Utah Aborts Logic and Reason, But They Weren’t Using Them Anyway

By on March 2, 2010 in News 12

Mutterhals writes on the Black Sun Gazette:

For most Americans, science is akin to magic. We don’t know how much of this shit occurs, but as long as everything keeps humming along smoothly we feel some sense of peace. The problem with this state of being is that it allows for all sorts of rival interpretations on things that are basically cut and dry.

I’ve had many arguments with religious types regarding abortion, and most cannot wrap their heads around the fact that the gestating fetus is indeed a part of the woman whose belly it’s in, which seems fairly straightforward. I don’t mean to go all Amazon woman on you, but I have to believe the fervently religious who protest in front of abortion clinics and wish death on doctors who perform the procedure have to be somewhat perturbed that a woman, a lesser being according to their holy bible, is in charge of this impending life.

A bill is being proposed in Utah that would criminalize pregnant women who do intentional harm to the fetus. The bill came about after a teenager, probably in response to the difficulty of obtaining a legal abortion in Utah, had someone throttle her stomach in order to stop the pregnancy. Instead of getting this girl some counseling and moving her the hell out of Utah, they attempted to charge her with murder, which fortunately didn’t fly. The next desperate teen may not be so lucky. The exact language of the bill is as follows:

A person commits criminal homicide if [he] the person intentionally, knowingly, recklessly, with criminal negligence, or acting with a mental state otherwise specified in the statute defining the offense, causes the death of another human being, including an unborn child at any stage of its development (see here)

Read More: Black Sun Gazette

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  • Gregory

    Now see, this is the psychobabble that pro-choice people use to call a pregnancy something other than what it is, while also questioning the intelligence of anyone who disagrees with them.

    It's not “impending life” it IS life. To call the gestating fetus simply a part of the woman, as if it was a wart growing on the nose or a mole on the elbow or something that needed to be excised is not only a blatant avoidance of the facts, it's just plain silly.

    Just because one calls Abortion what it is…the premeditated murder of an unborn child…doesn't make one stupid or uninformed or a religious nutjob. It makes one in touch with the truth.

    Instead of the spin that both sides put on Abortion…pro-choice avoiding the issue by calling it “reproductive rights” or trying to use semantics to say, “oh, it's not really a child yet” and pro-Life saying that this is agin the Will o' God, we need to come to an acceptance of this…that many people across the world feel that it is okay to kill your child inside the womb and to examine why humans think this is okay. This is a larger issue we need to deal with, a higher altitude discussion of the truth, not two sides saying they have a monopoly on it because they're both shooting wide of the target.

    Infanticide outside the womb has been practiced historically, for example. It would help to examine why those cultures did that. Some sacrificed them to gods, some got rid of them if they were not up to a certain specification. Even as the child became older, there sometimes were these rites of passage the child had to go thru, many involving the possibility of death, in order to be called an adult. Today, infanticide is practiced mostly due to the financial burden the child would cause, also because of the desires of the parent(s), basically saying “no, this is not what I want to do right now, and yes, I know I engaged in sexual intercourse and that the main point of that is to make babies, I just don't want to deal with the responsibility right now, I'm a liberated adult, dad gummit.”

    And again…just because the developing child doesn't have fingers and toes and stuff is irrelevant, it is life and killing it at any stage, when you know the ultimate expectation is to make your child, is murder with malice aforethought.

    If we can accept that, then we can get to a place where we can explain why so many people support this, because obviously a great many people do. That has to be a reasonable, logical explanation, but despite the insistence of pro-choicers, they are not currently using logic either. Science has simply made abortions more available and has helped distance the woman from what is really being done. A pro-Life stand also has to be more than because of religious beliefs. There is a truth that we all can embrace if we are willing to be objective and discuss something without ideologies getting in the way of that. It's like having a tomato and one person insists it is pronounced “tahmato” and one insists it's “tohmato.” It's still the same thing.

    So please…less psychobabble about calling it a “gestating fetus” or “reproductive rights” or “women have a right to do with their body what they want” etc. Hey, pro-choice women…strangle someone with your hands and then plead not-guilty because “you cant tell me what to do with my own body.”

    And on the other side, please pro-lifers, until you can discuss your point of view in some other case besides abortion makes Jesus cry, that discussion we need will not happen as well.

    fiat lux.

    • Broken Finger

      I love how you denounce the use of definitive signifiers as “semantics,” “psychobabble,” and “just plain silly,” and then proceed to do the exact same thing yourself. Hilarious!

      All kidding aside, I cannot wrap my head around your assertion that a biological process (ha, ha! More “semantics”) occurring in and owned by a pregnant female is comparable to a living, breathing human, to wit:

      (Hey, pro-choice women…strangle someone with your hands and then plead not-guilty because “you cant tell me what to do with my own body.”)

      and furthermore, that the rights of the biological process are more important than, and absolutely trump without question, the rights of the human being in whose body the aforementioned process is taking place.

      I do appreciate your attempt to call out both sides, though. That was thoughtful.

      caveat emptor.

      • Pantheisticsolipsist

        strangling someone with your own hands wouldn’t be the domain of your own body, as it includes the strangled. the only real debate is whether the fetus is considered its own person before birth. the problem is that everyone has their own definition of a person. for me, the question is answered by, is the fetus conscious?

    • Super Dave Osbourne

      Since when would “gestating fetus” be considered psychobabble?

      Psychobabble: Language characterized by the often inaccurate use of jargon from psychiatry and psychotherapy.

      Was it Freud who said “Tell me about your gestating fetus” ?

      Please look up the definition of words before you try and use them to put people in their place. It makes you sound like a moron when you don't.

    • tunaghost

      “Science has simply made abortions more available and has helped distance the woman from what is really being done.”

      This statement leads me to believe you haven't witnessed the procedure being performed. I very much doubt that it is possible to distance a woman, to any great degree, from someone poking around inside your genitals with an array of disturbing-looking and rather cold tools. Even if the patient is under anathesia, the effects will linger.

      That said, I also believe the issue is far more complex than either side would like to admit–the problem is that, on paper, it's hard to give the subject the subtlety it deserves when drafting a bill or reforandum or what-have-you.

      To call the gestating fetus (not psychobabble, just a cut-and-dry medical term) a person is not accurate, which is why we don't grant the fetus the same rights one grants a human child. Of course, to call it simply a part of the woman's body is also misleading. The woman doesn't GROW it, the way one would one's hair or fingernails or pancreas, the fetus is using the materials supplied by the mother (which inlcude raw materials like protiens and vitamins and minerals, as well as the basic cellular organelles that come along with the egg) in accordance with a set of “blueprints”, for lack of a better word, supplied by the father to grow itself. Because the fetus and the mother are locked in a complex biological system together does not necessarily grant one rights over the other.

      Nevertheless, I believe it would be wrong to suggest that a gestating fetus has attained personhood when it is still less developed than a whole host of multi-cellular organisms that we give no rights to whatsoever. I personally believe, in case anyone asked, that humanity is conferred when one takes one's first breath and cries at the sheer horror of facing reality for the first time. There is one or two scriptures that can support this, but I can't locate them at the moment. I'll keep an eye out.

  • 5by5

    Frankly, whether it's life or not, is legally immaterial.

    The Constitution specifically protects “persons born”.

    Not globs of goo in a woman's uterus.

    It's why in no other area of law, do we regard the fetus as a legal entity. We do not issue death certificates for even naturally miscarried fetuses. We do not apply citizenship at the moment of conception (otherwise, more than a few of you little goobers would be Mexican by virtue of your parent's honeymoon in Acapulco). We do not give tax breaks for conception, only for BIRTH.

    Abortion is LEGAL. Thank God. Deal with it.

    And because it is, far FEWER people actually die in a system like ours, than would in a system where abortion is illegal, because abortion will STILL TAKE PLACE.

    The only difference is, when it's made illegal, WOMEN DIE TOO.

    Do you really care about life? Then decide. Will you risk one life, or two?

    Because if you're willing to risk two lives, then this really ISN'T about you being “pro-life”. This is about you subjugating women.

  • GoodDoktorBad

    Making abortion a criminal offense is like poking an open wound with a stick to make it better. That is reason enough for being “Pro -choice” for me. I don't think that abortion is a trivial thing, especially for the woman involved because she has to endure the physical, mental and emotional strain. Obviously it is serious business.
    As has been said, if you want to stop abortions, remove the need for abortions, push free birth control and condoms, teach realistic sex education, stop treating sex like people should stop having it, they won't stop having it OK?

  • Belcat

    If mother nature can abort pregnancies because it thinks that they won’t make it (or worse, will live a much reduced life), why shouldn’t we?! 1/3 of pregnancies are miscarriages anyway.

    Anyway, you have to take a much more practical viewpoint. If you forbid abortions, then any man who wants a kid only needs to coerce, drug, rape, or even just lie for a week or two and he’ll have one. All the procreation powers are given to the man. On the other hand, if you allow abortions, then the procreation power are more balanced; if the women is really distraught at having a baby, they can abort it. (So then the powers of procreation are more in the favor of the women, but hey, they are carrying thing, so why wouldn’t they be?).
    Anyone who thinks women are going to do this on a whim – it rarely happens. More often you hear of women carrying a baby to term from some jerk who doesn’t deserve to be a father.

    Finally, if women really want an abortion – they have been known to do whatever they think might work, often killing themselves in the process (just ask emergency room workers). So all you anti-abortion people now have TWO deaths on your conscience, so think about that too.

  • Belcat

    If mother nature can abort pregnancies because it thinks that they won't make it (or worse, will live a much reduced life), why shouldn't we?! 1/3 of pregnancies are miscarriages anyway.

    Anyway, you have to take a much more practical viewpoint. If you forbid abortions, then any man who wants a kid only needs to coerce, drug, rape, or even just lie for a week or two and he'll have one. All the procreation powers are given to the man. On the other hand, if you allow abortions, then the procreation power are more balanced; if the women is really distraught at having a baby, they can abort it. (So then the powers of procreation are more in the favor of the women, but hey, they are carrying thing, so why wouldn't they be?).
    Anyone who thinks women are going to do this on a whim – it rarely happens. More often you hear of women carrying a baby to term from some jerk who doesn't deserve to be a father.

    Finally, if women really want an abortion – they have been known to do whatever they think might work, often killing themselves in the process (just ask emergency room workers). So all you anti-abortion people now have TWO deaths on your conscience, so think about that too.

  • Pantheisticsolipsist

    strangling someone with your own hands wouldn’t be the domain of your own body, as it includes the strangled. the only real debate is whether the fetus is considered its own person before birth. the problem is that everyone has their own definition of a person. for me, the question is answered by, is the fetus conscious?

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_4K3KM67XITZTXUE45K42KS4OEE brian

    At any stage of its development?!?! What if I step on some sperm…..will I be guilty of breaking this new law a billion times over? Will i be charged for every sperm? *gasp*….what about masturbation!?!?! Hey’d I’d save the little guys if I could…..Maybe I can gather em up in a jar and keep them in my freezer…..

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_4K3KM67XITZTXUE45K42KS4OEE brian

    At any stage of its development?!?! What if I step on some sperm…..will I be guilty of breaking this new law a billion times over? Will i be charged for every sperm? *gasp*….what about masturbation!?!?! Hey’d I’d save the little guys if I could…..Maybe I can gather em up in a jar and keep them in my freezer…..