Sliding down the slippery slope on abortion
Bookworm on Jun 28 2011 at 11:58 am | Filed under: Abortion
“Killing a fetus in utero is not the same thing as killing a sentient human being. When the right gets around to facing scientific facts and abiding by what they say, then we can have an intelligent discussion on the issue. The US killed tens of thousands of people who were innocent but were at the wrong place at the wrong time in their country of Iraq, and those deaths are a bigger tragedy than millions of fetuses aborted in the US since Roe v. Wade–occuring as they do before the brains in those fetuses know they are alive, feel human pain and loss. To compare these two sets of deaths is just silly. I will never understand how conservatives have no problem with collateral damage in the wars that they eagerly support, but worry about fetuses that have less ability to feel pain or suffering than the cattle or chickens that are slaughtered to create Big Macs and McChicken sandwiches. The morality of the right ignores the realities of pain and suffering, and thus it is morally bankrupt to anyone with basic common sense.” — abc
I found fascinating the comment abc left on my “leftist morality” post because it is precisely the kind of thinking I had in my teens and twenties. I was abc. I know how I got there: I was raised in San Francisco in liberal Jewish circles and schooled at Berkeley. What’s more interesting to me is how I left that kind of thinking behind. My purpose in analyzing my changing attitudes is to say that there is hope for everybody. Even abc, whom I suspect is rather young, might come to revisit his cherished Leftist dogma.
American Jews are probably amongst the most devout abortion supporters in America. Those Jews who vote on the abortion-ticket like to point to a very old rabbinic tradition holding that, if a woman is dying during labor, it is acceptable to kill the child, provided that the child has not yet seen the light of day. Later rabbinic thought expanded this holding to place the child’s life over the mother’s at all times.
These were always narrow exceptions, though. Pragmatic considerations had to be balanced against God’s injunction to “choose life” and to “be fruitful and multiply.” Also, in pre-modern times, abortion was both unpopular and risky, and medicine limited a physician’s ability even to assess the risks a pregnant woman was facing. The early Jewish philosophers were dealing with anomalies that justified abortion, not with Planned Parenthood clinics in every neighborhood.
Although the rabbis wouldn’t recognize abortion today, modern Jews rely on ancient and narrow rabbinical strictures to embrace an ideology that allows abortion, not only in life and death situations, but at all points in time during the pregnancy, and for all reasons. I grew up, therefore, in a very abortion-friendly milieu.
I also grew up in a Holocaust milieu. Without exception, all of the older Jewish people whom I knew when I was growing up had a connection to the Holocaust, whether they’d escaped it or lost people to it. The Holocaust was a defining backdrop to my childhood.
With the Holocaust come questions: How can a nation deliberately target one entire group of people for extermination? Please understand in thinking about this question that the dead were not simply unlucky enough to be citizens of a country that was at war, which would make them the ordinary, tragic, collateral damage of traditional warfare. Nor were these people being killed for acts in which they had engaged, as would be the case with someone tried, convicted and executed for murder, or someone who willing takes up arms against another nation. Instead, they were targeted simply for being. It was an existential — or, rather, de-existential — slaughter. You are, therefore you’re dead. I always knew that acquiescing to the death of innocents simply as a housecleaning matter is evil.
What I tried to tell myself, though, was that abortion, unlike the Holocaust, wasn’t the death of innocents just for housecleaning purposes. It was the salvation of women, keeping them from abusive relationships, dark alleys and coat hangers. Except that’s not true. Or at least, not so true to justify unlimited abortion. Yes, there are women for whom abortion is the difference between life and death, a situation the rabbis would have recognized and one with which I still feel comfortable.
Living in the Bay Area, however, I knew women who followed the Hippie lifestyle, got too drugged-0ut even to contemplate birth control, and then had an abortion as ex post sexto birth control. One woman I know did this 11 (yes, eleven) times. When she finally married and wanted children, she couldn’t get pregnant for love or money. Nature (or God) has a sense of humor.
The next stage in my development was to be troubled, not by abortion itself, but by the wholesale abortion industry. I just couldn’t explain away industrialized abortion as something that sat squarely with decency or morality. I tried another rationalization: to the extent a human fetus, in its early stages, is indistinguishable from a chicken or dog, it should have at that time in its development the same rights as chickens or dogs — and we shoot chickens, don’t we? (That’s a rhetorical flourish. I know that we behead them.)
The argument that the fetus isn’t a person went out the window when I had my own babies. As I’ve mentioned here before, seeing my daughter’s 16 week-old spine on a scan, something that looked like the most delicate string of pearls, made it impossible for me to deny the fetus’ humanity. It’s a person. Likewise, watching my children grow-up and my mom grow old — seeing the connection between baby, toddler, child, teen, young adult, middle aged person, and old person — forced me to recognized that there is a continuum here. An honest, intelligent person cannot say that the fetus is entirely separate from the baby or the grandmother. They are one and the same, just at different developmental stages. To kill a fetus is to kill an old person.
But what about Iraq war? abc says it’s much better to kill 163 million non-human girl fetuses than it is to kill 100,000 Iraqi civilians. I disagree. If we killed civilians simply to houseclean, abc might have an argument. But as with the rabbis’ distinction between gratuitous abortion and necessary abortion, sometimes we take lives to save lives. If the Allies had acted against Hitler when he went into the Rhineland, even had that meant killing thousands of Germans, clipping Hitler’s wings would have saved the 20,000,000 lives that WWII destroyed, including the 6,000,000 Jews, the gays, and the gypsies casually exterminated for Aryan housekeeping purposes. As the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto came to understand, it’s better to fight for your life than to be annihilated because of mindless, evil prejudice.
I have no problem with striking down evil people, whether they lead a nation, operate in a terrorist cell, or kill children in a ghetto. Since I believe in free will, those who have embraced evil — the Nazis or the Islamists or the gangsters — have forfeited their right to walk freely amongst mankind. That others are killed alongside them (the woman and children with whom they surround themselves, or those who cannot leave, whether because the system imprisons them or because they know no better) is a tragedy, but it doesn’t lessen the fundamental morality of destroying the evil that creates those prisons. To quote my favorite Bookworm post:
But what about the innocent lives lost as a result of Pharaoh’s, the Nazi’s, and the Japanese high command’s intransigence? As the Japanese tale shows only too well, the innocents were always going to die, with the only question being whether they would die quickly or slowly. The same holds true for the Germans, whom the Nazis had long ago designated as cannon fodder to support their intensely evil regime. That’s the problem with an evil regime. If you’re unlucky enough to live under that regime, whether or not you support it, you’re going to be cannon fodder. Pharaoh will let you die of plagues, and the Nazi and Japanese leadership will let you be bombed and burned — as long as they can retain their power.
Iran is no different. Although the people bleed and cry under the brutish regime, no plague, including rioting in the streets, has come along that is bad enough to break the back of that tyranny. The people continue to die by inches, and the regime threatens everyone within bombing distance.
Liberals believe that it is immoral to impose serious consequences against the Iranian regime because there are innocents who will suffer from those consequences. What these liberals fail to understand is that, when power doesn’t reside in the people, but resides, instead, in a single group that is insulated from all but the most terrible strikes, imposing small plagues against the country (freezing a few bank accounts, public reprimands, vague threats) is utterly useless. These small plagues, no matter how much they affect the ordinary citizen, do not affect the decision-making process in which a tyrant engages. The only thing that will move the tyrant is to destroy his power base. Everything else is theater.
The Bookworm Turns : A Secret Conservative in Liberal Land, available in e-format for $4.99 at Amazon, Smashwords or through your iBook app.
Email This Post To A Friend
94 Responses to “Sliding down the slippery slope on abortion”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
[...] Excerpt from: Bookworm Room » Sliding down the slippery slope on abortion [...]
Wow. Bookworm justifies one faulty claim (abortion is a slippery slope to massacre) with many others. I am not who you think I am, and I am most definitely not you or a former version of you. You can attempt to put me in a little box, put a label on it, and then debate your packaged strawman. But you are not debating me. You are debating a dumbed down version of what you think I represent. How sad that you think this will lead you to any kind of understanding. Or, more accurately, how sad that you resort to this rather than seeking understanding. But that is your choice. From where I sit, where I know who I am and what I think (and how old I am), your posting looks rather silly.
Direct hit, Book. Good work!
“You can attempt to put me in a little box, put a label on it, and then debate your packaged strawman.” – ABC
You did that to yourself.
Similar to the Nazis ploy against the Jews, the pro-choice crew adopts language that dehumanizes for the purpose of conscience-free slaughter. The unborn child becomes a fetus or fish flesh; during the holocaust living, breathing, God-imaged people became locusts, their personal names replaced with tattooed numbers.
This ghastly humanity-denigrating practice can be seen with Sarah Palin. God preserve her.
(http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/the_wilding_of_sarah_palin.html)
Why is it illegal to remove a Bald Eagle’s egg from it’s nest or otherwise destroy it?
I will never understand how conservatives have no problem with collateral damage in the wars that they eagerly support, but worry about fetuses that have less ability to feel pain or suffering than the cattle or chickens that are slaughtered to create Big Macs and McChicken sandwiches.
McIdiot!
McPompous!
McMerciless!
McMisery!
You can attempt to put me in a little box, put a label on it,
I just did.
Has ABC finally “jumped the shark”?
I know he did for me when a debate about abortion became about the Iraq War and McDonalds sandwiches.
suek, the story goes that a militant survivalist is being led away to a five-year prison sentence after being found guilty in federal court of having killed and eaten a condor.
Just as he’s about to exit, the judge asks,”Say, before you go, what does condor taste like?”
The survivalist mulls the question for a few moments, then replies, “A lot like bald eagle.”
The belittling and bashing never has an off-season.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/576642/201106271903/Belittling-Bachmann.htm
Has ABC finally “jumped the shark”? Yes!
I look forward to hearing about how it wasn’t really a shark, it was a civilian-murdering SEAL, and by calling it a jump, conservatives are ignoring the scientific fact that you can’t really jump over a shark/SEAL if you’re water skiing behind a motor boat traveling at a speed of greater than blah, blah, blah..
@Libby:
Are you jumping the shark/SEAL or is it the earth jumping away from you? It’s all about your frame of reference.
“millions of fetuses in the US since Roe vs. Wade” is not equal to “163 million non-human girl fetuses,” which is the number of estimated abortions from a previous post. You distorted the quoted passage to fit your narrative.
Why can’t my family and I decide what is proper for us? Someone is always trying to make decisions for me that have absolutely zero affect on them. If I have an abortion, how does this impact my neighbor? It’s the same with seatbelts, my wearing a seatbelt does not impact any one around me (okay, I suppose my body could be ejected from the car and cause harm/damage), but there is no federal mandate against texting/talking on the phone while driving and that can have serious consequences for everyone on the road.
diodorato, your baby is not your neighbor?
When she finally married and wanted children, she couldn’t get pregnant for love or money. Nature (or God) has a sense of humor.
Or maybe there’s something called divine law which says that actions have consequences.
I just couldn’t explain away industrialized abortion as something that sat squarely with decency or morality.
The Left will talk about evil corporations exploiting the poor for profits, but the way you know that something is rotten in PP is that they never talk about PP’s profits. Once a Leftist starts wondering about this, they are going into heretical territory.
If I have an abortion, how does this impact my neighbor?
You didn’t know? Your abortion is paid for partially by your neighbors. It’s called taxes and federal funding or subsidization of abortion. You know that PP gets federal funding, correct. You know this, right. And you’re okay with it, right?
If I have an abortion, how does this impact my neighbor?
If you watched your neighbor try to commit suicide, would you try to stop or interfere with his/her decision? After all, how would his/her decision impact your life. It’s his/her decision to kill themselves.
Care and Diodorato write the only non ad-hominem comments above. The rest of the commentary above is better left unreplied to, since those that write them apparently don’t know the difference between making an argument and just calling people names. I can take the name-calling as long as the person doing it also demonstrates the intelligence to do more. When they don’t, it’s really like trying to converse with a dog…maybe worse. The dog, afterall, may be too dumb to understand, but at least he wags his tail and wants to be around you…
Care writes:
“Similar to the Nazis ploy against the Jews, the pro-choice crew adopts language that dehumanizes for the purpose of conscience-free slaughter. The unborn child becomes a fetus or fish flesh; during the holocaust living, breathing, God-imaged people became locusts, their personal names replaced with tattooed numbers…This ghastly humanity-denigrating practice can be seen with Sarah Palin. God preserve her. ”
See, here’s the thing. My comments distinguishing a fetus and a baby, which some idiots above continue to use to refer to fetuses anyway, are not part of a strategic war of propaganda to allow a holocaust. They are based in science and empirical reality. That is the difference between my comments and those of the Nazi’s who had to LIE to make the claim that Jews, Gypsies and others who were killed in the Holocaust were less than human. I do not have to LIE to establish that a fetus is less than human. I can present a bunch of scientific (biological, anthropological, etc.) facts to make the claim. That Care fails to see and acknowledge this difference is not surprising. Conservatives generally have problems acknowledging reality and staying in touch with science. But the really bad thing about this example is that comparing the destruction of unborn, early term fetuses with the destruction of sentient people in the Holocaust is insulting to all who care about the Holocaust. They are not morally equivalent, nor even in the same zip code.
Diodorato asks an important question: if I reject the idea that life starts at conception and refuse to ignore the science that says that a fetus is a baby, and if I follow the law and have an abortion, then what is the problem? How does it impact others. The answer, of course, is that it does only if you believe that your subjective definition of when humanity starts is the only one ordained by God and that anyone who has a different point of view, even if they ground it in empirical science, is not only wrong but sinful for thinking that way. In short, you need to return to a type of thinking that existed from the writing of the Old Testament to about the Middle Ages (with the brief, shining exception of what was happening in Athens, Greece for a while). Under that mentality, which still prevails in places like Iran, as well as red states in America (although they have agreed not to kill or imprison you in the latter place, unlike the former), you are not able to have a different opinion even when empirical knowledge leads you to that conclusion. If you are not able to live in the carefuully constructed fantasy work of the conservative, then there is something wrong with you. So please get with the program Dio, and accept on faith (and by ignoring scientific evidence) that a fetus is a baby and it is murder to kill it at any time in the pregnancy. To do so not only is equal to murder, but offends God himself who is watching you always and, like Santa Claus, keeps a list of who is naughty or nice, that he’ll pull out on your day of reckoning… I swear, conservatives have a world view as mature as a six year old child.
There’s a big difference between annoying seatbelt laws and institutions like Planned Parenthood, the Ford Foundation, and the U.N. that encourage millions of families of a particular group (e.g. Chinese, Indians) to use sex-selective abortion as a form of population control. The death of 163 million girl babies and the resulting imbalance of the male/female population actually does effect the entire group (even those neighbors who didn’t abort their children).
Dear abc ~ I’ll try to be flattered that you deemed my comment worthy of your response. But somehow…I’m not.
Care, as you can plainly see, abc does not know just how he bad he looks or how to rein in his hatred once he gets going. We kind of indulge him the way we do the goofy uncle who lives in the attic.
abc: ” I do not have to LIE to establish that a fetus is less than human.”
Yes, you do. A human fetus, if left to develop, will develop into nothing other than a human. Because the fetus was created through the fusion of human cells, it starts as nothing other than human. If, as abc asserts, it is less than human, which by definition is not human, what is it? A shark? An elephant?
Indigo, you are running into abc’s magical thinking. He snorts at us for believing in Sky Fairy, but has never been able to explain just how a non-human/less-than-human thing becomes a person. He is at a loss to give us a scientific explanation—because there is none—therefore must resort to magic. Abracadabra! One moment it’s a fetus and the next moment it’s a baby!
We all bow to something or Someone. Obviously, abc is wholly devoted to empirical evidence, aka, science. Science is fine so far as it goes. Science, however, does not settle existential ethical character issues. It is, as we say, out of its league or, as our President would say, “above (its) pay grade.” The use of science to bludgeon the sacredness of children – born or unborn – is untenable.
This point can be made by throwing an infant in the middle of a busy highway. Intuitively by knee-jerk response, everyone would veer out of control to avoid hitting the child. For cryin’ out loud, I do this for a squirrel which is a kissing cousin to a swamp rat. We know what is sacred and a child surely qualifies.
“The law of God is written on the human heart.” God help the man or woman, who erases the law in his own conscience through sheer neglect or pompous rebellion. For the law is meant to preserve, protect and ennoble.
I look forward to ABC sharing with us the mathematical/scientific formulation that defines a human being.
In the last thread, abc seemed to be leaning towards a fetus becoming a baby when it can survive on its own outside the womb (if a fetus isn’t a baby until it is born, then late-term abortion should be legal and widely available, right?). Problem is, with medical advances, the point at which a fetus/baby can survive is not static. And arguing over when a fetus/baby becomes human doesn’t even address the original post – that the pro-abortion movement (my body, my choice) had led to the mass abortion of children based on their sex. Regardless of how far along these fetuses/babies are when they’re aborted for being girls, how does a person who champions a woman’s right to choose reconcile that this had led to the selective destruction of (eventual) women?
Charles, thanks. I don’t believe in the Skye Fairy, Spaghetti Monsters, Galactic Meadow Muffin, or even God; I’m an Atheist. That, however, does not free me from the inconvenience of principles.
Arthrogryposis multiplex congenita, a birth defect I live with, would have doomed me to instant eradication under the eugenics protocols of the NAZIs and Planned Parenthood and nearly ended my life at birth in 1954 Michigan when my parents were advised to put their newborn, me, into a facility that would allow me to die from starvation on the quaint theory mine would be ‘a life not worth living’ as well as being a drain on the families well being and finances. Extended family excoriated my parents for being bad people because I was so obviously a punishment from God.
I was recently with an orthopedist who told me not many with my condition are seen anymore because of the availability of ultrasound and abortion. I’ve often, in my 57 yrs, been subjected to the judgement that I am less than human and should not be in public, especially wearing shorts. I know I’m human, have always been human, and will eventually be a human corpse, then human dust. I cannot condemn the unborn to death for any reason without condemning myself for a particular reason.
No matter age or life experience, people like abc are foolish to believe an acorn will be anything other than an oak tree, a human embryo and fetus will be anything other than human. Observation, logic, experience – the things that make emperical science – all tell us the foolishness of the magical thinking that an organized collection of human cells will somehow become something else because another life is just too inconvenient or embarassing.
abc, you start out by saying “Care and Diodorato write the only non ad-hominem comments above. The rest of the commentary above is better left unreplied to, since those that write them apparently don’t know the difference between making an argument and just calling people names.” But then you turn around and refer to those who disagree with your claim that a fetus is not a baby as idiots. You end with “conservatives have a world view as mature as a six year old child.” These are every bit as much ad hominem attacks as what anyone else has said here. Pot, meet kettle.
Let me try to restrict myself to some more or less random, but I think relevant, questions and comments. I’ll try not to stoop to ad hominem attacks myself.
A human fetus is fundamentally (scientifically, if you will) different from a chicken’s egg or a cow’s fetus. A human fetus, if allowed to develop, will become a human adult. No matter what, the best the other two can hope for is to become a chicken and a cow. THIS is the scientific fact that is important to me and, I believe, to most conservatives. Everything else, like whether one refers to a fetus as a baby, is mere semantics and not a proper subject of scientific analysis.
Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that fetuses feel pain very early in the development cycle. Am I wrong about this? They also respond to stimulus. I doubt there is much evidence that their thinking is fundamentally different one minute after they are born than one minute before they are born either. Insofar as one can make a scientific argument (and, as I’ve said, I don’t think one can make such an argument over this semantic matter), what is the scientific argument that a fetus is not a baby one minute before birth (or viability, or third trimester, or any other borderline you care to draw) but is a baby one minute after?
Let’s say you are right that it does not directly impact me if my neighbor aborts her fetus. I could argue the point, but let’s assume you are right. By the same logic, it also doesn’t directly impact me if my neighbor kills her baby one day after birth. Or one week after. Or one year after. If I follow your logic, and please correct me if I’ve missed something, none of these cases is any of my business. Yet I think you would agree they were murders, even if they did not impact me directly. How do you feel about honor killings? Those probably don’t impact me directly either. Personally, I do not think this is the type of issue about which the “mind your own business” argument carries much weight.
Innocents were already dying in Iraq. Saddam was committing genocide on the Kurds and many others were dying as well. There really is no way to know whether our intervention, net, saved or cost innocent lives. We do know that we removed an oppressive and dangerous murdering ruler. While I opposed our entry into Iraq, and still believe it was a mistake, I can’t say with any certainty that removing Saddam wasn’t worth the lives it cost.
Indigo, yours is one of the most powerful testimonies I’ve ever read on this site.
I sincerely hope that abc closely reads what you’ve written and begins a long overdue examination of conscience that can take him outside of himself, if only for a few seconds.
I speak of the Left as being enemies of humanity. Perhaps some here now know that such words weren’t used for rhetorical effect. I meant them and I’ll keep using them because they are true. The Left are enemies of humanity. Doesn’t matter who you are, if you belong to the Left, you are de facto an enemy of humanity. There are many reasons for this. Abortion is only one, small, reason out of many. There are plenty more.
Libby, of course there is a big difference. But if the Left can make you ignore that difference by talking about your immorality or hypocrisy… they don’t have to deal with such glaring flaws in Leftist ideology.
I sincerely hope that abc closely reads what you’ve written and begins a long overdue examination of conscience that can take him outside of himself, if only for a few seconds.
Like Z’s temptation to throwing childish tantrums around on the topic of life and death, A has his own glaring self-righteousness on this matter.
Both have what i would call immature positions on the subject. They don’t take it seriously enough. Z will no more understand what I wrote than A would understand what Indigo wrote. Their brains have been lobotomized, you could say. Leftist brainwashing will do that to you. That and zombies 2
[...] Bookworm Room – Sliding down the slippery slope on abortion [...]
Don Quixote writes:
“abc, you start out by saying “Care and Diodorato write the only non ad-hominem comments above. The rest of the commentary above is better left unreplied to, since those that write them apparently don’t know the difference between making an argument and just calling people names.” But then you turn around and refer to those who disagree with your claim that a fetus is not a baby as idiots. You end with “conservatives have a world view as mature as a six year old child.” These are every bit as much ad hominem attacks as what anyone else has said here. Pot, meet kettle.”
And I stand by what I wrote. No scientist would equate a fetus with a baby, so only an idiot would make that mistake by calling a fetus a baby. As for the conservative world view being that of a six year old, I see little difference between believing in God and believing in Santa Claus. And I am not alone: apparently Red Indigo puts believing in God on the level with believing in Spaghetti Monsters, whatever they are.
“Let me try to restrict myself to some more or less random, but I think relevant, questions and comments. I’ll try not to stoop to ad hominem attacks myself….A human fetus is fundamentally (scientifically, if you will) different from a chicken’s egg or a cow’s fetus.”
Human DNA versus chicken or cow. Okay so far…
“A human fetus, if allowed to develop, will become a human adult. No matter what, the best the other two can hope for is to become a chicken and a cow. THIS is the scientific fact that is important to me and, I believe, to most conservatives. Everything else, like whether one refers to a fetus as a baby, is mere semantics and not a proper subject of scientific analysis.”
Right, so the fact that the human fetus requires support from the mother and carries risk to the mother is ignored in this account, although those are scientific facts as well. You ignore them to support a narrative that doesn’t comport with reality, but which is the one that you push for ideological reasons. Why do you do this? The Court in Roe didn’t. They focused on independent viabilty, which is a scientific question, but you call it semantics. Your facts are incomplete and your logic fails.
“Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that fetuses feel pain very early in the development cycle. Am I wrong about this?”
Yes. Much of the rhetoric around this ignores rather than relies on science.
“They also respond to stimulus.”
So does an amoeba, so does a dissected and detached frog’s leg. What you are pointing to is the response of a disembodied spinal cord or the reptilian brain that develops and fires neurons long before the cerebellum, which is the center for uniquely human feelings of suffering. We have no problems killing and eating cows in large part because they do not show a level of intelligence like a human, which is also why most people in the world would seek to treat higher primates with greater respect than cows. Humans do not develop human thought until very late in the second trimester, with current research putting it at approximately 26 weeks, based on what I’ve read.
“I doubt there is much evidence that their thinking is fundamentally different one minute after they are born than one minute before they are born either.”
Of course not, but conservatives are trying to claim that human thought and feelings of suffering start at 5 or 6 weeks, and say so in their propaganda. This is a lie, like so many propagated by ideologues who don’t want you to know inconvenient scientific facts.
“Insofar as one can make a scientific argument (and, as I’ve said, I don’t think one can make such an argument over this semantic matter), what is the scientific argument that a fetus is not a baby one minute before birth (or viability, or third trimester, or any other borderline you care to draw) but is a baby one minute after?”
Of course not. But there is a relatively narrow window of time in which the centers of the brain responsible for higher level thought develop and turn on. It is likely that feelings of pain would come even after those centers first start showing the firing of neurons, but to be conservative ( in a scientific estimating sense, rather than an ideological one), one could use the neuron firing markers as the signal that feelings of pain and suffering will soon develop.
“Let’s say you are right that it does not directly impact me if my neighbor aborts her fetus. I could argue the point, but let’s assume you are right. By the same logic, it also doesn’t directly impact me if my neighbor kills her baby one day after birth. Or one week after. Or one year after.”
We draw lines all the time amidst grey areas. It impacts your neighbor when Ford spends $5K per vehicle on safety rather than $6K, so why don’t you tell Ford that people have souls and that human life is precious and that it is a siippery slope to massacre when they elect to lower the amount spent on safety in a car from $6K to $5K. Of course, it is your business in this case, but we draw bright lines amidst uncertainty and grey areas and cars have to have minimum standards that are somewhat arbitrary even though they impact life-and-death situations. This is rational and makes sense to the rational mind that thinks in cost-benefit and probabilistic ways, but to the conservative mind, which is static and (falsely) absolutist, it is offensive–or, more accurately, it is offensive in selected areas (since you don’t see this kind of absolutist thinking in a lot of areas since conservatives don’t protest safety spending on passenger cars, liberals do). And this hypocritical, inconsistent application bothers me. Look, if you say, I think human thought starts at this point and abortions cannot happen at that point, then I can accept the logic; however, conservatives draw no distinction between a morning after pill and murder, and this flies in the face of science. So they ignore the science. I have a lot of problems with that.
“If I follow your logic, and please correct me if I’ve missed something, none of these cases is any of my business. Yet I think you would agree they were murders, even if they did not impact me directly. How do you feel about honor killings? Those probably don’t impact me directly either. Personally, I do not think this is the type of issue about which the “mind your own business” argument carries much weight.”
You are describing clear cases of murder and trying to analogize them to a fetus not able to have any of the characteristics that make humans valuable. Essentially, conservatives believe in irrational and unprovable things like souls and demand that those of us who do not believe in the supernatural nonetheless use this to make murder and the morning after pill the same thing. That is wrong. That is like the jihadists demanding that I believe that Mohammad is the final word on all morality and truth. I don’t need to believe that, and if I don’t need to believe that, then I don’t need to draw the line at conception, and so I can have an abortion. Now, many here say that I lack principles, but I have principles. I look at human pain and suffering and seek to do no harm in that sense. So I would have major misgivings about abortions after the point at which the fetus feels suffering as a baby would, and that, rather than full closing of the heart, would be the significant distinction for me. That might not make Bookworm happy, but she is dead wrong to say I lack her principles that are “hard” to follow–implying that my morals are looser than hers. She is arrogant the way the jihadists are: letting scientific ignorance maker her foolishly arrogant in judging those who don’t think like her. Others here think the same way, and it is sad. That is why I made the point about seeking understanding versus not. Jihadists in general and conservatives on this issue are very similar in their closed-minded, dogmatic thinking that is not in touch with reality or principles grounding in anything empirical. It is dangerous and can lead to violence, which explains both 9/11 and killing Dr. Tiller.
“Innocents were already dying in Iraq. Saddam was committing genocide on the Kurds and many others were dying as well. There really is no way to know whether our intervention, net, saved or cost innocent lives. We do know that we removed an oppressive and dangerous murdering ruler.”
True, but the killing rate was higher after we invaded than before. You have to go back to the Iran-Iraq War, which we funded and supported Saddam in, to see a killing rate as high. We also were selective about which murdering dictators to stop and which ones to support, both through time and across geography. Now, I am a realist and understand that there is collateral damage in war, but I am also not making ridiculous statements about how it is absolutely wrong to have an abortion all the time since the fetus is sancrosanct. Conservatives are seeking to have it both ways. Not I.
” While I opposed our entry into Iraq, and still believe it was a mistake, I can’t say with any certainty that removing Saddam wasn’t worth the lives it cost.”
Perhaps, although I think the data is there to make reasonable conclusions. The main point of raising Iraq and collateral damage is to highlight the selective outrage conservatives show toward human pain and suffering, which is hypocritical. The burden of showing that invading Iraq was unquestionably worth the cost needs to be born by the conservatives, given their argument, and I think they’ll have a tough time proving it. Hence, their outrage, once again, is selective, and that makes them look hypocritical. I think the logic is clear enough.
Watcher’s Council nominations…
Joshuapundit-‘Divorcing’ From Israel The Noisy Room The Fascist Stealth of Agenda 21 New Zeal Key Socialist Fears White Working Class Could Defeat Obama Simply Jews Z-ranha first time in action: sabotages Gaza flotilla ship The Glit…
“An honest, intelligent person cannot say that the fetus is entirely separate from the baby or the grandmother. They are one and the same, just at different developmental stages. To kill a fetus is to kill an old person.”
BOOKWORM: As always an excellent piece but the above contains a profound statement that has slipped by even you. For thirty years I have predicted that society would have to find a socially acceptable way to rid itself of an elderly and sick boomer population. This the hidden meaning in Obamacare. The boomer generation has always been a problem and will become moreso as they age. Similar to a garden snake trying to swallow and digest a buffalo. There will need to be an old folks home in every neighborhood and immense medical facilities to give proper care. We are already bankrupt so it will be impossible to finance. It is ironic that the generation so supportive of taking life will now get to partake of it as they are denied medical treatment in what will be a “socially acceptable” explanation that they are no longer useful. Thought I would die before it happened but since I’m now 77 all I can advise is STAY HEALTHY and don’t expect anything good from Uncle Sam who no longer has deep pockets.
Thank you, abc, for your lengthy and serious response. I’m at work and don’t have time to adequately reply, so a few short (I hope) comments will have to do. “No scientist would equate a fetus with a baby.” Perhaps you should define scientist. You seem to be saying that it is impossible to be a scientist and believe in God, which I suspect would come as a surprise to many scientists. Not being a scientist myself, I can’t say with authority, but I suspect lots of people who think of themselves as scientists do, in fact, equate a fetus with a baby, at least at some point during its development. You even seem to do so later in your comment. One should be wary of such broad overgeneralizations.
“As for the conservative world view being that of a six year old, I see little difference between believing in God and believing in Santa Claus.” The fact is that the vast majority of people in all of recorded history have believed in some form of religion. I don’t happen to share those views any more than you do, but I do not agree that this means that the vast majority of all people in all of recorded history and even the vast majority of people in the world today have the world view of a six year old. In any event, such a comment, even if you believe it to be true, is still an unnecessary and unconstructive ad hominem attack.
“Right, so the fact that the human fetus requires support from the mother and carries risk to the mother is ignored in this account, although those are scientific facts as well.” You have a point. I didn’t realize we were talking about the risk to the mother; I though we were talking about the semantic issue of whether we call a fetus a baby. Balancing the rights of the mother against the rights of the fetus is the hardest part of all of this, but the left is as guilty of taking absolute positions as the right is. Many on the left would allow abortions at any time up until the actual birth and even approve “partial birth abortions” on the theory that the child is not a human being, no matter how fully developed, until it is out of the womb. You can treat this as a strawman if you like (and, to some extent it is) but it is no more so than your strawman about the morning after pill. There are supporters of every position on the spectrum, and even a few that would allow mercy killings for some period of time after birth (see IndigoRed’s inspiring story).
You are quite right that we draw lines all the time in grey areas. But the line here is necessarily arbitrary. Your invocation of science as providing guidance as to where to draw this line makes no more sense than a believer’s invocation of God’s will for the same purpose. There is no ”rational” or “scientific” answer as to when in its development a fetus/baby acquires human rights, including the right to life. You describe my examples as “clear cases of murder” but how do we define a “clear case”? This is not science, however much you might want to view it as such. If it were, there would be no grey areas.
Your attack on Bookworm is simply wrong as a matter of truth. I know her well and the very last thing she is in the whole world is arrogant. In fact, she has been able to take the long political journey she has precisely because she is not arrogant and has been open to new ideas and new ways of looking at things. As many of her posts, including one she wrote just yesterday, reveal, she is highly conflicted on the issue of abortion and is not the absolutist you seem to think she is. She is also not scientifically ignorant. She is one of the brightest and most knowledgable people I know, though admittedly she is not a scientist. But science can only inform, not decide, moral questions such as abortion, and to pretend otherwise is to elevate science into a religion indistinguishable from the traditional religions you so abhor. By the way, you are right to say she is not you. I believe all she really meant by that is that she once held the beliefs that you now express in your comments here and she thinks this may give her some insight as to why you hold those beliefs. Perhaps you are right that it does not.
Your claim of similarity between jihadists and conservatives is invalid. As a general matter, conservatives are very interested in facts and intelligent discussion. Even those who believe in God, and many do not, are far more interested in truth than the vast majority of those on the left. By contrast, jihadists are driven entirely by religion, seeking to convert or kill all those who do not toe the line of their belief system.
Your comparing 9/11 and the killing of Dr. Tiller is equally misguided. First, 9/11 was done with the intention of taking as many lives as possible as a part of an on-going war against western civilization. The killing of Dr. Tiller was the very focused taking of one life in the hope of saving others. Second, 9/11 was celebrated in the streets in many places. The killing of Dr. Tiller was very nearly universally condemned by all conservatives. To suggest that such a killing has anything to do with the vast, vast majority of conservatives is to deny reality. The only ways in which the two acts were similar is that they were botk inspired by religion, they were both extreme and they were both horrific.
Let’s put it in scientific terms you can appreciate. Jihadists are to Muslims as the killers of Dr. Tiller are to religious conservatives (both are small, violent subsets of larger nonviolent religious groups, though the jihadists are a much larger subset than the killers). The proper, logical comparison is between jihadists and the killers, or between Muslims in general and the religious conservatives. It is illogical and unscientific to compare jihadists to religious conservatives, or the killers to Muslims in general. That’s apples and oranges.
I don’t know who here thinks you don’t have principles. I think it is clear you do, and I even kind of agree with you as to one possible place to draw the line on abortions. Not all conservatives agree that the line should be drawn at conception no matter the circumstances (though many do, and some commentators on this blog surely do). I don’t and I don’t believe Bookworm does. Yet you tar us all with the same brush. But I’m curious. When you comment on liberal blogs, are you as quick to condemn those who support abortion on demand right up until birth, or at any point after the point you say you would have “major misgivings”? Seem to me you’d have to, to be consistent, as a scientist should be.
Okay, guess I couldn’t keep my comments short. Back to work.
Morning ABC; I see your still at it. I give you credit for perseverance.
People aren’t addressing your arguments directly anymore because they are old, tired and have been repeated endlessly by you and others like you.
We are all talking past each other because we disagree fundamentally on a PHILOSOPHICAL issue that no matter how much you want it to, science cannot solve. Science can inform our position, but it doesn’t have all the answers. No one (IMO) is arguing with the science tidbits you present here, were arguing the morality of abortion and what that means for our society.
You however seem to only want to use science to determine your morality… fine. Can you not see how that in itself is a form of faith (or philosophy if you prefer) as well?
You just assume that because we don’t see the world the way you do that we are ignoring what science says/determines and must be idiots, hypocrites and/or religious nutjobs; because it obviously can’t be you and your possibly flawed logic. Or that we may actually have a valid point.
I still dont know why you bother.
Well put, DQ. There’s dishonesty and convenient absolutism on both sides of the abortion debate. But the dishonesty on the right errs toward preserving, rather than destroying, nascent human life. That’s really what the disagreement boils down to on this, the most troubling of the casuistical (line-drawing) ethical issues of all time. Since there’s no absolute marker about where to draw the line, the question is, will you draw it in favor of the nascent life, or in favor of the convenience of the already fully-developed life, aware that the “choice” of the mother will cost the fetus its (potential) life? Not all wars have civilian casualties; but in every abortion, someone dies who otherwise would (almost always) have lived if left alone. Both sides of the debate need to confront that fact honestly. In my experience, the “conservatives” have confronted it more honestly than the “liberals” have, whose term “choice” obscures the death that every abortion entails. In most cases, abortion isn’t “murder,” either, though the later the “procedure” is performed the closer it comes to murder. Abc, you can be bothered by conservatives’ “hypocrisy” till the (nonhuman) cows come home, but hypocrisy is irrelevant to the uniquely troubling morality of every abortion.
spiff writes: “No one (IMO) is arguing with the science tidbits you present here, were arguing the morality of abortion and what that means for our society….You however seem to only want to use science to determine your morality… fine. Can you not see how that in itself is a form of faith (or philosophy if you prefer) as well?”
You say we are talking past each other and my arguments are old and tired, but you don’t understand them. Science cannot create morality, but it informs it. You say that you are arguing the IMmorality of abortion given what it means for society, but that impact is a scientific question, so the science that I provided, which shows that the impact is minimal, is important and you ignore it. THat is a huge problem.
You cannot make societal rules based upon made up stuff. It must be grounded in reality. Otherwise, any societal rule, no matter how awful, could prevail. Conservatives want to ignore reality and assert made-up stuff, like fetuses and babies are the same thing when they are not. If you cannot state a rational rule, then you cannot guarantee a rational policy, and you run the risk of the very thing that you falsely claim liberals seek…a massacre or some other calamity of morality. Notice that Indigo Red is against abortion, since an easier abortion policy might have led to his demise, so while I disagree with the idea, I understand his bias. BUt note also that the belief that his life was worthless was driven by irrational sentiments of religious people (“punishment from God,” he says they told his parents.), so I think he kind of proves my point that one should stay grounded in reality rather than fantasy belief like whatever religion could prompt such a ridiculous comment. Morality has to be more than merely, “God wants it–or, more accurately, I want it–this way.”
Funky, please name the absolutism in my argument. And please state why your unsupported claim of the cost of killing a fetus offends morality isn’t tantamount to absolutism. I have a principle (cause no human suffering) and a rule (don’t abort after such feeling is possible, unless to save the mother’s life) which balances personal freedom against the costs on the other side. It is a dynamic set-up that can be altered as the scientific knowledge evolves. You have an absolutist position, that the death of a fetus is morally reprehensible, that you cannot balance against freedom or other considerations. But you call me the absolutist. Very strange logic there, my friend.
I find it interesting in the whole abortion debate that it somehow assumes the “viability” of the baby once it is born. However, a newly born babe is not independently viable – left alone, it will soon starve or die of dehydration or exposure.. The only thing that changes when a baby is born is the source of its sustenance and its temperature control system.
ABC, as one who is a scientist, I can definitely say that you don’t understand how science works, how it has come to be, nor what it is capable or incapable of achieving. Defining morality or what constitutes a human being is not within the purview of science.
To say that scientists cannot believe in God is to show complete ignorance of the role that Judeo-Christianity has had in forming modern science, whether it is Fr. Gregor Mendel (a Catholic monk considered the father of genetics), Monsignor George LeMaitre (physicist, mathematician, priest and father of the “Big Bang” theory) or Gerald Schroeder (nuclear physicist, molecular biologist, orthodox Jew), to cite just a few examples.
A bit more humility might be in order.
@ABC:
I understand your arguments just fine. I just don’t agree with them. I am not arguing from a position of faith nor have I mentioned god in any of my comments. I however do recognize that we have fundamentally different philosophies regarding this issue.
Fine, a human fetus is not a human baby anymore than human baby is a human adult. It’s still a human being is it not? I mean, it’s not going to form into a monkey or a pig right?
A human baby left to its own devices would likely die without someone caring for it? Does that make it ok to kill human babies out of convenience because all that crying and carrying on is annoying? Or the cost of baby food is too high?
I (and most on this site) have not advocated the complete prohibition of abortion. We are however discussing how it is applied to our society and what it means about our culture. What does it say about the future of a society that is ok with killing off large numbers of its next generation out of convenience? Personally, I don’t like what it says. You however appear to be ok with it, you know, because science says it ok or have nothing to say about that… fine, that’s your choice. But because I am not willing to accept that does not mean I am an idiot, hypocrite, or whatever.
“You cannot make societal rules based upon made up stuff.” – That is essentially what laws are my friend.
“It must be grounded in reality.” – And perception of reality has changed over time. At one time it was a scientific fact that the world was flat.
Spiff: We are all talking past each other because we disagree fundamentally on a PHILOSOPHICAL issue that no matter how much you want it to, science cannot solve.
Though we shouldn’t ignore science when it is pertinent (e.g. viability); the value one places on a person, thing or idea isn’t something that can be argued. On the other hand, we might show the implication of the idea, such as this thought-experiment:
Imagine a fire at a fertility clinic. Down one hall is a vat full of blastocytes. Down the other, a small child crying. There may only be time to save one. Which do you choose? How many blastocysts would justify abandoning the child?
Most people would look on with horror if you rolled out the vat rather than save the child, but the implication that a blastocyst has just as much value as a child leads you to that result. But that’s just most people.
Zach, I must commend you on a balanced and thoughtful response.
“Though we shouldn’t ignore science when it is pertinent…” – and I dont think anyone is.
Interesting moral dilemma; but it does not invalidate my position or validate ABC’s. Human beings are presented with moral dilemmas all the time. Some have no right answer. Although I think in this scenario it is fairly clear what the right or expedient choice is.
(since you didn’t state the age of the child) I would ask the child to help me wheel out the vat.
Danny, I don’t. The blastocyst/small child example is one of the pro-abortionists’ classic boilerplates. Zach simply scoured the Internet until he found it. His “thoughtful response” is yet another Zach grab and paste.
Notice the usual Zach manipulation of language: “blastocyst” is used as a total identifier rather than as a description of a child at the very begining of life. Bllastocyst is an ugly word; small child is an aw shucks image.
Then notice the attempt to guide us to a conclusion about the choice we may make by reminding us that most people would think a decision to save the blastocysts would create horror. This is not moral reasoning, it’s the fallacy of the majority—if enough people don’t think it, it must be immoral.
Most telling is Zach’s beautifully executed feint away from offering his own view on the morality of abortion. What else is new? If he were clever enough to be playing a game where he manipulates us into thinking all sorts of wrong things about him, I’d understand the tactic. But he’s not that clever. Once again, the blog’s resident amoralist pretends to make a moral argument as a means of showing mastery.
It took awhile, but Zach predictably trots out the inevitable straw man. When all else fails…
I mentioned elsewhere how much I treasure my premature twin grandchildren. They were born at seven months. The little boy was in ICU for two months, the girl for one. Clearly, they were not viable–by some definitions– at birth. It took a major effort by many loving, caring people to bring them to that point. Were they sentinent? Who knows? Mom was having a difficult time at six months, and had been for some time. I am so glad she didn’t give up on them at 6.5 months. So is she–although she never considered that option. Now, at 14, what wonderful young folks they are; and that is not just Grandpa’s opinion. What a blessing for all who know them. Many people are fortunate that they had the opportunity.
Well said, Danny L. Enough with all of the double talk and rationalization. The issues are stark and clear.
Danny Lemieux: I must commend you on a balanced and thoughtful response.
You act as if you just saw a dancing dog.
Spiff: Interesting moral dilemma; but it does not invalidate my position or validate ABC’s.
It illustrates your point about it being a philosophical rather than an analytic difference.
Spiff: Human beings are presented with moral dilemmas all the time. Some have no right answer.
‘Tis true, ’tis true ’tis pity, And pity ’tis ’tis true.
Ok…I’ve tried three times to post a link to an article I ran across. Each time it simply disappears…so I’ll try something different:
http://www.plumbbobblog.com/
That’s the main page, and the article is the first article.
Danny writes:
“I find it interesting in the whole abortion debate that it somehow assumes the “viability” of the baby once it is born. However, a newly born babe is not independently viable – left alone, it will soon starve or die of dehydration or exposure.. The only thing that changes when a baby is born is the source of its sustenance and its temperature control system.”
Actually, the viability argument is more complex than that. A baby that can survive outside the mother’s womb can be cared for by OTHER PEOPLE. So the countervailing consideration, a woman’s freedom and control over her body–which is an important issue that conservatives often minimize in the debate–no longer is a constraint. That you miss this reveals how much that issue matters to you, perhaps…
“ABC, as one who is a scientist, I can definitely say that you don’t understand how science works, how it has come to be, nor what it is capable or incapable of achieving. Defining morality or what constitutes a human being is not within the purview of science.”
I never wrote that science defines morality, but it sets constraints on how it enters a debate and thereby limits its claims. Z said it better than I: value placed on human life comes before science, but science sets constraints and informs the debate by defining things like viability, beginnings of human thought, etc. I have no problem with people viewing the scientific data differently or reaching different moral conclusions even based upon the same data, but I have no tolerance for moralistic people that make factually incorrect or unsupported claims that science can answer. If the presence of abortions leads to societal decay, then you ought to be able to show that empirically. If you cannot, then saying it offends God is not enough for a policy argument. I could say it offends Batman, and the weight accorded that should be the same.
“To say that scientists cannot believe in God is to show complete ignorance of the role that Judeo-Christianity has had in forming modern science, whether it is Fr. Gregor Mendel (a Catholic monk considered the father of genetics), Monsignor George LeMaitre (physicist, mathematician, priest and father of the “Big Bang” theory) or Gerald Schroeder (nuclear physicist, molecular biologist, orthodox Jew), to cite just a few examples.”
And I never made that claim, but those scientists are great because they answered real scientific questions rather than merely saying God did it.
“A bit more humility might be in order.”
And a bit more fidelity and accuracy in reporting what I have written as well.
[...] Bookworm Room – Sliding down the slippery slope on abortion [...]
abc, please show me where I accused you of absolutism. I said there are absolutist positions on both sides of the abortion debate, which I thought you said as well. You seem to want to lump me in with those who make “ridiculous statements about how it is absolutely wrong to have an abortion all the time since the fetus is sancrosanct,” despite the fact that I don’t make such statements, either in my post or anywhere else. I didn’t even say (as you accuse me) that the death of a fetus is “morally reprehensible” (though I believe that the fetus’s status as a potential human being–do you disagree that it’s a potential human being?–makes its surgical removal and death at least morally problematic). All I’m saying–largely to those on the left–is recognize that what you’re doing when you abort is morally questionable, and that you are purchasing your freedom and convenience at the cost of a potential human life.
I think, my friend, that your own prejudices about the irrationality and intellectual immaturity of conservatives leads you, on occasion, not to give them the benefit of a careful reading and consideration of their views. Many conservatives are irrational, as are many liberals. The larger issue here (explored in Book’s and Danny’s posts about Krugman) is the automatic illegitimacy many liberals ascribe to conservative views, as if there’s no possible way that any conservative position could be logical, fact-based, consistent, and free from mercenary self-interest. Like many others who visit this site, I once thought as you do about conservatism, but changed my way of thinking when I examined the philosophical presuppositions and logical implications of both the liberal and conservative world views. What other conservatives believe is immaterial to conservative thought, which has, in fact, more precision, rationality, consistency, and logical rigor than the supposedly “scientific” and “empirically based” theses to which you adhere. You hold a caricatural view of conservatism, based on your disgust with the behavior and views of some conservatives. You must be careful, though, not to fall into the trap of confusing conservatives–whom you may find personally distasteful–with conservatism, which is a system of thought that exists outside and beyond the people who espouse it.
spiff:
“I understand your arguments just fine. I just don’t agree with them. I am not arguing from a position of faith nor have I mentioned god in any of my comments. I however do recognize that we have fundamentally different philosophies regarding this issue…Fine, a human fetus is not a human baby anymore than human baby is a human adult. It’s still a human being is it not? I mean, it’s not going to form into a monkey or a pig right?”
Right. The human DNA argument again.
“A human baby left to its own devices would likely die without someone caring for it? Does that make it ok to kill human babies out of convenience because all that crying and carrying on is annoying? Or the cost of baby food is too high?”
No. Because you can put it up for adoption in the case of the baby or even independently viable fetus. But the vast majority of abortions occur before this point, when you are balancing the potentiality of a human, which is valuable, against the unique demands and infringement on the freedom of the mother and her control over her own body. You also forget this tremendous distinction. Curious. It is an important consideration.
“I (and most on this site) have not advocated the complete prohibition of abortion.”
Really? You are okay with the 90%+ of abortions occurring in the first trimester when the mother’s freedom is deemed to outweigh the value of a fetus that is not conscious in a human sense and cannot live independently outside her womb? Or are you okay merely with the tiny minority of cases in which the mother’s life is mortally in danger. Your comment is highly equivocal and might bear little room for all but the most extreme cases of abortion. You should flesh that out more.
“ We are however discussing how it is applied to our society and what it means about our culture. What does it say about the future of a society that is ok with killing off large numbers of its next generation out of convenience? Personally, I don’t like what it says.”
What does it mean? And do you have empirical evidence to show that impact? This is not exclusively a philosophical question but one that actually can be answered with facts and data.
“You however appear to be ok with it, you know, because science says it ok or have nothing to say about that… fine, that’s your choice. But because I am not willing to accept that does not mean I am an idiot, hypocrite, or whatever.”
It could mean that you are seeking to impose an incorrect or dangerous belief upon people without any empirical justification, like the argument that gay marriage is a slippery slope to bestiality or that it corrupts children since you might catch the gay germ. That kind of stuff. Your asserting that you dont’ like it, and you don’t like its impact on society, without more data, is no different than these types of bogus arguments against gay marriage.
“’You cannot make societal rules based upon made up stuff.’ – That is essentially what laws are my friend.”
Good laws are rational bad ones are not. That is the difference between Sharia Law and the dynamic US Constitution. If you don’t see that difference, as your comment clearly implies, I worry about you.
“’It must be grounded in reality.’ – And perception of reality has changed over time. At one time it was a scientific fact that the world was flat.”
Right. And progress is a good thing, so you better have a flexible enough world view to accommodate that. All we can do is the best we can with the data and understanding we have now.
Sorry, one more
abc writes:
“So the countervailing consideration, a woman’s freedom and control over her body–which is an important issue that conservatives often minimize in the debate–no longer is a constraint.”
Ah, but at a certain point, it’s not her body–it’s someone else’s body! This is what makes abortion such a terribly complex issue, and offers yet another example of the dishonesty of the pro-choice position. Yes, it’s her body for a while; but it’s always in the process of becoming an increasingly autonomous body, with (presumably) the full range of rights–including the right to live–that the mother has! So by acting on her freedom, the woman deprives the fetus of the life into which, with each passing second, it is transitioning.
[...] Bookworm Room – Sliding down the slippery slope on abortion [...]
Charles Martel: Notice the usual Zach{riel} manipulation of language: “blastocyst” is used as a total identifier rather than as a description of a child at the very begining of life.
Blastocyst is a precise term. You can give them names, if you like. Betty, Sue, Charlie. Does giving them names change your mind?
Charles Martel: This is not moral reasoning, it’s the fallacy of the majority—if enough people don’t think it, it must be immoral.
No. It illustrates the implication of equating the value of a blastocyst with that of a child. Whether most people would save the child or the vat of blastocysts is irrelevant to which you would save, Charles Martel. You didn’t answer.
Zach, which would you save, and why?
Charles Martel: which would you save, and why?
We’d save the child, of course. Blastocysts are just the inkling of human life. Now, what would Charles Martel do?
abc, true, you did not say no scientist can believe in God What you said was, “No scientist would equate a fetus with a baby.” Since your whole point has been that those who equate a fetus with a baby do so for religious reasons and you reject religion as a value reason for making that equation, it is not a large leap from the one statement to the other. Anyway, scientists can believe in God and scientists (whether or not they believe in God) can believe that a fetus, at some point in its development, is a baby. Your absolutist statement to the contrary is simply, factually, incorrect, which is what Danny was pointing out.
Funky, that’s a fair criticism. I assumed that I was being lumped in the general liberal idiot bucket, since so many others here place me in it. Recall that Bookworm sought to debate me on the issue by comparing me to her foolish former liberal self, and don’t forget that this is after slandering intelligent liberal positions on the issue by comparing them to a desire to put the country on a slippery slope to massacres. Not very forgiving stuff, so you can judge me, but do it in that context. In any case, I apologize for jumping the gun.
You also wrote:
“The larger issue here (explored in Book’s and Danny’s posts about Krugman) is the automatic illegitimacy many liberals ascribe to conservative views, as if there’s no possible way that any conservative position could be logical, fact-based, consistent, and free from mercenary self-interest.”
That is not true. I posted an interesting experiment in which 10 questions that highlight liberal myths were asked and the conservatives did better on the test than liberals, while a second test of 10 questions was adminstered, this time exploding conservative myths, and the liberals did better. My comment on it was that we need to stay grounded in facts and emprical data and sound logical reasoning, rather than take things on faith. I am commenting on a conservative site, and I seek to explode the conservative myths. When I post on HuffPo, I focus on the liberal myths, and you’d like my writing there much more. Like I apologized for earlier, you assume way too much about me with that last comment. My vigorous attack of conservatives’ fallacious beliefs doesn’t preclude the possibility of their having sound ones (e.g., minimum wage laws increase unemployment rates, which Z might disagree with, but I do not).
“Like many others who visit this site, I once thought as you do about conservatism, but changed my way of thinking when I examined the philosophical presuppositions and logical implications of both the liberal and conservative world views. What other conservatives believe is immaterial to conservative thought, which has, in fact, more precision, rationality, consistency, and logical rigor than the supposedly “scientific” and “empirically based” theses to which you adhere.”
That is not possible. Scientific and empirically derived knowledge is the most important knowledge that we have, aside from pure mathematics. Conservatives often use bad logic, masquerading as something higher, to try to disprove emprical science and in this they fail miserably, even if other conservatives do not see it. Those that point this out are not biased against conservatives, but against bad ideas and faulty logic and lack of empirical rigor.
“ You hold a caricatural view of conservatism, based on your disgust with the behavior and views of some conservatives. You must be careful, though, not to fall into the trap of confusing conservatives–whom you may find personally distasteful–with conservatism, which is a system of thought that exists outside and beyond the people who espouse it.”
Perhaps, but some of the arguments made by conservatives here are so bad that they are not worthy even of caricature. I have long argued that the conservative movement needs another Wm F Buckley to keep the swamp fever at bay, but conservatives today ARE the swamp fever that he bemoaned in his lifetime. Do not miss this important transformation within the conservative movement over the last 40 years.
Zach, I’ll happily answer when you tell me what “an inkling of human life” means. I don’t accept sophomoric prose descriptions as an explanation for much of anything.
Don, I see the point but would caution you against reading too much into it. A scientist who rejects a sound theory because of religious belief is practicing bad science. That scientist is free to believe in God, but when his belief in God causes him to ignore facts about human development, then he is no longer acting as a scientist. Even the great Einstein failed to develop quantum mechanics, which is a sound theory in physics, since he could not accept from a religious standpoint its implications (“God doesn’t play dice,” he was known to have said), so this is a profound challenge for scientists. But at the end of the day, if you are going to define the fetus as a person and human, then you ought to have some basis for it in reality, not in souls or other unprovable stuff. Otherwise, the rules can literally be anything under the sun, and then you run the risk of jihad or other irrational massacres that we all want to avoid. So a scientist can believe in God and say God ultimately gave me my mind, and that mind is the defining characteristic of humanity, so a fetus becomes a baby when that mind becomes human, and I’d have little problem with it. But if he says, God commanded me to think unquestioningly that life begins at conception and no one shall kill the two-day old baby (although that two-day-old zygote is a far cry empirically from a baby), then I’d have lots of problems. Both scientists believe in God, but only one is stil speaking rationally to me. Hopefully, that makes sense.
“That is not possible. Scientific and empirically derived knowledge is the most important knowledge that we have, aside from pure mathematics. Conservatives often use bad logic, masquerading as something higher, to try to disprove emprical science and in this they fail miserably, even if other conservatives do not see it. Those that point this out are not biased against conservatives, but against bad ideas and faulty logic and lack of empirical rigor.”
This is a perfect example of the intellectual dead end scientism leads you to. Some of its problems include:
—No proof that the forms of knowledge mentioned are the “most important that we have.” We are expected to accept the assertion on faith (which itself is unscientific).
—No examples given of conservatives’ so-called bad logic, failures or other conservatives’ blindness. (Probably the only proof that would be offered here is the persistent refusal by this room’s denizens to accept abc’s often wild leaps and bizarre conclusions.)
—The total exclusion of other forms of knowledge as essential or useful to human affairs. Yet abc cites the Tao, which is as unscientific a tome as has ever been written. Why quote from it when it does not belong in the category of the most important knowledge we have?
Funkey:
“abc writes: “So the countervailing consideration, a woman’s freedom and control over her body–which is an important issue that conservatives often minimize in the debate–no longer is a constraint.” Ah, but at a certain point, it’s not her body–it’s someone else’s body! This is what makes abortion such a terribly complex issue, and offers yet another example of the dishonesty of the pro-choice position. Yes, it’s her body for a while; but it’s always in the process of becoming an increasingly autonomous body, with (presumably) the full range of rights–including the right to live–that the mother has! So by acting on her freedom, the woman deprives the fetus of the life into which, with each passing second, it is transitioning.”
Wrong. The distinction between the mother and child’s bodies remains fixed, and you can do genetic analysis to prove it. The issue is that the fetus becomes able to live outside the mother at a certain point. And Roe explicitly addressed this issue, so liberals, who support Roe, are in touch with this idea, while it is the conservatives who, even on this site, appear to ignore the dependence on the mother’s body issue, seem to frequently ignore it. Now, it is true that many liberals push for abortions beyond that point, which should be justified only to protect a mother’s life, far beyond that point. And on this issue conservatives are right, in my opinion, that stricter limitations ought to be placed, as they have been in many states. But most conservatives seek to go well beyond these limits and ban abortions far earlier than the point at which the fetus is able to live outside the mother’s womb, and this is a direct attack on Roe and the idea that we are discussing here.
abc writes:
The distinction between the mother and child’s bodies remains fixed, and you can do genetic analysis to prove it.
I don’t follow. If the child is always distinct from the mother’s body, how is she exerting her control over her own body by aborting it? It’s either her body or it isn’t; she doesn’t have control over the tissues of someone else’s body. That was my point. I said that the child is always becoming less and less a part of the mother’s body; therefore her freedom to “control” it dissipates with its increasing biological autonomy.
FunkyPhD: You’re almost correct when you say “the child is always becoming less and less a part of the mother’s body; therefore her freedom to ‘control’ it dissipates with its increasing biological autonomy.” This is true in all mother/child relationships except for the Jewish mother/child relationship. As I can attest through my own experience, those mommies never let go.
Zach, your choice is a false one.
It demands that we prioritize in the event of a fire. Sure, I would prioritize saving a baby over a blastocyst. But then I would also prioritize saving a baby over an old person that has lived most of their life or as a parent (me, in this case) saving my child over myself.
Suek, re. #48. Excellent link! Should be required reading for everyone. It has actually been the topic of discussion between Book, Charles M and me.
Funky, I believe the argument is that a mother has a right to end the fetus when it uniquely relies upon the mother’s body to survive. When the fetus no longer needs the mother to survive, then it cannot be terminated (but should then presumably be removed and then put up for adoption). It is not that the fetus is the same as the placenta and thus the mother controls it as she does the placenta, which is part of the mother’s body. Rather, it is that the mother has a right to deny the fetus the sustenance required for survival, including formation and continuance of a placenta, which is part of the mother. To argue that the fetus is part of the mother would fly in the face of science.
Danny and suek, yes, we have discussed the infiltration of conservative sites by people posing as thoughtful contributors. I’m not sure that Bookworm Room is under any such assault, though our two resident pests certainly have been frantically busy launchng all the memes in the leftist quiver at us.
Interestingly, abc has now taken to claiming that he posts on HuffPo, and is as deliberately contrarian there as he is here. I tend to doubt it, as I doubt most of the claims he makes for himself, but it is possible. The biggest hole in his claim is that HuffPo would put up with him. That site just doesn’t like contrarians. Here, even though abc is a tedious and easily dismissed gadfly, he knows that Book isn’t going to banish him. Most conservative sites like having whetstones to sharpen themselves on, and for playing that role I’m glad abc is here.
The unanswered question in Suek’s linked article is, who pays for this? My bets are on Soros.
Danny Lemieux: your choice is a false one.
A false choice? Yet you answered it without difficulty.
Danny Lemieux: It demands that we prioritize in the event of a fire. Sure, I would prioritize saving a baby over a blastocyst.
Of course you would.
Danny Lemieux: But then I would also prioritize saving a baby over an old person that has lived most of their life or as a parent (me, in this case) saving my child over myself.
Danny, the other problem with Zach’s second-hand dilemma is that the answer he is angling for, namely, save the small child, violates his own utilitarian philosophy. If a forest fire threatens a small, not-yet-productive oak in a field, as well as a bin full of viable acorns, which “save” do you think Zach would advocate?
Wouldn’t it make more sense to save the many acorns over the lone oak, knowing that the Prime Directive is “the greatest good for the greatest number?”
Just askin’.
Danny, who pays for your comments? The Koch brothers??
Charles Martel: Wouldn’t it make more sense to save the many acorns over the lone oak, knowing that the Prime Directive is “the greatest good for the greatest number?”
Indeed, we would save the oak tree over a bin of acorns. Amazing that you are still confused on that point. Did you ever attempt an answer to the question above?
Funny, ABC. Conservatives don’t troll.
Zach, I told you, in plain English, which you seem to be allergic to, that I would answer when you explained to me what the hell “an inkling of human life” means. I have no idea what your sophomoric prose means, and I was rather hoping you could give me an adult or scientific explanation of the description.
Danny, be kind to abc. He once confessed that he hasn’t a humorous bone in his body. Apparently he also lacks the one for irony.
Danny: “Funny, ABC. Conservatives don’t troll.”
That’s funny… How do you explain this?
http://mostlywater.org/node/106741
http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2011/03/will_the_employer_seeking_righ.php
Must be Canada…
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389×6266805
…or not!
Charles Martel: I told you, in plain English, which you seem to be allergic to, that I would answer when you explained to me what the hell “an inkling of human life” means.
Not sure why you insist upon negotiating your response, but inkling means ‘a slight indication.’ If you prefer, you may replace it with “potentiality.”
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/inkling
Nevermind, though. Not sure if your opinion would be of much value anyway. Others have already answered. To most people a toddler is more important than a blastocyst.
Danny Lemieux: Conservatives don’t troll.
Not True Conservatives™ anyway.
Zach, as always, nice try. When you don’t know what you’re talking about, you pretend that we’re talking about something else.
A blastocyst does not have “a slight indication” of human life. The phrase is meaningless. Nature may be blind, but she is not stupid. She did not evolve blastocysts to have “slight indications of life” before implanting them in the uterine wall.
As for “potentiality,” that is another one of your weasal words. How can something that is already alive have “potential life?” Are you contending, as 97 percent of 19th-century biologists did, that piles of garbage and offal harbored “potential life” from which maggots could arise? You are now pushing the concept of spontaneous generation?
Please, please, please learn how to use English. Some here assume that your problems with it are because you are not a native speaker. But, surely, the exact and proper use of language is as big a requirement in your native tongue as it is in mine?
ABC: I will try and answer you and provide some insight into where I at lease am coming from. “Right. The human DNA argument again.” Yes; I understand that it does not fit your narrative/world view very well and thus it appears you would like to ignore it. “No. Because you can put it up for adoption in the case of the baby or even independently viable fetus. But the vast majority of abortions occur before this point, when you are balancing the potentiality of a human, which is valuable, against the unique demands and infringement on the freedom of the mother and her control over her own body. You also forget this tremendous distinction. Curious. It is an important consideration.” At least we can agree on that. I didn’t forget any distinctions; I just took the example to its logical extreme which did not require that distinction. I support the mother’s right for control over her body, but do not accept that that distinction makes the choice easy or conclusively answers the moral dilemma. “Really? You are okay with the 90%+ of abortions occurring in the first trimester when the mother’s freedom is deemed to outweigh the value of a fetus that is not conscious in a human sense and cannot live independently outside her womb? Or are you okay merely with the tiny minority of cases in which the mother’s life is mortally in danger. Your comment is highly equivocal and might bear little room for all but the most extreme cases of abortion. You should flesh that out more.” Since you want specifics (and assuming your stats are accurate) I personally would prefer that it only be used in extreme cases of rape/incest and where the life of the mother is in danger, but am willing to accept it the other 90%, I, however would like to see the cost of the procedure passed on to the mother (or father/family) in those cases at the minimum and perhaps a cooling off with counseling period prior to the procedure. Perhaps an adoption process should be offered. That all said I would like to see serious education regarding what the consequences of unprotected sex are so we don’t have to ever get to this point anyways. That would be a pragmatic answer to a complex issue, and it still does not answer the morality. Yes I am sure some programs like this exist… why they are not or do not appear to be working is another issue.
“What does it mean? And do you have empirical evidence to show that impact? This is not exclusively a philosophical question but one that actually can be answered with facts and data.”
I personally think abortion as it is applied currently devalues life and denigrates the miracle that is the creation of said life. Science cannot answer the philosophical value of life other than give us a monetary value of what the body is worth when it is broken down to its base elements.
I don’t think the taking of that life, regardless of its viability at the time it is taken, is a decision that should be taken lightly. The ease and availably of abortions has, in some ways, taken away the seriousness of this choice away. Or it has given people the perception that it is not serious choice with consequences.
I personally don’t think abortion as it is used today makes our society better… it makes it coarser. I don’t blame all that ills our society on this one issue, but it sure as hell doesn’t make it better. And I don’t need an empirical study to tell me what I can plainly see with my own eyes. Nor can science directly answer this for our society either.
I will readily admit that what you perceive as good or positive in our society may be different than what I perceive as good or positive. I would like to think it isn’t, but based on my experience with people from the left and what I am seeing from you here, we do not.
“It could mean that you are seeking to impose an incorrect or dangerous belief upon people without any empirical justification, like the argument that gay marriage is a slippery slope to bestiality or that it corrupts children since you might catch the gay germ. That kind of stuff. Your asserting that you dont’ like it, and you don’t like its impact on society, without more data, is no different than these types of bogus arguments against gay marriage.”
I have no answer for you other than you continue to accuse me and others of using faulty logic to come to our conclusions and infer motivations that just aren’t there. You are either unwilling or unable to recognize the fact that just because we disagree that our reasoning is no less well thought out and/or justified as you believe yours is. I however recognize that you have valid position, I just happen to disagree with it.
“Good laws are rational bad ones are not. That is the difference between Sharia Law and the dynamic US Constitution. If you don’t see that difference, as your comment clearly implies, I worry about you.”
My statement does not imply anything remotely near what you infer about me. Regardless of the rationality behind laws, they are essentially made up. As with perception of reality, what is rational has changed over time and even differs from culture to culture. It was nothing more than a philosophical statement is all. In fact it is outside of the scope of this debate and should probably have been ignored. “Right. And progress is a good thing, so you better have a flexible enough world view to accommodate that. All we can do is the best we can with the data and understanding we have now.” Thanks for the advice… but I am certain my world view is flexible enough to keep up. However, from my perspective, I am unsure of what you see as progress as necessarily always being a good thing.
I’m done on this one. If you cannot accept my view… then I am sorry. Perhaps it is my writing ability. Have a good one. Oh… one more thing:
≠ I’ll tell you how I did it you like.
Zach: Liberals troll. Conservatives inform, educate and impart wisdom. All serious people (97% – a consensus) agree. It’s a scientific fact.
Sorry formatting got all jacked again. Anyways, I think I am done anyways. It really has come down to a difference in philosophies; one that science really cannot answer for me. Have a good one all.
spiff, good stuff:
“I would like to see serious education regarding what the consequences of unprotected sex are so we don’t have to ever get to this point anyways. That would be a pragmatic answer to a complex issue, and it still does not answer the morality. Yes I am sure some programs like this exist… why they are not or do not appear to be working is another issue.”
I would too, although I think one has to be realistic. It isn’t the rational brain that is dominating when people have unwanted pregnancies. It is the reptilian brain that is dominating, and that one doesn’t respond as well to past lessons, especially in the heat of the moment. One has to recognize the immense evolutionary pressures that make mating a very strong urge. We live in a civilized world and must learn to control urges, but we are not that far from our jungle past and have to be realistic about the strength of those urges. Thinking that education will overcome seems a bit naive to me.
“I personally think abortion as it is applied currently devalues life and denigrates the miracle that is the creation of said life. Science cannot answer the philosophical value of life other than give us a monetary value of what the body is worth when it is broken down to its base elements.”
I disagree. We can scientifically study the impact of abortions (or ongoing war or violent video games available to kids) to see what the impacts are on attitudes or behavior. I think such studies are more valuable than anecdotal evidence or personal opinions since personal opinions are notoriously unreliable and innaccurate.
“I don’t think the taking of that life, regardless of its viability at the time it is taken, is a decision that should be taken lightly.”
Nor do I. And I extend that to declarations of war, executions of convicted criminals, funding cuts for public health, and the like. Hopefully, you do as well, since those latter areas involve sentient humans rather than fetuses.
“The ease and availably of abortions has, in some ways, taken away the seriousness of this choice away. Or it has given people the perception that it is not serious choice with consequences.”
Actually, the availability of abortions varies widely across states, so one could do a study to compare perceptions in various states to see whether increased ease and availability does what you claim it does.
“I personally don’t think abortion as it is used today makes our society better… it makes it coarser.”
Those who needed or wanted an abortion would disagree with your assessment of societal benefit, but again, personal opinion probably matters less than some kind of systematic analysis of the impact on society. If it doesn’t make society coarser, then what? Or if it does, but it saves a given number of women’s lives, then what? At least with some scientific or statistical analysis, you can frame the discussion and relative cost-benefit.
” I don’t blame all that ills our society on this one issue, but it sure as hell doesn’t make it better. And I don’t need an empirical study to tell me what I can plainly see with my own eyes. Nor can science directly answer this for our society either.”
Again, that assertion is false.
“I will readily admit that what you perceive as good or positive in our society may be different than what I perceive as good or positive. I would like to think it isn’t, but based on my experience with people from the left and what I am seeing from you here, we do not.”
It’s what Mark Twain noted makes stock markets and horse races interesting. Embrace the differences rather than fretting them, but be sure that you can defend your point of view thoughtfully rather than through nonsense.
“I have no answer for you other than you continue to accuse me and others of using faulty logic to come to our conclusions and infer motivations that just aren’t there.”
Actually, there are LOTS of conservatives that have claimed that the existence of gay marriage will hurt straight marriage or cause children to become gay. Maggie Gallagher, whose group is the leading opponent to gay marriage, writes syndicated pieces claiming this (falsely) all the time. You make it sound as though I am claiming something odd or improbable. I’m citing the headlines.
“You are either unwilling or unable to recognize the fact that just because we disagree that our reasoning is no less well thought out and/or justified as you believe yours is. I however recognize that you have valid position, I just happen to disagree with it.”
Wrong. I am pointing out that when opinions without evidentiary support are put on the level with opinions with evidentiary support, then any opinion is suddenly valid, and people wil make the most ridiculous claims you can imagine. And if those become policy or law, then we suffer for it.
“My statement does not imply anything remotely near what you infer about me. Regardless of the rationality behind laws, they are essentially made up.”
Made up, as in created? Then yes. But there ARE good laws and bad laws, and the good ones tend to be rational rather than irrational. So being rational when you set the laws is a good idea. But too many people are irrational, so we get the bad laws.
“I am certain my world view is flexible enough to keep up. However, from my perspective, I am unsure of what you see as progress as necessarily always being a good thing.”
I never said always, but on average, I believe it is.
“I’m done on this one. If you cannot accept my view… then I am sorry.”
Don’t be sorry. Remember Twain’s horse races.
“Perhaps it is my writing ability.”
Not likely. You write better than most here.
“Have a good one.”
You too.
“Oh… one more thing: ≠ I’ll tell you how I did it you like. ”
Yes, please.
Sadie: Seeing someone actively attempting suicide is a bit different abortion.
Libby: I am definitely not for gender selective abortion so that the family name can be carried forward. But I do wholeheartedly believe that people should be allowed to make their own life decisions. Same goes for the war on drugs. If you want to sit around and get stoned, then more power to you. But the minute you get behind the wheel of a vehicle or rob someone you need to go to jail.
What’s at stake here is the unlimited right to abort. Once you’ve established that right, why discuss what you think is a ”good” reason and a “not good” reason for doing it? Both result in the desired outcome: a dead fetus. Since it is not human, who cares why you have it killed?
[...] Bookworm Room ‘ Sliding down the slippery slope on abortion [...]
Danny, the Koch brothers? Lol
I still don’t think you see what I am saying.
“Thinking that education will overcome seems a bit naive to me.” – ABC
No more naïve than your belief that science is the answer to everything. I don’t believe education will solve the problem; it is but one of the many tools to help. The idea is to minimize the need for abortion hopefully to the point that it is not a choice made out of convenience.
“Again, that assertion is false.” – ABC
No more true or false than yours.
Your faith in science and empirical studies to answer everything (especially questions of philosophy) is naïve in my opinion. As science is also a human endeavor, it is prone to error, bias and chaos in general (unintended consequences and unknowns). There is the truth and then there is the TRUTH, we likely will never really know the TRUTH no matter how many studies, statistical analyses and computer models we do. Questions like this are not the same as designing a bridge where you use a factor of safety to account for the unknowns.
As I have tried to infer before, what you deem true from your frame of reference may indeed be false to mine. So simply stating I am false with certainty on something as subjective as this I find rather amusing, arrogant and somewhat close minded.
One does not need an empirical study to see what is plainly in front of their faces. Our society is coarser and continues to get coarser; human life in practice outside of the isolated enclaves (read well off areas – such as Marin and Harvard where the residents are insulated from the affects of policies they advocate for) is cheaper. I cannot pinpoint what the root causes are for the ills of our society, and frankly it is outside the scope of this debate, but the killing of unborn humans out of convenience at the best makes our society neutral on the question of the value of life. I find it hard to believe that you actually believe (or accept) that abortion somehow can make our society better or that some study will tell us that it is a good thing. It is self evident that choosing life can be anything but positive thing for the soul of our society – how could it be any other way?
BUT, that assertion assumes that we have similar ethical/moral systems of belief, which as I have tried to point out; we do not appear to have.
Were you able to get the “does not equal” sign to work?
[...] Fourth place *t* with 1 1/3 votes – Bookworm Room-Sliding down the slippery slope on abortion [...]
[...] Joshuapundit-‘Divorcing’ From Israel Fourth place *t* with 1 1/3 votes ‘ Bookworm Room-Sliding down the slippery slope on abortion Fourth place *t* with 1 1/3 votes ‘ Rhymes With Right-On The Pulitzer Prize Winning Illegal [...]
Watcher’s Council Results…
Here are the full results of this week’s exercise in blogging excellence: Council Winners First place with 2 2/3 votes! The Noisy Room-The Fascist Stealth of Agenda 21 Second place with 2 votes The Razor -The New Misogyny: The Lefts Sexist Treatmen…
Watcher’s Council results…
First place with 2 2/3 votes! The Noisy Room-The Fascist Stealth of Agenda 21 Second place with 2 votes The Razor -The New Misogyny: The Left’s Sexist Treatment of Conservative Women Third place with 1 2/3 votes Joshuapundit-‘Divorcing…
[...] Fourth place *t* with 1 1/3 votes – Bookworm Room – Sliding down the slippery slope on abortion [...]
[...] Fourth place *t* with 1 1/3 votes – Bookworm Room-Sliding down the slippery slope on abortion [...]