Abortion absolutism

This debate is lacking the presence of cadet and sportschick

 

I don't get it

 

It's a Festus, not a chioce.

 

Is that Marlon Wayans?

 

Too early for a Festusvus Miracle.

 

WHEW!

I cringed clicking on this thread.

I thought for sure my favorite vodka ad campaign had finally gone too far.

 

Not for nothing but if you GIS Absolute Abortion - this is one of the first pictures

 

Of course there's a difference between a miscarriage and abortion.

And, agreed, there should be no bright line on abortion.

The third trimester health exception can and is used for women who claim their mental health would be damaged by delivering the baby.

 

Here is a similar argument in the NYT's The Stone blog.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/on-abortion-and-defining-a-person/

A couple theories why this might be picking up steam/support:

1) This is the only way to reconcile small-government conservatism and libertarianism with anti-abortion policies.

2) The younger generation has been shown to be more gay-friendly and more anti-abortion (though not quite majority anti-abortion) than older Americans. The view that has seen the biggest increase in acceptance from one generation to the next is the personhood view. Sure, an absolutist position could be explained as simply a rationalization to square anti-abortion politics with other political beliefs (see point 1), but for many, the inability to identify a rational place to distinguish between protected and unprotected is a position arrived at honestly.

Rather than this being an argument for the position, I just want to show that an anti-abortion position need not based on some religion or some irrelevant factor: It's easy to say the line should be drawn at birth. It's far more difficult to say how the move from in the womb to outside the womb changes the nature of a being from killable at one moment to "endowed ... with certain unalienable rights" at the next. If that isn't the line, we end up with the logic detailed in the blogs above.

*Just a note: I quoted from the Declaration, rather than the Constitution, purposefully. The current Constitutional significance of the word "person" is not what this debate is about. It's about what *should* be the understanding of who is protected by this concept of personhood. If I quoted from the Constitution, it would be reasonable to say that the Framers of the 14th Amendment meant post-birth humans. My point would then be to challenge the Framers on that issue.

 

Lately, I've noticed more and more of the pro-life crowd doesn't want to allow exceptions for rape. I have a real problem with that. I don't think anything that has to do with a rape should be the victim's responsibility.

 

I'm anti-abortion, in that I hope no one in my life would have one.

But I'm pro-choice, in that I think it's up to a woman to decide what comes out of her body.

That said, if you are of the opinion that life begins at inception, as I think a vast majority of anti-abortion people are, then you by definition believe that abortion is murder. Therefore, it doesn't matter HOW the fetus came to be, destroying it is murder. The whole rape/incest/life of mom exception doesn't jive with this fact.