Posted on 10/18/2005 9:49:08 AM PDT by holeinchilada
I figure I'm about 25 degrees to the right of political center in America. Nonetheless, there's one rightwing issue which I wish I'd never heard of, which is the idea of "Right to Life". That, as far as I can tell, is the one basic issue which has kept the criminal democrat party alive over the last 35 years, and it's the one major issue which democrats come anywhere close to being on the right side of.
Not that most abortions should be happening. They shouldn't be. If the people who care about this issue were to put half the time, money, and energy into convincing people not to have abortions which they put into trying to pass draconian laws, the democrat party would die and 90% of the abortion business would probably evaporate.
90 Percent of abortions are basically unnecessary; nonetheless, the ones which are necessary tend to be REAL necessary.
The problem is that the whole idea of there being any such thing as a right to life involves a fundamental logical contradiction and the question of rape brings the contradiction into sharp focus.
What you're really talking about is the question of there being such a thing as a right to life which is sufficient to compell hardship and suffering on another person. In the case of rape, there's no justifying it.
Nonetheless, the law makes no distinction between born persons on the basis of how they were conceived and logically it's hard to picture there being such a distinction amongst the unform. In other words, if ANY unforn could be construed as having a right to life sufficient to compell the mother to carry it to term despite any claims she might have to the use of her own body, then you'd figure the unforn child of the rapist would have the same right.
That's the basic problem.
An article linked from Drudge recently noted that there were something like 94,635 rapes in America in 2004. In other words, the situation which highlights the problem isn't just hypothetical.
Moreover, there have been recent studies which indicate that rape itself is basically a biologically ingrained genetic survival mechanism, and not just some sort of a psychotic crime:
Answers in Genesis Interview with Craig Palmer
Rape is not, typically, the crime of male domination it has been portrayed as by sociologists and feminists in recent years, says a University of New Mexico biology professor.Instead, UNM's Randy Thornhill and Colorado anthropologist Craig T. Palmer have developed a new theory that rape is a complex sexual crime with strong roots in human evolution.
Moreover, contend Thornhill and Palmer, rape "prevention efforts will founder until they are based on the understanding that rape evolved as a form of male reproductive behavior."
That study and others like it raise the startling possibility that by bearing a child for the benefit of a rapist, a woman encourages rapists generally and helps cause other girls and women to get raped.
The only logical conclusion I can come to from all this is that the drive for draconian abortion laws needs to be abandoned, and the effort put into peacefully convincing people not to have abortions. It's one of those areas in life in which the unintended consequences outweight anything positive you might hope to accomplish.
I am a wife, mother, educator, productive member of my community, tax payer, AND was born to a teenage mother. I am pretty glad I didn't fall into the "acceptable instances" of abortion.....even if I did, wouldn't I be the exact same PERSON?
You're not buying what?
That would never satisfy those who think they are engaged in a jihad Holy Crusade to end abortion.
The basic problem is that pols no longer want to deal with social issues at all and actually prefer shunting them off to judges. In colonial times that wasn't the case since being a politician was not a profession but a short-term civic duty. A professional politician on the other hand figures that ANY vote he ever casts on such an issue is going to offend 45% of his electorate, and that any clumsy thing after that might have him out looking for another job.
Professional politicians are nothing but frontmen, blowhards, conmen, or outright thieves. The concept of "statesman" has been lost to history and we are much worse off for it.
Welfare laws can be changed by the state legislature, just as abortion laws can (absent Supreme Court override.) Both abortion-on-demand and handouts-for-life are products of idiotic 60's ideology. Both aberrations can be eliminated at the voters' discretion.
sex with a 12-13 year old is not consensual....
Making some girl carry a baby to term where Daddy or Big Brother raped her.
I have always suspected this to be the case.
And so I am inclined to believe that the victim of a rapist who does not have any resulting pregnancy terminated, may in fact not really have been raped, as she agress to reward the rapist by bearing his child.
What draconian abortion laws? There are none, sadly. What do you suggest? Should Planned Parenthood come over and pick you up in a cab?
You write: "If the people who care about this issue were to put half the time, money, and energy into convincing people not to have abortions which they put into trying to pass draconian laws, the democrat party would die and 90% of the abortion business would probably evaporate."
Hmmm. And if the Lincoln wing of the Republican party hadn't pushed so strongly to outlaw the evil of slavery in 1860, there never would have been a civil war. If only they would have spent their time "convincing" people not to own slaves...
A lot of unborn babies are perishing. Does that matter to you?
It is wrong to kill unborn babies as a form of birth control. The rape argument is a Trojan horse; relatively few abortions involve rape. (3 million a year). Sorry, but lot's of us reject moral relativism (which arises in no small part from the preposterous claims of evolutionists) and believe that evil must be confronted and stopped.
The FIRST duty of a government is ALWAYS is to protect the lives of its people.
If an adult consensually engages in intercourse with a blood relative, I don't see why it necessitates an abortion.
What's the argument? The child has a statistically higher chance of being disabled?
We now have caesarian sections to solve this problem in most cases. Impending death of the mother from what?
"The fetus was not conceived by any choice of the mother, not in some drunken one night stand or with some short term guy but by violence and abomination."
You missed my point, so here it is in plain english. The basis of abortion rights is that the fetus does not matter only the mother and what she wants. Your reply clearly supports this premise.
OK, let's consider the three "exceptions" one at a time.
1) Rape. Rape is usually devastating for the woman. But there's no evidence that aborting the child will make her feel better. On the contrary, abortion usually leaves a mother feeling depressed and guilty. So it's not unreasonable to say that if, as is probably, the mother prefers not to bring up a child that reminds her of being raped, then she should give it up for adoption. This isn't easy, either, but it's no more damaging than having an abortion. In addition, as has already been pointed out, rape isn't the baby's fault, and there's no reason why he should be killed for the rapist's fault.
2) Incest. This too is always unpleasant. But the same arguments apply. Abortion will not make the mother feel better about it, and the baby is guiltless. There is an added factor that incest is not desirable for the gene pool, but I don't think that justifies killing an innocent child.
3) Life of the mother. This is often used as a pretext for getting an abortion. The traditional moral teaching is that if having the baby will certainly kill the mother, although the baby will probably live, then that is a decision for the mother to make. If carrying the baby will certainly kill the baby and the mother, as is the case in a tubal pregnancy, then the only choice is to abort the baby as a side effect of saving the mother's life. The primary intention is not to kill the baby but to save the mother, and the baby's death is a regretable but necessary side effect of saving her.
As for the contention that letting raped women have children will encourage rapists, that's plain nonsense. A child of rape is no likelier to be more evil than other children, and most rapists are not interested in whether they have children or not. We are not talking about Genghis Kahn here, or marauding Muslims. We are talking about sick people who want sex and power over others, and could care less about whether the mother has a child.
The solution to rape is to punish rapists. In spite of decades of feminism, for the most part rapists are NOT punished nearly as often or severely as they were in the past. That's what we need to deal with.
Well, there's an answer to that, too. Eliminate welfare. You breed 'em; you pay for 'em. Pregnancies would drop drastically among the unwed. No, they wouldn't disappear entirely.
I have come to agree mostly with the pro-life movement. I argue thatany consensual sex, even with birthcontrol, involves the implied agreement that YOU KNOW that you MIGHT POSSIBLY create a baby. Heat of the moment or whatever, you, as a rational human being, KNOW that you might make a life, and therefore, you are responsible for this.
This breaks down in cases of rape and perhaps some other cases (sex with underaged but sexually mature girl). On the other hand, how can one justify killing a baby just because his daddy was a very bad man? I admit to myself, that this is one of those cases where I am not as cut and dry as I wish I was.
Having said that, even if I was less pro-life than I am now, I could say that I would be in favor of banning later term abortions (partial birth, 2nd trimester, what have you). I think the majority of Americans agree with me on that. That part of the platform is a not a problem. Overall however, I dont think the anti-abortion stance of the conservative movement hurts us as much as I once thought, I having been of the same mind as you.
That is not a pleasant thought. But either life is sacred or it isn't. There is no gray area when we are talking about human life. History is replete with examples of how God can take a horrible circumstance like the one you laid out, and turn it into something good. What if the "fetus' of the raped child is the person who cures cancer? Have a little faith. That means we don't always know the result beforehand, but we know God has our best intersts at heart.
If a state banned abortion and welfare at the same time, how would they go broke with skyrocketing welfare costs? Welfare is NOT a given. It's a temporary socialist program which fails to fix a problem
It's not about the baby. While tragic to lose a life what message to we send a girl that she is forced to carry Daddy's child/grandchild and then has to go through life knowing such an abomination exists that she helped (not of free will) create?
It's ugly and really just a no win situation but I (JMO) think that that there are some things society can't make people participate in.
Sorry, you don't get to quote religion when abomination occurs.
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