The atheist’s case against abortion: respect for human rights

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This topic has been debated ad nauseum and surprisingly there is no consensus.

yes there is a consensus its wrong

[Chris]

This topic has been debated ad nauseum and surprisingly there is no consensus.

Then the court should never have invented a right to abortion and imposed it on an undecided people.

[ripmeister]

let the girl speak.

Certainly

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Then the court should never have invented a right to abortion and imposed it on an undecided people.

One of the earliest and most egregious cases of judicial activism.

[Tahuyaman]

Then the court should never have invented a right to abortion and imposed it on an undecided people.

Correct.

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Rights. Women's Right? There is no such thing in the Bill of Rights.

Our rights as United States Citizens? Now we are on to something.

Of all the rights I have, the biggest one is that I have the right to not have someone come up to me and kill me. That would seem to be pretty obvious. It is the fundamental Right to Life, upon which all other rights depend.

The Abortion discussion has been hijacked by the Left and the media and we are told it is about Women's Rights. As I said, the Bill of Rights contains so such sub-section of rights.

What Abortion is really about is Human Rights and the Right to Life.


The atheist’s case against abortion: respect for human rights
https://www.americamagazine.org/poli...t-human-rights

Here's another one:

A Left-Wing Atheist’s Case Against Abortion
https://www.crisismagazine.com/2019/...ainst-abortion

What about the feminist claim that abortion is an issue of a woman’s right to control her own body?

Look, once you allow that the occupant of the womb is even potentially a life, it cuts athwart any glib invocation of “the woman’s right to choose.” If the unborn is a candidate member of the next generation, it means that it is society’s responsibility. I used to argue that if this is denied, you might as well permit abortion in the third trimester. I wasn’t as surprised as perhaps I ought to have been when some feminists—only some, and partly to annoy—said yes to that. They at least were prepared to accept their own logic, and say that the unborn is nobody’s business but theirs. That is a very reactionary and selfish position, and it stems from this original evasion about the fetus being “merely” an appendage.

But it’s only an evasion if we have some firm grounds for suspecting that the fetus is a human being.

True. But I think that by now we know where babies come from. And dialectics will tell you that you can’t be meaningfully inhuman unless you are actually or potentially human as well. Pointless to describe a rat or a snake, say, as behaving in an inhuman fashion. I put the question like this. You see a woman kicked in the stomach. Your instinct is properly one of revulsion. You learn that the woman is pregnant. Who will reply that this discovery does not multiply their revulsion? And who will say that this is only because it makes it worse for the woman? I don’t think this is just an instinctive or an emotional reaction (not that we should always distrust our instincts and emotions either). We are stuck with a basic reverence for life.

But aren’t all these notions of the sanctity of human life and so on alien to your otherwise Marxist view of the world?

Hitchens: On the contrary. As a materialist I hold that we don’t have bodies, we are bodies. And as an atheist I believe that we do not have the consolation of the afterlife. We have only one life to live, so it had better be good. All the nonsense we hear about mediate and immediate animation, the point where a soul enters the unborn and so on, is at best beside the point. It has in common with the sectarian feminist view a complete contempt for science and the theory of evolution—which establishes beyond reasonable doubt that life is a continuum that begins at conception because it can’t begin anywhere else.

Would you favor reversing Roe v. Wade and returning abortion to the states, so that there would be local prohibitions on abortion, perhaps with the exceptions you recommend?

I would prefer to see abortion as a federal issue. Nothing is more horrible than inconsistency on the life question. Just look at capital punishment. The tremendous variance from state to state totally undermines the idea of stable justice or fair retribution. This moral objection applies whether or not capital punishment is a deterrent, which I don’t think it is.

More: https://www.crisismagazine.com/2019/...ainst-abortion

[Chris]

Here's another one:

A Left-Wing Atheist’s Case Against Abortion
https://www.crisismagazine.com/2019/...ainst-abortion

What about the feminist claim that abortion is an issue of a woman’s right to control her own body?

Look, once you allow that the occupant of the womb is even potentially a life, it cuts athwart any glib invocation of “the woman’s right to choose.” If the unborn is a candidate member of the next generation, it means that it is society’s responsibility. I used to argue that if this is denied, you might as well permit abortion in the third trimester. I wasn’t as surprised as perhaps I ought to have been when some feminists—only some, and partly to annoy—said yes to that. They at least were prepared to accept their own logic, and say that the unborn is nobody’s business but theirs. That is a very reactionary and selfish position, and it stems from this original evasion about the fetus being “merely” an appendage.

But it’s only an evasion if we have some firm grounds for suspecting that the fetus is a human being.

True. But I think that by now we know where babies come from. And dialectics will tell you that you can’t be meaningfully inhuman unless you are actually or potentially human as well. Pointless to describe a rat or a snake, say, as behaving in an inhuman fashion. I put the question like this. You see a woman kicked in the stomach. Your instinct is properly one of revulsion. You learn that the woman is pregnant. Who will reply that this discovery does not multiply their revulsion? And who will say that this is only because it makes it worse for the woman? I don’t think this is just an instinctive or an emotional reaction (not that we should always distrust our instincts and emotions either). We are stuck with a basic reverence for life.

But aren’t all these notions of the sanctity of human life and so on alien to your otherwise Marxist view of the world?

Hitchens: On the contrary. As a materialist I hold that we don’t have bodies, we are bodies. And as an atheist I believe that we do not have the consolation of the afterlife. We have only one life to live, so it had better be good. All the nonsense we hear about mediate and immediate animation, the point where a soul enters the unborn and so on, is at best beside the point. It has in common with the sectarian feminist view a complete contempt for science and the theory of evolution—which establishes beyond reasonable doubt that life is a continuum that begins at conception because it can’t begin anywhere else.

Would you favor reversing Roe v. Wade and returning abortion to the states, so that there would be local prohibitions on abortion, perhaps with the exceptions you recommend?

I would prefer to see abortion as a federal issue. Nothing is more horrible than inconsistency on the life question. Just look at capital punishment. The tremendous variance from state to state totally undermines the idea of stable justice or fair retribution. This moral objection applies whether or not capital punishment is a deterrent, which I don’t think it is.

More: https://www.crisismagazine.com/2019/...ainst-abortion

Surprising especially coming from a New Atheist. I agree with Hitches, "But sorry, lady, this is an extremely grave social issue. It’s everybody’s business." But disagree it should be a federal matter.

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Surprising especially coming from a New Atheist. I agree with Hitches, "But sorry, lady, this is an extremely grave social issue. It’s everybody’s business." But disagree it should be a federal matter.

Aren't all of our rights all a federal matter? Bill of Rights and all that?

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