"I’m not really sure where you got the ‘i’m after punishing sex’ line."
I never said you did; you're misquoting me. It's true that I don't have a lot of respect for views like yours, popular as they may be. You' pay lip service to the "difficult moral calculations" that you've supposedly figured out. But you don't show your work. After all, it's the "middle position", which, no duh, is where all difficult moral calculations lead. I think you're just hedging your bets, like a lot of Americans who want legislation towards the middle of the "spectrum". (A spectrum which is shaped by women on one end with no agency, and women on the other end who made their bed, and now must lie in it.)
What I am saying is that when we talk about these compromises, we mean banning the abortions that most people want to ban, according to polls. And those majorities are shaped by a significant chunk of people who think stricter abortion laws will force people, especially women, to take fewer risks in their sex lives.
For example, imagine a state where there are strict abortion laws. Now imagine a woman who would have gone to bed with a guy without these laws, but because she can't be sure of her access to an abortion, decides she'll wait until she knows that he would definitely not abandon her if she got pregnant. There are a lot of people who would think that this is an unqualified good thing, and these people are both seeking to punish sex, and they are making moral judgments about certain types of behavior. And these people factor in to your compromises.
I don't know how much more obvious this can be than the fact that even the most conservative states have to write rape exceptions into their fantasy trigger laws. Once you allow political compromise to shape legislation, you are allowing prejudice against certain types of behavior to be a factor in who lives and who dies.
Rape exceptions and other loopholes are what make any laws that would actually vote through unconstitutional. We can't offer these protections to some fetuses, or to some women, based on some mass delusion that women who need abortions can be placed along a "spectrum".
2009-01-31 03:07:47
Chris Dierkes;
"But can you see that the entire disagreement roughly comes back to this point: is abortion in that category? in fact both sides could argue themselves into the side of the defense of rights on their side–in fact they do."
This is a moot point. As soon as you start creating abortion laws via political compromise, you are inevitably going to end up drafting unconstitutional laws.
These "compromises" always end up as back door bigotry. Some believe that fetuses must be protected against harm. But for most that belief evaporates if the mother is a victim of rape, or if the child is seriously ill, or if the mother's health is at risk. (But it better be "serious" risk, goddammit!)
It should be clear that the greatest potential for compromise exists where there is most contempt for the hypothetical woman seeking the abortion. Whether or not you think that states should be able to deny abortions to women because their reasons for wanting one aren't good enough, or because they "should have made up their mind already", the idea that we can grant rights to unborn children based on our moral judgment of their mothers, without violating the Constitution, is absurd.
Maybe you could draw up a law that granted legal protection to fetuses that was principled upon a sincere desire to protect the "rights" of unborn humans, and not to punish sex. And perhaps, in that case, there would honestly be room for debate as to whether or not it was Constitutional. But there would be no political support for such a law, so who cares?
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Chris Dierkes
"I’m not really sure where you got the ‘i’m after punishing sex’ line."
I never said you did; you're misquoting me. It's true that I don't have a lot of respect for views like yours, popular as they may be. You' pay lip service to the "difficult moral calculations" that you've supposedly figured out. But you don't show your work. After all, it's the "middle position", which, no duh, is where all difficult moral calculations lead. I think you're just hedging your bets, like a lot of Americans who want legislation towards the middle of the "spectrum". (A spectrum which is shaped by women on one end with no agency, and women on the other end who made their bed, and now must lie in it.)
What I am saying is that when we talk about these compromises, we mean banning the abortions that most people want to ban, according to polls. And those majorities are shaped by a significant chunk of people who think stricter abortion laws will force people, especially women, to take fewer risks in their sex lives.
For example, imagine a state where there are strict abortion laws. Now imagine a woman who would have gone to bed with a guy without these laws, but because she can't be sure of her access to an abortion, decides she'll wait until she knows that he would definitely not abandon her if she got pregnant. There are a lot of people who would think that this is an unqualified good thing, and these people are both seeking to punish sex, and they are making moral judgments about certain types of behavior. And these people factor in to your compromises.
I don't know how much more obvious this can be than the fact that even the most conservative states have to write rape exceptions into their fantasy trigger laws. Once you allow political compromise to shape legislation, you are allowing prejudice against certain types of behavior to be a factor in who lives and who dies.
Rape exceptions and other loopholes are what make any laws that would actually vote through unconstitutional. We can't offer these protections to some fetuses, or to some women, based on some mass delusion that women who need abortions can be placed along a "spectrum".
Chris Dierkes;
"But can you see that the entire disagreement roughly comes back to this point: is abortion in that category? in fact both sides could argue themselves into the side of the defense of rights on their side–in fact they do."
This is a moot point. As soon as you start creating abortion laws via political compromise, you are inevitably going to end up drafting unconstitutional laws.
These "compromises" always end up as back door bigotry. Some believe that fetuses must be protected against harm. But for most that belief evaporates if the mother is a victim of rape, or if the child is seriously ill, or if the mother's health is at risk. (But it better be "serious" risk, goddammit!)
It should be clear that the greatest potential for compromise exists where there is most contempt for the hypothetical woman seeking the abortion. Whether or not you think that states should be able to deny abortions to women because their reasons for wanting one aren't good enough, or because they "should have made up their mind already", the idea that we can grant rights to unborn children based on our moral judgment of their mothers, without violating the Constitution, is absurd.
Maybe you could draw up a law that granted legal protection to fetuses that was principled upon a sincere desire to protect the "rights" of unborn humans, and not to punish sex. And perhaps, in that case, there would honestly be room for debate as to whether or not it was Constitutional. But there would be no political support for such a law, so who cares?