TRUMP: "There has to be some form of punishment" for women who have abortions

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Women who have abortions do a very bad thing for generally understandable reasons. I think it's completely reasonable for a pro-life person to not want to see them punished harshly especially compared to e.g. the doctors.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I'll give ClassicConservative the benefit of the doubt and assume he's read Discipline and Punish.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

But I must ask - How do some pro-lifers justify calling abortion murder while letting women, who seek out the abortion, off the hook? If abortion really is murder to them, then a woman seeking an abortion doctor is almost exactly like, say, a wife seeking a contract killer to snuff out her husband.

Because women who seek abortions usually have much more sympathetic motivations, and because, if we're being honest about what sorts of laws a decent society would or should actually tolerate, punishing them is simply impracticable to do in any way that's subjectively reasonable.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Because women who seek abortions usually have much more sympathetic motivations, and because, if we're being honest about what sorts of laws a decent society would or should actually tolerate, punishing them is simply impracticable to do in any way that's subjectively reasonable.

I guess, but I still think the people who want to ban abortion but don't want to punish the women should not call abortion murder if they don't intend to punish the woman. It's hypocritical. Why call it murder if you don't intend to treat it like murder?

You're right, actually. This is a good reason to prefer a word like 'homicide'. There are all sorts of types of homicide with all sorts of types of consequences. Unfortunately, 'abortion is homicide' comes across as the sort of technical statement that makes most people's eyes glaze over and makes for terrible copy.

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Atlas pro-lifers are way nastier about it than pro-lifers I know in other contexts. I'm not sure if this is because of selection bias in my offline life, the fact that Atlas is so overwhelmingly male, the fact that I live in Massachusetts, or some combination of the three.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Atlas pro-lifers are way nastier about it than pro-lifers I know in other contexts. I'm not sure if this is because of selection bias in my offline life, the fact that Atlas is so overwhelmingly male, the fact that I live in Massachusetts, or some combination of the three.

I'd wager that the average pro-life activist would tend to have even nastier views on the matter. The average person who votes "no in most cases" in a poll probably not, though. From what I've seen, most Americans tend to fall somewhere on the spectrum rather than having clear-cut views.

Right, because clear-cut views tend to be subjectively unreasonable. 'A mentally and physically healthy woman in her late twenties or early thirties should be allowed to abort in the third trimester on a whim' is a subjectively unreasonable position, as is 'a fifteen-year-old girl who has been raped by her uncle shouldn't be allowed to take RU486', even though those are the views that make the most 'sense' according to most coherent ethical frameworks. Most pro-lifers I know would deeply want the fifteen-year-old not to abort but would also be squeamish at the idea of legally prohibiting her from doing so. Some of these people are in fact activists for that position; they just don't have very loud voices.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Atlas pro-lifers are way nastier about it than pro-lifers I know in other contexts. I'm not sure if this is because of selection bias in my offline life, the fact that Atlas is so overwhelmingly male, the fact that I live in Massachusetts, or some combination of the three.

I'd wager that the average pro-life activist would tend to have even nastier views on the matter. The average person who votes "no in most cases" in a poll probably not, though. From what I've seen, most Americans tend to fall somewhere on the spectrum rather than having clear-cut views.

Right, because clear-cut views tend to be subjectively unreasonable. 'A mentally and physically healthy woman in her late twenties or early thirties should be allowed to abort in the third trimester on a whim' is a subjectively unreasonable position, as is 'a fifteen-year-old girl who has been raped by her uncle shouldn't be allowed to take RU486', even though those are the views that make the most 'sense' according to most coherent ethical frameworks.

That is why I don't understand the extremist Pro-Lifer's who do NOT want ANY exceptions in the case of RAPE, INCEST or the LIFE OF THE MOTHER. saying it's a gift from God is very scarring and degrading to the raped woman. Imagine carrying that child to term and it being a constant reminder of your rape? How would you feel? A woman or child should NEVER be forced to carry their rapists child EVER.

I believe women should have the choice after consulting their doctor whether or not to terminate a pregnancy, it is very hard on a woman to make that choice, it's not like they go and willy nilly get an abortion.

The standard counterargument to this is that there's apparently a statistic floating around out there that vastly more women who abort after rape regret aborting than women who don't abort regret not aborting, and I'm willing and desirous to believe that that's the case, but I haven't actually seen the statistic myself and it seems like the sort of survey question that's tailor-made to get dishonest responses.

I've actually never met anybody who doesn't believe in life of the mother exceptions but I'm sure for every terrible position there are HPs willing to hold it.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I'm not sure why the "subjectively" qualifier is necessary here. Obviously it's subjective in that people will have different positions (and indeed I'm sure there are a good number of people who would agree with each statement), but that doesn't mean that beliefs in this area should be exempted from judgments of objective morality.

Tic from the way I write in some of my theology papers.

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Oh, yeah, there are a ton of people who believe that. On my less stridently Catholic days I believe it myself.

(The profile--letter-reversing pun intended--of the types of activists I was alluding to above, by the way, is: Young, well-educated, Catholic women who I in many cases met through Tolkien fandom.)

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Placing you to the right of Thomas Aquinas there (who would have considered it ‘something less than homicide’)

And yet, I'm to the left of Gregory of Nyssa on whether or not somebody would go to hell for doing it.

(I'm aware that this may not come across as an appropriate riposte or worthy of a to somebody who's not still reeling from a fall semester spent arguing about patristic and medieval theology.)

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If existence itself is based on feelings, why is murder wrong?

You're sort of proving my point on the ontology!  Because you conceive a zygote as life you make the comparison to murder. A pregnant woman isn't wilfully 'murdering' anything; that is not her intent when choosing an abortion.

This is, I agree, an important distinction, and feeds back into the argument I've been making to (or, in some cases, over against) other pro-lifers over the past day that women who have abortions are way more sympathetic than people who commit murder/homicide/acts that pro-lifers believe to be murder or homicide in other contexts and for other reasons.

Re: Your post directly in response to me: I've alluded in the recent past that while I'd still be personally uncomfortable with an equal-protection finding of a right to abortion I'd accept it as perfectly valid and respectable constitutional law.

In general my thoughts on what the best political/legal (as opposed to religious, moral, medical, feminist activists, et cetera) attitude to adopt or consensus to advocate on this might be have been swinging pretty wildly back and forth for...longer than I've let on, and will probably continue to do so, even though my personal religious/moral attitudes are probably going to stay put (and have been where they are for, again, longer than I've let on).

I haven't yet responded to your main philosophical argument--either at the beginning of the year or now--because I don't yet have the grounding in the relevant fields of philosophy to adequately do so and I respect you too much to bullsh**t something. (Also because I'm on Atlas Forum during a class discussion about WHINSEC and liberation theology and don't want to get too too involved in this conversation right now in case something interesting pops up.)

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

That ‘Brand USA’ Christianity (Paul Weyrich et al)  so readily adopted the Catholic position on ‘defining life’, couched as it is marian piety in order to fight the culture wars is the strangest takeaway from all of this!

Yes; the fact that I had 'Rosa Mística' in my signature for months probably does a good job of indicating my own high regard for Marian piety but the fact that American-Jesus Protestantism has adopted that posture--in this context and no other!--is deeply bizarre and obviously done in bad faith.

My grandfather fought in the big one too. He was very proud of having done so but equally proud of not having killed. I think that says a lot about the deep ambivalence that most people naturally have towards defensive violence (which from the perspective of the pregnant woman abortion typically is).