#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.
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.
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. . . .
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.
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