Fox explains that the abortion issue is very personal for her because her unmarried, eighteen-year-old mother faced the difficult choice of whether to seek an abortion 43 years ago.
She goes on to state her position and her disagreement with Don Wagner:
Whether or not to have an abortion – or whether to give a child up for adoption – is a deeply personal and often painful decision for a woman or couple to make, and it is a decision they have to make based on their own faith and values, not someone else’s – and certainly not the government’s.Responses to Fox’s piece run the gamut. At least one response is thoughtful.
My opponent for the 70th Assembly District believes otherwise.
He believes that he has the right to impose his own faith and beliefs on every woman and family in California. He has vowed to use his position in the legislature “to defend life from conception to natural death” – bringing back the days when thousands of women each year in California were forced to make the horrific choice between having unwanted children or illegal, dangerous abortions. And he has already received thousands of dollars in contributions from groups outside our district that are determined to use the government to impose their particular faith on everyone else.
Don usually describes himself as a libertarian. Evidently, he makes an exception in the case of pregnancies to the familiar libertarian rejection of government "interference." Perhaps he is inclined to insist that a fetus is a person and the government should therefore be protecting fetuses from, well, being killed by anyone.
Does anyone know how Don explains the prima facie conflict between his libertarianism and his hostility to abortion rights?
Wagner doesn’t discuss abortion on his campaign website, but I don’t doubt that he holds the position that Fox attributes to him. I'll try to locate an explanation of his views on abortion. [CORRECTION: at the end of his comment regarding the "protection" of families, Wagner writes: "I believe that life is precious and will fight to defend life from conception to natural death."]
12 comments:
Wagner on abortion at his website
Here is Melissa Fox's post from her own website:
http://www.votemelissafox.com/blog.php
Don is thus the champion of the freshly implanted egg, that is now apparently a fully formed human being. Time to call in the fetal police to make sure mom's eating correctly.
If you believe that life begins at conception, then the only logical response for government is to protect life (including fetal life).
So if you believe in abortion, then you really do not believe that life begins at conception (otherwise you would believe it is OK to murder). So, when does life begin?
Does it begin at the birth canal? That is what the partial birth abortion supporters believe in. If the baby's head is in the birth canal, you can stick a vacuum cleaner in the baby's skull and suck her brain out and that is legal today.
At conception that fertilized "egg" has everything necessary (given the proper environment of the womb)to grow into an adult human.
If you use the argument that an "unwanted baby" is the criteria as to whether the baby is allowed to live, why stop at the birth canal? Why not allow a year to determine whether you really want the baby. After all being a parent is one of the few jobs you can get without any prior experience. Why not allow a "test drive" for a year and if you don't like it (unwanted) then kill it. After all it isn't good to have a baby that isn't wanted. How cruel is that!
Really the only consistent and defensible position is that life begins at conception.
Oh and BTW of course this is imposing morality on others. That is what laws are all about. As Jefferson penned in the Declaration: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,..."
So who is inconsistent? The one that wants to protect life and that life begins at conception? Or the one that wants to determine whether a baby is wanted, before the baby is allowed to live?
I choose the former.
Scott, you seem to perceive a hostility to Wagner's position that I did not express. I did not say that Wagner was inconsistent. Rather, I wondered how he explains the prima facie (i.e., "at first look") tension between his libertarianism ("government ought not to meddle in our lives") and his hope that the government will forbid abortions. I speculated that he does so on the basis of including fetuses among the persons of civil society who deserve the state's protection. But, of course, he will need an argument. A good one.
One point of logic you should consider. At least since the early seventies, the kind of inference you draw--that, if a conceptus/fetus is a person, then ipso facto abortions are forbidden (because they are murder) has been widely regarded as fallacious or at least not obvious. Roughly, the problem is that, though a person has a "right to life," it does not always follow that it is wrong to kill him/her. The classic "challenge" to your way of thinking was provided by MIT's Judith Jarvis Thompson in her famous essay about the "violinist." You should look it up. Through a series of clever examples, she reveals that it is not so clear that, in a conflict between someone else's life and one's own lesser "rights," the latter interests must give way.
Certainly, government can be viewed as an imposing of a morality on the population; but it is more common to view it as the result of a kind of "contract" ("consent") made among reasonable persons who seek to overcome the disadvantages of anarchy. Viewed as such, it is easy to defend the imposition of such rules as "don't steal," etc. But it is difficult to defend the imposition of particular views about who shall count as a "person" (in the moral sense).
You ask: where does life begin? ("Life" is surely the wrong word, since no one disputes that the conceptus is a living thing.) But you do not reveal your "point" or "line" as correct simply by noting a deficiency of some other's line. Notoriously, all who "draw a line" are saddled with arbitrariness (You might want to look up the Ancient Greek "paradox of the heep.")--arguably, including you, since the potential for baby production exists even before the conceptus comes into being.
Your reference to "partial birth abortions" simply confuses the issue, since it assumes what is false, namely, that all those who defend (some) abortion rights defend those abortions.
Your appeal to Jefferson and his reasoning is very problematic. At least in the philosophical/Logic community, appeals to self-evidence are regarded as empty. (It was self-evident to many during J's time--and perhaps to Jefferson--that Africans were less estimable than Caucasians. So what?)
We can continue to honor and embrace (some of) the values of the Founding Fathers, but we cannot do so on their bases.
I think you reason relatively well for a defender of Don's sort of position, and so I want to encourage you to keep thinking about this issue and to offer your thoughts. But you'll have to get up to speed a bit. (Note: I have not just now argued for my position, which I have not stated. I endorse some abortion rights, with restrictions. I also find this issue to be rather difficult, especially in a democratic society that rejects the imposition of "values" onto the populous. I am somewhat sympathetic to your/Don's philosophical stance. That is, if one can make sense of the notion that a conceptus is a Person in a full moral sense--which I doubt--one naturally must find the practice of abortion to be very troubling. I do sympathize. I do not think the culture is "done" with this issue by any means.)
--BvT
Scott, the phrase "life begins at conception" is a loaded phrase. Ceratinly a sperm is life, as is an egg. But is it 'a" life? That's another argument entirely, and neither I nor millions of others believe that a freshly implanted egg is "a" life. Otherwise, I assume you'll be having funerals for early miscarriages.
You can believe this all you want, but a key problem with this perspective coupled with aspiring legislators is to codify this in a statute, and force many who disagree to surrender their personal autonomy to specious and usually religious beliefs. If you want to argue when a fetus does indeed become "a" life, autonomous and entitled to legal protection, we can do that.
Also, please drop the "partial birth" routine--this is a made up term calculated to involve red meat tossing. A late term abortion rarely happens, and it's when something has gone terribly wrong, and an abortion is medically necessary. Doctors do not give abortions to women who forgot to have one until month 8, so look up the facts or drop this absurdity.
I just want to register my sympathies with Scott, as well; for you (Scott) seem thoughtful and intelligent on the issue, which so routinely destroys the powers of reasoning on both right and left. I say this as someone who is also very troubled by the prevalence of abortion, and abortion itself, though I have long defended the pro-choice position as the imperfect best we can muster in our deeply, tragically flawed world.
If the conceptus is a *person,* a *human being*, then you are right to say that the consistent position is that the state should protect it as vigorously as it does other persons' lives. Even a libertarian, I think, could hold this position, if libertarians think that government should keep us from harming one another, but do no more. Still, Judith Jarvis Thomson's argument (see BvT on this above) is pretty powerful stuff.
I hate the dishonesty and bad reasoning that infects so much abortion talk--sometimes *particularly* on the side that I ultimately side with. I also am aghast at the attacks that pro-life activists suffer (I don't mean the very few who are violent), for being courageous enough to stand up for their convictions and try to protect innocent (as they see them) persons.
Thus I appreciate the good and civil conversation here.
MAH
"If the conceptus is a *person,* a *human being*"--well, that's the point, isn't it? And how can it be so? Does it have a consciousness, a sense of being?
I know, 7:10; I know. I don't myself think that the conceptus *is* a person. But for those who do, of course they need to protect those invisible, voiceless, tiny persons. They show integrity and moral courage when they do so, given the scorn heaped upon them. That's something that often gets overlooked, strangely.
MAH
I'd like to agree with you, MAH, but I find that, all too often, these folks care less about "tiny persons" than they do about forcing women to give birth for all sorts of reasons, mostly religious and sometimes mysoginistic.
Note that after the "helpless baby" is born, then it's on its own. These are the people who, generally speaking, vote for a particular party that professes to not care less about the post birth scenarios. A clump of cells is, curiously, much more important than a fully formed human that needs proper nutrition.
10:46: I find what you say about motives (wanting to force women to give birth) wildly implausible.
And even though conservatives should care more about the *born*, a violent death is, after all, very different from living in poverty. They would say: at least don't flat-out destroy--murder--this person; give her a chance to make her way in the world.
Besides, you don't have to be a hypocrite or inconsistent or callous in order to be pro-life. Many are, but not all. (That was a sneaky ad hominem you inserted into the argument!)
MAH
Yes, sure, but their rhetoric is disingenuous. What of the serious question begging that an implanted egg is now a baby, person, child, human being, etc., without addressing the serious implications of such a statement.
I also dislike their using the term "pro life" which implies that those who disagree are "pro death." The better term is "anti choice" which is, at lerast, intellectually honest.
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