Blog for choice
Haven't seen any mention hereabouts, so I thought I'd mention it -- Tuesday, Jan. 22nd is the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, and NARAL is asking people to "raise the profile of reproductive rights in the blogosphere and the media" by participating in Blog for Choice Day.
This year's topic: tell us, and your readers, why it's important to vote pro-choice.
You can sign up here.
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Not to be contrarian, or to hurt anyone's feelings. I'm sorry if this does and really do not want to imply that someone who has had an abortion who may be reading this is or was irresponsible in other areas of life or since the event. I recognize that emotions, including fear, can be involved at the time, and should be taken into account. At the same time, there is much to be said about the human dignity of having a higher bar of self-control and responsibility set for ourselves. I tend to think that many, many people argue that an unborn and conceived within the womb isn't human or alive only after they've decided they want to advocate for some one or some group that has had an abortion, perhaps a family member, or oneself.
To speak of choice in the case of elective abortions following consensual risk of conception is like wanting welfare money for folks with full time jobs. A person has chosen one thing, then wants a choice to cancel out the risks of that choice. In the case of public funding for same, it is a guarantee for irresponsible conduct falsely called choice and financed by the public.
Were it a matter of privacy, how can we say that the third party assistance with abortion brings more privacy than a social expectation that people who have consensual sex that risks conception to any extent be willing to support children that may come from the relationship?
For involuntary, criminally imposed conception, a rarity, we can honestly speak of choice, since there was no choice to begin with. To expand it beyond that sounds in eugenics.
I realize many here have argued, I think un-persuasively, that the unborn in a human being mother is not human life, despite that it is human, growing/living, will grow into a son or daughter, and are not cancer cells.
The arguments for calling abortion a valid "choice" morally are like erroneous views held among those in the GOP that capitalism is correct to dogmatize the premise of Calvinistic total human depravity, ergo how can we act other than selfishly? For a smooth running material system, shall we all assume depravity is good? Greed is good? And how long will that system survive the corruption that must happen to it with that anti-philosophy? Mother Teresa I think made similarly convincing arguments against abortion.
Abortion and greed are not progressive vehicles. They are regressive.
January 10, 2008 8:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
To speak of choice in the case of elective abortions following consensual risk of conception
This is a distraction to the real issues surrounding abortion.
Many (most?) pro-life forces want to outlaw all abortion, including in cases of rape and incest, and without any consideration of health risks to the mother. Also, abortions are going to happen, and black market abortions are certainly more dangerous for women. We've been down that road already.
Those are the political realities around this issue, and it doesn't serve the debate to focus on morality. No one likes the idea that abortions are happening, but it seems like only one side of this debate is dealing with real-life.
Compounding this all is the abstinence movement (indistinguishable, from what I can tell, from the pro-life forces) which takes yet another step away from reality, believing that kids won't have sex. They do, and ya can't stop em.
My final thought is this: outlaw abortion, and I guarantee you that wealthy people will continue to have abortions. Especially if it's brought down to the state level.
January 11, 2008 5:38 AM | Reply | Permalink
Leave labels out of it for a moment so we can be clear about the merits.
You imply that abortion is for minors because minors are incapable of self-control over their behavior and destiny. They need a product to cover their lack of self-control. And many like you tell the minors exactly what you're saying. And they run with it.
Also, are you saying that sex and its risks is not a choice for which a person should be responsible?
German kids drink. Germany doesn't have a huge alcoholic problem. This wasn't achieved through teaching German kids how to purge their stomachs of warm beer.
Swedes drink. But few if any Swedes drink and drive. That was found, empirically, to be due to long term legal and strong cultural norms against drinking and driving that came from a unified, homogeneous culture, not a divided partisan culture. Hence, over time, a similar approach to the young in this country will yield children trained to resist sex while they cannot support themselves and a baby.
If you say it isn't possible, I say you denigrate young people by assuming that they cannot do something we all know they can. What undermines it is the frequently encountered subtext from some in this debate that such children aren't normal, or that they're repressed, and the snickering begins. This is itself an insidious way to program children. What's really an interesting question is how did adults who use this manipulation actually get to be the way they are? Through bogus Freudian fallacies and non-empirical case findings shoved into their minds in error. And they mindlessly pass this conditioning down...repression and all that hooey.
The "forces" at work in public schools for teaching them that they cannot handle it, and removing them from any filial influence for 6-7 hours a day, have a great deal of impact on their exercise of behaviors contrary to being raised well.
Who has more waking time per week with their school aged children? School officials and personnel. If they doubt what the kids learn at home, it counteracts whatever good lessons they try to learn. If peers pick up on this, kids taught values at home (like abstinence) are often shouted down by those who are not. And this happens in part due to compulsory public schooling exacerbated to the point of coercive if a family wants an alternative but hasn't the money or connections.
January 11, 2008 7:48 AM | Reply | Permalink
You imply that abortion is for minors because minors are incapable of self-control over their behavior and destiny. They need a product to cover their lack of self-control. And many like you tell the minors exactly what you're saying. And they run with it.
That's not what I am implying or saying at all.
Things happen. Minors and adults both can be responsible, take full precautions, and still get pregnant.
I'm not advocating people should be irresponsible about sex, and I don't see why the argument has to be turned into that.
January 11, 2008 9:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
Of course "things happen," but not without choice of risk in the situation we're talking about. When they "happen," that is the time for taking responsibility.
There are no fullproof precautions. You might as well speak of airtight security. The risk lies in the imperfect outcome of precautions. One assumes that risk that human life will result.
January 11, 2008 11:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
More specifically, the point isn't about the school personnel "stopping" them or "coercing" them not to engage in sex.
The point is about training them how to abstain not just how to cover up their tracks so to speak. I do not think abstinence programs are effective in teaching children how to abstain from anything for self-control purposes, including food, sex, spending and other appetitive desires or passions. Consequently we have an epidemic of obesity, credit hooked young people, and broken homes without devoted parents.
Why can't they train them how to abstain for a time? (that is, until they can support children and have found a person who commits to loving the other and the children?) Because schools, being publicly coercive institutions cannot touch the spiritual aspect of a person's control over their body. If they do, they run afoul of the establishment clause and perhaps discriminate against certain free exercises of spiritual life by emphasizing others.
What this speaks to is the largesse of the public education monopoly and how it forces limitations on kids for the better part of their young lives...5 days, 6-7 hours per day. And that is one reason for the school choice and alternatives platform among social conservatives.
On one hand the left pushes hard against encroachments on the 4th Amendment. On the other, the left pushes hard for encroachments on the First Amendment by insisting on public school monopolies on education, with it inherent limitations.
Ironically, government actors' unnecessary, non-compelling encroachments on the Fourth Amendment speak to their impatience and impulsiveness as public officials who have not learned abstinence from what they strongly want and attach themselves to.
Our partisans don't always know it, but they create and nourish the problems they campaign that they are needed to solve.
January 11, 2008 9:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
Why can't they train them how to abstain for a time?
Biology.
January 11, 2008 9:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
*Deleted, because did I not just say that I would agree to disagree? Sometimes I have no discipline....*
January 16, 2008 9:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
Not to be contrarian, or to hurt anyone's feelings.
Well, I appreciate your trying to be sensitive to different points of view.
I'm not sure that a big debate about this between you and me would be all that productive, so I'm pretty much inclined to just agree to disagree.
January 16, 2008 9:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
The point is about training them how to abstain
And this training has been proven not to work.
January 11, 2008 9:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
There is no serious abstinence training in the schools, so we cannot say it has been proven not to work. There have been didactics, but didactics are generally good for regurgitating information on tests and in papers, not in resisting the temptation to have intercourse with another student. That goes beyond mere sexual relations and into the subjects of controlling the self in other ways.
Abstinence training should train kids first to make abstinence and self-control gains in what they choose to eat, drink, do and say, not just sexual relations decisions. From there the same repetitively exercised habits can be applied to decisions about one's biological impulses. If you say they are uncontrollable, all we need is at least one high schooler who has managed to abstain from sex until they were employed and prepared to commit to taking care of their family should they build one via children. There are many, many more than one who have learned temperance in other areas.
And even didactics and sloganeering on abstinence are constantly under attack by those interests which believe it is important for young people to develop the habit of instantly gratifying themselves. This way, they'll be easier to pin down to a debt lifestyle, fill jobs that suck and produce cheap labor that campaign donors needto fill, and have a larger middle class that doesn't compete much for equal wealth because they learned early on to instantly gratify and got deluded out of the self-control mindset needed to begin and finish college, grad school, professional school or to build their own business.
January 13, 2008 1:39 AM | Reply | Permalink