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Club said "I cannot buy into abortion rights on the basis of the burden on the mother (exceptions for rape, incest, etc.)".

I agree that it doesn't make sense.

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Is there a non-rhetorical difference between saying that a woman who engages in non-incestuous consensual sex forfeits the right to autonomy, and saying that you're not going to include the burdens to her in weighing the relative interests relevant to her desire to have an abortion? I'm not seeing it.

Do I see a difference? Yes. Do I think it should be material? No. It's not much of a right to autonomy if it disappears when someone thinks you've been irresponsible. That's like saying that you have a right to free speech, but that it disappears if you say something dumb. Not so much of a right, that.

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It's a very difficult question and one I haven't yet come to grips with yet. I said before that I believe science will give us the data necessary to answer it. Paramount to me is the experience (or lack thereof) of the fetus. Can it/he/she feel pain? Can it/he/she think? Etc. If either of these are present, I could give a shit about the mother's rights.

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I assume you know someone, or at least have met someone who has had an abortion or has gotten someone pregnant and gone along with a subsequent abortion. Do you really view these people as murderers in the same way you'd view a man who walked up and shot your son?

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I'm sorry - what's the interest competing with grandma here?

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Well, you can answer it in either of the two contingencies:


If no pain--legal;
if pain--not legal?

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It's one thing to talk about a criminal conspiracy directed at targets within the United States but which takes place in other countries. It's another to talk about economic activity which is lawful where it takes place but which our government has decided is against our foreign policy interests.

I don't get why the United States should be able to restrict one of its citizens from travelling from Country A to Country B, but maybe there's a lot about international law I don't understand.

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If the mother experiences pain, could you give a shit about the fetus's rights?

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I think it goes to how much weight you give the burdens - less if she didn't take proper precautions in the first place.

Answer me this? Why do most people agree there should be a rape/incent exception? Could it be that there is a "no fault" element to their rationale?

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If pain - not legal
If no pain/no thought - I still struggle with the balancing of the right to live v. mother's rights.

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Is it life threatening or otherwise grave?

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Its more of a motivational question you are raising. Are we up in arms about the murder rate in the Mexican border area? We aren't even up in arms about the murder rates in the inner cities. I think people (way more than now) feel comfy when they've defined their own communities. As always, its a sliding scale, but I'm somewhere in the bottom 25% on this issue (none except for rape, incest, health of mom), and just about every pro-Life Catholic I know says they'd accept the national problem if the nation butted out.

Of course they'd have to fight it out state by state, but ultimately people like me move to Indiana. And I bring my poor Irish cousins with me.

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Response to negative stimulus is present in almost all living things. As to capacity for thought, I'll leave that for sebby and other philosophers to determine what exactly defines "thought."

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I fail to see where you are giving any weight at all to the mother's interests. It sounds like you think abortion is OK only if the fetus is entirely oblivious to whatever it experiences. It's not really "balancing" if one side of the scale has nothing on it. It is analytically, simply, I grant you, but only at the cost of ignoring half of a difficult moral equation.

I think most people are of more than one mind about abortion. A majority is uncomfortable with the idea of forcing a woman who has been raped to have an abortion.

Most people probably don't agree with your view of property rights. You should not lose your right to expel strangers from your apartment simply because they generally think that have a right to come and visit.

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Get raped, carry around the result of that rape for nine months, give birth to the child of the monster that raped you and get back with me.

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Odd that you didn't have the same question about the fetus' pain. Or not so odd, since the interests of the woman are not really reflected in your moral calculus.

And I was talking about "pain," as you were, not about the severity of the threat to the woman's health.

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Speak in plain terms. In the pro-life rhetoric, this is "Its her fault."

I've heard its cousin, "She asked for it" is also popular.

Fear of women, my man. Its all about fear of women. You'll never see a man totally comfortable with women as his equal out there picketing a clinic. Is that a generalization? Yep. And I'll bet my first kid its spot on.

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I give less weight to the woman's rights because she is not potentially being killed as a result of my decision. Seems logical, doesn't it? You seem to think there are equal items on both sides of the scale. I do not. Perhaps one day science will reveal that is not the case, but until then, I find it prudent to error on the side of life (just like I do on the death penalty).


I don't understand your comment on forcing a woman to have one.

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Huh? Where is this coming from? I do not believe a woman should have to carry a child resulting from rape.

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Again, you want to equate the to, but I don't think you can. A woman suffers a burden if she is forced to have a child. A fetus loses its right to live. They are not equal.

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You're a riot.

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Call me callous, but I see a pharmaceutical solution to the "what about the pain the fetus might feel?" argument. That comports with my "necessary evil" stance on the matter. The process is ugly, but the alternative is far uglier. For all you "hey, she had sex, its her problem" folks, this is the other side of your "tough love" sword. If its tough love for the women, its tough love for the fetuses. Everyone's gotta be responsible, right? Life isn't fair, right? That she happened to be a woman is her tough luck. Well, that it happened to be a fetus in the wrong woman at the wrong time is the fetus' tough luck.

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I think it is more of a wish to spare someone subjected to a traumatizing experience a constant (for 9 months), growing, physical reminder of the experience. A reminder, moreover, that massively fucks up your body (not how the body looks -- it will suck nutrients out of you and expand some organs and squish others, can cause you to have to stay in bed (pretty much immobile) for extended periods of time, can cause you to have diabetes, can suddenly turn out to be life-threatening when it starts to be born).

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This is just a matter of degrees. Many woman are emotionally traumatized if their husband/boyfriend leaves during pregnancy and don't want to have a reminder of the relationship around for 18+ years, but you'll find far less agreement in this situation.

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Maybe what you mean is not what you're saying -- that you don't consider the woman's interests -- but that the fetus' demise outweighs almost any possible interest the woman could have. If so, you'd get more sympathy if you acknowledged the woman's interests instead of suggesting that she gets whatever she's got coming if she chooses to have sex. Although I still don't understand how any of this changes if the fetus is the product of rape, which is where we started. As someone else said, the harm to it is no less in those circumstances.

I don't think I said there are equal items on each side. You're comparing apples and oranges. I'm not sure how I would resolve the problem if I were faced with it, though I think I know. But I reject the simplistic thinking that ignores the differences between, e.g., a week-old fetus and a baby. At a week after conception, you're talking about a speck, something we wouldn't have been able to identify as human until the last few decades. When people invest that speck with rights, I have to think that they are motivated more by nostalgia, or sentimentality, or other bigger ideas in which abortion plays some supporting role.

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Then why were you asking about pain at all? And if you start asking about pain, why do you care about the pain experienced by the fetus, but not by the woman?

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The woman may lose her life, in childbirth. And don't "exception for danger to woman's health" me -- this can happen completely unexpectedly. Everything is going great, the pregnant woman has had a great checkup within a week, and suddenly, boom, shit happens and she almost dies.

I guess you could say "tough luck, people die unexpectedly all the time" but I will refer you to SD's "tough luck" being a fetus in the wrong woman at the wrong time.

And do you know how many non-adopted kids are out there? You make women who would rather have an abortion have kids, some of them think they are so cute that they keep them when they're born. During these kids' childhoods, a decent proportion are going to be given up by or taken away from the mother, when they are older and far less adoptable.

Even before that, women who don't want a baby to the extent that they are willing to have an abortion are unlikely to take care of themselves during the pregnancy, meaning that the resulting children are more likely to be "imperfect" and thus less adoptable.

I mean, shit, how many 8-y-os with fetal alcohol syndrome, who weren't read to as kids and had crappy nutrition as kids and are discipline problems, have you adopted lately?

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According to Edwards today, "When John Kerry is President, there won't be any more pain"

So I guess the question is moot.

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No, you aren't. Not if you can sit back and allow knocked up kids in Northern Virginia to stream across the state line to over here in Maryland (come on, you know we'll be one of the last to go, and Virginia one of the first) to murder their unborn children. Dead babies are dead babies, regardless of which side of the Potomac.

You, sir, are a federalist. NTTAWWT.

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Fan-tastic. That seals it -- I'm voting for that Kerry fellow.

Sa-Prize, Sa-Prize, Sa-Prize!
 

Bush and or Blair getting a Nobel for going to war? How Orwellian.

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This is a bad analogy. The proper analogy would be does he view a woman who gets an abortion in the same way he'd view his wife walking up and shooting his son.

How I view someone who has an abortion totally depends on why. Was the pregnancy a threat to her life? Did the baby have a severe birth defect and it would have been more cruel to allow the child to be born? Was she raped? Was she 12 when she got pregnant.

All of those scenarios are very different from the typical woman who has an abortion. The CDC keeps data on this. The majority of women who have abortions in the US are white, middle class women in their 20's who are not having them for health reasons or because the child has a birth defect. The majority of abortions in this country are of healthy babies by women who have the means to support them. Go check out the CDC stats on this.

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But how many times?

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The man who said, "vote early and often," was the mayor of Boston, I'll have you know.

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There are plenty of women who are pro-life.

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Yes, this is what I mean. I do not believe a woman has something coming to her, that's ridiculous.

Logically, you are right. But still, there seems to be something intuitively different about a woman's rights in this scenario.

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I appreciate the point you are making about unwanted kids. And, I appreciate DTB's point about the racial disparity in unwanted kids. These are both huge problems, though my understanding is that adopting the neediest kids is like adopting an angry martian shark. I know one nice girl who's family has fostered 100s of these kids for Chicago's DCFS, and I know a lot of people in Chicago who deal with the kids before they are taken out of their homes and put up in foster homes. Strangely, the girl I know is from a farm town about 50 miles South of Chicago. They do whatever they can to take these kids out of the zooey neighborhoods. And then there is the DCFS system itself, where kids are constantly raping each other etc. etc. etc. Thank God for some of these foster parents, though not necessarily all.

That said, its been kind of interesting watching the abortion, and teenage pregnancy rates fall together ever since that nice Bill Clinton forced his Contract With America on y'all and ended welfare. In the big picture, we roll back the Great Society bullshit to somewhere around 1927-levels, I doubt there is anything left for us to argue about on a societal level.

ET clarify that they didn't foster hundreds of kids "at a time"

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Interesting that you bring that up. When the so called partial-birth abortions are done on third trimester feti, they don't use anesthesia for the baby, although they could. What kind of fucking monster would do something like that? These docs who will crush a child's skull with a forceps and hack it to death should be required to euthanize the child first with KCL or at least anesthetize the kid. Monsters.

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You are having trouble here because you've been thinking too much about how our government acts without regard to due process and other rights abroad.

Think of tax burdens - you get to pay US taxes whereever you go in the world. Think of the foreign corrupt practices act - you can't bribe anyone no matter where you go. But, whatever you do, don't think of Gitmo.

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Oh good god. (a) your "intuitive" thing is kinda crap and (b) how would the woman access the exception for rape? Would there have to be a conviction? A trial? Charges filed? Visible violence to the woman?