Guilty as charged. That is because I support the liberty of the individual, not the power of the majority to strip that liberty away. That's what a conservative believes. You believe it too - you utterly oppose a tyrannical majority that would restrict your firearms right. But is that only because that's a right that you happen to care about?
The power of the state to require a woman to reproduce is an imposition on a most basic sort of human liberty.
You act as if standing up for the lives of the helpless is is treating people who have chosen to engage in sexual activity like brood mares.
No one is requiring her to engage in sexual behaviour or artificially inseminate herself.
No one at all. Any reproduction would, with the rare exception of rape, result from a consensual act on her part.
And, with almost universal sex education, there is little chance anyone capable of having sex doesn't know where babies come fron.
No one forced her to reproduce, the choice was hers. Once a new life has been created, though, is it not inherent on the State to protect the very life of those who cannot protect themselves? Is this not the reason we have police? Is this not the ultimate duty of the law, to protect the rights of the innocent (a presumption given all) and helpless?
Yet that law, in a jurisprudential abortion, has been contorted to excuse the destruction of the most innocent and helpless.
Now understand that I do not adopt an extremist position.
Just because a position is commonly held makes it no less extremist, just as a majority can be wrong, and often has been.
A woman's right to choose must be meaningful, but it is not unlimited.
Which is why there are statutory age limits for such behaviour. After all, we can't have oversexed twelve year olds running about breeding like rats.
After the fetus is viable, I think she's had more than enough time to exercise her right.
No, the time to exercise that right was
before there was a little bun in the oven.
At that point, IMO, she's assumed a fiduciary obligation that I think the state can choose to enforce.
I think viability is a useful marker that respects the dignity of each side of this issue. Liberty is a difficult pill to swallow for some folks - because human beings can make bad choices. Abortion is a bad choice, but liberty is what it is. It's the woman's choice, and hers alone, and God blessed her with both a conscience and free will.
But once the fetus can survive on its own, the fact of its potentiality for humanity is obvious, and requires only the exercise of fiduciary care. So let the majority of citizens in your state choose to regulate or ban abortion, after the point of viability.
But not before.
Is that a compromise? Of course it is. But it is the best means I can think of to reconcile the competing ideals that animate the passions surrounding the abortion debate.
The bad choices are already made before the ept ever says they are pregnant. You keep acting as if reproduction hasn't already occurred. The process has been set in motion by the combination of DNA that produces a unique individual.
Don't start it, no new life. Once it is started, reproduction has occurred. New life has been created. That new life will grow and develop until it dies.
"Viability" is a moveable goalpost, and nonsense. There are enough 20 somethings out there living in a relative's basement, who may be capable of locomotion, even reproduction, but cannot survive on their own.
That's a line that can be dragged all over the field, so contending that it is better to murder some of the people some of the time than declare open season on infants in the womb sounds so much better.
The viability line can come back on the field, on the other end, too.
As people get older or just sick, would you declare them 'non viable' and take them out of play like a damaged piece of equipment? And who gets to choose?
Strip away the gadgets, was Stephen Hawking "viable"?
Statistically speaking, in the few minutes it took to type this, enough babies lost their lives to , when older, fill a school bus, a couple of classrooms, a restaurant. Just because they will instead end up in a bucket/ medical waste pail/make a payment on someone's Lambo, doesn't mean they will be any less dead.