A different sort of Abortion discussion

[Slag]

Hussar said:

Minion, I would like to move away slightly from the idea of when does life begin. That issue has been and will be debated pretty much forever and, quite probably by smarter minds than ours, egos notwithstanding.

Look, at least in North America, abortion is not illegal. In Canada or in America, you can go into a hospital and have an abortion. That is a fact. The question that I am asking is, does society have the right to invade the individual's privacy and ask for reasons for the abortion? If so, what gives society that right? How can we justify an invasion of privacy on that level?

Despite what prolifers may say, an unborn fetus has NO rights under the law. NONE. It is NOT a person under the law. Should it be? Possibly. But that's not the question here. The question is, does society's right to protection outweigh an individuals right to privacy? Because that's what it comes down to. Society needs to grow and it needs babies in order to do that. Without babies, societies die. Abortion reduces the number of babies thus threatening a society as a whole. However, is that threat great enough to justify taking away an individual's right to privacy?

The problem with any question is that there are too many answers. As the four "possibilities" you originally posted attest to there is never a simple black & white view of any topic, even life & death. We can only make our own decisions for any specific circumstance. Any over-riding law (such as the mother's rights vs. the fetus' rights issue of abortion) will always have circumstances where it is unfair for a given situation or abused via a loophole. Therefore I believe a person must make their own choices for any situation based on their own beliefs and suffer the consequences of their actions. In the case of #4 (the real controversial one) nothing by law can stop her from aborting to look good in a swimsuit should she decide too, but I personally would hope this hypothetical woman would rethink her actions. If she does go through with it, I'd hope the guilt haunts her in her dreams for the rest of her life, but maybe that's selfish of me. The point remains, however, that you must look at the whole of the law, not the extreme viewpoints, to properly judge the moral, ethical, and legal ramifications of it. In the case of abortion it's hard to find any sort of middle ground, so there will be no compromise. Even if science discoveres life to officially begin at "week X" of the pregnancy and the laws change to reflect this, how long do you think it will take before a new study concludes that life actually begins at "week y"?

Charlie Hu$$le makes a good point as well about abortion vs. animals vs. killing at war and our treatment of life in general. That brings up a whole different world of discussion that goes beyond the singular issue here, but I think is one we should all ask ourselves. Do we condemn one form of killing while sanctioning another? If we do, why have we made that decision and how does it reflect on us as individuals and as a society? Save that one for another thread...

[Minion]

The question is, does society's right to protection outweigh an individuals right to privacy?

That all depends. Society has every right to invade your privacy if it is to prevent an act of murder. So isn't the real question, is abortion the killing of a human being? And what warrants the death of a person? We're not allowed to help adults to die if they are suffering unbearably. Why is this different for unborn children? It isn't because unborn children aren't living human beings, because they are.

[Wyrmfire]

To Draxy:

It's not that I don't want the responsibiity. I just realize that it is not my descision, whether I am the parent or not. You might say I am pro-child's-choice. It is not MY place to decide whether life or death is preferable, nor is it the mother's. You have seen these thing, but have you really felt them? Can you say without a doubt that that child wants to die, without even asking?

To Hussar:

The question is, does society's right to protection outweigh an individuals right to privacy? Because that's what it comes down to. Society needs to grow and it needs babies in order to do that. Without babies, societies die. Abortion reduces the number of babies thus threatening a society as a whole. However, is that threat great enough to justify taking away an individual's right to privacy?

Honestly, I think that abortions don't really threaten society in any way that I can think of (America's, anyway, I'm not familiar with the nuances of Europe and Asia). I think (not sure though) that most of our population increases come from immigration anyway, or at least a large portion. Most of the reason for population decrease are birth control, not abortion: women are just not ready to have children until much later in life, and so they don't get married and raise a family until they are in their late thirties, if at all.

[Draxy]

Hi Wyrmfire,

I've raised, or am raising in the case of my youngest, who's just graduating to training pants, three of my own and I love my children more than most folks can imagine... but yes, if one of mine was suffering a similiar fate I'd help it to end... and cry myself sick about it afterwards and always wonder if it was the best choice.

So many just die ... and some, after years of struggle, were they are usually mentally challenged by comparison to non-addicted youngsters and almost always socially maladjusted, do make strong turn arounds. But some do not.

My second wifes eldest daughter had a close friend who had been addicted to crack during her pregnancy. She stuck it out though, got clean and fought to keep her baby and did. Little Vincent is the most disturbed and violently sadistic child I ever knew... and it is a direct result of being born addicted to crack. His mother has spent the last ten years caring for him with extreme devotion... but has finally given up. Why?

She had twin girls some years later, when he was eight and, quite purposefully, Vincent drowned one of them in the wading pool in the back yard when his mother ran in to grab the cellular phone off of the kitchen counter. She was in the house less than two minutes and he picked his eight month old baby sister out of her play pen and stuck her in the pool and held her head under water. She drowned. He told his mother he did it because she was teasing him.

Vincent was taken as a ward of the state, but his mother kept up the visits she was allowed, trying to forgive herself for the tradgedy, since she had long forgiven him, when he kicked his other little sister, then two, in the head during one of the visits.

This is not to say that all crack addicted babies grow up this way... but even with the extreme care he was given from birth onward... even with all the psychological intervention that she used, religiously, and all the special schools and all the extra financial burden of it; because she LOVED her boy, she was told that this was all but unavoidable because of his severely imbalanced brain chemistry and the other physiological problems inherent with "crack babies".

She visits him still, but always alone now, allows him his rages at her, the slaps and punches that are his primary method of communication, because she still loves her boy.

I truly pity her, but I pity Vincent far more. IF he ever becomes able to deal with society enough to live within it, will he then, knowing what he has done, ever be able to forgive himself?


Draxy

[Wyrmfire]

Draxy,

So, you want to kill everyone that might turn out to be a murderer, or suffer in their life? You're going to run out of people pretty fast if that's what you go by. Even if someone is likely to turn out that way, I still don't feel that killing them is an appropriate course of action.

I don't mean to soud uncaring in regards to your post, it does make me cringe. But, there is something else to remember: assuming that he was always acting like that, he should have been deep in counseling LONG before anything like that could happen. Even if Vincent was a monster, the fauslt lies partly with his mother for refusong to see what he really was. What I am trying to say is that there are other solutions to a problem like that than killing the boy before he has a chance to do any harm.

If I have offended, I apologize, but the thought of killing someone when there is a reasonable amount of uncertainty chills me to the bone.

[Draxy]

Wyrmfire my friend, that little boy had been in counciling or special classes or the like since he was three years old. He couldn't attend public schools any longer, by the age of seven none of them would have him except the one he attended that was over half populated with kids just like him. It's not all that rare any more.

His mother and everyone around him knew what he was capable of... but you simply can not anticipate the likes of his actions as a reality. It just isn't possible for most people to believe that a little boy could really do that, even when you KNOW intellectually that it is possible.

I'm not advocating killing three year olds who misbehave, I'm simply saying that a crack addicted child is being unmercifully handicapped before he/she is ever born and if the mother or a legal guardian decides on a 1st or even 2nd trimester abortion for that reason, because the kid is going to be born with two strikes against them, then I think it's understandable.


Draxy

[Minion]

I will agree that there is a danger involved with many pregnancies, especially crackpregnancies. And in the case you describe the death of a little girl could have been prevented by killing the boy before he was born. But Wyrmfire is right. You can't go around killing potential disturbed and violently sadistic kids, because you can't be certain that they are. Innocent until proven guilty should be applied in all situations. I myself know 2 crackbabies who are growing up with problems, and are at times confused and downright difficult, to say the least, despite of all the care that goes into their raising. But they aren't killers, and good kids at heart. The thought of them being killed before birth sickens me even more than your story of the boy who drowned his sister, because they wouldn't have deserved to die without being given a chance. Noone does.

[Draxy]

As I said already, I am not for advocating the killing of any child who is already born or even in the last trimester before being born. I am for allowing a mother or legally appointed guardian to make the choice to abort the child in the first or second trimester.

Draxy

[Minion]

I will agree with you on the 1st trimester. I can't bring myself to come to a decision on the 2nd, but as my daughter was born at the very beginning of the 3rd, and from being there for 4 pregnancies and watching ultrasounds and feeling movement etc during the 2nd trimester, I'm leaning towards opposition to it.

I cannot agree with abortion at any time, but I also cannot agree with forcing a mother to carry out a pregnancy under certain conditions. The problem with this topic is that we can't just draw a line and say "this side good, that side bad"

[Hussar]

It's so nice to see someone else say that for a change. That is the problem. There is no absolutes here. Most of us can agree on one end or the other, but it's the stuff in the middle that no one agrees on. No one seems to have a problem in the first case where there is a very real threat to the mother and most of us have a problem in case number 4 with the preggy bathing suit.

That being said, laws cannot be written in shades of grey. For a law to exist, there has to be a set boundary. A place where we, as society say, this is right and this is wrong. Not drinking and driving is right and drinking and driving is wrong. Not killing someone is right and murdering someone is wrong. Those laws are pretty easy.

The question isn't whether a fetus is alive. Of course it's alive. It's living cells. It's alive. That's not in question. The question is, is a fetus a person? Is a collection of 20 or so undifferentiated cells a person? If it is a person, when does it become a person? But that's the problem, there is no single point where you can diffinitively say, "Yes, that's a person." any more than you could look at a painter painting and say at a certain point, "Yup, that's a painting all right."

So, since laws, by their nature, must deal in black and white and this issue is anything but, can we justify enacting a law governing abortion?

[Wyrmfire]

Well, as far as the "gray" are is concerned, I come down firmly on banning abortions in the third trimester, and only in the forst or second if there is a demonstrable threat to the mother. That way you don't have to get in to their privacy- you make them provide medical proof that their own well being is in danger, instead of doing an extensive background check. To my knowledge, there is nothing that they would have to provide that would harm them in any way. I might be wrong, but I can' tthink of anything.

Awaiting Draxy's rebuttal.

[Hussar]

That's exactly the law in South Korea. What you just stated. So, what happens is the mother slips the doctor an extra couple of hundred bucks and he makes up a reason that her health is threatened.

When you say health is threatened, how badly does it have to be threatened? Must it be life threatening? How about mental health? Cannot that be an issue? Again, you are invading the woman's privacy because she has to "prove" that her health is threatened. How threatened does it have to be? 50% chance of death? 20? 90? Where do you say that the threat is enough to constitute a legitimate threat?

[Wyrmfire]

Hussar,

People will always circumvent the law to abort fetuses. One of my wors memories of high school is listening to a pregnant teenager describe her "abortion party"- she planned to get horribly drunk, stoned six ways from sunday, and then do jumping jacks until she collapsed. I don't know how it turned out, but I had to excuse myself and go to the restroom just to keep myself from beating the sh*t out of her.

And, I would consider any physical harm to the mother more than whatever normal is to be worthy of a first trimester abortion, and, say, 50% greater or more for the second trimester. I would say that mental harm does not in any way qualify, just because people have far to loose of a definition of "mental harm"- if a woman just doesn't want to deal with the responsibility or is afraid of childbirth, that would permit an abortion, which seems wrong to me... The above percentages are really just pulling numbers out of my bum, though, so if anyone disagrees, don't expect me to put up much of a fight...

[Draxy]

The law, unfortunately, is ENTIRELY about shades of grey once it is written. This is the reason a first year law student who weight lifts can still get a bad back carrying books around.... there are reams and tomes and entire libraries of precedent.

Try looking up, in a law library, precedent law on something like invasion of privacy. The clerk will shake his or her head, give you that "I pity your weekend plans look" (even though it's Tuesday when you go there) and point you towards the six wall length, ceiling high shelves that look like the iron frames of them are going to collapse at any second because of the weight.

Trying to decide what even constitutes what the court itself can request of a person, never mind what minor bureaucrat A (who will have to make most of these decisons to keep the already massively over burdened courts from swamping entirely) can access legally is a nightmare that I doubt most of the people who haven't taken some college level law courses can begin to understand.


Draxy

[Hussar]

That's not entirely accurate Draxy. While the court's interpretation of the law is about all the shades of grey, the law itself is not. The law is written in such a way that it is supposed to be pretty concrete where it applies. Not that this is always true, which is why lawyers always have jobs, heh. But, you can't have a law that says, well, it's okay in this case but not in that case. The courts can do that, certainly, but the law cannot.

As you say, the precedence for invasion of privacy is a huge issue. That is why there are so many precedents. If it weren't constantly being challenged, there wouldn't be the precedents.