From Naked Lunch
I managed to keep up my habits performing cut-rate abortions in subway toilets. I even descended to hustling pregnant women in the public streets. It was positively unethical.
The question of abortion has been with us for at least 2,500 years. No law yet passed has made it go away.
However, with modern medical technology and weekly and possibly daily urine examinations of females it may yet be possible to actually do something. And since according to some people chemical birth control is really just abortion in disguise that will have to be eliminated too. Anything that prevents implantation is murder. Even if it is only considered to work that way.
Every miscarriage will need to be investigated. And we will probably need more orphanages. Probably more welfare. And even with Black Markets in abortion we can at least denote our moral purity by passing laws.
There is only one thing that bothers me. Any government strong enough to prevent abortion is strong enough to make it mandatory. And you know – according to some the earth is overpopulated. But what are the odds of them ever getting in power? It can’t happen here.
Comments
9 responses to “Dr. Benway On Abortion”
I’m bringing <a href="http://classicalvalues.com/2013/04/asset-or-liability/#comments"this discussion forward to this later comment. Hope you don’t mind.
I reiterate, I do not agree that recognizing the humanity of a gestating human means that abortions must be universally prohibited. However, when we fail to recognize that essential humanity, it opens the door to questioning the humanity of people in general. Unless you really think the birth canal is magic. That is what I mean by negative externalities.
You are worried about giving the government the power to intrude on pregnancy. But when we justify abortion by claiming that a fetus is not human by reason of dependency, we have given the society (and government) the power to dehumanize anyone who may be dependent or less “developed” than nominal. Not surprisingly, there are members of the establishment who are advocating the expansion of “not human” to include “post-birth fetus”. With this decision, we are throwing away one of the best characteristics of Western civilization, what perhaps is its strongest cohesive force: “All for one and one for all”, “women and children first”, “no man left behind”. We are reversing God’s compact with Abraham, the root of our civilization.
Your right to decide who is human and who is not ends at the tip of my nose. I think you have posited a false choice, but in the end, if the choice is between womb inspections, and possibly having the law decide that I am not human, then I must choose womb inspections.
Oops:
Meant to say this discussion.
Of course it can happen here, and it is.
Marc Faber recently said, “In the economy of the cuckoo people that populate central banks, everything is possible.”
Well, in the egotistical legislative world of the cuckoo people that populate Congress it is possible to criminalize, regulate,subsidize,finance,ignore or encourage anything and everything.
It could even go in this direction;
http://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2012/03/01/medethics-2011-100411.full
I was trying to be comprehensive but I see I left out discouraged,taxed, and probably a few others.
Neil,
Where things go very bad wrong is putting the decision pro or con (excepting past viability – and the health of the mother exception) in the hands of the government.
Individual error is bad but to some extent tolerable. Mass error in either direction does very bad things.
The problem is that we have removed both societal and legal protection from a class of person, by claiming that they lack humanity by reason of incapacity. One or the other protection must be restored, or there will inevitably be other classes of person added to the list. This is no longer theoretical–that’s what became apparent during the Gosnell trial.
My belief is that societal protection is the stronger of the two, and perhaps the only one that will really work. But the hours grow short…
Neil: The problem is that we have removed both societal and legal protection from a class of person, by claiming that they lack humanity by reason of incapacity.
You are clever with your argument, but it is nothing more than Terri Schiavo redux. Does a brain dead accident victim kept alive on a ventilator lack humanity? Your argument would have society intervene in a decision which must be made by those held legally responsible for the individual – usually their spouse, parent, sibling, or offspring. In the case of aborting a fetus, you would have society intervene to protect a dependent, non-viable entity that you define as human. The switch in definitions you make doesn’t hide what you are about. By your definition out of womb test tube “pregnancy” doesn’t lack humanity. We are talking here about early stage abortion, not late term murder. Your argument would remove the decision from the person directly, physically responsible, which is the mother.
By your argument, women do not own their own bodies. So should women be forced to have babies if society demands it? Maybe we can round up unwilling women and put them in incubation clinics by force, and like Hitler, specify which race should breed them.
Your argument makes a fetus human by denying human status to women.
Bravo Frank.
And further:
http://classicalvalues.com/2013/04/the-appeal-to-government-is-an-admission-of-weakness/
[…] Frank makes a point I have made before but he makes it so much more eloquently than I ever did (and I […]