saquigley@watmath.UUCP (Sophie Quigley, Univ. of Waterloo) (03/01/84)
_1. _S_e_x, _R_e_s_p_o_n_s_i_b_i_l_i_t_y _a_n_d _P_u_n_i_s_h_m_e_n_t
In the last two parts I presented what I percieved to
be the "pure" pro-life and pro-choice approaches to the
abortion issue. They are both altruistic approaches, but
are based on completely different ethical systems, so arrive
at radically different answers. In this part, I will
present a different approach to abortion where decisions are
not made for completely altruistic reasons, but rather to
serve other purposes. My goal is to question the appropri-
ateness of the usage of the abortion issue for these pur-
poses. This part was the one I was most interested in when
I started this discussion last week, but I got carried away
in my zeal to try to get a complete approach on the subject.
In the last part, I was questioning the reasons behind
allowing abortions to women who were pregnant as a result of
rape but not to others who would suffer just as much and did
not come up with a consistent answer. The thought process
behind such a decision can be figured out from the varying
answers to my original question:
> For each category of women listed underneath, which of them should be allowed
> to have an abortion if they so desire:
> 1 - Women who get pregnant as a result of not using birth control.
> 2 - Women who get pregnant as a result of a birth control failure (failure
> of the method, not of the couple using it)
> 3 - Women who get pregnant as a result of rape.
> 4 - Women who get pregnant because they want to have a child, but change their
> mind once they are pregnant.
This question was carefully worded to avoid giving any
details on the development of the embryo as well as on the
personality or personal history of the mother (except for
the rape case) except for their behaviour concerning contra-
ception. So the embryos could be assumed to be the same in
all the cases and as all relevant details about the women's
situations such as age, marital status, education, economic
situation were omitted, the women could also be assumed to
be the same except that they had behaved differently while
having sex. Except for the raped women, all of them could
also be assumed to suffer as much from being denied an abor-
tion, yet some people found it reasonable to deny some of
these an abortion but not others. Typically 4 and 1 would
be the most likely to be denied access to abortion, then 2,
then 3. The only difference between these cases was the
varying responsability in choosing to have sex and in using
contraception while doing so.
Women who had sex without contraception were considered
to have done something we disagreed with. It was decided
that because of this they should do something they don't
want to do, i.e having a child. This is a simple view of a
very old concept: punishment for a crime committed. I will
now look at the crime, the criminals, the punishment, the
appropriateness and effectiveness of this specific treatment
of this crime and what our view of the punishment reveals
about our attitudes.
(..... continued in next article ...)
Sophie Quigley
watmath!saquigley