As usual South Dakota War College alerts us to two pieces of potential legislation on abortion. My guess on this is that the failure of the last attempt at pro-life legislation has probably poisoned the well. It may be that the chance for some moderate limitations on abortion, which I am certainly for, is gone for the time being.
Anna, now my Keloland colleague, has a lot of interesting things to say. I comment here on the logic.
We have a bunch of legislators who believe they're doctors, scientists, and God, all rolled into one.
The question whether the law should protect a woman's right to an abortion, or the right of the unborn to life, is a human rights question and as such a public question. Courts and legislatures will decide it. No one needs any special sort of expertise, let alone Divinity, to have an opinion on that.
Abortion has existed through virtually all of recorded history, through virtually all societies.
Yes, as have infanticide and other forms of child abuse. This tells us nothing about whether such things ought to be opposed or not. I agree with Anna that it is not a matter of whether abortions will occur. It might be a matter of how often they occur.
UNFPA states that 68,000 women die every year in developing nations as a result of unsafe, illegal abortions.
I have no idea whether those numbers are accurate or not. But for those who believe that abortion is infanticide, about a million and a half children die every year in the U.S. alone from safe, legal abortions.
Anna's arguments are plausible if, and only if, her underlying assumption is true: that the unborn (I am being very careful about the language here) is neither a moral nor a legal person. But that is precisely the point of contention. For those who see it otherwise, opposition to abortion is not a character flaw.
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