• In total there are 32 users online :: 0 registered, 0 hidden and 32 guests (based on users active over the past 60 minutes)
    Most users ever online was 789 on Tue Mar 19, 2024 5:08 am

Morality of Abortion

Engage in conversations about worldwide religions, cults, philosophy, atheism, freethought, critical thinking, and skepticism in this forum.
Forum rules
Do not promote books in this forum. Instead, promote your books in either Authors: Tell us about your FICTION book! or Authors: Tell us about your NON-FICTION book!.

All other Community Rules apply in this and all other forums.
User avatar
Robert Tulip

2B - MOD & SILVER
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 6499
Joined: Tue Oct 04, 2005 9:16 pm
18
Location: Canberra
Has thanked: 2719 times
Been thanked: 2662 times
Contact:
Australia

Re: Morality of Abortion

Unread post

The current Booktalk nonfiction selection Divided We Fall by David French discusses abortion as a major theme in the culture war. The current Supreme Court debate is about whether abortion rights can reasonably be constitutionally mandated at national level through legal opinion, without national legislation. The Roe v Wade decision was a political fix, recognising that legislative guarantees for abortion rights could not gain enough federal support, making judicial activism necessary to override the democratic will of conservative states and communities. The power of activist judges to impose a contested morality is a main source of separatist resentment.

The injustice and harm produced by banning abortion is seen by Republicans as a lesser evil than overriding the democratic will of a community at local and state level. The structural problem is that it is an abuse of federal power to allow the Supreme Court decision in Roe v Wade, which is quite tendentious in its reasoning, to intervene to overrule such local decisions. The main precedent seems to be civil rights, where federal law rightly made it illegal to have openly racist state laws.

The issue here is that people do not like being told how to legislate on a sensitive moral issue against their will. I think what will happen is that Republican States will experiment with banning abortion, but the human rights abuses involved in the ban will generate significant debate and opposition, especially on extreme views like banning abortion after rape. It will open up how much the focus of the policy debate is really about federal power and how much it is about the morality of abortion.

An underlying moral question is the balance between personal autonomy and the traditional family values that see motherhood as the highest vocation for women. Putting the debate in these terms illustrates how support for motherhood, which used to be a cliché, has become highly contested. There is a line of opinion in the climate activist movement that motherhood is bad because there are already too many people in the world. From that angle, abortion is good as a form of population control. I don’t agree with that argument for abortion as the number of people in the world is not a main factor in whether we can shift to a stabilised climate.

A recent world values survey reported at https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSPu ... sBooks.jsp linked the collapse of religion to the steady growth of personal autonomy as an accepted moral framework, and to the growing critique of the main social function of church to support and validate the family values of procreation. Anti-abortion advocates reject the morality of everything that conflicts with the traditional view that sex is only about procreation, such as homosexuality, prostitution, sex outside marriage, etc. All these things are justified by a morality of autonomy, but there is an interesting question what sort of society is produced by permissivism, with questions such as social fragmentation.

The anti-abortion moral framework sees the nuclear family as a social ideal. It expects that women will sacrifice their personal autonomy in support of a primary identity as wife and mother. Having more children links to ideas like patriotic duty, national strength and national security. A big part of this is the role of the family as the agent of cultural continuity, serving to transmit traditional cultural values into the future rather than allow secular modernity to dominate ethics.
User avatar
Robert Tulip

2B - MOD & SILVER
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 6499
Joined: Tue Oct 04, 2005 9:16 pm
18
Location: Canberra
Has thanked: 2719 times
Been thanked: 2662 times
Contact:
Australia

Re: Morality of Abortion

Unread post

Interbane has started another thread on this topic. I have just posted this reply there and am copying here.
Interbane wrote: Thu May 05, 2022 9:52 am I need someone to run my ideas across, a devil's advocate. It's a complex topic and my understanding feels messy at this point. This will be somewhat train of thought, as a deterministic accounting of the morality of abortion.
Hi Interbane, your ideas here are interesting. A consequentialist deterministic ethic of abortion is more complex than how you have described it so far, in my opinion. The consequences of any such decision extend beyond the individual circumstances to also affect the broader society and its values and decisions.
Interbane wrote: Thu May 05, 2022 9:52 amMy starting assumption is that the universe is deterministic. Not in a shallow "foreordained" sort of way, as that has implications of agency. But more in the sense that everything that occurs does so within a vast web of causality. We should seek to understand everything around us in terms of cause and effect. Where we're incapable of discerning causality (the human mind), we adopt what Daniel Dennet calls the "hidden layer". In other words, there are parts of our universe whose workings we don't understand, but that does not mean they aren't governed by causation. Instead, the fog of war of our knowledge hasn't yet illuminated the causal web in those areas in a way that can be comprehensively explained.
This is a really valuable and important framing of the causal postulate. Determinism means every event is the result of causes. The key question I have about determinism is whether quantum indeterminacy means that in principle there are events that could happen differently from the same initial conditions, refuting the Laplace clockwork model of reality, and therefore whether human freedom is real or only apparent. Like Dennett’s hidden layer, we cannot know if the Laplace model of knowing the position and vector of every particle could hypothetically enable complete prediction of the future. But as you say, that is not relevant to your argument.
Interbane wrote: Thu May 05, 2022 9:52 am Attacking this starting assumption is valid, but won't be helpful here. It's a topic for another post. So humor me within a deterministic framework. Or not, perhaps there are valid arguments against. But I'd like to stick closely to the implications of morality and abortion, rather than determinism in general. My thoughts on morality is what's known as a "forward-looking account". In a sense, the concepts apply not in the sense that they derive benefit from reprisal of past action, but rather as causal reinforcement to persuade future beneficial consequences. A german philosopher name Moritz Schlick phrased it that punishment and reward have goals that are concerned with the future, not the past. He says that the 'idea' that punishment “is a natural retaliation for past wrong, ought no longer to be defended in cultivated society” 1930 [1966: 60] Instead, punishment is "concerned only with the institution of causes, of motives of conduct…. Analogously, in the case of reward we are concerned with an incentive. 1930 [1966: 60] The best moral or ethical theory that fits here is consequentialism, although I'm not sure where precisely my own thoughts fit in that category.
This theme that moral philosophy is entirely about the future has a compelling logic. We cannot influence the past, but everything we do influences the future. Ethics is about how we influence the world for good or evil. Quantifying the consequences of action should be at the core of ethical theory, but is obviously impossible to do in a complete way, given the scale of unknowns and the legitimate differences people have about what is good.
Interbane wrote: Thu May 05, 2022 9:52 amI think a version of Utilitarianism, but saying that makes me hateful of the labeling. I only mention it in case you want a keyword to dig deeper. Where I differ from most of what I've read is the utilitarian maxim. Most common is to "maximize happiness". But I see some Asimov-style circumventing of language possible here, where short term happiness is maximized, which then inadvertently leads to long term unhappiness or even extinction. Another issue is that maximizing happiness may be found upon the suffering of others, so we also must consider the minimizing of harm. Another is that happiness isn't necessarily the only positive goal, as we can be happy with drugs yet a detriment to our species. Happiness is important, but we should clarify that we're also concerned with human flourishing. I'm not sure who I stole this from, but the most sensible maxim then seems to be "minimize harm while sustainably maximizing happiness and human flourishing."
Maximising the sum total of human happiness, the utilitarian doctrine of hedonic calculus, can reasonably be equated to maximising human flourishing. Happiness is not the same as pleasure. Short term pleasures such as taking drugs are far from maximising happiness, since the unhappiness and loss of potential that they cause far outweigh the immediate pleasure. A further point is that seeing complex ecosystems as sacred enhances human flourishing and happiness, since the alienation of culture from nature seen in conventional religion not only creates human trauma but also fails to see how ecological sustainability is central to durable human flourishing on our fragile planet. And durable flourishing contains more happiness than immediate pleasure does.
Interbane wrote: Thu May 05, 2022 9:52 am That maxim then becomes the litmus test by which we measure the forward-looking consequences of moral actions.
Of course all consequences are forward looking, so ‘forward looking consequences’ is a tautology. But spelling out tautologies can be very important in philosophy, such as in the suggestion that flourishing and happiness are the same.
Interbane wrote: Thu May 05, 2022 9:52 am I'm running out of time, so need to summarize how this ties to abortion. Minimizing harm means that of all methods of abortion, the least possible harm should be done to the foetus. If we know it can feel pain, that must be considered. It is also only judged as a moral act only if the mother is in such a condition that carrying the birth full-term causes a great deal of distress/harm.
There really are much bigger moral consequences of abortion to consider than the immediate points you mention. The effects on social values of seeing a foetus as disposable private property owned by the mother are one complex area. Another is the foregone flourishing that is lost by accepting that the emotional feelings of the mother outweigh the rights of the foetus. The question of whether adoption should be encouraged for women who feel unable to raise their child is a point that is often excluded from consideration. Another is the difficulty of weighing and assessing post-abortion feelings of guilt and regret. Another is the value of having more of the next generation born in the country compared to coming from immigration, in terms of cultural continuity.
Interbane wrote: Thu May 05, 2022 9:52 am All human lives have moral value when we admit that our individual existences promote human flourishing. Without any other qualifier, we are valuable to our species by default. This is similar to Richard Dawkin's selfish gene, where we have attachments even to distant cousins. It has to do with identity and empathy, but these are the thoughts that are still messy.
A problem with asserting moral value to all human life is that circumstances of extreme disability create a difficult moral calculus. Should we insist parents sacrifice their opportunities in order to care for a child where ultrasound has determined it will be extremely disabled? That certainly reduces flourishing and happiness and pleasure for the parents, even though some people in such circumstances claim otherwise. My view is that such pregnancies should be aborted on moral grounds. But I think a healthy foetus in an accidental pregnancy should be carried to term, and then either given up for adoption or cared for by the parents. Of course adoption creates the messy problem of contact with the birth parents, but that is better than abortion.
Interbane wrote: Thu May 05, 2022 9:52 am Thoughts?
My cultural context has been totally pro-abortion, based on my mother’s strong feminist ideology. In recent years I have come to question this view, with its total emotional rejection of any moral dialogue about abortion. I will also post this comment to the thread Morality of Abortion, where I raised some other moral questions that I have not seen much debated. For example, the problem of whether Roe v Wade is primarily about abortion or power.
User avatar
Interbane

1G - SILVER CONTRIBUTOR
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 7203
Joined: Sat Oct 09, 2004 12:59 am
19
Location: Da U.P.
Has thanked: 1105 times
Been thanked: 2166 times
United States of America

Re: Morality of Abortion

Unread post

Robert Tulip wrote:Hi Interbane, your ideas here are interesting. A consequentialist deterministic ethic of abortion is more complex than how you have described it so far, in my opinion. The consequences of any such decision extend beyond the individual circumstances to also affect the broader society and its values and decisions.
Yes, it's beyond me. I wanted to bring it to this group, as the best set of intellectuals I know. Whatever ethical theory we chose do inform our decision on abortion has an impact on the broader society. Mainly in the sense of clashing viewpoints which would foster division. But if we're speaking from within the framework of consequentialism, the broader impact is a nonlocalized harm to the group caused by the death of one of it's potential members. The slight reduction in flourishing.
Robert Tulip wrote:This theme that moral philosophy is entirely about the future has a compelling logic. We cannot influence the past, but everything we do influences the future. Ethics is about how we influence the world for good or evil. Quantifying the consequences of action should be at the core of ethical theory, but is obviously impossible to do in a complete way, given the scale of unknowns and the legitimate differences people have about what is good.
I think any attempt do quantify consequences leads to the main weaknesses of utilitarianism. Rather, if individual actions are judged by many through the lens of consequentialism, we can use the framework of that ethical theory along with our moral emotions to judge any given act. It would need to be a large enough group, and groups of adherents to other ethical theories would need to inform the discussion as a control set.
Robert Tulip wrote:This is a really valuable and important framing of the causal postulate. Determinism means every event is the result of causes. The key question I have about determinism is whether quantum indeterminacy means that in principle there are events that could happen differently from the same initial conditions, refuting the Laplace clockwork model of reality, and therefore whether human freedom is real or only apparent. Like Dennett’s hidden layer, we cannot know if the Laplace model of knowing the position and vector of every particle could hypothetically enable complete prediction of the future. But as you say, that is not relevant to your argument.
I remember we discussed this quite a bit in the past. Always an interesting discussion.
Robert Tulip wrote:Maximising the sum total of human happiness, the utilitarian doctrine of hedonic calculus, can reasonably be equated to maximising human flourishing. Happiness is not the same as pleasure. Short term pleasures such as taking drugs are far from maximising happiness, since the unhappiness and loss of potential that they cause far outweigh the immediate pleasure. A further point is that seeing complex ecosystems as sacred enhances human flourishing and happiness, since the alienation of culture from nature seen in conventional religion not only creates human trauma but also fails to see how ecological sustainability is central to durable human flourishing on our fragile planet. And durable flourishing contains more happiness than immediate pleasure does.
You're saying there's no real need to reference happiness, as it's redundant? My sense of the conceptual definition of the word flourishing is that it lacks emphasis of mental health. It's more about the thriving of a group in the same sense that an ant colony could thrive, but still be robotic. But maybe my experience with the term is lacking, but my gut tells me it's insufficient.
Robert Tulip wrote:Of course all consequences are forward looking, so ‘forward looking consequences’ is a tautology. But spelling out tautologies can be very important in philosophy, such as in the suggestion that flourishing and happiness are the same.
I agree, although it's more about extra emphasis on the forward-looking aspects. Consequences can be viewed in the past tense as well, in analysis of events. Naturally that must inform the measurement, but the measurement is only regarding actions with respect to what follows.
Robert Tulip wrote:The effects on social values of seeing a foetus as disposable private property owned by the mother are one complex area. Another is the foregone flourishing that is lost by accepting that the emotional feelings of the mother outweigh the rights of the foetus. The question of whether adoption should be encouraged for women who feel unable to raise their child is a point that is often excluded from consideration.
I think the messiest effect is the impact on social values of seeing the fetus as disposable property. I don't think there is any way around the moral disgust at the act, because it is wrong. But the choice of words more accurately lies somewhere between 'disposable' and 'indispensable'. I also think that pro-life advocates dismiss the rights of the mother without proper consideration. If we're speaking of rights, then by what right one human use the body of another human against that human's will? Yes, it's a natural part of the cycle of life, but put yourself in the shoes of a young woman who suddenly has a new human inside her, then being told she has no say in the growth of this human. She's required to allow it to grow. In spite of pregnancy being natural, the thought makes me queasy when I think of those women who desperately don't want to be used as a vessel for the growth of a new human. Until the technology comes along where we can transplant the fetus into another woman or artificial womb, the only choice here is to allow the woman bodily autonomy.

When you mention the rights of the fetus, what rights are you referring to? Are these the god-given rights all people have, where secularists would call them self-evident?
Robert Tulip wrote:A problem with asserting moral value to all human life is that circumstances of extreme disability create a difficult moral calculus.
But doesn't that moral calculus already exist? Don't we judge the inherent value of some to be greater than others? I think that deep down inside we do, and perhaps feel a bit of shame about it. The missing ingredient I think is many fail to consider that the value of an individual must also take into account all their relationships. To lose a person does more harm to all those around them. In fact, I'd argue that the majority of the harm done when someone is murdered is harm to the survivors that loved them or knew them. There is also the generalized harm to society at the loss of one of their members, and also in the slight reduction in flourishing.

We smooth the complexity of this calculus out by saying that all people are equal, because their relationships are invisible to us and therefore an unknowable variable. This judgement becomes so automatic that over time we dismiss the gut feeling that value between people isn't truly equal. I think this 'smoothing out' of the complexities is fair and appropriate for most, but on matters such as morality where we're translating it to law, the complexities must be considered. Unless we give appropriate weighting to the relationships a person has, this can quickly become a slippery slope. It's far safer to simply declare that all people are equal. But to be perfectly honest, I don't think it's entirely true.
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.” - Douglas Adams
User avatar
Robert Tulip

2B - MOD & SILVER
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 6499
Joined: Tue Oct 04, 2005 9:16 pm
18
Location: Canberra
Has thanked: 2719 times
Been thanked: 2662 times
Contact:
Australia

Re: Morality of Abortion

Unread post

Interbane wrote: Mon May 09, 2022 9:19 am I wanted to bring it to this group, as the best set of intellectuals I know.
That is very high praise for the Booktalk community! Abortion is a hornet’s nest for moral theory, highly charged with complex emotion and politics. I hope others are willing to comment. The trauma inherent in abortion means people are often unwilling to discuss it from a dispassionate ethical and philosophical perspective. I was interested to see some comments on this a while back from Harry Marks, and there are all sorts of issues worth discussing especially in the current context of the Supreme Court debate. Wikipedia has a good article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosoph ... ion_debate
Interbane wrote: Mon May 09, 2022 9:19 am Whatever ethical theory we choose to inform our decision on abortion has an impact on the broader society. Mainly in the sense of clashing viewpoints which would foster division.
Social division based on ideology may well be the main impact of the abortion debate, but there are also other impacts. After the Roe decision in 1973, the idea that children who are unwanted or whose parents cannot support them are likelier to become criminals, led to the linkage of abortion with a lower crime rate, argued in Freakonomics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized ... ime_effect
Interbane wrote: Mon May 09, 2022 9:19 am But if we're speaking from within the framework of consequentialism, the broader impact is a nonlocalized harm to the group caused by the death of one of its potential members. The slight reduction in flourishing.
The morality of abortion is usually discussed in terms of rights, setting right to life against right to choose. Arguments about rights are inherently metaphysical, with the claim that a moral principle has absolute validity grounded in the nature of reality. As a result such arguments appeal to our cultural beliefs and principles for their persuasion, and do not rest mainly upon evidence. A consequentialist approach is quite different from a principle-based approach to ethics. Assessing consequences means defining all effects caused by an action in terms of factual evidence and probability. It requires that we think about how things might have turned out differently, known as the counterfactual. The counterfactual for abortion means imagining what would have happened if a pregnancy had or had not been ended. It requires saying at the individual level what would have happened if the abortion had not occurred, and what may have happened if a child allowed to live had been aborted. There is also a social level of impact, with the abortion rate having demographic and cultural effects. The view that abortion is an expected means of birth control changes people’s attitudes about relationships. Types of abortion can be classified, for example teenage, disability, rape, wedlock, large family, poverty, etc, and they all have different moral implications.
Interbane wrote: Mon May 09, 2022 9:19 amYou're saying there's no real need to reference happiness, as it's redundant?
Happiness and flourishing are different, but in terms of their ethical meaning there is major overlap, to the point that a utilitarian ethical theory can reasonably identify them as the same. Short term happiness that undermines longer term flourishing (eg abortion?) is a case in point. Just saying a baby would be inconvenient is not a particularly good reason to abort the fetus. Happiness is more than immediate desire. Eating cake and smoking cigarettes can make you happy, but at the cost of a greater amount of future happiness that could be produced by abstaining from these pleasurable activities. How we balance the immediate and the long term depends on what economists call our discount rate, how much we are willing to forego the prospect of future happiness in favour of present happiness, effectively balancing pleasure against flourishing, consumption against investment, even temporal against eternal if we are metaphysically inclined. My view is that the ideal moral discount rate is very low, almost totally equating utility/happiness with flourishing, prioritising investment in future wellbeing over present consumption.
Interbane wrote: Mon May 09, 2022 9:19 am My sense of the conceptual definition of the word flourishing is that it lacks emphasis of mental health. It's more about the thriving of a group in the same sense that an ant colony could thrive, but still be robotic. But maybe my experience with the term is lacking, but my gut tells me it's insufficient.
The use of flourishing as a moral concept goes back to ancient Greece, with Aristotle using the term ‘eudaimonia’ to mean the highest good for human life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaimonia It is good for the individual and the society to do well and flourish. Flourishing is far from a robotic biological calculus, given that human evolution is primarily cultural rather than biological. Our future flourishing is arguably driven more by conscious intent than by emotion and instinct. We flourish when we are healthy, wealthy and wise. These conditions generate stable and durable happiness, and require good mental health as well as physical health. Abortion cuts the birth rate, by definition, and raises the challenging problem of weighing the potential likely happiness and flourishing of those unlived lives against the actual happiness and flourishing of the woman who decides she is unable to carry the pregnancy to term.
Interbane wrote: Mon May 09, 2022 9:19 am I think the messiest effect is the impact on social values of seeing the fetus as disposable property. I don't think there is any way around the moral disgust at the act, because it is wrong.
The message that it is morally acceptable to regard a fetus as like a tumour totally prioritises personal autonomy over any social interest. There is trauma in abortion, and there are significant psychological dilemmas around how to deal with the grief arising from deliberate termination of a pregnancy. There does seem to be a coarsening of moral sensibility in the view that the only rights are those of the pregnant woman, a diminishing of the sense of dignity of human life.
User avatar
LanDroid

2A - MOD & BRONZE
Comandante Literario Supreme
Posts: 2800
Joined: Sat Jul 27, 2002 9:51 am
21
Location: Cincinnati, OH
Has thanked: 195 times
Been thanked: 1166 times
United States of America

Re: Morality of Abortion

Unread post

Chris O'Connor: The idea that our Constitution is somehow this magical and perfect document that addresses all past, present and future needs of our nation is ludicrous. To me the worship of the Constitution isn't much better than how some Biblical literalists view the Bible. Surely we have evolved as a society past the point where we worship antiquated words on paper.
The authors of the Constitution knew it was not a "magical and perfect document." That's why they included a complicated process to amend it, which has been done 27 times. However there are modern conservatives who seem to believe differently. The Originalism theory states that laws should be interpreted in terms as understood by the authors of the Constitution. (I think Scalia was and Thomas is a proponent, possibly others on Scotus.) It is valuable to consider legal terms as understood by the framers of the constitution, but we cannot be bound by that. Originalists abandon their theory when considering the modern military. In another example, the original constitution was ratified with the understanding that "Property" included "Human beings." We should understand that, but give it not one nanogram of weight when considering modern legal disputes.

No rights are absolute. Jewish law requires access to abortion in certain circumstances. Contrary to right wing propaganda, once Roe falls, various State abortion laws will have direct First Amendment conflicts with the free exercise of religion.
User avatar
geo

2C - MOD & GOLD
pets endangered by possible book avalanche
Posts: 4779
Joined: Sun Aug 03, 2008 4:24 am
15
Location: NC
Has thanked: 2198 times
Been thanked: 2200 times
United States of America

Re: Morality of Abortion

Unread post

Robert Tulip wrote: Sat May 14, 2022 5:36 pm The message that it is morally acceptable to regard a fetus as like a tumour totally prioritises personal autonomy over any social interest. There is trauma in abortion, and there are significant psychological dilemmas around how to deal with the grief arising from deliberate termination of a pregnancy. There does seem to be a coarsening of moral sensibility in the view that the only rights are those of the pregnant woman, a diminishing of the sense of dignity of human life.
This "coarsening of moral sensibility" must be an outcome of the "group polarization" that David French discusses in his book, "Divided We Fall." Because it's actually pretty easy to see how someone can be opposed to abortion and, likewise, to see how someone can be "pro-choice." If you took away the influences of the culture war, perhaps we would all be willing to engage with the moral grayness of abortion and be able to come to a reasonable compromise.

The pending Supreme Court ruling that negates Roe vs. Wade has itself become a pawn in the culture war. We can find radically different viewpoints on this issue, owing to our growing radicalization. But if you can resist the pull of this tide, remember how easy it is to see that there is valid opposition to abortion as well as opposition to pro-choice. It's classic necker cube.

https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Necker_cube
-Geo
Question everything
User avatar
LanDroid

2A - MOD & BRONZE
Comandante Literario Supreme
Posts: 2800
Joined: Sat Jul 27, 2002 9:51 am
21
Location: Cincinnati, OH
Has thanked: 195 times
Been thanked: 1166 times
United States of America

Re: Morality of Abortion

Unread post

Limits on early abortion drive more women to get them later
An 18-year-old was undergoing treatment for an eating disorder when she learned she was pregnant, already in the second trimester. A mom of two found out at 20 weeks that her much-wanted baby had no kidneys or bladder. A young woman was raped and couldn’t fathom continuing a pregnancy.

https://apnews.com/article/abortion-pol ... 36538b418c
Unpleasant reading, but situations that will soon become even more difficult to deal with...
User avatar
LanDroid

2A - MOD & BRONZE
Comandante Literario Supreme
Posts: 2800
Joined: Sat Jul 27, 2002 9:51 am
21
Location: Cincinnati, OH
Has thanked: 195 times
Been thanked: 1166 times
United States of America

Re: Morality of Abortion

Unread post

Because any substantive due process decision is "demonstrably erroneous," we have a duty to "correct the error" established in those precedents. After overruling these demonstrably erroneous decisions, the question would remain whether other constitutional provisions guarantee the myriad rights that our substantive due process cases have generated.

...In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court's substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.

- Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas
Concurring opinion in Dobbs Vs. Jackson Women's Health Organization 6/24/2022
A threat concerning SCOTUS decisions on contraception, sodomy and same-sex marriage. We can't even say "as expected that didn't take long" since it's in the ruling.

https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2 ... 722723001/
https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/24/politics ... index.html
The Alito opinion is an extended attack on the concept of "unenumerated" rights -- that is, rights that are not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/24/opinions ... index.html
Hasn't he read the 9th amendment to the US Constitution?
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Indeed, in one of the opinion's many disparaging references to Roe, Alito writes that Roe "held that the abortion right, which is not mentioned in the Constitution, is part of a right to privacy, which is also not mentioned."
(Link in previous quote above.)
Hasn't he read the 4th amendment to the US Constitution? It doesn't contain the word "privacy," but confers that right.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
User avatar
Robert Tulip

2B - MOD & SILVER
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 6499
Joined: Tue Oct 04, 2005 9:16 pm
18
Location: Canberra
Has thanked: 2719 times
Been thanked: 2662 times
Contact:
Australia

Re: Morality of Abortion

Unread post

Now that the Supreme Court has announced its decision on abortion law, it is even more important to reflect on how this has come about. My own perspective is to support abortion on demand, while also encouraging dialogue about the moral and political issues that arise, recognising abortion as a significant moral issue.

The essential issue in this decision is about the misuse of political power. At the time of Roe v Wade, Congress did not have enough votes to enforce the national legalisation of abortion, so use of judicial power was a way to get around this democratic deficit.

Justice Alito’s description of the use of the privacy line in the constitution in Roe v Wade as “an abuse of judicial authority” is correct, illustrating that opponents of abortion are viewed with contempt by pro-choice advocates. This perception of abuse and contempt drives the popular anger among those opposed to abortion. Progressives rode roughshod over the concerns of their opponents, presenting them as primitive and oppressive and stupid. Mutual demonisation led to the steady growth of abortion as a flashpoint and signal of social division.

Use of courts to change the law in contested political questions increases the polarisation of opinion, as unelected courts lack the legitimacy and authority inherent in legislative policy decisions made by elected governments. In a democracy, major policy decisions should be made by the legislature, not the judiciary. If you can't get a decision through the legislature, you should wait until you can. Forcing a policy on communities who disagree with it should only occur when the moral issues are very clear, as they were with slavery but are not with abortion.

If we think about the counterfactual, what would have occurred if SCOTUS had not legalised abortion? For a start, there would have been ongoing suffering of parents forced to raise unwanted children, as well as ongoing suffering of women finding illegal abortions.

But on the other side, there would not have been an undemocratic suppression of the rights of states to make their own decisions. The nation would not have debated about the authority of the Supreme Court to overrule the authority of states. As a result, the role of abortion as central to the culture war would not have been so fraught.

Meanwhile, the pressure for abortion on demand would have continued to grow. States that continued to ban abortion would have been criticised for the inevitable human rights abuses, such as criminal action against women who had miscarriages, and health problems from illegal abortions. Instead of debate about the arrogance of liberal elites in demeaning the moral values of conservatives, the main moral issue would have been the problems of unwanted births and oppression of women. Progress toward abortion law reform would have been slower, but might well have been more effective, gradually building pressure for legislative action at the federal level without creating the current massive backlash.

This all illustrates how central process is to outcomes. When due process is short circuited, grievance is created, and the aggrieved will build their resentment by campaigning against the decision.
User avatar
Robert Tulip

2B - MOD & SILVER
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 6499
Joined: Tue Oct 04, 2005 9:16 pm
18
Location: Canberra
Has thanked: 2719 times
Been thanked: 2662 times
Contact:
Australia

Re: Morality of Abortion

Unread post

A friend of mine recently wrote on Facebook
It’s so hard to see The Handmaids Tale - that I read as a dystopian fantasy when it came out - charting the contours of the US slide into fundamentalist authoritarianism.
Due to the level of political emotion this raises, I don't want to reply directly. But I want to share a comment here.

I am wondering if opponents of abortion could reasonably regard the 1973 decision of the Supreme Court to mandate a universal right to early abortion as "fundamentalist authoritarianism." The Roe v Wade decision certainly was authoritarian, using judicial authority to bypass the democratic process, in a way widely seen as tendentious.

As to whether it was fundamentalist, it initially seems obviously not from the perspective of liberal scientific reason. However, the debate over whether life begins at birth or at conception is a matter of fundamental values. Requiring that other people accept your view on such a question of values takes an absolute stand on a woman's right to own her body as private property, which was the basis of Roe v Wade.

Any absolute moral viewpoint is essentially fundamentalist in nature, setting up a metaphysical opposition between good and evil. When people want to say their own moral perspective is objectively and fundamentally correct, and then use authoritarian methods to enforce their view by state power, as occurred with Roe v Wade, invoking fundamentalism to demonise their opponents only enhances the political polarisation,

It may be that the religious fundamentalism of Young Earth Creationism etc is only incidental to the driving motivations of hostility to abortion. It seems plausible that rejection of authoritarian federal control of local legislatures is a more influential motivating factor.

It is of the nature of fundamentalist mythology that its adherents do not brook any criticism, and instead see their own opinions as objective facts. That psychology appears across the political spectrum.
Post Reply

Return to “Religion & Philosophy”