In his latest attempt to double down on his right-wing-religious-asshole bet, Rick Santorum has clarified his position on abortion in cases of rape: rape’s bad, but if you get pregnant from it, hey, free baby! Who’d want to turn that down? Normally when we talk about a political candidate being full of himself, it’s not scatological humor, but in this case it just writes itself.
Male rape survivors are of course erased again from this discussion, but look on the bright side. At least when men are victimized and traumatized like that, we’re not likely to get Rick Santorum’s idea of a precious gift. I can’t imagine what Christmas with him must be like.
@Amphigorey,
Vegetarianism is perfectly healthy. Veganism is not, at least without vitamin B12 and iron supplements. (Vitamin B12 stays in the system quite a bit so if one ate a lot of meat as a child and then switched to veganism in college or something, should be fine for the rest of his/her life.)
Also, while I agree that ovo-lacto-vegetarianism is healthy, I note that the exact same reasoning in your last post could be used to prove smoking is healthy.
The idea of souls as living one life and then passing eternity somewhere just “waiting for others” is rather new, too.
You shall have hundreds of mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and lands before I come to pass.
Sounds reincarnationist to me.
Calling it ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’ might be (somewhat) new, but the idea of a different afterlife depending on how you lived (or died) certainly isn’t. And I’ve never heard of them being the equivalent of the Greek underworld. If anything, there seems to be more Egyptian/Sumerian inspiration in the older parts of the Torah and the bible.
And the English word Hell is likely closer related to the pagan Germanic deity/underworld Hel than to Hades.
Heaven and hell are inventions made in the last millenia. “After-life” and “the kingdom of God”, are the equivalent to Hades’ place (you know, Hades reigns upon dead souls, not BAD dead souls – all of them).
The concept of a soul ish’t persuasive, because granted the concept is true, a soul is supposedly immortal and before birth *innocent*, and logically when its body dies headed directly to the heaven they claim exists. In fact, since more conceptions fail than survive to live birth (speculation is possibly up to 80%), the only way they can avoid their God being a total monster is to agree that’s what would happen. I have never heard anyone come up with a good reason why it would be considered ‘harm’ for the innocent soul to go directly to heaven without suffering… Read more »
Uh, guys? I’ve been a strict vegetarian for 23 years and I’m perfectly healthy. There’s nothing “problematic” (seriously, wtf) about vegetarianism and the supposed lack of nutrition I get.
I mean, yeah, you can do it badly and eat nothing but rice and cheese doodles, but there’s nothing inherently unhealthy about vegetarianism.
“How can someone who builds up an inherently contradictory set of ethics hold onto those ethics”
I’m confused. How are the ethics of a pro-life person inherently contradictory? You yourself called Santorum “consistent” upthread (wrong, but consistent, which seems about right).
@smhll:
People cannot be forced to donate bone marrow (or blood or a kidney). That’s what the violinist metaphor is supposed to invoke.
I like forced bone marrow donation as a thought exercise to engage people without uterii in the discussion of forced pregnancy. (I do have a male relative who has donated bone marrow. I have scant acquaintence IRL with trans men, so I don’t know any men who have carried a fetus for any length of time, or who worry about doing so.) If the government or medical establishment had the ability to find marrow donor matches without those people having come forward and offered to be donors, would it be legal to compel that person to donate in order to… Read more »
@Fnord, perhaps I’m unique in thinking this, but I never thought of Theseus’s Paradox as being very problematic. But at any rate the iPod thief problem as well as abortion is not an instance of Theseus’s Paradox because in each case, it’s very clear which the original is and which the copy is. I brought it up to defend the iPod problem as not being “unfamiliar” by pointing out that the transhuman ethics you mentioned are actually rooted in very familiar philosophy and very little about them is inherently “new”. As far as begging the question from a pro-lifer’s perspective,… Read more »
@dugone: Your argument is that the thought experiment clarifies the issue by bringing in a philosophical problem which is famous for having no clear resolution? I don’t really have an interest in sustaining a long argument about abortion while arguing against the position I support. But I will say, that from the perspective of pro-life people, giving the unborn rights isn’t “changing the rules”, it’s a reflection of their intuitive and/or religious beliefs about reality. From their perspective, any argument for abortion that doesn’t recognize their moral rights is begging the question. I’m not, per se, arguing accommodation (although, didn’t… Read more »
@Dungone:
Regarding Theseus’ Paradox, I have an even more fun example for the human body. I recall reading somewhere that we change out ATOMS every 7 years or so. In other words: owing to the consumption and metabolism of molecular resources, you are not made of the same atoms you were made of no more than seven years ago!
I think that’s kinda cool.
@Amphigorey, I disagree. Many of the forced-birthers are women themselves. It’s not that they want to control women. It’s that they want to control everyone. Gays, atheists, Jews, Muslims, government officials, soldiers who got shot and are about to die, homeless people who just want some food, everyone.
The whole business about the “rights of the unborn” is a red herring anyway, because what forced-birthers really care about is controlling women.
@Fnord, regarding the problem of “uniqueness” in 1 through 3: In 1, I could modify the thought experiment to say that the thief carefully modifies the copy to erase any trace of fa e moral framework and memories that led to the thievery. The intention would be to make it more analogous to the way the rapist passes on a copy of his DNA to the fetus but not necessarily the guilt of having carried out the rape. In 2, I can claim that the iPod is technically unique because it is a sentient being capable of unique thoughts as… Read more »
@Fnord, regarding souls: I see that you’re advocating accommodation a little bit. But I can tell you for certain, the “beliefs” of the pro-life crowd are rigged to justify their position. Changing the rules of a thought experiment to their liking will only ever result in them winning. If Santorum wants to say that a fetus is a human because the fetus has a soul, then I can say that the iPod is a human because the iPod has a soul. Which actually fits quite well with the original concepts of what a soul actually is, namely the “animating principle”… Read more »
@Fnord, under the premise that the unborn have a full set of rights, the violinist thought experiment still fails to explain why rape victims should have abortion rights. If you click through on the Wikipedia link to the Trolley problem, the analogous situation to the violinist scenario is pushing the fat man off the bridge to stop the trolley before it runs over the other people. The violinist in that example is there against his will and should not be made to suffer for the immoral decisions made by others. It’s clear that supporting the violinist for 9 months will… Read more »
@dugone: “I don’t think that the violinist thought experiment is a good analogy for abortion. The first reason is that we simply do not have to grant the same rights to the unborn as we do to the born.” Well, yeah, but people like Santorum would like to grant the same rights to the unborn as we do to the born. If fetuses don’t have rights, then the case for abortion becomes pretty clear. The violinist thought experiment is an attempt to explain why, even if the unborn do have rights (at least morally), abortion may still be permissible. There… Read more »
…wow, I got off surprisingly lightly there. Thanks everyone!
@Clove:
To clarify, I meant vegetarianism was problematic for the reasons EE brought up, as well as the nutrition issues.
@Chris R:
What Jim said. Thanks, Jim!
I don’t think that the violinist thought experiment is a good analogy for abortion. The first reason is that we simply do not have to grant the same rights to the unborn as we do to the born. A violinist is already clearly established as a human with full human rights whereas the unborn is not. This changes the entire dynamic of the ethics involved. The violinist thought experiment seems like it would be much better suited to the way courts order men to pay child support even in the case that they had been raped. I would suggest that… Read more »
“As for your violinist hypothetical, well, a person has a recognized right to preserve his own life at the cost of another’s life in cases of actual necessity. But the survivor may be required to defend his actions as truly necessary.”
In fact, this is not generally true, at least legally. Self-defense using deadly force is allowed, but only against the attacker, not against an innocent. Contrariwise, though, there is generally no legal duty to extend aid to another, even when extending that aid does not involve risk of death.
Lamech, “You are not required to support someone”. Oh? Courts issue orders of support every business day. “Incest is pretty thoroughly assumed only to happen through some flavor of abuse.” Why is that assumed? The legal definition of incest has been fiddled around with over the last thirty years or so for the purposes of advancing the various fiddlers’ rhetorical positions on abortion. Illinois statutes used to define incest as “sexual relations between consenting adult relatives”. Sexual relations between consenting adult relatives are now classed as “criminal sexual activity”, with the word “incest” appearing nowhere in that section, reflecting, I… Read more »
@Chris R “@Gaius: If we’re talking about erasing people, we could start with the half-billion vegetarians in India who apparently don’t exist anymore because their body is “primarily designed to ingest meat” and therefore they have no choice but to do it..” Point of order, and this goes to the whole meme of “erasure” – Gaius is not Shiva and he cannot erase anyone just by failing to mention them. Or are you making some ironic joke about white privielege or something, as if some whiteling on a blog has the power to make all those people disappear? Erasure is… Read more »
@Amphigorey: I agree! My current girlfriend has had an abortion and she feels compelled to remain silent about it. Even if she had a positive experience with it, she cannot share that knowledge with other women and other women cannot share that knowledge with her. This stigmatization of abortion is in itself the only thing that makes abortion a horrible experience that makes people feel isolated and deprives them of the support they deserve. In my girlfriend’s case, she learned that her mother had an abortion, too, something that one of her aunts finally told her after her mother died.… Read more »
Someone upthread made the comment that abortion is a horrible choice, even if it’s the least horrible choice. I disagree. Abortion is a fine thing; there is nothing wrong with abortion. It sucks to need one, but it sucks to have a root canal too, and we don’t call dentistry a horrible choice. Framing abortion as Always A Tragedy does damage to the national conversation about reproductive rights in two major ways. First, it cedes far too much ground to the forced-birth movement by implicitly agreeing with the position that a fetus is a person. Second, it erases women’s experiences.… Read more »
Oh, in case anyone wants to misinterpret my second paragraph, let me be clear that the only ethically consistent resolution to pregnancy by rape is to be pro-choice for everyone. Being pro-life inevitably puts you in the position of having to solve that dilemma, being pro-choice does not. I do not think that pro-life is a defensible position and that is one of the reasons why.