Women Are Not Moral Actors

I'm over at Hill Buzz discussing (in the comments) what an enforcement of anti-abortion laws might look like and said this:

Could some one tell me how a government program against abortion will work? Like the drug war?

How will you combat RU-486? Menstrual extraction parties? Birth control pills as morning after (or later) pills?

Not only that. If you put it in the hands of government you are abdicating your personal moral responsibilities.

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If you look at it objectively (assuming that you agree that abortion is murder) it is murder one. Where the woman hires an accomplice to pull the trigger.

Suppose we put 2,000 females a year on death row for abortion? Will that create a counter movement?

And how will you handle miscarriages? As murder investigations?

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It is all a fantasy. Utopianism. Here is an anti-abortion group that does not want government “help”.

Rockford Pro Life

Well, I got some responses. This one is a doozy (and it is not the first time I have heard it.

The problem with having women tried for murder because they had an abortion is that many women are misled or lied to by abortionists – “it’s not really alive yet,” “it doesn’t have a heartbeat”, “it just looks like a big clump of cells.” While some would freely admit they knowingly ended the life of a human being, a lot of women can only make themselves go through with an abortion by reassuring themselves that the doctor said their baby isn’t a “real person.” In order to be convicted of murder, it has to be found that you wilfully and knowingly killed a human being. If you believe – because a medical professional told you, no less – that abortion didn’t end the life of a human being, the wilfully and knowingly aspect is gone.

So the impregnated woman doesn't believe that she is carrying a potential human life? Uh. That is hardy creditable. And medical professionals as the great deceivers? Man - the devil is every where you turn. No one is safe from demon possession. Kill the witches.

The deeper seated "reasoning" behind this rationalization is that women are not moral actors. That they are incapable of telling truth from fiction. Wasn't that one of the reasons given for not allowing women to vote?

The truth of the matter is that the most rabid abortion foes refuse to follow the logic of their own pronouncements because they reel at the obvious consequences. Which is to say they do not believe what they claim to believe. So they invent fictions like: "women are not moral actors and if they are they have never heard the 'abortion is murder' line."

So how about some truth: "abortion is misdemeanor manslaughter and the woman goes free". Not quite the same punch as "abortion is murder" is it? But generally that is the current truth of the abortion foes.

My problem with all this? To give over to government the responsibility for "preventing" abortion (they will probably find a way to increase the number of abortions - it is a government program after all - if enacted) makes our moral muscles go flabby. Instead of fixing the problem in civil society we hand it off to them and can then forget about it.

In engineering we like to find the root causes of problems and fix those. The root cause of the abortion problem is not "the doctor made me do it". In this case I think the root cause of abortion is envy. "I can have more stuff if I have fewer or no kids". Another cause is the lack of fathers. And a big cause of that is how the Drug War changes the Demographics in some communities. So we could reduce abortion some by ending the drug war. But you know - that would be rational. Besides we would be just trading abortion demons for drug demons. Well you know where that ends. The demon possessed see demons everywhere.

And we could reduce abortion by eliminating envy (we could pass a law). Good luck with that. As I said in the beginning. The people who mouth "abortion is murder" are for the most part Utopians. Run for your lives and liberty. Because most of them don't mean it.