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Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Is There a Connection Between anti Abortion Rhetoric and Violence at Abortion Clinics?

With all the talk about Trump attacking Megyn Kelly, the real take away is that the alleged serious candidates have all taken very extreme positions on abortion-and contraception. This is one thing that must be remembered when talking about the anti-abortion argument.

They may claim it's not anti-women or anti female choice but that they just think abortion is murder. But then you notice that they also oppose contraception.

It's no secret that the GOP is 'pro-life' but even so, the comments at the first debate were shocking and eye-opening. Scott Walker, Jeb, and Rubio all rule out exceptions in the case of rape and the life of the mother. On Sunday Mike Huckabee showed what this position looks like when he said a 10 year old girl who is raped must be forced to bring the rapists' baby to term

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/huckabee-abortion-10-year-old-rape-incest-victim_55d0a275e4b07addcb433a4a

But Walker would go as far as ruling out an exception for the life of the mother.

And I guess if you really believe abortion is murder then these positions take on a kind of consistency though a pretty shocking one.

But something is surely wrong form a moral standpoint with this argument. I agree this can be a hard issue to really draw out morally. It can lead to hair splitting arguments over When does life begin?

This is why while I agree it's a tough call, I think that women should make the ultimate decision on this as they bear the pregnancy for nine months. We pay such homage elsewhere to a mother's instinct and a mother's love so why not let them decide here?

My premise is that if it really were murder then most pregnant women wouldn't consider it. I just think on this issue women have to be the ones who break the tie. Here we really should trust 'women's intuition' as anything else is morally repugnant.

However, there is yet another case of an abortion clinic almost being bombed. In a way, if you take the prolife rhetoric seriously, doesn't that make the actions of this man who wanted to bomb this Kansas clinic moral?

If it's murder then surely doing whatever you can to prevent it is moral whatever the law of the state says? Aren't such violent activists like the abolitionists as prolifers sometimes claim?

In this way you can argue that calling abortion murder is already implicitly a incitement to violence, the equivalent of yelling Fire! in a crowded theater.

That this is the result of this moral premise that abortion is murder-an incitement to violence-strongly suggests that this premise is deeply flawed.


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