----- Original Message ----- From: "martin" <mschiller at pobox.com>
> a msg onMon, 3 Feb 2003 21:21:57 -0800fromIan Murraycontained-
>
> >Seems to me the practice should include forcing the opposition to meet the
> >impossible demand of providing a non-circular explanation/justification
> >as to why abortion should be criminable at all, ...
>
> The complementary argument might be requested from the choice advocates.
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Unlike them, we do not want to imprison our adversaries for doing something -not having an abortion- even as we would call on the law to protect women and men threatened by their version of CD. In a sense, we're running a variation of the innocent until proven guilty principle. Since, there are few, if any, "knock-down" arguments in ethics, the very interminableness of philosophical debate on the topic does not bode well for advocates of criminalization.
> Analogies to hangnails and tumors aside...if you had an experimental
> environment with laboratory animals and the animals began eating their
> young you would want to know what it was in the environment that caused
> the behavior. You would know that disciplining the animals to try to halt
> the behavior would interfere with any environmental adjustments to the
> experiment to adjust the behavior. This is very much common sense and I
> see no reason why it is not applicable to the phenomenon in a human
> population.
>
> Martin
====================
Women want abortions due to the unintended consequences of consensual or coerced sex. That's a far cry from animals eating their young. The law is always already interfering with society; shifting the directions-dimensions of it's interference to afford greater scope for women's life choices will leave the overwhelming majority of citizens far better off than they are now.
Ian