I guess that should say “Hear Hear” instead of “Well written” because I am definitely not the person to be judging writing capability. :)

Brilliant! Harsh, but necessary questions. Somehow I get the feeling that not many pro-lifers will be responding to this. They just don’t have the answers and many have never bothered to think it through to this stage.

… Woah. This is absolutely brilliant. Because I can think of dozens of pro-lifers that I’ve debated with who would talk about criminalizing abortion all day, but stutter when faced with the hard questions.

Definately save this for future arguments.

How much time should she get?

The death penalty. With a coat hanger hanging out her slutty cunt.

I’m sure that they’ll say that the point is to make it illegal so that doctors will stop performing it, which I think would make it the only law of its kind to punish the provider and not the procurer. But again, that’s trying to equate it to something like drugs… their point is that it’s murder. If I hired someone to kill my husband, you’d better believe that I’d go to jail, along with the person I hired. Maybe if I’m ever driven to it, I could ask the judge for some counciling instead (provided these laws go through).

My favorite part of the video is when the woman says “we should pray for them.” Court-ordered prayer! Yee haw!

And what about the “out” for wealthy women - going to Europe or Canada? I’m not an expert, but it seems to me that any citizen who travels for the purpose of committing a crime could be punished upon her return.

It’s such an excellent question - especially for the “I should be allowed an abortion, but not you, you slut” crowd.

Thank you. I have actually asked this question on a few websites and occasionally I’ve gotten commenters to agree that women who procure abortions should go to jail. I soooo wish I bring all those statements out into the open, where people could see just how hate-filled these people are.

“I’m sure that they’ll say that the point is to make it illegal so that doctors will stop performing it”
Most doctors will stop performing it, but, as we’ve seen everywhere abortion is banned, that will hardly stop it from being done. The question is still valid.

Hi Jill,
To answer your first question - I’d say none.

I actually had a post on this video and the reaction of pro-choice bloggers to it about two years ago.

I also had a post discussing whether women should be punished for having abortions about two and a half years ago at the spurring of Between Two Worlds who also highlighted some thoughts of philosopher Francis Beckwith on this issue.

What I wonder about is after seeing the video and knowing that people who protest at abortion clinics (obviously some of the most adamant people opposed to abortion) don’t want women thrown in jail - do you still think one of the goals of the prolife movement is to punish women for having premarital sex? If so, why?

Quindlen writes: If abortion is made a crime, then surely the woman who has one is a criminal.

Why? For example, couldn’t a state pass a law prohibiting physicians (or anyone else) from providing a woman with abortion and then provide punish (loss of license, fine, or jail time) to the individual providing the abortion and not make the woman a criminal at all. Sometimes I think pro-choicers forget that abortion was illegal for many years in many states and women weren’t prosecuted and thrown in jail. Quindlen is treating laws as if they were simplistic and punishments didn’t vary and there aren’t any reasons at all for not prosecuting women.

Two things regarding the embryos “leftover” from in-vitro. First, maybe we could regulate IVF clinics so they’re not creating more embryos than women are planning on implanting - I think that could be a good first step. Second, don’t force women to carry pregnancies against their will but allow those embryos to be given to people who are interested in carrying them.

There’s a fire in a fertility clinic. Inside the clinic there’s a three-year-old boy who you’ve never met and have absolutely no connection to. There are also 100 embryos in a box. You only have time to run into the clinic one time. You cannot carry the boy and the box at the same time. What do you do? Do you save 100, or do you save one?

What is the goal of this question? Is the goal to somehow prove embryos aren’t persons or aren’t human beings? Is the goal to prove it should be legal to kill human embryos? If so, how does being forced to choose to save one or the other prove it? The question is about choosing to save which life (lives) not choosing if it should be legal to intentionally kill that life or those lives.

Ramesh Ponnuru says this regarding the burning building scenario: “The moral question posed by the burning-building scenario is the extent to which you can show favoritism without being unjust. That’s an interesting question. But in answering it we might reasonably take account of all kinds of things - family ties, the life prospects of potential rescuees, the suffering they would undergo if not rescued, etc. - that aren’t relevant to the question: Can we kill them?

To put it another way: In affirming that all human beings have an equal right not to be killed, we need not affirm that all human beings have equal claims on us in all aspects.”

They will generally argue that the poor woman is brainwashed by the Abortion Industry, and so we can’t punish her for the fact that her poor little lady-brain was unable to help her resist.

How about if you spontaneously abort because you failed to follow your doctor’s bedrest instructions to the letter? Is that premeditated or unpremeditated? What were your motivations in picking up your crying toddler when you were expressly told not to?

No, they will stick it to the doctors because otherwise they have to acknowledge that abortion is not all about slutty behaviour but it is mostly about health (mental and physical) issues.

norbizness: Was that a spontaneous miscarriage of justice, or a premeditated miscarriage? :p

Anonymous above is right:

“…it’s not about the precious golden fetus and life, it’s about women’s sexual freedom.”

I am most certainly not “pro-life” but if I were I’d be supporting research that would allow zygotes, embryos, and fetuses to grow outside of woman’s wombs. I would be looking to science to make an incubator so that instead of abortion, we could have fetus transplants. The “aborted” fetuses would be carefully removed from the womb and then placed inside an incubator for the duration of the “pregnancy.”

JivinJ, the questions are asked to pro-lifers who think abortion is murder. If you honestly think that abortion is murder, how do you not charge the woman? If a man pays someone to kill his wife, would you say the hitman should lose his professional license, receive a fine, or maybe get jail time, but we should have sympathy for the husband for going through something so hard? Or what if a woman purchases poison (RU486 analogy) from her doctor, or from anywhere (RU486 is available on the internet) and used it to kill her husband, should we punish the seller, but not her?

If you wouldn’t treat a murder the way you would an abortion, or vis versa, then how can you call abortion murder?

. . .couldn’t a state pass a law prohibiting physicians (or anyone else) from providing a woman with abortion and then provide punish (loss of license, fine, or jail time) to the individual providing the abortion and not make the woman a criminal at all. . .

Yes, it certainly could. The question is, what’s your rationale for such a law? If you think abortion is murder, why would you want to jail the person committing the murder, but let the person contracting the murder get off scot-free? The point is that the pro-life position appears logically inconsistent here; it is of course possible to have laws that are logically inconsistent, but it’s not desirable.

For example, couldn’t a state pass a law prohibiting physicians (or anyone else) from providing a woman with abortion and then provide punish (loss of license, fine, or jail time) to the individual providing the abortion and not make the woman a criminal at all.

Great, so then there will also be no punishment for people who hire thugs to snuff out people for them? Because it’s the same thing, if you equate embryo with person. (I also don’t like the casual throwing around of “fetus” - the vast majority of abortions are performed at the embryo stage). If you don’t think so, then you’re saying either women don’t have the mental capacity to understand the consequences of walking into a hospital and asking for an abortion or that the embryo isn’t deserving of full-citizen rights.

Let’s also not forget that, a lot of the time, women perform their own abortions with over-the-counter medicine. Would we prosecute such a woman as an abortion provider rather than a recipient? 5 years? 10? Prayer?

JivinJ: Do you believe that a person who hires a hitman to murder someone should or should not be legally accountable for murder? By pro-life doctrine, how is a woman contracting a doctor to perform an abortion any different?

Did anyone really expect any honest answers? Since I am pro-choice I have only more questions. In case abortions are always prohibited what happens when a woman dies when an abortion could have saved her live? Could one sue a doctor, because he “killed” the woman, for not treating her? If a woman tries abort by throwing herself down the stairs what happens? Is it attempted murder?

Jivin’, the refusal to treat abortion like premeditated child murder absolutely proves that pro-lifers (excluding the terrorists, of course) do not think that abortion is murder or that a fetus is a person.

If the antis thought that abortion was premeditated child murder, they would (a) believe that women who participate in it were committing murder for hire and should be jailed for long terms or executed — and none of this “brainwashed” stuff; we sentence people to life in prison for things they did only because they were intoxicated or in the grasp of addictions; (b) support the saving of a lot of people (embryos) instead of just one, ceteris paribus; and (c) they would support legislation to prevent women in one jurisdiction from terminating a pregnancy in another — the US will prosecute here a citizen who travels abroad to have sex with a minor; surely premeditated child murder is worse than molestation.

But nobody except the terrorists propose those remedies. (Kopp is a monster but he’s an intellectually consistent monster.)

The rest of the “give ‘em counseling” opponents are full of shit. They think abortion is bad, but only sort of bad, like stealing money. That’s why, when they need one, they can justify it by “necessity”: theirs is “different.” Their reasons are better, not like those other bad women. For example, I have a cousin who terminated two pregnancies, and in between, she protested in the big clinic-hit protests of the early 1990s with her evangelical friends. But, you know, the father of the fetus was black and married and her dad was a racist and wouldn’t accept it and … she really, really needed it, not like those other women.

For the vast majority of antis, it is manifestly true that they will use the rhetoric of “murder” but shrink from its conclusions because they don’t believe it. If a fertilized egg had a right to live equal to that of a two year old, then we would treat their deliberate killing similarly; but they don’t propose that.

So if they don’t believe it’s murder, then what’s wrong with it? The answer feminists keep coming up with is that it thwarts God’s plan that sexually transmitted disease and pregnancy are the punishments for sexual sin. That is consistent with the reasoning that contraception should be limited or eliminated, and that schoolchildren be discouraged from using condoms.

But I suppose you have a different explanation.

licious, I am for abortion on demand without apology.

“If women are so infantile that our bad acts toward fetuses must be punished with counseling or left to God, does that apply when our bad acts are directed at born people?”

If they crafted the statute so that the law was directed towards protecting the fetus and the mother from the harm of the abortion, then legally they could prosecute doctors who performed them without having to worry about dealing with the women, because you can’t be complicit in a crime (or at least not in a conspiracy to commit a crime) when you are part of the class intended to be protected by the statute (i.e. only prosecuting shopkeepers for selling alcohol to minors, instead of prosecuting both the shopkeeper and the minor for that particular crime).

Other than that minor technical escape hatch, I don’t see that any pro-lifer has much of a response to the other points that doesn’t compromise the practical applicability of their ridiculous moral position.

While I definitely give Jivin points for being brave enough to show up and answer the question, the only “pro-lifer” so far to do so–I find his answer kind of silly. As others have already, if abortion is murder, infanticide even, then letting the woman who procures the abortion get off with no penalty is appalling. Would you propose that a woman who commits infanticide go unpunished? If not, then why the distinction?

As far as the fire in the IVF clinic question goes, all I can say is that when one is presented with a scenario in which 101 people are in danger and you can either save 100 of them or 1 of them, it’s usually not a hard decision to make. Failing to save the one would feel crappy, of course, but it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which saving one life versus saving 100 is really that big a dilemma*. So why is it in IVF clinic question? Maybe because those 100 4-8 celled organisms aren’t really people, not even in the opinion of a hard core pro-lifer?

*Yes, I know, it can be done, usually by making the one person someone important to the decision maker. But the toddler and products of conception involved were both explicitly stated to be random.

“PM, since I oppose all unwanted pregnancy and support comprehensive sex ed and free contraception to all as a public good, I would like to see a world in which abortion was merely a last resort, primarily used to deal with pregnancies that endanger the woman or show abnormalities that cause the woman to want to terminate; that said, I think the availability of the means safely to end any unwanted pregnancy is a good.”

I asked mainly because the phrase seemed to be included like a caveat, almost like the old “I’m pro-choice, but I personally would never have an abortion” line. Once somebody’s using it like that, it seems reasonable to ask what they mean by it.

Hello Jill. You’ve asked a lot of questions and covered a lot of ground, but I”ll try and do my best to respond. If abortion is the taking of the life of a human person, than aborion is murder. Hence if abortion is made illegal, the same punishments should apply to women who procure abortions and doctors who perform these abortions as would any murderer found guilty in a court of law. Personally I don’t think the death penalty should be used on women who abort nor on any murderers. But this is the logical conclusion from my (the pro-life) position.

“How can it possibly be legally (or even morally) consistent to attach full rights to a fetus and then treat its death as somehow less important, or different, than the death of a born person?”

I agree with you 100%. The same laws which take into consideration a person’s mental health or knowledge when they murder someone should be the same as those applied to a women who procures an abortion.

“Could it be that when we actually examine the case of a pre-meditated, deliberate murder of a born, living person against the case of a woman who terminates a pregnancy, we see that the two situations feel… different? Could it be that we see that there is a difference between a fetus and a born person?”

Again, you are correct. Same laws.

As far as your question about embryos in fertility clinics goes, that is a question to which I don’t believe there is a good answer to. A grave evil has already been done, and it is difficult to say what the best solution is. The problem is that that situation should never have existed in the first place. So i believe that there is no good answer yet as to what to do about all the IVF babies.

“If a fertilized egg is a full-fledged person under the law, what other legal activities — other than abortion — would have to go? Fertility treatments? Birth control?”

Yes. As I said above, some fertility treatment (think IVF) is a grave evil that leads to problems like you mentioned as well “fetal reduction”, which is just another word for abortion. Like birth control which promotes sex without babies, IVF promotes babies without sex. As you alluded to, the pill, the patch, IUD, the ring, all these hormonal contraceptives act as an abortifacient because they can cause the uterine wall to think, making implantation impossible for the embryo, causing it to die. This is why the deinition of pregnancy was changed from conception to implantation, to avoid those hormonal contraceptives from causing an abortion. Although that is rare, it nevertheless can happen.

The risky behaviors question you ask is an interesting one. A lot of what you mentioned can’t really be monitored. In fact, we don’t have laws in the US regulating everything. Consider adultery. Most people agree that this is wrong, but we don’t have police barging into people’s bedrooms checking to see if adultery is being committed. I think the answer to you questions about drinking coffee, eating tuna, etc. is that this cannot be regulated by the law. It is just too difficult. Who would police it?

“What do doctors do if they’re faced with a life-threatening pregnancy? Do they force the woman to continue it, knowing it will kill her? I mean, it’s not the fetus’s fault, and it can’t really be construed as self-defense to terminate the pregnancy. And their lives are equal, aren’t they? Do we just let nature take its course, then?”

This is a very good question and I think a lot of people who support abortion have the wrong idea about the pro lifers answer to this. The purpose of medicine is to help people and to save lives. So the job of the doctor, in the case of a life-threatening pregnancy, is to try and save BOTH the mother and the baby. We don’t have to choose between one or the other. We love them both. Although most life-threatening pregnancys need to be treated on a case-by-case basis, the general guideline is to have the pregnancy go as far as it can and then induce labor in the hope of saving both mother and baby. Sometimes this is not possible, and labor is induced too early and the baby dies. That is not the same, though, ripping the baby apart limb by limb in the womb. You try and save both. Another case is an ectopic pregnancy. For this, we apply the principal of double-effect. When the baby implants in the fallopian tube, you remove the fallopian tube to save the life of the mother. An unintended side effect of this is that the embryo dies. But you don’t WILL the embryo to die. In fact, if it was possible, the doctors would do something to save that embryo’s life. The big difference is that in an abortion, a doctors job is not done unless the baby is dead. In the ectopic pregnancy, the doctors job is to save the mothers life, while a secondary, UNINTENTIONAL side effect is the death of the baby.

The final question you asked, just simply cannot be answered. One cannot choose between the worth of human life. All human life is sacred, and so one person’s life is as valuable as 100 peoples life (infinity = infinity X 100, hehe). You just can’t choose between who is more valuable. It is analogous to asking “who would you save in a fire? your mom or your 100 of your friends? or 100 strangers?”.

As far as the Judith Thomson article goes, I think she misses the point completely. There is a nice rebuttal to her paper in the book “Architects of the Culture of Death” by Donald De Marco and Benjamin D. Wiker. But let me say that ultimetly, it is a conflict of interests. What I mean by that is that if it is a human being and if the mother does not want the baby, who should get their way under the law? The question is who has more to lose? Let me give an analogy. I’m a student at Dartmouth College, and on campus we have this street intersection which is usually quite busy. A lot of times students will walk across the street without looking and a car, who has the right of way, will have to slam on the brakes in order to avoid hitting the student. Now the car has the green light; it has the right of way. But even though the car has the right of way, the car must stop by law. Why? Because the student has more to lose. The driver will lose some time, and cause wear and tear to his car, but the student could be seriously injured or even die if the car doesn’t stop. This is the same idea behind abortion. Granted, having a baby changes your life FOREVER and is nowhere near as easy to recover from as simply being inconvenienced a few seconds. But the alternative is that the baby dies. Period.

I hope this answers some of the objections you raised. This is the first time I’ve seen this blog, and I look forward to dialogue, and learning more what your side believes. Thanks, and God love you.

Nick

I am curious. On the flipside, considering it’s a woman’s absolute right over her own body, how stringent (if at all?) do you wish legal abortion to be?

Personally, I support abortion at any time, for any reason, with no restrictions. I figure it isn’t my place to decide whether any woman’s reasons for an abortion are valid. If I needed one, I’d get it and I’d resent anyone else having a say in it, so I will extend that same courtesy to anyone else. In the case of minors, and here I’m only talking of extreme minors (say 13 and under), I think it would probably be a good idea for there to be some counseling, etc., but definitely not parental consent. Although I’d think that abortion would/should be the immediate first choice for a very young girl (again, 13 or younger), even if I wouldn’t force her into it if she were opposed. And, I don’t think that anyone who doesn’t own the ovaries in question (and by own, I mean bodily attached to) should have any final say in any of these decisions.

And I also support complete state funding of all contraception, abortion, and sex ed, with guaranteed access to all of these for everyone, regardless of income, race, class, etc.

JivinJ: Maybe I need to ask a couple more fundamental questions. Do you believe that abortion is murder? If not, what class of crime do you consider it to be?

As in, the medical community should define safe and practical standards, and those should be followed, and, say, selling a woman half an abortion pill or skipping out on safety procedures to make more profit should be illegal.

It is illegal. The legal term is “malpractice”.

Every time I read about anti-choicers, this quote leaps to mind:

If you’re pre-born, you’re fine; if you’re pre-school, you’re fucked…
- George Carlin

Hi Jill,
So are you saying you wouldn’t have this problem (meaning the how to punish women who have abortions problem) if a prolife law simply stated it was illegal to induce abortions and didn’t include items like “human embryos are persons” or “life begins at conception?”

Murder is a legal term so I’m not comfortable saying killing a human being is necessarily “murder” - there are other words used to describe the killing of a human being including manslaughter. It should also be recognized that women who get abortions aren’t the ones doing the actual killing (unless they’re self-aborting).

I don’t think a human embryo should have the exact same rights as you and I (for example - I don’t believe embryos should have the right to vote) but I do believe it shouldn’t be legal to intentionally kill them.

If you’re ok with that, then fine — but then at least admit that you recognize that there’s a difference between a fetus and a born person.

Of course there’s a difference between a born person and a fetus. There are a number of differences. The born person is larger, more developed, less dependent and in a different location. However, I don’t see those as good reasons for why it should be legal to kill one and not the other.

Isn’t this what some pro-choicers argue?

Not really. Even pro-choicers who acknowledge the unborn are living human beings still think it should be legal to kill them, right? The burning building scenario does nothing to address that - it merely seems to be an exercise in trying to prove prolifers don’t really believe what they say they believe. I could potentially do the same thing with someone opposed to the death penalty. Who do you save - the award-winning scientist or 12 death row inmates who are admitted rapists and killers? If you save the scientist I don’t see how that proves death row inmates aren’t living human beings. I also don’t see how it proves someone opposed to the death penalty doesn’t really believe what they say they believe - that the death penalty shouldn’t be legal.

Because they’re still forcing women to use their bodies to support another person, without the woman’s consent.

But that’s not really an insidious goal, is it? It’s a consequence of protecting unborn human beings (which you don’t agree with) but it’s not a devious reason (punishing women for having sex) behind what prolifers do.

One of the things that often bothers me about your writing is how to me it seems you are very prone to put evil motives on those opposed to abortion or who are against something you favor while just accepting wholesale anything a pro-choice group says - for example - the Nigeria abortion statistics - did you ever check what the methodology of those estimates was before proclaiming them as true.

Well, Nick, I have to give you credit for largely consistent answers, and responding to what is obviously a somewhat hostile audience. Responding to an ectopic pregnancy by removing the fallopian tube, rather than applying methotrexate, and then acting as if the death of the embryo is a big surprise (OK, “unintended consequence”) seems a bit of a stretch, but OK.

Can I ask you a few more questions? (1) Should anti-abortion laws have an exception for rape? (From your answers, I assume “no,” but am just checking.) (2) Do you think it is morally acceptable to kill a serial killer whom the police will do nothing about? If so, do you think it’s morally acceptable to kill an abortion provider?

Regarding the Judith Jarvis Thompson argument, can any of you lawyers/law students out there tell me if Nick is correct on the law? Do I in fact legally have to brake for jaywalkers? I know I can’t go out of my way to hit them, but do I actually legally have to slam on the brakes? My impression was that I brake out of altruism, rather than to comply with the law. Similarly, my impression is that if I see someone drowning, I am legally free to go on my merry way without helping them. Nick’s argument is that legally, we need to balance the harms to the mother and the embryo. My impression is that generally I have no legal obligation to help anyone else.

What about high risk pregnancies? A friend of mine had to get an abortion because if (big IF) the baby had been carried to term then she and the baby surely would have died during child birth, and what about a woman whom is raped? I know I certainly would not want to carry a monsters child for 9 months. There are reasons other then being “slutty” for aborting a fetus. And if they do end up outlawing abortions then what? Woman once again start preforming at home abortions with coat hangers and basically ruining her uterus and any further ability to conceive. And anyway abortions aren’t preformed after the 1st trimester unless it’s an emergency like Marle says. I actually agree whole heartedly with a lot of waht Marle says. Very very wise internet-er there.

I’m just going to assume that if one is pregnant by IVF or some other artificial means that it is a wanted pregnancy and so abortion isn’t really a question except in cases of the health of the woman or fetus

Actually, a lot of IVF fertility treatments use the “scattershot” approach of fertilizing several eggs in the hope that some of them will implant and develop properly. However, sometimes multiple embryos implant, which is why there has been an increase in multiple births in humans in recent years. Prospective parents may choose to abort some of these embryos, both for financial considerations and for the health of the mother.

IVF promotes babies without sex.

This is distinctly off topic, but why is babies without sex a bad thing? (Assuming you think that it is. If not, I apologize for my misreading.)

Ok Nick, I have a question for you. It is wrong to take any medication that could kill an embryo, right? Let’s say a pregnant woman finds out she has cancer and must start chemotherapy right away, lest she die in 6 months. Chemo is of course very bad for embryos, and I’m pretty sure cause a miscarriage. If the woman undergoes chemo to save her life and has a miscarriage (we’re assuming it’s a wanted pregnancy) is she still a murderer?

And your logic on the ectopic pregnancy is highly specious. By those standards, it could be said that hormonal issues are causing unrestricted growth in the uterus, and in order to stop the suffering of the woman, the lining must be scraped out. If an embryo is killed in the meantime, it was only an unintended side effect, and therefore not an abortion. Now, am I talking about endometriosis, or pregnancy?

Furthermore, you say taking drugs that can make it more difficult for a fetus to implant (not impossible, and I’ll tell you why in a minute) due to lining issues is tantamount to abortion. Well, what if a woman has an incomplete miscarriage and needs to have the products of conception scraped out of her uterus. After a D&C it can take a while for the lining to regrow and be fully functional. If she gets pregnant 2 weeks later and the embryo doesn’t implant due to lining issues, is that a murder?

Lastly Nick, here’s your promised biology lesson. After ovulation, the corpus luteum secretes progesterone, which matures and thickens the lining to prepare it for implantation. This is called the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle. Doctors believe that one needs sufficient progesterone to have a luteal phase of 10 days to make a pregnancy possible. If a woman has a luteal phase of less than that, it’s highly likely that any embryo cannot implant. THis happens naturally, and regularly (I have this problem myself, and have had two early miscarriages because of it). The birth control pill mimics this effect. However, I have an acquaintance who has a luteal phase of 5 days. That means her period starts before it’s probably that an embryo could implant (usually day 7-10). She is currently 4 and a half weeks pregnant. This, and the fact that people get pregnant on the pill every year proves that the pill (or low progesterone) do not make implantation impossible, just a lot less likely. Therefore, only an idiot would consider the pill to be an abortifacient.

About birth control… many, many fertilized eggs never attach and thus are naturally aborted. I see no problem with birth control doing the same thing that your body does naturally. I also think that people who want to force rape/incest victims to carry a baby to full term are just sick sick sick. Also who are these people to force women to undergo a very dangerous medical procedure? Childbirth is still horribly risky. But really, again the point that needs to be remembered is what happens to these babies afterward. Has Nick adopted an unwanted child? I want to start seeing these people put more money into the hands of children and less into printing up signs with pictures of stillborn babies.

comitting an act of violence against the innocent third party who never asked to be part of the “fathers” sickning act doen’t somehow “undo” what he did.

Abortion is not an attempt to undo the rape. It’s an attempt to no longer be pregnant, period.

Some people talk about the sexual freedom of women. Now, there is a consequence for every action, whether it be good or bad. Why do people think that they shouldn’t be responsible for their actions when it comes to sex? If someone goes and eats every parsel of food in front of them and becomes fat, isn’t it generally their fault? If you take actions, there are consequences. That baby (with the exception of rape) is there b/c of something you intentionally did. You talk about forcing woman to use their bodies to protect someone else, but it’s not the same case scenario b/c it is the mother’s along with the father’s actions that caused that person to be there in the first place.
As far as charging someone who has an abortion, no there isn’t an easy answer to that. Yes, I believe that the fetus is just as important as another person. I think that a punishment should be administered in a manner that would create good. You have a person in society who has done a lot of good. They spend their days helping people but find out they are pregnant and get an abortion. Would it be useful to society to place that person in prison? I’d say most likely not. Would it be helpful to that person and to society to have that person see a counselor? I’d say yes. Especially considering the statistics on how many woman go through mental and emotional issues after an abortion. No, I don’t remember exact numbers. You are oversimplifying the situation. You can’t only take one factor into account, that is how things are misconstrued. How many people here have actually seen what an abortion looks like? I have, and I’ll tell you it’s not pretty. It’s very gruesome.
People should be held accountable for their actions. That’s one of the main problems with today’s society. Nobody wants to take responsibility for anything anymore. They just want to accuse other people of things.
There’s talk about having no legal obligation to help anybody else? That’s pretty damn rotten. If you were in danger of being murdered and there was someone standing right next to you capable of preventing it but doesn’t, oh well, they had no obligation to help you. You’re dead. No future. No chance at life. You don’t matter to anyone.
Pretty rotten, isn’t it?

Fined? Wow, what a deterrant!
Why a fine? Do we fine other people who intentionally kill born people? If you’re unwilling to hand out a harsh punishment for getting an abortion, then why do you even think it should be criminal? If it’s not so bad that women deserve jail time for it, then quit trying to outlaw it. If all you’re going to do is fine women, abortion can’t be much worse than speeding.

KJ, I’m a very responsible person. I’ve always taken responsibility for my actions, and if I were to become pregnant I’d do the same - by getting myself an abortion as soon as possible.

Abortion IS taking responsibility. You assess your situation, think about your options, consider what’s best for you and your family (if you have one), and make a decision.
Know what “not taking responsibility” looks like? It’s getting pregnant, going into denial about it, smoking and drinking for 9 months, neglecting to get pre-natal care and giving birth in your backyard without telling a soul.
Aborting is often the MOST responsible thing a pregnant woman can do, depending on her circumstances.

…And, if it is no worse than speeding, then why all the fuss about it in the first place? If pro-lifers think that it’s murder and many rally, fight, and are activists in some way or another about, and feel so strongly on the issue, why does the crime in question require such a small consequence?

Why do people think that they shouldn’t be responsible for their actions when it comes to sex?

So, if I get pregnant, even though I used available means of contraception, and I didn’t want to have a child, but was made to anyway, I am sure my kid would love me lots when I told him/her: “I didn’t really want you. You’re just a ‘consequence,’ a ‘punishment,’ for having sex. So, make sure you don’t have sex until you’re married, otherwise you’ll have to raise a kid, like I did! I sure regret that!”

…Not that I think anybody would really tell a child those things… But, still. Is that how we want our children to grow up? As a punishment, to a consequence to a bad decision? I don’t think so.

SarahMC -

I knew a pro-lifer whose response to that was:

“That’s not responsibility, responsibility would be owning up for the ‘Oops’ and raising the child. If you don’t want children, don’t have sex.”

I didn’t really know how to respond.

Nick, it sounds like what you’re proposing is that very few women who abort their pregnancies could be considered in sound mental health. That still seems deeply problematic–let’s imagine that even as few as 20% of women will identify as prepared to consider an abortion if they were to have an unwanted pregnancy. That means that of the roughly 1,200,000 legal abortions in the U.S. every year, an extremely conservative figure of 240,000 were already prepared to have an abortion before they apparently came down with a fit of hysterics due to becoming pregnant. That’s 240,000 clear premeditated murders. About 1.4% of murders currently result in the death penalty: that’s maybe 3,300 more executions every year. Not to mention the other 230,000 life prisoners we would need to incarcerate.

So even if “you’d have to be crazy to have an abortion” were to fly 80% of the time (and I’m not even talking about what that argument would mean in terms of infantalizing women), that could still mean an incredible glut of incarcerations and executions. Even if we were to imagine that abortions were to drop to pre-Roe levels (around 580,000/year, according to the CDC), that’s a shitload of women getting thrown into prison and jabbed with a lethal injection.

“Although most life-threatening pregnancies need to be treated on a case-by-case basis, the general guideline is to have the pregnancy go as far as it can and then induce labor in the hope of saving both mother and baby. Sometimes this is not possible, and labor is induced too early and the baby dies.”

You’re ignoring the flipside: sometimes labor is induced too late and the mother dies. In that world, a viable human life is unnecessarily wasted based on the hope that a fetus will reach viability. I can’t imagine the medical calculation that would justify that result.

Let’s do a thought experiment, similar to the ectopic pregnancy. Let’s imagine a world in which it were possible to save either the fetus or the mother, but not both. Who do we save? I know that world isn’t likely to occur, but it’s an important question nevertheless, because it establishes the relative values of those lives. If the existence of a non-viable fetus is really equivalent to that of a mother, the answer to that question would be “flip a coin–it doesn’t matter.” I imagine that a fair number of pro-lifers would be fairly uncomfortable with that answer, however.

“The final question you asked, just simply cannot be answered. One cannot choose between the worth of human life. All human life is sacred, and so one person’s life is as valuable as 100 peoples life (infinity = infinity X 100, hehe). You just can’t choose between who is more valuable. It is analogous to asking ‘who would you save in a fire? your mom or your 100 of your friends? or 100 strangers?’.”

It’s not at all analogous–Jill was very specific that all of these figures are complete strangers. There’s no conflict of interest here.

That kind of reasoning justifies terrible things, Nick. Let’s do another thought experiment. One person has a rare disease: he has to eat a living person’s heart every day to stay alive. In your world, it is the moral equivalent for this person to die and the 25,000 people he needs to kill to live a full life to die. That seems intuitively false by any reasonable moral standard.

You can claim that a situation where that choice needs to be made will never arise, but it does. Medical triage is a great example of where it can be necessary to save several and allow one to die. Mathematical cutenesses aside, the world is several people richer for having saved the many and sacrificed the one.

So I think the question stands: why not save the 1000 embryos? I wonder if it’s maybe that the world would be a richer place if you saved the toddler. And if maybe that implies that the life status of an embryo is more complicated that you make it out to be.

[Abortion] doesn’t somehow “undo” what [a rapist] did.

I see this weird strawman from “pro-lifers” a lot. “Pro-lifers” know that the actuality of what they’re saying doesn’t sit well with the American public (or anyone with a sense of decency), so they have to make up a strawman.

almost like the old “I’m pro-choice, but I personally would never have an abortion” line.
PM, since you brought it up, that is pretty much how I feel and I suppose I give legalized abortion a relatively conservative embrace, but I strongly believe any government should provide for its constituents free of any bias. A respectable middleground, if possible, at the very least.

Thomas, ks, Marle, thanks for the reply. I totally agree, up the sex ed. I guess I cannot reconcile a totally unrestricted policy for it as I do see a viable fetus as human life (not even morally speaking, but scientifically). I would probably lean towards a gestational timeframe, first trimester; for me, I do not find aborting a fetus that can be delivered a preterm baby justifiable, even reckless.

An interesting implication, well at least for me, should a fetus not be considered a human being until conception, that would mean, say, a man who kills a woman will have just the same moral/criminal weight as when he kills a 8-month pregnant woman. Huh.

I will expand upon this later as I have very little time at present.

I self identify as prolife but am not a fundementalist
The question comes down to legal consistency and what kind of society is created by tolerance and non tolerance of ideas.

Pro Choice & anti Gun

A Gun May kill an abortion WILL kill

Guilt

In a death Penalty case most defendants are guilty of the crime and almost all are guilty of similar crimes and the defendant at least has the attempt at due process at the WORST.

In abortion the defendant is guarenteed innocent beyond ANY doubt and Due process is opposed under the idea of privacy.

What it comes down to is a feteus is treated like a Roman mine slave. Make use of it until it is used up (Stem cells and organ harvesting) and then dispose of it when all good is wrung from it.
Any interferance is considered dictating what one may do with ones own property and is fanatically protected right.

Once a slave class is accepted it is then easily expanded by increments. Check dutch Euthanasia laws.

Has anyone else noticed the way the gender of posters is generally playing out in this discussion?

Sorry, mistype on the last paragraph — I meant inception, not conception.

Well, I know just as many female pro-lifers as male pro-lifers, and I know a bunch of really passionate, eloquent male choice advocates (even if I only know them from the Interwebs).

Yes, Will, I appreciate the contributions of pro-choice male posters on this thread. I was more referring to the fact that the anti-choicers posting so far are (to my knowledge) men, except for claire. In that respect, I don’t think it’s working out fairly evenly, and I do find it interesting that this is the case.

Jill,
The differences between the born and unborn might not be a good reason to punish individuals who kill them differently but there could be other reasons. For example, not all individuals who kill born human beings given the same punishment. Some are given the death penalty, others get plead down to almost nothing based on how much evidence the prosecutor has against them or the small likelihood of them being convicted.

Autumn Harvest,
Our society treats the killing of human beings differently all the time. Laws attempt to provide punishments for actions and not every punishment is the same - some killings are viewed in a different light than other killings. Sometimes it’s based on the circumstances of the killing, sometimes it’s based on the evidence available, the chance of conviction, etc.

KS, Dianne,
By insidious goal - I mean a deceptive goal - the goal that is really behind the movement not what they say. For example, the prolife movement would have an insidious goal if they acted like they wanted to save unborn human beings but in fact didn’t give a rip about the unborn but really just wanted to punish women for having premarital sex. Prolifers who openly and truthfully state their goal is to make abortion illegal because they don’t think it should be legal to kill the unborn don’t have an insidious goal. They may have a goal you disagree with but it wouldn’t be insidious.