Yeah, the primary driver for antiabortionists isn’t saving lives, it’s punishing women for their “choices.” Otherwise they’d fully support widespread, free contraception and sex education, which have been shown to dramatically reduce abortions.
But it is so much more satisfying to hold the moral high ground over people than it is to actually attempt to resolve the problem! Well, at least until it’s your mistress or daughter who gets pregnant.
Yep, which is why when they say it’s all about abortion, we know… it’s really not. Oh they’ll tell you is, probably get mad when you don’t buy it but in the end, it’s an all or nothing attack on behavior.
That’s a bigger issue than abortion. To a certain type of person, the law isn’t a tool to prevent god-fearing prosperous white people from doing things. It’s a tool to prevent non-white non-prosperous people who are probably childlike and don’t know any better from doing immoral things. That view has shaped the American debate on lots of topics beyond abortion such as social safety nets/welfare and the war on drugs.
Doctrinally, I believe Catholicism still considers contraception to be sinful, so there is a consistency there between being anti-abortion and anti-contraception. It’s impractical, but it’s consistent.
I have been under the impression that protestants of most stripes are OK with birth control, so evangelical dislike for contraception (if true) is a puzzler. I suppose it has to do with promoting “immoral” behavior.
I don’t find it hard to imagine that some anti-abortion people are sincere. But we’re talking about millions of people of different stripes, so any generalizations are risky.
You also have to realize that lots of people believe things dogmatically, without really thinking about them. This goes for folks of any political persuasion. Most folks believe stuff they’ve been told, without bothering to really process it fully or fit it into a larger coherent worldview.
For lots of pro life people, they believe about is wrong, because someone told them god said it’s wrong. They don’t really think about it beyond that. They aren’t using it as an excuse to oppress women. They genuinely believe it’s wrong. The fact that belief might not mesh well with other things they believe doesn’t matter.
I hear this ‘abortion is the only issue’ argument a lot online, but I know a lot of R voters (mostly people I work with, I don’t have many friends like this) who just vote R due to the R. They are never going to vote for a Democratic candidate for numerous reasons, mostly because they had an R family upbringing and they’ve always viewed Democrats as a joke. These people don’t really care about abortion.
I know there exists ‘abortion only issue’ voters, that’s just not anyone I know.
There are plenty of single-issue voters out there, but a lot more people are the “Vote for My Team” group.
I have to quote this. This is it.
Prove to me how it is wrong.
I don’t know about proving you wrong, but there is always so much talk about religion and women and their place in this one-issue voter sphere… and that whole stack of cards basically falls on its ass when you look at African women who are in one of the most religious groups in this country, defined by regularly attending religious services. And you know what, over half African Americans, according to the Public Religion Research Institute, believe abortion is wrong, but the same data shows 67% believe it should be legal, and that’s all or most. When you restrict it down more, the percentage goes up.
Maybe, just maybe, it has less to do with what people think is wrong, and more to do with one group having actual experience of being forced under the will of others and the other a history of forcing it.
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.
FYI
It’s the economic anxiety again!
That’s like every possible category of WTF rolled into one video.
What the ever-lovin’ fuck?
Blackface? (yes, I understand that it is a mask. But…)
Is that Ted Nugent over on the far edge of the stage?
I wonder which of the grassroots protesters brought the stage and sound system?