Posted on 12/18/2004 8:50:18 PM PST by MikeConservative
Has anyone heard some of the most popular slogans/rhetoric that seems to have arrives soon after the election?We can not make laws that make Abortion illegal because Its a personal choice -and- to outlaw abortion is wrong because its a moral issue.
To tackle this Rhetoric I would ask if any just law isn't a matter of personal choice. For instance, If I'm driving a car 60 mph when a sign has the speed limit at 40, I've just chosen to do that and I know its against the law. There is a CHOICE implicit here. If we had laws that were impossible to follow or impossible to not follow (no personal choice) what would be the point of the law? In other words we can, should, and do make laws that dictate personal choices when they are harmful to innocent individuals, or harmful to society as a whole.
The idea that you can't legislate on moral convictions is just as absurd. Again, what laws are not based on the convictions of a group of people? How could a law exist if no one had ever believed the restricted activity was wrong? Drug abuse is legislated against because people found it unacceptable(wrong) because of the harm it does to the ones who use them, and very likely the people around them. But nobody really has to think on such a simple issue? The Countries of Belgium and Holland have decriminalized marijuana-most likely you can get it wherever you want in those nations and smoke it in public.
Amorality has been good for them because it removes guilt from actions associated with their liberal ideas, such as homosexuality and abortion.
Where they have taken no moral stand in the past, there has been no guilt.
They want their amoral ideas to become a moral platform they can stand on since they have had no moral foundation and feel they have lost public support.
In other words, they just don't get it.
It's that very amorality that has turned people away and has caused them to cite moral values as a reason they voted republican regardless of their personal economic situation.
A rose by any other name...
Usually I hear something along the lines of
"A woman has the right to do what she wants to her own body."
I usually respond that
1) Then why can't you stick a heroin needle in your arm?
2) Why is prostitution illegal?
3) Why is it illegal to commit suicide?
The only question that is relevant to abortion is whether or not the fetus is a person with rights. Everything else is an irrelevant smokescreen.
Personal choice? Well, you can make a personal choice to smash your television. You cannot make a personal choice to shoot your neighbor in the face. Your television is not a person with rights, while your neighbor is.
Legislating morality? We legislate morality when your exercise of choice would harm another person. If the fetus is a person, we are well within the purview of the law to protect its rights.
"A woman has the right to do what she wants to her own body."
It is also sometimes useful to respond with the fact that it is not the woman's body at issue, it is the baby's; and they are two completely different persons.
Absolutely. Like I said, the only issue is the personhood or lack thereof of the fetus. Many other arguments brought up on the abortion issue fall apart when this is shown.
It's a hardship to the mother? Well, raising an infant is also a hardship, and we don't allow mothers to throttle their young for their own convenience.
The child might not have a good life if it wasn't wanted? That's not your decision to make. Nobody has the right to decide for another person that his life isn't worth living.
It will severely strain social programs to have hundreds of thousands of additional unwanted babies? Well, we could surely ease the strain on social programs by executing infants, but we don't do that because infants are persons with rights. If the fetus is also a person, it deserves the same rights.
Once I've gotten someone to see that the personhood or lack thereof of the fetus is the only relevant issue, I usually segue into asking them when they think personhood adheres. Take it as axiomatic that a newborn infant is a person while a pair of unconnected sex cells is not. Where, along the journey from the latter to the former, does an entity become a person?
At birth? A fetus two seconds from being born is not much different than an infant two seconds after birth. Why should the journey down the vaginal canal magically confer personhood? If two babies are conceived to two different mothers on the same day at the same time, and exactly nine months later one of them has been born while the other has not, why should one be considered a person and the other mere property that can be disposed of at will?
At the end of the first or second trimester? It makes no sense to pick an arbitrary date on the calendar and say "here this entity is a person with rights, the day before it's nothing."
At "viability?" But viability is a function of the state of the art in medicine. A hundred years ago a baby born one month premature was likely to die, today it has an excellent chance to live. Was the baby a hundred years ago not viable while the one today is? Does the presence of basic human rights change because some guy in some lab invents a gadget that extends the date of viability?
I can think of only two checkpoints that make sense for decreeing that a fetus is now a person: conception, and the beginning of brain and/or heart activity. The former would necessitate forbidding abortions outright, while the latter would in practice ban most abortions, since brain and heart activity begin before many women will even know they're pregnant.
I'm not a religious man and I don't use religious grounds to justify my opposition to abortion. Rather, I stand on my firm belief that human beings have rights, and it's nonsensical to say that those rights begin any time but at conception or briefly after. I don't hate women, but I don't consider a woman's right to control her own body to justify killing a person any more than I would consider a cotton farmer's right to his property to justify owning human beings.
As far as Lauralee's arguments... sorry, I don't buy them, because I believe you should be able to stick a heroin needle in your arm, and you should be able to engage in prostitution, and you should be legally allowed to commit suicide. As long as you're only harming yourself and/or consenting others, go nuts, I don't give a crap. That's freedom. But as soon as you harm another... like, say, a fetus... the law should step in and kick your ass.
have to go back a while in reply to their choice theory :"it's not a choice, it's a child."
and their idea that there are so many unwanted children and "every child a wanted child"--there are more people ready and willing to adopt,than there are children here in the USA, many are "wanting" a child.
At the time that Harry Blackmun wrote the opinion in Roe, I think he made it clear that if the "fetus" were ever determined to be a "person" as defined by the Constitution, then the whole thing would be void. Since then, advances in medical technology and science have, in fact, shown the pre-born child to be an individual person. One simple example is that the unborn child does not have the same DNA as the mother, but, rather, has its own unique and individual DNA. If the "fetus" were merely a "part of the mother", it would have a DNA signature IDENTICAL to the mother's.
Ultra-sound technology was also not a part of everyday life back then, either, so people had no way of knowing what the pre-born was doing or what they looked like.
The abortionists want to hide behind ignorance and this superstitious jargon with words like "choice" so that they can continue in their barbaric and profitable practice.
I have a whole string of reasons for opposing this slaughter - moral, religious, social, legal and scientific - and try to be prepared to argue on any and all of the above-named grounds. Of course, the demleftsocialists are devoid of logic, but still...even if the net result is only to watch their heads spin around while the puke up their vitriolic soup, it's worth it.
Perhaps, but the point of debate is to talk about what the law should be, not what the law is. If I believed the fetus were not a person and hence had no rights, I'd answer the argument "there are a bunch of other things you can't do with your body" with "yes, and I oppose that".
By the way- I feel it's so unfair that you felt you had to state that you didn't hate women to justify your having a point. Men who are pro life are often put down in an abortion debate by some femiNazi who says something along the lines of "You couldn't possibly know because your not a woman."
I usually answer that one by asking if the person who made that argument also believes that only Southerners should have had any say about slavery, or if only taxpayers should have any say about taxes. Sometimes I go on to say that just as ex-slaves like Frederick Douglass went on to become the most vocal and eloquent supporters of abolition, I am an ex-fetus and I continue to fight for the rights of my brethren in the womb.
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