In a recent conversation with a fellow pro-lifer, we were discussing Clinton's "Safe, Legal, and Rare" position on abortion. He said (and is welcome to correct me if I am misquoting him) he thinks abortion should be "safe, illegal, and very rare". Now, the point of this post is "is that possible"? I would say that it would be very difficult for that to happen, if not impossible. Before you comment, though, here's what this post is not about. It's not about whether abortion should be legal or if it's right. It's not about whether abortion can ever be safe for the baby. My point is that, while it is legal, abortion is not very well regulated. How could it ever be safe (let's ignore the post-abortion trauma for a minute) for the mother if it is even less regulated (aka if it was illegal)? I'm not advocating legal abortion, but proposing that the position of "safe, illegal, and very rare" is not practical.
Discuss….
Edey
Comments 11
If you illegalize abortion, it will result in the death of many poor women. How many is certainly a matter for debate, but that it will be significant really isn't.
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Posted 27 Aug 2006 at 12:38 am ¶Edey, he said safe, LEGAL, and rare. Which is LeftieSpeak for "unfettered, cheap, and commonplace, but we'll pretend we don't like it to try to get the fetus-lovers to shut the f*** up about it."
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Posted 27 Aug 2006 at 11:12 am ¶Now, let's address the idea of "safe, illegal, and very rare."
Illegal abortion mortality was a problem that was fixing itself due to improvements in overall health, in medical care, and in a contraceptive-driven reduction in pregnancies among women likely to seek out an abortionist.
We had two paths before us:
1. Continue to improve medical care, health, etc. so that those women hell-bent on killing their offspring would have a reduced risk of facing their Maker while in the midsts of spitting in His eye. Meanwhile, work to make this choice even less common by awakening the conscience. This path would have reduced both the incidence of abortion and the maternal cost thereof to the bare minimum possible, given the unwillingness or inability of some women to love their own children.
2. Pretend that fetus-slaughter is perfectly natural and safe, turn loose the abortionists, and pretend that this made the maternal deaths go away.
We chose path 2. We stopped counting the dead because the whole goal of legalization wasn't to reduce maternal mortality (that was happening on its own, and legalization was totally unnecessary for that) but to gain societal approval. You can't gain societal approval for slaughtering fetuses while admitting that you're still killing their mothers.
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Posted 27 Aug 2006 at 11:20 am ¶John, you go ahead and believe that. Pretend that women aren't dying horrible deaths now. Improvements in medical care were working with a contraceptive-driven drop in pregnancies among women likely to want their fetuses dead. Then we totally abolished any punishment for killing the woman.
I will never understand how people can look at a woman dead from a criminal abortion and say, "How sad that we're punishing the person who did that to her!"
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Posted 27 Aug 2006 at 11:24 am ¶I made no value judgements. I did not say that the loss of life from illegal abortions was grounds to keep abortion legal. I certainly never said that people who perform abortions in violation of the law should not be prosecuted.
Moreover I did not say that there were no maternal deaths from abortions now, i just said that the number would increase if it they're performed on pool tables by bar tenders instead of in sanitary conditions by a doctor.
Furthermore, the post was clear that Clinton said legal, and his friend said illegal. in the preceding sentence, Clinton had been the object, not the subject, so the pronoun in the next sentence refers to his friend.
Just figured I should help you out since your hatred of "Leftiespeak" would seem also to include a hatred of basic grammar.
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Posted 27 Aug 2006 at 2:52 pm ¶John, you simply made the assumption that for some reason if abortion is recriminalized this will result in more deaths. This assumption is based on political rhetoric, not on any kind of sound research. The vast majority of illegal abortions before decriminalization were performed by doctors, and there's no reason to doubt that if abortion is driven back underground, physicians won't continue to perform them.
All decriminalization did was remove the penalties for killing or injuring the woman. How that was supposed to motivate abortionists to take greater care continues to elude me.
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Posted 27 Aug 2006 at 3:27 pm ¶I said that poor women would be killed. well to do women will always be able to find a doctor that will perform the abortion, or travel to a place where it's legal.
It's the poor women you're going to kill off.
I don't have stastical information at the ready, but my mom grew up in a very poor neighborhood in new york city, and knew a lot of women who were killed by back alley abortions.
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Posted 29 Aug 2006 at 12:58 pm ¶And women, poor women, are still killed in perfectly legal abortions that differ from the "back alley" abortions only in that the woman wasn't forewarned of the danger, and the quack who kills her suffers no ill effect.
Why so much distress at women who might die of illegal abortions, and so little care for the women who are dying from legal abortions? Why is it that to the prochoice, the only bad abortion death is the one where the doctor goes to jail for it?
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Posted 29 Aug 2006 at 3:02 pm ¶I am sure that prior to performing an abortion, doctors inform women of the risks associated with them, just as they do before even the most minor prodecure or most common prescription. And certainly they explain things better than someone doing it outside of the medical community.
As to the degree of risk: if there are complications and a woman is in a doctor's office, the odds that she'll receive proper treatment are far higher. And very significantly, doctors maintain high standards of sterilization. If you illegalized abortions, the number of women dying of sepsis would certainly rise.
None of this is to say that abortion should or should not be legal. Just that we should make public policy in an effacing and honest manner.
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Posted 29 Aug 2006 at 10:11 pm ¶I believe I was the one who made the statement about abortion being "safe, illegal, and very rare." Of course abortion cannot simultaneoutly be all three with any practicability. However, I maintain that it is a certain ideal. Abortion, being an immoral proposition from the first, should be non-existent, and therefore not have any adjectives describing its qualities at all. However, since abortion indeed happens, harm to the woman receiving the abortion is to be avoided, insofar as unnecessary harm is always to be avoided. Finally, abortion should be illegal, because, as an axiom of Catholic thought, positive laws should always reflect and accord with divine and natural law, which prohibit abortion.
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Posted 12 Sep 2006 at 6:29 pm ¶you were indeed the person who made the statement. i understood that you were meaning it as an ideal but was considering the practical implications (i know…the engineer in me…) of it over my weekend in milwaukee. i figured i'd get discussion from a larger audience.
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Posted 12 Sep 2006 at 9:01 pm ¶Post a Comment