Can O' Worms: Abortion
Nov. 8th, 2004 09:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsWell, it hasn't taken long for the steamroller to get underway. Karl Rove has announced that he intends to push for a Federal Marriage Amendment codifying marriage as a union between a man and a woman, his way of crafting a "hopeful and decent society" by doing what only nightmare countries like Indonesia and Zimbabwe have done: codifying a form of discrimination into the fundamental constitutional basis of our nation's laws.
What most of you didn't notice is that Senator Sam Brownback (R- Kansas) has announced his intention to introduce something called the "Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act." Sen. Brownback asserts that fetuses can feel pain, and therefore if abortion is to be performed, the mother should be told these "facts" (as he asserts them) and be informed that she must use anasthesia.
I think this is a good idea. No, not the law, but the debate surrounding the law. I think it's time that Mr. Brownback actually supported his assertions with evidence. Sad as it is to contemplate, there are enough traffic and other horrible mechanical accidents that happen every year, even sometimes to pregnant women who nonetheless successfully carry to term, that we can determine through MRI if fital pain actually has a residue; does pain in the fetal stage cause recognizeable changes in the character of the adult? We fear pain, and when we're experiencing it we fear it may never go away; what does the word "pain" mean to a creature that hasn't got the consciousness necessary to have a concept of the future? Are words like "pain" and "fear" as we experience them even meaningful, or are they poor analogies? In the case of abortion, do we really care about these analogous experiences in a creature that may not even experience them at all, and will soon be incapable of developing into a person who can?
It's going to be an ugly four years. Already, the anti-choice groups are redirecting their funds to those states where abortion was legal prior to Roe v. Wade; they're convinced that those states that have anti-abortion laws on the books will be enforcing those laws very shortly, and yes, those laws are still there, and if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, they immediately go back into effect. In my home state of Washington, there's a massive campaign underway, with billboards showing beautiful bouncing babies smiling and captions with "I could smile before I was born" and "I could feel pain before I was born." Being a bit thoughtful, my initial reaction to those is "Yes, but could you feel pain or smile in a meaningful way?"
The anti-choice group has also hired an airplane that flies over the suburbs with a giant banner trailing behind with a picture of an aborted fetus. As nauseating as the picture is, wouldn't a picture of a disease liver be equally unpleasant? The anti-choice people are relying on our natural human sympathy to the vaguely human shape in the picture they're showing, but what we have to understand is twofold: what you're seeing could never happen to you, so your instinctual sympathy is misplaced, and two it could never have happened to you: if it had, you wouldn't be here to consider the matter.
As much as I loved Kouryou-chan from the moment she was born, I was quite aware that for the first three or four months of her life, the lights were not on; she was still on automatic as her brain completed the transition from stimulus-and-response to interpretating, planning, and acting on that plan. It was wonderful to watch, but my experiences as a father have, much to dismay of the anti-choice people I know, only affirmed my initial position that there is no moral difficulty in abortion.
I have no desire to turn my blog into the kind of battleground this subject always creates, so I'm doing something I very rarely do: I'm turning off comments.
What most of you didn't notice is that Senator Sam Brownback (R- Kansas) has announced his intention to introduce something called the "Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act." Sen. Brownback asserts that fetuses can feel pain, and therefore if abortion is to be performed, the mother should be told these "facts" (as he asserts them) and be informed that she must use anasthesia.
I think this is a good idea. No, not the law, but the debate surrounding the law. I think it's time that Mr. Brownback actually supported his assertions with evidence. Sad as it is to contemplate, there are enough traffic and other horrible mechanical accidents that happen every year, even sometimes to pregnant women who nonetheless successfully carry to term, that we can determine through MRI if fital pain actually has a residue; does pain in the fetal stage cause recognizeable changes in the character of the adult? We fear pain, and when we're experiencing it we fear it may never go away; what does the word "pain" mean to a creature that hasn't got the consciousness necessary to have a concept of the future? Are words like "pain" and "fear" as we experience them even meaningful, or are they poor analogies? In the case of abortion, do we really care about these analogous experiences in a creature that may not even experience them at all, and will soon be incapable of developing into a person who can?
It's going to be an ugly four years. Already, the anti-choice groups are redirecting their funds to those states where abortion was legal prior to Roe v. Wade; they're convinced that those states that have anti-abortion laws on the books will be enforcing those laws very shortly, and yes, those laws are still there, and if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, they immediately go back into effect. In my home state of Washington, there's a massive campaign underway, with billboards showing beautiful bouncing babies smiling and captions with "I could smile before I was born" and "I could feel pain before I was born." Being a bit thoughtful, my initial reaction to those is "Yes, but could you feel pain or smile in a meaningful way?"
The anti-choice group has also hired an airplane that flies over the suburbs with a giant banner trailing behind with a picture of an aborted fetus. As nauseating as the picture is, wouldn't a picture of a disease liver be equally unpleasant? The anti-choice people are relying on our natural human sympathy to the vaguely human shape in the picture they're showing, but what we have to understand is twofold: what you're seeing could never happen to you, so your instinctual sympathy is misplaced, and two it could never have happened to you: if it had, you wouldn't be here to consider the matter.
As much as I loved Kouryou-chan from the moment she was born, I was quite aware that for the first three or four months of her life, the lights were not on; she was still on automatic as her brain completed the transition from stimulus-and-response to interpretating, planning, and acting on that plan. It was wonderful to watch, but my experiences as a father have, much to dismay of the anti-choice people I know, only affirmed my initial position that there is no moral difficulty in abortion.
I have no desire to turn my blog into the kind of battleground this subject always creates, so I'm doing something I very rarely do: I'm turning off comments.
