Boy, the caricatures of anti-abortion principles, arguments, and motivations in this thread are comically bad. I get that no one wants to give their political adversaries the benefit of the doubt, but still, don’t go trying to put words in their mouths or pontificate about what they should believe, it they were earnest in their stances.
A few corrections:
Abortion isn’t considered wrong because “God said so.”
Reducing the rate of abortions may be good, but that doesn’t make it morally adequate, assuming the practice continues and has societal approval.
The same principle of the dignity of human life that forbids abortion forbids treating women as property, subservient, less than human, lesser than men, or marginal in any way.
I can’t defend anti-abortion individuals or movements, their voting records, their rhetoric, or their abundant hypocrisies and blindnesses–so don’t ask me to. (In the case of Republican-aligned individuals or organizations, I flat out won’t do so!) But the philosophical and political position deserves more credit than it’s receiving here.
If you want to make a principled moral argument against abortion I concede that it is possible to do so. I have no seen evidence of such principles in the larger American debate on abortion, so I’m not going to change my viewpoint. Not until the vast majority of American voters who get enraged over legal abortion stop resisting any attempts to actually fund/execute programs that would reduce abortion or improve the welfare of unwed mothers or make the raising of unwanted children a public responsibility.
Abortion is a totally solvable problem (if one has the viewpoint that it is a problem), so I’m forced to conclude that the fact that we haven’t solved it and are still fighting over it is because there are other motivations at play.
One of the things that bothers me about anti-abortion folks is they often link the movement with the idea of abstinence being the only moral form of birth control for unmarried people. This is so impractical. Humans love to mate. That behavior will not stop.
I also don’t like it that most of them don’t mind capital punishment. A life is a life.
I generally agree. It’s an artifact of the anti-abortion position getting grafted into the rest of the Republican ideology. We can’t have abortions, but government programs to help?? Ew! I think one of many reasons that happened is that Democrats ceded that ground for their own ideological reasons–absolutely well-meaning ones, about improving the status of women in society.
I think you can believe that abstinence is an ideal path without expecting lots of people to hold to it! I think way more important is fostering the cultural assumption that new parents, their broader family, and the whole community/polity are all responsible for the well-being of a new child, regardless of the circumstances.
Agreed on capital punishment. The political battle lines between our parties frankly don’t make any sense at all, at least from where I sit.
Are those supposed to be Trump and Obama masks? Except Obama is super super super dark black? And Trump is dancing in the ‘Government takes everything we make’ song?
