Comment to me on yesterday's blog containing statistics about abortions:
"So basically restricting abortions to the first 15 weeks would affect 6% of all abortions. Though for Planned parenthood it’s all or nothing."
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| 15-week fetus |
Feminism was part of an era of social change we are still working through. There were hippies. War protests. Earth Day and Environmentalism. A Black Civil Rights Movement. Homosexuals became more visible and acknowledged.
Inthe early 1960s reliable oral contraceptives--"the pill"--became available, which gave women far greater control of pregnancies, with giant consequences for women in the modern workplace, and in their sense of sexual agency. The book, Our Bodies Ourselves, 1970, was part of the movement. Guess what? Women wrote that they liked sex. (When I was a county commissioner in the 1980s a local group of Evangelical ministers met with me to demand that the book be removed from the Jackson County library. The book remained.)
Roe v. Wade was foundational to feminism because it judged to be Constitutional women's child-bearing autonomy. Women owned themselves, their own bodies, at least until the fetus had independent "viability."
The feminist problem with it is that it reverses Constitutional agency for women as child-bearers. Feminist principle demands childbearing be the woman's choice as a fully empowered citizen, in her own way juggling the multiple and conflicting wife-family-student-career-mother-parent roles of a woman during childbearing years.
A 15-week cutoff is doomed to displease people who believe that life begins at conception. It will also displease people who consider non-viable fetuses to be the woman's business and no one else's. A 15-week abortion cutoff could be an armistice in the abortion wars, if it reduces some of the urgency on either end, and if a solid majority of the public agrees that terminating a 15 week pregnancy is early enough. It will not, however, be a peace treaty. There are principles in conflict.
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15 comments:
If you believe Anti-Choice will be content with 15 weeks I have a bridge you'd be interested in.
94% sounds good to me. Let’s take away this divisive issue or at least, mitigate it. I’m pro choice, but recognize that for some, this is a passionate issue. The citizens who want it completely eliminated, can carry on, but this strikes me as a compromise that would be good for the country. Women are still discriminated against in countless ways, and this may be one of them, but there are plenty other ways women are not treated fairly that can be focused upon.
The last paragraph of Mr. Sage's post made me think of the Missouri (Mississippi?) Compromise. John Roberts in the role Henry Clay?
It's worth noting that women as second-class citizens is a "deeply -embedded notion" in human civilization, period, not just Western.
The Judeo-Christian tradition is rare in having managed any major evolution in this respect. Certainly not their Abrahamic cousins.
Credit where credit is due? The Chinese, for instance, don't spend time in reparative reflection concerning any facet of history and society.
Regrettably, the more progressives focus on the ways various groups - women, people of color, LGBTQ… are denied justice in this country, the more threatened are white non-college educated working class white men (and women). It’s a conundrum. If injustices are downplayed then Dems will lose the support of leftists. If injustices are addressed then regressive voters will be activated. I’m hopeful that these contradictions can be resolved.
Art,
The problem is the way that progressives focus on these issues. Almost everyone would be fine with removing discrimination. But progressives increasingly demand reverse discrimination. That’s where the war starts.
Many fields, including mine, are criticized for not having “enough“ minorities/women, or not “looking like America.“ Both of these are essentially demands for quotas. Considerations of competence and excellence are pushed aside in favor of demographic “equity.“
I am all in favor of non-discrimination. But demands, for instance, that 50% of engineering positions go to women fly in the face of things like individual preferences.
What principle are you arguing for, Peter? The woman’s right to abortion through the 9th month?
What a joke: here we have a bunch of guys debating women's rights. One (Art) actually claims that it's white guys who are denied equal justice. Sure, Art, they've been lynched by the thousands.
Supposedly, Republicans don't want government interfering in the doctor/patient relationship. Abortion is a medical procedure. Maybe the doctor and patient should decide whether it's necessary.
Response to Sally’s question.
I think the “woman is the sole decider” position allows a simple formula for the issue, but in a democracy it is a self-destructive position. It allows some cases that will not stand up to inspection and criticism because they come too close to infanticide. The viability test at the 24th week seems ok to me. Maybe back off 2weeks from that. After that point we are considering the interests of two people, not one. That strikes me as one that honors the autonomy of the woman so long as she is carrying a fetus that has no separate life of its own.
After viability there is reason for the state to balance the interests and consider the now-viable baby girl a person who has an enforceable interest in being born.
The 15th week policy would be more politically durable, and if the issue were abortion alone, I would be ok with that, but it NOT abortion alone. There is a principle of autonomy, so I would defer to that and go with the Roe v Wade viability standard at, say, 22 weeks.
There is a risk in absolute rights. The gun people think they have it, and therefore they flaunt and exercise their big win on open carry, etc. it means that they celebrate 17 year olds parading around with an AR15 carried in front of him amid a civil disturbance. It was Trouble waiting to happen. Young men carrying AR15s at volitile situations, armed with stand your ground laws, empowered by self-defense rules that say it is ok to shoot if you feel at risk, will lead to shootouts, everyone claiming self defense. The guy who got his bicep blown off by Rittenhouse should have shot first. He had a better self defense claim than did Rittenhouse because he had seen Rittenhouse shoot two guys and he appeared to be an active shooter pointing an AR15 around. He declined to shoot, so Rittenhouse shot him. Self defense, this time for Rittenhouse. Eventually the situation of young men brandishing weapons will cause a reversal in the presumed “absolute right.”. The public won’t stand for the trouble it causes. The NRA is running up the score in this political game, and it will backfire.
Absolute rights lead the holders of those to go too far.
Peter Sage
I’ve always found the “viability” argument for determining personhood to be troubling. If we are honest, aren’t most of us “unviable” at different stages of life? Under what conditions do we determine “viability”? What is the threshold of life support required before we decide that a person is not longer viable and we would deny them personhood? I know this is not a new argument.
One of my classmates is a prenatal surgeon in Australia who regularly performs procedures on patients in utero as early as 17 weeks. The parents talk about saving their “child”, while elsewhere in the same hospital a very different procedure terminates pregnancies at the very same or later stages. This is not a mere philosophical, legal, or political discussion for someone like him. Here is one of his many published articles that some of you may find thought-provoking.
Secularist (like many commenters here) often have moral reasoning very different from a Christian, who would generally hold that all human life at every stage is sacred (Jeremiah 1:5 I knew you before I formed you in your mother's womb).
Eventually, as medical science progresses, “viability” will start at conception. What then?
When fertilized eggs can be incubated outside the womb, in birthing containers, the meaning of parenthood will change, as will the responsibility for what to do with them. Women of moderate means will be able to extract a few dozen young, healthy eggs at age 20, a medical “improvement” to harvest eggs at the prime condition.prime guy she happens to fancy can provide 60 million sperm with a moment’s work,or maybe Jeff Bezos would like the honor of fathering 50,000 kids, each with a million dollar start. He would still have $75 billion for other ventures. Possibly local evangelical churches will volunteer to raise them and bring them up in the bosom of the true faith. It will require a whole new set of laws and a whole new attitude toward fertilized eggs.
I realize we have surrogacy now, but gestation boxes will change everything.
Need to discuss the pain of abortion. No woman unless they are disturbed thinks abortion is a wonderful procedure. It is a deep, emotional long lasting decision.. no one outside the woman’s body has any right to judge or even comment regarding this sacred act. It is beyond removing an internal organ or tooth. So butt out Biblical wackouts, old men of the Catholic Church, tribal Torah theologians, and other preachers and sexual patrolmen. Put your arms around the sorrow. It is not yours but the woman who dares to enter the clinic.
Ralph Bowman has painted a vivid picture of abortion today. Perhaps when the wonders of modern medical procedures advance us to the day when the choice of which member of (hopefully) the marriage will carry and give birth to the child of that union will we abandon our simplistic views of the basic act of reproduction. I suspect very few men would agree to undergo this
often excruciating experience which they have assigned to the so-called "weaker sex". It is already well past the time for men "get the hell out of the way" and allow women the overall power to control and regulate what in our nation (and many others) has become a political football. People who carefully study (sociologists) tell us the flawed marriages produce flawed children who unwittingly grow into flawed individuals that do great and lasting harm to all they encounter along a troubled journey through life. No one can deny that the world would be a better place if Mrs. Shickelgruber and Mrs. Putin had considered that option.
Bob Warren
A sixth-grade science student will tell you that's importance unless humans evolve to that point.
Viruses will destroy humans before we evolve that much.
The abortion choice is not about a fetus. It's about men controlling women.
I hear Oregon will soon limit the purchase of condoms, birth control pills, and guns and ammunition, and allow us citizens to sue anyone who breaks the law. Ka Ching!
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