On Barack Obama, abortion, and Hitler
Someone suggested that the comparisons between President Obama and Hitler-as-mass-murderer are justified by Obama's support of abortion. I responded as follows, with some editing together of different posts to make a unified monologue.
You make a fair point about abortion. However, putting that much blame on Obama specifically for all abortions in the US since he was twelve, when in fact even as President he has relatively little influence over the law on the issue, is still a severe exaggeration of his actual responsibility. He may support legalized abortion, with all the moral consequences thereof, but that's not comparable to being the single individual who directly ordered every single instance of it.
Further, while I don't agree with abortions of convenience, which describe over 95% of the 800-900k abortions in the US each year, abortion is fundamentally different than state-sponsored genocide. Abortion involves an inherent conflict of rights between two individuals, the mother and the child, both of whom are recognized as having rights. Abortion law is, by nature, an attempt to compromise between the rights of those individuals. Mass murder by the state, however, is the declaration that certain classes of individuals have no rights at all. Of course, how much that distinction is worth to you will vary with the relative weights you place upon the child's right to live and the woman's right to control her body, so for many it may end up being no distinction at all.
I think we actually agree on abortion, in large part. If being responsible for a child is not acceptable to you, then don't have sex. Abortion should not be used to evade responsibility for one's willful actions. My point was more that the SCOTUS ruling allowing abortion of convenience is interpretable as a matter of conflicting rights, wherein the weight of a fetus's right to live, relative to the mother's rights, is directly proportional to the fetus's gestational age and viability. If an eight-week fetus could survive and develop outside the womb, via whatever medical means, I think we'd see a complete rewrite of abortion law. Eliminate the conflict of rights, and abortion loses all justification as anything but a tool of convenience. That's one reason I support funding of the development of artificial wombs. It sounds sci-fi, but early research indicates the concept really is viable.
You make a fair point about abortion. However, putting that much blame on Obama specifically for all abortions in the US since he was twelve, when in fact even as President he has relatively little influence over the law on the issue, is still a severe exaggeration of his actual responsibility. He may support legalized abortion, with all the moral consequences thereof, but that's not comparable to being the single individual who directly ordered every single instance of it.
Further, while I don't agree with abortions of convenience, which describe over 95% of the 800-900k abortions in the US each year, abortion is fundamentally different than state-sponsored genocide. Abortion involves an inherent conflict of rights between two individuals, the mother and the child, both of whom are recognized as having rights. Abortion law is, by nature, an attempt to compromise between the rights of those individuals. Mass murder by the state, however, is the declaration that certain classes of individuals have no rights at all. Of course, how much that distinction is worth to you will vary with the relative weights you place upon the child's right to live and the woman's right to control her body, so for many it may end up being no distinction at all.
I think we actually agree on abortion, in large part. If being responsible for a child is not acceptable to you, then don't have sex. Abortion should not be used to evade responsibility for one's willful actions. My point was more that the SCOTUS ruling allowing abortion of convenience is interpretable as a matter of conflicting rights, wherein the weight of a fetus's right to live, relative to the mother's rights, is directly proportional to the fetus's gestational age and viability. If an eight-week fetus could survive and develop outside the womb, via whatever medical means, I think we'd see a complete rewrite of abortion law. Eliminate the conflict of rights, and abortion loses all justification as anything but a tool of convenience. That's one reason I support funding of the development of artificial wombs. It sounds sci-fi, but early research indicates the concept really is viable.
posted by Stephen Collings at
8:34 AM
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