pmd@cbscc.UUCP (Paul Dubuc) (09/07/84)
I posted this last week, but it aparently did not make it. Here it goes again. >(Betsy Hanes Perry) >As several people have pointed out, >I defined my major premise badly. I said 'Unenforceable or unenforced >laws are bad for society.' What I meant by 'unenforceable/unenforced laws' >was 'laws which do not reflect the moral consensus of the community.' >Notice the word consensus here; it's important. If a man kills his wife, >his neighbors will certainly disapprove. What he has done is not only >illegal, but violates their common moral standard. If a man smokes >marijuana, the results will not be as clear-cut. Some of his neighbors >will be offended, and others will not. There isn't a moral consensus >against marijuana in the United States; some do, and some don't. >Similarly, Prohibition was disobeyed because most adults saw nothing >immoral in their own drinking. Yet, as Paul DuBois has already pointed out, there is a problem with making unenforcability or popular appeal the main criteria for passing a law. If most people approved of wife killing or child beating would that mean that there should be no law against it? Anti-slavery laws were definitely unpopular in the antebellum South. Does that mean slavery should have remained legal? It could be argued that the laws themselves did little to help Blacks in the South and, in essence, were not enforced very well. Laws set a standard for what is right and just in society. Whether that standard is popular or widely obeyed is not the main point. If the law is indeed just and right as a standard, its existence is justified on that basis. Note that I am not talking about things like parking or traffic laws, but laws that directly protect the basic rights and life of individuals. Laws against murder, slavery and elective abortion fall into this category. Laws against drinking and drug abuse to not make for a good comparison. > > By and large, people obey laws because the laws agree with their >own feelings about right and wrong, not simply because they're laws. >If a law does not jibe with the community consensus, policemen >will be reluctant to arrest offenders, juries to convict, and >judges to sentence them. Laws which conflict with community moral >standards tend to be under- or un-enforced. The laws against theft >are well-enforced: some culprits may go free, but the police >investigate theft reports vigorously. Historically, the laws against >abortion have not been so well-enforced. I claim that this reflects >community ambivalence about the criminality of abortion. As I pointed out before, I think community ambivalence is due in large part to the fact that abortion laws in the States were struck down by the Supreme Court. People also justify their actions by the law. If something is not illegal they begin thinking that it is really right. Personal blame is pushed aside by the fact that the law now says abortion is OK. (And so does a woman's doctor.) If laws against abortion had little effect on the practice of abortion, how do you account for the dramatic increase in the number of abortions per year since 1973? They have averaged over 1 million per year in the U.S. since then. The increase has just leveled off last year. The main point that you didn't respond to in the justification of abortion laws is that making it illegal will tend to reduce the number of abortions, perhaps dramatically, over time. More people will use the alternatives. If the point of a law against elective abortion is to protect the life of a human being (the fetus) then the law is justified. It doesn't matter to what extent the law is obeyed or even enforced initially. Laws serve to help change the mind of the public. It justifies education on the issue. It also gives us more impetus to implement workable alternatives. I'm not talking about iron-fisted enforcement (i.e. trying to close abortion clinics over night), but a change in direction. I think the public's awareness is very blurred on this issue. The media is very antagonistic or deliberately ignorant to the pro-life view and very amenable to the pro-choice view. I have seen opinion polls worded so as to produce greater "pro-choice" opinion on abortion laws. I can't help but believe that it's deliberate in most cases. The abortion victim is invisible. You won't see a picture of him or her on the evening news or in Newsweek (bullet riddled bodies in Beirut are a different matter). They live out of sight in the mother's womb. When they are "terminated" they often struggle against the abortionist's knife or choke and kick violently when being "salted out". Sometimes they come out still alive and breathing (though dying) but never-the-less are thrown into a bucket on their way to the incinerator. If the fetus is small enough it is sucked into a jar with a vacuum device. Often the limbs and body parts of this "mere blob of fetal tissue" (as the euphemism often goes) have to be counted and reassembled both to insure that nothing was left behind and as proof that the abortion was indeed done on a pregnant woman (some clinics aren't too careful about that). Does it bother you? It bothers me... at least as much as bullet riddled bodies in Beirut. It seems that most people, including the press, don't consider showing the victims of murder and war to be an abuse of emotional technique (an offence that I'm sure to be accused of here). The public has "a right to know" and not be sheltered from the grim realities in the world. Such scenes, it can be argued, rightly arouse our indignation for war and human slaughter. We are told, however, that an aborted fetus is just a blob of tissue and not a human ... and, I suppose, we are not required to see it in order to believe it. There is no emphasis on the study of fetal development with regard to the abortion question from the pro-choice camp. Indeed, their treatment of the issue has bent it more toward obscurity than clarity (and that is sufficient to maintain the status quo and even extend it). In his recent book, "Rites of Life: The Scientific Evidence for Life Before Birth", Dr. Landrum Shettles gives a good example: When the Executive Board of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in 1981 issued a statement opposing restrictions on abortion, it also fell back on the argument that no one can tell when human life begins. It focused instead on what it called the "cost-effectiveness" of abortion in dealing with a number of medical and sociological problems. A number of members of the College, including me, expressed distress over this statement, which so clearly reflects the new ethic I have been discussing. Dr. Richard V. Jaynes, for example, declared in *Ob. Gyn. News*: "To say that the beginning of human life cannot be determined scientifically is ... utterly ridiculous". [Sept 15, 1981] This is the same College that recently said the President was wrong in saying that the fetus experiences great anguish during an abortion. They maintained that there was no evidence that this was so. In response a group of very well qualified fetologists drafted a statement strongly supporting the President's position. Abortion buisness accounts for a good part of the College member's income. (i.e. many members are abortionists). Their scientific and medical opinion with regard to the abortion issue seems aimed at protecting that business rather than presenting the truth. > >The best evidence for future disregard of an anti-abortion law >is past disregard of such laws. I quote "Encyclopedia of Crime >and Justice", edited by Sanford Kadish, 1983, v.1, p.4. >The book says that in the mid-twentieth-century (before Roe vs. Wade), >"As many as 90% of all abortions were sought by married women seeking >to limit family size, and 90%-95% of all premarital pregnancies ended >in abortion. ... Despite numerous statutes incriminating the abortion patient, >prosecutions were exceedingly rare and reported cases indescoverable. >- Model Penal code 1959, commentary section 207.11 ". >On the same page, it is noted that "Physicians performed more than half >of all illegal abortions." To summarize, the laws existed, but were widely >ignored. What evidence is there that future laws would be any more successful? I think that my argument at the beginning of this article explains why I feel this to be irrelevant. Even so, I can't help but distrust the figures. How can figures with any reasonable degree of accuracy be obtained in 1959, when abortion was illegal? Even the encyclopedia article calls these figures "estimated". They are not hard statistics. My distrust stems, in a large part, from the abuse and deception carried out along these lines by groups who worked to repeal abortion laws. Dr. Bernard Nathanson, a former abortionist and pro-choice advocate, co-founded the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws. (NARAL. I think it's the Nat. Abortion Rights Action League now.) In a speech to a Canadian pro-life group in 1981, he said: We fed the public a line of deceit, dishonesty, a fabrication of facts and figures. We succeeded [in breaking down the laws limiting abortions] because the time was right and the news media cooperated. We sensationalized the effects of illegal abortions, and fabricated polls which indicated that 85 percent favored unrestricted abortion, when we knew it was only 5 percent. We unashamedly lied, and yet our statements were quoted [by the media] as though they had been written in law. Also, Shettles says the following, quoting from Nathanson's book "Aborting America": In "Aborting America", Dr. Nathanson calls this [the argument that women will again resort to dangerous 'back-alley' abortions if abortion is restricted or made illegal] "a fundamental argument; one that moved deeply in the late 60's, and one that could justify ... abortion even if no other argument stood up". Dr. Nathanson and others who were agitating for legalized abortion at the time often spoke of as many as 10,000 women dying every year because of abortions performed by incompetent or unscrupulous operators. [ The encyclopedia article Betsy references quotes an "estimated" figure of 8,000/year. --pmd] "I confess", Dr. Nathanson wrote years later, after he had changed his mind about abortion, "that I knew the figures were totally false, and I suppose the others did too.... The overriding concern was to get the laws eliminated ..." In truth the number of deaths ... was probably closer to 500 per year, he now acknowledges, adding that if abortion were to be outlawed again today there would be no return to the days of he "coathanger" abortion. "The practice of abortion was revolutionized at virtually the same moment the laws were revolutionized, throught the widespread indroduction of suction cutterage in 1970." Even a trained non-physician, Dr. Nathanson believes, can operate a suction curette "with remarkable safety". Nathanson has written another book called "The Abortion Papers" about his involvement in the pro-abortion movement. His books are very hard to find (i.e. in book stores and libraries) for some reason, though they are still in print. As one pro-life slogan goes, "There *are* alternatives to abortion. There have to be". The pro-life camp's work does not only involve changing abortion laws. It is heavily involved with providing other solutions to the problems that abortion supposedly solves. Before abortion was legal, there was also little support for the problems some women faced with pregnancy. They were often treated as outcasts rather than given help and understanding. Contraceptives weren't as safe, available, and effective then as they are now. If laws against abortion are reversed, I wonder how much help the pro-lifers will get from Planned Parenthood et. al. for these women they profess to care so much about. Does their compassion only extend within the bounds of the availability of abortion as an "easy" and cost-effective answer? >I believe that laws which enforce a minority moral code are bad for the >country, and it seems clear to me that laws against first-trimester >abortion would do just that: enforce a minority's moral code on the majority. Laws are not unjustified only because 49% or less of the population approve of them. Even so the percentages tend to depend on the wording of the opinion polls you consult. (Never trust poll results without knowing exactly what (and how) questions were asked.) I would like to quote something related to the divisions of pregnancy called "trimesters". It is important to note that these divisions are arbitrary as far as fetal development and "viability" are concerned. They reflect legal expediency. The biological distinction of trimesters is arbitrary. The Supreme Court used these arbitrary dividing points along with the shaky concept of "viability" to dictate what, if any, restrictions the state may impose on abortion. The fact remains that, as much as second and third trimester abortions bother many people, abortion cannot be made illegal--even up to the point of birth. All a woman needs to do to obtain a third trimester abortion is to convince her doctor that giving birth would greatly impair her emotional well being. In determining the point of viability at which the state may take steps to protect the fetus as "potential human life", the Supreme Court apparently just followed the lead of New York's extant abortion law. The New York law, passed in 1970, set 24 weeks as the point of "viability". The following quote from "Aborting America" give some interesting insight into the making of that law: I had the opportunity to ask Assemblywoman Constance Cook about how the architects of the bill had arrived at the twenty-four week limit. She told me, a little apologetically, that doctors had regarded the twentieth as that point at which the expulsion is no longer an abortion but a premature delivery, and the fetus is an "infant" born alive, or a "stillbirth" if born dead. The older English common law figured viability, the point at which a prematurely delivered fetus had a reasonable chance to survive, at twenty-eight weeks. At this point in her exegesis she paused a beat or two, then said: "We split the difference." And that, children, is how laws are written. -- Paul Dubuc {cbosgd,ihnp4}!cbscc!pmd The true light that enlightens every one was coming into the world... (John 1:9)
wetcw@pyuxa.UUCP (T C Wheeler) (09/12/84)
Sevener put together the most amazing arguments I have ever seen on this net. Just what in hell does SALT II have to do with the abortion issue? Good grief Sevener. Get it together and discuss one issue at a time. The mixup you just created was not worthy of dicussion. Logic, fella, Logic. T. C. Wheeler
orb@whuxl.UUCP (SEVENER) (09/14/84)
> Sevener put together the most amazing arguments I have ever seen on > this net. Just what in hell does SALT II have to do with the > abortion issue? > T. C. Wheeler the question of the World's right to life does indeed have to do with the question of the fetus' right to life. Anti-abortionists always couch their arguments in terms of the absolute right of the fetus to life. They usually then proceed (as Archbishop O'Connor recently did) to make the protection of the unborn's right to life their over-riding political concern above all other moral or political issues. By placing all their priority on one category of life (whether fetuses are actually human life or a part of the mother's body is the subject of great controversy) they ignore all other issues of protection of indisputably human life. There is no argument by right to life advocates that they themselves are human, or that people once they are born are alive. Indeed the usual crux of their arguments is to lend weight to their protection of fetal life by saying that if fetal life is not protected, then born life will not be protected in the future. They fail to ask the question, is human life protected now? Can we claim to be protecting ALL life, human, fetal or animal with nuclear weapons that will very likely lead to the extinction of all human life, much mammalian life, and nobody knows what other forms of life? Which has priority? The protection of SOME life which may or may not be considered to be human, or the protection of ALL life, born or unborn? How can one talk about the "right to life" and then ignore the nuclear threat to all human life? My answer to Paul Dubuc's question about which issue has priority (protection of fetal life or all life) has to be clear: the protection of ALL human and other life has to have priority since it includes the protection of fetal life and the possibility for humans to continue as a species whatsoever. I would like to see anti-abortionists address THIS issue of the right to life and not bury their heads in the sand saying it really doesn't matter. If the human species ceases to exist after a nuclear holocaust there will be no fetal life to protect. Tim Sevener Whippany, Bell Labs whuxl!orb