So whenever I hear a pro-lifer telling me that there’s no such thing as a medically necessary abortion, I tell him or her my story. And then I tell them how noble I think it is that they believe my wife should have died for their principles.

At that point, they’re usually speechless. Shame it doesn’t last.

If legal adults don’t all have the same rights, we don’t live in anything resembling a fair society. For what it’s worth, owing to strict biological considerations (like that fetuses don’t live independently and need to use someone else’s body to survive), I roundly reject the idea that a fetus should have equal or greater rights to a legal adult or a minor.

I wasn’t implying that “abortion on demand no questions asked” is in fact the law in the United States. But it is a fallacy to conclude from that that, within the so-called “pro choice” movement, there are not significant numbers of people who do in fact want such a law.
This was not a debate on the status of abortion law – the actual status is quite clear. Casey v. Planned Parenthood is in fact now the law, not Roe vs. Wade.

JuniorPartner:

I’m gonna go right ahead and say it: so what? Lets say I support “abortion on demand, no questions asked.” So what? On a fundamental level, when considering the concept of competing rights, why does it matter? I know, you’re arguing about dogmatic, absolute statements, but from what principle does moderation flow?

Its the 400 pound gorilla of the abortion debate. Whenever you have a situation of competing rights, you end up with a winner and a loser. When discussing abortion you end up with two possible final outcomes: a fetus dies or one individual’s body is used (potentially against their will) in order to ensure the survival of another. Your argument is that we should find a balance and work to avoid dogmatic extremes, that there is a middle ground between abortions-for-all and abortions-for-none.

The problem is that, in ever refusing even a single abortion, you set the precedent that an individual’s body can be claimed by another in the name of survival. Are you comfortable with that? More importantly, are you comfortable with that precedent out in the wild, subjected to the elaboration of courts and legislatures? Allowing abortion can easily be looked at from a property rights perspective, a self-defense perspective, or a privacy rights perspective without creating any new law. The same cannot be said of denying abortion.

“Abortion on demand, no questions asked.”

How many laws do we have in the United States prohibiting medically necessary procedures? How many laws prohibiting elective surgeries to improve the quality of life? Why should abortion be different from any other medical procedure?

It shouldn’t.

However, the policies you attempt, falsely, to dismiss as “extreme” from the so-called “pro-life” people are routinely implemented in the nations where they have gained power, and are proposed frequently and at high levels in nations where they have not yet gained power. Therefore they must be assumed to be the mainstream goals of the pro-slutpunishing movement. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t have been implemented, now would they?

Which is why I say your entire argument is simple bullshit, a pathetic attempt to deny reality, and to smear the pro-choice argument as, and I quote your own words: “abortion on demand, no questions asked”, which is a demonstorable lie. Thus the ire, venom, and profanity. You were, and are, spewing one of the most pathetic and stupid lies of the “pro-life” people. Lies calculated to play on the emotions of others and give your true agenda the mask of reasonability when it is in fact a movement devoted to the cause of making women’s lives miserable.

Further, I do not discuss fetuses, and let’s use the proper terminology here, “unborn baby” isn’t a medical term anymore than “partial birth abortion” is, its yet more propaganda, as victims because they aren’t people you insufferable twit. They are *potential* people, but so are the 25%-50% of fertilized eggs that are, without any medical intervention whatsoever, mensturated out. Unless you’re going to start weeping over that, your crap about fetuses being the victims of abortion is just that, crap. Do you hold cute little burrial ceremonies for tampons?

And, tell me, was the corpse you and your allies forced Miss D to carry in her body for 5 months a victim? No. It was Miss D who was victimized by the pro-slutpunishing movement’s routine, mainstream, policies.

The reason that we focus on women as victims of the pro-slutpunishing movement is, surprise, because they are, and the goal of your vile movement is to victimize women as can be seen by simply looking at any country where your kind has gained power. Every single place the forces of evil have won has implemented the policies you try to dismiss as “extreme”. Every. Single. One. You seek to make women victims, and then ask why we see women as victims, nice bit of insanity there chum.

And, finally and most importantly, if you actually cared about reducing the number of abortions, as opposed to the slut punishing agenda you really care about, you’d be pushing for increased reality based sex education, starting as young as possible and continuing through high school, freely available contraception, and increased public spending on contraceptive research. Planned Parenthood is the single most successful group at preventing abortions that exists in the USA. How much was your last donation, and how long ago was it?

and that it is permissible for doctors to save women with ectopic pregnancies.

It was mentioned before, but is worth repeating that under this rule, doctors are only allowed to save women by performing unnecessary surgery to remove womens’ functioning reproductive organs, frequently rendering them involuntary infertile. As you say:

so long as the death of the embryo is just a “side effect” of removing the tube/cervix/wherever it’s implanted

And taking out a woman’s cervix or fallopian tube just for kicks is NOT an acceptable way to treat an ectopic pregnancy. It’s an awful “compromise” whereby the rules say, sure, you can live, as long as we get to damage you a bit.

You’re quite right that many positive social outcomes probably flow from more liberal (as opposed to completely restrictive) abortion policies – e.g., the reduction in the crime rate observed after Roe because of abortion’s disparate impact on population groups more likely to commit crimes. I was not trying to make a public policy argument, merely pointing out the oddity of focusing strictly on women as “victims” when people rarely discuss unborn babies as victims. I am not trying to take a metaphysical stance here – in fact I don’t think it’s possible to answer such a question, or even a coherent one to ask. But precisely because it’s impossible to answer these questions using abstract reasoning as opposed to empirical evidence, it makes little sense to refer (as “pro choicers” often do) to women as “victims” and unborn kids not. Such a claim requires an untenable background assumption (that it is possible to distinguish, based on ability to suffer “victimhood,” a woman from a fetus).