Claude
Posted on 03/07/2012 7:15:50 PM PST by Morgana
Implicit in most pro-abortion commentary is a certain level of frustration that there remain people who disagree with them. “It’s the 21st century and the Supreme Court has spoken; can’t you anti-choice yahoos get with the program?” This leads to all sorts of outlandish speculation about what really makes pro-lifers tick.
Yesterday, UC Berkley sociology professor Claude Fischer published his thoughts on the “abortion puzzle,” attempting to figure out why Americans are growing “notably more laissez-faire on most sexual issues,” but not abortion:
Before the Roe v. Wade decision on behalf of abortion rights perhaps 25% to 30% of Americans were inclined to say yes [abortion is acceptable for any reason]. Then opinions shifted a bit in the liberal direction. Since that initial shift, however, the distribution of opinions has changed little. The trend since Roe v. Wade is displayed in the blue line in the graph below. About 37% of Americans said yes to abortion on demand at the end of the 1970s and about 41% said yes at the end of the 2000s.
Contrast that to the change, three times greater, in the percentage who said that “sex relations before marriage… [is"] not wrong at all” — the red line — from about 38% at the end of the 1970s to about 51% at the end of the 2000s. And contrast that to the shift, five-fold greater, the green line, in the percentage of Americans who disagreed with the proposition that “Women should take care of running their homes and leave running the country up to men.” Another perspective on this compares generations of Americans. The generation born in the 1970s was far more liberal than the generation born in the 1910s on whether women should stay at home and on premarital sex (by over 30 points on each question). But the 1970s generation was only a bit more liberal on abortion than the 1910s generation (only 7 points more).
To begin with, the premise’s question is flawed in two ways. First, while conservative and religious people are more likely to value stay-at-home motherhood, that’s a far cry from believing women should “leave running the country up to men.” If social conservatives didn’t believe in women having professional lives or political influence, then how do you explain Gov. Sarah Palin’s popularity among values voters, or the fact that the leaders of Live Action, American Life League, Americans United for Life, and the National Right to Life Committee are all women? This isn’t a recent phenomenon, as Fischer suggests—Mildred Jefferson helped found NRLC back in 1970, and Phyllis Schlafly has been an influential advocate for conservative cultural views since the sixties.
Second, abortion is not primarily a sexual issue. It’s related to sex because sex makes babies and abortion helps people have sex without becoming parents, but it’s only controversial because of what it destroys. But Fischer admits as much later in the piece, so more on this below.
Fischer cites a few sociologists who argue that disputes about gender roles lie at the heart of the abortion debate:
For one side, motherhood was the essence of being a woman, in which case abortion, especially abortion for convenience, devalued women’s purpose in life. For the other side, women were, or should be, essentially like men in ambitions and careers, in which case unwanted pregnancies undermined their freedom and the validity of their dreams.
But as time passed, the story goes, women’s reasons for getting abortions shifted, as did society’s conception of motherhood. With “how we understand motherhood…removed from the abortion debate, what remains are concerns about faith and about the personhood of the fetus”—“harder issues” to resolve than that of a woman’s place.
Could be. Or, it could be that personhood of the fetus was always pro-lifers’ chief concern, but the general public’s limited understanding of embryology made it easier to dismiss personhood as a strictly theological question. But as the science became clearer and ultrasound technology advanced, the truth of the pro-life message caught the attention of many who otherwise would have dismissed abortion as a private sexual matter.
Here’s a crazy idea: instead of writing books and commissioning studies about why pro-lifers believe certain things, maybe these guys could, y’know, ask us? Then again, the answer can’t possibly be as simple as “those people don’t want innocent babies murdered,” because that would raise some deeply disturbing questions about why pro-choicers don’t agree.
“can’t you anti-choice yahoos get with the program?”
I guess the learned Prof never heard that you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar. Or maybe he just “deconstructed” that myth.
Well, in his case maybe a retroactive abortion is ok.
Live Action News needs an editor.
I want to be patient with him because it is clear that he appreciates the basic question - there is obviously something different between the broad acceptance of sexual activity and a similar acceptance of abortion. Whatever could it be? Um...now let me think. Could it be because the latter involves a dead human being?
A sociologist cannot draw that conclusion. The furthest he can go is to conclude that there is a perception that the killing of a human being is involved. From there it is easy to fall back into the comfort of the position that it's only a matter of perception, and that the perception is likely to be erroneous.
Well, it isn't. It's a matter of stark appreciation of biological fact. That thing isn't undifferentiated tissue, it is a person. I will quote Christopher Hitchens on the issue: if it isn't human, what is it? And if it isn't alive, what is it?
It is, to be sure, a perfectly legitimate sociological question as to why so many of us think that the death of a human being is involved. "Because it is" is a terrifying answer. But it does lead to an equally valid question that I challenge him to ask: why so many think that the death of a human being is not involved.
I wonder why this Berkley Professor wasn’t aborted.
With the latest so-called ethicists calling for after-birth abortion at the parent’s whim, it is certainly an anti-life crowd.
Reference:
http://www.christianpost.com/news/something-deadly-this-way-comes-after-birth-abortion-70975/
Because babies are the least able to help themselves or defend their life.
Because all things want to live and we recognize that quality in us.
Because death is absolute and final.
Because no one would willingly let another human life be taken needlessly or cruelly at the hands of another who has no right to kill.
Because babies are beautiful.
Because babies are cute.
Because babies smell like babies.
Because babies smiling warm any weary soul.
Because babies laughing are infectious, making us laugh as well.
Because babies make baby noises and we just have imitate them.
Because only a loving God would create a baby so beautiful you know that baby represents life.
Because all life has equal value in the beginning, in the middle and at the very end.
Because I love babies.
(well, other peoples babies anyway)
That's a long way from the Hippocratic Oath ("First, do no harm...")
/johnny
Mark
Claude
It is zee 1930s and Der Fuhrer has spoken; can't you Joo-loving schwein get vit zee program?
Easily answered.
Of course it is biologically human. Of course it is alive. Of course it is a human life.
Those are scientific questions with obvious answers.
The question is not whether the fetus is a human life, it is whether it is (or should be) a legal person with the rights of other persons.
This is not a question that can be answered by science, as it is moral, ethical and legal in nature. In fact, it is at root a theological question.
It is entirely logical, though deadly wrong IMO, to believe a fetus prior to the moment of birth is not a person and has therefore no legal rights. Or, more accurately, choosing the moment of birth as the point where such rights are acquired is neither more nor less logical than any other random point. This creates logical problems for proponents of abortion, as we can see from the recent arguments that "post birth abortion" should also be allowed.
Each human life is a continuum from conception to death, whether that death occurs 3 months or 100 years after conception. There is and can be no point on that continuum where it becomes logical to say that life should acquire (or lose) the "rights" of a "person" under the law.
They understand. This “playing dumb” act is a cynical calculation by some VERY evil people.
Would like to meet his mother so I can kick her arse as to why she brought into this world.
These fools grew up thinking that steak originates in sealed plastic trays, they know nothing about death, or life, it's all put on someone else's shoulders, the doctor or the butcher or the cop.
Sit at a dinner table with them and discuss killing the cow and they'll ask you to leave. They will curse you as a killer because you hunt, while they eat a Big Mac.
They are able to tell, and believe, the lie that shields their conscience.
They are insane, and they will hate you because you aren't.
Only a career academic could be so hopelessly blind and consummately ignorant.
There we have reached ethical nullity, the position of grunting beasts. I think that we are something more, and for evidence I shall point out to the ethically challenged that those of us who believe and behave otherwise tend to have grunting beasts for supper. There is something to be said for the strong protecting the weak, most notably that it is in the interest of those who were weak, are now strong, and who will inevitably become weak once more. In short, all of us, and those who pretend otherwise are only pretending.
Bingo. They KNOW that abortion is murder, that is why they never discuss the actual reason people oppose abortion, but rather make it a privacy issue, as the scotus did in its great moment of cowardice.
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