Master CraftsMon - Aired Monday, January 30, 2006 at about 11pm CST - Segment 3
Master CraftsMon - Aired Monday, January 30, 2006 at about 11pm CST
Segment 3
Now, let me talk to you about the symbol called Abortion. Yeah, last Monday was the 33rd anniversary of the Roe vs Wade. Roe vs Wade set up a set of policies for dealing with abortions. In the first trimester, the States were precluded from denying abortions for any reason. The second trimester, the States could make laws against it for a few reasons. The third trimester, abortions were not to be performed. You're sitting there going, "Wait, I didn't know that. I thought abortions were legal for all nine months." Yeah, the companion decision called Doe vs Bolton said that abortions could not be denied if a physician said it was best for the health of the mother either mental or physical. The best guess is that Roe will fall in three to ten years from now. What will happen next?
This is where it gets weird. You assume that abortion will become illegal. Nope. It passes back to the state legislatures. Suddenly the Left will have to come up with arguments as to why abortion is a good idea. They won't be able to do it, because our country has never debated abortion. I know, it looks like we have, but we really haven't. The debate was just getting started in 1973 and suddenly it was cut off by a Supreme Court that dictated the outcome of the debate. A policy decision that should have been settled by each state slowly, so we could see what the effects were. If we had debated state by state about abortion rights, then the side effects of abortion could have been exposed and many people would have been able to decide rationally whether it was a good idea.
BUT the Left has defined Abortion as a symbol for freedom. You cannot debate whether freedom has side effects. That's silly. The Left will look at all these side effects and quibbles brought before the legislatures in the states and simply state as fact that abortion is the same as freedom. Freedom is so important that it has infinite value. To state that abortion does not achieve the goals that it has set out to achieve is silly. Abortion is an absolute symbol for freedom. In short, it becomes a circular argument. If freedom has infinite value, then abortion cannot be dispensed with. It follows that we cannot debate abortion, because it represents freedom.
Freedom is NOT free. It has a cost. Sometimes the cost is very very high. Yet there are many flavors of freedom. What if you are mistaken about the flavor of freedom you are paying for. By my standards, before you kill someone to get your freedom, you best make sure the freedom you are buying is VERY important. The Left refuses to see that, because they have assigned an infinite value of the symbol abortion.
Let me give you an example from the New York Times. A woman was living with a man. She told him that she was having trouble with the pill and wanted to stop taking it. She and the guy decided that their relationship had matured enough that if a child was conceived they would have the child and raise it together. The woman became pregnant in a very strange way. She had triplets. A woman has two ovaries. In this particular woman, an egg from one had become a baby and the egg from the other had divided and become two babies. Fraternal twins are VERY rare. Fraternal triplets. God knows what the odds are. The woman when she found out said that she wanted her doctor to kill the two twins, because she only wanted one child. Her reason was that she feared that three babies would force her to shop at Costco. She feared having to shop at Costco. She explicitly said that. Stories like that are extremely common. Whether they are true, is not the issue by my standards. An abortion can be performed for good reason, bad reason or NO reason. That is the problem I am having with Abortion. A woman can give me huge sob stories about the small percentage of abortions that give freedom as I define it, but the rest of the stories are like the one I just mentioned. They make no sense to me.
I have no problem with a woman wanting her freedom. I have a problem with her wanting to kill her child to do it. The technology has changed to the point where we can extract the fertilized egg and put it on ice and implant it in a woman who wants to have a baby, but cannot. There are people on the Right who do have a problem with even this form of abortion, but I am not one of them. I want the killing to stop. I am in favor of prenatal adoption, but I am NOT in favor of murdering a child for a reason I cannot understand. If Planned Parenthood would just start doing prenatal adoptions, I for one would laud them for their efforts.
Prenatal adoption is a good compromise. Here's why. It covers all the reasons why abortions are done without killing the child. It also causes a ripple throughout society. Suddenly becoming pregnant has consequences. Under abortion at least symbolically, it does not.
Because the Left has defined abortion as a form of freedom, women seeking abortions are under the impression that there are no consequences. Very quickly they find out that there are consequences, BUT by the time they find that out, it is WAY too late. By having prenatal adoption, women then have to weigh whether they want to go through the extraction process or have the child and give it up for adoption. The chant on the Left has always been that abortion should be legal and rare. I agree. The reasons for avoiding carrying the child for the full nine months should be... whatever you want it to be... as long as you do not kill the baby. Not my business. I really and truly do not care why a woman wants to avoid carrying a baby to term... as long as she does not have the right to kill her child.
What makes me angry about abortion is that it defines the child as belonging to the woman... exclusively. Except in marriage. In marriage both the man and the woman are responsible for the child. Note that outside marriage, the child becomes a thing that is owned. Inside marriage, the child is a person and the parents are responsible for the child.
Symbols... Symbols... If a woman can abort a fetus and the fetus is defined as a clump of cells, then the fetus is not a baby. It is a thing like a TV. You want to destroy your own TV, then I should not make that my business. On the other hand, under the prenatal adoption option the fetus is a child who is not owned, but is someone's responsibility.
Let me give you an example. Assume that a man and woman marry. In the first year of marriage they have a baby. The baby then develops colic. Colic causes babies to scream and scream and scream. Is it likely that the man would abuse his child? No, it is not. The child is partially his responsibility. Is it likely that he would abuse his wife, because she has been unable to get the baby to shut up? No, it is not. She's doing the best she can and the baby is their baby, not just hers.
Now. Assume a woman and a man are living together for a year without wedlock. The baby arrives. The guy stays for some reason. Why shouldn't the guy abuse the child with colic and the child's mother? What is his downside risk? Very little. The woman can kick him out. Big deal. To the guy, the baby is the symbolically the woman's property. The guy in that situation has no responsibility for the child except maybe child support. The child belongs to the woman... period. Symbolically, because the woman can kill the child, she owns the child. The guy has no incentive to be a good parent. Again, I am not saying that in actual fact this is how it works, by symbolically, yes. With abortion, the child becomes, symbolically, a thing that is owned. With marriage, the child becomes a responsibility. Again, that is not how it works every time, but that is how it is perceived to work going in. If you as a male do not have a reasonable expectation that any child you have by a woman will be your responsibility for 18 or so years, then why do you have a reason to treat even the woman well? Much less the child. Go check it out. Abuse happens more often outside of marriage than inside.
What I am getting at is that if you want to salvage the right of a woman to determine how her body is used, you are going to have to accept and fund prenatal adoption. You have three to ten years to get ready with your arguments for a woman's right to choose to have a child. If you say that the woman has the right to kill her child for what she perceives as freedom, then you cannot get that passed by any legislature. Prenatal adoption... yeah, that will work with about 80% of the people. Of the remaining ten percent half will say that the baby has to be killed, so that there are no consequences and the other half will say that even prenatal adoption is against God's will.
If prenatal adoption comes about, then the number of women having babies out of wedlock will drop precipitously. The number of prenatal adoptions will be relatively small and all parties will get what they say they want... in reality. Abortion is a bad symbol. When you kill a child for freedom, you are setting a bad precedent. It ripples throughout society and makes it hard for us to be civilized.
I know, I know, abortion where the child is killed is a right according to the Constitution. Nope... The Constitution does not protect abortion even in a general instance. Starting in 1922, Supreme Court decisions slowly inched forward until 1973 when someone decided that they saw a right to privacy in the Constitution. There is none. We COULD amend the Constitution to create a right of privacy, some states have done that, but right now it does not really exist.
I wanted on this program to make clear that symbols should have a definition that matches their substance. When they do not, we have to debate whether the substance or the definition is wrong. Right now, the definition of abortion is freedom. Is the substance of abortion actually freedom? In order for abortion to be a right, abortion has to free women in actual fact instead of in theory.
I am in favor of prenatal adoption, because symbolically it says that the child is a responsibility, not a thing. It also saves a child's life.
I want you to think about that. Are you sure abortion actually equates to freedom? After all, Freedom is NOT free. Sometimes it IS necessary to kill to maintain your freedom. If you ARE going to kill someone, shouldn't you be sure that the freedom you have bought at such a high price is real freedom? If there is a way of achieving the freedom you want where the child lives, shouldn't you want that way instead of abortion?... Something to think about.
Segment 3
Now, let me talk to you about the symbol called Abortion. Yeah, last Monday was the 33rd anniversary of the Roe vs Wade. Roe vs Wade set up a set of policies for dealing with abortions. In the first trimester, the States were precluded from denying abortions for any reason. The second trimester, the States could make laws against it for a few reasons. The third trimester, abortions were not to be performed. You're sitting there going, "Wait, I didn't know that. I thought abortions were legal for all nine months." Yeah, the companion decision called Doe vs Bolton said that abortions could not be denied if a physician said it was best for the health of the mother either mental or physical. The best guess is that Roe will fall in three to ten years from now. What will happen next?
This is where it gets weird. You assume that abortion will become illegal. Nope. It passes back to the state legislatures. Suddenly the Left will have to come up with arguments as to why abortion is a good idea. They won't be able to do it, because our country has never debated abortion. I know, it looks like we have, but we really haven't. The debate was just getting started in 1973 and suddenly it was cut off by a Supreme Court that dictated the outcome of the debate. A policy decision that should have been settled by each state slowly, so we could see what the effects were. If we had debated state by state about abortion rights, then the side effects of abortion could have been exposed and many people would have been able to decide rationally whether it was a good idea.
BUT the Left has defined Abortion as a symbol for freedom. You cannot debate whether freedom has side effects. That's silly. The Left will look at all these side effects and quibbles brought before the legislatures in the states and simply state as fact that abortion is the same as freedom. Freedom is so important that it has infinite value. To state that abortion does not achieve the goals that it has set out to achieve is silly. Abortion is an absolute symbol for freedom. In short, it becomes a circular argument. If freedom has infinite value, then abortion cannot be dispensed with. It follows that we cannot debate abortion, because it represents freedom.
Freedom is NOT free. It has a cost. Sometimes the cost is very very high. Yet there are many flavors of freedom. What if you are mistaken about the flavor of freedom you are paying for. By my standards, before you kill someone to get your freedom, you best make sure the freedom you are buying is VERY important. The Left refuses to see that, because they have assigned an infinite value of the symbol abortion.
Let me give you an example from the New York Times. A woman was living with a man. She told him that she was having trouble with the pill and wanted to stop taking it. She and the guy decided that their relationship had matured enough that if a child was conceived they would have the child and raise it together. The woman became pregnant in a very strange way. She had triplets. A woman has two ovaries. In this particular woman, an egg from one had become a baby and the egg from the other had divided and become two babies. Fraternal twins are VERY rare. Fraternal triplets. God knows what the odds are. The woman when she found out said that she wanted her doctor to kill the two twins, because she only wanted one child. Her reason was that she feared that three babies would force her to shop at Costco. She feared having to shop at Costco. She explicitly said that. Stories like that are extremely common. Whether they are true, is not the issue by my standards. An abortion can be performed for good reason, bad reason or NO reason. That is the problem I am having with Abortion. A woman can give me huge sob stories about the small percentage of abortions that give freedom as I define it, but the rest of the stories are like the one I just mentioned. They make no sense to me.
I have no problem with a woman wanting her freedom. I have a problem with her wanting to kill her child to do it. The technology has changed to the point where we can extract the fertilized egg and put it on ice and implant it in a woman who wants to have a baby, but cannot. There are people on the Right who do have a problem with even this form of abortion, but I am not one of them. I want the killing to stop. I am in favor of prenatal adoption, but I am NOT in favor of murdering a child for a reason I cannot understand. If Planned Parenthood would just start doing prenatal adoptions, I for one would laud them for their efforts.
Prenatal adoption is a good compromise. Here's why. It covers all the reasons why abortions are done without killing the child. It also causes a ripple throughout society. Suddenly becoming pregnant has consequences. Under abortion at least symbolically, it does not.
Because the Left has defined abortion as a form of freedom, women seeking abortions are under the impression that there are no consequences. Very quickly they find out that there are consequences, BUT by the time they find that out, it is WAY too late. By having prenatal adoption, women then have to weigh whether they want to go through the extraction process or have the child and give it up for adoption. The chant on the Left has always been that abortion should be legal and rare. I agree. The reasons for avoiding carrying the child for the full nine months should be... whatever you want it to be... as long as you do not kill the baby. Not my business. I really and truly do not care why a woman wants to avoid carrying a baby to term... as long as she does not have the right to kill her child.
What makes me angry about abortion is that it defines the child as belonging to the woman... exclusively. Except in marriage. In marriage both the man and the woman are responsible for the child. Note that outside marriage, the child becomes a thing that is owned. Inside marriage, the child is a person and the parents are responsible for the child.
Symbols... Symbols... If a woman can abort a fetus and the fetus is defined as a clump of cells, then the fetus is not a baby. It is a thing like a TV. You want to destroy your own TV, then I should not make that my business. On the other hand, under the prenatal adoption option the fetus is a child who is not owned, but is someone's responsibility.
Let me give you an example. Assume that a man and woman marry. In the first year of marriage they have a baby. The baby then develops colic. Colic causes babies to scream and scream and scream. Is it likely that the man would abuse his child? No, it is not. The child is partially his responsibility. Is it likely that he would abuse his wife, because she has been unable to get the baby to shut up? No, it is not. She's doing the best she can and the baby is their baby, not just hers.
Now. Assume a woman and a man are living together for a year without wedlock. The baby arrives. The guy stays for some reason. Why shouldn't the guy abuse the child with colic and the child's mother? What is his downside risk? Very little. The woman can kick him out. Big deal. To the guy, the baby is the symbolically the woman's property. The guy in that situation has no responsibility for the child except maybe child support. The child belongs to the woman... period. Symbolically, because the woman can kill the child, she owns the child. The guy has no incentive to be a good parent. Again, I am not saying that in actual fact this is how it works, by symbolically, yes. With abortion, the child becomes, symbolically, a thing that is owned. With marriage, the child becomes a responsibility. Again, that is not how it works every time, but that is how it is perceived to work going in. If you as a male do not have a reasonable expectation that any child you have by a woman will be your responsibility for 18 or so years, then why do you have a reason to treat even the woman well? Much less the child. Go check it out. Abuse happens more often outside of marriage than inside.
What I am getting at is that if you want to salvage the right of a woman to determine how her body is used, you are going to have to accept and fund prenatal adoption. You have three to ten years to get ready with your arguments for a woman's right to choose to have a child. If you say that the woman has the right to kill her child for what she perceives as freedom, then you cannot get that passed by any legislature. Prenatal adoption... yeah, that will work with about 80% of the people. Of the remaining ten percent half will say that the baby has to be killed, so that there are no consequences and the other half will say that even prenatal adoption is against God's will.
If prenatal adoption comes about, then the number of women having babies out of wedlock will drop precipitously. The number of prenatal adoptions will be relatively small and all parties will get what they say they want... in reality. Abortion is a bad symbol. When you kill a child for freedom, you are setting a bad precedent. It ripples throughout society and makes it hard for us to be civilized.
I know, I know, abortion where the child is killed is a right according to the Constitution. Nope... The Constitution does not protect abortion even in a general instance. Starting in 1922, Supreme Court decisions slowly inched forward until 1973 when someone decided that they saw a right to privacy in the Constitution. There is none. We COULD amend the Constitution to create a right of privacy, some states have done that, but right now it does not really exist.
I wanted on this program to make clear that symbols should have a definition that matches their substance. When they do not, we have to debate whether the substance or the definition is wrong. Right now, the definition of abortion is freedom. Is the substance of abortion actually freedom? In order for abortion to be a right, abortion has to free women in actual fact instead of in theory.
I am in favor of prenatal adoption, because symbolically it says that the child is a responsibility, not a thing. It also saves a child's life.
I want you to think about that. Are you sure abortion actually equates to freedom? After all, Freedom is NOT free. Sometimes it IS necessary to kill to maintain your freedom. If you ARE going to kill someone, shouldn't you be sure that the freedom you have bought at such a high price is real freedom? If there is a way of achieving the freedom you want where the child lives, shouldn't you want that way instead of abortion?... Something to think about.
posted by aRandomTexan at
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