keep women from harm as often as they are able. If they are not, should the women help? You better! I’m not so macho that I wouldn’t want some help…
Are my statements general? Of course. How could anyone conceivably cover ALL possible situations. Does that help?
General question to all: Why is it that seemingly liberal women are so fond of the term “douchebag?” You just love Randi Rhodes or what?
Tell ‘em Steve-Dave
Civilized people try to keep harm from other people, SD…this is not and should not be a gender specific quality/trait/”role.”
But just so we are clear, can you give us a specific example of what you envision?
Dunno SD. Pushing 50 here, don’t get AA in our neck of the woods, and if any of our three had added “douchebag” to the huge dictionary of insults each had compiled over the years, I would also have asked for an explanation.
Gawd, I am old.
Steve-Dave, would you mind dropping a note to our Dear Leader about the protect women concept before he sends any more Americans with a double X to go get blown up overseas? Thanks awfully.
Actually, I would prefer that all XXXYs not be used as political cannon fodder.
I am saying that IF a man is present, a civilized man will always try to protect any women nearby.
From what? Disease? Accidents? Other men? Themselves?
It seems to me that the odds of having a protector around when you need one are pretty damned slim whether you’re a man or a woman. Man-as-protector is a racket, pun intended.
Exactly Sniper…but we must go through the motions.
I have to go to bed, but I’m pretty sure the “Manly Fireman Standard” is about to be raised.
(And a day later I finish reading all the comments.)
Devil’s Advocate:
To be fair, however, I’ve made the argument that adoption is a good alternative to abortion; not because infertile rich white people deserve someone else’s kid, but because I think abortion is morally wrong for the reasons I stated earlier in this thread.
No it’s not. Adoption is an alternative to parenthood. Abortion is an alternative to pregnancy. Adoption still requires a full pregnancy to happen and is therefore in no way an alternative to abortion.
To everyone that mentioned inficide:
Um, what?? Even if you’re talking about a late term pregnacy, until it’s born the fetus is inside another human’s body and is attached to and completely physically dependent on that person’s body. It is therefore in no way, shape, or form an independent life form. A child that’s been born is. That make it fundamentally different.
And before someone tries to say it, Roe vs Wade already outlaws third trimester abortion except in extreme medical circumstances. If they’re aborting that far into the pregnancy, the child wouldn’t have lived no mater what they did (but the woman most likely would have if they hadn’t).
All in all, I agree with ‘Bout F’n Time. The woman who is creating a potential life has complete control over that life while it is inside of her body.
Who:
Do your damn homework. From Time magazine, regarding “Silent Scream” (emphasis mine):
“Yet among many doctors–especially Nathanson’s fellow obstetricians–the film has provoked an outcry. ‘The problem is that it is factually misleading and unfair,’ says Dr. Richard Berkowitz, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at New York City’s Mount Sinai Medical Center. Special effects may further the deception, according to Dr. John Hobbins of Yale School of Medicine. Early shots of the fetus seem to be run at a slow speed, but when the abortion instruments are introduced, the film is speeded up, creating the illusion that the fetus is thrashing about in alarm. Actually, says Hobbins, ‘the fetus appears to be acting in a perfectly normal fashion. It’s just technical flimflam.’ Also misleading is the size of the ultrasound image and the doll- like model used in some scenes to represent the fetus. It gives the impression that the twelve-week-old fetus is as big as a full-term baby, when in fact it is less than 2 in. long.”
A child several months (or even years) old will grab a knife or touch fire because they don’t know better, and yet you honestly expect us to believe the some mindless clump of cells magically knows a plastic tube is going to be harmful?!
Ruby, your statement that “Adoption still requires a full pregnancy to happen and is therefore in no way an alternative to abortion” is incorrect. Simply because your desire for instant gratification cannot be realized does not mean waiting is not an alternative.
Similarly, your statement “The woman who is creating a potential life has complete control over that life while it is inside of her body” is also incorrect. Females have a responsibility to the father of the child to carry it to to term if he so wishes. If the male waives this right, fine. If not, the mere fact that the woman is going to be incubating a child for 9 months is no basis for claiming sole decision-making authority.
As has been clearly stated, abortion is a matter of convenience in 90+% of cases. If a woman is going to abort her child the least she can do is recognize the reason why.
See you guys? You let Jasper get away with this line of reasoning, and now Texas Rainmaker is doing the same thing.
So, Texas Rainmaker. When you retort to the statement:
“having sex doesn’t mean consent to pregnancy�
With
Assumption of risk.
You are saying that the bitch deserves what she got for assuming a risk. But women who become pregnant through rape didn’t assume the risk willingly.
Do they get to have abortions for not deliberately choosing to have sex - or not?
And if the answer is not - then STFU about “assumption of risk” - it’s an absolutely meaningless argument in light of your ignoring the LACK OF assumption of risk in rape pregnancies.
Once we get that idiotic line of “reasoning” out of the way, we can move on. But not until.
What exactly did Steve-Dave tell ‘em, Steve-Dave? Steve-Dave’s latest comment boils Steve-Dave’s previous statements down to mush. Steve-Dave now says, essentially, that men and women should protect each other, if the situation calls for it. So Steve-Dave agrees with us.
That sure is telling ‘em.
I haven’t read all the comments yet, but I think it’s wrong to talk about abortion as morally right or wrong - it’s a medical process, and nothing more. More here.
Simply because your desire for instant gratification cannot be realized does not mean waiting is not an alternative.
Actually, it does. For something to be a legitimate alternative, it must offer similar advantages. Since the adoption “alternative” does not offer the same advantages that abortion currently does, it is not a good alternative.
Similarly, your statement “The woman who is creating a potential life has complete control over that life while it is inside of her body� is also incorrect.
Um. No. No it’s not. Since a woman can get an abortion, she currently does have rather total control over it, doesn’t she? Her dietary habits, her behaviors… they can directly alter the fetus. So, yeah. She seems to have pretty much total control over it. It strikes me as silly to argue otherwise.
Females have a responsibility to the father of the child to carry it to to term if he so wishes. If the male waives this right, fine. If not, the mere fact that the woman is going to be incubating a child for 9 months is no basis for claiming sole decision-making authority.
And, yeah… that’s wrong too. You’re not doing so good here. Women have no responsibility to carry the child to term just because the father wishes it. His desire to have a child in no way trumps her right to self determination. He doesn’t have rights over her body anymore than she has rights to his. She can’t demand he share a kidney with her just because they’ve had sex, and he can’t make demands on her womb. The fact that the fetus uses her body is definitely basis for claiming sole decision-making authority.
As has been clearly stated, abortion is a matter of convenience in 90+% of cases. If a woman is going to abort her child the least she can do is recognize the reason why.
I’m not sure of the accuracy there, but even if it’s right… So what?
Honestly, if 99% of abortions were done for convenience… so what?
Is there some rule that we’re not allowed to make choices of convenience anymore? Since neither the fetus nor the male have rights over the woman’s body, it’s really up to her what she does with it. If I were a woman, you can sure as hell bet that I’d be making the choices most convenient to me. Why the hell shouldn’t she?
Roy, thank you for your response to blackshards. It’s infinitely better than mine, which would have been SHUT YOUR FUCKING GOB YOU STUPID FUCKING SHITEATER.
Am I correct in my assumption that you base your morals on “value”? If this is so, and the value a person places no an object, person, act, etc. is what determines its morality, then my view that “fetuses” have value, making abortion immoral, is equally valid. Which of course means everyones morals are valid, making nothing right or wrong, including your beliefs. You’re contradicting yourself with an illogical, self defeating argument.
Perhaps you should rethink this.
*on
sorry, typo.
“Having sex doesn’t mean consent to pregnancy�
If all this is claiming is that intending pregnancy is not entailed by intending sex, prolifers would not disagree. But this only means that explicit intent is not a necessary condition for moral obligation. For example, a rapist is surely responsible for a child that results from his rape, even though he consented to sex and not to pregnancy.
Francis Beckwith, author of
Defending Life: A Moral and Legal Case Against Abortion Choice (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming July 2007).
I’m sorry, Mr. Beckworth but I find a legal position that puts disproportionate risk onto one half of the population to be untenable. I might consider a law that puts an equivalent risk on both parties. The legal requirement of carrying a pregnancy to full-term regardless of risk to the mother must be balanced by an equivalent risk to the father at some point in his life. Perhaps if the full force of government be laid onto male genatalia and reproductive possibilities as the law proposes for women. Perhaps all males could have potentially reversible vasectomies performed on them at puberty and at the insistence of law. Perhaps the reversal of said operation be tied into some proof of moral righteousness- say a test of their moral sense, their standing in the community and their ability to take responsibility for their progeny. After all if the law can impose a belief system, medical and financial burden on women then it is only fair that it do so on men as well. I am sure that you will be first in line in support of responsible life choices for all. After all, women only use abortion as a means of contraception and to show men their power.
Let me make this absolutely clear- I do not think that government enforced vasectomies on men is an idea with merit but I also do not believe that government enforced pregnancies is an idea with merit. Tying a rape victim to her rapist for life by forcing her to carry his child to term and be morally responsible for her own violation is not an option. Tying a woman who cannot safely carry to term to her probable death due to accident or error when an option is available is not an option. Leaving a woman in penury due to stupid sexual choices while leaving men flying free from social and financial obligation is also not an option. Currently there are no equitable solutions in the abortion debate, find one and I will consider it, until then only the person most intimately involved has the final choice.
Simply because your desire for instant gratification cannot be realized does not mean waiting is not an alternative.
(side note:) A great rebuttal for men who insist their scrotums will fall off it they don’t have sex on demand.
(but seriously) Waiting? You think healthy babies are born of pregnant women simply by *waiting* for them?
What you call “waiting” (gestation and childbirth)are the singular more stressful things that a woman will ever endure in her life. The process of incubating a life inside you, which will take your nutrients FIRST before you get yours, which draws on every bit of strength you have to carry it to term and push it out of you, is agonizing, difficult and dangerous. It can also be incredibly important (obviously) rewarding and life changing (for good, ill or both).
Anyone who suggests that an unwilling pregnant mother should “wait” and bear her child to hand it over to others as an alternative to abortion is fundamentally ignorant, a sadist, a male or some combination of all three.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Beckworth but I find a legal position that puts disproportionate risk onto one half of the population to be untenable.”
It’s “Beckwith,” not “Beckwourth.” (One of our family’s pet peeves, by the way).
I’m not clear about the jest of your argument. It seems to me that on the one hand you are equating the rightness of an act with its absence of suffering, but then you switch gears and seem to make an argument based on the aggregate suffering (or lack thereof) of society. Yet, both positions cannot be true simultaneously, since we can easily think of cases where the increased suffering of a few results in the net reduction of suffering in society as a whole. For example, suppose that coercing 5 women to have abortions every year results in a net decrease in societal suffering. So, five women are forced to abandon their rights for the good of society. In this case, the five women suffer but society as a whole in benefited. Surely you are not suggesting that such a scenario is just? After all, to embrace such a scenario undercuts the most principled argument for the prochoice position: the government ought not to coerce women on matters of reproductive choice. But this point of principle–though powerful–cannot resolve the debate, since it begs the question as to the moral status of the unborn. After all, if the pregnant woman is identical to her prenatal self, then the same rights we accord her postnatally would apply prenatally. If not, then some property or properties must arise postnally in her being that would justify the different treatment. That, therefore, is where the action is morally and legally. Short of answering that question in a definitive way, the prochoice principle is inadequate.
Unnecessary killing is wrong. Killing innocent people in Iraq is wrong. Fomenting wars is wrong. Killing the innocent unborn unless it is to protect the mother’s life is wrong. America has stumbled in a moral fog for five decades now, attempting feebly to convince ourselves otherwise. Abortion is a business. It’s so out of hand they are actually trawling for business through front organizations like Planned Parenthood. The government pays the bill with our money (your money, my money) and Uncle Sam isn’t frugal. That’s the primary reason abortion won’t go away. It isn’t about feminism, it’s mean business.
My apologies Mr. Beckwith for my failure to verify the name before posting.
By the very biology of the human body, a woman takes a disproportionate risk in propagation. Males come into the picture and make a moral choice whether they will stick with the process. To bring the process to completion, a woman cannot vacate her body for the whole gestation period and wait for cute and cuddly to appear before making a choice. Once an infant is born, both parents can be brought to take equal risk in the responsible care of the child or to assign the risk to one parent or the other or to another group of people entirely. Before the child is born there is no mechanism for equivalent risk or for transferance of risk. This is why I believe that the government has no place in the decision making process, no legal right to exercise imminent domain over the woman’s body, choices or morality.
By the way, societal pressure, i.e. listening and responding to family, friends and such is massively different from legal pressure with the possibilty of incarceration, forced childbirth and the loss of autonomy. Since, there are no current prenatal quaranteed rights, then assigning those rights without some mechanism to ensure that they do not take away the rights of the the mother is a quandary. This leaves the woman, with the aid and advice of those she looks to for help, to make a choice based on her belief system, her needs and the needs of those she respects and loves- this is how morality is supposed to work. Law is a different matter and is primarily amoral due to its impositional nature.
The Moral Good of Abortion…
Over at feministe there is an interesting essay - inspired by something at pandragon - entited Abortion is a Moral Good. It is actually very good and I agree with a lot of it. This is why I am, in general, pro-choice, and in favour of legal abortion……
“You also just need to look at embryos and fetuses as things without moral agency and values…”
I’m interested to get a concensus about when the unborn baby is considered to have value? When does life begin? It’s been stated several times that because the unborn are attatched to, inside of, and reliant upon, sharing a blood supply, that the woman has total control, therefore has complete soveriengty over that…pre-life? Consideer this…
A woman deliberates about having an abortion. (for arguments sake there is no third trimester rule) Upon labor she realizes she has made a huge mistake and doesn’t want to make sacrifices in her life, but its too late. The once-fetus exits her womb and she is holding it. It is still however, sharing her blood supply and is no less dependent on her to live than it was moment before. According to anti-life theory, she should be able to dash the “former-fetus” against a wall as long as it is still attached to her and depentant on her to live, and it will still make life more inconvienient to her. From what I can tell, according to pro-choicers, life never begins, so why should anyone care if it ends.
Why then are third trimester pregnancies illegal?
If a woman was on her way to a clinic to have an abortion, and someone assailed her before she got there, kicking her in the stomach and killing her fetus, would that be considered particularly hanus? Should that attacker be accused of more than assault?
“A woman has a life. She is the agent of control of her life. She comes first in her life. She is a live human with consciousness and the ability to choose what is best in her life. That is my take on it.”
This is a pervasive theme to anti-lifers
That’s an amazing argument, papa Smurf. (The Smurfs always knew what they were doing, they had enough sense to have a Papa and no evil selfish mama). It’s almost as if these wide eyed radicals think of incubators as human beings! Imagine the kind of lunacy that makes it possible to distinguish between a clump of cells that lives inside someone else’s body and say, a three year old, oh sure, it’s a “former fetus”–now it has rights! It’s beyond me. My town won’t even issue birth certificates for sperm, I just can’t understand it. I’m holding a tissue, it’s a mass killing field, and nobody cares. What a sick and backward world we live in. Daily mandatory government reported pregnancy tests for everybody, if they’re positive we shackle you to the wall for the duration. Stop thinking about your life and consciousness, this isn’t about life or consciousness! It’s about…um…
“You also just need to look at embryos and fetuses as things without moral agency and values…”
I’m interested to get a consensus about when the unborn baby is considered to have value? When does life begin? It’s been stated several times that because the unborn are attached to, inside of, and reliant upon, and sharing a blood supply, that the woman has total control, therefore has complete sovereignty over that…pre-life? Consider this…
A woman deliberates about having an abortion. (for arguments sake there is no third trimester law) Upon labor she realizes she has made a terrible mistake and doesn’t want to make sacrifices in her life, but its too late. The once-fetus exits her womb and she is holding it. It is still however, sharing her blood supply (prior to cutting the umbilical cord) and is no less dependent on her to live than it was moments before. According to anti-life arguments, she should be able to dash the “former-fetus” against a wall as long as it is still attached to her and dependant on her to live, and it will still make life more inconvenient for her.
-From what I can tell, according to anti-lifers, life never begins, so why should anyone care if it ends.-
Why then are third trimester pregnancies illegal?
If a woman was on her way to a clinic to have an abortion, and someone mugged her moments before she arrived, kicking her in the stomach and killing her fetus, would that be considered particularly heinous? Should that attacker be accused of more than assault?
“A woman has a life. She is the agent of control of her life. She comes first in her life. She is a live human with consciousness and the ability to choose what is best in her life. That is my take on it.” - (gotta look out for Number ONE, right?)-
This is a pervasive theme among anti-lifers. It comes from a self image that society does not force on women anymore. If a woman feels like she needs to shout to the world that she has a life and value, and has control of herself. Great. She had those things before she started all the shouting. What she should not have control of is the life inside her. It is not her life, and not hers to snuff out. She knew before she became sexually active that she could become pregnant, and therefore, should be prepared to accept responsibility for that choice. What she wants after she becomes pregnant regarding its convenience is irrelevant. Now she must take on the responsibility of caring for the life she now carries. Her family planning should have included the consideration of risk, and if the risk of becoming pregnant was to cause such unplanned, inconvenient, annoying effects on the course of her life as to resort to abortion, than perhaps abstinence should have been her choice. If a person gambling on a hand of poker loses an entire paycheck, there’s no mulligan, no erasies, no do-over. He knew the risks, decided to take the risk, and now must pay the piper. Perhaps anti-lifers should create a law where, if a woman loses money gambling at a casino, she should be able to, after realizing that not losing the money is best for her and her family, “abort� the bet, and take back her money, leaving her and her family safe and secure. Maybe Hillary will present the “Whatever is best for a woman� bill someday.
I guess my point is here that it’s all about responsibility and accountability. No one can do anything about the fact that a woman is stuck with the role of carrying a child. I can’t help that I was born a man. I will never have a full understanding of what it means to carry to term. But I do posses RESPONSIBILITY. If I were to have gotten a woman pregnant, I would do the right thing, and be a part of the child’s life, and help the mother, marriage or no marriage. I actually had so much respect for my wife, that I refused to have sex with her until we were married. I respected that she had an undergraduate degree to finish, and her whole life ahead of her. I was RESPONSIBLE enough to know that contraception is not 100% reliable, so I made the SMART choice not to even play with fire. Lo and behold, she did not get pregnant, finished her degree and we got married. We now take measures to reduce the risk of pregnancy as we want to wait to have children, but are fully prepared to accept the RESPONSIBILITY of caring for a child should she become pregnant.
Don’t bother arguing: “Well that was the choice you made, and that is your right, but if I choose to be sexually active, I should be able to do so.� Because I fully agree. That is your choice. But Your choice includes the risk of pregnancy, and therefore is not a sound course of action for someone who absolutely does not want to become pregnant.
What would you say to teenager who is considering becoming sexually active? Would you advise them to use a condoms to reduce the risk of contracting an STD, or becoming, or getting someone pregnant? Would you tell them that condoms are not 100% effective, but go on to say, “ Don’t worry though, you can always have an abortion, and I hear they have good pills for treating genital herpes now!� Any RESPONSIBLE adult would say, that abstinence through self control is the ONLY way to ensure you don’t get pregnant or contract a disease. You would tell them how valuable their future is and that if their goals are valuable to them, that they should do everything in their power to reach them, however difficult. Abstinence is not easy, trust me, but it is possible. Most teenagers, people for that matter, do not posses the RESPONSIBILITY and SELF CONTROL necessary to accomplish this, and those who don’t may someday be forced to deal with the results of their actions.
In today’s society of instant gratification, we will justify a means to fix the little problem with sexual activity…pregnancy. Abortion is simply an easy way out for sexually irresponsible people. “I want to have sex but am in no way willing to accept the responsibility of pregnancy,� is not the thought process of a logical, responsible person. “I want to take measures to ensure that I can care for a child should I become pregnant,� is the proper thought process. But this process has been perverted by anti-lifers by replacing preparation and good decision making with abortion. A responsible person would establish a stable home, with a quality spouse who is in it for the long haul before risking pregnancy.
I can’t wait to hear the arguments that abortion is a “moral alternative to having self control, accountability responsibility, preparation, good decision making skills, and logic.
Justin, I hope that the pink-coloured glasses never fall off and that you and your family can continue to live under its pastel glow. However for those of us who live in a world where plans go awry for reasons that have nothing to do with us and where being treated as adults in an adult world is important to us, the whole point of being pro-choice is because we are responsible, ethical, concerned people who have looked at all available options and have chosen. You don’t have to like the choices, you don’t have to morally approve those choices and you don’t have to live those choices. What we object to is forcing others to live YOUR life choices in THEIR lives. Stop being an ignorant git and get it through your head that FORCING others to do things your way is not a moral good and is in fact a moral evil. You cannot make people do good by force, if you think you are so good then live your life as an example to others. Abortion is a tool, preferably of last resort but just a tool.
Abortion as a Moral Good?…
Amanda Marcotte, the blogger who worked for John Edwards campaign before she fell victim to the “right wing noise machine”, has an interesting take on abortion: To see that abortion is moral, you just need to look at women as……
Abortion as a Moral Good?…
Amanda Marcotte, the blogger who worked for John Edwards campaign before she fell victim to the “right wing noise machine”, has an interesting take on abortion: To see that abortion is moral, you just need to look at women as……
Justin, you make me ill. You said:
This is exactly why we need to provide teens with adequate education and unhindered access to birth control. If I think my teen is going to go out and have sex anyway (despite my careful parenting of course), I am going to teach him as much as I possibly can about STDs and pregnancy, and make sure there’s a big-ass box of condoms in the bathroom that will be refilled when empty, no questions asked.
You make me ill because you would set your children up for failure. You would preach abstinence to your children, whom, despite their instilled sense of self-worth and responsibility, might still go out and have sex. And you will not have provided them the tools with which to protect themselves from pregnancy or disease - you will have only provided them with a surefire way for you to heap guilt and shame upon them, for something they could not control, and which you fully expect them to be unable to control. Shame. On. You.