Case in point, the following political cartoon, found in McClatchy.com, where other similar cartoons make the guilt by association clear and without doubt:
Being possessed of no logic whatsoever to support the 50,000,000 abortions suffered in this country beyond claims of "tolerance", "privacy" and women's "Right" to kill their progeny, it is absolutely predictable that abortion fans would jump at the opportunity to charge pro-lifers with murderous intents, and therefore moral hypocrisy. The Guilt By Association Fallacy matters not in the least to a relativist group for whom no truth exists, and thus no lie or fallacy exists either. Their day is made when they can apply morals which they don't believe in to their opponents, even if the accusation is false.
It remains obvious that the long term fight against the irrationality of killing the unborn is more important, and that potential abortionist killers must be stopped when they are discovered. The long term approach is more pragmatic, and it is correct morally as well. The irrational and fallacious appeals to the weakly moralled by the abortion fans in the media must be countered with strength and conviction.
3 comments:
'Tiller by Association
Generally, your articles are extremely well written and your logic is very admirable.
50,000,000 abortions. If that number is correct( currently unsupported by an quote of a supposed statistic ) then it is a good thing. If there were 50MM more people in the U.S. Imagine the strain on food, jobs, and others who would be paying for them in birthing, vaccinations, food, schooling, intermittent diseases, etc. It's usually the low economic class that has them and so the imagined child's fate would be povertized.( to coin a word ). The false logic is that every person deserves to live. A child is a person. Therfore it deserves to live. Every person does not deserve to live. Example, murderers. End of that argument. Another argument: babies in the womb are not persons. They do not yet have a "personality" because they have not come into the world in order to start developing a "personality". They are fetuses. A man or woman must not only look at her immediate birth survival, but at her own long term servival with a child. She must look at the povertized and suffering circumstances,that will befall the child if she brings it into the world. She has and decided not to bring it into the world. She therefore is like a god. Her rule is the rule of nature, survival of the fittest. She has absolute power and dominion over her own body and anything in it. That is a law of nature which is obvious in the animal world. Humans are animals, first and formost, 2ndly they are humans. To say that she does not have that dominion is to say that another person or many other persons own, have dominion over her body. If someone has dominion over another's body, the dominated are slaves. And we all know that throughout the history of the world, slavery is abhorred and is to be fought against to the death. If the woman, sacrificing her unborn fetus, saves the rest for of us a job to work at, food to eat, etc.then she is doing all of us a survivalist kindness.
As I understand your argument, it goes like this (abreviated):
1. Humans are animals first. What animals do is natural and therefore OK.
2. Not every person deserves to live: death row inmates.
3. Babies in the womb are not persons (presumably they are animals, though).
4. The woman has absolute power over her body and its contents; otherwise she would be a slave.
5. Killing the unborn baby creates jobs.
I hope I did not miss too much.
Now.
First, is it valid to claim the animal defense for all human actions? Young male lions will kill an older male and then kill and eat his progeny kittens; this brings the female lion into estrus and enables the young lion to breed her. Is it valid to encourage this behavior because it is natural for animals, of which we are one? Obviously not.
I don't think there is much of an argument to be made that doing as the animals do is the source of valid moral or ethical behavior for humans.
2. According to the enlightenment view expressed in our constitution, all individuals do have a right to life; that right is forfeited by criminal actions. So comparing death row inmates to unborn babies is a false analogy, an apples and oranges fallacy.
3. An unborn individual is existing at a valid part of his/her development cycle as a valid human at that stage; there is no reason to devalue any human at any point in their development cycle, from conception to last breath. Devaluing a person at some portion of their life is not just immoral, it is a dangerous power that is presumed by another individual. There is no moral or functional difference between devaluing an unborn child, and devaluing an old woman, a mentally defective, a genetically defective (racially), a genetically defective (physical impairment), etc. Devaluing humans is what leads to slavery. Not to mention holocausts.
Devaluing an unborn human is taking the "right of human valuation" as a personal attribute. How humans are valued or devalued is not an issue; the issue is that they can be valued or devalued, and who can do it. Once a person has taken that "right" for himself, then he can value or devalue as he sees fit, whoever he sees fit to do it to.
4. A woman does not have any innate right to kill her progeny at any point in their development, beyond the animalistic anarchic behaviors you attribute to her. Being an animal first conveys no special murderous ethical rights to a woman; in fact the male of the species has as much ethical claim to the progeny as does the woman. And in fact it has been shown that many of the abortions are performed at the insistence of the male - spouse or boyfriend - not at the wish of the girl/woman. Who has what right, and is it because they are animals first? Is male dominance justified because animals do that? Is mate abuse justified because animals do that?
5. The "jobs benefit" of abortion is just not a tenable reason; we could kill off everyone above the age of 50, and make more jobs, more food, more housing, etc. We could kill 3 out of every 10 school children at any age and do the same thing. We could castrate 3 out of 10 men, or maybe remove the uterus of three out of ten women of breeding age. There are lots of murderous, invasive and destructive (yet pragmatic) paths that can be taken, and have been taken under totalitarian eugenic plans. That this might control the population has no bearing on whether there might be a moral issue involved. Denial of moral issues is a serious problem that leads to an anarchic, relativistic worldview where anything goes (after all that's how it works in the animal world). And "anything goes" is the motto of our current amoral world. But it's not justifiable just because the animals do it that way.
If your argument becomes, "what would we do with another 50 million people", the answer is still not to kill them. The answer is a separate topic altogether.
BTW, the 50 Million abortion statistic was taken about six months ago from the NIH / CDC website.
Post a Comment