Straight up, academically speaking abortion isn’t much of an issue outside of theology either. And I’m definitely not going to do the literature justice, but might as well spend some time breaking things down just a little bit.
Like, even if abortion is murder, so what? States with capital punishment murder and that seems to be accepted. I’m convinced there are assassinations going on all the time. In war, there’s just a lot of murder and evidently that’s “fair.” On the streets, cops have a high level of immunity when they murder. And even between us regular folk, there are legal defenses.
For the record, I’m anti-capital-punishment, anti-war, and anti-police brutality. I tend to be pro-life so much so that I’m not very comfortable with the legal defenses for murder. But I’d make the distinction between an immoral act and a criminal act. I think we should criminalize the actions that detriment society, not necessarily the immoral ones. And if criminalizing an immoral act makes that society not run very well, it should fuck right off.
With that all laid out, let’s look at a defense of murder. I’m pretty sure they’re distinct defenses, but I’m going to lump castle laws and self-defence laws together. America is unique in the legalization of the use of deadly force by random citizens against someone threatening their property, but most countries accept that if someone comes at you, you can defend yourself proportionately.
To answer how that would relate to abortion, we have to ask (1) who can do the killing to defend the person? (2) Is abortion a proportionate response? and (3) when is it needed?
(1) In a self-defence case, it’s usually the one that’s being threatened that does the killing. But if you called the experts, AKA the cops, they could and would be expected to “neutralize that threat” for you. Other civis might be able to too and claim necessity, though I’m not 100% sure. It’d make sense. We don’t want survival of the fittest out there. Even if a doctor doesn’t have a cop’s licence to kill, I would hope, they are expert enough to be allowed to neutralize medical threats too.
(2) Proportionate to what? In a rich-ass country like Canada or the US, we go to lengths to minimize the risks of pregnancy. But let’s face it boys, if anyone threatened to make our urethra expand ten to fifteen centimetres in diameter, we’d say it was self-defence.
Maybe we’ll have the ability to incubate outside the womb from conception with an easy operation and then that could be an option. For now, there’s no other way to deal with the fetus’s birthday plans.
(3) Honestly, I have no fucking clue. The risks of abortion will always be present and I don’t know how to calculate that. And if we could, how do we decide what percentage abortion should become a choice or even a necessity? Most non-extreme folk would agree there are some exceptions, but where do we draw the line? Or rather, who gets to decide?
Should the doctors or the government? When did they get the right to decide for someone else? Especially when most of their data comes from self-reporting. Even if we tried to get “hard science” done, there’s going to be ways to fake that shit too. Remember, we tried this route and shit didn’t work. Rich folk either paid for a referral, bought a manual on how to fake a suicide to trick a psychiatrist in getting a referral, or just took an abortion vacay. And the legal system couldn’t do shit about it.
For the people who are into that whole rights shit, we can sidestep this whole discussion outright. (1) If you think when the government guarantees your right to life, they don’t mean they will keep you alive forever, but that they won’t actively kill you, the baby ain’t got an argument to stand on. The government doesn’t have to step in if the mom evicts that bitch. (2) Who the fuck gave the baby any right to the mom’s body? I remember this sex ed video’s jingle, I don’t think it was supposed to be about abortion but I thought it was relevant, it goes: “my body’s nobody’s body but mine.”
P.S. A note on eugenics. Both Canada and America have a long history of eugenics policies targeted at racial minorities and cases of forced and coerced sterilization keep popping up to this day. Most recently, there have been reports of ICE forcibly sterilizing some migrants while denying access to abortion for others. Those Progressive Era Catholics were rightfully scared of the eugenics movement; I mean, we kept that shit post-Hitler with some rebranding (Oregon renamed its “Board of Eugenics” to the “Board of Social Protection”). They were just a little off on what they needed to be worried about. Decentralized abortion decisions aren’t what lead to eugenics. Giving that power to a centralized institution, whether it’s the AMA or the government, does.
Wake Up Sheeple! 