“It’s not a choice of hot dogs and hamburgers,” Levatino told the audience as protesters lining the aisles with signs proclaiming, “Our bodies, our right” hissed and interrupted. “There’s more at stake.”Supporters of abortion rights heckled during the speech. Can somebody explain how they can think that helps their cause? I'd say trying to blot out the other side's speech, especially in this case, implicitly expresses your fear that the information and reasoning he's providing is persuasive. Also, it makes you look rude and insensitive to both the speaker and those in the audience who want to hear, which is especially damaging to the abortion rights cause (because it's easy for people to think of abortion as a woman's selfish insensitivity to the interests of another).
Levatino then launched into a graphic description of his abortion procedures, which involved pulling individual body parts off a 20-week-old fetus from inside the womb with a large metal clamp.
“I didn’t have any qualms with what I was doing,” Levatino stated. “I was pro-choice. It was part of my care to women.”
৬ অক্টোবর, ২০০৫
"For the first time in my life, after over 1,200 abortions in private practice, I actually looked at the pile of goo..."
A pro-life speaker on the UW campus:
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If you believe that a 20 month year old fetus is not life an no different than cutting someones hair, it wouldn't bother you to boo and hiss someone who thought otherwise.
I suppose PETA supporters feel they get a similar insensitive reaction from farmers who take their pigs to the slaughter house.
The more I think about it, it is odd that PETA members are not also radically pro-life. There is a breakdown in logic somewhere in their thinking.... how could a 20 month year old fetus have less rights than an egg or chicken.
Your ending comment is spot-on - it doesn't help their cause to interrupt information, especially from an expert. This relates well to a post you had a few weeks back about Chief Justice Roberts during his law school days - he was one of the rare conservatives surrounded by liberals - he *HAD* to be more schooled in facts against purely emotional arguments.
We need hecklers however. Public speakers must never be allowed to think they have captured the hearts and minds of any audience. Heckling is raw Democracy at its finest. About 5 years ago I was one of the hecklers at a kkk rally. There were 4 klansmen and about a dozen of their supporters. There must have been at least 150 hecklers, all booing, hissing, chanting, cat-calling, etc. There truly is delight in heckling a public speaker. There is a savage joy in it, all moraltiy and politics aside.
Mr. Sloan--
20-month old human fetuses would almost certainly be dead.
JB & Sloan:
It's not inconsistent to support vegetarianism and abortion rights, both as a matter of personal choice.
I am a vegetarian and think it's a good idea for various reasons, but I don't expect that a legislative ban on meat consumption is the answer, morally or pragmatically.
Even on a strictly moral level, there is no moral interest in meat consumption that I can see. Whereas there are arguments for the right of women to abort their fetuses based on moral considerations, agree or not.
Not that your comment doesn't pose some good questions, but if you tink you've hit upon some kind of ultimate contradiction, you're missing some obvious differences between the two issues.
I think there should be a new species of academic fallacy: Assuming contrary to evidence that college students are acting rationally.
Stranger,
Has anyone been to their local abortion clinic lately?
Yes.
Have you noticed if it is or is not surrounded by shouting, marching anti-abortionists with large posters depicting said 'piles of goo'.
Yes I have noticed, and yes there are some of those people, but they are a minority. Mostly, the "protesters" are there praying and offering to speak to anyone who'd like to hear about alternatives to abortion. It's hard to do when you're not allowed within 150' of a clinic entrance.
They especially like getting their posters right in the faces of the terrified and depressed young women trying to survive what is usually the worst experience of their life.
Yes this happens, and I think it's unfortunate. But I understand why protesters use those posters since Planned Parenthood refuses to show sonograms to their patients or give them useful information - they are told it's a "product of conception" or "mass of cells." Why do 90% of abortion-minded women who see a sonogram choose not to abort?
I don't like the use of graphic posters personally, but I understand the justification. Just like when PETA shows graphic pictures of abused animals, or when TV showed pictures of fire hoses used on civil rights protesters, pictures are a powerful way to communicate truth.
And I agree with you it's the worst experience of of a young woman's life. That's why I am conflicted about the use of such tactics.
Does that behavior really help their cause? Does it help those women?
I doubt it, but who knows? I think their immediate cause is to 1) Force the young woman to be confronted information she definitely will not receive inside the clinic, and 2) Raise enough doubts in her mind such that the fetus will not be killed.
Signs work well. They show solidarity and numbers, give a certain threshold level of respect to the speaker, and make it into the morning paper.
JB -
The distinctions didn't keep you from finding the vegan/pro-choice stance "laughable" and "disturbing", but you noted them.
better than nothing...
You're right, Decklin, there are no easily defended positions, and that's why hecklers do their cause no good. It's not the heckling, it's the lack of thought, that rankles.
I don't want abortion to be illegal, but I have to say that all of the women I know who have had abortions did it for reasons of essentially convenience. That was a couple of decades ago, in the early days of Roe v. Wade, and women perhaps chose abortion too quickly, but this is not a good for society, either.
Anselm: "Even on a strictly moral level, there is no moral interest in meat consumption that I can see." I used to be a vegetarian, but I felt sick in a way that I found was cured by eating meat. I don't eat a lot of meat and I try to buy free-range type meats. I feel I need to eat meat for my health. Is that not a moral interest if I also take care to buy meat from animals that have been raised under decent conditions?
The problem with eggs isn't their status as potential chickens -- you're probably not looking at fertilized eggs. It's the conditions under which most egg-laying chickens are confined. It's therefore important to buy eggs from free-range chickens. Concern for the suffering of chickens caused by you is not inconsistent with your supporting a woman's autonomy in governing her own body. It's true that you're failing to rescue the unborn child, but you would have to intrude on her body to do it. When you eat eggs from chickens raised under poor conditions you are part of the cause of the suffering.
Hecklers appearing to be rude and insensitive?
Hecklers ARE rude and insensitive, on both sides of the issue, whatever the issue.
Oh, I know. The hecklers are thinking of themselves as wielders of 1st amendment rights, participating in confrontational politics. And that's the problem.
Confrontation goes beyond the boundaries of civilized discourse, and to the degree the hecklers go beyond those boundaries, it becomes less a matter of expressing a viewpoint and more like an assault, with the underlying possibility that violence is a possibility. In short, heckling is a threat, and is meant as one.
Milos, thanks. Your experiences echo mine. All this 'choice' can break your heart.
Anselm wrote:
Not that your comment doesn't pose some good questions, but if you tink you've hit upon some kind of ultimate contradiction, you're missing some obvious differences between the two issues.
That the killing of the children of animals is more morally egregious than the killing of the children of humans?
Because that's how it looks like, when you're a vegan AND pro-choice.
I am pro-life, and I veer towards favouring anti-capital punishment.
I realise one is the killing of innocent life, and the other is the killing of life which has taken life, which the State has decided must be punished, but at least my way, makes more sense.
But vegan and pro-choice? Please.
Cheers,
Victoria
implicitly expresses your fear that the information and reasoning he's providing is persuasive. Also, it makes you look rude and insensitive to both the speaker and those in the audience who want to hear, which is especially damaging to the abortion rights cause (because it's easy for people to think of abortion as a woman's selfish insensitivity to the interests of another).
Brava.
Cheers,
Victoria
But when the mask is removed, their position boils down to anti-choice and anti-woman;
I am hardly likely to be anti-myself or anti my own interests.
This is where the absolute breakdown of logic occurs.
It is not men who are the basis of the pro-life movement. It is women.
You have to find another argument than "It's the big bad MALES who are at fault for trying to keep you down!".
You'll find that doesn't work in the West as much anymore.
Cheers,
Victoria
tcd said...I've had my share of abortion arguments with enough American males to know where they're coming from.
If you've approached said males as antagonistically and condescendingly as you did the posters here, then I doubt very much that you discovered anything about where they are coming from.
tcd said...I was referring to all pro-lifers when saying
their position boils down to anti-choice and anti-woman; pure control over half of the population
You just confirmed my opinion that its unlikely you've actually gleaned much from anyone you debated abortion with.
I have a hard time believing that you have never met a single pro-lifer who opposed abortion on moral grounds. Every single pro-lifer simply aims to control women, huh?
That seems a rather naive and simplistic view of things.
tcd: For the record, I absolutely think women have a right to make a choice. I just think we need to make our choices well before you think we do.
And, I feel it is morally repugnant to stand by and tacitly condone something that is wrong. Can you understand that, from my perspective, I would be betraying my own beliefs by supporting a right to abortion?
That said, you certainly have the right to your beliefs and to lobby for laws that support your beliefs. I think I have that right as well.
Allicent is absolutely right. There truly is common ground between pro-choice and pro-life. And, no one is served by a contentious debate where each side seeks to silence and insult the other.
Anybody else catch this?
"My wife does not want to have a child because this would cramp her 'creativity,' a faculty which remains, in her 30s, amorphous and ill-defined. She used to be in a band."
"I know two other women in their 30s who attend writing workshops and hope to be novelists and reject motherhood as something which would put an end to that hope."
That's a rather extreme view of "pro-life" if you're suggesting every woman should be a mother. Good or bad, why not respect their choices since your judgment here might be off. Or did I miss something and they've all aborted too?
(You could always leave your wife if you feel so strongly about fatherhood -- there's probably still time for you as a man. Sorry to hear about your youthful mistakes, but it sounds like neither of you were responsible enough to care for a child then, and her parents did not want to either. Perhaps this was the least painful outcome considering what might have become of that child, had you not found a decent adoption home for the child. Good luck.)
Allicent writes:
"You say mothers who abort are "murderers". Well then, those good Christian women who give up their children for adoption must then be "abandoners"?"
That is simply specious. I'd say leaving a baby on the side of the road might qualify a person as an "abandoner", but entrusting a child to a loving home most certainly is not. You, of course, know this, but you had a cheap point to score. Well, congrats!
A long time ago, I read that abortion was the main means of birth control in the Soviet Union. Don't know if it's still true in Russia.
I increasingly don't know where I stand on this issue, but I always thought that little fact puts some moral context on the issue that pro-choicers might want to consider. I mean, given the rather mechanistic, anti-human aspects of the Soviet approach to organizing life.
tcd -
The only thing I'm saying is something vague about the nature of abortion, such that it struck the Soviets as such a wonderful means of birth control.
So perhaps it's more a comment directed at women having abortions than at the pro-choice movement. Although, I do think there is an aspect of the militant pro-choice wing that evinces a certain pride in the choice and even in the act.
It was a musing sort of comment. But maybe there is meaning for the pro-choice wing, in that the way the Soviets embraced it provides a clue for what strikes the pro-life movement as so dark and anti-human about it. And also, results-wise, the fact that it's not mandatory doesn't mean it doesn't become common.
In fact, now that I think about it, it wasn't mandatory in the Soviet Union either. It's just the way things developed, I believe.
I am basically a pro-choicer, still, just because it is a moral decision about which there is great disagreement, so I've always thought we really have no choice but to leave it up to individuals. Yet I also have always known that ethical construct means nothing to pro-lifers who see it as murdering babies.
I also think it's been an issue that has contributed strongly to the political decline of the left. Politically, emotionally, staking a large part of your base on something that CAN be seen intellectually as a legitimate right for women versus something that can very easily be seen as killing babies - well, you're at a disadvantage.
Especially, by the way, since about half the women in the country don't agree it should be a right. So it becomes kind of hard to argue that it's a totally obvious right.
Again, I'm just thinking about political dilemmas.
OddD: Victoria is spot on with her comment: Men are consistently more pro-choice than women.
I think you're both completely right here.
Ann: You've had a few threads on abortion in the past few days. Kudos to you that you've created a forum where posters (with a few exceptions) have maintained a civil discourse on a subject that's notorious for reducing debaters to screeching, seething radicals.
Thanks, Jennifer. One of my primary concerns in blogging is fostering civil discourse. I love good debate and have devoted much of my life to trying to inspire it.
Allicent: Good points. I've also noticed that a lot of men are pro-choice by default. They've never associated the issue with themselves and therefore have never really formed specific opinions or beliefs.
A long time ago, I read that abortion was the main means of birth control in the Soviet Union. Don't know if it's still true in Russia.
That was true, and IS true today in Cuba.
(I don't know about North Korea, since I have never met a N. Korean)
The mother of my ex-boyfriend, Cuban-Americans here in the US since 1985, once had to be rushed to hospital with profuse bleeding.
Turns out she had an IUD implanted in her without her knowledge, let alone consent.
This was after she had given birth to the 2 children considered the ideal of a Communist Cuban family (1 more than in China and Russia), and apparently, it was determined not to leave it to chance.
We're not in any danger of that or Indira Gandhi's mandatory vasectomies here in the US, but you see, birth control and abortions in some societies (these alleged Superior Societies at that) are not about women's rights.
Cheers,
Victoria
I've also noticed that a lot of men are pro-choice by default.
My father is pro-choice. My mother is not.
I've never dated a man who was pro-life. Ever.
Cheers,
Victoria
My father is pro-choice. My mother is not.
Funny - we're the opposite. My father is ardently pro-life and my mother is just as adamantly pro-choice. This breaks down along religious lines, though, in my family.
I've never dated a man who was pro-life. Ever.
My husband was pro-choice when we met 10 years ago. He was surprised that I wasn't. Over time, his views have changed some what. Mostly since we had our first child.
While he was talking to his sister on the phone during my first pregnancy, he said something or other about the baby. She broke in and said it's not a baby - it's just a bun. I think that was a turning point for him.
I wouldn't classify him as totally pro-life, in the political sense. But, he's not exactly pro-choice any longer either.
Paul: I am basically a pro-choicer, still, just because it is a moral decision about which there is great disagreement, so I've always thought we really have no choice but to leave it up to individuals. Yet I also have always known that ethical construct means nothing to pro-lifers who see it as murdering babies.
I'm glad you made that point. It's so easy for it to become us against them. They are all baby killers. Or they all want to control women.
This is one of those debates where the fundamental differences in the two sides are so far apart, it's really easy to be blind to the foundation of your opponents' argument.
To tcd and others who have made the point that if you don't like an abortion, then don't have one...
I am pro-choice, so this is not exactly what I believe, but to someone who is pro-life and has determined that abortion is immoral, isn't saying "if you don't like an abortion then don't have one", the equivalent of saying "if you don't like slavery don't own own a slave"?
So the point is that the morality of the issue IS the lynchpin here on which the outcome rests.
To Ann:
I think that you're too hastily dismissing the conflict between a woman's right to autonomy and a fetus's possible right to life. I think that, if anything, if we determined that a fetus is a person, then the right to life ought to trump a right to liberty. Now of course, this is a rebuttable presumption and noted MIT philosopher Judith Jarvis Thompson has written extensively on the "violinist" problem (look it up on Google or Wikipedia). But there is a conflict there and I do not think it's adequate to say, "sure, the fetus might have some rights, but we shouldn't invade on women's bodies" especially when in the vast, vast, vast majority of cases, the actions of those women are the reason why this conflict exists in the first place.
Now that doesn't mean that I think that we should blame women for pre-marital sex or sex when they don't want to have children, etc. But I do think that just because it ought to be morally acceptable to make those decisions (to engage in sex when not willing or ready to have children), we should not entirely discount any of the potential consequences.
That said, great job on providing such a great forum for reasoned debate.
The pro-choice hecklers are engaging in propaganda which is not intended to persuade, convince, or inform, but to coerce silence and/or humiliate.
When people are forced into silence, to renounce their own views before the mob, or to repeat the mob's views as if now their own, the complete debasement of the independent human mind is accomplished. Such heckling is not merely childish or, in an active democracy, counterproductive, it is at its core aggressively anti-human.
tcd: I'm not sure why you think so little of the people who make up the pro-life side of the debate. Of course I sympathize with your dilemma. Most pro-lifers would - which is why few would deny an abortion in the case of medical necessity for the mother.
That you would be angry at people who oppose what they perceive as legalizing the killing of innocents as a routine course because you have a medical necessity confuses me.
tcd,
Thanks for sharing your own story and personal investment in the issue. I'm assuming from your comments you want to at least have the possibility of having children, and physcial issues make that potentially dangerous for you. I can't imagine how hard it would be to have to terminate a pregnancy because of your own health concerns. That would have to be one of the most tragic and painful situations imaginable.
The vast majority of pro-life people (myself included) would not want you to have sacrifice your own life to save an unborn child - precisely because we are pro-life. There have to be exceptions for cases such as yours because your life matters, and I'm sorry if in the past your personal concerns have been glibly dismissed.
I think the sharing of personal stories has been helpful and generated increased understanding and sympathy. Here goes:
Our 5th grader wanted her ears pierced for her birthday, so we took her to Claire's where we had to sign release forms giving them permission to perform an extremely minor and inconsequential medical procedure. We left with aftercare instructions which we have helped her remember and follow.
Right now, abortion is largely unrestricted. Are there parents out there who think it is in your minor daughter's best interests that she is able to undergo a very significant medical procedure with moral implications and long-term emotional effects with less parental oversight and involvement than there is in getting her ears pierced?
Most pro-lifers are opposed to abortion not because they want to control people's bodies, but because abortion hurts people.
Allicent,
Thanks for your even-handed response. You wrote:
stories of frightened and alone young girls who partake in life threatening scenarios in order to abort w/o parental consent are also horrifying.
I agree. It's sad that there are family situations such that minors would risk their own safety to avoid telling their parents they were in trouble. That's why notification laws are usually structured to allow for a judge or other responsible adult to provide consent for minors. Most minors probably don't know this.
And Christians are involved in helping young women with unplanned pregnancies. Our local pregnancy resource center has a room stocked with clothes, diapers, strollers, blankets, formula, toys, and more - all free, and all donated by Christians. We have free classes in parenting, basic financial management, and job skills; we provide counseling, referrals to adoption agencies, and even housing. I know a number of people who have taken young women into their homes and treated them like family, or invested months of their time and quite a bit of money mentoring, encouraging, and supporting young women who give up their children for adoption.
Perhaps it's a little unfair to say that Christians are either uninformed or uncaring of the problems associated with unplanned pregnancies and adoption?
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