Mental Rhinorrhea has a thoughtful post, Morning After Pill Redux and Open Trackbacks, up responding to a comment I made to an earlier post there that deserves a fuller response from me than just a brief comment on her blog. Read her post first and come on back here.
Even posting this in response doesn’t do her entry enough credit, since I’m only commenting on a portion of her post—and then taking off on one of my trademarked rabbit trails. 🙂
I particularly commend her comment, “I would love to think that, God forbid, I were raped and became pregnant that I would have the emotional support needed to deliver the child to term…” My personal prayer is that no woman would ever have to face that particular decision, but if one should, Lingerie Lady’s outlook would be what I’d pray prevails.
Still, if one truly believes abortion is murder, then what? Simple logic compels the thought, apart from religious beliefs: if the fetus is not human, what species is it? Porcine? And if so when does it switch from being a pig to being a human? (OK, in cases of fetuses that grow to become politicians, the answer would be “Never” *heh*)
If the answer about when a fetus becomes human is the silly, “When it can sustain life outside the womb,” then that would suggest that most of the folk on “welfare” are abortable… among other classes of not-humans (by that definition). The question is silly, but it’s also either dangerously stupid or dangerously disingenuous… or both.
The answer is for those of us who have a moral sense to legislate that moral sense into law. After all, every crime against persons is a legislation of moraility, is it not? If murder is only “criminal” and not “immoral” then where is the justification for criminalizing it?
It is the bane of civilization: postmodern (and even sloppier post-postmodern) relativistic humanism that makes the disingenuous argument that one cannot legislate morality: if laws are not legislations of morality then they are purely arbitrary.
OK, almost hung myself on that one, didn’t I? Granted, many of the laws we are saddled with today are arbitrary, disconnected from morality, and also, not coicidentally, the prime factors in what Jerry Pournelle has labeled as the increasing presence of “anarcho-tyranny”–loosely, the arbitrary and unjust rule of subjects (no longer genuinely citizens) by bureaucrats and political elite, resulting in a disrespect for the rule of such arbitrary and unjust laws.
And make no mistake here: I have no respect for the current crop of abortion laws on just that very basis alone, apart from moral arguments: they are arbitrary and unjust. If they were just, they’d allow for the baby to be born, grow to maturity and argue its own case for being allowed to continue living or be “aborted,” but fetuses are allowed no rights in abortions. Arbitrary, because the assessments as to the humanity of the fetus are all subjective, with no foundation in fact.
Coming around to the original post by Lingerie Lady on the “womb broom” morning after pill and pharmacists who refuse to dispense it: On the grounds that abortion laws are arbitrary and unjust, alone, I would argue that anyone who refused to dispense those pills would have not only the right to assert their displeasure with the laws by refusing to dispense the poison but the responsibility to themselves and a just society to do so.
As in respect to such laws as require dispensing drugs against the personal moral judgements of citizens, “The law is a ass.*”
I heartily recommend putting Mental Rhinorrhea on your watch list. It’s going on my blogroll. Lingerie Lady’s post referred to here deserves a much fuller response than I have made, but I trust at least a few readers here will hop on over and check her blog out, and perhaps leave a few comments of your own.
*Yes, I know it is grammatically correct to say “The law is an ass,” but that’s not a correct quote.
“If the law supposes that,†said Mr. Bumble,… “the law is a ass—a idiot. If that’s the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is that his eye may be opened by experience—by experience.†–CHARLES DICKENS, Oliver Twist, chapter 51. First published serially 1837–1839.
Update: It ocurred to me that I’m not the only one who thinks that laws are esesentially morality codified. In a speech the other day (sorry, no reference right now, just going off memory of a CSPAN ‘cast), Justice Antonin Scalia referred not only to the concept of an over-arching natural law, but to the fact that it is the right and responsibility of the citizenry to anact its perceptions of natural law into codified law. He said it much more sruditely, of course, but that’s the substance of his comment about natural law.
The Founders believed they were legislating natural moral law into code. All judges and justices and legislatures—the electorate, in fact—pretty much believed so, as well, up until recently. What has changed? Oh, that now the prevalent winds blow toward an unelected (judicial, academic, media) elite deciding what the overarching principles are and they “enact” law by fiat and by propaganda, not according to the sense of natural law and justice as the electorate might see it.
Of course, the electorate, debased by “art” that has deteriorated to vulgar entertainment, academics who are increasingly culturally illiterate and an “education” system than produces functional illiterates by the droves, is split on many moral issues by their enstupiation.
*sigh*
There may be little time left to save—no! resurrect!—the dream of a democratic republic handed us by the Founders…