6 comments

1. 

   Comment by Man of the West on February 20, 2009 at 6:24 AM

   Perhaps even worse are those who do not have good intentions at all, but merely pretend to have them for the sake of getting elected and implementing their agenda.

   But then, that describes most politicians, some more so than others.

2. 

   Comment by RSUProf on February 21, 2009 at 2:47 PM

   As an Episcopalian, Lewis is a favorite of mine, although I confess that I found his fiction work in the main excessively pedantic. The point of the quotation, of course, is that paternalism is to be feared. I suspect that Tyson has a particular variety of paternalism in mind.

   Lewis appears to assume that robber baron’s cruelty and cupidy might be circumscribed once their appetite is exhausted, whereas the moral scold is inexhaustible in their will to “do good.” I think he’s right in that, although I would suggest that his account of the moral psychology of the robber baron might be somewhat erroneous: a robber baron can cloth his cruelty and cupidity in the morality of social darwinism, and say that one must be “cruel to be kind” to the workers that they abuse, and convert their infliction of cruelty to a necessary and even “moral” virtue. Such cruelty then becomes morally desirable, and consequently inexhaustible.

   The problem with paternalism as a principle of constraint is that it can easily become a recipe for political and moral emasculation. Tyson is surely right to condemn abortion if he truly believes that abortion is the murder of an innocent unborn. But he is surely subject to cries that he is behaving in a paternalistic fashion to insist that the state share his view, and use the power of the state to impose that moral view on people who reject that view.

   That is the challenge of politics. What for one person is desirable and even necessary is a paternalistic imposition for someone else.

3. 

   Comment by Tyson Wynn on February 22, 2009 at 7:44 PM

   You assume that it is an imposition to guarantee life to unborn persons. They have a right to life whether than can articulate the desire for it.

   It’s not that I want my view imposed on those who disagree with me (my positions on many other issues that do not have to do with the ending of a life should make this obvious); it’s just that I view embryos as persons whose rights to exist outweigh almost all rights of a mother who would chose to end that life. And the funny thing is that when we, at our Baptist pregnancy centers, show pregnant women that there is a live being in them via an ultrasound, between 80 and 90% choose life. And this will blow your mind: when the fathers see the ultrasound, 99% chose life for the child.

   So, yes, I believe that in this case the power of the state is rightly used to prevent a death. Funny how you seemingly oppose the state flexing its power only in this case. You don’t seem to mind the state sharing your view that it has first dibs on anything I produce, but God forbid it share a view that a person is a person and that nothing magical happens to convert a non-person embryo into a full-fledged person as they pass through the birth canal.

   It has absolutely nothing to do with forcing people to agree with me and everything to do with guaranteeing life to every person. You should understand by now that I don’t have a need to be agreed with; you are free to be as wrong as you want and put it on display all you want. But if you went around murdering people, or say a student was arrested for plotting a massacre at a state university, that does indeed cross into the realm of the state having a genuine interest and rightly being involved.

4. 

   Comment by RSUProf on February 24, 2009 at 8:56 PM

   Strong words, as I expected. Like you, I have what I take to be a powerful rationale for my beliefs. Both my parents were in the medical field, and my father worked in the emergency room of the military hospital, and dealt with the consequences of back alley abortions.

   Tyson, I would love to live in world where abortions were nonexistent, but I am a realist. My household currently includes a 9-month old, and I love that child so much it hurts. That love does nothing to shake my belief that women have a right to control their reproductive destiny, and that if a pregnant woman decides that she is not ready to be a mother that she has the right to stop the process, as 1/4 of all processes are stopped by miscarriage.

   Tyson, I threw out the abortion issue as a throwaway dig, and I probably shouldn’t have. I have been distracted.

   I am enormously ambivalent about the issue of abortion, and I share your hope that we can live in a world without abortions. I also want to live in a world where every child is wanted, and where no child is raised in an orphanige, or denied adequate nutrition, or denied a decent education, or… all the things that are essential to a decent community raising children.

   Tyson’s point is that we should resist imposition when we can persuade. I agree.

5. 

   Comment by Tyson Wynn on February 24, 2009 at 10:50 PM

   What amazes me is that folks think they can class up back-alley abortions (that everyone always seems to have encountered in one way or another) by moving them into a sterile environment. It’s almost 100% fatal for a person, regardless of the locale. Face it, when we made abortions safer for the mothers, we made them more likely for the children. No way around it.

   Here’s some realism: children have a right to exist whether they are wanted or not. There are other ways for women to avoid the responsibilities of motherhood without resorting to ending a life, regardless of how unwanted it is. How dare we insist that we know a child would rather not live than struggle with life. When was the last time that you, due to a struggle in your life, seriously considered ending your life. Even if you considered it, you didn’t dare do it. It is not rational to lay that on unborn persons when we’d never consider it ourselves. It is precisely the low view we as a society have taken of life that empowers persons to abuse and neglect the children who do survive pregnancy.

   Yes, women have a right to control their reproductive destinies–and there are many other viable methods than abortion. All our rights are limited when they intersect with others’ rights, especially when they are more compelling. Roe is bad law, justice Ginsburg even says so. May God have mercy on us for tolerating it.

   It’s one thing to wish abortions didn’t exist; it’s another thing altogether to create an environment where they are discouraged, even by force of law. I’ll leave the percentage of unborn who die in pregnancy in the hands of God, where it belongs.

6. 

   Comment by RSUProf on February 25, 2009 at 6:47 PM

   Ginsburg criticized Roe as imposing a judicial solution on an issue that was “unripe” for a judicial remedy, and I agree with her criticism. It was then-Gov. Reagan who signed an abortion liberalization law in California before he saw the electoral advantages of a pro-life position. I wish the Roe hadn’t shut down the political debate: perhaps we might have found a policy that both Tyson and I could live with, but as I said, I am a realist.

   Let me push you on this. Did you support the Bush administration’s cutting off of funding for international family planning programs that provide information on abortions, despite the fact that the policy likely led to more unwanted pregnancies and more abortions? I actually think you are right: we should be ruthlessly consistent. If we want to live in a world where fewer unborn children are “murdered,” then we should support pollicies that reduce the need for abortions. Otherwise we are guilty of Emerson’s “foolish consistency of mediocre minds.”

   I suspect, Tyson, that your blog readers think one of us is acting “paternalistic,” and I am confident that — given the venue — they think its me. Mea culpa maxima.

   Here is my view of abortion, as informed by my church. The fetus is at insemination a potential life, and that life has value. Until viability, however, that potential life is a part of the mother nursing it, and in the balance that you concede exists, I believe that a women has a right — even at the admittedly late date of three months pregnancy — to decide whether to nurse that spark into autonomous life. I am much more reluctant to say that late-term abortions are acceptable, and were I a Supreme Court justice I would consider allowing states to impose significant constraints on mid- and late-term abortions where there are no medical considerations (e.g. hydrocephalus or “waterhead” babies).

   My position is a moral one, informed by my religious, moral, and ethical beliefs. Incidentally, how do you respond to the claim that you care passionately about the fate the unborn right up to the point of birth, and then not at all? Do you agree that the poor infant should share the fate of their unlucky or imprudent parent(s)? How moral is that? Do you truly believe that charities and churches can eliminate the crushing implications of poverty, as I believe my sister believes (having read our manuscript, you are probably more aware of my views than your readers)?

   Like you, I am a capitalist. Unlike you, I view poverty as a moral problem, and the damage imposed by poverty on the children of the poor as a moral failing of society. Don’t you?

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