Abortion

In the wake of the murder of George Tiller there have been some very thoughtful discussions on the abortion topic.

Here is a blog entry from The Edge of the American West that I find particularly useful because it provides some facts in what is often a venting of fact-free opinion.


The above is a graphic from that blog entry that gives an excellent picture of how small the number of late term abortions are. There is a nice addendum to gives even better hard facts relevant to George Tiller: There are 1.2 million abortions per year with approximately 100 abortions per year performed after 24 weeks gestation, around 0.01% (rounded up.) Late-term abortions are very, very, very rare.

What the blog entry tries to do is help you to understand why there are some late term abortions: "... the usual time to find an abnormality would be during the second trimester ultrasound, usually around 18-20 weeks, sometimes a bit earlier. It seems reasonable to conclude that many of the abortions performed post 21-weeks are due to the discovery of some sort of anomaly. Moreover, medicine can’t catch these abnormalities significantly sooner than they are discovered."

The religious fundamentalist aren't swayed by facts. They don't care about individuals, relevant details, amount of pain, individual suffering, etc. They are puffed up with moral indignation and are going to issue their death-dealing judgements anyway.

The part that drives me crazy is that the founder of their own religion has a story of encountering religious bigots determined to stone a young woman for adultery but Jesus stopped them by saying "let him who is without sin cast the first stone". Which of these current religious zealots, Randall Terry and others, is without sin? I've seen too many puffed up religious leaders like Jimmy Swaggart or Ted Haggard have to stand up and announced that they have sinned and ask for forgiveness.

Why do people follow these crazed zealots? Why do those black suited basiji club and shoot protestors asking "where is my vote?" Life is a mystery to me. There are too many crazed people who would rather "fix" somebody else than look at their own faults. (Again, I remember words about removing the beam in your own eye before getting carried away removing a mote in another's eye. Yet another religious aphorism that is ignored by "the faithful".)

Here is a more political take on the abortion issue from a post by Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings:

I, however, understand perfectly well that the debate about abortion (at its best) is a debate about personhood. That's why I used the example of Iraq to make the point that Megan seems to be responding to:

"I opposed the war in Iraq, but I did not conclude that it would be OK for me to kill soldiers who were shipping out, policy makers with blood on their hands, and so forth. In that case, many more innocent lives were at stake than could possibly have been at stake in Tiller's."

I might be confused about a lot of things, but whether or not our soldiers and the inhabitants of Iraq are persons is not one of them, nor does my thought that killing Donald Rumsfeld would be wrong depend on any such idea. My point, basically, was this:

(a) We have a system for resolving political disputes in this country. We elect people, and those people make laws. When those laws are within the limits set by the Constitution, they are binding. When not, a court can strike them down. When we want to, we can change the Constitution, though it is (rightly) rather difficult.

(b) One inconvenient thing about democracies is that it is very, very unlikely that your own side will prevail all the time. You get a voice, but so does everyone else, and barring stupendous coincidences, this means that things won't always turn out the way you think they should.

(c) It would be naive to think that you will lose only on unimportant questions. Governments make hugely consequential decisions all the time. Sometimes, these decisions lead to the killing of innocent people, in ways that you think are deeply wrong.

(d) If anyone who believes the government had adopted a policy that would lead to the killing of innocent people is justified in killing people to stop this, then we might as well just decide not to have a government at all. During the Bush administration, half the country would have been justified in trying to assassinate the President and members of his administration. Any corporate executive who works for a company that does not adequately protect its workforce from poisoning or injury would have to watch her back. Etc., etc., etc.

(e) If you are committed to our form of government, you must leave some room between (1) the claim that some policy it adopts is wrong, even very wrong, and (2) the claim that you can kill people to prevent this wrong thing from happening.