Abortion in the case of rape or incest

You have spent a lifetime building a house. It has a tornado shelter and a hatch.

One day you see a twister on the horizon. You dive into your beloved, well-stocked shelter and lie flat. The roof shears away. The walls fall in. The hatch rattles harder and harder.

The wind stops and the hatch groans. Someone is breaking in. Robbers.

They beat you and raid your stock as you struggle to your feet. You see two children with them, abduction victims, a girl around four, a boy around eight or nine. They each grab the boy and run with half your supplies on their backs.

The wind starts up again. Bruised and dazed, you tie the hatch together and hope for the best. Then you realize it could be a long wait, and they left the little girl behind. She's eating your biscuits and drinking your water. She's knocked over one of the last standing shelves.

She's a stranger. You never asked for her and you don't want her. You're not ready to be a parent. This all happened to you and now you have to deal with her? It seems beyond unfair, too much to comprehend, that life can throw so much at you. But here she is. And she has no idea you don't want her.

It would be easy to push her outside. The robbers might come back and take her. They'd probably end up killing her if they did, or the falling poles and flying debris would. It would be a cruel death for the child, but a small temporary relief for you, until you healed enough to understand what that would mean -- that you killed a child who did nothing to you.

So, what are your rights? What would heal every innocent person in the scenario most? What would end up hurting the innocent more? What would bring the guilty -- the robbers -- to justice?

Your house can be rebuilt. Your shelter can be restocked and repaired. By all rights, the robbers should be the ones to do the work, but since you might not want them in your house again, it makes sense to put them in prison and make them work there for a fund for you, which you can use to heal.

The little girl will be returned to her home when her parents claim her. Until then, she ought to be in foster care. You can care for her for now and call on friends to help. Anyone who is a real friend would help you at a time like this. If you have no one to turn to, a church or other charitable organization will help you.
You need to have your injuries treated. So does the child.

THE CHILD ISN'T AN INJURY. THE CHILD IS A PERSON.

The robbers must be imprisoned. You must be healed. The innocent child you ended up sharing shelter and nourishment with must be cared for as any child. She's been through a lot too.

That's an analogy. If you became pregnant as a result of rape, your child isn't the one who raped you. Some man did that, and he's a vicious criminal who belongs in maximum security rotting away while working for a fund for your healing. The child didn't do anything. Killing the child won't help you. It will hurt you again.

In any debate, always keep in mind what the topic is. In an abortion debate, the topic is the tearing limb from limb and skull-crushing of a child who did nothing wrong.

Allowing victims of a crime to punish -- with execution, and in a manner of brutality no modern country would stoop to in executing anyone -- limb from limb, finally crushing the skull -- another person, not the perpetrator but someone who never heard of the perpetrator: This makes no sense. Killing the child won't punish the perpetrators in any way. It will allow their values to prevail.

Saving the child won't reward the perpetrators or punish the victim in any way. It will allow life, love and new hope the chance to win. That's the most healing way for both victims.

A rational, kind, loving policy would be to make the perpetrators work in prison to support the victims' healing and the daycare expenses of the child, who is another innocent victim.

A barbaric, nightmare society would execute the infant child of the perpetrator, who is also the child of the victim. We don't want to live in a barbaric, nightmare society.

Why I Am Not a Liberal Anymore

I was one of those people throwing yellow round condoms at you in the street, when men wore flowered tights and everyone called everyone "Girlfriend" and snapping was an art.

I was standing red-eyed in coffeehouses shouting at shorn young Republicans about "economic justice" and assuming such justice would mean full redistribution of all goods every year or every generation at least.

I was reading about gender as a continuum with fascination, wondering why I couldn't be more sure where on the continuum I fit.

I was arguing with classmates about life, claiming it "obviously begins at birth, because that's when you breathe."

I was arguing in coffeehouses about why ages of consent are necessary to prevent child abuse while my acquaintances argued that sexual freedom meant no laws pertaining to private behavior at all -- and that "our concept of childhood" was a "social construct".

I was envisioning a world where the government owned every major industry and the family was whatever its members signed a contract to make it. Poverty would vanish and everyone would spend hours each day playing multilingual Scrabble and buzzing along on latte and white chocolate brownies. No more countries, religion, or possessions -- just a party, folk music and smug laughs at the tales of conservatives' anger and shock as we paraded chaotically into power -- a peaceful revolution.

What happened?

I was sitting in a coffeehouse (it's an expression of the fear of being away from The Crowd; we spent our last pennies on coffee we didn't want and ate the sugar packets because we were out of food), overhearing some of my casual "friends" at another table and a few Christian college students near them. The students, women, were talking about how glad they were that they had chosen to be chaste during college. They were enjoying their choice, a private decision, and I was happy for them. My so-called friends began hooting and jeering. They shouted the women down. I thought they believed in every individual's right to choose how to live his or her private life. But they didn't. They thought they supported such choices, but really they supported every individual's sexual availability to the rest of the world -- a system that would obviously favor the more pansexual and oppress the monogamous, the selective and the asexuals totally.

There's a science of growth and development?
I was reading about fetal development. It seems that babies develop neurologically and chemically a lot faster than we ever thought. The closer we look at them, the more is going on with the little people in their hiding places.
We had thought in the '70's that babies at two to three months after full-term birth can't see anything but blurs of light, don't move on purpose, and might not feel pain.
In the early '80's we found out even premies -- some as young as five months post-conception -- recognize faces, reach for things, react to sharp stimuli just the way older babies do, suggesting strongly that they feel pain, and know their mothers' voices from birth.
In the '90's fetal surgery gave us an accidental look at babies not capable of surviving birth, handled with extra care to allow surgeons to operate on them and put them back into their mothers' bodies. These infants reach for fingers -- not tubes, not clamps, fingers -- respond to voices differently from other sounds, cry, flinch and move away from things it stands to reason might hurt them. They seem to feel pain and interact with people in very mature ways for such tiny folk, and that's not all.
In the past few years a lot of miscarried and aborted babies have come out still alive and been observed, EEG and EKG monitoring has become more sensitive and fetal and embryonic heart, nerve and brain activity have shown up earlier than we had ever guessed, and we now attribute to children at five weeks the kind of awareness we used to reserve for mid-term kids.
They're beautiful, too. No child is ever a mass or clump or blob of cells. From fertilization onward, we form elaborate predictable patterns, translucently shining pink in our living cocoons, in our living mothers. Each cell division brings a new stage of complexity right up to the final trimester, when we just get bigger and stronger; from around five-and-a-half months on out, we are as elaborately formed as we ever will be, just little. Immunities, metabolism, fat, muscle, bone, nerve covering and lung air sacs get bigger and tougher and more adaptable, but stay basically the same in form and activity from then on. At roughly 550 to 600 weeks after conception, our reproductive systems go through a change and with that our entire bodies spend about 400 to 500 weeks growing, roughening, hairing over and turning grown-up-ish. After that we're physically mature.
The major changes in our lives happen in the first three days after fertilization, a gradual change from a human zygote to a human embryo, with distinct, working parts we'll have all our lives; five weeks to six weeks, a gradual change from embryo to fetus, when we begin using every organ we have except the reproductive system and mammary system; somewhere between four and ten months we undergo a days-long gradual change from fetus to newborn, and for six months after our third week after that, a gradual shift from newborn to older infant; a gradual change from infant to toddler at eleven to thirteen months after birth (87-95 weeks after conception) when we begin using our muscles and inner ears to balance ourselves, causing increased spatial skills and muscle and bone development; five to eight years after birth, six to nine years after our lives began, when we slow our growth dramatically, begin reasoning, change teeth and gradually change from small child to bigger child; eleven to eighteen years after conception, when we grow faster again, become the near-size and near-shape of full adults, and begin seeking independence; parenthood, which begins when our first child is conceived, whenever that may be; grandparenthood; and the final stage, dying, when our bodies lose their functions one by one and then we leave them.

There are infinite gradations of change between these stages, with social significance. When our mothers learn they are pregnant, when they show, when we are born, when we eat solid foods, say "Mama", start school, graduate, leave home, get jobs, get married, go through menopause, retire and write our wills we commemorate these times of change, and many others: moving, opening a business, even adopting a dog. There are many milestones in our lives. It makes no more sense to define "life" as something that starts at birth than to define "life" as something that ends at moving out of town, or that begins when we get a Yellow Pages listing for our home business. Some cultures count age from approximate conception. To take the life of a child is a heinous act and remains one regardless of the child's location at the time of the attack. To redefine "human life" to deny its sacredness to those in more powerful people's way is the starting point of every atrocity, ever, everywhere - the groundwork of all evil.

And there are known facts about sex, sexuality and gender?

No psychobiologist, I still noticed that regardless of our friends' claims to be perfectly pansexual or totally bi at any rate, and in some middle space on a gender continuum where there were no absolutes, I knew who was which and which who preferred.

A sex study emerged that we all dismissed loudly (and angrily). We all called it a right-wing, biased survey of nothing but a bunch of married people who didn't have anything to do with the real world. We considered marriage strange and rare. We thought one person in ten was out to the public as mostly gay, around the same number to possibly just under half were genuinely mostly straight, a majority or half-ish were thoroughly bi, a few asexual but most who thought they were acey were really closet gays or autos or something.... it was a continuum anyway. We figured marriage, mistake that it was, should be put off until a person's life was essentially not going to be interesting anymore anyway. We assumed that girls and boys ought to be raised cross-sex-type, not reinforced-sex-type, to help them see past unimaginative anatomy and especially to overcome bland tradition's dull shackles. We felt pretty sure our gender-bending scene would be the human race very soon if only the masses would awaken to our sage goodtimeyness and brilliance and join us. In addition, sexual activity was obviously (to us) the unavoidable, irresistible, constant in everyone's life except the most repressed, whom we pitied. Every topic had to bring up a sly double entendre. We walked into public places and spoke to the room at large about deeply private matters with no self-consciousness. Except the real secret. How uncomfortable we often felt, how we craved something we knew we had lost, how we wished it made sense, how we wanted to calm down, wrap our dignity around our bellies again, go to some unknown location that would be home, we could not announce these thoughts.

But that survey had been right enough, jibing well with most quiet studies on what almost everyone really wanted, did and benefited from in private. Having one or two partners, marrying them first, of the opposite sex, and around the same age more often than not, was what most people with all the choices chose after all. Was there a reason? Were these people aware of something we had forgotten or not been informed of?

Possibly. Of the people who have experienced same-sex attraction, most settle down willingly with an opposite-sex spouse in time, and are content to be faithful for life. Indeed, it seems same-sex attraction really is usually a phase. When it is not, it continues in two-and-a-half percent of men and one-and-a-half percent of women. Of that number, a majority also experience opposite-sex attraction. Around one to two percent of men and fewer than one percent of women are actually gay. About one percent of each are bisexual. About one percent are lifelong asexuals. Around one percent are oriented toward themselves, objects or something other than people. The heterosexual population is 19 adults in every 20.

Of these, nearly all not only opt for but also demonstrably benefit from a certain way of arranging their sexual and social lives: Marriage in their late teens, 20's or 30's to someone they know a lot about, a child or two or several, mutual faithfulness, helpfulness, kindness, support, living together, someone to stay home with the kids until they're at least one-and-a-half, breastfeeding, high academic standards, chores and religious activity for the kids. This correlates with longer, healthier lives for all, higher reported happiness and less crime.

Is such a lifestyle also beneficial to gays? Presumably so. But, what do we know about child development in daycare and communes? Well, they fare best emotionally when they have a close relationship to at least one man and at least one woman who have a good harmonious relationship to each other.

Even infants of six months post-birth know the difference between being held in a man's arms and a woman's -- and they tend to prefer a woman to hold them most of the time, a man a little of the time.

Perhaps that's one of the reasons almost every society that has ever existed as far as we know has had an institution of marriage and presumed that it includes at least one of each sex. It benefits the next generation, which tends to benefit us all.

Being against unnecessary force, I would never presume to ask homosexual households not to continue living together, especially considering how many people have no place to call home at all. Indeed, I see no reason the government should even ask what people's social relationship is or what private ceremonies they have held before letting them put each other on their insurance and hospital visiting lists. For all the government's business it is, they're a group of friends who have agreed to help each other through life. But, is this the same exact thing as marriage? Is marriage really nothing but a civil union? Or is it society's way of bringing families together through the life-giving union of opposites?

We actually have some amount of control over whether we have sex or not at any given time. Maybe we could tell that to kids in school, and that it's safer and more self-respecting to wait. That we want the best for them and that's chastity until marriage.Then, the kids who are being pressured for sex could report it knowing what they're being asked for is wrong and someone will protect them. The ones putting the pressure on would know someone objects. It might reduce the epidemic of STDs and of abuse in school. Remember, sexual health is more than viral-bacterial protection. It's also respectful attitudes toward the human body. If we tell them at the start that they will do everything we can think of in the following few years anyway, and that there is no way around it, they will take that as an order. I remember being that age. It hurt me deeply to realize what was expected of me. I wanted high expectations. It would have sent a message of value and respect instead of degradation and emptiness.

You mean there's a science about jobs too?
Moreover, I studied economics. It took a good five years to absorb the revolutionary premises of it: People make rational market choices. Not always right, not always acceptable, sometimes criminal, as when people buy other people as slaves. But they make market choices in their own interests. The only safeguards people require in the market are those that forbid force and fraud. Slavery and abortion are force. Yes, it is an act of first-strike force to stick scissors in someone's head and pry the brain out. A system that prevents force would prevent slavery and abortion, if it were consistent. Apple juice that is really sugar syrup is fraud. A system that bans fraud would prevent this. Pesticides in boxes with playing kids on the front and contents that actually poison children are fraud. A system that prevents fraud would prevent this. Get rid of force and fraud and people will basically do what is good for them without mostly hurting anyone. When they do hurt anyone, the rules against hurting anyone ought to take effect, so they won't do it again.
A system of government that punishes only acts that unfairly (as in a first-strike act) harm and/or trick people, and leaves everyone else alone, might increase the amount of good stuff in the world, like privacy and food and family life. Or it might not, but it's very unlikely to decrease privacy and food and family life, as socialism tends to do all over the world where it occurs. People would still help one another. We all need help sometimes. It would be mostly voluntary, except in emergencies when volunteer efforts would be overwhelmed. Then the government could step in. It would never get to a point where millions of people would spend their whole lives feeling they were best off staying home and not trying too hard, living year after year penalized if they tried to help themselves, never knowing ownership or stewardship of anything. Everyone has a right to the dignity of some level of independence and some opportunity to own something significant someday. Aid would be designed to raise folk to their feet and help them steady themselves, not order them to lie still. Productivity would be rewarded enough to ensure it would happen, so when we give people money it will be worth some value and be able to buy things, instead of runaway inflation or constant shortages. Then the aid they get would actually help them.
You could call the system that works something short and snappy, like, say, rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Oh, that's too wordy yet. Let's just call it real hope.

Once they said three months. Then they said nine. Whose life will be next to lose all protection?

When Roe V. Wade came down on the side of abortion in 1973, only children conceived less than two-and-a-half months earlier lost most legal protection. States could still outlaw abortion three months after the mother's last menstrual period began, and restrict abortion before that age to those babies whose mothers and fathers (if married) had talked about it and been professionally counseled beforehand, and to those whose mothers had been raped. Prochoicers immediately assured prolifers that the right of states to protect babies beyond that age was unassailable. After all, everyone knew babies at three months have recognizably human faces, hands and feet, move toward light and away from noise and pressure, and have working brains, nervous systems, hearts, immunities -- individual life, obviously human, obviously worth guarding. A few years later such protection was assailed after all. Prochoice activists demanded the "right" to abort children at five months, an age at which some babies had already been born and survived. The new ultrasound imaging showed the child at five months holding her own hands, fluttering his fingers, feeling her face, sucking his thumb -- the things a baby does after birth. The new watchword among prochoice debaters became "viability" -- the ability to live outside the womb -- rather than humanity, consciousness or sensation. They argued that no woman should ever endure one more minute of pregnancy than what she wanted, and that a mother had the right to terminate any baby she couldn't deliver live.

I was a prochoicer then, and passionate about the drive to stop unwanted pregnancy. I had never been pregnant. I assumed it was a terrible feeling. I made up stories to assure myself that a child felt nothing until viability, or even until birth.

But the available data showed that children react to stimuli just the same ways at three months, and many of the same ways at a few weeks, as they do when they're viable. Every time science looked at babies, they seemed to develop faster, and every time the prochoice movement looked at babies, they seemed to become more disposable; it took some years, but I jumped horses for the sake of honesty. Of course life begins at conception, of course killing a human being is murder, and of course murder is a crime. If not, then what is?

Today we face a term under a President who has already promised to remove all legal protection from children from conception to birth, and beyond birth if the children's mothers had tried to abort them but failed. He has already twice voted to overturn the Born Alive Infants Act, thereby leaving infants to cry alone in back rooms of hospitals until they die, because they were "unwanted". I maintain that it is incorrect to call any human being unwanted, as no one can be sure there isn't someone out there who wants another person. Indeed, couples who want any child they can adopt outnumber available children several times over. "Unwanted" in this context is simply a euphemism for "unpopular with someone". The unpopular, the struggling, and the helpless have just taken a hit they can ill afford.

Another may be on its way. Peter Singer is a philosopher who has spoken at college campuses. Singer teaches bioethics at Princeton, founded Monash University's Centre for Human Bioethics and has a major following among utilitarians, winning Humanist of the Year Award in his native Australia but so far failing in his political career with the Green Party. He hit the mainstream consciousness decades ago with the book Animal Liberation, which set the tone for a new voice of radicalism in the animal rights movement.

The grandson of WWII Holocaust victims, he launched his career with an exploration of the meaning of suffering and the meaning of charity. Many of his critics, including this one, consider the course of his philosophizing chillingly ironic. Singer's support of death for handicapped children has been frequently likened to the first moves of the Nazis, the very party that persecuted Singer's own family.
Singer considers such charges a misunderstanding, and writes that he favors the maximum good for those in the most need -- as long as they are fully human. He considers a less-complex brain activity level a factor that compromises the capacity to have preferences or to suffer, thus reducing need and humanity. Full humanity, by that measure, develops gradually along a lifetime "journey" of inventing and reaching goals. He acknowledges a fetus, embryo or zygote's life and membership in the human species, but challenges the assumption that it is wrong to kill a human being. Some, he implies, are more human than others.
It is no coincidence, but rather a trend away from caring, that brings such opinions to the surface just as a majority of American voters choose a candidate who has said the first thing he will do is to sign away the lives of the most vulnerable among us. America has chosen not to care, but it has not made that choice unanimously -- nearly half of us are still paying attention. We can turn this around, but we must act quickly.
Under an Obama presidency, we will very probably see a constant increase in acceptance of death sentences for the disabled at every age, and an increase in diagnoses of disability. The tide of convenience thinking will ultimately erode all that now guards any human being from her or his killers. Within four years life will have no protection whatever unless those who care about life treat this term as an epic battle for which our descendants will remember us as heroes or the generation who let the future die.

Note:

I have typed the facts as I have researched them in plain type, including opinions I share. My own commentary, including irony quote marks, is bolded.

Pro-choice false dichotomies examined

I was pro-choice nearly all my life. At about seven or eight years of age I joined my mother in a rally for the "right" to take tax money and apply it to abortion for poor mothers. I marched with a doll held aloft, my own idea, a symbol of the value of a wanted child. My young brain wasn't schooled in recognizing false dichotomies yet. Wanted children wouldn't suffer for the presence of unwanted children even if there were such people as unwanted children. In fact, every child in the USA is wanted many times over by families who wait years to adopt. Regardless of race, age, disability or any other statistic that can be listed about a child, every child is wanted by adoptive parents. But I thought there were people no one would ever be nice to, and they would be born instead of children who could have nice childhoods. I therefore was talked into reversing reality very smoothly. I had the idea abortion prevented cruelty to little children rather than being extreme cruelty itself.
False dichotomies are just one of the fallacies the pro-choice movement uses, but it relies on them for most recent "moral" arguments.
Try this one: "A woman has as much potential as a clump of tissue and should be allowed to finish school instead of being forced to have babies."
That constitutes a veritable snarl of false dichotomies, including "finish school" v. "give live birth" (In fact, giving birth and releasing the child to adoptive parents takes about the same amount of time out of a student's schedule as abortion would); "a woman's potential v. a clump of tissue's potential" (In fact, no one was ever a clump of anything, but a distinct organism from the moment of conception, intricate and purposive at every step, and a woman has the same amount of potential in every area of life regardless of whether she has given birth, and the child's potential is not the only reason to value the child's life); "forced to have babies v. free to be childless (In fact, once a woman is pregnant she is biologically a mother and already has a baby, who is just growing until he is strong enough to live in the cool air with the rest of us, and childbirth is the normal outcome of conception, far from being a forced outcome, and she was quite free to be childless up to the moment she ceased to be childless, at which time we simply ask her not to take a life); "a woman's potential value v. a child's potential value" (In fact, a majority of aborted babies are female, and we value these girls' potential as children and later as women because they are human, just we value their mothers' potential -- equally and absolutely, with no compromise.