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| June 14th, 2004It would also seem fitting if another Pope Urban II arose and called a crusade to defend our innocent brethren in the womb. If the Church can call Christians to arms to drive out the Islamic hordes who were murdering innocent Catholics, why shouldn’t it call to arms a defense against the wholesale slaughter of innocent children? If anything, this would be a more justifiable war…not that the Vatican believes there is such a thing.
Whatever the case, the praticality of such action would be very difficult to guage. I’d like to hope that the fact that the pro-life side doesn’t have a reasonable chance of success would be the only disqualifying factor…
Steve Skojec, writing in the comments at Amy Welborn’s blog.
I don’t think Mr. Skojec’s pro-violence position is the norm among pro-lifers (the fellow who responded to Mr. Skojec, arguing that pro-lifers should not resort to violence, is much more mainstream). But we should remember that there are folks like Mr. Skojec out there.
June 14th, 2004 at 1:55 pm
I would like to be clear on my position - I do not advocate violence per se, however, I do think that the issue of abortion is every bit as dire, if not more so, than the issue of slavery - which prompted the Civil War; or the issue of the Holocaust, which was integral to the second World War.
If you view an abortion as the murder of an innocent child, as pro-lifers do, then it is only natural that one would be moved to be willing to take up arms in defense of that life. I don’t see this an intellectually inconsistent position.
That’s essentially my point. If this is the great injustice that the pro-life cause believes that it is, then why is there such restraint on the moral outrage and subsequent action on our part. It would seem that in times when consciences were less deadened by relativism, this would bring our country to the brink of war. Instead, it merely acts as an abstract catalyst for public debate.
I do not advocate the indiscriminate or personal violence of individuals against those involved in the abortion industry. I do, however, believe that there would be, at least in theory, sufficient moral impetus for a civil position to form, declaring the unwillingness to abide a government whose laws sanction such atrocities, even though that position may entail military reprisals from said government.
I’d rather not, when history comes to pass, be lumped in with those Germans who sat idly by while fellow human beings were exterminated in concentration camps, and did not speak out for fear of suffering the same fate. But for there to be any efficacy in such a statement, it must bear the weight of numbers. That is something I do not think will ever be supplied, so the point remains in the abstract.
This comment was written by Steve Skojec.Report this comment to the moderators
June 14th, 2004 at 2:34 pm
I’d like to remind all “Alas” readers to please keep responses to Steve (or any other pro-lifer who posts here) civil. I’m cool with people attacking pro-life positions, but please attack the position, not the person.
Steve wrote: If you view an abortion as the murder of an innocent child, as pro-lifers do, then it is only natural that one would be moved to be willing to take up arms in defense of that life. I don’t see this an intellectually inconsistent position.
I don’t think it’s an intellectually inconsistant position, either. However, despite the frequent rhetoric, I’m not sure that most pro-lifers do view abortion as the same thing as the murder of a one-year-old child.
For instance, no seriously proposed pro-life law calls for either life in prison or the death penalty for abortionists. Nor do most of the proposals I’ve seen call for punishing the mother at all - only the doctor is punished.
This is not consistant with the claim that there’s no difference between an abortion and child murder. (Would anyone suggest that the murder of a one-year-old doesn’t deserve the same penalty as any other murder; or that if a child’s mother pays someone else to do the murder, she should therefore not be punished at all?)
As you say, IF one accepts that there is no moral difference between the Holocaust and legal abortion, then it becomes difficult to resist the conclusion that a call to arms is justified. However, the vast majority of pro-lifers not only resist that conclusion, they reject it entirely. To me, this suggests that at some level, they do recognize a difference between fetal life and an actual person.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
June 14th, 2004 at 2:50 pm
hey, that’s cool. see, i’m one of those weird liberals who believes in the second amendment and actually knows how to fire a weapon. (spent almost three years in the army, too, so we’re not talking just .22s here.) if these nutcases think this is no different than the holocaust, they obviously also believe that pregnant women do not have the right to their own bodies, and that right is something i’d be willing to kill to defend, if it came down to it.
i don’t mean i’d go to clinics and shoot anti-choice protesters, but if they wanted to start a war, they just might find some of us shooting back.
i also think it’s very telling that these bozos only believe abortion is evil when women make strides towards having equal rights. if we just sit down and shut up and take the abuse, on the other hand, they always look away from those of us who choose to end our pregnancies. why do you suppose that is?
This comment was written by dana.Report this comment to the moderators
June 14th, 2004 at 4:12 pm
Ampersand wrote: I’m not sure that most pro-lifers do view abortion as the same thing as the murder of a one-year-old child.
For instance, no seriously proposed pro-life law calls for either life in prison or the death penalty for abortionists. Nor do most of the proposals I’ve seen call for punishing the mother at all - only the doctor is punished.
This is not consistant with the claim that there’s no difference between an abortion and child murder. (Would anyone suggest that the murder of a one-year-old doesn’t deserve the same penalty as any other murder; or that if a child’s mother pays someone else to do the murder, she should therefore not be punished at all?)
You make an excellent point - the very thing I was trying to underscore in my original post at Amy’s blog.
Contrary to what logic would lead us to deduce, I think the majority of pro-lifers do in fact place the life of a 2-month-old child in the womb on a par with a 1-year-old child who is in the world, so to speak.
And that’s the fundamental problem. We believe this, but we don’t act like we do. Why? Because we’ve had our hands tied for so long, we’ve become forcibly desensitized. If we read in the paper tomorrow that across the country, thousands of infants were being murdered every day, and their parents were getting away with it - we’d be outraged to an extreme degree. But we know that every day in this country, thousands of abortions are performed, yet we don’t blink an eye.
You know what I think about in the morning when I wake up? I’ll give you a hint - it’s not how I can save some babies today. It’s usually along the lines of “Should I have oatmeal or eggs for breakfast?” or “I really wish I had gone to bed an hour earlier last night.” I hate that despite what I believe, I am capable of putting it out of my mind. And yet I seem to have no recourse.
This is because of two things:
1.) The weak position of our moral leadership.
2.) The consequences we will suffer in society for taking action - no matter how peaceful - against abortion.
The first cause is something I see as endemic, and it causes me no small amount of headaches in many issues not directly pertinent here. Suffice it to say that we are bound by our own moral leadership because it has confused charity with pacifism, where previous generations did not make that mistake. There are justifiable causes which necessitate violence, though they are never desirable. I feel as though current Christian leadership, particularly Catholic (which affects me directly), might as well be Quaker for how they view this. It’s a fundamental failure to understand that if you want peace and justice, sometimes you have to fight for it.
The second cause gives rise again to my analogy with Nazism. The pro-life position, far from being insubstantial, has simply lost the propaganda war. The pro-choice side employs every trick, semantic and otherwise, to keep veiled the subject of the hallowed “choice” they seek to promote. The very term pro-choice is a manipulation of language, because the term “choice” refers to something specific - something not as easy to stomach if reflected on.
The pro-abortion (for that is the choice in question) position views the fetus as something other than a human life. In ampersand’s post, this philosophy is echoed - “they do recognize a difference between fetal life and an actual person.”
This is the same language used by the Nazis to describe the Jews. Hitler, in a Nazi propaganda piece, phrased it this way:
“The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human.”
This rhetoric is compatible with the current variety on abortion: “The fetus is undoubtedly a life, but it is not human.”
In the rare case that pro-abortion rhetoric attempts intellectual honesty, it is largely ignored by the majority of abortion advocates. A perfect example of this is the article written by Naomi Wolfe - an icon in feminist circles - entitled, “Our Bodies, Our Souls”. In the article, Ms. Wolfe depicts her own experiences with abortion, and paints as disingenuous any attempt to deny the humanity of the fetus. She posits:
“Abortion should be legal; it is sometimes even necessary. Sometimes the mother must be able to decide that the fetus, in its full humanity, must die.”
Her attempt to be truthful about a difficult subject is laudable - but the horrific implications of such honesty don’t help the propaganda war. Because of this, her article didn’t get nearly as much attention as it otherwise might have.
As the pro-abortion position continues to marginalize even its own shining stars who attempt to view honestly the humanity of the preborn child, it is evident that they have effectively made the subject taboo - a foregone conclusion that does not make for socially acceptable discussion and debate. As long as the truth can be kept quiet, the industry can go on.
And in the end, that’s what abortion is about - money. Like slavery before it, it’s a federally guaranteed “right”, ratified by the supreme court and treated as the law of the land.
Because of this, there is a psychological disconnect for all of us on the reality of what abortion entails. I think that’s the reason why my side is so numb. I think that’s the reason why those on my side - even those who get it - propose legislation that penalizes those involved with procuring abortions on a far gentler scale than homicide. Because they realize that people don’t get it. To use the words of Christ, “Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.”
If I could have it my way, I’d convert every last one of my opponents. The only real way to eliminate your enemy is to make them your friend. And on a personal level, that’s the approach I take. I’m not going to condemn anyone.
But on a broader, more abstract level, I really think a time will come when people finally put their foot down and say, “I’m not paying taxes to a government that sanctions murder.” And that’s when things will get dicey. That’s the kind of thing that starts a civil war. And the thing is, the pro-lifers probably wouldn’t stand a chance - modern military technology makes Jeffersonian revolutionary ideas sort of obsolete. But when it comes down to it, it’s a justifiable position, in my view.
And I think that’s what I’m getting at.
This comment was written by Steve Skojec.Report this comment to the moderators
June 14th, 2004 at 4:55 pm
I don’t have time to address everything you wrote right now, Steve, but I’ll return to it later.
For now, though, a few brief notes.
1) I appreciate how polite you’re being; trust me when I say that not all my pro-life visitors here are so polite. However, since you say you want to “convert every last one of my opponents,” may I make a suggestion? You might have a better chance of winning some hearts and minds if you’d refrain from calling people you disagree with Nazis quite so often.
2) Even more importantly, I think you should consider refraining from criticizing the alleged bad motives of people you disagree with. Not only is doing so rude, it’s irrelevant. After all, if it turns out that the vast majority of pro-choicers have good motivations (however mistaken they may be), and are not motivated by money, would that make abortion more acceptable, in your view?
If your answer is “no, it wouldn’t,” then it seems to me that you should consider the motivations of pro-choicers irrelevant.
3) You wrote: The pro-abortion (for that is the choice in question) position views the fetus as something other than a human life. In ampersand’s post, this philosophy is echoed - “they do recognize a difference between fetal life and an actual person.”
In this and a couple of other places in your post, you seemed to assume that the words “human” and “person” are interchangable. They are not. I view the fetus as human life; I do not view a fetus as a person. (Certainly not before the 24th week or so, and probably not even after the 24th week).
More later.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
June 14th, 2004 at 7:00 pm
Of course they don’t really believe that fetuses are people. They only pretend to believe that, in an abstract sense, for rhetorical purposes. When the discussion turns to the real-world implications of their claimed belief–such as that abortion should be criminalized as the crime of murder, or that abortion should be criminalized even in cases of rape, or that women should be prosecuted even for the use of an IUD or the morning-after pill or RU486–they get all wobbly and try to come up with excuses for actually treating abortion as if it’s about as serious as jaywalking. The whole anti-abortion movement suffers from this form of cognitive dissonance. They want to believe that abortion is the equivalent of murdering a child, but in the end, apart from a few of the most extreme fanatics, they just can’t persuade themselves to accept that absurd proposition.
And then they wonder why no one else is persuaded, either.
This comment was written by Don P.Report this comment to the moderators
June 14th, 2004 at 7:16 pm
[preface: i realize i’m rushing in foolishly here; i’m agnostic on the abortion issue, seeing both sides, and as a male i tend to leave this to others, however:]
This comment was written by arbitraryaardvark.i’m no expert on crusades, but i suspect that, like jihad, a crusade is about struggle, and does not need to be violent. a crusade based on nonviolence and satyagraha could be as cost effective as other means. there’s some precedent, dr king, tolstoy, suffragettes, thoreau, jesus, christians versus lions.
the idea of a tax strike is a good one. i’m not sure how president kerry would respond to a pope calling for a tax strike. while just war theory might (might) justify violence in the name of baby-protecting, that’s no reason to opt for violence if non-violence gets the job done.
ghandi said something like, it is better to resist injustice by picking up a gun than to do nothing. better still to resist nonviolently.
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June 14th, 2004 at 7:48 pm
If you oppose abortion as the taking of human life, then you have to 1) Oppose the death penalty and 2)Oppose war of any kind. Anything less is intellectual hypocrasy. So, when I see the leading lights of the pro-life movement in the forefront of protests against the death penalty and writing letters denouncing the war in Iraq, I will begin to pay more attention to their opposition to abortion.
However, I will also need to see them selling their goods and chattels to eliminate children dying of hunger and disease anywhere in the world. It is galling to listen to pro-life adherents arguing against family planning and abortion in Third World countries when it is more than likely that the children conceived and carried to term will die before their fifth birthday. Personally, I think it is more humane to abort a 24-week old fetus than it is to watch a five year old starve to death.
Now, I know that it is not as likely that an unwanted child will starve to death in this country. However, if you oppose abortion here, to maintain your credibility, you have to oppose it everywhere.
I have much more to say about this, but I will wait for another time to continue this discussion.
This comment was written by Jim.Report this comment to the moderators
June 14th, 2004 at 10:10 pm
Steve, where do pregnant women - specifically women like me who need the option of abortion to potentially save our lives and continue to parent the children we have - fit into this model?
Is my human life not fit for saving?
This comment was written by Lauren.Report this comment to the moderators
June 14th, 2004 at 11:40 pm
And that’s the fundamental problem. We believe this, but we don’t act like we do. Why? Because we’ve had our hands tied for so long, we’ve become forcibly desensitized.
Can you explain how having your “hands tied” makes you “desensitized” to the difference between a two-week-old fetus and a two-year-old child? I see the assertion, but not the explanation, and I’m a little baffled. After all, if you were really desensitized, you wouldn’t even say a two-week-old fetus was a human life; you’d say something about “potential life” or “kind of like a baby.”
ampersand is correct in that the rhetoric of abortion-rights opponents doesn’t match the philosophy. You would never see a law permitting consanguinity between mother and father as a defense to a mother’s killing her infant, or allowing “The pregnancy was a result of rape” to excuse a mother’s paying someone to kill her five-year-old. Yet the majority of abortion-rights opponents cherish exemptions when the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest.
What’s really happening is not desensitization, but unpopularity. Simply defining a fetus as human from conception would be easier than a patchwork of laws against abortion; but the average person really doesn’t want that definition. It would mean no more Pill, no more IUD, no more morning-after pill for rape victims, criminal charges against pregnant women who have a drink during pregnancy, forced C-sections when a doctor believes it would be in the fetus’s best interest even if it would harm the mother.
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
June 15th, 2004 at 5:27 am
First, I want to thank everyone for being so willing to actually discuss this. The fact that this all started because I was being made an example of - in a pro-lifer willing to use violence kind of way - means this could have been ugly, but it hasn’t been, and I am grateful for that. I’m hardly a fanatic, but I do believe that intellectual consistency on this topic requires a certain willingness to put one’s money where their mouth is, so to speak, hence my comments about civil war.
Arbitraryaardvark put it best I think - it’s better to resort to violence to fight injustice than to do nothing, but there’s no reason to opt for violence if non-violence gets the job done. That’s pretty much how I feel.
Ampersand, I understand your point about not calling people Nazis, and I’m really not interested in epithets - I’m simply pointing out the congruities between the philosophy of the Nazis on human life and the philosophies of the minds that move the abortion movement. There were direct connections between developers of Nazi eugenics programs and the founders of Planned Parenthood. Lorthrop Stoddard, an original member of Planned Parenthood’s board, actually went to Nazi Germany to discuss with Hitler the methods the Nazis were using to purify the race of imperfections.
So I am not saying, to all those who profess a belief in the right to abortion, “YOU are a NAZI!” Rather, I’m saying, to all those who profess a belief in the right to abortion, “Are you aware of how closely aligned your beliefs are to those of the Nazis?” I think it bears consideration, and I’ll not flinch away from it, because I honestly think most people who are for abortion really think they are doing something good. They need to think about it.
This is why I think your point about criticizing alleged bad motives kind of misses the mark. I’m sure I didn’t make myself clear - I was in a hurry when I last posted - but I do not believe that most of those I disagree with on this subject believe what they do out of malice. I believe, as I mentioned before, that they do so out of ignorance. I’m sure that will provoke some ire, but either its malice or ignorance - if I think abortion is murder, I can’t really offer many other options for why it’s not as obvious to others as it is to me.
I do, however, believe that many of the elites who promote the abortion industry, and in particular those doctors and nurses who are most intimately aquainted with the haunting reality of the childrent hey dismember in the womb, are not ignorant. They know the stakes. And for them, it really is about money. It’s not just speculation - there are a number of doctors who have had a change of heart and switched to the pro-life side. They’re more than willing to share their stories on motivation.
So while the question of motivation doesn’t change how I feel about abortion - evil is evil, no matter why you do it - that doesn’t mean I don’t care about motivation. Because something is allowing millions of people every year to do something that, to me, is so obviously wrong. I want to get at the root of that tree. Why? Because I’m not actually going to start a war, and I give a damn about the people on the other side.
I don’t have time to get into the distinction between human life and person - and it’s a philosophical discussion that would likely only lead us off track. But I’ll get to some more comments after I get to work. I’ve got to go.
This comment was written by Steve Skojec.Report this comment to the moderators
June 15th, 2004 at 5:28 am
Don P is right on the mark when he says most pro-lifers are suffering cognitive dissonance. Part of that comes from the fact that the whole abortion issue is ultimately just a rallying flag anyway, an easy target for moral posturing that has been magnified into an “atrocity on the scale of the holocaust” (a comparison that always offends my Jewish friends) by regressive-reactionary leaders in order to stimulate their supporters.
Such supporters are only too willing to be whipped up into a frenzy, because let’s face it, people love to feel righteous. Issues like this give them a sense of easy black-and-white purpose, a cause much less messy and complex than taking care of the poor for instance, and the vicarious sense that they are a faux rebel minority.
Such soundbyte morality is cheap and adictive. If these people and their catspaw ever succeed in enforcing a criminalization of abortion and homosexuality they will simply move on to a new “outrage”. Perhaps the fact that divorce is legal will become an “outrage” in such a world, or the practice of religions other than the state mandated one. The quest for scapegoats and a simple sense of purpose is neverending.
This comment was written by Deep River Appartments.Report this comment to the moderators
June 15th, 2004 at 5:36 am
Well, steve has just hit upon all the things we already discussed in countless posts just before the march in April, and I’m getting that exhausting sense of deja vu. Amp, is there any way we could copy-paste the arguments that were had with Joe M., Annie, and Pangloss to save ourselves the trouble of repetition?
This comment was written by Deep River Appartments.Report this comment to the moderators
June 15th, 2004 at 5:53 am
I generally agree with the tenor of comments regarding the cognitive dissonance among anti-abortion activists — they rely on the RCC’s concept of natural law to define personhood as flowing from the moment of fertilization of an ovum by a sperm, but they cannot possibly bring themselves to accept the consequences of that position as it might affect legal precepts on contraception, infertility treatment, and so on, casting into doubt (and I mean deep doubt) whether they really accept the underlying premise at all. And if they don’t, why should I or anyone else?
The truth, as I see it, is that a majority of people do see abortion as a moral dilemma, but they also see that the question of when “life” begins can actually and reasonably be subject to different conclusions by different people of good will — life being properly understood to mean when human cells should be accorded the same respect under the law as a human who has already been born. They are therefore willing, up to a point, to accord each individual the right to determine for themselves the outcome of that moral inquiry, until such time as a clear majority no longer disagree that what is at stake is the life of a person. I actually think this is a pretty fair compromise of the issue, especially since, in this moral calculus, it appears that very few would ever argue that the life of the fetus should be deemed to be as if not more important than the life of the mother at any point along this continuum.
What pro-life groups (most of them) don’t want to admit is that they too are engaged in an exercise of line drawing (as most would not make contraception or infertility services illegal, and even approve of abortion in the case of rape or incest) and they don’t like where the majority of people currently seem to want that line to be drawn — somewhere between 18 weeks on, with exceptions based on the health of the mother or grave defects in the fetus.
What is most obnoxious is to assume as Steve does above, that anyone who disagrees with this disjointed, not to say incoherent, set of “pro-life” principles is proceeding from bad faith, likely because of an economic stake in maximizing the number of abortions and just as evil as the Nazis. Steve, your views may indeed consistently track the “a life is a life is a life” view of natural law, but we are all thinking people and we can see that most of those who call themselves pro-life do not. In other words, they want to be able to assert the inviolability and gravitas of the natural law principles, just so long as they get to decide when it’s okay to chuck them overboard. Why do you think this may seem to be unacceptable to the rest of us?
This comment was written by Barbara.Report this comment to the moderators
June 15th, 2004 at 6:10 am
So I am not saying, to all those who profess a belief in the right to abortion, “YOU are a NAZI!” Rather, I’m saying, to all those who profess a belief in the right to abortion, “Are you aware of how closely aligned your beliefs are to those of the Nazis?” I think it bears consideration, and I’ll not flinch away from it, because I honestly think most people who are for abortion really think they are doing something good. They need to think about it.
Steve,are you aware that under the Nazi regime women had no reproductive rights at all? Our lives weren’t worth anything–unless we were white, then we were valued as breeding mares for the White race. And God help a woman who didn’t want to do that.
From the Holocaust Learning Center:
The state encouraged matrimony through marriage loans, dispensed family income supplements for each new child, publicly honored “child-rich” families, bestowed the Cross of Honor of the German Mother on women bearing four or more babies, and increased punishments for abortion [emphasis mine].
Do you realize that most neo-Nazis are against abortion? That most neo-Nazis are against access to contraception? That most neo-Nazis are against any kind of reproductive rights for women?
Do you realize that when you take away those rights from women, you are putting our lives in danger?
I’m saying, to all those who profess a belief in the morality of restricting reproductive rights, “Are you aware of how closely aligned your beliefs are to those of the Nazis?” I think it bears consideration, and I’ll not flinch away from it, because I honestly think most people who are against reproductive rights really think they are doing something good. They need to think about it.
This comment was written by Sheelzebub.Report this comment to the moderators
June 15th, 2004 at 6:33 am
Wow. There’s so much here that I want to address, and no way to do it succinctly.
So at the risk of abandoning certain points that should be responded to - because I simply can’t get to all of them - I’ll focus on the big ones.
My point since this whole discussion began is exactly what many of you are pointing out. The pro-life side is riddled with cognitive dissonance. There are exceptions for this and exceptions for that. There’s an unwillingness to have a comprehensive view.
In my honest opinion, the only tried-and-true pro-life position is that of the Catholic Church. That’s because it’s the only position willing to go the whole nine yards. No exceptions for rape, incest, or life of the mother. No artificial birth control or IVF. No mechanical tampering with the process of creating life, or letting it grow once it has been created.
If the pro-life side is unwilling to hold these positions, it is disingenuous at best, and none of you, to answer Barbara’s question, have any reason to accept it as legitimate. It’s almost more insidious for a “pro-lifer” to say that the fetus is a human person, then make exceptions for when it may be destroyed, than it is for someone to say, “I want abortion on demand, because it’s not a kid.” This is my problem. This is why I made my original post at Amy’s blog. Because so few people realize the implications of what we say we believe.
But I DO belive that the pro-life cause is more than a rallying-cry. There may be far fewer of us who really view it as the evil I’m saying it is, but we not only exist - many of us are capable of doing our own thinking as well.
Everyone keeps bringing up the legislation issue. The reason that the penal legislation proposed by the pro-life position is so lacking in teeth is because, quite honestly, of compassion. Pro-lifers understand that the majority of those who are involved with abortion on a personal level don’t think that what they are doing is wrong. Honestly, we tend to view the mother as a victim as well. Having known women who’ve been down that road and later had to deal with their consciences, I know their struggle. They were made to believe it was their only option. Truth is, it wasn’t. So, when it comes to putting a mom in jail on first-degree murder charges because she has an abortion, there are ethical difficulties. Doctors, on the other hand, have no excuse. In my view, every abortion doctor is a serial killer - and they have the medical knowledge to know that what they are doing is destroying a human life. They see the bodies. They know the toll.
I also think that drugs like RU486 should be outlawed. Any contraceptive that acts as an abortifacient should be.
The desensitization that has taken place in the pro-life movement has to do with knowing that abortion is an evil but having our laws and popular culture tell us there’s nothing we can do about it. It also has to do with the cognitive dissonance we’ve discussed, because there are many in the pro-life camp who undermine our efforts by being hypocritical when it’s convenient. So in the end, guys like me - married working stiffs with families - can’t do too much but talk about it with people. When you’re faced with something like murder, but you have no recourse, nothing you can act upon, you learn to suppress your emotional response. Eventually, you become kind of numb. Eventually, that’s why you lose.
Lastly, I’d like to address the idea that to be pro-life is to be anti-war and anti-capital punishment. That’s a non-sequiter. There is a fundamental distinction between the taking of innocent life, and the taking of the life of a combattant or guilty criminal. All killing is bad, but in war, or in execution, there can be justification for it. There can never be justification for the destruction of innocent life. In his article entitled Abortion vs. War, Fr. Frank Pavone delineates this distinction:
Lastly, I must admit I find the question of women needing to destroy their children to save their lives to be a paper tiger. It is EXTREMELY rare that a procedure like this is medically necessary. But beyond this, what mother wouldn’t step in front of a bullet for her child? Isn’t that what motherhood is? To give life? To lay down your own life for your children?
We’ve lost our sense of heroism when we have to ask these questions. I can’t help but feel taht it’s symptomatic of a narcissistic culture when a mother cares more about herself than her child.
This comment was written by Steve Skojec.Report this comment to the moderators
June 15th, 2004 at 6:48 am
“In my honest opinion, the only tried-and-true pro-life position is that of the Catholic Church. That’s because it’s the only position willing to go the whole nine yards. No exceptions for rape, incest, or life of the mother.”
Wow. That’s very, very scary and I can’t begin to tell you how glad I am that this view is held by only the tiniest minority. No exceptions for the life of the mother? Close to 20 years ago a friend of mine wrote a comic SF serial in which cause of the young of the near-future day was fetal rights at the expense of the mother. That is to say that the fetus holds more value than the mother. I can tell you with no hesitation whatsoever that if my wife was pregnant & her life was in danger if she did not get an abortion that both of us would want the abortion. How grotesque and nightmarish that somebody outside of our family would make the choice that my wife should die so that a potential life MIGHT be born. Are you aware of the condition of most fetuses in cases where abortion is called for to protect the life of the mother? Would you not think that in the case of the danger to the life of the mother that abortion would be considered self-defense? Just like what happens if you kill somebody who was trying to kill you?
Scary, scary stuff. You have succeeded in scaring the pants off of me.
This comment was written by Jake Squid.Report this comment to the moderators
June 15th, 2004 at 7:13 am
I wish I were more competent with tags, but here goes. First, Steve, I will say that you at least appear to have the courage of your convictions — that, indeed, you are willing to state that there should be “No exceptions for rape, incest, or life of the mother. No artificial birth control or IVF. No mechanical tampering with the process of creating life, or letting it grow once it has been created.”
But allow me to express an oh so gentle sense of disgust at your patronizing view about women who undergo abortion, that, “Pro-lifers understand that the majority of those who are involved with abortion on a personal level don’t think that what they are doing is wrong. Honestly, we tend to view the mother as a victim as well.”
Steve, if they really and honestly don’t believe that what they’re doing is wrong, why do you think it is up to you to decide this issue for them? Well, it’s clear, in fact it is quite illuminating that you justify your position by denying that women are capable of understanding and exercising moral judgments, instead, they are victims incapable of truly exercising moral free agency. It’s all of a piece, isn’t it, the view that you need to make the moral, not simply the “physical” choice for this woman — because she is herself unable to.
It is true that there are some women who cannot come to terms with having had an abortion, but most women realize over time, if not immediately, that they made a difficult choice likely under trying circumstances, and they made the best choice they could given the information they had. It’s downright insulting, in this light, to be viewed as a victim because of one’s inferior reasoning capabilities. It doesn’t strengthen your case at all.
At least you admit that the “cognitive dissonance we’ve discussed” exists, “because there are many in the pro-life camp who undermine our efforts by being hypocritical when it’s convenient.” But I would suggest that it is much more than that. I would suggest that the visceral feel of right and wrong is just absent for many people when it comes to early term abortion, not because they are “hypocrites” but because they assert an underlying premise without understanding or believing it. And it would drive the debate way forward for people like you to be unsparing in your moral judgments, as you have, and for other pro-lifers to be equally honest in theirs — which they frequently will not do, for whatever reason. Instead, they, like you, rely on the idea that “It is EXTREMELY rare that a procedure like this is medically necessary.” Therefore, they hope that their views won’t really cause the kind of extreme hardship that extreme views usually do. Believe it or not, I know women who have faced this. It isn’t nearly as rare as you think it is.
Finally, to impose “heroism” on individual women is simply obscene. Heroism, to be truly so, must be chosen, otherwise, a woman in this situation is simply society’s sacrificial victim.
This comment was written by Barbara.Report this comment to the moderators
June 15th, 2004 at 7:18 am
Jake, Steve’s views are less scary when they are set forth as they really are — because what is happening currently is that people with those views are in fact “hiding” them whilst trying to sound reasonable to the rest of us. Like I said above, most of those who assert the “natural law” position don’t really believe it because they have no idea what its logical consequences really portend. In order for them to understand this, it needs to be spelled out for them in all its scary detail by true believers like Steve.
This comment was written by Barbara.Report this comment to the moderators
June 15th, 2004 at 7:41 am
The notion that an abortion is the euqivalent of murder of a child is ENTIRELY a post-Roe v Wade invention. Back when abortion was still illegal in most US jurisdictions, it was not regarded legally or in the minds of the general public as murder. The common law rule, dating back as long as we have records of anyone addressing the subject, is that life begins with birth (How old are you? Do you count from your birthday, or from you conception day?).
“Life begins at conception” was a concept developed purely to enable the anti-abortion types to argue that there is some other “person” besides the mother whose rights must be taken into account in any constitutional analysis.
This comment was written by rea.Report this comment to the moderators
June 15th, 2004 at 7:53 am
The thing about war is that it doesn’t just kill combatants, but usually harms and kills large numbers of non-combatant civilians as well, including children. So a truly pro-life position really would have to be anti-war as well. Even if the war would overall be predicted to save more lives in the long term than it took, it still wouldn’t be a pro-life position. For example, a strict pro-lifer wouldn’t say you could abort one fetus to enable the mother to go on to have more children, therefore giving a net “gain” of lives, because end doesn’t justify means. The same would seem to apply to the death penalty, and the argument that executing one criminal might save the lives of several potential victims.
It seems to me that there are two options - either it’s wrong to kill anyone, ever, for any reason, from fertilisation to natural death. Or society can set out certain strict laws designating the situations where killing someone is allowed. That usually includes war situations, self-defence, sometimes even defence of property (!) (and if your body isn’t your own property then what is? But that’s a different argument…). Other situations may be the death penalty for certain criminals, and the unique situation of a pregnant woman, where from the pro-life point of view you have one person inside the body of another.
I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable to say that abortion shouldn’t be on the list of lawful killings. You might of course disagree, and I guess we all have different opinions on where to draw the line. But it’s no more illogical or unreasonable than any other form of lawful killing, even if you consider the fetus to be deserving of “personhood.
This comment was written by kasasagi.Report this comment to the moderators
June 15th, 2004 at 8:38 am
“Rea” should do a little more research on what the law used to say:
Blackstone said: “Life is the immediate gift of God, a right inherent by nature in every individual; and it begins in contemplation of law as soon as an infant is able to stir in the mother’s womb. For if a woman is quick with child, and by a potion, or otherwise, killeth it in her womb . . . this, though not murder, was by the ancient law homicide or manslaughter. But at present it is not looked upon in quite so atrocious a light, though it remains a very heinous misdemeanor . . .”
And then this:
In other words, it is absolutely false to say that the “common law” always thought that life began at birth. That just isn’t true.
This comment was written by Joe M..Report this comment to the moderators
June 15th, 2004 at 8:40 am
I think Kasasagi brings up a really good point. Much of the distinctions being made between the decision to go to war and the decision to terminate a pregnancy centers on who makes the decision — and much of the discomfort with legalized abortion, in my very humble opinion, is the exercise of self-determination in adjudicating the moral interests at stake. It’s not a reflection of the notion that life is always so sacred that no competing interest can ever get in its way. That the determination is being made by women makes abortion conceptually even more difficult to accept. This is reflected in Steve’s statement that the women involved are “victims” who “don’t believe what they are doing is really wrong.” Ergo society must step in and exercise control.
I think if society were unified in its view on the beginning of “personhood” then I think the rules over abortion would not engender much fuss. That society is not unified results, for most people, in deferring to individual judgment, because we place a very high value as a society on liberty and freedom of conscience. Those who would outlaw abortion would never admit that they do not value these things, but it is clear that they value them far less than they value social control over moral decision making.
This comment was written by Barbara.Report this comment to the moderators
June 15th, 2004 at 8:46 am
Lastly, I must admit I find the question of women needing to destroy their children to save their lives to be a paper tiger. It is EXTREMELY rare that a procedure like this is medically necessary.
Sometimes it is to save the mother’s life (although the pro-lifers seem to have an elastic definition of risk when it comes to this topic). Sometimes it is to save the quality of her life–some pregnancies can and do result in prolonged health issues and disabilities.
But beyond this, what mother wouldn’t step in front of a bullet for her child? Isn’t that what motherhood is? To give life? To lay down your own life for your children?
Would you mind telling me how it’s beneficial to a mother’s other children–who need their mother–to have her sacrifice her own life?
And frankly, I think it’s awfully easy for you to decide that mothers should lay their lives down. Maybe a woman would like to live. Perish the very thought that the perfectly natural instinct of self-preservation sets in! These terrible, selfish women, wanting to live.
We’ve lost our sense of heroism when we have to ask these questions. I can’t help but feel taht [sic] it’s symptomatic of a narcissistic culture when a mother cares more about herself than her child.
It’s hardly heroic for someone who’s not in the situation to foist a choice upon someone else. That’s oppression, actually, not heroism, and that’s not going to convert me to your side. I can’t help but feel that it’s arrogant and misogynistic to dictate to women that we should be willing to die for a fetus, that our lives and well-being mean nothing, and that we are mere breeding mares.
This comment was written by Sheelzebub.Report this comment to the moderators
June 15th, 2004 at 8:48 am
Joe,
Your first example hearkens back to the idea of quickening — the point at which a woman “feels” a child inside — hardly at the moment of fertilziation, indeed, often not until week 20 or even later depending on how the placenta is situated.
Your second example regarding the “testator’s” children is similarly inapt, such a child would not be considered the testator’s issue if it were never born alive. The key there is “born alive” no more than nine months after the testator’s death.
Neither of these demonstrate that, at all stages of development, for all legal purposes, has the fetus been given the same consideration as humans who have already been born.
This comment was written by Barbara.Report this comment to the moderators
June 15th, 2004 at 9:13 am
Rather, I’m saying, to all those who profess a belief in the right to abortion, “Are you aware of how closely aligned your beliefs are to those of the Nazis?”
Tsk. As I’m sure you know, the Nazis were fervently opposed to abortion–for “Aryan” women, anyway.
Judaism holds that abortion is permissible in many circumstances; the Talmud says that a fetus is ‘like water’ for the first thirty days of its existence. Care to explain again how close those views are to those of the Nazis?
To get back to your earlier point on blaming women for choosing abortion, you have the moral calculus exactly backwards. An abortion doctor is, in your universe, like a hired hit man. She kills strangers for money. Whereas the mother is deliberately seeking out and paying a killer to murder her own child. How can you possibly say that the mother is “a victim” led astray? Not only has she conspired and directed a murder, but it is the murder of her own child–a child she should, as you say, be willing to die for.
Seeing such women as “victims” is the same cognitive dissonance you earlier decry. Yes, it’s more comfortable to look at a friend, or wife, or sister, and think, “She’s not really a murderer; she didn’t know what she was doing.” But it’s neither principled nor correct. At best, you are patronizing and dismissing the woman’s moral agency; at worst, you are cynically soft-pedalling the woman’s crime in order to gain popular support.
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
June 15th, 2004 at 9:30 am
We have reached that inevitable point in the discussion where further debate is fruitless.
The failure to distinguish the humanity of fetal life from some sort of cancerous growth or abstractly potential human biological amalgomation is disturbing to me. It’s also disturbing that no distinction is made between the innocent child, whose presence may endanger the life of her mother, and a criminal or enemy combattant. Innocent lives may incidentally be lost in war, but are never to be deliberately taken - if they are deliberately targeted, it is every bit as much of a crime as abortion is.
But, as I mentioned before, an abortion deliberately targets an innocent child. I do not care to “foist” heroism on anyone - merely to limit a kind of self-obsessed cowardice which treats a human life as disposable.
For Christians, it is the ultimate paradox. We learned from Christ the value of life because he was willing to lay it down. “This is my body, which will be given up for you.” Now, everywhere I turn I hear, “This is my body, I’ll do whatever I want with it.” When we collectively reach the point that we can’t recognize the valor in the sacrifice of one’s life for another, and that failure to do so is an act of weakness and selfishness, not love, then we have lost our humanity. One doesn’t need to be a Christian to see the nobility of such sacrifice.
The worship of autonomy - call it freedom if you wish, but it’s not real freedom if it only enables us to be slaves to our own vices - has become a catalyst for endemic perversion in society. I know that probably most of you think that I am wrong. I only believe men are truly capable of righteous self government when they themselves are virtuous. Otherwise, we have traded monarchical tyranny for the tyrrany of the many - either system can be equally corrupt.
If you want to know why there’s so much war in the world, why there is rape and murder and torture and child abuse and every evil thing - it’s because we’ve lost our sense of the dignity of the human person. We objectify each other. We seek the satisfaction of self over the good of others. You can’t have peace if youd don’t work for justice - and justice is for everyone, no matter how small or irrelevant.
That’s something I’ll hold to, and many of you will not. In the end, we’ll find out who was right. For the moment, I can’t justify spending any more time going around in circles about this. I know what you think of my positions, and you know what I think of yours. Time will tell what all of this will bring.
This comment was written by Steve Skojec.Report this comment to the moderators
June 15th, 2004 at 9:49 am
We have reached that inevitable point in the discussion where further debate is fruitless.
I guess that would depend on what ‘fruit’ you’re trying to harvest from the discussion.
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
June 15th, 2004 at 9:49 am
Just a couple of points for Steve:
I don’t “fail” to distinguish the humanity of fetal life from some sort of cancerous growth. I just happen to think that it is legitimate not to view every stage of developmental potential as being equivalent to the completed whole.
It’s also disturbing to me that authorities are so willing to turn the concept of intent upside down when it comes to the “incidental” killing of noncombatants during wartime. Normally, under the criminal law, engaging in force that you know will result in death is sufficient to be charged as murder. Why isn’t it here? It’s not that I think it should be, but it is clear that, under certain circumstances, we more or less target innocent life with impunity and without conferring consequences on the culpable parties. That it may be considered “just” is itself a commentary on the matter.
I don’t think time will render a decision. It hasn’t yet. Evil and good have co-existed from the beginning of time. Neither has definitively triumphed.
As to the rest — as I always say to my father-in-law when he gets too nostalgic, the “good old days” were alot better for some than for others.
This comment was written by Barbara.Report this comment to the moderators
June 15th, 2004 at 10:45 am
mythago says:
“I guess that would depend on what ‘fruit’ you’re trying to harvest from the discussion.”
He’s not here to discuss, he’s here to fish. Under the pretense of a “debate” that will leave no mark on his viewpoint whatsoever he is casting out rhetorical soundbyte lures to try and hook fence-sitters who might be susceptible to dramatic sounding innacuracies and theocratic grandstanding. Once he feels that the pond here has wised up to him he will simply move on to another message board and repeat the exact same points.
We’ve seen this a hundred times before and we’ll see it a hundred times more.
This comment was written by Deep River Appartments.Report this comment to the moderators
June 15th, 2004 at 10:55 am
In fairness to Steve, Ampersand initiated the thread with reference to comments Steve made on another pro-life blog. He only came over here, I suspect, because his comments were being commented on. I’m guessing he’s not a trawler.
This comment was written by Barbara.Report this comment to the moderators
June 15th, 2004 at 11:06 am
If you want to know why there’s so much war in the world, why there is rape and murder and torture and child abuse and every evil thing - it’s because we’ve lost our sense of the dignity of the human person. We objectify each other. We seek the satisfaction of self over the good of others. You can’t have peace if youd [sic] don’t work for justice - and justice is for everyone, no matter how small or irrelevant.
Oh, yes, because before abortion was legal these things never happened.
I love how pro-lifers try to blame women for all of the evils in the world.
Reread your history books. As I pointed out before, the Nazis that you like comparing us to criminalized abortion and they hardly respected the dignity of people.
Remember the Inquisition? That was not exactly a paragon of “our sense of the dignity of every person.” And it was brought to us by the Catholic Church, the same institution that supposedly loves life–or at least loves fetal life.
Slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, strikebreakers, legalized marital rape, child labor and exploitation, indentured servitude, civil and world wars (that featured rape, torture, starvation, bombings, and murder). . .all took place when the so-called evil of abortion was illegal. These are hardly examples of a society that respects life, but they are examples of a society that objectified others and sought the satisfaction of self over the good of others. No convienent scapegoat of abortion to blame then.
But hey, if it makes you feel better to tell women that it’s all our fault, you go on ahead. But don’t give me the song and dance that you love life after telling women that they should gladly die for a fetus.
This comment was written by Sheelzebub.Report this comment to the moderators
June 15th, 2004 at 11:18 am
Although I would never put it quite like Sheelzebub, it does sometimes seem like “autonomy” and “liberty” became vices at approximately the same time that women and other disfavored groups were finally permitted to exercise them. Sort of like the Pope discovering that women were likely to be the victims of oppression related to male sexual opportunism at approximately the same time birth control became widely available, and finding a link between the two. Like said phenomenon was a new chapter in human history.
This comment was written by Barbara.Report this comment to the moderators
June 15th, 2004 at 11:37 am
It’s one thing to praise the heroic mother who does step in front of a bullet for her child. It’s quite another to pass a law saying that she *must* do so, or be guilty of murder. Especially if we don’t require the same sacrifice of non-mothers.
This comment was written by kasasagi.Report this comment to the moderators
June 15th, 2004 at 12:04 pm
Joe M.–your second-hand quotes from Blackstone’s 18th century treatise in fact show the very opposite of what you claim they prove. Blackstone cites a bunch of instances in which unborn fetuses are treated differently from children born alive, and you somehow conclude that means that the common law treated life as beginning at conception?
Not to mention, Blackstone’s reputation as a historian of the common law being rather less well regarded nowdays than it was a century or so ago . . .
Jeez, 3 years at a “top 5″ law school, 25 years in practice, and I get to have some layperson tell me I don’t know as much about the law as I ought, because he read some out-of-context quote from an old treatise on an anti-abortion propaganda site . . .
This comment was written by rea.Report this comment to the moderators
June 15th, 2004 at 12:24 pm
In light of Steve Skojec’s statements, it’s worth remembering that anti-abortion fanatics such as Paul Hill and John Salvi (a young, conservative Catholic man) had a history of making public statements to the effect that violence against abortion providers is “justified” prior to actually committing their crimes. Both men are convicted murderers (Salvi, I believe, subsequently committed suicide in jail).
Since 9/11, and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the federal government has stepped up its surveillance of possible terrorists threats, including domestic terrorism. This surveillance includes increased monitoring of anti-abortion groups and activities, such as public websites frequented by anti-abortion extremists who promote the same kind of “violence against abortion providers is justified” sentiments espoused by people like Hill and Salvi.
Such individuals may become suspects in incidents of criminal anti-abortion activity, especially those that occur close to where they live. This includes not just acts of direct physical violence against abortion providers and abortion clinic workers and clients, but things like vandalism, bomb threats, stalking and all the other types of criminal act that anti-abortion activists have a history of perpetrating.
This comment was written by Don P.Report this comment to the moderators
June 15th, 2004 at 12:32 pm
Barbara says:
“In fairness to Steve, Ampersand initiated the thread with reference to comments Steve made on another pro-life blog. He only came over here, I suspect, because his comments were being commented on. I’m guessing he’s not a trawler.”
Hmm, true, I’m probably being unfair as to his initial motivation, but such things can shift given the opportunity. I still doubt very much he’ll walk away a changed man.
Rea says:
“Joe M.–your second-hand quotes from Blackstone’s 18th century treatise in fact show the very opposite of what you claim they prove. Blackstone cites a bunch of instances in which unborn fetuses are treated differently from children born alive, and you somehow conclude that means that the common law treated life as beginning at conception?”
Joe has a strange tendency to shoot himself in the foot that way. On a different thread he once complained that greedy abortion doctors were pushing the law so that their “unqualified” assistants could perform abortions, thereby increasing “production”. He linked to a court case where a pro choice organization defended a doctor’s assistant against a pro life activist motion as proof of this sinister “agenda”. Trouble is, even a cursory reading of the case he linked to revealed that the doctor’s assistant had already been legally performing abortions for some 20 years because otherwise the isolated and besieged clinic would not have been able to keep up with the demand. The case was actually an attempt to curb the endless illegal harassment and terror tactics that pro lifers had been using against the doctor.
This comment was written by Deep River Appartments.Report this comment to the moderators
June 15th, 2004 at 12:44 pm
Joe M.–your second-hand quotes from Blackstone’s 18th century treatise in fact show the very opposite of what you claim they prove. Blackstone cites a bunch of instances in which unborn fetuses are treated differently from children born alive, and you somehow conclude that means that the common law treated life as beginning at conception?
I didn’t say that the law historically treated life as beginning at conception, as any literate person would see. Instead, I was refuting your claim that “dating back as long as we have records of anyone addressing the subject,” the rule has been that life “begins” at birth. Not only is this scientific nonsense, it is plainly false. As I already showed, even if the old law didn’t treat life as beginning at conception, they most certainly didn’t pretend in every instance that it began at birth. Rather, various legal authorities recognized at least some protection for pre-birth life, and at least some capability of property ownership there as well.
Nice try, though.
This comment was written by Joe M..Report this comment to the moderators
June 15th, 2004 at 12:53 pm
Rather, various legal authorities recognized at least some protection for pre-birth life
Your example of estate law doesn’t prove your point. It recognizes that a pregnancy may result in a potential heir, and vests possible rights. Not at all the same as “rights” in the way we are talking about–the right to life, to avoid harm, to have interests that outweigh the pregnant woman’s.
By the way, insults about ‘any literate person’ neither advance your point nor refute rea’s.
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
June 15th, 2004 at 1:02 pm
Mythago: You are quite correct that a right to own or inherit property isn’t the same thing as a right to life. Still, your point is completely irrelevant. “Rea” had falsely claimed that every legal source back to the beginning of time treated life as beginning at birth. Now plainly if fetuses can inherit property, they must have been seen as alive in some sense. Even if this isn’t the same thing as a right to life, the fact that fetuses could own property refutes “Rea.”
This comment was written by Joe M..Report this comment to the moderators
June 15th, 2004 at 1:16 pm
“Rea” had falsely claimed that every legal source back to the beginning of time treated life as beginning at birth.
Er, no, as rea referred to “the common law rule”–meaning, to a lawyer (as rea says she is), English and American common law. That leaves out quite a bit of jurisprudence, but as America’s legal system originates in English common law (heavily modified by the Constitution and subsequent law), we can probably leave out the Code of Hammurabi and the Talmud.
It’s quite true that the common law recognized that a fetus is alive in some sense. That’s why there were laws about inheritance, the custom of a pregnant woman “pleading her belly” to avoid execution, and quickening (fetal movement) as the point at which a fetus was considered alive.
But the law never recognized a fetus as having personhood. Noboody is really saying a fetus isn’t alive–zygotes are alive, so are amoebas–but whether it’s a person, a human being, and therefore invested with rights as a born person is. The law has never* granted citizenship based on where you were conceived, counted age from conception, or treated an abortion to save the mother’s life as murder.
*Except for a recent court case in California, where a judge has held that if a fetus is an “unborn person,” USCIS cannot deport the pregnant mother since her fetus was conceived here, and thus he would be deporting a US citizen.
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
June 15th, 2004 at 1:17 pm
Joe, fetuses have never inherited property. That is not what the text you copied said. It said that a person who is born live nine months or less after the death of the testator will be considered to be among his heirs. Live birth is essential.
This comment was written by Barbara.Report this comment to the moderators
June 15th, 2004 at 3:20 pm
Steve’s comments are consistent with authoritarian Catholicism, that espoused by Antonin Scalia and Sean Hannity.
However, his support of the death penalty clashes with that of a somewhat influential Catholic - Karol Wojylta, aka Pope John Paul II.
Quoting from the Pope’s 1995 encyclical, Evangelium Vitae (which is the most recent papal screed against abortion):
It is clear that, for these purposes to be achieved, the nature and extent of the punishment must be carefully evaluated and decided upon, and ought not go to the extreme of executing the offender except in cases of absolute necessity: in other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society. Today however, as a result of steady improvements in the organization of the penal system, such cases are very rare, if not practically non-existent.
Excerpts
Full Text
It seems that Steve doesn’t really go in with the doctrine of papal infallibility, at least when it involves the death penalty or the concept of just vs. unjust wars.
And I don’t consider myself hypocritical for citing a Papal encyclical, as I’ve voluntarily left the Church, never to come back unless there’s a Second Reformation.
This comment was written by Aaron V..Report this comment to the moderators
June 15th, 2004 at 4:53 pm
Mythago says:
“Noboody is really saying a fetus isn’t alive–zygotes are alive, so are amoebas…”
Don’t forget sperm and eggs ;-P
Save the pre-conceived babies!:
This comment was written by Deep River Appartments.http://geocities.com/preconceivedbabies/index.html
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June 16th, 2004 at 10:09 am
At the risk of promoting my own blog, last night at http://vark.blogspot.com i wrote about a chance encounter with the folks from http://www.soulforce.org. They do a much better job than i was doing of communicating the philosophy and tactics of satyagraha and ahisma
This comment was written by arbitraryaardvark.(soul force, truth force, nonviolence, prolife.)
It disappoints me that the commenters here attack a strawperson, assuming that all opposition to abortion is authoritarian and anti-feminist. There are valid antiauthoritarian profeminist objections to abortion that aren’t being respected in this discussion. e.g margaret sanger’s views.
This same dynamic has been an issue in the libertarian party, where i’ve invested a lot of my life’s effort. the dominant view is that libertarian theory supports abortion on demand, while an embattled minority keeps fighting for the position that the party platform should recognize diversity of views on this point, that some thinkers are consistently both pro-life and pro-liberty. abortion isn’t an issue i choose to work on, but i see it as part of the spectrum of violence in our culture, along with child abuse, taxes, war, violence against women, violence against animals, torture in prisons, and a general lack of respect for both life and liberty. the soulforce page makes the point that our enemy is not each other, it is untruth.
now, i haven’t fully sorted out whether steve is a creative thinker or a raving loon. i’m aware some here consider me in the raving loon camp, and i’m ok with that. my views are far outside the mainstream, and i’m not skilled at expressing them well. but i did enjoy his krispey kreme art, and the way he has conducted himself in this thread. i think he’s right that we’ve reached a point where we’ve moved from arguing to bickering, and i should let it drop and get to work. but i wanted to share last night’s experience, and i’m pretty good at work avoidance.
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June 16th, 2004 at 10:47 am
Steve’s is the argument from fanaticism, that you are right solely because you are really, really sure that you are right.
Suppose that I believed (as I do on my worst days) that the Catholic Church is an evil institution, one that has held back the progress of humanity for nearly two thousand years, that has subverted the noble teachings of Jesus for the sole purpose of holds its followers in thrall (and that the existence of so many Catholics of the highest moral caliber demonstrates the capacity of human goodness to triumph over evil institutions). Would I be justified to demand unremitting war against the Catholic Church? No, I would not. Being really, really sure that you’re right is not sufficient grounds for war.
When we revile those people in the Middle Ages who burned witches at the stake for imaginary crimes, we do so not just because they were wrong in a matter of fact (for who has never been wrong in a manner of fact?), but for their _hubris_, their refusal to be humble in the face of their own ignorance. It is one thing to be really, really sure that you are right, and it is another to _know_ that you are right. Surety is a matter of belief, while knowledge is a matter of objective truth. Refusing to distinguish one from the other is not an error, it is arrogance.
This comment was written by Walt Pohl.Report this comment to the moderators
June 16th, 2004 at 11:25 am
There are valid antiauthoritarian profeminist objections to abortion that aren’t being respected in this discussion. e.g margaret sanger’s views.
I don’t know what this means. What are these supposed “valid antiauthoritarian profeminist objections to abortion?”
This same dynamic has been an issue in the libertarian party, where i’ve invested a lot of my life’s effort. the dominant view is that libertarian theory supports abortion on demand, while an embattled minority keeps fighting for the position that the party platform should recognize diversity of views on this point, that some thinkers are consistently both pro-life and pro-liberty.
I don’t think libertarianism is a coherent political philosophy to begin with, but it does seem especially incoherent to claim to be both a libertarian and opposed to the right to abortion.
This comment was written by Don P.Report this comment to the moderators
June 16th, 2004 at 1:11 pm
Don P. has trouble with the concept of libertarians who are against abortion. But it’s easy:
1. Government should do nothing except protect human beings from harming each other.
2. Given 1, libertarianism is the proper philosophy about restricting the role of government.
3. But abortion is precisely an example where human beings do harm each other. The fetus who is killed never gets a chance to have a life. If it’s not murder, this is at least some form of harm.
4. Therefore, government can properly restrict the availability of abortion consistent with 1.
That’s a perfectly respectable way to reconcile libertarianism and pro-life views. Not that all libertarians subscribe to it, but it’s not contradictory or incoherent.
This comment was written by Joe M..Report this comment to the moderators
June 16th, 2004 at 1:27 pm
Joe M:
Government should do nothing except protect human beings from harming each other.
In that case, libertarians should have no objection to a woman removing a fetus from her body. Under your stated principle above, the government should not compel women to act as a life-support system for another “human being.” Thus, a pregnant woman may refuse to allow her body to be used to sustain the life of a developing fetus (for the sake of argument, we’ll assume the controversial claim that a fetus is a “human being” is true).
Conversely, if your definition of “harm” includes the refusal to provide life-sustaining services for another “human being,” then the government may legitimately require people to do anything else that is required to sustain another “human being’s” life–food, clothing, shelter, health care, etc., etc. That is a very bizarre conception of libertarianism.
This comment was written by Don P.Report this comment to the moderators
June 16th, 2004 at 1:52 pm
One key distinction that Don P. seems to miss: Failing to provide some other person with food, shelter, clothing, etc., is not the same thing as poking scissors into the back of their skull and suctioning their brains out. In the first case, person A may be simply leaving person B alone. But in the second, person A is deliberately killing person B.
That’s what abortion does: The abortionist doesn’t just leave the fetus alone. He deliberately kills it by pulling off the fetus’s legs and arms, or suctioning its brains out. Libertarians could quite easily be against that form of deliberate killing.
This comment was written by Joe M..Report this comment to the moderators
June 16th, 2004 at 2:18 pm
Joe M:
One key distinction that Don P. seems to miss: Failing to provide some other person with food, shelter, clothing, etc., is not the same thing as poking scissors into the back of their skull and suctioning their brains out. In the first case, person A may be simply leaving person B alone. But in the second, person A is deliberately killing person B.
You’re not listening. If a woman is not required under libertarian principles to sustain a born human being’s life by providing it with food, water, shelter, etc., why is she required under libertarian principles to sustain an “unborn human being’s” life by providing it with food, water, shelter, etc. using her uterus?
This comment was written by Don P.Report this comment to the moderators
June 16th, 2004 at 2:30 pm
Joe M. says:
“But abortion is precisely an example where human beings do harm each other. The fetus who is killed never gets a chance to have a life. If it’s not murder, this is at least some form of harm.”
All together now: You can’t regret having never existed.
Joe M. says:
“Failing to provide some other person with food, shelter, clothing, etc., is not the same thing as poking scissors into the back of their skull and suctioning their brains out. In the first case, person A may be simply leaving person B alone.”
I love your “leaving alone” as a euphemism for “neglecting” and “turning a blind eye to” the plight of others. I’m starting to understand the Reagan ideal.
This comment was written by Deep River Appartments.Report this comment to the moderators
June 16th, 2004 at 3:01 pm
All together now: You can’t regret having never existed.
So what? Even for adults, you can’t regret having been killed after the fact, unless you are assuming that you somehow continue to exist on a ghostly plane where you are capable of regret. That doesn’t mean that killing adults is ok.
“Having never existed” — a very odd way to put it. If the baby doesn’t even exist, abortion would be impossible by definition.
If a woman is not required under libertarian principles to sustain a born human being’s life by providing it with food, water, shelter, etc., why is she required under libertarian principles to sustain an “unborn human being’s” life by providing it with food, water, shelter, etc. using her uterus?
It’s Don P. who isn’t paying attention. I already explained the obvious distinction between (1) leaving someone to their own devices, and (2) having them killed on purpose.
Put it this way: For the sake of argument, assume that all the inhumane things said by pro-choicers are true. That is, the fetus really is nothing more than the equivalent of a malicious trespasser who can be thrown out. Well, yes, I may not have to provide food and shelter for every homeless person who wanders across my land. But that doesn’t mean that I have the right to kill a homeless person by smashing his skull. Even if I’m a libertarian. The most that a libertarian should properly say is that if it’s my land, I have the right to eject a trespasser. But not to kill. That’s another matter entirely.
Is there a form of abortion wherein the abortionist simply removes the baby alive, whole, and in one piece, and then waits to let the baby live or die? If not, Don P.’s post is irrelevant.
This comment was written by Joe M..Report this comment to the moderators
June 16th, 2004 at 3:16 pm
Joe M:
It’s Don P. who isn’t paying attention. I already explained the obvious distinction between (1) leaving someone to their own devices, and (2) having them killed on purpose.
That distinction is irrelevant. The death of the fetus is an effect of depriving it of the life-sustaining services of the woman’s uterus. Just as the death of a born human being would be the effect of depriving him of the life-sustaining provision of food, water, etc. If libertarian principles do not require a woman to sustain another human being’s life in the latter case, why do they require it in the former case? Answer the question.
Put it this way: For the sake of argument, assume that all the inhumane things said by pro-choicers are true. That is, the fetus really is nothing more than the equivalent of a malicious trespasser who can be thrown out.
I see no one claiming that the fetus is “malicious.” I consider it entirely innocent of wrongdoing. Just as a born child who is dependent on someone else to sustain its life may be completely innocent. If libertarian principles do not require a woman to sustain the born child’s life, why do they require her to sustain the “unborn child’s” life? Answer the question.
Well, yes, I may not have to provide food and shelter for every homeless person who wanders across my land.
Then why does a woman have to provide food, shelter, etc. to a developing fetus?
But that doesn’t mean that I have the right to kill a homeless person by smashing his skull.
But I’m not saying you have the right to “smash his skull.” If you have the right to refuse to provide the homeless person with life-sustaining food and water, why doesn’t a pregnant woman have the right to refuse to provide a fetus with life-sustaining food and water?
This comment was written by Don P.Report this comment to the moderators
June 16th, 2004 at 3:22 pm
Joe M:
Is there a form of abortion wherein the abortionist simply removes the baby alive, whole, and in one piece, and then waits to let the baby live or die?
I don’t know. But if one human being has a right to refuse to provide life-sustaining services to another human being, why doesn’t a woman have a right to abortion using this method?
Your position now seems to be degenerating into the claim that it’s not the death of the fetus that you object to, but merely the method by which that death occurs.
This comment was written by Don P.Report this comment to the moderators
June 16th, 2004 at 3:29 pm
That distinction is irrelevant.
Really? You don’t see any difference between (1) the guy who just walks by a beggar on the street without giving him any money, or (2) the guy who takes a hammer and smashes the skull of the beggar on the street? Wow. That’s a little frightening.
Let me just say that in a criminal prosecution, the second guy would NEVER be able to defend himself by saying “Gee, the beggar was starving and he was going to die anyway, and smashing his skull was just the same thing as not giving him food.”
But I’m not saying you have the right to “smash his skull.”
Well, you’re obviously not talking about abortion, then.
If you have the right to refuse to provide the homeless person with life-sustaining food and water, why doesn’t a pregnant woman have the right to refuse to provide a fetus with life-sustaining food and water?
Even if libertarians believe that, that would ONLY mean that a woman coul