We’re keeping this one up a little longer.
This is a different view of the whole raging controversy over, effectively, which entity has the right to control a woman’s body: the federal government or states.
The Right Without Which No Other Right Exists
The fetus only exists because of the woman’s body — not yours, not that of some possibly corrupt and stupid politician in Washington, and not the body of some possibly ignorant and venal politician in a state legislature. As I have watched this debate develop, and as I have considered with astonishment the increasingly byzantine efforts to ” draw lines” about the point of viability, the time at which a full set of rights attaches to the fetus, and all the rest, I have become increasingly convinced that the right of the woman to control her own body when she is pregnant must be absolute up to the point of birth. All the attempts to craft legislation circumscribing that right prior to birth quickly become enmeshed in what are finally subjective claims that can be disputed into eternity, and impossible of proof in one direction or another.
#15 – MM
“Plenty of death row candidates have been exonerated by DNA evidence.”
Well, no. Not “plenty” by a long shot. A few. Who were sentenced to death on circumstantial and / or eyewitness evidence. The vast majority on Death Row deserve to be there. Actually they deserve to be dead.
Which is exactly why I support the DP – but I also say that a blanket Federal rule is needed to absolutely prohibit it’s imposition when there is no physical evidence connecting the defendant to the crime, or when it cannot be determined who among multiple defendants actually committed the act at issue.
There is a balance, a middle ground between “They’re all guilty! Kill ’em all!” extremist idiocy and “Nobody should ever be killed” extremist idiocy. But nobody wants that.
#26 – JimR
“…may I humbly suggest that you could have said “you are mistaken, and here’s why…”
If you do, I’ll stomp you…
No, seriously – I stick to civil discourse when discussing honestly held viewpoints with thoughtful people. But when confronted with mindless parroting of socially destructive propaganda, I’m not dealing with someone who is reasoning, so in order to break through the mental process operating when someone repeats programmed responses instead of stating a rationally-arrived-at opinion, a verbal ‘slap in the face,’ by eliciting anger or embarassment through public humiliation, often provokes an emotional reaction which can serve to make the ‘brainwashee’ reconsider, if even momentarily, his defense response and possibly comtemplate how he came to profess such a thing and whether he might actually have not arrived at it through conscious thought.
Either that, or maybe I’m just what John Cleese calls a ‘vicious bastard’… 🙂
>>Well no. Not “plenty” by a long shot.
Well, I guess it depends on your definintion of “plenty”, and what a “long shot” is. Here’s a list of 124 (http://tinyurl.com/5pzcu) who were wrongfully convicted and freed, after serving an average of 9.2 years in jail/ on death row (not all of them exonerated by DNA evidence, but that may be due to the prosecutors’ tooth and nail battle against reviewing DNA evidence after the fact; probably a lot of them have already been killed).
GIven the amount of money we piss away on trophy wars in Iraq, spying on innocent citizens, and all the other gummint bullshit, the cost of maintaining prisoners in jail for life without parole is a drop in the bucket. And it always leaves open the opportunity, when some convict is eventually exonerated, so send him on his way with a “sorry, buddy”. Rather than relaying the regrets to his family, after he’s been wrongly killed by the government.
You may think that 124 almost-dead innocents is not “plenty”, but I do. If there were “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that the death row inhabitants were guilty, I wouldn’t have too much of a problem with the DP. But that’s supposedly the way it is now, eh? Too bad things so seldom work out the way they’re supposed to in these cases.
does anyone realise thats britney before she went nuts
#32, Actually Lauren aka VB, I laughed my arse off through the whole post. I just felt (guiltily) sorry for the poor slob on the receiving end… but your psychological objective / explanation makes sense too.
You have an enviable talent that I wish I could draw upon in a few embarrassing, verbally-lacerating real life (non-blog) situations, instead of standing red-faced and speechless. 🙂
#24. Actually, Lauren, control for the overall numbers and it is the race of the victim that determines the likelihood of the death penalty to be imposed, with a black defendant killing a white victim being the most likely circumstance and the reverse being the least likely.
that is simply a fact.
all the psychotic invective you can muster4 (accompanied no doubt with foam flying onto the keyboard) does not change that fact.
All thorough and unbiased statistics are available for abuse. Help yourself.
The parallels between abortion vs. death penalty are not good parallels. I prefer the abortion vs. gun control issue.
To be pro-life is to be pro-nanny state, while pro choice is pro freedom. To be pro gun control is to be pro nanny state, but pro guns is pro freedom. Thus most conservatives and liberals are logically inconsistant on these issues.
I take a moderate position on both: Abortions and Guns should be safe legal and rare.
We need to step up the beheading and liquification of fetuses immediately! We could be using them to feed the hungry in Africa! They don’t vote and if they did they’d probably either vote Republican or rob somebody! Screw them!
#38 – ArianeB
“I take a moderate position on both: Abortions and Guns should be safe legal and rare.”
Exactly. Available if needed, with effort toward reducing the need for either one. The thinking persons way of dealing with unpleasant necessities, as opposed to the authoritarians’ simplistic and simpleminded solution, to forbid them.
…sorry, “…forbid them – until they themselves need them.”
If only a pre-natal test could be done to determine pro-death advocates in womb (those who promote abortion), we could abort those alien non-lifeforms and end the debate.
That way both sides could very peaceably go on with their respective views of live.
The pro-death advocates have their own theocracy (they just don’t realize how Jim Crow their opinions are) and IMHO more prone to self-deception then you average joe/jane.
Just listen to their endlessly circular arguments. They are really the same as those used in the south pre and post civil war. Evil really does hate life.
Question… is it a life or is it a dirt clod?
Rod
Neither one. It is, until such time as it can survive outside of the womb, a part of an adult human being’s sovereign body, which is the sole property of the person whose brain controls it.
That answer your “question”?
#19 – HMeyers,
Your original post did make it appear that you are anti-choice. Reading your later posts clears up that you are mostly not. I do not believe I accused you of being extremist. I merely wanted to learn more about a rare breed that I had thought does not exist, i.e. an anti-choice atheist. Now I see that I can go back to my assumption that, at least in my experience, this breed does not exist.
Lauren the Ghoti,
There’s a lot fishy with your arguments today. And, to be honest, they do indeed sound racist. Are you aware of how much more often blacks are searched for no reason? Do you think there’s also a good possibility that they get arrested and convicted more often while committing the same number of crimes? Do you think it’s possible that any discrepancies that do exist may be more a factor of socioeconomic status than race?
Most importantly though, I have heard statistics where whites who murder blacks are dramatically (4 times, if I remember correctly) less likely to end up being tried for a capital crime than blacks who murder whites. I am having trouble finding this one the web, unfortunately. It was from an old article mailed to me by a friend. I’ll see if she still has it and knows the source.
According to a 2003 Amnesty International report, blacks and whites were the victims of murder in almost equal numbers, yet 80 % of the people executed since 1977 were convicted of murders involving white victims.
http://tinyurl.com/4f4o4
Noname,
Try this thought experiment. I infer that you view abortion as murder. And, clearly, the woman who gets an abortion planned it in advance, i.e., premeditated. So, first degree murder.
Would you turn your daughter, sister, aunt, mother or female relative who got a abortion in to police? Would want/expect her to be put away for 50 years or receive the death penalty for the abortion? I know I wouldn’t, I think most Americans wouldn’t..
Now if that same relative killed in a premeditated way someone else, would most people turn that relative in? Probably yes.
So, abortion isn’t getting your tonsils out, but for most people, it certainly isn’t murder.
#46. You hit the nail right on the head. Except for a tiny fraction, most of those who would outlaw abortion as the unjustifiable taking of a human life would not punish it as murder.
Most of those who hold anti-abortion views would not equate a woman who had an abortion with a mother who hired someone to kill her toddler. Proof of this is in the South Dakota law (recently struck down) that did not treat abortion as murder. Indeed, the pre-Roe laws did not treat abortion as murder, but rather as a lower-level felony.
Kudos to the people who have already responded to Lauren the Bigot’s usual white supremacist disinformation. Since there is so much of it, we need to share the load.
When Justice Blackmun wrote >i>Roe, he tried to balance the values of the woman, the fetus and, the physician’s role. (He had been counsel for the Mayo Clinic and was particularly interested in doctors’ freedom to practice medicine.) The reason Justice Blackmun gave for giving the fetus rights after viability was society’s interest in encouraging births so as to maintain a population that can sustain itself. The problem with viability is that it begins earlier with improved medical techniques allowing fetuses to live outside the womb. Currently, most fetuses are viable at about six months gestation, but some will survive post-delivery earlier. If it becomes normal for say, four month old fetuses, to survive in large numbers in neonatal care units, the concept of rights attaching at viability will need to be revisited.
I’ve been interested in this topic since writing a law review article about it years ago. The case that has my attention now is that of Christy Freeman of New Jersey. She gave birth to a stillborn fetus in July and tried to hide the experience. Police found the fetus stashed in her bathroom. Initially, she was charged under a statute holding a person who kills a viable fetus in utero culpable for murder. However, it turned out that she had three more dead fetuses at her home. She has now been charged with the murder of a live birth full-term fetus after confessing. It is unknown how the two other fetuses died.
You can read about the Freeman case here:
http://www.mdcoastdispatch.com/article.php?cid=30&id=1117
#46, Rob,
While you attempt to illustrate a valid point, I’m afraid it is very weak.
I would not turn in any close family or friend to the police unless the victim was also close. This goes along with the saying that “blood is thicker than water”.
The difference between being a juvenile delinquent and a rambunctious child depends upon if you are the parent.
#48 Podesta
I think you raise a key issue. As part of an intelligent approach to abortion, people should make the decision as soon as possible to avoid any problem with crossing into infanticide.
#49
Mr. Fusion. I think you miss the main point, it isn’t about the familial relationship. The scenarios can remain, you can just remove the familial relationship. I think it shows how most reasonable people would behave on this issue of “abortion as murder”.
I saw we kill the feminists responsible for screwing up research on artificials wombs otherwise this debate would have been over by now.
Lauren,
Here’s a bit more on racial inequality of the death penalty.
http://tinyurl.com/33r6t2
http://tinyurl.com/2fusrw
#51 – Rob R,
Point very well made, in my already sold opinion. I bet that the only people willing to call abortion premeditated murder, even when it’s not their family member, are the wackos killing doctors and setting of explosives in populated areas to show how precious life is.
#54 – me,
Setting off explosives, of course.
#52
At some point in the future the artificial womb has been perfected. Everyone places one next to their aquarium because they use some of the same supplies. You go to the Repro section of the supermarket and pick up a dozen “eggs” and fertilize one of the eggs. After a few weeks on the AutoGestate cycle you decide that fatherhood is not for you. You do a control-alt-delete on the controller and hit the flush lever on the tank.
Murder? Manslaughter? Choice?
#46 Rob R
Ok Mr thought experiment. Einstein your not!
1.) A mother bearing a child and due to give birth tomorrow, however; she decides instead to take a kitchen knife and stab herself, killing the child, but she lives. Is that murder?
2.) Same mother, bearing a child and due to give birth tomorrow, however; she is accosted by a jealous female friend who takes a knife and stabs her, she lives but the child dies. Is that murder?
3.) Same mother, bearing a child and due to give birth tomorrow, however; she is accosted by her insane husband who takes a knife and stabs her, she lives but the child dies. Is that murder?
4.) Same mother, bearing a child and due to give birth tomorrow, however; she is accosted by an escaped convict (male or female) who takes a knife and stabs her, she lives but the child dies. However, the mother already arranged with her doctor (health provider) to have a partial birth abortion when she delivered. Is that murder?
5.) Same mother, but this time she lives in India, bearing a child and due to give birth tomorrow, however; as the child is born she learns the child is female; she has the doctor partially deliver the fetus to suck the brains out. Is that murder?
Now play with the time, instead of giving birth tomorrow, how about she is only 1 month pregnant. Is any of this murder to you? Probably not, because you and your kind, are among the most self delusional wing nuts, regardless of your political/religious persuasion.
Your thinking is no different then 17th and 18th century slave holders, who viewed people declared legally and intellectually as slaves, nothing more then personal property to be disposed of as pleased and nothing more.
Enlighten me Mr thought experiment, tell me how the thinking “abortion is not murder” any different then killing a slave in the 17th and 18th century. Why is this is significantly different??
#57 Noname
The single most salient point of your response is that you didn’t have the courage to answer my question.
So, you would turn in your sister and expect and want her to do time for getting an abortion? Would you want her to be executed? What is it?
#57 Noname
Additionally, to do you the courtesy you’ve refused me so far, in answer to your various scenarios, is, as I’ve already posted, the closer one gets to term, the greater the risk of infanticide, which would get the perpetrator arrested.
53–Scott==I’ll read those references a bit later, but what does it matter if certain races are executed at higher rates than others?
The more relevant issue is whether or not they committed the crime and whether or not that crime is worthy of execution? I have never seen that approach taken and will be pleasantly surprised if your references do.
To do the race as a percentage of population vs race as a percentage of executions is to leave out the many and varied and unmeasurable and uncontrollable factors of culture and society. An impossible and therefore illegitimate task.