inboil:
Quote:
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If it is a life, than the non-fatal health issues that the woman faces are not sufficiently important to allow abortion, and if it isn't a life, then abortion is not ethically different from having a mole removed.
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i chop this out of your paragraph restating an earlier argument because i think this gets to the crux of what i'm arguing (though in an inverted way).
i reject the idea that absent some "objective" rule or standard that abortion ceases to be an ethical problem. the are several grounds for this, some of which i've already gone through above--but i don't see this as a matter that anyone approaches in a cavalier manner--so it is simply not the case that the anti-choice people and their world view is all that stands between the present and an absolute erasure of any trace of ethics.
(aside: think of the arrogance implicit in this assumption.)
the folk i know who've had abortions made a quite difficult and complicated choice based on the way in which they weighed out a wide range of contextual factors---no-one that i've talked to or read stuff from or heard from indirectly treated the decision as something trivial...la la la today i went shopping for turnips, tomorrow i shall off my child, la la la.
it seems to me that this is a very difficult, complex decision. and i see no basis---at all---why anyone who is not directly involved with such a decision should put themselves in the position of determining what kinds of considerations do and do not count in making it. "am i ready to be a mother?" is no more or less legitimate a question than any other---
if, say, you occupy a position consitent with the current pope's--which i find ridiculous--that sex is a procreation device only and that fertilization of an egg is god's will so that from this initial point onward, what's really at issue is the unfolding of god's will, not the choices of human beings--then NO considerations on the part of the mother are really of any consequence. but there is no way to extend this logic beyond the confines not just of roman catholicism, but of a subsection of roman catholicism--and the argument is itself entirely theological.
given a pluralist context--which the present pope has a Real Problem with in any event--the furthest it seems legitimate to go is to say that if you oppose abortion don't have one--but (again) that the procedure should be legal as a way to insure its safety.
aside: if the idea of original sin is to you a strangely vindictive fable--which is more or less how i see it---then there's no reason to assume that without the Guidance of some Institution that only chaos would happen. social norms come from all kinds of sources and operate in all kinds of registers--it is simplistic to assume that only the Command/Control model is operative. this is really just another way of saying the same as above.