cb1000rider wrote:I've been busy listening to the hearings... All I've heard is claims that this is protecting women health, not outright admissions to protecting the unborn.
I do stand corrected, the official press releases indicate that it's about both - protection of the unborn and womens health... I was wrong on this... Didn't do enough digging on my own.
I'm unabashedly pro-life, but I'll try to throw a couple of facts in here to maybe lend some balance to the discussion.....
A) Roe v. Wade defined a right to abortion in the first trimester gestation. That's 3 months, or 12 weeks, depending on how you want to see it. A pregnancy lasts approximately 40 weeks, and the pending bill proposes to severely limit access to abortion (no ban it) after 22 weeks of pregnancy.....well into the second
semester of gestation.
B) I have
personally drawn blood specimens from babies that were born at 21 weeks of gestation, when they were newborns. They will almost fit in your hand. If they survive the first few days and weeks, they will usually grow up to be normal children. In any case, they are fully formed infants at that age of gestation. Their lungs still need to mature, and their eyes aren't open yet, but they are definitely
human.
Opponents to the pending bill wish to preserve a system in which fully formed humans—who are no more dependent upon the medical support of a critical care unit than any post-operative heart transplant or brain surgery patient—can be killed in the womb for the sake of the mother's convenience.
I want to emphatically state that I do not want to see women thrown in prison for having abortions, but I
absolutely expect that proponents stop dodging the implications of their advocacy, and that all of us, pro-life and abortion advocates included, exercise more than a little moral clarity in these arguments. The reason I insist on it is that the more radical of abortion advocates have proposed some pretty bizarre, and frankly savage and uncivilized things. For example, James Watson (Watson/Crick) is on record as saying that a mother ought to have the right to terminate her children up until the age of 2 years old. Are we going to be a society of commonly decent people, or are we going to be a society of people who rub out 2 year olds?
Princeton ethicist Peter Singer (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Sing ... nfanticide) has an even more bizarre approach to supporting abortion. Quoting his page on Wikipedia:
Consistent with his general ethical theory, Singer holds that the right to life is essentially tied to a being's capacity to hold preferences, which in turn is essentially tied to a being's capacity to feel pain and pleasure. Critics such as Laing hold that this view is subject to charges of inconsistency, equivocation and contradiction.[23] Be that as it may, in Singer's view, the central argument against abortion may be stated as the following syllogism:
- It is wrong to kill an innocent human being.
A human fetus is an innocent human being.
Therefore it is wrong to kill a human fetus.[24]
In his book Rethinking Life and Death, as well as in Practical Ethics, Singer asserts that, if we take the premises at face value, the argument is deductively valid. Singer comments that defenders of abortion attack the second premise, suggesting that the fetus becomes a "human" or "alive" at some point after conception; however, Singer finds this argument flawed in that human development is a gradual process, and it is nearly impossible to mark a particular moment in time as the moment at which human life begins.
Singer's argument for abortion differs from many other proponents of abortion, then; rather than attacking the second premise of the anti-abortion argument, Singer attacks the first premise, denying that it is necessarily wrong to take innocent human life:
- [The argument that a fetus is not alive] is a resort to a convenient fiction that turns an evidently living being into one that legally is not alive. Instead of accepting such fictions, we should recognise that the fact that a being is human, and alive, does not in itself tell us whether it is wrong to take that being's life.
Obviously, these are some really extreme illustrations, but they are not based on something I pulled out of my nether regions. Some really famous people who are at the vanguard of what passes for pro-abortion "morality" actually
said these terrible things—and these terrible things are part of the total package of "moral underpinning" used to support abortion.
In my opinion, limiting abortion to the first 22 weeks of gestation is not going to condemn women to coat-hanger abortions. If you're pregnant, and that pregnancy is not
literally endangering your life, and you can't make up your mind to have an abortion during that first 22 weeks, then you have made up your mind
not to have one, and that living baby, fully capable of feeling both pain and pleasure, deserves a shot at life at that point. That is really not such a radical concept. In fact, the "abortion at all cost" faction are the real radicals.....particularly when the rest of us have to help pay for it against our conscience.
Thanks TAM.