e, I'll troll a little: I don't think this pro-choice gotcha works: "If abortion were illegal, what punishment exactly do you see fit for the mothers who have abortions?" [crickets]. It is reasonable to say that an act that should be illegal, but you still have compassion for the perpetrator and want to see them get help instead of be punished.
Sure, but rarely would those acts be "murder" or "genocide", which is what the pro-lifers in this hypothetical are labelling abortion.
Rarely, but there are acts of murder under duress, which the anti-choicers would see as parallel, presumably.
I'll troll a lot:
"If abortion were illegal, what punishment exactly do you see fit for the mothers who have abortions women who shoot legislators?"
It is reasonable to say that an act that should be illegal, but you still have compassion for the perpetrator and want to see them get help instead of be punished.
I think it doesn't work because one of the major anti-choice narratives is that women don't know what they're doing. Waiting periods, counseling requirements, mandatory ultrasounds, concern trolling about post-abortion regret. In that case, it makes sense to protect women from themselves with abortion restrictions and while punishing doctors who perform abortions.
2 & 4 aren't wrong, exactly, but the overlap between anti-choicers* and people who think it's fine to try 12-y.o.s as adults is, what, 90%?
*the ones who'd call abortion genocide, at any rate. Let's say we're talking about everyone who wants a ban even in the case of rape & incest.
5: Well, I sure as hell think that conservatives in general are opportunistic, inconsistent, and evil. But I'm just quibbling over one pro-choice talking point.
Let's say we're talking about everyone who wants a ban even in the case of rape & incest.
I don't know why I even bring this up but this particular wording drives me up the wall. Either the incest in question is rape, statutory or otherwise, or the person bringing it up is just cool with eugenics, which isn't what you'd normally expect from people who are trying to restrict abortions.
That's something that never occurred to me but seems obvious now that you mentioned it.
I think we've had exactly this exchange before, but my sense of the "rape or incest" language is that it's intended to exclude statutory rape without exacerbating circumstances. So, pregnant fifteen-year-old by an adult man? She got herself into it. By a family member? I suppose we can cut her some slack.
I assume the 'incest' addition in there is mostly for people who think that most rapes are really just sluts trying to lie to people in order to get away with seducing virtuous men, which I bet overlaps with pro-life positions to a substantial degree.
Just a note, I do recommend reading the linked article. It's the most compelling thing I've read online this week. All of the stories are really interesting.
It is reasonable to say that an act that should be illegal, but you still have compassion for the perpetrator and want to see them get help instead of be punished.
Yes, it is reasonable to say that. But you know what? If someone want to use that defense, they should actually have to say that. If they are going to use a bullshit analogy to murder and genocide, there's no reason to cut anyone slack on articulating the work-arounds they use to try to get abortion to fit into that model.
Ever since the original video was publicized I've seen more anti-choicers willing to just bald facedly state that they absolutely would be fine with seeing the women involved prosecuted for murder/manslaughter/whateveritis. I think it only caught them off guard at first and once the country got a good look at it they mostly realized that if they didn't say exactly that they'd be revealed as exactly what they really are, so they just bit the bullet on it. I doubt they'd be comfortable with it in practice, because as often as not the women getting the abortions are friends and family members of theirs, but these are the same people who you'll find responding to other 'but what about...?' cases with things like "oh well actual rape can't get anyone pregnant" or "there aren't really any cases where medical problems force someone to decide between a late term abortion and death/a baby that dies in agony minutes afterwards/etc. because even when it looks like that might happen God intervenes to make sure it doesn't so you just need to have faith."
Also "It's murder and the punishment should be forgiveness!" is the sort of answer that deserves and occasionally even gets scornful laughter. So while it's the sort of thing that liberal audiences think of as a great compromise-aren't-we-all-people-of-good-will-really? line it's not something that should be getting any respect or being added in as a potential mitigating factor.
8
Incest, even 1st degree incest, isn't really that bad as long as it's infrequent and there's not some immediate deleterious genetic trait. On the flip side, incest can also be ok once it's widespread and sustained enough and you've selected out all the really bad stuff. Most small isolated groups are pretty inbred, like South Koreans or Norwegians or cheetahs. It's mostly culturally gross, but there's really no reason to make brother/sister or cousin reproduction illegal except that there's no political pressure to get rid of this remnant of eugenics laws.
I also agree with those people saying that you can both think abortion is murder and women shouldn't be prosecuted as long as you also think that women are less than fully rational human beings who cannot be held responsible for their behavior. That's pretty consistent with certain strains of Christianity. It's also consistent with trying teenage boys as adults, because you might think men reach adulthood by age 12-15, but women still maintain the mental/moral judgment of a child.
South Koreans or Norwegians or cheetahs
2: Sure, but that conversation takes place at sentencing. It's a mitigating factor when someone commits a crime, not a finding that the person shouldn't stand trial.
You don't hear antiabortion types make the argument: "The woman should be given a break at sentencing because of duress." Or maybe, "Prosecutors should consider whether or not to charge a particular woman who has an abortion."
If they said that, then I'd agree that the argument has a certain logical consistency.
But the inevitable form of the argument is: "Women shouldn't be prosecuted for having abortions."
Nobody says there are cases where murder or manslaughter should never be prosecuted. Murder and manslaughter are crimes - or they're not murder or manslaughter. This is a definitional thing.
Now if you're talking about feticide as justifiable homicide - well, that's a rather bizarre argument that, once again, nobody actually makes. But it's a pro-choice argument.
Women could probably get out of prosecution if they claimed they were standing their ground and the fetus was wearing a hoodie.
to make this comment thread more active, I'll troll a little: I don't think this pro-choice gotcha works: "If abortion were illegal, what punishment exactly do you see fit for the mothers who have abortions?" [crickets].
Well, sure, it doesn't "work" in the sense that it wouldn't change peoples' minds. Gotchas and few things in general rarely change peoples' minds. However, it's a fair question to ask, it's something they'd have to deal with if they got their alleged wish and got abortion banned, and I think most fence-sitters about abortion would find the answer or lack thereof revealing. What more do you want from a gotcha?
What if a policewoman had an abortion in the line of duty?
Oh, c'mon. We all know that it starts with "the woman was under duress" and it ends with Nicaragua, and women who have miscarriages are jailed. Oh sorry, I meant, Alabama, -today- (is that where it was? I forget .. the recent incident).
The goat-f**kers (poor, poor goats) wanna enslave all women. Always have, always will.
Hell, I think that's their main goal in life.
Poor goats. Poor, poor goats.
I wouldn't have said that either South Korea or Norway was particularly isolated. You may be confusing it with Iceland?
Nor are cheetahs - the population has just bottlenecked, which is a different issue.
I thought the cheetah population was pretty fragmented, so there may be more recent inbreeding clusters in addition to the ancient bottleneck, no? Anyway the same pattern caused both Norwegians and South Koreans to be world class sprinters, which is probably the common denominator.
16.1 IPMHB my grandfather's grandfather the doctor/med school prof who was the son of two products of first cousin marriages. Some of his rants on the foolishness of the incest taboo are preserved in the Connecticut State Library.
I was mostly entirely going for humor over total accuracy. Yes, small island populations are considered most exemplary, but the same thing still holds to a large extent for isolated peninsula populations as well.
We're also talking about time frames of >1,000 years ago or so, which means a lot more places counted as isolated.
An arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife.
That's the way you spell New York
I seem to recall, about 1000 years ago, Norwegians tended to get around.
Did you just slut-shame Vikings?
"Slutty" seems not quite right, but I'd say the Viking thing of sleeping with each one of a dead man's companions before being ritually murdered in his honor qualifies as "kinky."
Yeah, I think 11th century Norwegians not only weren't very isolated, they weren't nearly as isolated as everyone else thought they should have been. Mountain peoples would maybe be a better bet - the Swiss, the Caucasians.