Maggie's Farm

I wouldn't think twice about pulling the trigger on the battlefield or on a home invader or somebody threatening my wife or kid. I feel exactly the opposite way about an unborn baby. It has to do with the innocence of that human life and the fact that it is my responsibility to take care of it; it has no choice in the matter.

Any lack of moral clarity I had was remedied after my wife's first trimester ultrasound. It was in color and I saw my son's face, and his movements. I had intellectually always believed that a fetus was a nascent human deserving of the full protection of the laws; after that I believed it on an emotional and intuitive level.

The time for the difficult, agonizing personal decision is when the couple are all heated up and there's not a condom in sight. It's not later. The fetus is a consequence of a difficult, agonizing, personal moral decision, it shouldn't be the subject of it. There were times I didn't take adequate precautions in my wild oat sowing; thank God my recklessness did not put a girlfriend in a bad position where abortion was an option. I realize the decision has a lot of gravity, and I'm not trying to condemn here (Alison), just trying to state where I stand.

I realize there are some situations akin to the lifeboat (e.g. life of the mother) where the moral scales are weighted quite differently. But I don't see convenience or the fact that a child might face a tougher life as a rationale for abortion, and I have known more than a few women who rely on abortion as an alternative method of birth control. No agonizing there, but plenty of justifications. Kids have grown up fine in ordure, without big screen TVs, and in relatively penury, and doing so is not as big of a handicap as one might think. Nor is living in a smaller house or having an older car than one desires a black mark, and, in fact, in most moral systems, sacrificing one's own desires on behalf of another is generally an extra credit activity.

I find KRW's argument about the rape and incest (and I suppose life of the mother) problems particularly galling - it basically says that if we cannot be perfect in our morality then we should not even bother. Not sure I'd like to live in that sort of a world, but maybe people in KRW's neighborhood are more perfect than those who live in mine. As a matter of political practicality I'd settle for eliminating third trimester abortions and ask for elimination of anything past about the 4th month, save in extreme cases - again, my morality is imperfect here.

Similarly, the fact that many fetuses spontaneously abort does not justify abortion. To argue that opposing abortion imposes a moral duty on believers to stop natural spontaneous abortions intentionally conflates proscription with positive duties to intervene. The law prohibits many things, but only rarely imposes a duty to intervene - in tort law, for example, one is prohibited from harming an accident victim and causing further injury during rescue, but the prohibition on harm does not also impose a duty to rescue or a duty to intervene to prevent harms that naturally would have occurred to the same victim. Arguing that opposing man-made abortion compels prevention of natural spontaneous abortion is like arguing that because we oppose murder and manslaughter, that we also have a moral duty to stop heart attacks, cancer, lightning, bus strikes, old age and other causes of death - otherwise our opposition to murder is morally invalid.

You find galling an emotional response? Okay, I won't try to spare your feelings this time by making it about my subjecting reaction. I find your line of reasoning fatuous and objectively flawed.

The primary flaw in your reasoning is that you somehow manage to find opposition to man-caused abortion logically inconsistent, arguing that if we oppose man-caused abortion then we must also necessarily favor taking all steps available to stop natural, spontaneous abortion. This very clearly conflates a duty to do no harm, with an affirmative duty to act. Within your heart attack example, our duty to not go around poisoning people and causing heart attacks (which would be murder) includes an affirmative duty to protect them from heart disease.

That you cannot see the difference between a proscription and an affirmative duty to act is fatuous. And still galling.

Point taken. I'll note though that God's servants tend generally to be somewhat imperfect, and one of the tricks to finding God is to look past his imperfect and sometimes downright treacherous servants. Just as a virtuous rich man may have a butler who purloins silverware, there are occasionally thieves in some of the rooms in God's temporal mansion around these parts. Until men are perfected I think that will always be the case.