Quote:
Originally Posted by opendoor
No it isn't. It illustrates that the existing rules have effectively eliminated what many people who want to more heavily regulate abortion are purportedly against.
|
Right. Which is a separate argument and one that is logically inconsistent with the position that it shouldn't matter to you when an abortion is performed, because whether it's late term or early term, it's simply a medical decision between the woman and her doctor with no morally relevant third person involved. That's what Altaguy's position is. Which is why I said the number of late term abortions that actually take place in practice is a separate argument that doesn't align with his primary position.
Ultimately, what is being argued is that even if you accept that late term abortion is a bad thing, it's not a widespread problem, and therefore not worth taking up time and political bandwidth arguing about. That's a reasonable place to stand I guess... but when the other side is saying "well I see late term abortion as the murder of a baby, so if your response is that the current system has relatively few baby murders, I'm not going to be satisfied with that given how bad I think murdering babies is" I don't know who you think is likely to be convinced that that's a satisfactory response. It sort of assumes the person you're talking to already agrees with you.
I obviously agree that wedge issues - and abortion is the ultimate example - take up a massively outsized portion of everyone's public and political attention considering the problems faced by society and how little overall political will / energy is available to solving these problems, so getting bogged down in it is effectively creating opportunity costs that are completely unacceptable... but I'm not one of the people who thinks this is baby murder, so my priorities are set accordingly.