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The Abortion Debate

Assuming that No One is Pro-Choice and Pro-Life and that you are interested in forming an opinion on the subject, you ultimately need to make a decision about which camp you want to belong to. In my mind, this involves determining first what the parameters of the discussion really are. There are a number of issues that get brought up, but not all of them are truly relevant as to whether or not someone ought to be pro-life or pro-choice. So, we need to frame the debate.

Philosophical Issues

Abortion primarily gets discussed around a small number of basic moral and metaphysical issues. In my mind, these are fairly straightforward questions, though the answers might get tricky.

  1. Is the fetus alive?
  2. Does a fetus have a “right to life”?
  3. Under what circumstances is it morally permissable to kill a living person in the womb?
I think the pro-life position requires that you answer those questions as “Yes. Yup. And few-none.” Moreover, I think the pro-choice position requires that you answer just one of those questions in nearly the exact opposite of the pro-lifer.

Policy Issues

The policy issues are issues about what should be done about it, if anything, once you’ve made up your mind. There are a good number of policy issues involved in this topic. These are things like the following:

  • How would we enforce an anti-abortion law without violating the mother’s right to privacy?
  • What would the punishment for getting an abortion be?
  • Won’t this cause back-alley abortions and harm the health of women?
Personally, I think these kinds of issues are things you should care about after you’ve decided which camp you fall in. I jumped the gun and outlined my policy stance before talking about any of this.

Why I’m Pro-Life

First, I think it’s nigh impossible to determine a point at which the developing child is not a living, human person that doesn’t create damnable circumstances if carried out to its logical extreme. For instance:

“You have to have been born to count!”

Oh? Why would the location of a person relative to their womb change what they are? If we stick the baby back in the womb, can we still kill it or is it just a one-time deal? What about Cesearian or surgically-removed premies? Do you have to pass through the birth canal? It seems odd that we would have such rigid constraints here.

“You have to be able to live on your own to count!” ”You have to be viable!”

No infant can live on their own. Arguably, most people can’t live on their own. I don’t think that makes it ok to kill them. “Viability” doesn’t seem to pan out to me because newborns are increasingly viable as medical technology advances. Surgeons have successfully performed surgery on premies in utero and premies have increasingly improving survival rates as time goes on. So, to say that it’s alright to kill someone just because, in the event that they *did* have an issue, we haven’t developed the technology to make them viable seems morally and metaphysically problematic at best. Effectively, you’re saying that we’re should count more and more things as living beings as the centuries progress. Technological prowess shouldn’t make it morally permissible to murder the elderly and young children.

“You have to be a person!”

What, exactly, defines a person? While you’re busy building a definition, I’d like to point out that you’re likely going to find that either the unborn exhibit the same behaviors you’re describing in utero (and that we’re continuing to discover a number of different things about the unborn as time goes on) or you’re going to describe someone much older than you intended on doing (e.g. a toddler, possibly some adults). Also, keep in mind that this is a moral/philosophical debate (which should be prescriptive) and not a debate about what the law currently is (which would be descriptive). Really, “personhood” doesn’t solve any issues so much as it just moves the problem and muddles the conversation.

“It’s my body!”

The problem is that it isn’t *just* your body. Pregnancy does a number on a woman, but why would the torment of pregnancy give the woman license to kill? (And, if it does, at what point does it stop? Husbands should tremble in fear of this argument.) Or, a stranger version of the question, how many organs would I have to donate to someone before I could kill them (because it’s my body)?

If you buy into the first bit, I think most of the basic policy issues are actually fairly easy to work out. When the life of the child has to be weighed, things become less muddled. For instance, take the “rape” concern. What if you had consensual sex with someone, got pregnant, had the child, and then got raped by the same person? Moreover, what if the child looked just like your rapist? Rape is a terrible crime, but that wouldn’t give you license to kill the child. You have to be compassionate to both parties when you acknowledge the existence of the child.

Additionally, if you accept the above, the practice of abortion becomes legally problematic. Why is it legally acceptable to kill the unborn but not the born? Why do we protect the rights of only some children and discriminate against the others simply because of their age?

Anyway, that’s more or less my 2 cents. Keep it civil in the comments.

 
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Posted by on 2012-03-30 in Abortion

 

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2012 Election Predictions

It’s just before Super Tuesday for the RNC primary and I feel confident enough to lay down some predictions / strategies. Romney is going to take the popular vote and will likely be the RNC candidate. Ron Paul is trying some sneaky business with the delegates, but I don’t think it’s going to work out.

In spite of that, I spent some time with a coworker speculating about how the election might look with each of the candidates as the RNC nominee and what kind of narrative the Obama candidacy needs to paint to win.

Mitt Romney

This should be all about class warfare. Who’s going to fight for the 99% and who represents the 1%. Point out Mitt’s tax rate compared to the tax rate of his secretary. Point out that political power is reserved for the rich. Tie yourself to Occupy.

Don’t get dragged into a discussion about how you’re basically the same person. The best that can accomplish is to drive down a voter’s desire to go to the polls and it cuts both ways.

Rick Santorum

Women’s issues, among other things. Scare the hell out of any progressives or moderates to get them to the booths.

It’s going to be easy to alienate a number of religious conservatives here. Focus on the issues, not the values.

Newt Gingrich

I keep writing him off, and he keeps surprising me. I still think he’s down and out. I don’t have much here except it seems like this is the candidate you need to beat a Republican on family values.

Ron Paul

I think this one is actually tricky. You can’t come right out and call him a whackadoo nut. You have to subtly point to it and that’s difficult to accomplish. Additionally, Paul is easily the least hypocritical long-term politician I know of. Obama has made several concessions and his administration has had a number of snafoos. That said, Paul will likely frighten quite a few progressives / moderates.

Paul would want to paint a narrative of Obama stripping freedom while pointing towards his beliefs. He might point to the drone attack on an American citizen. He might point to the individual mandate. He could point towards the recent inclusion of contraception on religious hospitals as an attack on religion. There’s actually quite a bit of story to spin here and it could resonate well with the low-government and social conservative groups and with moderates. Additionally, Paul has a series of rabid supporters.

As far as my interest in politics as a spectator sport is concerned, this is the match-up I’d like to watch. It would make for a *very* interesting election cycle.

 
5 Comments

Posted by on 2012-03-05 in Politics

 

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One of my Problems as a Developer

I spend a lot of time, I mean *A LOT* of time, working on improving basics and my environment. I don’t like doing something subpar right from the get go and I am absolutely anal about the quality of my code. I’m not saying I’m perfect, but I don’t move on when I notice something I don’t like.

I don’t have this problem at work because, well, a.) I’m a manager and don’t really code that much anymore, and, b.) I have deadlines that I have to meet and my work performance depends on that. What I’ve been able to do over the years is to just “bang something out” and then do research later to figure out a better way to do it.

On personal pet projects, however, I lack discipline. Maybe it’s because of the trade-off I mentioned above or maybe it’s because I know there really isn’t any real deadline and there’s no one really judging my performance. Or maybe it’s because I just enjoy playing around (on the project I’m currently working on, I’ve decided to build an MVC framework in PHP instead of download any of the actually good ones so that I learn PHP better and because I thought it’d be fun — and it has been). I’ve found that working with just one other person who is dedicated changes my capabilities pretty drastically.

Case in point: my brother came into town and spent some time doing some WordPress modifications for a personal project of his own (he’s into real-estate and SEO and was setting up a niche website for the area he works in). Because he was here coding something, I finally made some progress on a personal project of my own. Granted, I had been doing bits and pieces here and there, but I got more done while he was here than I had months prior.

This happens in other areas too, so I probably shouldn’t be surprised. People work out more consistently when they have a dedicated partner or a team they’re on.

Looking back at this weekend, though, I’d be remiss to say that I didn’t do much else besides more or less finalize an application framework in PHP. (I’m still not sure exactly how I want database updates to happen, but beyond that, I’m basically done with the basic framework.) This means I can get some things besides the registration and login pages functional — you know, actually do the parts of the program that are interesting to users.

 
 

I Don’t Get Satan

By which, I mean Satan as a being with a real presence. If you think Satan and sin are metaphors, well I don’t get that either, but that’s not the subject of this post.

As with most of my posts in this category, I might get Satan if I spent more time looking through things my church produces. I believe the answer is out there, somewhere, and if I spent a little bit of time on it, I could probably figure it out enough to satisfy myself. Or I could post something ignorant on the internet. Here goes.

The Basic Story

Most Christian churches that believe Satan is real have the same basic story. Satan was God’s most brilliant angel. Satan railed against God and got angels to align with him. This made them forever demons and live in hell. Satan (and his demons) will try to make you sin and go to hell too. There’s going to be a war / was a war / is currently a war between angels and demons. God’s going to win. The end.

What a shitty story!

There are a bunch of theories my church doesn’t subscribe to that I’m far more familiar with, so I’m mostly going to talk about those here.

What was his initial motivation?

Say you happen to personally know and have fairly fully experienced the omnipotent and omniscient creator of all things. What on earth would make you think you could rail against that, particularly since you know God to be omniscient and omnipotent and that said source of Good and Truth told you that you would lose? It seems about like me deciding to personally wage a physical war against the United States. The local police department could take me down, nevermind the whole freaking army.

I think I’ve usually heard “pride” and I suppose I can understand that as some kind of motivation that might fly in the face of reason. People who are addicts, for instance, often know that what they’re doing is wrong or bad and find that they can’t help themselves, no matter how wrong they think they are. Maybe it can be assumed that Satan bought the hype that he was God’s favorite, was addicted to being a pretty, pretty princess, and God corrected him about something inane one day and he got mad? Maybe the other angels called him a momma’s boy and he got upset?

But really, I still find it difficult to buy. How could an angel get prideful in that manner? How would something some have argued is pure intellect and has innate understanding of the universe decide that this is a reasonable thing to do?

This leads me to a related version I’ve heard. Lucifer saw an opportunity to become equal to God by destroying something God created. So, he set out to destroy Adam and Eve and bring death into the world. I like this version better, but I still get the impression that he should have known that this wasn’t possible. But maybe angels didn’t have that kind of knowledge. Maybe there’s some piece of this story that I’m just outright missing, but I guess there’s some possibility of it.

Fine, but what’s his motivation now?

Ok. Fine. Sometime near the beginning of creation you thought you could equal God. Then, Jesus is born, humanity is reunited with the divine essence, and Jesus not only escapes the bonds of death but also redeems humanity and makes humans eternal. Well, damn. At this point, I’d give up. Satan? Nope. So what’s his motivation here?

::shrug:: I mean, he’s basically lost by this point. I guess there’s a certain “I can be a real bother” aspect, but it’s got nothing on his original “I’m going to be equal to God” shtick. I guess being a sore loser is a kind of motivation. So would being somehow fixed in your earlier decision (thanks Medieval philosophy), but it’s still not a great story. It makes Satan…petty, petulant, and pretty bad at making decisions.

I guess I do kind-of intellectually grasp him, but I just don’t really “get it” on a personal level — about like I will never actually get quantum physics. I don’t think of Satan as this ugly, black creature with sharp, pointy teeth, wings, and a tail. I really don’t think of him as dumb, either. Satan’s smart and alluring. We’re the dumb, nasty ones.

Why does Satan still exist, exactly? What kind of war are we really talking about here?

And here’s where the story loses me again — probably because I didn’t read far enough wherever I found the rest of this (likely “The Ancestral Sin” by Fr. John Romanides and then a bunch of medieval philosophy excerpts). If you buy the bit about obliteration of creation making one equal to God, I can see why Satan and demons would exists. But why not keep them away from people? Why allow possession or even temptation? This creates a potentially weird Problem of Evil / anti-omnipotence argument where Satan potentially wins his argument that he’s God’s equal and that seems awfully goofy (and wrong) to me.

I’m pretty sure the idea that you can war with God (or maybe that God would war with you) goes the same way, though I suppose most people probably think of it in terms of a battle for human souls. I suppose that means Satan and the demons are trying to deny people full communion with God, and in that sense, they are winning a war? Sounds more like a high-stakes bake sale competition than a war. Or, if the demons win, American Idol.

 

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There’s Always a Loophole

In 2010, my company instituted a new policy for health care benefits that required adult participants to take a health survey and a health screening. Additionally, “due to rising health care costs”, they removed the fully-paid options and gave a discount to healthy employees (presumably because they, in turn, got a discount from the insurance company). If you had a medical condition that precluded you from the discount, you had to get a doctor to sign an affidavit saying that you couldn’t possibly meet the requirements for the discount and you got the discount. We were told that this was going to become commonplace in the workforce nationwide and there was a decent amount of blame thrown at the Affordable Care Act of 2010 and the Obama administration.

My wife was pregnant at the time and, therefore, could not reasonably meet the cholesterol discount — your cholesterol skyrockets during pregnancy (in a good way). So, she got an affidavit and I passed the test. It wasn’t until I was blocked from enrolling my wife in my health care plan in November before I realized that I apparently hadn’t  followed all of the rules.

Discrimination laws are an interesting thing, it turns out. “Discrimination is bad,” you might think. And I’d generally agree. But it means it is also legally very dangerous to bend the rules. And your HR department and that ERISA lawyer, they don’t work for you. They exist to protect the company. Any exposure to lawsuit, any potential risk they bring to the company, would be an example of them simple not performing their jobs. Period. So my efforts to enlist them were fruitless. So were the arguments I made based on my personal research. They would win a lawsuit if I brought it against them because I was legally in the wrong and any other action would mean opening them up to a discrimination lawsuit by nearly everyone else in the company and their families. Additionally, my wife wouldn’t qualify for COBRA unless she lost her coverage due to a specific kind of event that doesn’t involve goofing up the enrollment process. So, I needed another option.

First, I briefly looked at private individual health care. I figured it would just be more expensive than the health care provided by my company. One of the phone reps, I believe from Cigna, actually laughed at me when I told her what I wanted to do. Ever heard of pre-existing condition? Pregnancy counts. Additionally, they don’t even support maternity care.

“Wait,” you exclaim, “What about the Affordable Care Act?”

Maybe you hate the Affordable Care Act, maybe you love it, or maybe you just think it’s ok. Regardless, the act  did a number of things that could have helped us out. It allowed previously uncovered people the ability to gain coverage, even if they had a pre-existing condition (if you had been uninsured for more than 6 months). It expanded coverage for young adults (if you’re younger than 26). It prevents health care companies from rescinding coverage (for health reasons). It establishes health care exchanges for individual care, an individual mandate for health coverage, and removes the ability for a health insurance company to prevent you from obtaining insurance based on a pre-existing condition (all in 2014). So, we couldn’t use it, not because it didn’t do good things and not because the programs in it wouldn’t have normally worked, but because everything about it that was currently in place excluded specifically my wife in this exact scenario and everything else was going to pop into existence a few years after we likely didn’t need it anymore.

Second, I looked up what would count as a “qualifying enrollment event” based on HIPAA regulations and our company policy. Having the baby counts, but then it’s too late for the pregnancy. Dying counts, but that’s a non-starter. Employment status changes, on the other hand, could work. But the trick is that you have to get a job that *has* benefits. Then, you have to take those benefits. That’s a bit hard to come by as a pregnant woman — although, we probably could have pulled it off at a corporate Papa John’s location. Additionally, most places have a several month waiting period before you get those benefits and, by then, she would have delivered — my son was born in March.

Third, there’s COBRA. The only way we could get COBRA coverage is if I quit my job before her coverage ended (i.e. December 31st, 2010). For a long time, this seemed to be the most likely scenario and was something I discussed with my boss. I didn’t want to quit, but I was apparently going to have to quit.

But then, I found another way I could get my wife back on my insurance. Yes. It would be expensive. Yes. It would be time consuming. But, it would be less expensive than paying for an emergency C-section in cash, much less a loan. As it turns out, this was my financial saving grace and saved me enough money that I could pay for my son’s 3-4 month NICU stint and multiple surgeries. I could start my own business, hire my wife (and another person, to make it work in Texas), get a corporate insurance plan for small businesses, and set my own insurance policy (which paid 100% health insurance on the first day of employment). The business died very quickly and my wife and the other employee quit within a few weeks. That made my wife eligible for insurance at my present company again. I’m no lawyer, but I did talk to one – one that worked for me. It’s not fraud if you legitimately did it. I paid employees and taxes. I bought domains, wrote designs, and started banging out code. It wasn’t until I found multiple similar products in the marketplace before I stopped — and that was after folks quit.

I’m writing this today because I finally finished filing my company’s federal taxes. All that’s left is to hire a tax professional to handle my personal taxes (because that is just too much string to unwind). I still own the business and might try to pick it up again soon with a slightly different tack — more with what I originally had in mind. And I have learned a stupid amount about health care plans, HIPAA, ERISA, and taxation at the state and federal levels for someone with no interest or background in those fields, all of which I hope to soon forget about. I very much want to celebrate and to take a loooong vacation.

 
2 Comments

Posted by on 2012-01-19 in Personal

 

Babies Poop in Corners

One my my 9-month old’s favorite things to do seems to be to get into a corner, stand up, and poop. He then laughs or giggles. If you didn’t hear him pooping or catch the giggle, you will eventually smell it and the jig is up.

I accidentally took a very scientific study and discovered that 100% of babies surveyed poop in corners while standing by mentioning this story to 2 other parents. This has led me to believe that babies want poop privacy.

 
2 Comments

Posted by on 2012-01-13 in Personal

 

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I Don’t Get My Church on Gay Marriage

I get that my church is against gay marriage (and any other kind of marriage that isn’t heterosexual monogamy). They’re against gay marriage because they’re against sex outside of Holy Matrimony and I get the religious reasons why. The Holy Tradition (which includes, and validates, Holy Scripture) mandates that marriage is between one man and one woman and that it is sinful to have sex outside of marriage.

That’s great…for Christians (or Orthodox Christians if you want to get persnickety). I mean, look, I get that subjectivity is a poor basis for morality and that moral relativism is laughable. I get that the Church should stand for what it believes and not shirk it’s responsibility as a moral compass. I get that the Church shouldn’t change what it means by Holy Matrimony to make a few people happy.

But, in the context of a secular or plural society, where there are lots of people of differing opinions that are trying to pass laws to govern themselves, I don’t know why we really get involved. There are a billion sinful things people can do that are legal — and we keep inventing them. I don’t understand thinking that policies on political issues that require everyone to be Orthodox are good in those kinds of societies.

Personally, I’m a fan of “as long as you’re consenting adults, I don’t care what you do.” I don’t have a problem with polygamy or homosexuality as a legal thing carrying the same legal benefits as a church marriage and I don’t see why the church really does either.

Does it condone the behavior? No. It’s the state admitting that it doesn’t have any real hold on consensual, adult sexuality and that it can’t fairly discriminate against those people. It doesn’t condemn the behavior, but it really doesn’t do much of that now anyway. *That’s* the role the Church plays.

Does it normalize the behavior? Not really, no. Media outlets normalize (and sell) behavior and that’s already happened here.

Does it make the behavior right? Not unless you believe in moral relativism and the Church clearly doesn’t.

So….why care?

 

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I Don’t Get Thanking God

This is the first post is a series of things I don’t understand about things I believe. Since it’s the first post, I feel I should explain this a bit. By now, you should know that I don’t really bother researching…well…anything. Maybe I’ll bother if I write things down. Maybe. But, you’ll probably just get to revel in my ignorance as I’m sure that my lack of research is the whole reason I don’t understand it. On to the post.

I recently had a fairly traumatic medical family experience. My son went into the NICU the first day he was born and was diagnosed with a very rare case of NEC. He went from healthy to dying in 3 days time and had to have most of his large intestine removed. Before the surgery, I asked about the rate of mortality from children under average circumstances and was told his chances were pretty good. They were just over 50%. Maybe even 60%. Now, everything is fine and basically normal. Thank God.

Or should I? Is it presumptuous of me to think that he answered my prayers? Am I being prideful in thinking that God helped me out? And why didn’t He help out someone else in the NICU that had a similar predicament? Wouldn’t that lead someone to start blaming God for evil in the world, specifically the death of their child under similar conditions? And if my child had died, I think I might have.

I can certainly thank Texas Children’s Hospital and the doctors and nurses that work there. And I did. And I thanked God too, just in case — in fact, my prayer sounded about like that (“Just in case you did anything…Thanks.”). But, still I don’t get it.

 

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To Be Happy is to Have Been Sad?

An idea that seems pretty prevalent (to me, anyway) is along the lines of “in order to be happy, you have to be sad.” After all, how would you distinguish or understand your happiness otherwise? Look, I’m not some shiny, happy person that sees rainbows, sunshine, and half-full glasses everywhere I walk. But, I think this is bunk. My answer is twofold.

You’ll Know You Are Happy When You Are Happy

There’s a problem here in that the argument cuts both ways. Specifically, how did you ever know you were sad? You knew you were sad because you got sad about something and someone explained what sadness was to you. The same thing happened when you were happy. You know you’re happy because you know what happy feels like and you know how the word applies to your emotions.

Knowing You’re Happy is Different than Being Happy

Maybe nobody told you what happiness was or maybe you aren’t particularly introspective. That doesn’t mean you aren’t happy either. All it means is that you don’t realize it. For me, I often notice I’m happy after I’ve been happy for awhile and I don’t constantly think, “I’m happy,” while I’m doing whatever it is that’s making me happy.

The Problem of Evil in Christianity

Where the hell did this heading come from? I’ll tell you where. There are a number of Christians that believe evil is necessary for good, that pain is necessary for pleasure, that sadness is necessary for happiness, and that death is necessary for everlasting life. This is completely inconsistent with the beliefs of the ancient Christian church (which is clear in their rejection of Gnostic thought, amongst other places) and, in my opinion, Christianity as a whole. It either makes God the author of evil OR it deifies evil, making it as powerful as God. Either way, it’s not good and probably worth ditching the whole religion over if you think that way. (Why worship an evil God? Or, for that matter, why not worship Satan? Why do good if doing evil is God’s will? And so on.)

There’s an area of speculative Christian theology that deals with the question of “The Fall”. The thought here is that God had other plans for us if we could perform simple tasks. That we could have moved from one good to another and that we would eventually be allowed to eat the forbidden fruit. In other words, “The Fall” wasn’t necessary. Satan isn’t an agent of God. God didn’t create evil. This world wasn’t a part of His master plan or original design. We live in a fallen world, filled with death, out of his mercy.

 
 

My Pro-Life Policy

Mississippi just defeated a “personhood” amendment 58% to 42%, an amendment that’s fairly popular with some anti-abortion groups and has reared it’s head in other states in prior years (only to be defeated). As a policy bill, it was terrible. So terrible, in fact, that the National Right to Life Committee didn’t support it. Lots of smart people have pointed out, in mainstream media, the amendment’s gaping flaws (e.g. too vague, potentially criminalizes too much (including miscarriage), will be defeated by the Supreme Court, etc.), so I won’t repeat that here. Instead, I’d like to float a different policy for pro-life/anti-abortion groups. So, let’s ignore, for a moment, whether or not pro-life is a good position and just assume that it is. The question is, simply, what kind of policy should we propose if we want to stop abortion?

Oppositional Support

I’m going to lazily refer to a gallup poll from 2002, but most of this is probably consistent with about every conversation you’ve had on the topic. Most people are against abortion as a form of general contraception. Most people support the choice for abortion in at least some cases — including one or all of rape, incest, or death of the mother. Moreover, many of the popular reactions to attempts to ban abortion fall into women’s health concerns or, more generically, women’s rights concerns.

So, if you want to get support from people who believe in choice, you have to construct a policy that at least handles rape, incest, death of the mother, health concerns, and women’s rights in a preferable way. Additionally, you can’t lose the pro-lifers that brought you there in the first place.

The Policy

Make abortion a medical issue, governed entirely by medical ethics boards (preferably state medical ethics boards).

Sure, it could be flushed out more and made more complicated. I’m sure there are hidden problems to explore and clever ways of avoiding them. But, the basic idea should be sufficient for my purposes. It has the following effects:

  • It (nearly completely) removes abortion from the political arena.
  • It puts a woman’s health front and center.
  • Privacy concerns are already addressed by the medical community.
  • It removes the criminalization of doctor’s and patients for making tough decisions.
  • It reigns in abortion “as a contraceptive” by allowing local boards to punish irresponsible doctors. Egregious offenders (read: doctors) could potentially have criminal charges brought against them.
  • Local government is better at handling moral differences and moral conversations.
  • The medical community is better suited to handle biological and philosophical issues related to human life. This empowers them to make difficult decisions.
  • It unwinds the historical changes that put us here in a natural way.

Some Basic Problems

So, what about rape and incest? Those aren’t explicitly handled above.

Well, as far as they affect the woman, they fall into the “health” category. “Doctor” in this case should include a medical psychologist (or a related occupation).

What about stopping abortion? This doesn’t really do that. Isn’t that the point?

Sort-of. There are difficult moral concerns at play here that need to be navigated carefully. Sure, this is a system that can be beaten. But it would significantly dampen the 1 million+ abortions each year that happen for non-exceptional reasons. That’s the real goal that should be focused on before all else. Realistically, you can’t stop abortion and you can’t make an unbeatable system.

Obviously, it needs more work. I won’t even pretend I treated this subject properly. And, clearly, you won’t like it if you aren’t convinced of the underlying position and premise. But, I think it’s miles beyond a “personhood” amendment.

 
7 Comments

Posted by on 2011-11-09 in Abortion