I think this is a good argument to advance against anti-choicers and sympathy for anti-choicers, and since a number of people have started lobbying me via PM on behalf of anti-choicers I think I’ll revive it by responding to some of the posts that I didn’t get a chance to the first time.
Originally posted by Redstar1916+--> (Redstar1916) That's not what I asked. I asked if they held all women in contempt, not just women with unwanted pregnancies. Of course, most rapists do in fact hold all women, or women in general, in contempt, especially serial rapists.[/b]
I don’t think so. I’d strongly suspect that rapists actually hold specific women in contempt while probably not holding others in the same contempt and that serial rapists hold specific categories of women in contempt. Clearly some and probably most rapists are situational. Most rapists are the type of guys who disregard someone’s personal rights after they’ve gotten drunk and been led to think they’d get sex or felt that they’ve been disrespected in some way or something like that, if they were all such universally anti-social psychos as you seem to be positing than they’d be easier to tell apart from non-rapists; most are probably only anti-social psychos in narrower contexts. Similarly, abortion opponents only want to sexually abuse women who accidentally get pregnant.
In any case, this is somewhat irrelevant to the argument of the thread (again, a serious argument presented in my second post). The pro-life position is tantamount to a pro-rape position, they are objectively harming their victims in effectively the same way.
Originally posted by Redstar1916+--> (Redstar1916)
These women oppose abortion on religious grounds, claiming that God's will supersedes women's rights. What about the women who oppose abortion based on their opposition to murder (which they believe abortion to be)?[/b]
What about the rapists in Africa who think (supposedly, this might be made up by the BBC) that if they have sex with virgins it will cure them of AIDs? Clearly their unusual motivation for rape is irrelevant to the objective harm they cause their victims. Likewise the fact that some abortion opponents take creative justifications for advocating defacto rape doesn’t make them any less objectively disgusting.
Not if they [powerful women] get pregnant they don't.
Not really, abortion has always and will always be available to the rich. Closing all abortion facilities in a Midwestern state isn’t going to stop a single rich woman from having an abortion, because they can just get it done elsewhere and pay out of pocket; its only going to affect workers.
And in any case, the overwhelming majority of female politicians and powerful corporate executives are not personally affected by abortion laws because they are infertile due to age. It’s the young, working class women that they hold in contempt, not themselves.
Originally posted by NorthStarCompassML
is not entirely correct because you are not accounting for occurance of male-male rape, thus your analogy suggests that women are the sole victims of rape which is simply not true .... the links that i posted were not spam as you suggest but led to information concerning rape .... information that you appear to be sorely lacking ....
Don’t be stupid. Of course I (and everyone else above the age of about five who isn’t Amish) am aware of male rape victims. The fact that there are other types of rape however, does not change the fact that forced childbirth is a type of rape, and a particular nasty type at that.
I didn’t respond to your earlier mentions of it because I thought you were being so obviously facetious and it doesn’t undermine my argument in any way. If anything it strengthens it by exposing Redstar1916’s tangent about rapists supposedly having contempt for all women whereas abortion opponents supposedly do not, totally irrelevant.
Originally posted by Marxist-Rev
That's not true. "Anti-choicers" just recognize the right, of the child, to life. The women won't die having a child, but the child will most assuredly die if the mother has an abortion.
And let us not forget that we are not, necissarily, talking about children that are the product of rape. People who want to have abortions BECAUSE they've been raped is a completely different argument.
An unborn “child” that’s the product of rape is just as much an unborn “child” that’s the product of badly timed condom-slippage, and if its aborted, its just as dead. So how is it a different argument?
And anyways, I notice you have “anti-choicers” in quotes but no quotes around ‘child’. Do you think they’re correct then?
Now trash this entirely disgusting, and morally demeaning thread. Please.
I agree that anti-choicers are disgusting and morally demeaning, that’s kind of the point of this topic.
Originally posted by RedTsar1916
I'm sorry, but opposing murder is not a "weird moral" by any stretch of the imagination.
Advocating rape to prevent killing is a very “weird moral”. To say that someone can’t kill their fetus to prevent childbirth would be like saying that someone can’t shoot an attacker to prevent rape.
Originally posted by Redstar1916
Opposition to first-degree murder is something on which almost everyone agrees, nobody likes the idea of killing a baby in cold blood.
Abortion isn’t murder, the fetus is harming its host, so its killing in self defense. There is no “right to life” when it comes at the exclusion of someone’s bodily autonomy, not for adults, so likewise not for babies.
Originally posted by RedStar1916
The difference between pro-choicers and pro-lifers is merely that one side sees the act of abortion as an assertion of bodily autonomy, while the other side sees it as selfish baby-killing. This is not a moral difference.
Um, no, it is a moral difference. We’re against rape, they are in favor of rape. Easy moral distinction!
Again, it’s about as reasonable a position as those people in Africa who supposedly (according to the BBC (news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6076758.stm) which could very well be making it up) think that having sex with virgins cures AIDS. Its like, refusing them would be tantamount to first degree murder if they were right, right? Doesn’t make a difference to the victim though!
Invader
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That boys and girls is a semantic quibble.
I agree, although I don’t consider fetuses to be babies, my position would be identical if I did. It doesn’t matter. If you think a child has the right to life even when violating another’s personal liberty, than you should advocate forced organ and marrow donations from living people; since violating someone is, according to that logic, less bad than killing someone. Anyone who opposes abortion in any circumstances but does not support mandatory organ harvesting from living people who could survive it is being inconsistent, and their inconsistency comes from thinking that some people have more of a right to bodily autonomy than others (just like those who would make an exception for abortion if the fetus was conceived from rape). And that’s sick.
Invader Zim
And TC, while you most certainly can draw some rather dodgy comparisons between rape and anti-choice I am pretty sure that if I thought about it I could compare both the pro-and anti-choice line to the holocaust. meaningless comparisons designed to invoke an emotonal responce may succeed in the latter, but they are still meaningless.
You could, but you’d be wrong. There are apt comparisons where there are valid grounds and there are logically inconsistent comparisons. This was a meaningful comparison, yours is not, you cannot dismiss comparisons as a category of argument simply because there are some bad ones.
And in any case, I’m not simply comparing forced pregnancy and child birth to rape, I’m actually saying that forced pregnancy and childbirth is a type of rape. I think this is a powerful argument against sympathy for those who advocate it.
And I realize that anti-choicers often do compare abortion to the holocaust. Their comparison is wrong because European Jews weren’t harming the Nazis physically in any way. Fetuses do, and severely. People gloss over that because the harm is outweighed by positive benefits for people who have wanted pregnancies and that obviously isn’t what they’d like to focus on, but it should not be ignored or minimized when it comes to people with unwanted pregnancies.
I am not making any assertions about whether abortion is right or wrong, and I agree with you on the fact that a fetus is a fetus and not a child.
Ultimately though, although I think its irrelevant, the fetus vs baby issue is one that’s basically metaphysical not material. There are physical differences between even full term fetuses and babies (their physiology changes when they breathe and are separated from the placenta, and clearly there must be enormous psychological differences, its hard to imagine that a fetus could be meaningfully aware as a baby is), but even though they’re different, that I don’t really see why its more wrong to kill one than the other in the purely abstract sense; it is the fact that one is inside someone and that removing it without damaging her entails killing it that makes it alright to kill fetuses, not because they’re fundamentally different from babies. It isn’t the fetuses status as a non-person but its relation to the rights of another person that make it acceptable for her to terminate it, if it were in an artificial womb rather than a person, there would be no argument.
Although, for that matter, I do think babies are also different from children and I think that children have inherent rights that babies do not by virtue of their greater capacity for autonomy and social interaction (a baby cannot assert its will so one cannot violate its expressed will, a child can, so children have rights that babies don’t).
My only argument was against TC, who believes that an irrefutable argument for abortion at any term exists independently of the status of the fetus, and that anyone who opposes this argument is inherently reactionary.
Yah, that’s right, it is inherently reactionary. People who reject the personal right to refuse serious physical and psychological trauma (or unwanted intimacy which is a version of that argument) are utter reactionaries, and that includes people who support abortion only for utilitarian reasons (arguing that there are utilitarian benefits in addition to supporting it for the sake of human emancipation is different). This would be obvious in any other conceivable scenario, that’s the point of this thread.