 |
A supposedly fair assessment of the pros and cons of: |
|
A supposedly fair assessment of the pros and cons of: |
For an unbiased overview of the legal facts regarding abortion law
in the United States,
visit the incredible Abortion Law Homepage. Here I've summarized the first few paragraphs of their overview:
Abortion law comes from (1) the states, and (2)
the U.S. ("federal") Supreme Court. States widely criminalized abortion until Roe vs. Wade in 1973, when the U.S.
Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution provided a fundamental right for women
to obtain abortions; they held that the "right to privacy,"
established by the contraception
cases of the 1960’s/early 70’s, assured the freedom of a person to abort
unless the state had a "compelling interest" in preventing the abortion.
Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States:
Article. XIV. [Proposed 1866; Ratified during Reconstruction 1868]
Section. 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject
to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the
State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which
shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States;
nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without
due
process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction
the equal protection of the laws.
I got the numbers below (similar to those in the above article), from
"The World's Abortion
Laws" at the
Center for Reproductive Law and Policy (CRLP)
| Abortion restrictiveness in 5 categories: | # of Nations | % of World's Pop. |
| 1) Prohibited Altogether or only to Save the woman's life* | 74 | 26.0 % |
| 2) Permitted to protect the woman's life and physical health | 33 | 9.9 % |
| 3) Permitted to protect the woman's life, physical and mental health | 20 | 2.6 % |
| 4) Permitted on socioeconomic grounds** | 14 | 20.7 % |
| 5) Permitted without restriction as to reason*** | 50 | 40.8 % |
The Only Issue
The only issue is whether the fetus is a "life" or not. "Right to life"
and "A woman's right to choose" have no meaning whatsoever and DO NOT RELATE
to each other outside of that context, so SHUT THE FUCK UP! Continuously
spouting out these meaningless phrases and pretending yours is the only
side to the story is useless and just plain IGNORANT.
In other words, if the fetus is a life, then you don't have any more right to terminate that than if your child was one month old; but if the fetus isn't a life, then you can do whatever you want with it, the same way you have the complete right to decide if you want your own appendix out.
So we see that: Abortion falls somewhere between having your appendix taken out and murdering your one-month-old child.
| to the LEFT | to the RIGHT(?) |
| Let me Rephrase You | |
| The only correct way to phrase your "pro-choice, anti-life"
opinion:
I'm sorry, but I believe that the importance of a human being's right to choose what they want to do with their own body, especially when their health (and even their life) is at stake, outweighs the importance of a mass of cells that would most likely grow into a human being but at the moment CANNOT LIVE ON ITS OWN.. |
The only correct way to phrase your "pro-life, anti-freedom"
opinion:
I 'm sorry, but I believe that the importance of allowing a mass of cells that is the beginning of a human being to grow to live on its own outweighs the importance of a human being's right to choose what they want to do with their own body, even if their own health (or life) is at stake. |
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|
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| Your Body?
You say you have the right to choose what you want to do with your body. The most accurate situation to that scenario is whether you get to decide if you want to have your own appendix out. No one is telling you you don't have the right to decide that, in fact you are completely correct, you do have that right. But in an abortion there is something a lot more important involved, and the decision is not that simple. A life is almost definitely at stake... and it ain't yours. |
Slavery
What sucks is that forcing someone to endure unwanted pregnancy against their will is forced slavery and that's against the law AND the spirit of the constitution, no matter what's inside. Both pregnancy and abortion are potentially life-threatening. What is more personal than the right to decide what you can and can't do with your own physical person when your own permanent health and even your very life is at stake? (The right to defend yourself from a threat outside of yourself is certainly less personal.) There is no right more basic than that and NOBODY has the right to take that away. |
| So is the fetus a life? | |
| Morally, probably yes. When you were a 1-week-old fetus in your mother, that was YOU! There is no way you can deny that. If your mother would have had an abortion you wouldn't be here now. One is a direct result of the other (minus the chance that you would have died sometime between the time of abortion and now).* | Legally, no. The constitution does not define
a fetus as a life. Even in the Old Testament of the Bible,
the fetus was not accorded the same rights as the mother. And God is not
the law in this country anyway. If it were, freedom would not exist
. *Of course if your mother had used birth control when you were conceived, you wouldn't be here now either. The fetus may be a life in a moral sense but unfortunately can't live on its own, and the life and health of the mother is inexorably linked to it, and therein lies the problem |
| Selfish Left-Wing Bastards
Should you be allowed to decide if you want your one-month-old child to live or die? Why not? It's "yours." It can't live on it's own; it needs you to live. It takes your mental and physical time and energy. What if you decide you don't want it anymore? What if you lose your job or your spouse leaves you or you find out your spouse is a pedophile and you decide your child won't have a happy life? What if you didn't "realize" that having a baby could lead to this, or think it would happen to you? There is time in effort involved in caring for it, and emotional trauma and personal sacrifice involved in putting it up for adoption. Should you be forced to go through that (even if it was for nine months) when it is so much easier just to stab it to death and put it in the trash? What do you think of that, you selfish left-wing bastards? Why don't you try using birth control next time, or take responsibility for your actions? |
Meddling Right-Wing Shitheads
A fetus isn't really anything yet. If you take it out and put it on a table, it isn't alive - it's only alive as part of the mother. It can't do anything by itself; it's justs a mass of cells that has been growing for a couple of months. You're only eliminating the possibility of something, not something that is real now, the same as you do when you use birth control. Should we not allow birth control because of the miracle of the creation of a child that will occur if birth control isn't used? Also, if you are against abortion you really can't make exceptions for cases of rape and incest, because no matter how hard it is for the victim, it's still not the baby's fault; it doesn't deserve to die as a result of something someone else did to someone else. What do you think of that, you arrogant right-wing bastards? Why don't you adopt a few unwanted children or just keep your busybody, everyone-has-to-behave-the-way-I want-them-to mouth shut? |
Technically a sperm cell is also a potential human being, that only needs an egg and about 9 months inside a woman, whereas a fetus is a potential human being that only needs 9 months inside a woman, so even that step of fertilization is part of the continuum, although it's a pretty big jump. But I guess there are billions and trillions more sperm cells than there are fetuses, and we don't really have any say in their creation. But there are many fetuses to go around too and whenever one is terminated there is another one to take its place.
(Maybe with the advent of better contraception and morning-after pills all of this will be moot anyway.)
Court Appointments
It is interesting to note that Roe v. Wade was decided 7-2, even though six of the judges had been appointed by Republican Presidents. Webster (1989) and Casey (1992) still upheld the "central holding" of Roe (though weakening the decision somewhat), even though in 1992 eight out of the nine justices had been appointed by Republican Presidents. I wasn't aware of these imbalances; if the Republicans complain about a recently historically Democratic congress, at least it is balanced by a recently historically Republican Supreme Court, although I don't think that "conservative" necessarily means the same thing for a Federal Judge that it does in political ideology. But thank God for a balance of power in our country.
Truth of Consequences
The one obvious difference in a pregnancy that results from rape is that the woman didn't make the choice to engage in the act that included the inherent risk of prenancy. Concerning the voluntary act, there are other instances where if you engage in a particular activity, we (through our government) require you to do certain things as a consequence, for example if a family has or adopts a baby, they are required to take care of it and not to neglect it. If you drive a car, you are required to maintain it and drive responsibly. This could be used as a precedent to require that any person who has sex is required to face the consequences, such as effects on their time, energy, limitations on their rights, and yes even their body. The man, of course, would have to be required to face as many of the same consequences as possible. But there is a difference between something as personal as your body, vs. only your time, thought, emotions, resources and energy. Still...
Better Way
Here is a great quote from an article titled "Fetal Frenzy" by Judith
Lewis, that appeared in the April 5-11 edition of the L.A. Weekly:
"History has shown that prohibiting abortion
does little to stop the procedure; in counties from Nazi Germany to Romania
to the United States, banning abortion has led to death and injury among
women of childbearing age. Abortion rates have declined, however,
in countries that combine liberal abortion law with sex education and
access to contraceptives, and birthrates happily rise in societies that
reward mothers with subsidized day care and affordable medicine. Norway
has integrated into its abortion law a pledge that "all children enjoy
conditions for a secure upbringing"; France gives financial incentives
to mothers; Sweden offers a promise that having a baby alone, or under
financial duress, will neither stigmatize them socially nor consign them
to poverty.
These societies, which arguably need abortion
the least, offer it without restriction in the first trimester, free of
charge, and yet theirs is a social policy I can without reservation call
pro-life. Those who would be moved by the image of the embryo and
their various gods to stop women from having abortion -- and my high regard
for religious freedom demands that I respect their views -- would do well
to abandon their "truth trucks," and get to work making the world a more
hospitable place in which to raise a child. And then this magical
image of the embryo in the womb should symbolize a different political
movement: One that seeks to construct a social policy in which no mother,
whatever her economic circumstances, attitude or marital status, lacks
the resources to feed her children."
Abhortion
Give me adoption or give me death.
Blood is thicker than water,
but not than shame.
Sons and daughters,
are you glad you came?
--Tom Minkler
Just for laughs, check out this cartoon.
What do you think?
To follow someday: a "cost" benefit analysis of abortion vs. forced
to carry to term.
Also links to anti-life and anti-rights sites.
Have a nice day! :)
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