Dreamer Easy

MADNESS.

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Piles of dead babies tend to have that effect.

I find this fascinating from someone who advocates that abortion-on-demand is a good thing.

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Guess what one of the side effects of restricting access to safe, legal abortion is. No, go on, guess.

Edited Date: 2008-08-25 03:53 am (UTC)

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okay, I'm stumped.

Is it "dead babies?"

because the way I see it, abortion = "dead baby" as well.
so why exactly is one type of cause of dead babies okay, while another type is appalling?

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Tactics to prevent women from obtaining abortions, including refusing to fund reproductive health programs which so much as mention abortion, and frightening women away from reproductive health clinics which do provide abortion, result in dead babies. Dead mothers, too. You and I would both like to see as few abortions as possible; banning abortion has little or no effect on the number that take place and harms wanted children as well. The most effective tactic is to prevent unwanted pregnancies in the first place, through education and health care.

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this is a non-sequitur. I said nothing about "tactics to prevent women from obtaining abortions."

abortion = "dead baby"

high infant mortality rate = "dead baby"

I don't see a reason why one is appalling if the other isn't also. In fact, there are those modern ethicists who agree: your very own Peter Singer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Singer) argues that infanticide == abortion == right of the mother.

So again, tell me why one is appalling, but the other isn't? Where exactly are the bright lines here?

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The sequitur you're missing is that Kate, rather than taking up an adversarial position to yours, is sticking to the central topic: both people who oppose abortion on principle, and people who oppose rigid enforcement of black-and-white morality in a very grey area on principle, want to fix this problem.

It's bringing abortion into a discussion of how to minimize the distinctly different problem of actual infant mortality which is the dodgy link.

(Oh, and one sensible dividing line between the two is that until a baby is born, it is not yet a living being on its own. The fetus may manage to make that transition to independent life, or it may not -- the miscarriage rate is even higher than even the worst infant mortality rate. But until you've got a bellybutton, you're still part of another being; that's a distinctly different state. You individually may place more weight on other factors, but you can't really deny that's a biggie.)

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It'd be interesting to learn whether the same problems that cause high infant mortality are also responsible for the loss of wanted pregnancies.

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The most vulnerable human beings, like miner's canaries, tumbled into mass graves, dead of greed.

You're right - that isn't adversarial at all. That is clearly a statement which is going to help work toward minimizing a real and unpleasant problem. And it has absolutely nothing to do with abortion at all, even though that turn of phrase would be very much at home in pretty much any Pro-Life organization's pamphlet.

(You can make that argument, but it is a qualitatively different position than US law - US law does use the concept of viability, and it was the centerpiece of Roe v. Wade. My comparison stands.)

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I said nothing about "tactics to prevent women from obtaining abortions."

That's correct - you mentioned the exact opposite: "abortion on demand".

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...I think you might need to clarify for David why the assumptions underpinning his phrase lead to yours. It makes sense to _me_, but he hasn't had this discussion already!

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Last I checked, that is actually the desired outcome of most of the US pro-choice groups. I have yet to see one of the major, well known ones accept any limitation on abortion rights without fighting it.

In many places in the US, a minor can get an abortion without parental consent, but cannot get a cavity filled without it. That is quite a strong position to advocate, and I believe that "abortion on demand" does reasonably and fairly characterize it.

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I don't have a problem with the terminology.

Under what circumstances do you think abortion should be permitted?

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I don't know, and thank God, I don't make policy. I however do think that the answer lies somewhere between "never" and "always" - those two are such appalling approaches to life that my spirit recoils in horror.

The minor thing I mentioned above is a good example of how abortion gets treated qualitatively different from all other medicine. This to me seems like a problem.

I think that a big problem is that a medical procedure has gotten tangled up with "rights" and that makes for crummy policy all around.

Aside: you might be interested to know that Orthodox Judaism is the only major religion which views abortion as religiously required under certain circumstances. (In general, it tends to be forbidden unless it's obligatory, and this is handled case-by-case).

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I don't see a reason why one is appalling if the other isn't also.

Who said it's not appalling?

I'd go so far as to say that most people who believe in defending the right to abortion don't like abortion -- they would prefer that people be able to avoid the whole mess if possible. That's why pro- and anti-abortion groups have been known to work together on pre-emptive family-planning measures: they both want to minimize the number of times the issue even comes up.

Similarly, if you can ease the problems which make people not want to bring kids into this world -- such as the problems which are killing so many of them so young -- you decrease the demand for the whole operation.

The larger picture is one of overall harm minimization: not just harm to fetuses, but harm to children who will have to live with all sorts of suffering for a lot longer, and harm to parents who can't support those children. (Just as people think starving a child is a greater harm than poisoning a rat, people can believe that aborting a creature that hasn't yet achieved full consciousness is less harmful than bringing it into a state of prolonged suffering. But the details of that are a whole different argument, full of grey areas and uncertainty, and separate from the point I'm trying to make here.) Prohibition isn't a simple answer; as we've seen, the abortions will still happen, but in ways which make it more likely that the mother will suffer or die as well. The most productive way we can deal with a thorny situation is to build as much common ground as possible, rather than sidetracking from the huge things that need doing on that common ground and focusing only on the wedge issues.

We should save the point-scoring and logic-chopping over matters of principle till after we've attacked the crisis we all agree on.

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Not being directly, personally affected by it, you read all these statistics about the results of racism, about mortgages and glass ceilings and whatever, and it all seems so abstract; and then one figure smacks you between the eyes like a shovel. Piles of dead babies tend to have that effect.

and then

The most productive way we can deal with a thorny situation is to build as much common ground as possible, rather than sidetracking from the huge things that need doing on that common ground and focusing only on the wedge issues.

The second is a much better approach than the first. Tone down the rhetoric if you're actually trying to work toward a solution.

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WHEN I AM HIT BETWEEN THE EYES WITH A SHOVEL

*** I SHOUT ***

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Shouting fixes nothing. If you want to actually improve things like this, work on improving access to medical and food services in poor communities. I'm certain that there are lots of groups who need volunteers.

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...You jump in to accuse her of supporting baby-killing, and then complain that she's ramping up the rhetoric?

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Re-read from the start.

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I did. You're the one who took it from impassioned but non-divisive into ad hominem territory, by trying to make Kate's irrelevant personal beliefs on abortion your central issue. That's divisive rhetoric right there.

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Hmm. Last I checked, Kate had espoused public policy opinions on the subject of abortion. That takes personal beliefs out of the "irrelevant" category. I am making a connection between a public policy position and a public health problem. Yes, it's uncomfortable, and my statement was specifically designed to be uncomfortable, but I don't know exactly where it would have gotten into ad hominem territory.

Did I put false words into Kate or anyone's mouth?

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Dead potential baby.

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That is a reasonable response - you can hold that birth is the bright line between "this is human" and "this isn't." That's a defensible, coherent position.

However, you may want to know that some of the pro-choice advocates (like Peter Singer, ref. above) are arguing that infanticide is the moral equivalent of abortion, and should be permitted. That is a pretty chilling position, as far as I'm concerned.

On a topical note, one very interesting thing is that the child mortality rates are calculated very differently by different countries - with the US having a relatively strict interpretation. There are many places where very-low birth weight babies are not counted as live births, while in the US they are, for instance.

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That's fascinating! Which countries?

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Per US News & World Report (don't have a link handy), Germany and Austria were cited. However, I would just say that before comparing rates from different places, make sure that they're really the same thing.

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