It is irrelevant because banning all abortions at all stages has nothing to do with late term abortions. You could argue for banning all late term abortions and still allow the morning after pill.
Aye, you could...provided you could formulate a coherent definition of personhood that fell somewhere inbetween conception and the third trimester. I'd like to hear that definition.
That is not the Supreme Court ruling, that is your take on it.
Really? What's your take?
And late term abortions are rare. They happen in unusual and rare circumstances.
This also describes kidnapping. I guess we don't need laws for that either. Kindly point me towards the nearest ski mask distributor.
And even if you think they should be more restrictive, fine, fight for that, but that is not you position. You want the other extreme. You are not for compromise. Yours is the absolute position, not the other side, as if you and the anti abortion crowd would be happy and go away if all late term abortions under all circumstances were banned. You and they would still be trying to ban the morning after pill.
Well, no, because pro abortion people are more flexible. There are extremists and more moderates in that camp. But anti abortion, the closest they get to moderate, is those who would make an exception for the life of the mother and rape, and the latter seems to be disappearing from the official Republican Party position.
It isn't a reasonable position because options have nothing to do with it, if your option is it must be banned at all stages because otherwise the law would allow late term abortions. It is all or nothing. That is not reasonable.
I'm grouping this first quote with two others later, because they all say the same basic thing.
What you call your "flexibility" on this issue, I call inconsistency. You are "flexible" because you're not espousing any principles or taking any stand, and you're unilaterally excluding the margins of the debate. I'm sure all sorts of difficult political issues are easy to address if you give yourself permission to just arbitrarily exclude the tough parts, even if you can't articulate any standard that justifies doing so. But you can't duct tape your ideology together with ad-hoc exceptions. And you definitely can't make law that way.
And please, spare me the modern political fetish for "compromise." Compromise is not an inherent good; it may or may not be depending on the circumstances, and arguing for compromise as its own end is empty. And it works a lot better on issues less important than life and death.
Your position is no less extreme than the one you're criticizing, you're just less willing to acknowledge its implications. The degree to which it looks less extreme is the degree to which you're willing to hand wave late-term abortions away with theoretical possibilities, even when they can't actually be put into effect with any force. Saying we can restrict late-term abortions is like telling me I can't use a plane but making it up to me by passing a law that "allows" me to fly like Superman. What good is a right we can't meaningfully exercise? What good is the right to restrict late-term abortions if you have to hopelessly contort the legislation to avoid being struck down?
Also, you haven't actually said that late-term abortions should be restricted; you've only said it's theoretically possible to restrict them. What restrictions should pro-choice people support? And how do you reconcile your answer with the fact that there are scads of pro-choice groups that work night and day to stop even the lightest of restrictions from being implemented? Do you regard them as harmful extremists, too?
Yes, you can justify killing an unborn infant under certain circumstances. Even the anti abortion people would agree with that under certain circumstances, like if the life of the mother is at stake. What life is more important? Unless the mother is willing to sacrifice herself, most people would argue, except a minority of religious people, the mother's life is more important.
It can be justified in the same way that you can justify killing someone when forced to choose between multiple lives, yes. There are no right answers under those circumstances. But that's not what I mean.
I notice you chose to respond to this one sentence and ignore the rest of the paragraph, which was the important part, probably-not-coincidentally. The argument was:
"At some point, situations arise where you have to prioritize one over the other. You obviously can't justify killing something you regard as an infant, but to grant it equal protection, even late in the pregnancy when it clearly is an infant, undermines all the arguments about autonomy. So anything that threatens that principle gets struck down. This isn't some random development; it's baked into the nature of the law. This is why the general principles used to justify a law matter."
This is the point I keep making: you want to act as if the failure to meaningfully restrict late-term abortions is some sort of incidental thing, separate from Roe and the pro-choice ideology. But it isn't. It's an inevitable consequence of the articulated principles behind it.
If you want to paste in your argument, fine, but I can't be clicking links with my connection when I am replying.
You don't have broadband? Ouch.
Regardless, I'm pretty sure the solution here is just to reply the first time.
It is illogical because it is clearly not a person the moment conception begins. You could argue some sort of life began, but not that it is a person.
Really? How do you define personhood? So far, it seems like the answer is...that you don't.
Because I can't believe you really believe the second after conception that is a person. You may think it is long before the law recognizes it as a living being, but not at that stage.
It depends on how you define a person, obviously. I obviously don't think it's identical to you or me, but I don't think it has to be.
For about the dozenth time, I challenge you to produce some other standard of personhood that can withstand scrutiny. Because I'll wager that almost all of the reasons you can give me for why a fetus isn't a person are things that either a) can clearly be removed from living, breathing adults without compromising their humanity, or b) can be said of newborn infants, as well.
This also might be beside the point, because the argument is both about what we believe, and what makes for the most sensible legal standard. Even if we were to agree, for the sake of argument, that we can't say a newly conceived child is actually a "person," that would still leave us with the issue of where to draw the line of personhood, and it would be perfectly reasonable to say that conception is the only reasonable line. It would be perfectly consistent, for example, to not be sure exactly how early a fetus is a person, but to recognize:
1) that it's clearly much earlier than is commonly implied
2) that the current standards are completely ineffectual in distinguishing in any reliable way before birth itself, and
3) that laws about protecting life should err on the side of caution above all else.
No, restrictions on late term abortions are not abstract. It is a fact, not an abstract notion, that a late term pregnancy is close to being a person.
How close? How long are you going to talk about this issue, and talk about what is and is not a person, before you actually deign to offer a position?
A minute or day after conception is still very abstract. We are arguing philosophy and religion at that stage, not scientific fact.
I don't think you're using any of these words correctly. First, I again point out to you that the law is
constantly making judgments on abstract issues.
Constantly. The entire concept of laws, rights, justice, whatever; they're all abstract. And by saying some restrictions on abortion are theoretically possible, they're
already drawing an abstract judgment about humanity. The idea that this is outside of the purview of law is stunningly wrong.
Second, the idea that this needs to be about "scientific fact" is bizarre. Scientific fact has nothing to do with this; it can tell us when the fetus grows fingers, but it can't tell us whether or not having fingers is a good way to decide whether or not something has rights. It may inform the debate, but defining personhood is not a scientific question. And to the degree to which we
do introduce science into the debate it only complicates things for the pro-choice individual, destroying the coherence of standards like "viability" and the notion that the child is not a separate biological entity.
Closed Thread
