March 30, 2004
"CHOICE" VS. REALITY:
Face the Fetus: It's time for abortion rights advocates to stop denying reality. (William Saletan, March 29, 2004, Slate)
Once the embryo is defined as a child, and killing it is defined as killing a child, abortion at any stage of pregnancy becomes murder—immediately in theory, and eventually in law.Is this what the Senate intended? Not really. Last year, 52 senators voted for an amendment declaring that Roe "secures an important constitutional right" and "should not be overturned." Fourteen of those 52 pro-choice senators voted Thursday for UVVA. Four of them voted against an amendment to UVVA, offered by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., that would have preserved UVVA's penalties for assaults on pregnant women while changing its language to avoid a collision with abortion rights. Feinstein's amendment was the sole alternative put forward by abortion rights supporters. It was the whole ball game, and those four senators held the balance of power. With their support, Feinstein's amendment would have been adopted, and abortion rights would be safe. Instead, the amendment failed, 50 to 49.
Why did the pro-choice side lose those four votes? The answer lies in the text of the Feinstein amendment. It says that anyone who commits one of the enumerated violent federal crimes and "thereby causes the termination of a pregnancy or the interruption of the normal course of pregnancy" will get a second punishment "the same as the punishment provided for that conduct under Federal law had that injury or death occurred to the pregnant woman."
One word is notably missing from the amendment. The word is "fetus." There is no fetus. There is only a "pregnancy."
This is not an accident. Each time pro-lifers have tried in recent years to treat the embryo or fetus as a person in one context or another, pro-choicers have responded by treating the fetus as a nonentity. When pro-lifers sought to ban human cloning, pro-choicers offered a counterproposal that would require the destruction of every cloned embryo—which they referred to only as "an unfertilized blastocyst" and "the product of nuclear transplantation"—within two weeks of its creation. When pro-lifers sought to make fetuses eligible for the State Children's Health Insurance Program, pro-choicers offered a counterproposal to expand the program's eligibility guidelines "as if any reference to targeted low-income children were a reference to targeted low-income pregnant women." The pro-choice alternative made no reference to the gestated entity until it was "born."
It's a strategy of denial. And this week, it ran into too much reality. [...]
"If a state can put someone in jail for life because they took the life of an unborn child, then we're clearly saying there is something very valuable there," Feinstein warned Thursday. She wasn't endorsing that conclusion. She was reading aloud, with disapproval and alarm, the words of a Nebraska state senator. Guess what: There is something very valuable there. And if you can't see it, we can't hear you.
The pro-life strategy of re-humanizing the fetus is truly brilliant. Posted by Orrin Judd at March 30, 2004 7:58 PM
If Saletan believes what he says, he's heading straight for a Nat Hentoff moment in which he realizes that his beliefs can't be squared with abortion.
His point is that pro-choice "rigidity has turned a morally and politically winnable debate over whether the fetus is a person into a morally and politically unwinnable debate over whether the fetus is a distinct human entity deserving of legal consideration as a member of our species. Such consideration need not override Roe's central principle that a woman's privacy rights trump the legal value of a pre-viable fetus."
I just don't see that the person/human dichotomy is going to work much better for them than the human/clump of cells dichotomy has. More to the point, as Saletan makes clear, the pro-lifers are positioning the fetus as a "child", not merely human.
Posted by: David Cohen at March 30, 2004 8:14 PMOver the years we've had to redefine death to keep pace with medical advances, and even then, as the recent cases in Florida show, there are gray areas and gaps in those definitions. If we can define when life ends, why is it so hard to do the same with a definition of when life begins?
What these laws are doing is moving the current dividing line-- from a complete natural birth-- to a position in utereo. Of course the unlimited abortion crowd is going to fight them, because once you recognize that it's possible to be a "person" in utero, then you have to figure out where to draw the line.
Posted by: Raoul Ortega at March 30, 2004 9:02 PM"... Roe's central principle that a woman's privacy rights trump the legal value of a pre-viable fetus."
Since when was the viability of the fetus part of Roe's central principle? Under this formulation, the pro-lifers have already lost the major battle, and can only fight rear-guard actions from now on.
Posted by: jd watson at March 30, 2004 9:04 PMOops - that should read the pro-choicers.
Posted by: jd watson at March 30, 2004 9:31 PMjd:
The original opinion hinged on viability, though that was discarded almost immediately.
Posted by: oj at March 30, 2004 9:58 PMOrrin, I've been in the movement for 20 years, and we always were working on "rehumanizing" the fetus. Technology, in the form of better and better sonograms and the practice of fetal pediatrics and surgery has merely helped to reinforce our arguments.
Posted by: Ptah at March 30, 2004 10:55 PMIf the pubbies get to ban it again, kiss any hope of any higher office goodbye.
1st 3 months is choice. Take what you can get and move on to abstinence - which if you were really, really smart, you can win on by taking a leaf out of the cig/food debate and would reduce the need for abortion. You push complete, you had better be ready to walk the adoption talk yourself, maintaining the pregnant mother yourself, don't push it on the goverment - me. You have no solid plans, better get your private networks in place.
DO NOT TAKE ME FOR GRANTED BECAUSE THERE IS A WAR ON. It's out, it's not going back in. If prostitution is the oldest profession, there were ways back then.
You're never going to get 100% - it's human nature.
Posted by: Sandy P. at March 31, 2004 12:56 AMSandy: No, but we can aim to minimize it, and certainly remove government -- MY -- sanction for it.
Posted by: Chris at March 31, 2004 8:10 AMWhy bother winning the war if they're right about the quality of our culture?
Posted by: oj at March 31, 2004 8:22 AMApprox 60% are still for it. Remarkably constant over the past 30 years - in a nutshell, we don't like it, but we're not going to tell other people what to do, but we're not going to pay for it.
--
Country will have to live w/it.
Posted by: Sandy P. at March 31, 2004 4:22 PMOJ:
Because the quality of our culture is a meaningless consideration.
Regardless of quality, its heretofore unstoppable ability to steamroll anything in its past is the meaningful consideration.
Contrary to Intelligent Design, and very consistent with Evolution. Like it or not.
Sandy: very well said.
Posted by: Jeff Guinn at March 31, 2004 5:13 PMSandy, Jeff: Funny, I seem to remember some much-ballyhooed polls a few years ago saying over half want it gone, or limited to about 1% or less. Maybe my math is odd, but adding 60% to that sounds like more than 100%.
Rape will always be with us. Should we just learn to live with that?
Not with my state's sanction, if I can help it. And, curiously, it's beginning to look like I can!
Posted by: Chris at March 31, 2004 5:47 PMChris:
Depends on how those much ballyhooed poll questions are phrased. If the question asks whether someone is in favor of blanket prohibition, then few are in favor. If the question asks whether someone is in favor of no restrictions whatsoever, very few are in favor. Kind of like Sandy said.
OJ:
Your pity is utterly beside the point, never mind being completely misplaced. Please note I made no comment regarding the quality of our culture, only its apparent unstoppability. Do you care to argue with that?
Posted by: Jeff Guinn at March 31, 2004 8:46 PMIt's always stoppable, as are people like you.
Posted by: oj at March 31, 2004 9:40 PMWell, then, have at it.
Posted by: Jeff Guinn at April 1, 2004 4:54 PM