The following will most likely be a bit disjointed since I had a long day, but I want it out of my head tonight, so it won’t bother me tomorrow.
The following started with a Facebook post by a friend of mine, who is very left wing, but who I am not responding to since I genuinely like her otherwise. I think she is misguided, even though I would never say something that patronizing to her and expect to be able to hug her again.
It was a meme saying essentially that we don’t hesitate to pull the plug on brain dead people, particularly old people, so how can anyone say anyone able to do that values the human heartbeat.
Whoever wrote it, I think, thought it was a mike drop, but I of course was appalled that someone would conflate someone who had lived a full life and had no prospect of future consciousness, which is to say life; and a fetus which had yet to draw its first breath, much less a baby which was born viable, and still in danger in some places, or so I understand.
I commented on my own page that a metaphor occurred to me that a seed is different from a sprout, itself different from a seedling, then a tree, then wood.
Teasing that out a bit, I will offer another analogy that I posted elsewhere, but not, I don’t think, here: the situation as regards abortion with the Left is that a fetus is more or less in an indefinite, Schroedinger’s Cat situation: it is human if wanted, but not human if not wanted, and it can switch from human to non-human and back again as often as the woman changes her mind.
There, I called this philosophically unacceptable, as indeed it is.
Within the first analogy, the baby converts from a sapling to wood and back to a sapling, depending on the whim of the woman.
And it then struck me that the underlying notion is that HUMAN LIFE GENERALLY has to be subject, within such a paradigm, to the same logic. Why is the Left so murderous? Well, some people it wants, and some it doesn’t. And the people it doesn’t want aren’t people, so killing them is no crime.
Then it hit me that the reason for this dogmatism is that the same rigid and unempathetic mindset is applied to the political discourse itself: people who have the right opinion are human, and those who do not are not. No point in talking to them.
Where and when have you seen a Leftist EVER admit that a baby is a human being, in PRINCIPLE? They won’t do it. Emotionally, they live with the contingent, Schroedinger’s Cat image. They only know if the death of a baby is a tragedy if they know how the mother felt. If her boyfriend punched her in the stomach in a drunken rage and she miscarried, oh the tears and wailing. But if she herself chose to abort that same baby at the same time, then it was her choice.
Do you see the problem here?
And here is the perspective that occurred to me, that I am calling a new argument.
It is not technically true that the government’s laws are “on” the woman’s body. The laws concern the DOCTORS who perform the procedures. No one is telling her she can’t have an abortion: they are saying she can’t use the COMMUNITY to do it. She cannot ask the rest of us to tacitly endorse her decision.
Now, the argument all of us have lived with since we ourselves were not aborted long ago is that if “abortion is illegal then we will return to back alley abortions”.
In important respects, this is a ridiculous claim. Most importantly, no one is proposing banning ALL abortions. They are still legal.
And women KNOW how to prevent pregnancy, outside of rape, which is really not anything anyone is talking about any more any way.
For a woman to get pregnant, she has to have insufficiently protected sex. If it is voluntary, then the risk which led to pregnancy is something she could and should have controlled.
I see people say “the man should have too”, but the man does not get pregnant. If he wants to wear a condom, that’s great, but the ultimate responsibility OBVIOUSLY lies with the person who bears the consequences. This is simple fact. It is plain moral logic, that would be comprehensible, I think, in any non-decadent culture.
And here is the analogy I will offer, whose direct validity I have not decided on. It is perhaps not exact, but I will offer it anyway.
The fact is that because heroin is illegal, much of the heroin that is on the street is dangerous. If it were legal, and sold by pharmacies (and by the way, I would most likely not oppose this), then a lot less people would get bad stuff and die.
The argument could then be made, using roughly the same logic, that heroin MUST be legalized, since people using it will die if it isn’t.
But heroin is illegal. Should the law be concerned with what happens to people who break the law?
All public laws reflect moral norms that are sufficiently common that our elected politicians see fit to encode them in law. Our system, by design, is intended to allow for many moral norms. As I have pointed out often, there is no reason Minnesota cannot try and replicate Sweden (complete with Islamist crime and terror), and Texas, well, be Texas.
Differing understandings, within the broad rubric of the Constitution, which as I have said OBVIOUSLY does not speak to abortion.
{Roe v. Wade, if you study the history, was a set-up. Effectively it was left wing radicals intentionally and by long design creating bench legislation. It was a planned operation, controlled and directed by a group of people to the explicit purpose of getting the Supreme Court to affirm a “right” which did not exist in the Constitution.]
In my personal view, the window should be the first trimester, but what for me is not at issue is that if a baby is born breathing and crying, it should not be murdered. If you grant that infanticide is wrong, then it becomes a question of where to draw the line. Fetal heartbeat is one such place.
So to sum up, getting pregnant is something which only happens after a decision is made by the woman. If she is drunk, she chose to get drunk. If it was a bad decision, it was her bad decision. If this sounds unfair, perhaps it is, but only women can get pregnant. Life is not fair in many ways.
She takes a risk. The risk is pregnancy, and currently in Texas, the risk is that if she does not abort the baby, if she does not want it, before it has a heartbeat, then she either can’t abort it legally, or has to go out of State to get it done legally. She can also legally abort it herself, but that is of course dangerous. What she wants is safety, not unreasonably.
But if we grant that the State has the right to set a timeline from when the act of abortion becomes infanticide and thus murder, then that is a law she needs to be aware of, and take into consideration.
Not often commented on, but one key aim of such legislation is REDUCING THE NUMBER OF ABORTIONS.
It is the same aim with banning heroin: we want less of it used.
And if she knows what the law is, is there not reason to suppose her behavior WILL CHANGE? That her decision patterns will change? That she may do a better job of preventing pregnancy, with any number of options, including the pill, IUD’s and others?
Again, I am tired and perhaps offering some non sequiturs, but I don’t think so.
Let me try my logic again:
- The 4th Amendment does not guarantee a right to abortion on demand. Specifically, it does not require States to permit medical professionals to perform abortions for any period of time.
- This logically means that communities who want to do so can ban DOCTORS and nurses and other medical professionals from performing this procedure, within specific constraints, such as how far along the baby is.
- If a woman KNOWS this–and she obviously should–then she KNOWS she is risking creating problems for herself if she a) gets pregnant; and b) takes longer than 6 weeks to abort the baby.
- The fact that she is at higher risk of health complications should she decide to abort after 6 weeks is not the problem of the law, which deals in personal behavior and individual responsibility.
To my mind, the big red flags in all this are the denigration of personal responsibility–which is reinforced by allowing the negative consequences of bad decisions to manifest, and reduced by sheltering people who make bad decisions from the consequences–and the refusal of the Left to admit to any consistent and non-ironic definition of when life begins.
The latter refusal, as I have commented, has led logically to the rationalization of infanticide, and to the political theater of televised abortions which have the specific aim of incensing those who view fetuses as human beings.
There is plenty in here to make people mad, and I probably should not post it without sleeping on it, but shit, I’ve already posted lots of stuff to make people mad in the past.
The net is that discussion should be possible, but it is not possible on this topic because the whole thing requires sincerity with respect to what human life is and its value. You cannot have a values based debate with people who just want to keep their options open. For them, some human life has value, and some doesn’t, and it varies, depending on their political goals and current needs. That is more or less the root of it.
But the whole “My body my decision” involves a doctor. They don’t want government taking their hands of them, but rather keeping them off of the doctors, so the doctors can put THEIR hands on the babies.
One last thing: infants feel pain after a relatively short period. Anyone who would not torture a mute puppy–that can’t make a noise so you know you are inflicting agony on it–should consider that human fetuses are just as sensitive after a certain point.
Again, if we were trying to share a common humanity which differed in specifics, that would be one thing. But we aren’t. The people we are fighting don’t believe in our humanity in important ways at all. I honestly believe this, because I see it.
One last, last thing, only tangentially related: ponder how you NEVER, NEVER hear people like Fauci and Walensky talk about the human consequences of their policies, of the screaming and miserable children, the suicides, the depressions, the old people dying alone, all of it.
Contrast this with Tegnell of Sweden, who actually DID agonize, more or less publicly, about balancing policy with common humanity. I personally think he did a great job. He is virtually the only one on Planet Earth that I can recall making such an effort.