I wouldn't call them moral values, because the values expressed are so context-dependent.
I and almost all of my friends and family hold that "humans are created in the image of God, and thus their inalienable rights begin at conception. Therefore abortion at any stage is committing murder against the baby."
Not exactly context-dependent, unless I'm missing something. Perhaps you could elaborate?
The missing context is that your argument seek to protect the baby's life BEFORE birth , but after ... generally speaking the (R)/pro-life stance is pretty weak on social safety net, should the child have adequate (free!) health care, nutrition, etc.
Does that life "deserve" these things when they are only an infant? How about when they are 5-10 ... or 10-20 , or ANY age?
Passing laws to force women to give birth, but then systematically strip and reduce the social safety nets available seems highly context-dependent, and weakens greatly the belief that you "value life"
I don't know if I can generalize across Republicans, but as I understand it:
- humans naturally have both rights and responsibilities. Being human by itself grants inalienable rights, and as someone matures or is given positions of membership or authority they also incur further rights and responsibilities.
- Inalienable rights are to be protected by government. If it's not something that's naturally there and needs protecting, it's not an inalienable right. (Founding fathers summarized inalienable rights as "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" - those can't be given by a government but they must be protected by all governments).
- By making a woman pregnant, a man has incurred the responsibility to protect and provide for that woman and her baby. If he fails to do so, she has every right to seek redress -- and doing so ought to be easy for her, since she and her baby have a right to his protection and provision.
This is the ideal. I know it's not the reality, but protecting inalienable rights and holding people to their responsibilities when redress is sought ought to be the first priorities of government. While they are important, social safety nets don't even appear in my belief system. If they exist, they ought to be a last resort, only to be relied upon if the father, the mother, their family, their community (church or another organization), or local non-profits are not able to provide. But the government would do even better to be holding the responsible people accountable instead of giving them a way out.
Nothing in my belief system assigns responsibility to the government for taking care of people. That should be the people's job via healthy non-government institutions (especially marriage, family, and community organizations). If people aren't getting taken care of, that's not the government's job to fix. It's the people's. It's literally MY job, and yours too. If the government is ever involved, it ought to be holding people responsible for taking care of one another, especially within families -- instead of giving them an easy way out of their duty.
So when I vote against your Democratic party policy, I'm not voting against the heart behind it. I'm saying "great ideas, but that is not the government's job. Go form an NGO to do that (that doesn't also promote abortion) and I will donate!" In the mean time, stop taxing me so you can give people an easy way out of their responsibilities! I take care of my responsibilities (myself, my wife, my kids). No one else has to do that - it's my job and I do it. God forbid the government should do that for me. I also give to my parents, my wife's parents, my church, including those in my church who are poor, several non-profits that take care of the poor and spread the good news of God's love, and poor people I run into -- I give away more than 20% of my net income. Please don't hear me saying "look how good I am" (far from it, there are many people who make less and give far more) but to hopefully to share how much I believe taking care of people is my job and yours, not the government's.
People should take care of their own responsibilities to the extent they are able. When they don't, the government should hold them accountable. When they can't, it should make it easy for other institutions to do their job and help the poor. People love one another better through giving voluntarily, not paying taxes so the government can "love" people.
Finally, institutions are the engines through which human visions are carried out and sustained across generations. Different institutions have different responsibilities. The government should be one among many institutions. When the government is the only institution (or has control over the other institutions) we are in a totalitarian state -- and that is a horrible place to be for human well-being.
Abortion isn't the only topic that people make a "moral" stance about, and in some ways it's the least interesting. It hinges on an arbitrary "It's alive!" moment that's not really debatable, so much as a gut feeling.
On second thought, it does illustrate the difficulty most people have in thinking about continua rather than binary variables. Aliveness is, to me, clearly not binary. The fetus is minimally alive at conception and becomes alive at birth, but during the pregnancy is neither fully alive nor fully not alive. Similarly, an adult with brain damage, in a coma, isn't quite dead, but is also not fully alive.
I think that if we discussed specific situations, nearly everyone would wind up agreeing with the continua. It's only in the abstract that they insist on their binary labels. That's been my experience, anyway. Everyone's ethics are parsimonious, until it's their friends, family, or themselves that are in consideration.
First, how ever cruel and wrong doing so may be, letting nature take its course isn't murder - it's something else altogether (sometimes morally defensible, sometimes not).
Second, your hypothetical situation is a well-covered case in situational ethics -- "whose life to save when not all can be saved". I know in this case many Catholic hospitals would save the baby and let the woman die -- so they can baptize the baby and save its soul (so they believe... correct me if I'm wrong). I disagree.
In my ethical framework, the woman's life is the one worth saving. Between the two of them, it will be more devastating/hurtful overall for her to die than the baby... not to mention devastation/hurt to those who love her. Therefore it is more loving to save her. And if the baby dies, I believe he/she goes to heaven (that's not justification for infanticide or abortion, just that based on scripture, I don't agree with the Catholic belief that the baby has to be delivered and baptized for him/her to receive salvation).
> It hinges on an arbitrary "It's alive!" moment that's not really debatable, so much as a gut feeling.
... except that science has pretty much established when a new organism begins for every other species. It's well known. People just don't want to accept the moral ramifications for human babies.
Consider someone on a ventilator who is otherwise a vegetable -- yes they're alive, and stabbing them would be murder. However, it's not necessarily murder to let nature take its course -- to let them die by unplugging the machine that's keeping them artificially alive.
I think it's your ethics (or perhaps your gut feeling, as you put it) that doesn't allow for a binary "alive or dead" state. But biology is pretty clear on when an organism is alive or not.
Yes there are edge cases when tissue lines are kept alive for years, or organ transplants are done... but no one disagrees about how alive or dead someone is in those cases. The point is whether a human fetus is an alive person - that's where the rubber hits the road ethically. And biologically there's certainly no question in that case. He/she is a human and he/she is alive -- that's the moral starting point. Anyone who says otherwise is equivocating to avoid the moral ramifications.
We disagree on the definition of murder. I suppose the law might call it negligent homicide. That sounds like a type of murder.
> biology is pretty clear on when an organism is alive or not.
It is not clear at all. Are viruses alive, for example? A human body is comprised of a variety of things that might be considered individual organisms if they lived outside the body. Are they alive, separately from the human they're a part of? How about a fetus? If it's not viable outside the womb, then how can it be alive as distinct from the mother? Does technology change that decision? If so, does aliveness change depending on access to technology?
I hope no one is seriously advocating for that position, so obviously the issue of "consistency" is more complicated.
An adult is able to weigh for themselves the risks and benefits of receiving a vaccine. A child is not able to weigh those risks and benefits, and it reasonable in general to have that decision made by their parents.
I suppose someone could say, to be consistent, that we should allow parents to decide for the child in his or her mother's womb how to weigh the risks and benefits of being aborted versus being born, but at least for a healthy child we would never accept that being born is a worse outcome than being dead.
So I think that protecting adults from unwanted vaccinations and protecting pre-birth children from being aborted can be a consistent stance, even though, I accept, the problem is much more complicated than even that.
Conversely, if someone becomes pregnant they can put the child up for adoption, and the state should make the father pay for that child's needs for the rest of their life. If the father knew that the mother was under the influence of drugs, he should also spend a large portion of his life in prison learning to care about other people.
As for the pregnancy idea, sure, in a perfect place with great social support, little stigmatizing of sex & adoption, and a legal system that can impose on the father (from flight or responsibility). I don’t see that anywhere, so how would we get there?
I never was taught that cold sores are a virus transmitted via saliva contact, including sharing a glass, ditto for mono. I was just told kissing or engaging in sexual behavior led to terminal illness or pregnancy. Also if one becomes pregnant there is strong pressure from parents on both sides to marry and raise the child despite a total lack of maturity or social or romantic connection. This is the experience of many Americans.
How do you define proper support for adoption? How can you measure that on a scale of that vs a scale from outlawing abortion to proper abortion? Also what is proper abortion?
A strong factor of oppression is a restriction on mobility. For a 15 year old girl, how does she ask for a ride to the next state? When I was 15 I felt shady riding my bike ten miles. We are almost certainly going to talk past each other. Good day to you.