786 said:
So you would support repealing Roe v Wade. Yes? Since as I understand it, Supreme Court decision banned "late" abortions.
You understand incorrectly.
Roe v. Wade did not ban late-term abortions.
Right so principally from your point of view, killing the baby 1min before birth and killing the baby 1min after birth means one is just women's choice, the other is murder. And in this case choice to kill :shrug:, (unless you are disputing there is life 1min before birth).
Actually, I think you're just desperate to avoid dealing with the misogyny of Pauline libertarianism.
On whatever occasion you might be able to cite, suggest, or invent, the question is considerably more complex than that. I don't think you do yourself or anyone else a service by depicting "the dilemma that the whole issue of abortion brings" in such simplistic terms.
The whole basis of 'women's choice' arises from the fact it is her body. Thus to be principally consistent 'women's choice' supporters should also then support late term abortions. You did. But there is a VAST number of 'Pro-choice' supporters that DON'T. Yes let me repeat Pro-Choice people that don't.
I'm aware that your sense of political subtlety is about akin to a nuclear bomb blast, but many pro-choice advocates who concede the prohibition of late-term abortions do so because that's what the political landscape demands.
The problem with abortion brings contradictions on both sides. Its just really that simple.
In abstraction, sure.
Practically speaking, it's a bit more complicated.
You know,
practically? As in, "When put into practice"?
88% of all abortions in the U.S. are performed within twelve weeks of pregnancy; measuring twenty-one weeks not from conception but last menstruation, one and a half percent of all abortions in the U.S. are late-term.
If you are actually interested in learning something about that slender fraction, I would suggest an amicus brief filed by the
National Institute for Reproductive Health in
Gonzales v. Carhart, which upheld the right of Congress to outlaw partial-birth abortion—a law opposed by obstetricians and gynecologists; the court relied on Congressional opinion that intact D&E is
never needed to protect the life of a pregnant woman.
The NIHR brief describes some circumstances under which women seek late-term abortions:
• "Although I have always been pro-choice, I had winced at the thought of late-term abortions or “partial birth” abortions, thinking that it was just inhumane or irresponsible. Now I know differently. In my case, we were not able to confirm our diagnosis until 19 or 20 weeks gestation. I terminated at 22 weeks." (p.9)
• "I had the amnio on 12/26/05, and the results came in on Jan. 13, 2006. It confirmed without doubt – she had Cat Eye Syndrome tetrasomy in every cell of her body. The last 3 sonograms showed ... our baby’s kidneys were beginning to
malfunction ....
"We made this decision because we loved our daughter so much. We didn’t want her to suffer the definite and the untold problems she was sure to endure, if she even made it. We made the best decision we could with the information we
had. We fought for her. We wanted her. But we didn’t want to condem[n] her to [a] life of agony." (p.10)
• "It took me an agonizing week to make this heartbreaking choice, but in the end I know it was the best decision for me, my family and most importantly, our child. We lost our oldest son at 6 years and 10 months old, to complications from having a rare type of dwarfism. That dwarfism was exactly the reason why we had the CVS test done. We knew without a doubt that we could never in good conscience bring another child into this world with that disease .... Most genetic defects come with their own list of extra problems, which I didn’t take into account, and put that child at risk for painful procedures and even death. No child deserves to come into a world of pain. That is what made my decision for me ...." (p.10-11)
And so on.
Your theoretic "one minute before birth" is a mythic fantasy.
The case of rape is an inconvenient state. That is what Ron Paul said in that interview.
A delightfully morbid euphemism:
an inconvenient state.
When he said to Morgan that he was trying resolve the issue of life on the basis of this condition of rape, where Morgan said these things 'do happen'. Ron was essentially saying, yes Life does begin at conception. But rape and abortion brings in it a very moral contradiction.
Actually, what he said was that preventing conception was acceptable if it was an "honest rape". Explaining his point further, he went on, "because an hour after intercourse or a day afterwards, there is no legal or medical problem".
An hour or a day? But as
Chipz and
I have already
discussed, one cannot necessarily make the requisite distinction between an "honest rape" and whatever the alternative is—a trendy horde of baby-haters getting pregnant and lying about being raped in order to have abortions?—within that period.
Life begins at conception, rape doesn't change that fact per him. But that inconvenient condition must be accomodated, so he leaves out an exception of extremely early abortion where one doesn't know life is even there because you can't tell they are pregnant, so its a 'blind abortion' (pregnancies aren't 100% anyways).
It would appear that you
missed a thread last year discussing the problem with accommodating such an "inconvenient condition".
He could've done what you did. Go to the extreme and say 'no exceptions' even to rape that would be the 'Pro-life' extreme, and then there is the Pro-Choice extreme, which you just represented.
So as far as I'm concerned, you're asking him to be an extremist like you are. In any case I have no solid opinion on the matter because this issue truly is a divisive one, and I can see why.
It is a politically
inconvenient condition for Dr. Paul to reconcile because, as I have noted, his argument runs away from the question of
a pregnant woman's status as a human being.
Rick Santorum, as completely screwed up as I think he is, at least has the decency to stand on his position. Call the pregnancy from rape a gift from God, or something stupid like that. What he
did not do, when asked the question, was raise a mythic spectre of the evil, lying woman who can't be trusted for crying rape.
Which brings us back to the original problem with Paul's answer, and that is his hatred of women.
____________________
Notes:
Coll Jr., J. Peter, Linda A. Rosenthal, et al. "Brief of the Institute for Reproductive Health Access and Fifty-Two Clinics and Organizations as Amici Curiae in Support of Respondents". Gonzales v. Carhart, et al. September 20, 2007. NIRHealth.org. February 6, 2012. http://www.nirhealth.org/sections/howwepartner/documents/amicus-brief-womens-stories.pdf
