Digby's got an excellent piece up on the abortion debate from an angle all too often overlooked:
This updates the post below about whether women should be held legally liable for having an illegal abortion. Apparently this video made the rounds some months ago (and I missed it) in which anti-abortion protesters are asked that very question. Turns out most of them haven't ever thought about it before.
That is as I suspected. It's time we make them think about it. Most anti-abortion legislation makes no sense morally and these people need to be led through the various steps that will show them this. The cognitive dissonence was apparent on these people's faces. It's a question that everyone from the family pro-choice supporter to professiohnal interviewers should always ask.
Picture if you will a poll in which Americans are asked if women should be jailed for murdering their unborn child with an illegal abortion. What do you think they would say? Considering the fact that even the anti-abortion picketers in that video don't know what to say, I think it's fair to assume that it would be rejected by more than 90 percent of the population.
That's because it's clear that there is almost nobody who believes that abortion is murder in the legal sense of the word. How can there be a law against "murder" where the main perpetrator is not punished? How can it be murder if these people don't believe that the person who planned it, hired someone to do and paid for it is not legally culpable?
The looks on these womens' faces in that video were amazing: confusion, frustration, pain. Their position is untenable and they know it.
[...]
So I think we need to have this discussion. Let's debate it out in the open and "air both sides" because from where I sit it's the "pro-lifers" who haven't thought this thing through. Nobody says they can't agitate against abortion and stand out there with their sickening pictures and try to dissuade women from doing it. I will defend their right to argue against abortion forever. But when they use the law to enforce their moral worldview they need to recognize that they can't have it both ways. If fetuses are human and have the same rights as the women in whom they live, then a woman who has an abortion must logically be subject to the full force of the law. It would be a premeditated act of murder no different than if she hired a hit man to kill her five year old. The law will eventually be able to make no logical moral distinction. Is everybody ready for that?Mathwiz comments:
This gets to the heart of the issue, even if the "pro-life" crowd won't admit it: when does a woman consent to letting her unborn embryo/fetus use her body for room and board?
There are a few extremists who actually believe the "abortion is murder" rhetoric (Sen. Coburn, R-OK, for instance), but most "pro-lifers" implicitly believe a woman consents to pregnancy whenever she has voluntary sex, and that consent, once given, is irrevocable. This is why they usually support exceptions for rape and incest, and why they seek less severe punishments than for murder. But it's not a very logical position, especially when talking about minors who've been denied comprehensive sex ed. How can such a girl possibly give fully informed legal consent to bear a child?
The pro-choice community generally believes consent is revocable up to some reasonable point in the pregnancy (usually fetal viability, a la Roe), and they realize that, especially in a world of "abstinence only" sex ed, women and girls may not fully understand the risks of sex. There are a ton of (ahem) misconceptions about sex and pregnancy, and frankly, the right wing is trying their level best to be as unhelpful as humanly possible when it comes to dispelling those misconceptions.
Again we get back to the pregnancy as punishment concept behind most of the pro-life perspective. It isn't about the fetus when it comes right down to it, if it were there'd be no issue with cases of rape and incest. I mean the fetus would still be a "person" with full rights, regardless of how it was conceived. But even setting that aside, the sheer illogic of how these kinds of laws could possibly be enforced if taken to their realitic conclusion is mind boggling. Do we investigate each miscarriage to make certain it was from natural causes? And if it wasn't, is the woman legally culpable?
The fact that many pro-lifers have never even considered the logical conclusion to their "Abortion = Murder" message surprises me depressingly little, however.
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