On Aesthetics, Extremity, and Reality, Among Other Things
Lightgigantic said:
if you are prepared to set aside skin colour, why aren't you prepared to set aside your belly button?
What is the
functional comparison you're after with that? Or are you just assembling sentences that have the appearance of relevance without any functional consideration at all?
as mentioned several times earlier, declaring that one must be dependent in order to have access to justice issues simply empowers those already with power. In civilized society however, a primary function for justice is to protect those who are defenseless or dependent
"Declaring that one must be dependent in order to have access to justice"? What does that even mean?
As to protecting the defenseless or dependent? I have long made an argument about the absurdity of absolutism, and some have suggested that I venture into hyperbole.
In 2009, the Virginia legislature considered a bill requiring the reporting of all fetal deaths to authorities.
SB 962 did not distinguish between abortion and miscarriage. As I've noted in this and other threads, that is problematic. Responding to SB 962,
I wrote:
While it doesn't call for homicide investigations, SB962 presents an interesting possibility. Imagine down at the Fetal Death Investigations office any number of employees absolutely drowning in paperwork. The number of miscarriages reported is a mere fraction of the number that occurs. A woman might experience some pain and drop some blood into the toilet or some-such, and there are several possibilities. One of those, of course, is a miscarriage. And it might be the first and only sign she had that she was pregnant. Of course, it might also just be her body clearing blood from a uterine bruise after especially vigorous sex. So either the office of FDI, or whatever it ends up being called, might end up swamped with "maybe" reports, or thousands of women might end up in breach of the law, even if they don't know they've had a miscarriage. Ignorance is not bliss before the law, after all.
It was a thread about why men shouldn't have to pay child support, so I'm not surprised that prohibitionists didn't take it up at the time.
I presented the argument in 2008, for example:
A question for the anti-abortionists:
A woman miscarries. If life begins at conception, we should, then, investigate this death under unknown circumstances. How much money and how many hours are you willing to spend investigating every miscarriage that occurs?
And I mean every miscarriage. In 1997, my partner aborted a fetus that was already dead. How much should have been spent investigating how that fetus came to never come alive? (Its heart never started beating, as far as anyone can tell.)
In 1990, a teacher at my high school nearly died during a miscarriage. Because she was a Catholic, she refused to undergo a D&C when it was discovered that the fetus was developing without a brain, and had
zero chance of being born alive. It took her months to recover from the health damage. When should the investigation have started? While she was pregnant? Right after the miscarriage? After she had time to recover and bury evidence?
How many women who are anti-abortion would accept that
each of their menstrual issues should be screened for a fertilized egg, in order to ensure that a death does not go unnoticed?
As far as prohibitionist responses go:
"
Miscarriages and intentional baby-killing by the vicious mother are not the same. Any woman who could kill her baby is a soulless monster with an evil spirit imo."
(Sandy)
The resulting discussion is actually quite interesting; the prohibitionist was unwilling to discuss the implications of life at conception—we should not be surprised. And while
Madanthonywayne insisted that "there's no comparison between that and aborting a normal, healthy baby", it would seem that such a sentiment is not universal among the prohibitionist movement, as the Virginia bill suggests.
Reiterating the point in that particular thread, we finally got an answer—two weeks and over 340 posts after the proposition was introduced. And it is strikingly similar to your own:
• "
That is absurd. Even someone who does consider killing an embryo murder would not support such a policy as it would be impractical."
(Madanthonywayne)
• "
who amongst us would advocate passing extreme legislation that doesn't have the social foundation to be practical?"
(Lightgigantic)
Three years later, then, my response to your point about extreme legislation is the
same as it was then:
So, while it sounds great as a political slogan, it's too expensive for reality? .... If impracticality is a reason to not try to do important things, where would humanity be?
As extreme or socially untenable as you might think such policies to be, it is, as I asserted then, a matter of
integrity. These are the implications of life at conception in the pro-life context.
Indeed, as
I noted earlier in the thread, "I can envision a world that completely outlaws abortion, but the reality is that
nobody would go along with it." And as
I advised in a later post: "... I'm considering the practical outcomes of the abstract assertion that life begins at conception, and therefore abortion is murder."
In
2001 I inquired: "[W]hen a woman has a miscarriage, do we investigate and possibly then indict her for murder?"
I clarified the question:
After all, how do we know that the mother didn't do something to cause the miscarriage? Or, at any rate, to not prevent it. Did she fall down the stairs? If [she] wore socks on a wood staircase, then she is negligent in the death of what you claim to be a life. If she took a medicine, even one listed as safe for pregnant women, without first consulting her doctor, then she has been negligent. Manslaughter, then?
A year ago,
Rev. Debra Haffner explained:
Seventeen years ago this spring, I miscarried a very wanted pregnancy at 16 weeks. I had joyfully announced my pregnancy to my church community the day before, when I woke up with cramping and spotting. As the doctor performed the sonogram, we saw that the fetus had never developed past an eight-week embryo. We grieved for the baby who was not to be born that following fall. As I searched for answers to what had happened, I remembered that, right around eight weeks, I had used a hot tub several times at a day spa. I've never known if that was the cause of my pregnancy loss.
Under new legislation passed by the Utah state legislature (and awaiting the governor's signature), I might have been charged with criminal homicide. As unbelievable as that sounds, the proposed law states, "the killing or attempted killing of a live unborn child in a manner that is not abortion shall be punished as...criminal homicide." Any "reckless act of the woman" that results in fetal death is criminal homicide. According to the ACLU, "reckless" could mean not wearing a seatbelt, should a car accident result in miscarriage. It could mean that women in physically abusive relationships who did not leave but ended up losing their fetuses in an altercation could be charged. It could mean ignoring the warnings for pregnant women not to go on roller coasters or in hot tubs.
It should be noted that in the face of widespread criticism and condemnation, the bill's sponsor introduced a revised version. Governor Gary Herbert signed the new version, and vetoed the old. Still, though, the case arises from a rather chilling episode in which a teenager, facing limited options°, paid a friend to beat the hell out of her in order to cause a miscarriage. The assailant pleaded guilty under second degree attempted murder, but was sentenced under the anti-abortion statute—third-degree attempted killing of an unborn child. The girl was remanded to state custody until her twenty-first birthday, but was released in October because of how the statute was written. Judge Larry Steele asserted that according to the law, "a woman who solicits or seeks to have another cause an abortion of her own unborn child cannot be criminally liable".
(Aguilar)
Planned Parenthood's Melissa Bird says the same questions that so alarmed the bill's earlier critics still apply to the rewritten version that was just signed into law.
"What happens to women who are in abusive relationships?" she asks. "What happens if a woman threatens to leave the abuser, falls down the stairs and loses the baby? What if the abuser beats the woman and causes a miscarriage? Could he turn her in? Who would the prosecutor believe? What happens if a drug addict who's trying to get clean loses her baby? Will she be brought up on murder charges?"
Rep. Wimmer claims such women would not be prosecuted because they didn't knowingly act to terminate their pregnancies. But Bird says that is not necessarily the point.
"Even if the prosecutor doesn't take the case, nothing precludes a woman from being brought to the attention of law enforcement in the first place," she said. "What we're doing is driving women underground and preventing them from getting health care and prenatal care."
FOX News, among others, reported last week:
A Georgia state representative has reintroduced an anti-abortion bill that would make miscarriages a felony if the mother cannot prove there was no "human involvement."
The legislation from Rep. Bobby Franklin, a Republican, would make all abortions, described as "prenatal murder," illegal based on the belief that all life begins at conception. The bill's definition of "prenatal murder" excludes miscarriages "so long as there is no human involvement whatsoever" in causing them. Anyone convicted would face the death penalty or life behind bars.
So let us reconsider your complaint of extremity.
Three states in three years have attempted to attach life at conception, in the anti-abortion context, to legislation pertaining to miscarriages.
How would one go about enforcing these laws?
The
Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution obliges the states to provide every "person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws".
If life begins at conception, those fertilized ova are people. By law, they cannot be denied equal protection. Is the cause of death natural, or was there human agency? If there is an identifiable possibility of human agency, that avenue
must be pursued. Saying it's too complicated to enforce equal protection under the law for an entire class of "people" would constitute an abdication of sworn duty by judges, prosecutors, and police officers.
And yet the argument seems, consistently, to be that enforcing life at conception with any reasonable degree of integrity is an untenable proposition. Madanthonywayne rejects the idea as absurd and impractical. You call the proposition extreme and question its practicality.
Perhaps we might consider that if the implications of the principle are too great and complex to enforce consistently, there is a functional problem with the principle.
in the same sense, society tends to relegate everyone to a position of leeching of another body or individual.
In a wanted pregnancy, a woman
shares her body with the fetus. In an unwanted pregnancy, that fetus is a parasite.
Most everyone around here knows I
leech off my family to some degree. Except my family chooses to not see it that way. However, as regards your point, there is a difference between accepting money from my mother to pay a traffic ticket before I lose my license and feeding on her blood.
Ordinarily, I would presume one capable of comprehending that difference, but your argument doesn't exactly reflect that understanding. Do you
really not see the difference?
If you also don't have problems with late term abortion or pregnant mums smoking 6 packs a day or using crack, then no.
My general position is that I don't
like late term abortion, but I'm not about to assert that outlook as a basis for law. One might also consider the definition of a late term abortion. Twenty weeks? I don't have a problem with it at all. Twenty-seven weeks (e.g., beginning of third trimester)? Nope. Intact D&E beyond the thirtieth week? In the first place, in 2000, intact D&E accounted for 0.2% of abortions in the United States
(Rovner). To the other, it seems late term abortions in general come about for
complex reasons°, including failure to recognize pregnancy or wrongly estimated gestation (71%), difficult arrangement for abortion (48%), familial stress (33%), difficult decision to abort (24%). The bottom line is that I would not presume to interfere in a woman's decision to terminate a pregnancy at any time. What is taking place is contained within her body, and as such it is her dominion, and thus her decision.
As to smoking six packs a day—or even some more realistic excess—or smoking crack, that, too, is to the mother's discretion. It is an unfortnate reality of human nature, but I haven't the moral authority to do much more than point out that if the pregnancy is wanted, she ought to give the fetus as much chance as possible.
And if I ever happen to knock up a crackhead, yes, that will be my burden to carry if the child arrives in a difficult condition, but that's the point. After fertilization, my part begins either by her say-so or the child's arrival, whichever comes first. That is, if she wants me to participate in the pregnancy, I will certainly do so; if she wants me to stay away, I will certainly do so. If she chooses to carry to term but does not wish to raise the child, I will ask—and fight, if necessary—for my paternal rights and undertake the parenting adventure without her.
Jodi Jacobson reminded, in the wake of the Tiller assassination, of a narrative gap in the story: the nature of late term abortions. Reading through her article, you'll find not only that late term abortions are statistically rare—between one and one and a half percent—but also that they are heavily regulated by law, and in Tiller's case Kansas law required two independent diagnoses regarding the health of the mother. Jacobson asserts that:
... much of the media and talking heads pontificating on this subject have constantly focused on Tiller's being "one of the very few doctors who perform late-term abortions," without providing any context as to why he did so and under what circumstances.
As a result, the dominant narrative is one which perpetuates an assumption that people are electing to have late-term abortions for the sake of convenience. This public perception is shaped by the constant intonement that Tiller was "killing babies" coming from irresponsible journalistic hacks like Bill O'Reilly, the suggestions by Chris Matthews that women are blithely electing to abort fetuses that are viable outside the womb, and the statements of inconsistent moralizers like Will Saletan that "there are cases where there's no real medical situation other than some teenager in denial and it went on for five months [where the argument is] you should make an exception because of the so-called mental health of the girl."
The narrative is one in which women are shamed for choosing abortion, no matter the circumstances, and in which Dr. Tiller is portrayed even indirectly as a despicable aide in their shame.
This narrative is so pervasive that even among those who consider themselves pro-choice, many people are left to wonder: Are these women just waking up one day, deciding over coffee they are tired of being pregnant, and opting for an abortion at 24 weeks? Are there a lot of third trimester abortions? Are they just, as Chris Matthews likes to call them, "elective procedures?"
And that narrative is incorrect, as Jacobson goes on to explain.
On the contrary, this either/or policy is obvious arbitrary and absurd since there are obvious ethical considerations (when I say obvious, I mean even obvious for those who give the green light to abortion) for a mum who is taking drugs or requesting an abortion three days before it is due.
Jacobson further asserts:
The Guttmacher brief notes that:
• 37 states prohibit some abortions after a certain point in pregnancy.
• 24 states initiate prohibitions at fetal viability.
• 5 states initiate prohibitions in the third trimester.
• 8 states initiate prohibitions after a certain number of weeks, generally 24.
The circumstances under which procedures are permitted after that point vary from state to state. For example:
• 29 states permit abortions to preserve the life or health of the woman;
• 4 states permit abortions to save the life or health of the woman, but use a narrow definition of health;
• 4 states permit abortions only to save the life of the woman.
Some states require the involvement of a second physician when a later-term abortion is performed. Nine states require that a second physician attend in order to treat a fetus if it is born alive. Ten states require that a second physician certify that the abortion is medically necessary.
Abortions three days before the due date are generally not carried out without very good reasons. Indeed, doctors in the U.S. who perform such procedures without good reason risk the wrath of the law.
It would seem you're basing your point in this case on myth and hyperbole.
admittedly the arguments of the all go abortion camp tend to be quite simple - pursuit of convenience at the expense of others who exist in a state of dependence - a marked similarity to the arguments of the cotton plantation owners of yesteryear I might add ...
Yeah, well, show me an ultrasound of a fetus hoeing rows of cotton in the womb, and you might have a point.
I guess first we would have to imagine a society where parenthood is viewed as something more than a pastime for the rich with time on their hands
Given the higher birth rate among the less affluent, it's hard to figure what point you're trying to make there.
Generally a discussion of ethics is based at reshaping views on a problem ... which then, if successful provides small societal changes in lieu of changing attitudes.
Aesthetics don't have to be arbitrary. Indeed, some aspects of human aesthetics are inherent, such as our favoring of the 5:8 ratio.
But this aesthetic
is arbitrary. The inconsistency about how the life at conception principle is applied—e.g., emotional appeal of exceptions—reveals the political side of the assertion. As
I asserted earlier, "They don't want to be seen as hostile to rape survivors."
In this case, the prohibitionist aesthetic is, functionally, a lack of integrity—and a telling one, at that.
There is always a tension in societies in determining to what degree something should be legislated against and to what degree it should merely be controlled by societal norms of acceptable behavior.
Ideally, societal norms are not arbitrary or rooted in aesthetics.
IOW to suggest that a discussion of abortion be analyzed purely in terms of legislation is absurd since the hot seat it is contending for is aesthetics (since if a piece of legislation is going to avoid being a failure, it certainly must have a degree of "aesthetics" about it)
It's not purely about legislation. Rather, it's more about the
integrity of applicable legislation. If we ignore the implications of the principles upon which a piece of legislation is founded, the principles are not genuine.
If the principle is good enough to tell women what to do, it's good enough to tell women what to do. Making exceptions for the sake of the authoritarians' egos is a stupid and, ultimately, destructive way to go about the discussion.
Rape and incest exceptions are purely aesthetic. Even in those cases that stake the life of the mother, the reality is that
she got pregnant, and thus the life at conception argument should choose the innocent fetus over the woman it might destroy.
____________________
Notes:
° limited options — It should be noted that the Utah case highlights any number of problems surrounding the abortion debate. The nearest service provider to the young lady was in Salt Lake City, three and a half hours away from where she was. Ninety-three percent of Utah counties have no abortion service providers within their boundaries. Dr. William Adams, who operates one of the Salt Lake City clinics, explained:
"I became an OB/GYN in 1973, the year abortion became legal. Since then, it's only gotten worse,"
"I see women from southeastern Idaho, western Wyoming, and occasionally some from eastern Nevada .... They don't have providers there" ....
..... "Nothing really surprises me anymore .... What saddens me is the fact that no one wants to defend abortion, not even the women who have one. We're not even teaching our kids how to be responsible so they won't get pregnant or get STDs." (Aguilar)
Indeed, the Utah Senate refused last year to allow debate on legislation that would have permitted—speak nothing of obliged—comprehensive sex education to students in the public school system. Perhaps as a result, Utah youth (ages 15-24) are statistically more likely to contract chlamydia than chicken pox or influenza. According to student activist Emma Waitzman, who campaigned in her high school for comprehensive sex education:
""We talked to legislators who said, 'If you really want to share the information, then do it yourself' .... We said, 'No, it's not our responsibility. It's yours.' I couldn't believe a grown man was saying this to me. Are we going to have to teach ourselves?" (ibid)
And one parent explained:
"We're a predominantly LDS [Latter-day Saints] state. It's conservative here. I am LDS myself. I go to temple. I totally believe in this church. I believe in abstinence only, but I have four girls and I would be a fool to think that all of my children are going to choose abstinence. I grew up in this state and almost everyone was having sex. Let's get real." (ibid)
This is the sort of climate that leads exactly to such horrific outcomes.
Of course, the solution is not to rectify those circumstances, but, rather, to retreat even further into religion and politics.
° for complex reasons — These numbers are culled from a 1987 survey. Admittedly old statistics, the numbers still speak to the complexity of the decision to terminate a pregnancy.
Works Cited:
Virginia General Assembly. SB962: Fetal deaths; when occurs without medical attendance, mother, etc., must report within 24 hours. January 14, 2009. RichmondSunlight.com. February 28, 2011. http://www.richmondsunlight.com/bill/2009/sb962/fulltext/
Haffner, Debra. "Criminal Miscarriage, or Miscarriage of Justice?" The Huffington Post. February 26, 2010. HuffingtonPost.com. February 28, 2011. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-debra-haffner/criminal-miscarriage-or-m_b_478607.html
Aguilar, Rose. "Utah Governor Signs Controversial Law Charging Women and Girls With Murder for Miscarriages". AlterNet. March 9, 2010. AlterNet.org. February 28, 2011. http://www.alternet.org/rights/1459...women_and_girls_with_murder_for_miscarriages_
Clark, Stephen. "Georgia Lawmaker's Anti-Abortion Proposal Could Punish Women for Miscarriages". February 26, 2011. FOXNews.com. February 28, 2011. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/201...-abortion-proposal-punish-women-miscarriages/
United States Constitution. 1992. Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School. Februrary 28, 2011. http://topics.law.cornell.edu/constitution
Rovner, Julie. "'Partial-Birth Abortion:' Separating Fact from Spin". National Public Radio. February 21, 2006. NPR.org. February 28, 2011. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5168163
Wikipedia. "Late-term abortion". January 13, 2011. Wikipedia.org. February 28, 2011. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late-term_abortion
Jacobson, Jodi. "Late-term Abortions: Facts, Stories and Ways to Help". The Huffington Post. June 3, 2009. HuffingtonPost.com. February 28, 2011. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jodi-jacobson/late-term-abortions-facts_b_210614.html
