This is a comment by patrick on the post “The Modern Attack on Reproductive Rights“.
I disagree with everything you say, but will only comment on a few things. When a sperm enters an egg, something amazing happens. That egg now has it’s own unique genetic code. Yes, I will fall on that. No, I am not religious at all. I am just against senseless killing and murder, and abortion is certainly murder.
It is the extermination of unique individuals with genetic codes (albeit dependent on a mother while in fetal state, with or without feelings of fear) ultimately on a path to becoming a fully developed baby if everything is gestationally within normal limits.
Dear writer, you must examine your argument and ask yourself if there is a way to “boil it down” further. Aren’t sleeping people or people in comas without feeling that we can see or somehow acknowledge? I am no sleep or coma specialist, but I have never seen or heard of a sleeping person or someone in a coma record what they were feeling while unconscious.
Have you?
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Difference is sleeping/coma patients have already experienced some form of consciousness.
That’s a difference sure, but one needs to make a case that it’s a morally important difference, and that’s a more difficult task than you probably think it is.
Yet another example of why our schools are failing us in promoting scientific literacy, and why we should probably start teaching epistemology and morality in high school as well.
I agree to all of that- except I happen to think that doing those things would drive down public tolerance for a “right to abortion”.
“Certainly murder”? Premeditated, yes, but unlawful? depends where you live, nothing certain there, you are stating opinion as fact. Senseless is also interesting, the decision to kill an unborn is a tough one and rarely senseless, we kill animals and each other all the time for reasons of survival, self defense and so on. While not the same, abortion is similar. In my limited experience most women who make the choice do so after deep and painful consideration or the reasons are so compelling that little thought is needed. The use of words like murder and the ranting of the religious right make a tough decision tougher. The issue is distorted and hard to unpack, Peter Singer is very good on this, confronting and thought provoking. I commend his work to you.
“we kill animals and each other all the time for reasons of survival, self defense and so on. While not the same, abortion is similar.” – I don’t see how abortion is similar to self-defense or killing to survive. It’s generally about avoiding an unwanted burden. That doesn’t mean it’s not a serious matter, but it’s not a matter of life and death.
“The issue is distorted and hard to unpack, Peter Singer is very good on this, confronting and thought provoking. I commend his work to you.” – Peter Singer takes the same view as Michael Tooley. You may not be aware of the fact that their defense of abortion also argues that infants do not have a right to be killed. Singer puts the age at which you have a right not to be killed in the neighborhood of 18 months. There are videos online of both of them having debates/discussions with Don Marquis, a philosophy professor and bioethicist who argues for the pro-life position from a secular point of view. The form here doesn’t seem to want to let me add links without approval, so I’d suggest using the ‘video search’ function on google.
Okay, so extending that a bit…say I go rock climbing on a dangerous mountain face while pregnant, fall and lose the baby/fetus after falling because I did not bring sufficient equipment. Should I be charged with criminal negligence???
I tend to be a pragmatist about abortion issues, which endears me to neither pro-life nor pro-choice activists. Even if for the sake of argument I agreed that all abortions are equivalent to murder (just positing that for the moment), there are reasonable limits to how far society should go to prevent a murder.
The kind of surveillance, law enforcement, and government power needed to prevent and/or prosecute every abortion would be horrible to contemplate. The difference between a spontaneous miscarriage and an induced miscarriage is very hard to see. If there is a suspicion of an abortion, do the police seal off the uterus with crime tape and get a subpoena for a vaginal exam? If you flush a heavy period down the toilet, could that be a sign that you are destroying evidence of a crime? Shame on you for tampering with evidence. If you miss a period and then have a very heavy one, sorry sister, but you’re under investigation for murder.
You would need to monitor all women for pregnancy and set up some sort of social services network. Perhaps if you see a pregnant woman having a glass of wine she needs to be reported to Child Protective Services. Hell, serving any women alcohol at all would have to be illegal unless the bartender sees documented proof that she had a “no” result on a pregnancy test in the past 6 hours or so. Perhaps a test dispenser in the bathroom, just to make sure bars are free of criminal liability?
If the goal is to force every pregnancy to go to term, I wonder at the costs of that goal. Even murder prevention has to have limits.
I don’t believe any sensible pro-life person would disagree with you. Now the non-sensible ones however…
I am quite socially liberal, and not religious to any extent either, but yet I am very pro-life. Although devote religious groups and Republicans are indeed usually the most vocal pro-life people, they are hardly the only ones out there. As a social liberal, I believe in basic rights to ALL people, regardless of race, gender, orientation, age, disability, or anything else. So why would I believe in denying the most basic right we can have to a group based on the inconvenience of their birth-status? There are plenty of other people who can be considered inconvenient but yet we would not dream of ending their lives, would we?
Although using the word ‘murder’ may be a little insensitive to what would drive a pregnant woman to end the life of her unborn child, I do not see how it is inaccurate. It is in fact deliberately causing a living human being to cease to live. Liberals in general need to think outside the box as how to meet the needs and rights of BOTH the mother and the child, and conservatives need to realize that these woman are not heartless animals, but desperate women at the end of their ropes with no other options presented to them.
Senseless is also a valid description, but it is our society that is senseless, not the women. In this modern, selfish age were people obsess over their careers or whatnot until it is too late to bare children, there is absolutely NO excuse whatsoever for adoptions to not all but fully take the place of surrogate mothers, in vitro fertilization, sperm banks, et cetera. If this were to happen, abortion would be almost non-existent. So it is not the women who get abortions who are heartless, but liberals, conservatives, and our society as a whole for allowing it to be the primary option for them. It is a barbaric medical practice who’s time has come to go the way of lobotomies and bloodletting.
Just to clarify, I’m not saying that there is no reasonable use for surrogates, in vitro etc.
Hi Ben. I’m socially liberal, very pro-life, and an atheist with a strong belief that religious laws are unjust and the state must remain secular. I’ve met pro-lifers whom I didn’t get along with because they did fit the stereotype, but the movement isn’t monolithic. You’re not alone by any means. It’s just that the others yell louder and get more press. Through the magic of social networking we “non-stereotypical” pro-lifers are beginning to organize. If you’re interested, let me know and I can help you connect with groups where your views would fit in perfectly.
I’d recommend this group as one such example:
http://secularprolife.org/index.php
Sorry Ben, whatever your emotional response this is also a definition problem, murder is the unlawful premeditated killing of another. So as I said,depends on where you live and individual circumstance. Senseless is maybe true the way you put it but what about severe or terminal disability detected in the fetus? what about rape? And my point was that from the point of view of the person making the decision it obviously makes sense or they would not do it, whether it makes sense to others or not it is inflammatory and unfair to accuse women faced with this of being senseless.
I think Ben made a good point: if you believe that once you became a living human organism, you started to have human rights, then abortion is murder. Obviously if you think that personhood is necessary for human rights, then it wouldn’t be considered murder. Saying that something isn’t murder because of the law is a cheap semantic argument. While it’s not acknowledged in most dictionaries, it is common usage to use the term murder for something which one thinks ought to be murder, but actually isn’t because of (from the speakers POV) unjust law.
Two examples in situations outside of our normal experience would be stoning a woman to death for adultery in a country where this is allowed by religious law or a plantation owner beating a slave to death for attempting to run away. In contexts we’re familiar with, you here opponents of capital punishment calling the death penalty “state sanctioned murder” (which by your standards is ridiculous, but I know plenty death penalty opponents who would say it’s merely accurate), animal rights activists famously use the slogan “meat is murder”, and anti-war activists often use the word “murder” when describing civilian casualties (or “collateral damage”).
PS: “severe or terminal disability” and “rape” would account for somewhere between 2-5% of cases.
I say what I say to everyone who’s against abortion: prove to me that you’re categorically in favor of comprehensive sex education and widely-available low-cost contraception, or you have no right to expect anyone to take your opinion seriously.
Multiple thorough studies have been conducted that show that making abortion illegal does not change the per capita abortion rate one whit. The only, I repeat ONLY, things that correlate to reduced abortion rates are sex ed and contraception. In the world of empirical data, you must support those wholeheartedly if you actually want lower rates of abortion. Otherwise you’re just jerking off.
That’s odd. The pro-choice folks argue that ‘barriers’ such as waiting periods or shutting off state medicare funding actually prevent women from getting abortions. You’re claiming that legal prohibition wouldn’t affect the rate one bit. Can’t both be right.
BTW- When you meet pro-lifers who are for comprehensive sex ed and availability of contraception, what happens? All you’ve done is say that some pro-lifers seem to you to be inconsistent or ill-informed, but that says nothing whatever about the merits of the pro-life position itself.