There’s a Facebook group called “Being Liberal” that a few of my connections on Facebook subscribe to and repost the content of. Tonight was the first time I decide to venture to the actual page. I think I found a new place to get article ideas.
If there were a similar group for libertarians, I wouldn’t be a member. My issue isn’t that it’s a liberal group; it’s that the content they post is terrible.
Let’s start with this one:
I guess this is supposed to be a “gotcha” statement. Not many people are willing to adopt a thousand children, let alone one. But is this a fair question? If I’m against abortion, should I be expected to adopt any child that a woman would otherwise choose to abort? This is ironic because I’m sure the followers of Being Liberal don’t follow the Non-Aggression Principle, so I’m guessing they’d be fine with the following statements too:
Want to outlaw slaughterhouses? How many cows, pigs, and chickens will you take care of?
Want to stop animal abuse? How many dogs will you adopt?
Want to prevent me from laying off my workers? How many of my workers will you hire?
Want my trash to be recycled? How many trashcans will you sort through and recycle?
To me, abortion is much different. Those of us who are pro-life state that life begins at conception, so absolving yourself from taking responsibility for your own actions by first offering to transfer responsibility to another party is not going to convince anyone. It’s the same as someone saying “You don’t like me beating up my wife? Then I’ll divorce her and you marry her!” If you want me to change my mind about abortion, you’re going to have to convince me that my views on where life begins are incorrect.
The act in question doesn’t even have to be an unethical act for this argument to be nonsense. I could tell you that if you don’t shovel the snow off your sidewalk right now, I’m going to walk outside and walk on your sidewalk. And if I slip and fall and hurt myself, it’s your fault.* Unless a person’s action or inaction affects your ability to make a decision based on free will, you cannot claim that the person is responsible for your decisions.
A better example might be a person walking into the office of a business owner and after demanding a job saying, “If you don’t give me this job, I’m going to starve to death and it will all be your fault.” Unfortunately, with the ideas of “livable wages” being throw around these days, people will agree with that statement to the business owner.
*I know that people will claim that my sidewalk is my property and so it is my responsibility to keep it clear and free from hazard. Even though it should be my private property, it’s never treated as such. What would happen if I were to build a fence around my sidewalk?
And on the other side of the coin… I am ADOPTED and I am AGAINST ABORTION! So back at them.
Nice post. Certainly an odd argument, but could it be that both sides want the number of abortions to go down? and there are just different ways to do it?
Abortions affect women in the lower income bracket. They elect to have them because they cannot afford to care for their child. So to solve this problem you could, outlaw abortions, or you could stop the pregnancy through happening (contraceptives), provide maternal care for poor mothers who cannot afford it, and set up tax credits for those families that decide to have the child, but really cannot afford it. As a pro-lifer, those are the families that should be applauded, but need healthcare to safely have the child and help once the baby is born.
The newest data (https://perspectives.thirdway.org/?p=2423) shows between 2008-2009 abortion rate drops 5% in the US which is the largest drop in a decade, under a “pro-choice” President. Why can’t we all just agree to lower abortion rates and then decide which things help do that?
My issue with the typical “pro-lifers” is that they seek to outlaw abortions one one hand, then want to cut government spending and programs that would support those children/families who the programs help. You really cannot have it both ways.
Thanks for the comment.
One point I’d like to make is about the desire of pro-abortion people to lower the number of abortions. If abortion is to be considered not only legal, but also good, why should we want less of them?
Furthermore, we’ll never reduce the number of abortions if we increase the incentives risk getting pregnant. If you give people free contraception, they’re going to use it and become more careless with sex. If you subsidize abortions, people are going to see that as a viable option to eliminating pregnancy. There may be good intentions behind programs such as these, but intentions don’t necessarily dictate results.
Maybe the abortion rate dropped during the beginning of Obama’s term because people were recognizing that terrible economic times are not a good time to be getting pregnant.
If we want to reduce the number of abortions, all of the accountability and responsibility for a baby has to fall on the mother and father.
I’d say its rare that people say abortions are “good”. Yes, liberals want them to remain legal, but no one argues that they are good.
If you polled women coming out of their abortion procedure, I doubt any would say that they went because it was a “good” thing to do on a Thursday afternoon. If anything, women who have abortions feel horrible about their situation, shame that they got pregnant, scared about their decisions…Don’t mix up the argument by saying legal and good are the same the thing. Declaring war is legal is it a “good” thing?
Abortions are not a political issue, they are a class issue. 60% of all abortions are performed on poor people, 88% live in metropolitan cities. You cannot ignore that abortion is a “poo-man’s disease”. So when addressing lowering abortion rates, you have to frame it around how do you lower abortion rates for the poor. That is contraceptives, healthcare, maternal care, support for the baby once it’s born. And really saying that contraceptives would led to careless sex is actually the complete opposite of what contraceptives do which is safer sex.
The “Being Liberal” sticker has merit in that if the government wants to (1) restrict contraceptives, (2) cut healthcare for the poor and (3) cut food stamp programs for families, then poor women who get pregnant have no access to a maternity doctor, and no means of really paying for their child once its born and so they turn to abortion. We need to stop them from turning to the decision by preventing the pregnancy in the first place or if that fails, telling them that they have other options…and yes that’s going to cost money. Even if they elect to have an adoption, poor women still need healthcare to see the baby through to a healthy delivery.
There are a few points here that I want to comment on, but I’d like to spend some time on the response, so I’m going to make my next article one that covers these points. I hope to have it written tomorrow.
[…] a month ago, I got a few comments on an article about abortion from someone named “A different perspective” (I’ll call him ADP for now on). He wrote some […]