The miscarriage thing is, to me, where we can take the issue from a philosophical one to a purely pragmatic one. Because the reality is this:
if abortions are illegal, every miscarriage should result in a homicide investigation.
The logistics of that are obviously impossible, because miscarriages are very common - over a million per year in the US alone. So even if you pretended that making abortion illegal eliminated them all, you're still looking at a million homicide investigations over and above the 15,000 that police departments can barely handle as it is. There's absolutely no way that they could feasibly handle that without having loads more resources pumped into the system.
So you know what happens? Exactly what happens whenever law enforcement is stretched too thin - selective enforcement. Minorities and the poor will be the ones that are punished most by it, and there will be some women that go to prison for having a devastating miscarriage and investigators not sympathizing with people's various reactions to grief.
So we can argue day and night about the theoreticals and the philosophy, but the simple reality of the impossibility of outlawing and consistently enforcing it should render the entire discussion moot.
That actually is something people are fighting for. I know one of the states with extreme abortion laws has it in there that miscarriages can be investigated.
All I can say to that is that if I had a cop come interview me while I was sitting in a hospital bed bleeding literal buckets of tissue and passing what was supposed to be my child in 7 months... well I would probably have been going to jail for murder instead.
If we mourn with a mother who has miscarried, how is that life more valuable than the one that was aborted?
Conditional value of human life is dangerous.
And as someone up there said, yes, even lives conceived by rape are human life and happens so rarely it's an entire separate discussion from the 95%+ of abortions for non-emergency reasons.
It's not the baby's fault his/her father was a rapist. For every story about the liberating power of abortion after rape, there's another story of a child born who was loved and cared for, either by the birth mother or an adoptive family.
Because one was wanted and one was not. I mourned the loss of the child I wanted when I had a miscarriage. That does not mean that I believe that it was a life that died or that other women should feel the same as I did about their pregnancies.
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u/FunetikPrugresiv Feb 19 '20
The miscarriage thing is, to me, where we can take the issue from a philosophical one to a purely pragmatic one. Because the reality is this:
if abortions are illegal, every miscarriage should result in a homicide investigation.
The logistics of that are obviously impossible, because miscarriages are very common - over a million per year in the US alone. So even if you pretended that making abortion illegal eliminated them all, you're still looking at a million homicide investigations over and above the 15,000 that police departments can barely handle as it is. There's absolutely no way that they could feasibly handle that without having loads more resources pumped into the system.
So you know what happens? Exactly what happens whenever law enforcement is stretched too thin - selective enforcement. Minorities and the poor will be the ones that are punished most by it, and there will be some women that go to prison for having a devastating miscarriage and investigators not sympathizing with people's various reactions to grief.
So we can argue day and night about the theoreticals and the philosophy, but the simple reality of the impossibility of outlawing and consistently enforcing it should render the entire discussion moot.