The Life of Every Human Being Has Value
Initiative 11 reflects the will of the majority of South Dakotans to limit use of abortions to those circumstances where the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest, or where there is a substantial risk of serious permanent injury or death to the mother.
Initiative 11 does not permit an abortion simply because the baby is not in perfect health. Thus, if there is a genetic anomaly, such as Downs Syndrome or other illness, such as anencephaly, this law does not permit the killing of such human beings.
Our nation was founded on the principle that all human beings are created equal. That never meant that we are all created the same. It means the lives of all human beings have equal value and worth, regardless of our relative skills, intelligence, and the differences in our physical ability or health. The denigration of these values is the denigration of the human race.
If there are any self-evident and universal truths that can act for the human race as a guide or light in which social and human justice can be grounded, they are that life has intrinsic value and each individual human being is unique and irreplaceable.
Sign up for the OV Daily Newsletter
OV Social
"Our nation was founded on the principle that all human beings are created equal. That never meant that we are all created the same. It means the lives of all human beings have equal value and worth, regardless of our relative skills, intelligence, and the differences in our physical ability or health. The denigration of these values is the denigration of the human race."
And yet, if they are convicted felons, you throw your airs and graces about the sanctity of life out of the window in exchange for a swift execution.
All of these erronous beliefs about abortion and sanctity of life stem from religion rather than reality. Life is not sacred. People die every single day from completely random issues. Just visit / work in a hospital for a day. Death is sad, but it is an inevitability and nobody is going to save you after you die. If someone bothered to pick up a science book now an again there simple wouldn't be any issues.
Ultimately this is an argument between the educated and the uneducated. Controversy can only exist if both parties have a sound argument in the first place. As it stands the "pro-lifers / anti-women's rights bridage" have a lot of catching up to do.
This is a weak argument that appeals to emotion and does not in any way address the consequences of this law. Fine, try to prevent women from aborting their down syndrome babies - what are you going to do with these unwanted people? Abandoning genetically deformed infants to a shoddy state system is humane? How do you figure?
The problem, in my view, with all anti-abortion arguments is that they're about abortion is right or wrong. That is almost completely irrelevant, the debate here is about whether abortion should be legal or not. If you think abortion is wrong and want to prevent it, fine. Making it illegal will not prevent abortion. The numbers throughout the world conclusively show that the legal status of abortion does not affect the rates of abortion. The availability of contraception does. Criminalizing abortion will mean lots of illegal and potentially unsafe abortions, likely *increasing* the numbers of people who die. How is that pro-life?
If you want to protect the precious unborn babies, offer some support to mothers with unwed pregnancies. Get out there and advocate for freely available, low-cost or free birth control. You can't say that you want to stop abortion and try to prevent contraception from being available at the same time, at least not if you want to be consistent. This is something that seems to happen more and more, unfortunately, particularly with the move to reclassify contraception as abortion and also make it more difficult to get, typically a position advocated by supposed "pro-life" folks. Get real.
If you're against Roe v. Wade, you're pro-dead mothers, not against abortion. If you, like me, find abortion to be morally troubling, you should be focusing on more widely available contraception.
you ever hear of adoption? Check into the amount of couples that are trying to adopt sometime. "Genetically deformed" and everything. The problem with you people is you don't see the baby as a real person. It's all about the poor innocent woman. Give me a break. NO sex, NO baby is the free available low-cost birth control. After that, you have responsibility. Remember that? It's the baby that is innocent in this whole issue, not the parent.
First, "you people" is not a very polite way of addressing people.
Second, a baby implies birth has happened and no one disagrees about the human life of a baby. The problem is the pro life side trying to redefine a baby and moving it backwards until it means a zygote.
Third, No sex may be a preferable way for you to live your life, I pass no judgment on that. However that is you, there are many of us that consider having sex a natural, healthy, beautiful fun experience and see no compelling reason why an accidental fertilization should be the standard of judging whether we are responsible people or not.
Fourth, we have responsibility only after we have made the personal choice of keeping a fertilized egg.
Yes, I have heard of adoption. I think you'll find if you had actually read my comment and not just what you wanted to see, I never said that I thought abortion was right or good. I was arguing about the legality of it.
Saying "everyone should just be responsible" is all well and good, but that's a completely absurd proposal to actually solve any problems. You might as well say that the solution for our health care system is for people to just stop getting sick. The housing crisis can easily be solved by everyone being more responsible with their money.
I live in the real world, and in the real world criminalizing abortion does not help unborn babies, no matter how innocent. It merely makes abortion unsafe.
I welcome your comments on the issue of how criminalizing abortion actually causes the loss of more lives. If you want to take the stance that women who would seek abortion deserve to die, you are welcome to that opinion, but again it doesn't really seem to be pro-life.
First of all, what is with the "you people"? Everyone is entitled to their own opinion and shouldn't be classified in a group like that.
And yes, there are tons of people that want to adopt babies. But what happens to the baby that doesn't get picked? Or the baby that becomes a burden to the adopting family? He/she ends up in foster care bouncing between homes, possibly never knowing one set of parents as their own. Not to mention the kids that end up with various problems because their parents decided they couldn't handle the responsiblity, and rather than keep the child and raise them in an unfit manner, decide to give them up for adoption.
In my (sadly, lengthy) experience with the women who are drug addicts, those that do not abort unwanted pregnancies very, very rarely put them up for adoption. Instead they keep them in extremely dangerous and abusive home situations. Even those that are given away are frequently born addicted to drugs, which is a tough way to start life. For some reason pro-life arguments about the rights of the unborn child only seem to extend to its right to life; I've never heard anyone argue for a child's right to not be born virtually guaranteed to have a short, painful life of addiction.
I personally think that abortion is abhorrent and would never have one, but to criminalize just seems completely insane to me. I've never had anyone actually answer my position, just launch off on the litany of what an awful person I am and how innocent the unborn are. "You people" is exactly what I've come to expect.