guildenstern

Looks like you got most of your replies in the thread, but I'll post mine here.

I'm pro-choice and anti-death penalty.

I'm able to hold both of these views because I see them as confronting two different issues. In the case of the death penalty, I tend to take one of the views that Hobbes wrote about in The Leviathan: that law, in its search for appropriate punishment, serves to restrain the will to revenge. To me, justice seems to be most just when it is devoid of passion; the elimination of a human being as being unworthy of life is, IMO, the antithesis of this. (There are other substantial reasons for my objection, such as the known error rate in capital punishment cases, but this is my philosophical and ethical reasoning.)

In the case of abortion rights, I see it as being the only currently workable option for balancing the rights of the child with the rights of the mother. I agree that a fetus is a life; I also agree, however, that the vast majority of abortions are done in the first two trimesters, before the child is viable. (According to the CDC stats posted at religioustolerance.org, approx. 88% of all abortions are done previous to 13 weeks.)

The question as I see it is this: does the existence of a life that is fully dependent on the mother (i.e., that is not yet viable) serve as a valid reason to force the mother to accommodate that dependency?

I have no objection to encouraging the mother to do so, when this is done in a positive manner. (Scare tactics I find indefensible -- on both sides.) Nor do I have any objection to the notion that society has a vested interest in protecting those who are not able to protect themselves. However, I think that it crosses the line when we legally assign an obligation to an individual when that obligation is based on biological conditions.

What we are faced with is an interpretation of the meaning and ethical purpose of pregnancy. Does the state, or society as a whole, have a greater interest in the birth of a child than the mother? Does the father have an equal interest? Do either of these interests, if they exist, trump the interest a woman has in having control over her own biological functions?

Personally, I would like to see options such as embryo cryopreservation be more actively pursued -- embryo transplantation is already used as a successful means of surrogacy, for example, and there are adoption agencies that work to find mothers for embryos left over at fertility clinics after successful pregnancies. (Of course, that would raise other issues, such as vested genetic interest and weighing of the paternal and maternal interests. It's by no means a clean solution.) Until such options become readily available, though, I tend to see the availability of abortion rights as the closest thing we have to a solution that balances the rights of all involved -- including the child, considering that abortions cannot be done after viability without existing medical necessity.

It's a hard choice and there is no easy answer on either side. ("Her body, her choice," is just as empty as, "Abortion is murder." Both ignore the complexity of the issue.) In such situations we must make do with the best solution available, I think, even if it leaves us wanting.

To paraphrase one of my favorite scenes from Criminal Law: The law is the dark shadow of justice. It does not shine. It's not even the same shape... but we know what casts it, and it's as close as we can come.

Right now, leaving the choice in the hands of the individual, until the point of viability, is as close as we can come to justice. So I endorse it.

Its not feudal its complete meritocracy. The dime a dozen, was just a comment on a particular behavior of a particular personality type who feels the need to rush into an argument their not really part of and stick up fro someone without saying anything more than "You suck".

And yeah, its a waste of time, but at the moment I'm waiting on a guy coming to get a dumpster out of my driveway. Time, I got.