Irresponsibility and Abortion in Nicaragua

Dylan is right. Your argument is ridiculous. I personally am pro abortion, but if the goal is to minimize abortion, making it illegal is a pretty effective way to do so.

Sk

I find it astonishing that arguments like #2’s are still being made. There’s no accounting for stupidity, I guess, but one might have hoped that a little residual knowledge of what happens when there is no legal abortion might remain.

Making abortion illegal will reduce legal abortion 100%, in that much #2 is right. To the vast numbers of Irishwomen travelling to England, John M. might have added the cases from the 70s and 80s (before contraception in Irl. was available to anyone but the rich and well-connected; before freely available information and cheap flights made the UK option easier) of teenage girls dying while trying to perform terminations on themselves.

But how can one vote for legislation that forces women to give birth to a baby that is the result of rape or incest? Surely those parliamentarians must not have the faintest idea of what rape and incest does to the life of a girl or a woman.

I can’t understand how anyone could vote for a law that makes no exception for the life of the mother. But I can fairly easily understand how they could leave out exceptions for rape and incest. If you believe, as devout anti-abortion advocates claim to, that a fetus is a human being, then, simply, abortion in the case of rape or incest is no more permissible than infanticide in the case of rape or incest.

These legislators could fully recognize the tragedy for the woman and still be unwilling to compound that tragedy with what they consider the ‘murder’ of a ‘baby’.

I’m not religious, and don’t consider an early-term fetus to have the same moral standing as infant, but I can understand their position even though I think it’s wrong.

Assume, for the sake of argument, you truly believed that abortion was the murder of helpless children and that, by extension, abortion clinics were actually little death camps set up on street corners. You wouldn’t say, “Well, we might as well let people kill the babies here, because otherwise they’ll only take them abroad to kill them”, you’d try to stop both.

I am surprised, in fact, that people who believe fetuses are the same as infants aren’t more militant than they are–and I think they aren’t only because, in their heart-of-heart, they don’t really believe what they claim to.

I said making [alcohol consumption] illegal will ‘minimize’ [alcohol consumption].

i could have sworn that the US already experimented with illegalizing conduct that lots of people will engage in no matter what the law says.

i wonder how that experiment worked?

The US has also rather unsuccessfully “minimized” the use of marijuana and cocaine by making them illegal. No civilized country that I know of, meanwhile, has attempted to minimize the spread of HIV by making it illegal to be seropositive.

In general, people who are not stupid recognize that statute books are a remarkably ineffective way of changing behavior. (At the very least you need to devote enforcement resources.) It’s much more effective to look at the incentives people have to commit certain acts (or refrain from committing them). Change those incentives, and you change the rates of commission — which is why, for example, burglaries and robberies tend to decrease when young men have a better chance at making a decent living by other means. The law doesn’t change, but the conditions around it do.

(What I also find depressingly common here is the tendency of people who ordinarily assign primacy to market forces assigning them no power in situations like the decision to have an abortion.)

If you believe, as devout anti-abortion advocates claim to, that a fetus is a human being, then, simply, abortion in the case of rape or incest is no more permissible than infanticide in the case of rape or incest.

What Slocum said. Are you coming late to the abortion issue, Ingrid?

Since I support, faute de mieux, legalized abortion, I support the choice to abort babies conceived as the result of rape or incest … but it’s rather difficult to understand what the *baby* did wrong. Better to execute the rapist than the child, surely?

“I didn’t say making abortion illegal will eliminate abortion (#3). I said making abortion illegal will ‘minimize’ abortion. ”

Umm..I did not say you said that. I said that there was no proof in the Irish experience that making abortion illegal has minimised the effective abortion rate in Ireland. Just to be clear. #9 might like to substantively address this point – or not given the facile nature of his comment.

I don’t understand why the “foetus=baby => abortion=infanticide” position isn’t generally respected, or at least regarded as a position that people can hold without being evil.

Because until very recently most of the debate on abortion focused on late-term abortions. Which implicitly accepts a continuum, not an either/or statement. So people who worked hard to ban late-term abortions (regardless of their personal feelings on abortion in general) were de facto accepting abortion, just not in all situations. One might say that a certain credibility is lost in exchange for a more viable political position.

I think the problem with the argument that banning abortion leads to fewer abortions is the marginal case. Will a total ban reduce abortions? The answer is “maybe.” Some women undoubtedly will carry children to term, perhaps those who now wait until the last moment to get abortions won’t. And others may make more effort to avoid pregnancy in the first place. But many may just turn to abortion providers or leave for places that permit abortions, which won’t be measured in official stats on the subject because of the ban.

Interestingly many nations in Europe have much lower unplanned pregnancy rates, and hence lower abortion rates in the US. So we do know that pregnancy planning and prevention are successful at reducing abortion rates.

The real question is, at the margin is a positive reinforcement of reproductive health more effective than a negative reinforcement (jail time) in reducing abortion rates.

Ingrid claimed that the best road to minimizing abortions included having abortion be legal

I think Ingrid was making two points, which people have mixed.

This is how I interpret her: the most effective way to reduce the incidence of abortion is to increase availability of contraception, while making the choice of bearing an unplanned child less onerous (‘support women who are faced with an unwanted pregnancy so that they have effective choices between different options’). This is far more effective than legal restriction.

The best way, having done all that, to reduce the number of late term abortions is to make early-term abortions legal and accessible.

This improvement (reduce late abortions by speeding up early ones) may mean nothing to an absolutist. To me it is a worthwhile aim.

If I have misinterpreted your argument, Ingrid, I apologise.

Of course foetus!=baby so the syllogism doesn’t hold, but can people not accept that it’s something that might be sincerely held by others?

One good reason not to is that if the people who claim to believe that really did believe it, they would not be pushing for laws specifically about abortion at all, but would press for prosecution of both women and doctors for murder, tout court. (Complete with executions in jurisdications with the death penalty.) Since they almost universally shrink from doing so, one may reasonably infer that their actual position is a bit more complicated than it appears on its face.

Steve,

The fact that abortion opponents don’t press for the prosecution of women may grow out of their sense of what’s politically possible, rather than some inconsistency in their principles. At least I think that’s what’s going on.

Wow, this is almost as bad as an Israel thread.

The Nicaraguans aren’t holding everything the same while they outlaw abortion. They are lowering the general political status of women, and it is the relative powerlessness of women that lies at the root of many unwanted pregnancies

Okay, now that’s an argument that the abortion rate might increase under criminalization. I’m not sure how large I’d believe that effect to be though. For one, I’d imagine that a fair percentage of women in Nicaragua support the ban, which would make them less likely to consider it as a lowering of their status. This isn’t to say that the situation isn’t being (heavily) influenced by misogyny but people really do have non-misogynistic concerns about abortion so it seems like the effects would stem from much more mixed and convoluted sources than the opposite ones which would arise from criminalization (i.e. “you might go to jail or die”, pretty direct).

Since they almost universally shrink from doing so, one may reasonably infer that their actual position is a bit more complicated than it appears on its face.

Well, on both sides of this issue (like every other) people simplify and omit the things that are inconvenient for them. It’s doubtful that a large share of the people who say “Abortion is always wrong!” would really get upset about the loss of a blastocyst and the share of “Abortion is fine!” people who think abortion should be legal the day before birth is no doubt much, much smaller even though that’s an impingement on the reproductive freedom of women. I think this issue depends on balancing different needs, focusing on that gray area between conception and birth, and a fair amount of empiricism*. But people don’t really care much for such things, especially when they feel they’re in a fight for their survival (as both sides do) and especially especially when they feel that they’re losing (as folks on the pro-life side probably, and rightly, do). This is compounded by the fact that a lot of people probably don’t actually know what they’re talking about (just like how a good share of people who fume about their tax dollars being wasted on welfare and foreign aid would actually favor an increase in spending on such things if they actually realized how little of the budget goes to them).

* Personally, I think that the fact that something like 80% of conceptions end in spontaneous abortion has something to say about the “Life begins at conception” position.

Of particular interest is the part of the law that deals with ectopic pregnancy. In that case, the woman cannot be treated until signs of hemorrhaging appear.

In accord with current church teaching, the only legal remedy is surgery either to remove the fallopian tube or excise only that part of the tube where the fetus resides in a way that attempts to preserve function. I have no expertise in this area, so I don’t know if that’s possible in practice, especially given the requirement for hemorrhaging to become evident.

While all modes of treatment result in fetal death, alternatives that kill the fetus directly to preserve fallopian tube function, such as the use of an abortifacient, are not allowed.

A fuller discussion of the law and related ethical fine points is underway at Mirror of Justice — a right-leaning blog of Catholic legal scholars. Even there, opinion is divided on this particular issue.

23: You might think so, but when you raise the subject with such people, I’ve found that they always become very evasive. I remain convinced that deep down, apart from a few really insane types (who become abortion-clinic bombers and whatnot), they don’t fully believe their own abortion = murder hype. Which of course accords well with the common observation that it all seems to have at least as much to do with control of women’s uteri as it does with a tender regard for the rights of fetuses.

While all modes of treatment result in fetal death, alternatives that kill the fetus directly to preserve fallopian tube function, such as the use of an abortifacient, are not allowed.

They seem to have quite complex arguments for this position. Luckily, I don’t need to read them since they’ve already produced the reductio ad absurdum.

What is it with the queue-jumping comments around here? The comment that I addressed above as #23 has suddenly become #24. Weird.

Sounds like Catholicism is a really hideous, unenlightened, backward, medieval, and intolerant religion; oppressing and terrorising women and responsible for tens of millions of AIDS deaths all over the world.

It’s time we do something about it.

Let me get this straight: you really think that if tax evasion ceased to be a crime that the number of people evading taxes would not significantly increase?

Actually, I think this is the most ridiculous thing said on this thread so far. The post you are referencing says:

Making something illegal, by itself, does little or nothing to discourage it. Otherwise we’d have a whole lot less speeding, tax evasion and spitting on the sidewalk. Adding enforcement to the equation can provide incentives not to do a particular illegal thing, but enforcement of laws can also lead to perverse effects.

Obviously, you read the first sentence, got yourself worked up into a fine lather, and then didn’t read the rest of it. Clearly, since tax evasion is enforced, it can and does have an effect on behavior.

Obviously, you read the first sentence, got yourself worked up into a fine lather, and then didn’t read the rest of it. Clearly, since tax evasion is enforced, it can and does have an effect on behavior.

I suppose that it’s likely that Paul meant something like that so I retract my mockery a bit. I don’t think I’m entirely to blame here though. Spitting would be an example of that point but, as you point out, tax evasion and speeding aren’t. Usually when you illustrate a point with examples, it’s a good idea to use, you know, examples.

Ingrid is right–criminalization is, in fact, a highly ineffective means of prventing abortions (most Latin American countries have higher abortion rates than Canada, where abortion is not only legal but state-funded.) What happens in the real world (including the pre-Roe United States) is that affluent white women have access to safe grey market abortions (and, in a pinch, the ability to travel) even under abortion bans, and poor women will find means of illegal abortions. Admittedly, abortion laws are effective at getting women who lack connections maimed or killed, but as for protecting fetal life, not so much.

Scott,

Now the large drop in the number of births in the USA from about 3.7 million in 1970 to less than 3.2 million in 1974 may not have all been due to legalized abortion but certainly some of it was.

Since there were over 1 million legal abortions per year in the late 1970’s, and the TOTAL deaths from all causes for females age 15-45 was less than 50,000.

Even if half of all deaths to females in those ages were from illegal abortions then at most 25,000 lives per year were saved (2.5% of abortions), which means that
if even only 10% of the drop in births was due to net new abortions then twice as many new abortions were performed compared to the lives saved from eliminating back street abortions.

Its a nice anecdote but the scale of the deaths from backstreet abortions just doesn’t compare to the number of abortions.

I’m for legalized abortion for selfish evolutionary reasons but the numbers of your argument just don’t add up.

Martin – Calling someone on a factual inaccuracy: okay. Dismissing an entire position as “ridiculous” without argument (#2): not okay. Calling someone “dishonest” without giving reasons (#1): very bad.

And I usually skip over your mostly incomprehensible ramblings, so I can’t say they bother me that much but thanks for your concern.

And if you find me irritating, Martin: tough shit. It is a fact that there are a large number of “trolls and foolish commentors” commenting on this site, especially on threads like these. They do very often make it impossible to have any kind of enlightening discussion and I think that is a shame. If you find the kind of shouting match to which posts in the mould of #1 and #2 inevitably lead congenial then so be it, but don’t expect other people to share your tastes.

The “logic” uniting those positions is depressingly simple. The people who hold them just enjoy seeing people they don’t like: sexually active women; the non-affluent (who often are not White Christian Murricans)- screwed over. It reinforces their self-righteousness.

Yes, I agree with this as a description of rightwingers in general. But in America you are fortunate to have a large number of “libertarians” who loudly proclaim that their ideological commitment to “liberty” is consistent and extends to social liberties like, one would have thought, the right of the woman to decide on the morality of an abortion. Many of them comment on this site. Where are they now?

#51: Speaking only for myself, I’d say that (a) steve labonne is right about hypocrisy, (b) the OP seemed to think it was 100% obvious that having abortions be legal is a good way to minimize them, which is awfully cocoonish even if I happen to agree, and (c) some other posters are right to imply that a better argument would go: look, even if banning abortions would reduce the number of abortions, it would increase the number and magnitude of tragedies associated with unwanted pregnancies as well as perpetuating the subordination of women, those things are just as compelling as the deaths of fetuses, and so we should keep abortion legal.

Happy?

Engles, I’ll see your ad hominen attacks (both Dylan and sk provided arguments) and raise you two strawmen.

No, Radek, #1 and #2 do not provide any argument for contesting the premise that criminalising abortion is an ineffective means of reducing abortions. Did you actually read them, or not?

As been pointed out above if someone believes fetus=person then there’s nothing inconsistent about being a pro-life liberterian.

I did not say it was logically “inconsistent” for a libertarian to oppose legalised abortion. On the face of it, the commitment of libertarians to “social liberties” ought to predispose them towards defending abortion rights. However, I have never seen a single libertarian defending abortion rights on this site, whereas I have seen them defending so-called “economic liberties” over and over again, in the most strenuous terms. That causes me to question the sincerity of their commitment to liberty.

I don’t know what kind of circles you run in but it seems “a thoughtful discussion” you so desire involves little but everyone agreeing with each other and muttering “right wingers bad, mmmmmokay?” with out any consideration that there might be complexities, nuances and differences in basic assumptions. … I support legal abortion (as, you may have noticed, so does pretty much everyone in this discussion) but that don’t mean that I can’t understand that people may have good reasons for having different positions for some good reasons.

Jesus Christ, Radek, what a pile of horseshit. Where did I suggest that having a thoughtful discussion involves everyone agreeing with each other? Where do I imply that other people don’t have reasons for their views? Where do I demonstrate my woeful lack of “consideration [for] complexities, nuances and differences in basic assumptions”? Has it ever ocurred to you, Radek, that your own understanding of these controversies might be a little one-sided?

I am happy to argue with people with whom I disagree who argue in good faith, give reasons for their opinions and do not engage in an unnecessary amount of empty name-calling and invective. From your last comment, unfortunately, I’m not sure that you make the grade.

…I should change that “definitely increases” to “could increase”, since I don’t have the statistics on this; but the mechanism is plausible.

My statement that sex education is “completely unacknowledged” by liberals is patently false. I have no idea why I wrote that. There is substantial support for sex education within the liberal community and the democratic party.
I was trying to emphasize that a lack of sex education today is a worse problem than the occasional attempts to ban abortion that seem designed to appease the Christian right.

about minimising the amount of abortions as a goal:
i think for people who are in favour of the right to abortion this should not be a goal.
abortion is our good right as women.
its been agreed on during the international UN conference in Cairo about population and development,
the Womens conference in Beijing and its written in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

so it should not be a goal to have not so many abortions, but it should be a goal that every abortion that is done to any woman anywhere is done in a safe and responsible way.
of course we have to struggle more for free or as cheap as possible contraceptives worldwide too.

This thread, infuriating as it is, has taught me something at least. You see, as a happy hermeneuting-humanist, one can’t help having a slight residual inferiority complex regarding the slightly harder and more empirically-minded disciplines. But the literal- and narrow-mindedness shown by some on this thread (“Minimize!” “But she said ‘minimize’, therefore, Captain…”) have cheered me up no end. Identifying ‘means’ and ‘ends’ is no guarantee of sanity! It seems every field gets the scholasticism it deserves! Hurray! (Though I guess Weber knew that all along.)

Engels, yours was post #41. Plenty of articulation in the meantime. Did you just have some inner rage you needed to get out?

on some threads about “social liberties”, we see some of our regular “libertarian” commentators coming in on the side of liberty. To my knowledge, I have never seen this once.

I don’t know what threads and which ‘liberterian’ commentators (not including the occasional cross over from the Corner or whatever) you’re referring to but this seems just like a baseless assertion. Again, this blog is left of center, which is reflected in most of the comments with a sprinkling of some liberterians. And these two groups pretty much agree on social issues, with the possible exception of abortion which is much more complex (and let me remphasize this again since you’re completly ignoring it, prefering to attack your own fata morganas – everyone on this thread agreed abortion should be legal!). You want me to prove my social liberal cred? Fine. War on drugs bad. Gay marriage should be subsidies to make up for past discrimination. Immigration, more please. Homeland security and patriot act, stupid, wasteful and authoritarian. Swat teams and no-knock raids, trouble, trouble, trouble. Hell, I’ll throw in higher gas taxes and higher EITC for poor folks while we’re at it. On a good day you might convince me to extend unemployment insurance.
This is like the Cory Maye post where some commentators on here were trying to score cheap ideological points by saying “where are the liberterians on this? see how hypocritical they are!” while liberterians were actually doing most of the leg work on spreading the news.

And when you begin by questioning people’s motivations rather then engaging their arguments (again, post #41) then yeah, I think you’re just having an idelogical knee jerk reaction.

Steve Lebonne – “these people”? Where are they, I don’t see them. Yup much better to just call’em “these people” then actually say something substantial.

What Steve Labonne said.

This is like the “You’re the troll!” “No, you’re the troll!” game. Yawn.

By the way, in response to Steve Labonne’s (#35) comment about queue-jumping of comments: comments by people who post for the first time to Crooked Timber (not sure whether it’s only from a new e-mail address or also from another IP address), need to be approved for moderation (this is necessary to filter out spam). But when these comments are approved, they take the position that they had at the moment of submitting the comment. So that is why sometimes the numbering changes. I agree that can be annoying if you refer to another comment by it’s number. It’s therefore safer, but admittedly not so convenient, to refer to the name of the person writing the comment, rather than the comment’s present number.

Well, my first and last time visiting this forum. The most infuriating and toxic arguments around the issue of reproductive rights (or lack thereof) for women around the world can all be found here with no attention paid to the central factor in the debate. While you attack each other ad hominum and avoid the subject at hand, you ignore the very real and painful reality of millions of women confronted with an unwanted pregnancy. 70% of children in Boston are being raised by single parents. The best predictor for poverty in America is motherhood. The central issue in the abortion debate should focus on the rights of a pregnant women to be unpregnant vs. the rights of the foetus she is carrying. What follows is a debate between science and religion over when human life begins. The only salient point in this discussion is that no man has the right to apply his religious beliefs onto someone else’s pregnancy. It’s called seperation of church and state and is the reason most of us ended up here. My sisters in Nicaragua have my heartfelt sympathy. Rape, incest, and fallopian tube pregnancies are distractions from the real issue at hand–how much of a woman’s fate should be of her own making.
Have fun with your petty little flame wars. Life is bigger than that.

Aine, the ad hominem nature of this dispute originated, in believe, in comment #1, which accused the poster of being “dishonest”. I pointed this out at #44 and was rewarded with a string of personal attacks from Radek (as well as sharp criticism from Martin James and “asg”). I can not speak for anyone else but I would guess that the experience of others who sought to defend Ingrid’s “dishonest”, “ridiculous” and otherwise irrational post may have been similar. So I would humbly suggest that the “a plague on both your houses” tone of your reaction seems a little unfair.

Oh Radek, is your life really so empty?