Also, as an aside, I just learned that the Texas law makes exception for medical emergencies only when the life of the mother is at risk. But they are forcing all non-viable pregnancies to go to full term. Which mean that, in my example of a fetus who is developing with organs outside of its body, the mother is being forced to carry and deliver that stillborn baby, and to deal with all the traumas that come with this.
It is absolutely reprehensible and morally repugnant.
My other concern exists outside of the morality of abortion itself – Texas just created a state-sponsored vigilante program that can be emulated by other states and used to undermine any other number of human rights. This is a brand new precedent that is being set, with an entirely new legislative process and methods of enforcement, and I find it more than a little unnerving. Texas is trying to deputize its residents as law enforcers, and allow them to file lawsuits against each other for crimes that do not impact them personally whatsoever. This is a very, very dangerous precedent. I imagine that any woman in Texas who experiences a spontaneous abortion (miscarriage) is going to be terrified by how her own neighbors might interpret and litigate her experience.
Abortion has been normalised in society for hundreds of years , It is the normalisation of the regulation of abortion that is more recent. This has come about as the capacity of society to carry out safe abortions has caused an increase in the availability/take up of abortions. Read Saturday Night/Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe for an interesting read re home made abortions.
Infanticide has historically been a significant alternative to abortion. Infanticide is normalised in times of significant scarcity: consider the numbers of babies killed/left to die during the Irish potato famine. It is not difficult to lay the blame for this at the feet of the British govt which taxed bread out of the hands of the Irish peasantry leaving them starving with no means to provide for themselves, never mind their choldren.
I was about to post similar. It is one step away from criminalising sexual intercourse which involves contraceptives. The penetration by a man of the female is clearly a physical assault. At present consent stops it from being rape. However on the abortion law, consent is irrelevant on the basis it is protecting the foetus. . So if this is right, then it is quite logical to remove consent as a defence to sexual intercourse with contraceptives on the basis that it prevents a foetus having the opportunity for life in the first place.
You may think this is fanciful. However consider this: girl wants child with boyfriend. Boyfriend says no, ends relationship and takes up with new girlfriend. Spurned ex-girlfriend gets revenge by getting ex-boyfriend and new partner prosecuted.
Great point. Thousands of years, actually. Pregnancy used to be a death sentence for a plurality of women throughout history, so it’s no surprise that the only mention of abortion in the Bible is a recipe to help women terminate their own pregnancy more safely.
Killing innocent humans of all ages has been normalized in the past 50 years and we have various euphemisms for it so our sensibilities are not disturbed. “Collateral damage” is one of the most obvious. “Nation Building”, “Police Action”, “Overseas Contingency Operations”, “Asymetrical Warfare”, “Soft Targets”, “4G Warfare”, and so on and so forth. The United States profits from killing large masses of people in foreign lands.
Isn’t it hypocritical of a society based on and perpetuated on mass murder with the intent to kill so many people in so many different places for so long by so many different means … isn’t it hypocritical to say it’s immoral to kill one innocent child but that it’s moral to kill hundreds of millions of other children who have been born?
And the other easy to see hypocrisy is the use of the death penalty.
And again, as a point of principle, would you allow the abortion of Hitler at 7 weeks? (I’m sure there is a comment somewhere that says after a certain number of posts, Nazis are always brought in as a comparison…)
I always hated when people bring up that complaint. Of course Adolf Hitler is now an intrinsic part of our moral reasoning, he exemplifies the outermost edge of the margins. Which means that it is only natural when his name comes up in conversations like these. Our morals do not emerge in a vacuum, but in response to real world horrors, and those horrors then get baked into our moral codes.
Plus, I came up with a metatheory of parallel realities that explains why you can never just go back and kill Baby Hitler. Happy to share if anyone is interested
You’ve picked a truly ghastly example representing 1% of minor abortions. This exception can be and is already well comprehended in abortion laws/regulations, to my understanding.
What I was referring to might look something like the following scenario(s):
Teenager gets pregnant by her teenage boyfriend. (unknow to parents)
School counselor discusses options, including abortion.(unknown to parents)
Teenager visits a reproductive care clinic, which recommends for all the economic reasons you’ve outlined with “facts and figures” that abortion is a very good or best option. (unknown to parents)
Teenager has spent weeks deciding to abort the fetus. (unknown to parents)
2 Scenarios:
Scenario 1 - Teenager then informs parents 48 hours before the already schedule abortion. Parents, who have a legal and fiduciary responsibility for their minor’s health and well being, have effectively been “out of the decision loop” now “have to deal with it”. Some will handle with grace, many will be scared for their daughter, daughter’s future, and the unborn child.
Scenario 2 - Minor child does not require consent and has the abortion without parents knowledge or consent. Daughter returns home after secretly been pregnant, secretly having had an abortion, all unbeknownst to the parents. Daughter has had an invasive medical procedure which may have complications or require care. Daughter may need emotional/psychological care and support but parents still don’t know what’s gone on.
Perhaps not for all, but for many minor abortions and parental consent remain a valid concern.
Let’s say you live in rural Nebraska with the only hospital within 100 miles is a St. Somethingorother. Access can be an issue.
It seems arbitrary in today’s drum beat of injustices to be righted, equality of outcomes to claim as an “economic Class” vs “Racial” issue when we see over twice the number of Black fetus’ being killed than White (proportional to % population).
The quote from the founder of Planned Parenthood Margaret Sanger’s “The Pivot of Civilization” (linked): does support your many “greater good, for most number of people” and “economic effectiveness” rationales. While it might seem counter intuitive, Fiscal Conservatives do not believer as you think they should believe:
The lack of balance between the birth-rate of the unfit'' and the** **fit,’’ admittedly the greatest present menace to the civilization, can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these two classes. The example of the inferior classes, the fertility of the feeble-minded, the mentally defective, the povertystricken, should not be held up for emulation to the mentally and physically fit, and therefore less fertile, parents of the educated and well-to-do classes. On the contrary, the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective. Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon American society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupid, cruel sentimentalism.
Planned Parenthood performs 40% of the +600,000 abortions per year in the US with 97% of their pregnant patients getting abortions.
Let’s not fall into the “triviality of scale” trap. Texas does not allow exceptions for rape or incest. So no, there is no mechanism in Texas for this. Otherwise it would require the child to prove that she was raped by her father, which is an unreasonable expectation.
Who cares what Sanger thought? It has no relevance whatsoever. The founding fathers had slaves, and only gave voting rights to propertied white males. Should we throw out the Constitutions because of their obvious moral lapse that was encoded into our founding documents? No, of course we shouldn’t, because attitudes (and altitudes) continue to evolve over time.
Loving the vibe in this discussion. Probably because it makes us think deeply about the inner and outer aspects of all 4 quadrants. May I ask Corey, can you point us to any work in Integral theory that provides us with some kind of structure we can lean on as we seek to integrate all these 8 areas of consideration?
Conservatives often do, every time they try to defund school lunches, ban sex education, enforce abstinence-only education, limit/remove free access to contraceptives (such as the extremely effective IUD program here in Colorado I mentioned above, which has been under attack by state conservatives since its founding), etc. common tactics coming from the religious right wing.
I too think that humankind grows and develops (kind of the Integral Theory foundation).
As you so aptly point out, Slavery was at one time legal around the world (yes, even in the Old Testament), but now is Illegal in all Western Democracies.
Whilst number of abortions are down in the US from ~1M/year to only 640,000 per year, it likely some day might be considered a “stain on human history”.
Is it plausible that Abortion could some day be seen as culturally acceptable state sponsored genocide?
By the “8 areas of consideration”, do you mean the 8 perspectival zones? Ryan, Bruce, and I did a really great presentation here:
In terms of applying these zones to the topic of abortion, I’m not sure anyone has done that. I’ve been working on a piece that applies them to systemic racism, which I suppose could offer a very loose template in terms of how to apply the lens to social issues, but it’s still fairly half-baked
I personally do not think so, no, largely because of the increased dignities and freedoms that the orange and green altitudes bring to women, which are nonexistent in amber-dominated societies.
That said, I can imagine a future form of birth control that would allow women to consciously determine their own fertility windows, which would then make abortion more or less obsolete, at least in terms of unwanted pregnancies. I don’t think that will necessarily cause people to regard abortion as “genocide” because they do not share the same metaphysical assumptions about when an embryo or fetus should achieve personhood.
5,4,3,2,…
