Word: fetus
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...bombings, the violent protests outside facilities which perform abortions and the harassment of patients all point to the absence of civilized debate on abortion. The rhetoric of life activists has proceeded, threateningly, from appeals to protect the life of the fetus to sell righteous accusations which brand all those who do not accept their appeal "murderers." In a television interview last March, New York Bishop John J. O'Connor said, "I always compare the killing of 4000 babies a day in the United States, unborn babies, to the Holocaust." Responding to this charge at a news conference held this summer...
...work force and the marked decrease of family size in urban industrialized societies) to those conditions which more obviously relate to abortion in the United States today (such as the inadequacy of sex education programs and of aid to single mothers). To focus the abortion debate upon woman and fetus is to ignore the social complexity of the issue and to deny the social realities of which abortion is only one effect...
...first degree murder, and if so who would be prosecuted. The act that most old abortion statutes, by the author's own charge, criminalized the doctor, seems to answer that question. The mother, in-most cases, is so traumatized and exploited by the abortionist, and often by the fetus's father, that she is under enough mental duress to exculpate her from a large degree of the guilt, even under conventional insanity law. That is why the law must stop the abortion from happening in the first place. As for the abortionist, there is an easy answer to that question...
Next, Mr. Gooen brings up the old rape exception. It strikes me as funny because often I hear the charge that pro-lifers do not really care about the fetus, they just want to punish the woman. Actually, that type of twisted logic is exactly what is behind the rape exception. It says that the law will make an exception for this woman because she was not responsible for getting pregnant, implying that we will punish this other woman who had intercourse consensually because she is guilty. Pro-lifers, on the other hand, are not so concerned with laying guilt...
Finally, I must disagree with Mr. Gooen's political philosophy, which tells him that translating moral questions into concrete legal doctrines is too difficult even to attempt. The law is not here just to keep us from killing people (although in the fetus's case it does not even do that). It is here to enshrine as well the principles that make us a good society. We all know there is disagreement on what is "good" in many areas, but to suggest that this translation should not be attempted is to restrict our Constitution to being an instrument...