Why Abortion Isn’t Important

[Mitchell_b55]

[b]Why Abortion Isn’t Important[/b] ← Caught your attention didn't it?

Human Life Review | Summer 2002 | David S. Oderberg

Abortion is not important. I never thought I could write such a sentence. In fact, I never thought I could think it. But I do. That’s not all. I also think that euthanasia is not important. Nor cloning. Nor contraception. Nor IVF, embryo experimentation, genetic engineering, nor any other issue at the core of pro-life activity and policy. In fact, pro-life activity and policy themselves are not important. However, before you write a letter of outrage to the editor, or tear up your subscription, allow me to explain.

To clarify what I mean by these issues’ not being important, let me point out that I am not saying for a minute that pro-lifers should stop being pro-lifers, that we should spend our afternoons tending our rose bushes rather than campaigning, protesting, writing, or whatever it is that we do best in defending the pro-life cause. Like most pro-lifers, I am opposed to every single one of the things listed above. Every one of them is a moral crime, an attack on the sanctity of human life, and every one of them should be opposed in heart and mind and action by all people of good will. And yet—they are not important.

As a professional philosopher, I am trained to look at the big picture. True, most of my fellow philosophers, at least in the Anglophone academies, have pretty much given up on big pictures. We philosophers hardly ever talk about big pictures at our end-of-term garden parties, or in the common room between lectures. We don’t knock on each other’s doors and say, "Hey, Fred, what do you think of the state of Western civilization?" It’s just not done. What is done is to knock on a colleague’s door and say, "Hey, Fred, what do you think about Quine’s denial of the analytic/synthetic distinction? Don’t you think recent theories of meaning have cast doubt on his critique?"

Don’t get me wrong. Quine’s denial of the analytic/synthetic distinction is important and well worth debating. Plenty of good papers have been published on it. My list of things to research in philosophy would be a lot shorter if I didn’t have subtle or not-so-subtle technical distinctions to analyse. It was good enough for Aristotle and St Thomas Aquinas (let alone all the other great figures in the history of my subject)—so it’s good enough for me. Yet through it all, through the endless training in technicalities, and even despite the best efforts of many of those who taught me to philosophise, I have, one way or another, been trained to look at the big picture.

Which is why I have come more and more to see that pro-life issues, including the ones on which I have published at length and will continue to publish, form a smaller component of the overall stance that should be taken against society than many pro-lifers would think. Social activism, like everything else in the marketplace of goods and ideas, inevitably involves a division of labour. Animal rights campaigners (for all the bad mixed in with their good intentions) campaign for animals and very little else; animals are their world, the abolition of the battery cage their raison d’être. Campaigners against paedophilia have the welfare of children as their sole social concern, and see social policy through the prism of their anxiety that children be protected at all costs. Anti-globalists interpret every facet of economic policy in terms of its promotion or reduction of the depredations of transnational big business.

Pro-lifers are no exception. Of course I exaggerate, but the basic point is correct, that when a person embarks on the defence of a cause (and why they pick one cause rather than another depends on all sorts of reasons both personal and political), they tend to focus exclusively on that cause and to see all other social issues primarily in terms of how those issues reflect upon it. The division of labour is a good and necessary thing, both in economics and in social activism. I am certainly not advocating the disappearance of single-issue campaigning, or of multi-issue campaigning (like pro-life activism) that revolves around one large chunk of social policy. No policy would ever change if activists regularly spread their campaigning too thinly, thus depleting their intellectual and emotional (not to mention financial) resources beyond their usefulness in any one specialized operation.

What I am advocating, however, is that pro-lifers as a whole spend more time thinking about bigger issues and how they relate to their primary concern to protect innocent human life from womb to tomb. Perhaps the single thing that contributed most to this realization was when I first read the famous paper published in 1958 by the eminent (and recently departed) Cambridge philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe. Writing about the utilitarianism that has, since Bentham and Mill, taken over virtually all moral theorising in the English-speaking departments of philosophy (perhaps less true today of high-level moral theory than of applied ethics, where of course the damage is really done—witness Singer and Co.), Professor Anscombe noted that it had become a serious topic of moral debate among philosophers whether it could ever be justified to kill an innocent man (e.g., to save five others). Her response was brave—brave because it went so contrary to the grain of philosophy as argument and dialectic. What she said (and here I paraphrase and interpret1) was that when confronted with a person who really thinks it a live moral issue whether killing the innocent might ever be justifiable, even if that person offers sophisticated utilitarian arguments in support, the right thing to do is to walk away rather than argue; for such a person shows evidence of a corrupt mind.

Here is one of the (to my mind) greatest philosophers produced by England in the last century, telling people—especially other philosophers—that sometimes it is better to walk away than to argue. Why? Because a person’s conscience can become so corrupt, and lead to such equally corrupt rationalizations, that to engage them in serious argument about those rationalizations is both pointless—being unlikely to have the slightest impact on their thinking—and, what is worse, dangerous—bringing the thinker of good will into serious danger of having his own conscience perverted by the sophistries of the other.

Professor Anscombe did, nevertheless, write much in defence of life— though, notably, much of it for those who already valued life, arming them with arguments, rather than for those who could not even see the truth of the conclusions the arguments were arguments for. As to activism, well, it is not often that one sees a picture of an eighty-year-old female academic lying on the ground being dragged off by the police to the local lock-up. Her crime? Protesting outside an abortuary, of course.

Had she decided that protest against the devaluers of life was more rational than engaging them in argument over the futility of utilitarian thinking? I never got the chance to ask her, but the remarks in her 1958 paper gave pause for thought. After all, thousands of philosophers across the Western world (and it is the West with which I am solely concerned) continue to pose the very sorts of question Anscombe derided as showing evidence of moral corruption. Killing the innocent? No, that’s no longer even a question—most philosophers do not have a problem with it. Rather, it’s meatier territory they stake out now. In fact, when I first learned that the Doctor Exsecrabilis Peter Singer was now somewhat of a fan of bestiality,2 I caught myself being not nearly as surprised as I thought I might be: surely this was the logical working out (by a thinker who satisfies G. K. Chesterton’s definition of a maniac—not someone who has lost his reason, but someone who has lost everything but his reason) of a moral position that had already been poisoned decades ago by those first thoughts about whether morality is all about costs and benefits, and whether the job of modern moralists was to overthrow tradition and replace it with a brand new morality for our brand new times.

I assume it will be paedophilia next. Or perhaps incest. (Only a few weeks ago I happened to listen on BBC radio to a learned discussion of incest [not involving Singer] that was as remarkable for its high seriousness as for the insouciance of its participants.) I ask pro-lifers: can we really expect to have a rational debate with these custodians of what’s left of our cultural norms? Perhaps we should keep trying, lest there be one single person out there who changes his mind because of what pro-lifers have to say. Nevertheless, we also play right into the hands of the modern moralists when we approach ethical debate with such a narrow focus. What happens when a pro-lifer publicly debates, say, the so-called "morning-after pill" (alias the early abortion pill) with one of its advocates? Usually, the pro-lifer is accused of an unhealthy obsession with what goes on in people’s bedrooms. Why all this fixation on sex? they want to know. Is it the usual "Catholic guilt" thing, or the fact that they want to deny to others what they secretly wish they could have for themselves? Why don’t they get out of other people’s private lives and worry about their own?

Of course, none of these responses is remotely rational. But the point is that listeners to such debates usually take the rhetorical bait, having long ago abandoned any pretence at rational thought about the issues themselves. And so pro-lifers are portrayed all too often as swivel-eyed, obsessive single-issue fanatics. Needless to say, the double standards are obvious, since such epithets are rarely applied to animal liberationists or anti-globalists. The pro-lifers always get the worst of it: partly due to the obsessions of their opponents, who are really the ones who are utterly fixated on all things carnal; partly through a genuine fear that pro-lifers still (more so in the USA than the UK, by far) have political clout and can actually change things, at least by clogging the courts and slowing down the passage of anti-life measures, at most by getting their own measures adopted (e.g. anti-euthanasia legislation). Partly, as well, due to a tiny trace of residual moral conscience left in their critics. But partly also, it must be said, to the pro-lifers’ own excessively narrow focus.

Does that mean I advocate that pro-lifers should stop being obsessed by matters affecting the sanctity of life? Of course not. If we are not obsessed by life and death, we might as well not be obsessed by anything. What I do advocate, however, is that pro-lifers increase their obsession—not just with life matters, but with the whole state of Western society. We need to be obsessed by the state of utter desolation into which Western society is throwing itself. It may well be (as I believe) that what is left of Western civilization is doomed to extinction—but doing and caring nothing about it is just not an option. It is not only on what we achieve (and we may achieve a lot in the short or medium term), but on what we defend that we will be judged. And we must come to the realization that when a society has reached a state in which abortion and other attacks on life are not only tolerated; not only legalized; not only accepted as normal; but are positively embraced by millions of people as the very solution to what ails that society—then we must realize that something has not only gone seriously wrong, but went wrong a long time ago, long before the Sixties, long before any of us was alive.

We do not need to become social or cultural historians to analyse the current state of things. We should also acknowledge that there is a feedback loop among the phenomena under discussion: explanation is not always in the one direction. A general state of slow-burning moral disintegration gave rise to the climate in which the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s could take place; but equally, with that revolution now secure and its ageing vanguard installed as our rulers, the revolution feeds back into the wider state of decay and gives it added momentum. Which way the explanation should go in a given case is best left to the historians. What is more important is that we need instead to see that actions such as abortion can only ever become the norm in a society in which the very bonds that tie us together as human beings have been torn apart. We need to understand that the anti-life movement is a secondary cancer, a metastasis of a primary tumour that began to grow when the West began to lose its religious sensibilities, its sense of communal obligation, its norms of respect and due deference for the elderly, the wise, the experienced, those who govern in our name, its standards of gentility and politeness, when people began twistedly to interpret manners as hypocrisy, noblesse oblige as exploitation, civic duty as state oppression, state patronage as a human right, love of neighbour as poking one’s nose into the business of others, hypocrisy as the greatest vice of all (to which I reply—better double standards than no standards), and proper autonomy as the right to do as one pleases.

The primary cancer is as deep as it is old, and it is almost certainly terminal. But for us—as campaigners, writers, thinkers, activists—its terminal nature cannot be of prime concern. What we must attend to is the enrichment of our thinking about pro-life issues by studied consideration of just how the anti-life culture is rooted in a much broader social pathology. We need not, and must not, become self-styled experts on everything that is wrong with Western society (which of us can claim any such expertise?), and we must not dilute the pro-life message to the point where it no longer stands out against the cacophony of perpetual social commentary that clogs the exhausted airwaves and ever diminishing magazines of "opinion."

Still, pro-lifers must widen their perspective. We must understand the simple fact that a society in which people are judged not by their looks but by their virtues is a society in which abortion would be impossible. That a society in which travellers regularly give up their seats to the elderly is a society in which euthanasia would be impossible. That the antithesis of a me-first society in which physical perfection is the ultimate goal is a society in which genetic screening for physical handicap would be considered not as a moral outrage, but as just plain absurd—unthinkable, even. This is what I mean by saying that abortion is not important. A society which has gone as far as devaluing the lives of its own members has gone wrong long before. It is not just the metastases which must be attacked, but their malignant origin. Sure, let us be obsessed by anything that touches on life and death—how could we not? But let us also be obsessed by much, much more.

NOTES

1. To read her exact words, see ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ in her collected papers entitled Ethics, Religion and Politics: Philosophical Papers, vol. III (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), pp.26-42.

2. See his review of Midas Dekkers, Dearest Pet: On Bestiality, published on www.nerve.com in 2001 and also in the British magazine Prospect (April 2001).

---

[b]Notable Comments[/b]

[quote]Romans 1 : 28 - 32

The Condemnation of the Unrighteous

And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what should not be done. They are filled with every kind of unrighteousness, wickedness, covetousness, malice. They are rife with envy, murder, strife, deceit, hostility. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, contrivers of all sorts of evil, disobedient to parents, senseless, covenant-breakers heartless, ruthless. Although they fully know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but also approve of those who practice them.[/quote]

[quote]2 Timothy 3 : 1 - 5

But understand this, that in the last days difficult1 times will come. For people will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, slanderers, without self-control, savage, opposed to what is good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, loving pleasure rather than loving God. They will maintain the outward appearance of religion but will have repudiated its power. So avoid people like these.[/quote]

[quote]FIRST THINGS November 2002

The unstated premise of those who have adopted this strategy is that the Justices do not understand the nature of abortion, and that if they are forced to confront the scientific and medical facts about the conception and development of the unborn child, they will be compelled to reconsider Roe v. Wade and hold that the unborn child is a constitutional person. To speak in spiritual terms, the critics assume that the problem lies in the intellect rather than the will. That premise is mistaken. Every member of the Court understands what an abortion is. If there was any doubt about this before, the Court's decision in Stenberg v. Carhart two years ago, striking down Nebraska's partial-birth abortion law, should have laid that doubt to rest. The majority opinion's cold and clinical description of various abortion methods betrays no ignorance of the nature of abortion. The Court understands that the purpose and effect of an abortion is to kill an unborn (and, in some instances, a partially born) child. Whatever reservations some members of the Carhart majority may have about the morality of abortion in general or the partial-birth technique in particular, those reservations have not affected their collective judgment that women need abortion to be legal in order for them to be full and equal members of American society. It is that judgment, and not any misunderstanding of what happens in an abortion, that is the source of our present predicament, as even a casual perusal of the Court's opinion in Casey reaffirming Roe v. Wade would disclose.[/quote]

Edited March 8, 2008 by petrus_scholasticus

[Autumn Dusk]

To say that life (in this case abortion) is not of the paramount is denial of the true big picture.

To say that animal rights are comparable to humans, or the sexual exploitation of children is similar is overlooking that life has to be created for these actions to happen.

[Mitchell_b55]

That's not his point. In fact, read it again, your drawing an erroneous conclusion from what he said. Did you miss his point. Please, get back to me when you can identify his primary point. Hint, it is not that abortion is not important. The notable comments, a.k.a. pieces that I deemed notable from Free Republic, all lend light on this issue. He actually described the very thing that you are doing in the early paragraphs.


P.S. This is one of the most respected philosophers, and who is a unrepentant defender of life, just as I am, but who sees that it a larger social phenomenon... well, I'm getting ahead of myself. Read it again and then tell me the conclusions you draw. It might help to refer to the text. I can't explain it right now, because it will take me until next week this time to wake up if I don't sleep now.

Edited March 8, 2008 by petrus_scholasticus

[rkwright]

[quote]Does that mean I advocate that pro-lifers should stop being obsessed by matters affecting the sanctity of life? Of course not. If we are not obsessed by life and death, we might as well not be obsessed by anything. What I do advocate, however, is that pro-lifers increase their obsession—not just with life matters, but with the whole state of Western society. We need to be obsessed by the state of utter desolation into which Western society is throwing itself. It may well be (as I believe) that what is left of Western civilization is doomed to extinction—but doing and caring nothing about it is just not an option. It is not only on what we achieve (and we may achieve a lot in the short or medium term), but on what we defend that we will be judged. And we must come to the realization that when a society has reached a state in which abortion and other attacks on life are not only tolerated; not only legalized; not only accepted as normal; but are positively embraced by millions of people as the very solution to what ails that society—then we must realize that something has not only gone seriously wrong, but went wrong a long time ago, long before the Sixties, long before any of us was alive.[/quote]

So he's really not advocating a change in anything. Just keep on advocating matters affecting the sanctity of life. And start obsessing more over other things too.

Seriously, can we state the obvious anymore? I can't believe I just read that whole article to be told that the whole Western society is worth obsessing over... I could have looked outside to tell you that.

[jeffpugh]

Great article.

An error in the beginning is an error indeed.

I think the problem is the age of "enlightenment" (or endarkenment as it goes in my circle). This is the point in history where humans decided that the God's gift of "I" was more important to them than other's gift of "I" (that is, rationality, person-hood). What we are fighting for is the proper order of things: Love of God, and Love of Neighbour as Self. There is an over-emphasis on self, and it's going to destroy our civilisation. There is the big picture.

[the 13th papist]

I have to agree that the problem of the culture of death derives from a fundamental orientation which is incompatable with Christianity. They so misunderstand basic concepts life life, the good, and love, that it is often impossible to have an intellegible conversation with them. Also, philosophical debate often lacks the power to change another's opinion because we, as human persons, are not just thinking things, but also feeling things. We often require conversion of the heart before conversion of the mind.

[Deb]

The writer assumes that all pro-lifers or most, only have one little narrow point, to fight against abortion. In my life, most of the prolife activists I know have many areas of concern that they are involved in and are certainly not oblivious to the complete decline of our society. Abortion is just the biggest and most visible sign of it.
Lots of words to just say, hey, look at all the bad carp too. Sometimes, philosophers just talk too much.

[Mitchell_b55]

I wanted to see reactions. It seems that some haven't really grasped his point, except the 13th papist and SMM. We must recognise that a small error in principle is a large error in conclusion. It is the 'fundamental orientation' of our society that allows abortion. In that way, we can't fight abortion with arguments and hope to win unless there is a 360° turnaround in the most basic philosophies of our civilisation. Until that happens we cannot win the war against life. Because a civilisation that is even willing to contemplate the death of the innocent and try to justify it was corrupted further down the tree, perhaps poisoned at the very root.

When I read this article in late 2003, I was in eight grade and I had not yet converted to Catholicism. In fact, I had been reading both Christian and Taoist philosophies. However, I have always been pro-life, since I first found out what abortion was, and when I read this I realised that he was right, it was something more, something deeper. I hadn't found the Church, yet, but I would very soon and I intended to carry this philosophy with me, because it is so important, it might be said that it is the fundament on which all hope of social change rests.

That said, I will comment in full when I get the chance, until then consider this — why are we trying to show people that abortion is the killing of an innocent child? The judges on the supreme court know exactly what they're doing, unfortunately there is a perverted understanding of choice and that understanding isn't going to effect a change until we address this perversion and likely until we address all of the perversions in Western thought. I'm agreeing that abortion isn't important, because it isn't about abortion it's about something much much deeper and we need to address that problem before we can guarantee the right to life. It isn't that philosophers write too much, it's that they must be careful to elaborate everything to guarantee the right interpretation, an interpretation that reflects their premises and conclusion.

This is what we're missing:

[quote]We need to understand that [u]the anti-life movement is a secondary cancer[/u], [u]a metastasis of a primary tumour[/u] that began to grow when the West began to lose its religious sensibilities, its sense of communal obligation, its norms of respect and due deference for the elderly, the wise, the experienced, those who govern in our name, its standards of gentility and politeness, when people began twistedly to interpret manners as hypocrisy, noblesse oblige as exploitation, civic duty as state oppression, state patronage as a human right, love of neighbour as poking one’s nose into the business of others, hypocrisy as the greatest vice of all (to which I reply—better double standards than no standards), and proper autonomy as the right to do as one pleases.[/quote]

The metastasis is the process by which a cancer spreads. Anti-life is the result of this cancer spreading, and we need to target the source to get results. Like Mr. Oderberg, I say that this is not a question relinquishing our obsession with life issues, but realising that it's in what we defend not in what we accomplish that we will be judged.

We can't win the abortion wars, Roe versus Wade will not be overturned, until the other "carp" as you put is realigned with the natural moral law. This is about totality, about the big picture, and even though we can have single issue activists (or multi-issue activists) they need to work as one coherent unit.

As for judging the pro-life movement as having 'one little narrow point to fight against abortion' (and other anti-life issues), this is also my experience. That said, Mr. Oderberg may be one of the most respected pro-life activists that we have on our side. His work in this field allows him to generalise without too frail a basis. Consider that. He isn't attacking pro-life activists, he is defending them.

Edited March 10, 2008 by petrus_scholasticus

[rkwright]

[quote name='petrus_scholasticus' post='1475119' date='Mar 10 2008, 05:05 PM']I wanted to see reactions. It seems that some haven't really grasped his point, except the 13th papist and SMM. We must recognise that a small error in principle is a large error in conclusion. It is the 'fundamental orientation' of our society that allows abortion. In that way, we can't fight abortion with arguments and hope to win unless there is a 360° turnaround in the most basic philosophies of our civilisation. Until that happens we cannot win the war against life. Because a civilisation that is even willing to contemplate the death of the innocent and try to justify it was corrupted further down the tree, perhaps poisoned at the very root.

When I read this article in late 2003, I was in eight grade and I had not yet converted to Catholicism. In fact, I had been reading both Christian and Taoist philosophies. However, I have always been pro-life, since I first found out what abortion was, and when I read this I realised that he was right, it was something more, something deeper. I hadn't found the Church, yet, but I would very soon and I intended to carry this philosophy with me, because it is so important, it might be said that it is the fundament on which all hope of social change rests.

That said, I will comment in full when I get the chance, until then consider this — why are we trying to show people that abortion is the killing of an innocent child, why are trying to defend life, the judges on the supreme court know exactly what they're doing, unfortunately there is a perverted understanding of choice and that understanding isn't going to effect a change until we address this perversion and likely until we address all of the perversions in Western thought. I'm agreeing that abortion isn't important, because it isn't about abortion it's about something much much deeper and we need to address that problem before we can guarantee the right to life. It isn't that philosophers write too much, it's that they must be careful to elaborate everything to guarantee the right interpretation, an interpretation that reflects their premises and conclusion.

This is what we're missing:
The metastasis is the process by which a cancer spreads. Anti-life is the result of this cancer spreading, and we need to target the source to get results. Like Mr. Oderberg, I say that this is not a question relinquishing our obsession with life issues, but realising that it's in what we defend not what we accomplish that we will be judged.

We can't win the abortion wars, Roe versus Wade will not be overturned, until the other "carp" as you put is realigned with the natural moral law. This is about totality, about the big picture, and even though we can have single issue activists (or multi-issue activists) they need to work as one coherent unit.

As for judging the pro-life movement as having 'one little narrow point to fight against abortion' (and other anti-life issues), this is also my experience. That said, Mr. Oderberg may be one of the most respected pro-life activists that we have on our side. His work in this field allows him to generalise without too frail a basis. Consider that. He isn't attacking pro-life activists, he is defending them.[/quote]

I got the main jist of the article; it wasn't obscure. But is point has little pragmatic value. He says that we should not stop obsessing over the pro-life and anti-abortion. You can identify the cause as a general decline of western values, but the symptoms are having deadly consequences. If we sit back and say we need to fix society as a whole, then the rest will follow, millions will die as we sit and discuss philosophical issues. Look when the rubber hits the road, children are dieing right now and thats a problem that needs to be addressed right now. If the plight of western civilization causes it fine we'll work on that too.

Its like a restraining order. You don't tell the abused wife 'Your husband beating you is the product of a decline of western civilization, and we're going to focus more on that. The restraining order isn't going to do much good without addressing the larger problem.' We need a restraining order on abortion right now.

The judges in the Supreme Court don't know what they're doing on this issue. If you've read Roe v. Wade you would know this. The explicitly say they're not going to enter into the discussion of when life begins because they feel they can't answer the question. Put some justices in that can answer that question.

I whole heartedly disagree that in order to fix abortion we have to fix all of Western Civilizations problems first. Slavery was ended and it still took 100 years to fix the on going racism in America (actually it hasn't been completely fixed), but regardless the slaves are free.

On the practical level, the article doesn't suggest changing anything. It says keep on being obsessed with Abortion, just be obsessed with everything else also.

[Mitchell_b55]

If we want practical then we have to stop philosophising on abortion, which is what many people do, they attack the problem with intellectual arguments.

If we want practical and pragmatic then we need militancy, it almost becomes a question of condoning force and underground attacks on abortion facilities as well as interventions. If we're going to use abolitionists as a role model, then we should be physically going out and stopping abortion as well as lobbying our cause in the courts. If it's a question of babies dying then why don't we follow the model of those who burn abortion facilities and militantly oppose. That would be 'practical'. That would be 'pragmatic'.

I'm not sure that that will help the problem or make it worse.

Is that approach right? I don't think so, but it may be. If we are searching for practical application. Do we allow the woman to get beat until we can get the courts to outlaw the rule of thumb or do we intervene?

Edited March 10, 2008 by petrus_scholasticus

[dairygirl4u2c]

we've had a civil war before. only this time, it's much much worse than slavery.

i've never heard anyone give legit reasons we don't start a war. we have a just cause, and could get appropriate approval. the only question is whether it'd be effective. there's a good chance. since when does it have to be a sure thing? if it's not a probably lose war, and a good chance,,,,, what's stopping everyone?

i'm going to go out on a limb, though really i don't need to..... and say it's cowardice.
what if it was people being executed, like in the halocaust, which this is? there'd be war. there would be no "let's do this through the pain stakingly slow courts who may or may not ever rule in our favor"
so, it's not just cowardice me thinks, but also a degree of acknowledging some merit in the other sides' arguments or at least their sincerity, but not wanting to admit it.

that article was still to up in the air for such a simple message though, and this doesn't detract from that.

[rkwright]

[quote name='petrus_scholasticus' post='1475140' date='Mar 10 2008, 05:47 PM']If we want practical then we have to stop philosophising on abortion, which is what many people do, they attack the problem with intellectual arguments.

If we want practical and pragmatic then we need militancy, it almost becomes a question of condoning force and underground attacks on abortion facilities as well as interventions. If we're going to use abolitionists as a role model, then we should be physically going out and stopping abortion as well as lobbying our cause in the courts. If it's a question of babies dying then why don't we follow the model of those who burn abortion facilities and militantly oppose. That would be 'practical'. That would be 'pragmatic'.

I'm not sure that that will help the problem or make it worse.

Is that approach right? I don't think so, but it may be. If we are searching for practical application. Do we allow the woman to get beat until we can get the courts to outlaw the rule of thumb or do we intervene?[/quote]

No not at all. You can attack the problem with intellectual arguments, thats what needs to be done. But it would be incorrect to think that we need to fix Western's societies problems before we can fix abortion.

The article offers little practical advice; it says that we need to keep obsessing with abortion, and btw we need to obsess over western culture before anything gets done.

Again, when it comes time to start to do something, we should argue about abortion and fight to fix that; why 'handicap' ourselves and say we need to fix society first.

Militant aggression is counter productive to the pro-life movement. It is a practical move, but the wrong one.

Instead we put people in office, whether or not society is completely fixed, that will move to end abortion. We elect a president that will appoint justices to overturn Roe v. Wade. Roe v. Wade is a terrible decision on many grounds; it has come very close to being overturned (Casey).

If you had two candidates, one pledges to work on reforming our society as a whole, the other pledges to outlaw abortion by executive order, who do you choose? The later, why? Because reforming a society as a whole cannot happen in 4 years, its not guaranteed to ever happen; its a good idea in theory but gives little benefit to the people. Straight up outlawing abortion ends a crisis, now we can work on reforming people's beliefs without worrying about the unborn.

Slavery was ended before racism was cured. Should we put the blacks back in chains until we can cure racism?

[dairygirl4u2c]

[quote]Slavery was ended before racism was cured. Should we put the blacks back in chains until we can cure racism?[/quote]

i'm not sure you're drawing the right analogy.
if you're saying that looking at the big picture instead of just abortion, is like looking at the big picture instead of just slavery..... and obviously slavery ended bc we put up a fight.... then your point is good.

with that said though, slavery only came ot an end after a civil war. racism still existed, just like prochoice people would still exist, but we could still have a war.
i'm not sure you were fighting this point though, given the rest of your message and context.

really, though, you haven't really said why you think we shouldn't ahve a war, like we did back then.... other than to simply assert it's a bad idea. what's the difference? do you htink there was more support for antislavery back then?
actually, now that i think about it, i'm pretty sure there was, so i concede the point.... nevermind.

[Mitchell_b55]

[1.] I was being rhetorical about not offering intellectual arguments, of course they are necessary I've been saying that the whole time. But philosophy is not always practical, if by practical you mean producing instant effects. That's what we want we want instant effect.

We want a court case that will overturn the raw legislative act that our judicial body committed in Roe versus Wade. If that happens, all will be well... except that it won't because the cancer persists and will spread again.

We have to change the direction of western thought. This means penetrating the universities and saturating them with the meet and just. Maybe it isn't pragmatic, but I often think that democracy is flawed because it makes little allowance for the long-term.

Also, I don't think people realise how much of an effect the universities have on the popular understanding of things.

[2.] If you do not remove a cancer at its source and rather cut out that which has spread even while leaving the primary corrupt flesh then it will merely spread again.

[3.] I agree that 'militant aggression is counter-productive'. I would like to say to Dairy Girl that only the state can carry out a war, and then it must be just. T so-called civil war, which was not so much a civil war as a war between two governments, was conducted by two state bodies.

The pro-life movement can't just decide to go militant. It would be counter-productive, it would effectively make the cause completely illegitimate in our opponents eyes.

[4.] Maybe it's time to reconsider the structure of our government, too, and how conducive it is to constructive development.

Edited March 11, 2008 by petrus_scholasticus