A Question For Pro-lifers

Yes, this is the central problem with the embryo/fetus-as-person argument -- that we would all, even the vast majority of law-abiding pro-lifers -- behave much, much differently if we truly believed that embryos and fetuses were people.  It is a point that is given surprisingly little attention in public discussions about abortion.  Perhaps the reason is because it involves moral reasoning, which we tend to shy away from, and suggests that the deeply held viewpoint of many people is, in fact, morally unreasonable, dishonest, false, or, at least, way too simplistic.  Perhaps, on the other hand, it's because we don't want to encourage moderate pro-lifers to become extremists.  But, we're all reasonable here.

We can make the point more potently:  Suppose you are a German living in Nazi Germany.  If you engage in lawless behavior, even targeted violence, in opposition to the Holocaust, you would later be regarded as a hero, because the law is a perversion and the wholesale slaughter of innocents demands intervention.  Linker is right to ask whether "reasonable" pro-lifers lack the courage of their convictions and why such moderates are not regarded by most pro-lifers as Roe's willing executioners, if you will.

There are two ways out of the problem.  One, the moderates are pacifists generally.  But they're not.  They utilize pacifist rhetoric -- we don't kill anybody, because every soul is precious -- when it suits their intellectual puzzle-solving purpose.  I don't believe they would object to killing someone in immediate self-defense or defense of others, which the law finds justified, nor do I believe that they generally take the peacenik side on questions of war.

The second way out of the problem isn't really a way out.  Rather, it's exposure:  They don't actually believe what they say when the chips are down.  The embryo-as-person story makes sense to them intellectually, but they don't truly feel it.  So, what do they feel?  Perhaps, they feel something like what we all feel:  that a fetus isn't nothing, that it has moral status, and that that moral status increases as it more and more resembles an infant but falls short of moral status equal to that of human beings.  Debates about abortion, and abortion rights, would go much further if we could drop the charade of classing embryos and fetuses as people, and acknowledge more frankly what I suspect we all more-or-less think about the question.  The facts that few want to actually punish abortion as murder and that even fewer would sanction violence to stop a supposed daily mass slaughter tells me that my suspicions are probably close to the mark.

Stop calling these SOB's "pro-life"! They are "anti-choice" rightwing crazies who encourage violence and murder towards abortion providers and then make phony statements right after a monstrous act, such as the shooting of Dr. Tiller or the dynamiting of a clinic, decrying what they so vehemently encouraged and fomented. TNR & Mr. Linker has been way too soft on the anti-choice crazies and given them far too much credit for being honest, sincere, and worth listening to. They are a force for terrorism and must be battled against as such. Never give them a single inch or they'll try to take 10 miles!

Damon Linker asks an important and reasonable question: If abortion truly is what the pro-life movement says it is -- if it is the infliction of deadly violence against an innocent and defenseless human being -- then doesn't morality demand...

I don't think Nazi Germany analogies are that helpful-the US is a functioning democracy. Its possible to change policies without violence and through civil debate. The social contract stil works.

John Brown is perhaps a better example. He was right in the end. Maybe he was a good man and a good christian. But he seems to me to be a lousy American and citizen. He could have visited his victims the day before his raid and discussed politics with them civilly. He had the power to vote and, theoretically, could have achieved his objective via democratic means. Instead he murdered his fellow citizens.

More generally, I would say a lot of causes allegedly high stakes, but people don't kill other people over them. Doves anytime and anywhere can claim that if we oppose their policies people will die. Thousands of people, maybe hundreds of thousands. Aside from the internal contradiction of militant pacifist, if you thought the Iraq war would kill hundreds of thousands of people, why not take a pot shot at Bush or bomb your local army recruiting station? I could run through a laundry list of hot bottun topics whose supporters logically would have to concede that if they lost the argument people would die or a great moral evil would result. Climate change? Genocide in Darfur and the West's apathy? Animal rights, (fur is murder!). But few act out on it.

Well Darfur might not be a good example. If someone flew over and did something stupid in Darfur and tried to kill a warlord I don't know if he would be condemned. But that probably has to do with the unspoken assumption that killing foreigners who you disagree with politically is much more legitimate than killing your fellow citizens who you disagree with.

Well, mrdomino seems to have co-opted most of my arguments, putting them much more eloquently than I could have.  So I have little to add to that line of reasoning.  However, not enough has been made of Dreher's point, that it is also prudence that keeps violence in check among even the most radical members of a movement.  

Linker disparages Dreher's statement, saying Dreher  "admits... it is merely 'prudence' (and not principle)".  By this, I understand him to imply that Dreher's (and by extension, the pro-life movement's) rejection of violence is only a cold-hearted calculation of whether violence or non-violence would better advance their own ends.  While such a calculation is likely the basis for Western nations' refusal to interfere in the Darfur situation, Dreher states specifically:

"The consequences for introducing lawless violence into a society, even in a righteous cause, are unpredictable, and stand to bring about a worse evil than the evil the violence is designed to fight."

This is prudence, certainly, but not "mere" prudence - this is prudence that approaches principle.

As if playing semantic games is going to solve anything, when there are more trigger happy theocons on the right of this issue than there are on the left: Can anyone imagine Planned Parenthood with an assassination squad at its beck? I tend to agree with jhilder: a fetus is a human in development, and in the very early stages isn't even that, since embryos look surprisingly alike in the early stages, at least among mammals.

Acts of abortion, and or selective reduction, discomfits me, and I believe if both men and woman stopped to think about personal responsibility we'd have fewer of them, but I also believe, as my philosophy professor once put it, that women have the right to pull the plug, but not to the point of fanaticism.

It seems like we always resort to playing cowboys and indians in this country, always echoing the violence of our history.

But, mrdomino and dhauck, why does the status of Nazi Germany as undemocratic matter?  If the democratic United States were to commit a genuine holocaust tomorrow under sanction of positive law, well, first of all, they wouldn't be democratic anymore, and, second of all, violation of positive law would be easily justified and perhaps even demanded to stop it, and declining to take such measures out of deference to legal obligation would strike me as amounting to callous indifference to the slaughter of innocents.  Although the government is not killing infants directly, if you take the fetus=person view, the positive law clearly allows -- and requires allowing -- their daily and rampant mass murder -- a sort of private holocaust.  If you believe that that's what's going on, it's worse than slavery, so long as indifferently destroying human beings en masse is worse than owning them.  Statements that restraint is merely strategy either reveal moral repugnance, for normal people, or reveal what I suspect is more likely the case:  That anti-abortion rights activists (per frilz) view abortion as murder in roughly the way animal rights activists view fur as murder or beef as murder.  That is, they may *say* that that's what they think, and feel strongly that the acts they oppose are very wrong, but they overstate their view and do not end up subscribing to it in principle, thus revealing a weakness in the principle itself -- it doesn't cohere with what we otherwise believe.  Suggestions that restraint is merely strategic strike me as abstract intellectual problem-solving once backed into a corner rather than a genuine expression of one's feelings.  Another possibility is that they view it genuinely as the equivalent of murder but do not hold that conviction with the same certainty with which they believe that the premeditated killing of an adult man is murder, and so allow their doubt to check their fervor.  This too reveals weakness in the position.

I've always been of the mindset that the anti-choice types have never been outspoken and active (to the extent that they are 'active') for the sake of justice, but for the sake of psychic terrorism.  Did anyone hear about the activist who was going into Planned Parenthood and claiming that she was a 13yo who was sleeping with a much older man and secretly filming the counselor's advice?  The point was not to end the ending of pregnancies, but to deceptively pull a technical one over the opposition.  See for yourself: articles.latimes.com/.../na-abortion26

Tiller's murder also will not have the effect of ending the ending of pregagncies; it will only drive fear into the hearts of women.  

jhildner is exactly and precisely right. Except for extremists on both sides almost all of us think a fetus is something important but not so important that we would make a woman's heartfelt act a crime. As the fetus develops we feel it is more like a person and require a good reason to terminate it. And finally, at the end of its growth, we would kill it only to save another's life.

Surprise. That is almost exactly the Supreme Court's decision, made excessively exact and legalistic because that is who they are and what they do.

Check your own emotions: how do you feel about a miscarriage versus a baby who dies in childbirth versus an infant who dies in his cradle? Do you and the mother and the father not mourn in different ways?

Almost all of feel the same way; we are blinded by rhetoric and idiots. Let it be.

Let's see..when a pregnant woman goes to the Dr for a checkup, we ask "How is the baby"?....when the woman is in a car wreck we ask "Did she lose the baby"?  And when she miscarries we do indeed say "She lost the baby".  But someone who believes an unborn baby is a person deserving to be born is a right wing nut.

I would hope that the murder of Dr. Tiller puts the bill to ban all laws limiting a woman's right to choose an abortion back on Congress' front burner. President Obama has tried to duck this hot button issue, even talking about a diologue with anti-choice elements and finding "common ground". It should be obvious, however, that the anti-choice forces want nothing less than laws banning all abortions and that no amount of meeting them half way will molify them. Dr. Tiller's murder can only show us all that we can never give the anti-choice crazies a single inch. They foment deadly violence and then try to weasel out of the responsibility when it happens.

dylan wrote: "I've always been of the mindset that the anti-choice types have never been outspoken and active (to the extent that they are 'active') for the sake of justice, but for the sake of psychic terrorism." Gee, dylan, thanks a lot: I never really thought of myself as a "psychic terrorist" but, hey, I learn something new every day.

I believe that (at the very least) a fetus capable of surviving outside the womb deserves to be allowed to develop to term when doing so does not threaten the health of the mother. Years ago I dated the head nurse at a pediatric ICU, who routinely regaled me with stories of premies whose lives were saved by extraordinary diligence and skill by the hospital staff. It boggles my mind that we go to such great lengths to nurture some babies but will terminate the lives of others when such termination is unnecessary.

By some measures there are about a thousand so-called "late term" abortions each year in the U.S. (I say "so-called" because "late term" seems to me a misnomer; a fetus goes to "term," meaning to his or her birth; if anything "late term" would mean a pregnancy into its 10th month!). By some accounts many, if not most, of these thousand are viable and healthy and their birth would not seriously affect the health of the mother (certainly not as much as their abortion would affect their own health). The murdered doctor apparently focused much of his practice on providing such late-term abortions. Could those fetuses have survived outside the womb? I don't know. We probably never will.

As to the point at hand--the justification of violence in this case--certainly good and thoughtful men and women justify violence--just ad bellum. I have no quarrel with that. I hope that, were I walking along the street and saw an apparently deranged man about to throw a hand grenade into a daycare center, I would have the wits and courage to try to prevent him from doing so. I don't know, though. I am often a coward.

I would not have killed the "abortion doctor" for one thing because doing so would be an act of vengeance rather than of prophylaxis. The lunatic with the hand grenade is acting alone. I expect that one or more qualified physicians will take the murdered doctor's place.

frilzl wrote: "It should be obvious, however, that the anti-choice forces want nothing less than laws banning all abortions and that no amount of meeting them half way will molify them." Maybe this is true of those anti-abortion folks who make the most noise and get the most media. It's not true of me or the many people like me who approach the issue with discernment. A large poll (Gallup? Correct me if I'm wrong.) recently verified that, in fact, a large plurality (if not majority) of Americans are in the middle: some restrictions are needed; some procedures should be permitted.

I am not a monster because I oppose some forms of abortion. Both my daughter and my wife are staunchly pro-choice, and they are not monsters, either. I love them both unconditionally and they me, although we disagree strongly about this issue (among many).

William, the only true test of how the public feels about abortion rights is their opinions of Roe vs Wade, which they have consistantly supported since 1973, right though to today, by better than two to one. And I hope your loving daughters never have to live in a country where they could go to jail or be attacked by anti-choice terorists for excercising their choice to control their own reproductive rights.

WilliamYard falls into the same logical fallacy that all people who are anti-abortion but prefer to call themselves pro-life fall into. Somehow if you do not wish abortion to be outlawed with severe criminal penalities for those commiting the crime, you are somehow in favor of abortion, The concept that you can be opposed to abortion, but not believe that it your right to impose your belief on everyone else seems alien to such people.

Yard, I sincerely do not want to be dismissive of the view, such as yours, that says that there is a serious moral problem with abortion, especially late abortion.  I think we pro-abortion-rights types do our side a disservice when we are not honest to ourselves and others in acknowledging that such views are hardly crazy.  But, do you really think that abortions -- even late abortions, even post-viability abortions -- are equivalent, morally speaking, to throwing a grenade into a day care center?  I mean, really, truly?  If I really believed that -- and believed it with the same conviction that I believe that throwing that grenade would be an unspeakable act of murder -- then I would not be magnanimous to anywhere near the extent you are.  I would *hope* -- as you say -- that I had the courage to be an extremist.  I would not feel an ounce of sympathy for Tiller or his family.  I would certainly hate him passionately and welcome his death, just as I would the death of a sincere, committed National Socialist who had managed to hold the perverted view that the Final Solution was right.  I would not merely say, with a little irony and detachment, "Well, *I'm* a coward, so I don't know what I would do."  I would say, rather, "Bravo, murderer of Tiller!  If only I had your courage!"  But you don't say that.

I don't know.  Maybe I'm an extremist at heart.  Maybe I have a greater capacity to hate than is usual.  Somehow, though, I doubt it.  I can understand moral outrage when it comes to late abortions.  I think moral outrage about early abortions -- especially very early ones -- is absurd.  (I *do* dismiss the quasi-intellectual/spiritual nonsense that classes a few cells as a human being!)  But Yard, would you have seen Tiller executed legally?  Given a life sentence without parole for murder?  How about the women who availed themselves of his services?  Same punishment for them?  Let's get real.  When we do, LInker's question stands.  What are you prepared to do?  What do you feel *good* about doing?  What do you feel good about others' doing?  If you don't feel good about the killing of a mass murderer, however befogged by life-denying, downright evil rationalizations and a complicit law, well, shit, why the hell not?

I respectfully submit that any plausible answer to that question proves, as much as such things can be proved, that the abortion-as-murder proposition is, at the very least, an overstatement and not an honest, coherent, or genuine reflection of what *anyone* -- except those few such as Tiller's murderer and those in his cheering section -- actually believes.  If I'm wrong about my "proof" -- and I've certainly been wrong before -- I'm anxious to learn how.  If not, well, dare I say, there is an unexplored patch of common ground standing between you and me (or, maybe, your wife or daughter) on this most divisive of issues....

jh: I agree with the incremental arguments inherent in your first and last comments, but again, we regular TNR wonkies are having a party defining our terms of engagement with less than varying degrees of certainty. A fetus isn't *fully* human yet, and abortion isn't murder, but the killing of the fetus in development.

I doubt this matters to the reactionaries who have murdered physicians willing to still provide abortion over the years. I am not sure that Linker stirring the pot doesn't make the reactionary feel more justified.

To go back to the Nazi Germany analogy, which I also have issues with but it is convenient to my point: Would I be morally justified in killing the Nazi enablers who exterminated disabled German citizens? (And though Germany wasn't a democracy, as has been noted, public protest did indeed stop the genocide against the disabled, as most of these unfortunates did have German family members.) It is easy to say yes, in hindsight, and more anti-choice advocates probably feel that absolute conviction than pro-choice advocates feel for theirs.

A killer with a gun is one autonomous human being killing another. This is illegal. The fetus in the first three months of development when abortion on demand is legal is not autonomous.  The fetus - the baby (yes, in pregnancies that are planned or wanted we all call the fetus a baby after the test strip turns pink) - survives only in the womb.  At five months of development the bay can survive outside the womb, and the date of survival is being pushed gradually earlier.  This is when the idea of abortion becomes more horrible to many. However late term abortion is not on-demand.  Abortion is legal in the case of severe problems with the baby or danger to the life of the mother.  What can these conditions be?  Anencephaly for example.  Imagine you or your wife, daughter or partner receiving a diagnosis of anencephaly in month 5.  The baby has no cerebral cortex and will have no brain function.  Anencephalic babies born prematurely or at term die.  Would you want you partner or friend, in consultation with her Dr., to determine whether she could have an abortion, that is kill the baby, in month 5 or 6?  Would you insist that she carry the baby for 4 more months to face certain death?   Perhaps this is such a dreadful outcome that compassion and that maligned word 'empathy' may allow many to agree that in such a case the right to choose abortion should be preserved. Do you want to walk in those shoes?  

The female who is pregnant IS an autonomous person.  The fetus may become one.  There are many many factors that are borne by real autonomous human individuals between here and there.  

The debate boils down to those who believe choice should be preserved (while restricted in particular ways - but preserved) and those who believe killing any fetus at any time for any reason is murder and therefore there should be no choice.  I don't think that is a strawman construction. I think that is how the argument ultimately shakes out.  Take your pick.

jh (et al.) -

Without trying to be too snarky, if you believe your own arguments, why are you not on a plane to Darfur, loaded for bear and the Sudanese military?  Or at least calling loudly for the U.S. to bomb government buildings in Khartoum?  Targeted assassinations, perhaps?  Were you toting a gun in Rwanda or Bosnia back in the nineties?  Think of the innocent lives you could have saved by capping a couple of Hutus or Serbs.  Merely calling for U.N. "intervention" is hardly enough - not for someone who "would hope I had the courage to be an extremist."  Now, perhaps you did all these things, and I just don't know about it; if so, then my apologies.  But if not, why not?  Is it that you don't believe that ethnic cleansing is worse than a single murder?  Or are African lives and European Muslim lives less important than American lives, that is, they "have moral status... but it falls short of moral status equal to that of human beings"?

Ok, so maybe that last line is a little over the top, but jeez, man, there's only so many times you can call me a liar and/or a purblind fool before I start to get a little riled.  

To answer your question, I would not have had a problem seeing Tiller put away for life w/o parole.  As to the women who availed themselves of his services, I would no more wish them in jail than I would wish to lock up junkies with the drug dealer who sold to them (and perhaps hooked them on the junk in the first place).  And speaking of drug dealers - on a purely emotive level, with all practical considerations cast aside, the way I feel about Tiller's murder is comparable to how I would feel hearing about a dealer killed in a turf war:  I regret that one person died at the hands of another. I sincerely feel terrible for his family, just as I would for the drug dealer's mother, whom I see weeping on the 6 o'clock news, where she invariably will say, "My son was a good boy!"  And of course I wish to see the killer brought to justice.  But I don't mourn the loss of someone who made a living by destroying the lives of others.

Along those lines, there is another reason that pro-life activists don't follow John Brown's path: proximity.  It's easy to keep yourself at one remove from an argument when you are in fact well-removed from the situation, easy to remain logical when you don't see the suffering firsthand.  I suspect that's the main reason you (and I) can advocate for "buffer zones" and "peace talks" rather than firebombing janjaweed tribes.  Let us spend a month in a refugee camp, making friends and listening to their horror stories, then offer us the choice again - would we still have such a measured reaction?

Likewise, it's easy for me to call Tiller a murderer, while not calling for his summary execution, because I've never had to watch him work.  But if you put me in his operating room during an IDX procedure (the  recently outlawed partial-birth abortion) just when he was about to jam a tube into the skull of the child whose living body was lying on the table (the "partial-birth" in an IDX is feet-first, up to the neck) so he could suck suck its brains out... if, at that time, you handed me a loaded pistol and said "Make your choice", I could not honestly say what I would do.  At the very least, I think I would throw the gun at him and leap across the table.

Let me throw the question at you - what would you do?  This is where the rubber meets the road for pro-choice as well as pro-life advocates.  Forget the gun for a moment - would you try to physically stop him, or even just try to talk him out of it?  Or would you stand aside and let him stick that spike in that baby's brain?  Just how important to you is "a woman's right to choose"?  That's what I mean by proximity affecting how far we are willing to go for our beliefs.  

Ok, I've settled down now.  There's more I want to say, but this is already the most rambling post I've done in some time.  I'd better quit it before I find myself discussing cheese-making in western Iowa.

frilz1 -

"Stop calling these SOB's "pro-life"! They are "anti-choice" rightwing crazies who encourage violence and murder ... They are a force for terrorism and must be battled against as such."

Wow.  

You might want to dab at your mouth - you've still got a little froth at the corners.  Here, hold on, I've got a hankie somewhere...

Tell you what, I'll stop calling myself "pro-life" if you stop calling yourself "pro-choice".  After all, it's not like you mean you're just always in favor of personal choice (for example, my choice to drive my car down the local bike path, or sell Jim Beam to your ten-year-old kid).   You only mean you're pro-abortion-choice.  Likewise for me and "pro-life" - I freely admit it.  So let's call a spade a spade, eh?  I'll call myself "anti-abortion" and you call yourself "pro-abortion".  Fair enough?

dhauck there's a lot going on this thread.

But I want to comment on your second last post to "jh (et al)" and on one point in it.

You take obvious exception to Tiller's  later trimester abortions to the point where you are unsure whether, during one, before the babay's brains are sucked out, if you could, you would take Tiller out.

My comment is in the form of a question. Assuming it was a what the law calls a "legal"  later trimester abortion--with the mother's or the baby's life seriously compromised-- does your outrage still persist in that instance?

basman -

Actually, my point was not how much Tiller's late term abortions offend me, but rather to offer visceral reaction (or rather, the lack thereof) as a reason why pro-life advocates could call Tiller a mass murderer without simultaneously calling for his execution by any means necessary.  I'll save us all a rehashing of that point here.

As to your question, or rather questions, for there were two:

- If the test I mentioned had come prior to 2003, that is, when IDX was still legal, I should think my reaction would likely not have been affected.  It's really no more a logical decision to leap across that table (or pull that trigger) than it is to leap in front of a car to push a child out of its path.

- OTOH, if I knew for a fact that the mother and child were in an "either-or" (or possibly "neither") situation; or per AB, above, if I knew that the child was already brain-dead, then that would absolutely affect my reaction.  I would be unlikely in either case to even try to stop it.  I accept the ideas of both self-defense and passive euthanasia (pulling the plug on an already-dead person).  There may be other cases were I would be unlikely to interfere - the guiding factor is that they would be cases where I'd be equally willing to accept a "post-birth" person's death.

Is that what you were asking?

sorta'/kinda'

I don't know what IDX is or whether or when it became legal, and while I"m interested/appalled by the homicidal hysterics on the anti abortion side of the issue when those reactions come to that, and while I may have missed your precise point above, I was siimply interested in your position thoughts about later term abortions when the mother or baby's health was in serious danger. My question assumed a gruesome but legal procedure for that.

My own position, which I'd think is uncontroversial,  is that absent the existence of such an exception, later term abortions should be illegal, and are immoral. For the mother who gets one, the issue is tragic, for the abortionist who profits from it, from aborting viable babies with no serious physical danger reason, that is a action of outrageous immorality. Surely, on this specific issue, there can be no other reasonable view.

I would add one qualification that I can think of:  the case or rape or incest. My position as a matter of law would hold for me , though very unesaily, but on balance, in those instances for the later term pregancy, but he moral lines are entirely blurry. There may be other situations that I can't now think of at this moment  that raise that same blurriness.

basman -

IDX stands for Intact Dilation & eXtraction.  Sometimes it is called IDE, more often it is called Partial Birth abortion.  I try to use the technical term rather than the emotionally charged term because I don't want to get into a fight over semantics.

As to whether your position is uncontroversial, you'd be surprised.  I might agree with it, depending on what you meant by "such an exception" (I would expect such exceptions to be restricted to extreme circumstances), but there are many zealots I have talked to or heard from on both the pro- and anti-abortion sides.  These would like to see late term abortions available in all cases or no cases, respectively, regardless of circumstances.  I myself cannot understand this, despite having had both arguments presented to me several times, but it's not as rare as you might think.

Regarding rape/incest, well, that would require me getting into the difference between "what I want" and "what I'm prepared to accept".   That, I think, is too subtle a discussion for a thread that already has exhibited a pretty severe antipathy for my base position, so let's leave it go for now.

...That, I think, is too subtle a discussion for a thread that already has exhibited a pretty severe antipathy for my base position, so let's leave it go for now...

I think this thread can handle the subtley, though I did not mean to inaugurate a discussion. I was just rounding out my own bit of thinking.

Catch you round the bend.

dhauck -- my lengthy post in response has once again failed to post.  This time, I did save it, but it didn't post after trying again.  Oh well.  Anywho, I don't mean to convey any hostility.  I'm just trying to get at a disconnect I percive between the abortion-as-murder view on the one hand and seemingly inconsistent views on the other, such as your apparent willingness to let a woman totally off the hook who does the equivalent, under the abortion-as-murder view, of hiring a professional killer to shoot her infant child in the face for a small fee.  I assure you that I can handle subtlety.  "Abortion is murder" strikes me as unsubtle and as not reflecting the ambivalence about the issue that, I'm suggesting, is there even for people vigorously opposed to abortion rights.

...I assure you that I can handle subtlety. ...

Well, for the unconvinced, could you post a performance bond?

Uhh, just to be clear:  :-).

But that's tanamount to accusing you of unsubtlety.

jh - yeah, that's happened to me, too.  Sometimes it just won't take your post no matter what you do.  I've even tried splitting up ones that failed to show up into separate posts, but to no avail.

As to the disparity, I don't know what else I can tell you.  I agree that not all abortion is murder, in the same way that you cannot call every situation that involves killing any other person a murder - you have to look at the circumstances.  However, I don't think it's beyond the pale to put that label on Tiller, who specialized in post-viability abortions (Did he really do 60,000 abortions in his career, as I've read in several places?  Even in a career spanning 35 years, that's like 6 or 7 every day of the work week.  I don't know if that's outrageous or not, but it sure sounds ambitious.)

Anyhow, I've got to knock off.  I try to limit myself on the abortion stuff on TNR, because it's the one place where I really seriously disagree with most of the magazine's audience, so I can really get sucked into it (being called an "anti-choice rightwing terrorist" doesn't help either, not that you yourself ever did that) and I don't want to become a Wally One-Note.  So I'll catch y'all on the flip side.  Later.

basman, I got it.  I think performance bonds are a good idea for dating too.

Hmmm, a dating performance bond.

I think I can hook you up.