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Peace & Life Connections Index

#627 - Peace & Life: Break Stereotypes/Embryos & Women/Gorbachev - September 2, 2022

What Abortion Opponents Favor


The chart below was derived from the Nationscape Data Set. It shows some of the policies that have majority support specifically among U.S. citizens who want to ban abortion.


It doesn’t show a consistent ideology in American political terms of "left" and "right." To complete the picture, we'd want to see the percentage of those at the extreme of complete abortion availability favoring the same issues.

Encouraging points for consistent-lifers:


77% favor paid maternity leave (whether they favor parental leave that includes fathers may not have been asked)


74% favor a federal jobs guarantee and 67% favor raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, both poverty-countering measures


88% favor background checks, 61% favor a federal gun registry, and 54% favor limiting ammunition magazine size, methods of countering gun violence


75% favor the Dream Act, benefitting people who were brought to the United States as children



70% favor a big investment in technology for the environment, 66% favor capping carbon emissions, and 52% favor the Green New Deal.


Chart of Issue Positions of People Who Want to Ban Abortion, showing 88% favor background checks, 87% favor 10 Commandments in schools, 79% favor eliminating the estate tax, 77% favor paid maternity leave, 75% favor imposing tariffs on China, 74% favor a federal jobs guarantee, 74% favor the Dream Act, 70% favor big investment in tech for the environment, gy% favor raising the minimum wage to $15/hour, 67% favor debt free college, 67% favor school vouchers, 66% favor building a wall on the Southern border, 66% favor a cap on carbon emissions, 65% favor Right to Work, 64% favor raising taxes on the wealthy, 62% favor deporting all illegal immigrants, 61% favor a federal gun registry, 54% favor limiting magazine size, 54% favor allowing trans in military, 53% favor legalizing marijuana, and 52% favor the Green New Deal

 

Our Latest Blog Post

The most common tack on abortion in the mainstream media among those who favor it is to avoid any idea that there’s a prenatal child involved. This is a common tactic allowing for violence, especially against victims of war. Yet there have also surfaced some arguments that embryos and fetuses just aren’t that important compared to their mothers. The term “forced birth” has also become more prevalent as a method of decrying new abortion bans.


Images of a fetus and a grown woman

Rachel MacNair considers these in Is an Embryo More Important than a Woman? Of course, people arguing that they aren’t are missing the point. No one is proposing that embryonic and fetal humans are more important – and actually, when it comes to decision-making, they have to be less important because they don’t have the needed mental capacity. The proposal is only that they, along with everyone else, have a right to not be killed.


The post also covers those rare cases when pregnancy can be a life-threatening condition, so that death or injury to the woman does hang in the balance.

 

Quotation of the Week

Mikhail Gorbachev

Time Magazine, April 15, 2020


Gorbachev died this week, August 30, at the age of 91.


I recall how in the mid-1980s, we addressed the nuclear threat. The breakthrough came when we understood that it is our common enemy, a threat to all of us. The leaders of the Soviet Union and the U.S. declared that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. Then came Reykjavik and the first treaties eliminating nuclear weapons. But even though by now 85% of those arsenals have been destroyed, the threat is still there.


Yet other global challenges remain and have even become more urgent: poverty and inequality, the degradation of the environment, the depletion of the earth and the oceans, the migration crisis. And now, a grim reminder of another threat: diseases and epidemics that in a global, interconnected world can spread with unprecedented speed. . . .


Images of Mikhail Gorbachev and of a woman kicking a bomb

Is it not clear by now that wars and the arms race cannot solve today’s global problems? War is a sign of defeat, a failure of politics.


The overriding goal must be human security: providing food, water and a clean environment and caring for people’s health. To achieve it, we need to develop strategies, make preparations, plan and create reserves. But all efforts will fail if governments continue to waste money by fueling the arms race.

 

Responses/News Tips/Questions to share are all welcome.

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