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Colombia legalises abortion up to 24 weeks!
Comments
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As other users have pointed out, it is not "abortion" they are celebrating but the result of the referendum. And many of them absolutely deserve to celebrate that. Some people have been campaigning on this subjects for years or even decades. That they finally got the result they wanted, is very much cause for celebration.
But if you overly dilute down their reasons for celebrating like you do above, I can understand why the celebrations bother you so much.
But I do not know a single person who celebrates abortion. In fact the one piece of common ground pro and anti choicers have is that we would pretty much ALL want to see less, little, or ideally no abortions ever actually happen.
Think of heart bypass surgery. If we did not have that in Ireland I would campaign to get it. I would celebrate the day we got it. But I would also hope and dream for an Ireland where none of us EVER have to have one. It is wonderful that we can have them. It is tragic that we ever actually have to. I would say the same about abortion.
Having quickly caught up with the thread since I was last here, I find myself wondering if people are getting confused between "emotive" arguments and what is known as "arguments from emotion".
That is to say that sure, emotive language and rhetoric is not always helpful. I use it sparingly myself and usually only when I am trying to force a point home (such as one user getting uppity because I referred to the fetus as "human shaped").
But as someone who has engaged with the abortion topic for decades now, the worse issue is not emotive rhetoric but "Arguments from emotion" where people are trying to trigger an emotion not as PART of an argument.... but completely and entirely in lieu of one.
I gave an example of this already. The now departed boards user who went from abortion thread to abortion thread posting a science paper which referred to the movements of the tongue in a fetus. Because, using artistic license, the author of the paper described the movement as looking "LIKE the fetus was trying to speak"... this user was using this paper to try and illicit an emotional reaction in people. Because if he could make people feel the feelz of this fetus floating around trying to speak.... well "job done". Because for some people you just need to get them feeling uncomfortable ENOUGH about abortion to vote against it. You do not have to convince them entirely. And the sellers of emotional nonsense knew this. The tactic failed them all the same as the referendum shows.
But this has been the M.O. of the anti choice side for decades in my own experience. All too often they have no philosophical or intellectual or rational arguments against abortion in and of itself. So they jump on pictures (usually misleading ones) and ideas they hope will illicit emotional concern in their mark instead. This is why they jump to use words like "baby" instead of "fetus" too, sometimes regardless of how early in the process they are referring to (calling a 2 week old fetus a "baby" was not uncommon in my experience).
I could answer that question with a question, since you were asking this question in the context of a user mentioning the life of the mother being in danger.
Why do some areas of the world have exceptions to laws on violence and death under the rubric "Self Defense"?
I would see an abortion in support of the health of the mother in the same light as I see the concept of "Self Defense". She is a perfectly healthy human being and another human is impinging on that health and perhaps even survival. She has therefore every right to take the necessary steps to defend herself.
If the only option (and I support looking at all the options) is one that will result in the death of her assailant then so be it. Unfortunate, but unavoidable.
As such the question you ask is a little misleading. It is not so much one life is "more important" than the other. Rather under the concept of self defense, the rights of one become more relevant and defensible than the other.
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It is not so much the picture that people are dismissing as the manufactured "argument from emotion" people are using such pictures to create. See my posts above where I explain that in more detail.
However during the referendum I took a lot of pain to point out in any forum (on or off line) I was on that we should find common ground between the anti and pro choice side of this discussion. And that main common ground is that pretty much all of us, on both sides, want little or no abortions to happen. We just disagree that banning them in law is the way to attain that ideal.
So when you say "It's terrible it happens anyway" we can somewhat agree. I would say the same about any medical intervention. It is terrible that heart bypass has to exist and people need them. It would be ideal if they never happened. I hate that they have to happen. But its a GOOD THING that they CAN happen all the same. And I say the same about abortion.
But pro or anti choice we should support any and all initiatives which will be effective at A) ensuring unwanted pregnancies never happen in the first place and B) ensuring when unwanted pregnancies do occur that we maximise the potential for women to make other choices and not to feel like abortion is their only way out.
That's the world I want to live in. YMMV.
And so they should. I see no reason to consider morality and ethics to be objective and set in stone. And outside the theists who pretend there is a god without any evidence to that effect, I know of few if any people who want to consider or pretend morality is an objective set in stone. Morality and ethics should evolve with the society in which it resides.
That said, there is going to be some level of "arbitrary" no matter what conclusions we settle on. But I do not see all "arbitrary" as being equal. Some positions are markedly less arbitrary and much better argued than others. Simply declaring "Life begins at conception" and walking away with nothing else to say..... that is one end of that spectrum. That is about as arbitrary as it gets.
My own position would be closer to the other end of the spectrum. It can not avoid having elements that are arbitrary. I doubt anyone can! But if you have followed my position on abortion over the years as it has developed and refined... it would be a nonsense to compare it to many others solely under the rubric of "arbitrary".
In essence I see no reason for holding moral and ethical concern for non sentient entities that lack not just slightly, but entirely, any faculty of consciousness. I genuinely see no reason to have more moral or ethical concern for a 12 week old fetus therefore than I do a table leg or a rock. This position is not so much a position that is arbitrary as it is a position that remains when you trim away the arbitrary declarations by fiat many anti choicers use.
The question therefore is why, and whether we should, have moral and ethical concern for conscious sentient agents. I think we should and have said why over the years. But sure, there are going to be some "arbitrary" elements within that. But that hardly makes it comparable either. If we are going to have moral and ethical concern for anything at all... and sure we could say answering yes to that is arbitrary.... then I genuinely struggle to think of anything else we should be having it for. After all if sentience disappeared from the universe tomorrow, the very notion of having concern for anything would go with it. Perhaps in this, the moral and ethical argument for sentience literally can pull itself up by it's own bootstraps :)
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