Pro-Choice Equals Pro-Abortion

Although I'm pro-choice, one of my pet peeves is when fellow supporters of abortion rights try to pretend that being labelled "pro-abortion" is somehow incorrect. If you describe yourself as pro-choice you are in favor of keeping abortion procedures legal and available. It doesn't mean you love abortions or want to see more of them, but it certainly does mean you are "pro-abortion," as opposed to anti-abortion. It should be obvious, but when you support the right of a woman to choose, the primary thing you support is her right to choose an abortion. That makes you and I pro-abortion. If you pretend otherwise that makes you logically-challenged.

Having said that, why do I use the term pro-choice instead of pro-abortion? I use it for two reasons. First, it's the widely accepted and used term for those supporting abortion rights. Another of my pet peeves is when people refuse to use commonly-accepted terms and instead substitute some sort of jargon preferred by their particular group. (I'll get back to that point shortly.) Second, pro-choice as a term accurately reflects the primary outlook of those supporting abortion rights. Most of us support abortion because we focus on a woman's right to control her own body. In other words, being pro-choice emphasizes that a woman should have the final choice in whether or not she gives birth.

On a related note, I use the term "pro-life" for exactly the same reasons that I employ pro-choice. It's the commonly-accepted and widely-used term for anti-abortion people, and it accurately conveys their emphasis, which is to protect the life of the unborn baby above all other consideration -- such as the wishes & rights of the mother. It is common in left-wing and feminist writings to shun the term pro-life and substitute "anti-choice." I find this incredibly silly. Whenever I see people using this substitution it automatically makes me take them much less seriously.

h/t Forever In Hell

Killer Gets Life. It Should Have Been Death.

Scott Roeder, who murdered late-term abortion specialist Dr. George Tiller was sentenced to life in prison. Here's a guy who deliberately stalks his victim and plans a killing, walks into a church full of people and shoots his target -- putting other lives at risk as well. He's not only completely unrepentant, he takes proud ownership of the murder. In my opinion there is no good reason to keep such a person alive and in prison. He should get a speedy execution instead -- and by speedy I don't mean ten years from now.

False Equivalence as Usual

False equivalence and bad analogies are staples of left-wing argumentation, so I wasn't surprised to see the following piece appear at Balloon Juice: Your Ticking Time Bomb Scenario. The author, John Cole, writes

Since there is no doubt that we have a history of anti-abortion domestic terrorism, and since we know that evangelicals already support torture for everyone, when do we get to start waterboarding this guy? Does he have any children whose testicles can be crushed? Will we keep him up for weeks on end in stress positions in extremely cold rooms to get him to break? Beat him? All the right made a very good show of how shocked and appalled they were when this man killed Dr. Tiller, so surely they will not object. So when do we get to start torturing this guy?

Since this is an excerpt, I want to make it clear that Cole isn't actually advocating torture. He's just using a ridiculous analogy combined with a couple of strawmen -- in other words, he's making a typical left-wing argument.

First, and this should be blatantly obvious, domestic terrorism isn't equal to foreign terrorism. Anti-abortion radicals, eco-terrorists, and other domestic terrorists aren't' part of an international movement or network that wants to kill people just because they happen to be Americans. Instead, they have much narrower, more specific targets in mind. They are a far smaller threat because they threaten a tiny portion of the population. If you aren't an abortionist and don't work in an abortion clinic, you have little to fear from some lunatic pro-lifer. All forms of terrorists are not equal. We don't have to worry about crazy pro-lifers planting a nuclear device in one of our major cities. It's also unlikely that they'll be flying hijacked airliners into buildings, bombing crowded subway stations, or perpetrating Mumbai-style massacres. Last I checked, we weren't in a war against a radical pro-life group that killed thousands of Americans. 

Second, saying evangelicals support "torture for everyone" is just idiotic, even as an exaggeration. And of course, Cole deploys the common strawman about torturing the innocent, in this case children -- as if anyone who favors torture in certain cases has been advocating torturing innocent family members. Using that strawman is basically an admission that you don't have a rational argument against the torture of known terrorists, so instead you'll argue against torturing the innocent.

And finally, like many on the left, Cole apparently can't tell the difference between U.S. citizens who happen to be criminals -- yet have Constitutional rights -- and foreign terrorists who have none. Hostile aliens captured during wartime are an entirely different category of person than domestic criminals who are U.S. citizens. You might think that would be obvious. Of course it's always possible that his post was just intellectually dishonest, instead of being as dumb as it appears.

Thoughts on Dr. Tiller

Dr. Tiller was a hero to some, and a monster to others. As usual, I think the truth is found in neither extreme view. I see him as just a doctor who chose a difficult and controversial specialty. A while back I posted on why I am pro-choice, even to the point of supporting a woman's choice to have a late-term abortion. I'm not going to recap everything I wrote then. But I will repeat that unlike many who are pro-choice, I do see a late term abortion as the killing of a baby, a morally questionable act. However...

First of all, the choice to have an abortion is the mother's, often made in conjunction with her family. If there is blame to be assigned for an abortion, it should go primarily to those who make the decision, not to a doctor who carries out a legal procedure. And there are numerous circumstances that can bring someone to that situation, and cases vary wildly. Many pro-lifers seem to assume that Dr. Tiller was just performing "lifestyle" abortions.  They act like he was just callously destroying babies. The evidence indicates otherwise. Both of these posts, here & here, detail some personal stories of people who went to Dr. Tiller for abortions. This should be obvious, but not everyone who has an abortion has one because they are irresponsible, and just wants to dispose of a problem. For many it is an agonizing decision, brought about by circumstances beyond their control.

If you oppose abortion under any circumstances, you are entitled to your opinion. But recognize that you are an extremist, a type of moral absolutist. You are the type of person who would force a mother to give birth to a dying baby, rather than just ending the misery. Fortunately, that decision isn't yours to make. Most people, even many abortion opponents, allow for certain exceptions. Unfortunately sometimes major problems with pregnancies do not show up early. In those cases a late-term abortion is the only realistic option. Abortion providers like Dr. Tiller are necessary, no matter how repulsive the idea of late-term abortions may be to many. 

Abortion Provider Killed in Kansas

By now everyone probably already knows that Dr. George Tiller, a doctor who provided controversial late-term abortions, was shot dead while in church. A suspect is in custody. According to CNN, Tiller was previously wounded by a radical pro-lifer back in 1993. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that whoever killed him is not an atheist.

I've been skimming through the blogosphere reaction. Predictably, many are already jumping to conclusions. Some on the left are trying to smear the right in general with the blame. Andrew Sullivan is actually trying to link Bill O'Reilly to the killing. I must have missed where O'Reilly called for Tiller to be murdered.  I guess if some whackjob ever kills a former Bush administration official we can blame Sullivan. On the right, at least in some comment sections, there is some disgusting celebration of the doctor's death -- along with sentiment that even if the murder was wrong, he had it coming. 

It's also worth noting that the same people constantly whining about "fearmongering" with regard to threats of terrorism, have suddenly changed their tune. Now they are worried about "the terrorist threat posed by religious right extremists." Spreading exaggerated fear is fine as long as it serves their political purposes.

UPDATE

Little Green Footballs has posted some evidence that the suspected killer was indeed an anti-abortion extremist. I know, big surprise.

Why I am Pro-Choice

Abortion has been in the news again lately, with the controversy surrounding the president's speech at Notre Dame, and the Gallup poll indicating a public opinion shift toward the pro-life position. It occurred to me that I've never written about why I hold a pro-choice position.

My views on abortion have nothing to do with Roe vs. Wade. In that decision the court found an imaginary right based on the non-existent right to privacy. In my opinion there is clearly no right to abortion in the Constitution, and the only reason it is a Constitutional right today is because of government fiat. So why do I support it anyway?

My position on abortion went from being pro-life with certain exceptions, to pro-choice under limited circumstances, to fully pro-choice -- a position that I've now held for a long time. My shift from pro-life to a limited pro-choice position was a gradual change over a number of years. Basically I came to believe that there is a certain point at which a baby becomes a baby. In my view it was obvious that a fertilized egg was not a baby -- it was a fertilized egg and could be aborted with no moral problem. On the other hand, a baby in the womb one hour from being born was clearly a baby. Killing a late term baby, let alone a partial-birth abortion, looked a lot like infanticide. So for years I felt that early term abortions should be permitted, late term abortions should be prohibited, and middle term situations were debatable either way. But then my thinking took a radical shift.

Rather than just focusing on the baby, I began thinking, what if I were pregnant woman? Once I started looking at it from that angle, I realized that the rights of two people were at stake: the woman's and the baby. But the baby, even a fully-formed viable baby, existed inside the woman. Why should the rights of an unborn baby take precedence over of the rights of the mother, a person that contained the baby within her own body? I could no longer accept the idea that the state should determine what a woman could do with something inside her own body -- even if that something was another human being. It's not that I hadn't heard this argument before. But I had just rejected it out of hand, since I wasn't looking at it that way. But once my viewpoint shifted, my opinion changed to what it is today -- that a woman should have the ultimate decision over what happens to her unborn baby. 

Even though I am strongly pro-choice, to the point that I would support a woman's right to kill her late term unborn baby (and unlike some, I recognize that she's doing exactly that), I don't agree with it in many cases. I think it is clearly immoral to abort a late-term baby without a very good reason, and the decision is morally questionable in many situations other than an early abortion. But ultimately I think that should be the woman's decision to make and live with.

 

Souter-inspired Thoughts

I wasn't going to write anything about Justice Souter retiring. From a right-wing perspective, I don't see all that much to say. With Obama as president, we are going to get a replacement who is just as bad or worse. Republicans aren't really in a position to do much about it. Our best hope is that Obama nominates someone who is just a mainstream liberal, as opposed to a radical leftist. But whoever we get is likely to have the liberal judicial philosophy that the Constitution means whatever they think it should mean. And that brought something to mind.

The left in general, along with some allies, have been screaming and howling about the legal interpretations of the Bush administration. The Bush legal team came up with creative legal reasoning to justify waterboarding and other borderline coercive interrogation measures. The left is shocked and horrified, to the point that many of them actually favor prosecuting the lawyers for their legal advice. How dare lawyers come up with some sort of legal reasoning that enabled a Republican administration to do what it wanted to do? But when the judicial branch does the same thing, in a far more extreme way in support of liberal causes, they are completely fine with it. As long as it is done in the service of the "correct" cause, the Constitution is just a tool that can be twisted to justify anything they desire. Think I'm exaggerating? Look at abortion.

I personally support abortion rights, but the right to an abortion has nothing to do with the Constitution. Abortion is a right today because of government fiat. The Supreme Court declared it a right, and the government treats it as one. If you disagree, go look at a copy of the Constitution and find the right to an abortion. Most of those who support abortion rights have no problem with the ridiculous legal reasoning behind it. Why? Because it serves the purpose -- legalizing abortion. A significant portion of the left, which strongly supports abortion rights found nowhere in the Constitution, is apparently blind to the right to bear arms, which is plainly spelled out there in black and white. This is why, among other reasons, I find the hysterical outrage at Bush administration lawyers so laughable.

Oh, and back to Souter's replacement... Wouldn't it be nice if we could get an Obama nominee who appeared liberal but turned out to be much more conservative once on the court? That would be a fitting successor to David Souter.

Michael Steele is Confused?

How is it possible that a politician gets to the level of chairman of the Republican National Committee without knowing his own position on abortion? Abortion has been a major political issue for decades. Any politician, particularly at the national level, knows he's going to be asked about it, probably repeatedly and from different angles. It's a position statement that a competent politician should have nailed down cold. But not our RNC chairman. From Politico:

RNC Chairman Michael Steele said today that despite telling an interviewer he supports "individual choice" and state-level decisions on abortion, he in fact opposes abortion and supports a Constitutional ban.

Leaving aside the fact that I'm pro-choice and liked Steele's original statements better, he's not exactly filling me with confidence as RNC Chairman. First he attacks Rush Limbaugh in kind of a haphazard way, decides he didn't really mean it and apologizes. Then he says he's for individual choice on abortion, and as soon as he's criticized, turns right around and says he wants a constitutional ban. Is he incapable of formulating a coherent position and defending it? The last thing we need is more political incompetence in the GOP leadership. I was optimistic when Steele became chairman, and hopeful that he would represent positive change. He had a good reputation as a communicator. But he might want to start thinking before he speaks.

Brazilian Child-rape Case Part 2

The case of a 9 year old girl who had an abortion after becoming pregnant because of rape by her stepfather, which I recently wrote about here, has taken another turn. Not content with merely condemning the abortion, the Catholic Church in Brazil is now excommunicating the doctors involved and the girl's mother. According to the BBC, the situation has "has attracted criticism from women's rights groups in Brazil." Only from women's groups? If so, that's pretty sad.

The Ugly Face of Catholicism in Brazil

A nine year old girl was raped by her stepfather. She became pregnant with twins. Although abortion is illegal in Brazil, an exception was made and she had one at 15 weeks. Guess who objected to the abortion and felt the need to speak out? That's right, the Catholic Church.

Marcio Miranda, a lawyer for the Archdiocese of Olinda and Recife in northeastern Brazil, said the girl should have carried the twins to term and had a Caesarean section.

"It's the law of God: Do not kill. We consider this murder," Miranda said in comments reported by O Globo.

What about the little rape victim? He has no problem making a 9 year old go through a pregnancy brought on by rape, and then forcing her to have a major operation. She doesn't matter. Saving potential children is more important than than her life, according to the church in Brazil.