Murderers or Not?
Avedon Carol:
…I keep waiting for someone to lay it on the line: The anti-choice people have to dissemble about their real goals[*], and down-play the fact that the logical conclusion of a "principled" position for someone who believes abortion really is murder is to treat women who have abortions as murderers. [italics in original]
[an excerpt from Avedon Carol, "The tangles of my mind", The Sideshow, 12 April 2006.]
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*Quoting further
[…] you really, really have to think that controlling women is a worthier goal than saving the lives of people who have already been born to support the anti-abortion movement's obvious conclusions. They don't believe abortion is murder. Hell, most of the time, they don't even believe that murder is murder. "Abortion is murder" is just rhetoric. They don't mean it. What they mean is that women should not have control of their reproductive lives. Since that is not a saleable position, they must lie. [Given t]he fact that they stop caring about the lives of babies within mere minutes of birth, this is obvious.
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on Thursday, 13 April 2006 at 00.17
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I get the logic in the "Quoting further" portion, but the statement is much too broad. There may be some few for whom the motive is usurping control of women's bodies, but I don't believe most opposed to abortion have that as a goal. Rather, it's a consequence.
The whole abortion controversy is an abomination, really. It begins with "pro-life" hard liners' delusions about getting the law changed. If they accomplish that, it's not going to yield the results they want.
They have to learn the battleground is not in courts or legislatures. It's within the mind and conscience of women. You'd think people of faith would take that as a given, yet they don't seem to get it at all.
On the "pro-choice" side, activists types would be wise to work really hard discouraging women from having abortions of convenience. I'm convinced it's the idea of that going on unchecked that's most discombobulating to the pro-lifers.
So, therein could lie some common ground for people on both sides to work with. But no, they seem to have a remarkable capacity for all-or-nothing highhandedness.