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Should Abortion be Legal?

The landmark Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade was supposed to settle the question of abortion’s legality once and for all, but the Court’s ruling has instead become a fulcrum of debate. Placed squarely at the intersection of civil rights, health, religion and law, abortion is one of America’s most heated controversies.

Next question in Roe v. Wade

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Regarding Argument

Real “Choice” Requires Truth

- From ADF

Open Argument Go to this Argument

Just to make it clear:

I find it very difficult to see how you describe your position as "real choice" when you do not want there to be a choice at all.

- sharky September 24, 2008 8:52AM

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available abortion? why not available infanticide?

Are proponents of elective abortion facing the moral complexity of this issue? A baby's life is at stake, here.

The news yesterday was that babies dance to music in utero (in the womb). Did you know that baby boys in the womb are often seen to grow erections, when the ultrasound video goes on (as if they somehow know that they are being observed; so something)?

Why not Domestic Violence and murder? After all, Rihanna is HIS (Chris Brown's) girlfriend; isn't THAT what spouses and boyfriends and girlfriends reason?

When are these bloody, black shadows going to leave our beloved land, and that high, bloody, black hand which makes those shadows, as well?

- raymond March 20, 2009 11:34AM

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- You keep saying "black"
  
  and mention Rihanna and Chris Brown. Is there something about your view of abortion as it relates to people of color that you want us to know about?
  
  I have a little plant on the dashboard of my car. It dances when the music plays. It is not alive.
  I have a little wooden statue that my brother gave me, where when you take the wooden barrel off of it, it pops an erection. My brother has no sense of humor. But that object is not alive.
  
  - quantummechanik May 15, 2009 12:31PM
  
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  - Life
    
    Did I keep saying "black"?
    
    Sorry, then, about the mis"conception" (sorry).
    
    When I said black, I meant "onerous", deadly, foreboding.
    
    Even the first, one cell, already has the entire, human chromosome contribution from both dad and mom and it's dividing to reach the first goal of birth. At eighteen days, there are brainwaves. There are heartbeats before the mother knows (Latin: "little one") that she's pregnant.
    
    65% of Americans, even pro-choice Americans, believe that a human life is taken in abortion , Cameron. An abortionist I debated once on a radio program said: "Of COURSE I know that it's human. What do you think that I think it is, a TOMATO"!
    
    Why dehumanize the "little one"? Didn't dehumanization happen to a people in the early Twentieth Century on Earth (where and when I spent most of my life, so far)?
    
    and, when I used the word: "foreboding", earlier, I meant to.
    
    Did you know that the medical profession had already murdered over 250,000 children with "defects" (some as slight as mis-shapen ears), while Hitler was still a Corporal, recovering from a war wound in the Veterans' Hospital?
    
    Hitler didn't start the killing. He just took it over. In the end, he said: "Europe will stand up and thank me, for eliminating the defective from the gene pool". Like almost everybody in the world, Hitler believed in Darwin's ideas of some peoples being inferior to other. Hitler really meant what he said; and, explicitly.
    
    Anyway, don't shrink from the moral complexity, Cameron. Even Obama (the most pro-choice of abortion President in American history, to-date) admitted that much (the outright humanity of the human fetus); and, if I'm not mistaken, he used a term I've used, "moral complexity"early during his first News Conference.
    
    raymond
    
    - raymond May 15, 2009 1:14PM
    
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Abortion is a hate crime

Denying a man his right to provide life for his child is a hate crime . Men did not choose to be born with penises. They have the right to procreate without fearing that their beloved child will be taken from them. The discrimination against them concerning this issue is discrimination on the basis of both sex and sexual orientation.

- ufcarazy April 30, 2009 3:46PM

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- No, they don't.
  
  I don't have a right to engage in sexual intercourse and then later insist that my rights were violated because the woman used protection. It's not a violation of my rights for a woman to refuse to have sex with me unless there's birth control involved. We do not have a right to procreate.
  
  - quantummechanik May 15, 2009 12:33PM
  
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  - right to procreate?
    
    I believe that you may be correct in the case of a few dictators in human history; but, it would have to be a pretty overwhelming and controlling government which would take away its slaves' opportunity to procreate by law .
    
    - raymond May 15, 2009 1:34PM
    
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    - Do we have a right to procreate unchecked?
      
      Here's a great example of the difference between a positive and a negative right.
      Stating this right in a positive way would be saying:
      I have the right to procreate.
      or more specifically
      I have a right, as a male, to decide what happens to any individual created using my sperm.
      Which is a weird right, but okay. Let's go with that.
      Firstly, is it a codified right? I can't think of anywhere that such a right is stated or implied, unless you count your genetic offspring as property.
      Is it a natural right? Unlikely--people who give up their children for adoption and later want access to them, and have that refused, don't have their rights violated. Sperm or egg donors do not have their rights violated if they don't get to name\provide\have a say in their offspring's life.
      
      So let's look at the negative right statement, ie.
      No one should have the right to impede my procreation
      OR MORE SPECIFICALLY
      No one should have the right to disallow my choosing to decide what happens yadda yadda yadda
      This right could be applied to the government, or to the general populace.
      Now, I agree that the government cannot and should not mandate abortions, forced sterilizations, etc, like many governments have done (including the US). However, that's not what's happening. The government simply makes the option available, like any other medical procedure. It provides them some funding, since it's difficult to train doctors in such a procedure unless you're dedicated to it, and operating an abortion clinic as opposed to a plastic surgery clinic is about six times as expensive, to protect it from terrorism by extremists.
      So at last we have the
      "No one should have the right to disallow..."
      This is almost an eerie return to biblical morality. Not the good kind, where there's love and feeding of the poor--the scary kind. Rapists are forced to marry their victims kind. Does a rapist have the right to impede the abortion of the woman he's raped? Does a man or a woman have the right to force his involvement on his child, if a court order prevented it?
      
      - quantummechanik May 18, 2009 10:38PM
      
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      - Natural Law?
        
        As in the past, you present a thoughtful question. I will think more about this.
        
        For now, I will just ask "What is Natural Law?" and have we rights, after all, which are "given us by our Creator, such as Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness?"
        
        Does that still have meaning, today? And, if not, then are we "in the soup" or not?
        
        - raymond May 20, 2009 2:12PM
        
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        There are natural laws
        
        But it's beyond the court of the land to enforce them.
        If a woman chooses to have an abortion performed, that falls under liberty AND pursuit of happiness, wouldn't it?
        
        - quantummechanik May 20, 2009 2:27PM
        
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        beyond the court?
        
        Yes. Now. Because abortion is now considered a "right", it is beyond the court of the land to enforce it.
        
        But don't you argue that the court (the State) can violate Natural Law? Shouldn't the court violate the right to elective abortion?
        
        I more than that look upon the "little one's" right to life. If we haven't a right to life, then of what value or usefullness are other "rights" (the right to free expression becomes possibly the right to verbally object within the scopes of firing squads?
        
        I've tracked down my old friend of a decade ago. Here's some info about him. It's dated, so I must phone him soon.
        
        Stephen D. Schwarz
        Department of Philosophy
        170 Chafee Social Science Center
        10 Chafee Road
        University of Rhode Island
        Kingston, RI 02881
        Phone: 401-783-8265
        E-mail: Stephen Schwarz
        
        --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
        
        Stephen Schwarz is Professor of Philosophy. He received his BA and MA in Philosophy from Fordham and his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard. He joined the department in 1963. His research and teaching interests are mainly in ethics, metaphysics and epistemology. He received an Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 1971. He is now in phased retirement (half the normal teaching load), and will retire officially in 2007, but hopes to continue teaching after that, one or two courses a year.
        
        His major publications include:
        
        The Moral Question of Abortion. Chicago: Loyola Press, 1990, 1992.
        
        “Love of Truth as a Moral Virtue,” in Stephen Schwarz and Fritz Wenisch (eds.), Values and Human Experience: Essays in Honor of the Memory of Balduin Schwarz. New York: Peter Lang, 1999.
        
        “The Right and the Good: Two Fundamental Dimensions of Morality,” in Aletheia, vol. V (1990), pp. 59-76.
        
        “Faith, Doubt and Pascal’s Wager,” in The Center Journal, vol. 3, no. 3, Summer 1984, pp. 29-58.
        
        “Does Prichard’s Essay Rest on a Mistake?” in Ethics, vol. 81, no. 2, January 1971, pp. 169-80.
        
        Professor Schwarz regularly teaches PHL 212, Ethics and PHL 342, Knowledge, Belief and Truth.
        
        Copyright © 2005
        University of Rhode Island
        Disclaimer
        
        --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
        
        File last updated: Tuesday, December 13, 2005
        
        The University is an affirmative action /equal opportunity employer.
        All rights reserved. URL: http://www.uri.edu/artsci/phl
        
        - raymond May 26, 2009 11:14AM
        
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        More comments in this thread
        
        Also
        
        You have to look at the concept of natural law , and what would allow those rights to be violated. Do the laws of the state have the right to violate those natural rights?
        I'd argue that yes, they do.
        There may be natural law, but there isn't a natural law that states, for example, that, oh, you can't smoke marijuana . I think you'd be hardpressed to find someone who believes that is a natural law. However, the state can imprison you for doing so, thusly infringing on your Natural Right to liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
        There's no Natural Law that says you have to be loyal to your country, but the State has the right to kill you if you commit treason, violating your Natural Right to life.
        
        - quantummechanik May 20, 2009 6:42PM
        
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