welcome to high school debate class, where we think about issues with more nuance than most politicians.
How come people who are against abortion are in favor of the death penalty? Kind of seems like a contradicition/
Submitted 1 year ago by Don_Dickle@lemmy.world to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
Comments
Toneswirly@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Blackmist@feddit.uk 1 year ago
Makes more sense when you realise it isn’t about life, but about punishing women for having sex.
davidagain@lemmy.world 1 year ago
They want men to choose who lives or dies. They absolutely do not want women to be in charge of anything. That’s why no exceptions in the case of rape and incest. A man made a decision, they don’t want a woman to have the power to reverse it.
Ixoid@lemm.ee 1 year ago
It’s not about ethics, it never was. It’s about CONTROL.
rozodru@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Because it’s not about saving lives, it never has been. It’s about control.
Letsdothis@lemmy.world 1 year ago
How come *some people who are against abortion are *also in favor of the death penalty? (Ftfy) Kind of seems like a contradicition/
What contradiction do you speak of? Save a life, take a life. Seems logical doesn’t it?
Moobythegoldensock@lemm.ee 1 year ago
It ultimately is religious belief.
Religious people believe the soul enters the body at conception, granting personhood, so abortion is murder. They also believe that people put to death will go before God, where they will be judged as evil and sent to Hell for eternal punishment.
Everything else is just window dressing.
ammonium@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I think that can be explained, but tell me how someone can be in favor of the death penalty but be against assisted suicide.
spizzat2@lemm.ee 1 year ago
but be against assisted suicide
No free hand outs! You gotta work for your death!
/s
Bytemeister@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I’m pro-choice, but mostly anti-death penalty, isn’t that a contradiction?
I don’t really think so. A person’s bodily autonomy and the state’s power to execute citizens should not overlap.
Seasoned_Greetings@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I think it’s not necessarily a contradiction to hold your pro-choice and anti-death penalty stance, but it’s still a contradiction to hold the pro-life and pro-death penalty stance if your reasoning behind the pro-life stance is that all life is sacred.
I agree that a person’s body autonomy and the state’s power to execute citizens should not overlap, but I still think that giving the “all life is sacred” line to justify pro-life and then being pro death penalty amounts to hypocrisy.
UncleGrandPa@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The common thread is harm and punishment. They wish harm to those they would punish for the transgressions they make up in their heads
Pacattack57@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Because the inmates deserve it. The babies don’t.
angrystego@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I think they just see it as very simple: killing innocent babies - no, killing evil criminals - yes. It sounds perfectly alright if you don’t think aboit it too much.
LucidNightmare@lemm.ee 1 year ago
They only care until you’re born, then you can go and die in a ditch somewhere.
gerryflap@feddit.nl 1 year ago
I obviously don’t agree with them, but my assumption is that it has to do with maturity/innocence. An unborn child hasn’t done anything wrong. They’re full of opportunity and have a whole life ahead of them. A criminal sentenced for death has I some way done something very wrong. They’ve had their chance and failed.
Draconic_NEO@lemmy.world 1 year ago
They don’t actually care about life, they just don’t want women to have control over their bodies.
scarabic@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Liberals in favor of reproductive rights also tend to be against the death penalty. Is that a contradiction? Conservatives love twisting this into “they want to kill babies, not criminals.”
Do you think they’re right about that? Or is it more nuanced of an issue? If it’s more nuanced of an issue, then it’s more nuanced in both directions.
Liberals prioritize the woman’s ability to decide what happens with her body. They don’t like abortions, but they think they must be allowed if that’s what the woman chooses. They also recognize that it’s a medical procedure that’s absolutely necessary sometimes and other times might prevent an unwanted child from being born into bad circumstances. Meanwhile, liberals tend to be against the death penalty because our justice system is very flawed and innocent people have been put to death in the past. Perhaps a woman is allowed to decide what happens to a congregation of cells inside her body, but people shouldn’t decide the life or death of other people when imprisonment is always there as an option.
Conservatives think in terms of essentials and things are very black and white. It’s either a baby or it isn’t. They think life comes from god so it’s his affair and not our place to countermand a new life that he’s just brought into being. Meanwhile if a grown person with a mind chooses to commit crimes, that’s on them. God makes some pretty hard judgments in the Bible so they think great we can too and that will make us like god. Conservatives also tend to believe that some people are essentially good, and others are essentially bad. And in that framework, once a person has shown themselves to be a criminal, you know they are bad so what’s the point of letting them live. Meanwhile you have no idea if a fetus in the womb will be good or bad yet.
Please don’t downvote me for understanding both positions :)
EatATaco@lemm.ee 1 year ago
It only sounds like a contradiction if you take “pro-life” literally. In fact, I find this hard to understand at all if you simply just listen to pro-lifers.
Let me be clear, I’m about as firm a supporter of a woman’s right to choose as they come. I’m also adamantly against the death penalty. Do you find this position to be contradictory?
However, the general position of “pro lifers” does not contradict this at all, pretty obviously. They think that a fetus is a child that hasn’t been born yet, and because it hasn’t been born, it’s completely innocent. So you have no right to take it’s life. However, if some person in life has done something in life that removes that innocence, they believe sometimes that rises to such a heinous level that they must be permanently and irrevocably removed from society.
There are other glaring contradictions in their position, like not wanting to provide support to that innocent baby once it has come into the world, but this is clearly not one of them.
Etterra@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I’m pro choice but also anti-death penalty, but only because if someone is horrible enough to deserve it then they don’t deserve death, because death is the easy way out of suffering. They deserve to live long, miserable lives in a 3-meter cell.
frengo@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I’m trying to be the devil’s advocate here: one could say that one is an innocent “life” while the other is not.
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
Forced birthers don’t actually care about “life”. They care about violently controlling women.
mhague@lemmy.world 1 year ago
If you smoke weed you’re more likely to wear converse. It’s aesthetics. When someone says they’re anti abortion I usually see it as aesthetics. They want others to see them as being anti abortion. That’s what they get out of it.
It isn’t a literal belief. Democrats reduce abortions, much better than cons. Being anti abortion should mean voting for Democrats… IF you were still taking things literally. It’s not misinformation or lack of education, it’s misaligned priorities.
They’re just trying to be a tribe and signal allegiance. To have literal beliefs that you live by regardless of “your side” is a completely different game to what they’re playing.
ragepaw@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Because it’s never been about anything other than control. The right to choose anything is abhorrent to them. The only rights they want you to have are the right to be dictated to and the right to be like them.
barsquid@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It is, but they will persist because their motivation has nothing to do with rational thinking.
whoisearth@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
I’m pro abortion and against the death penalty! Someone ask me! I promise I’m not a troll. I am honestly pro abortion not just pro choice.
clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
I mean, I think that’s a reasonably common position on the left. Not particularly unusual.
whoisearth@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Pro-choice yes. Haven’t heard many actually pro-abortion.
Moobythegoldensock@lemm.ee 1 year ago
What do you mean by that? You’re an anti-natalist?
whoisearth@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Nope. I actually think life is sacred. The reason I’m pro-abortion is because I think anything that can be done to further impede children being born when we have hundreds of thousands of children in America alone who are orphans. That is a travesty.
My challenge to anyone who is anti-abortion would be are they adopting? Because their shit position is perpetuating a stream of children being born without someone to care for them either physically or emotionally.
In a perfect world, abortion would not exist outside of medical necessity. Unfortunately we do not live in a perfect world and as such many women are having children to be born into a cold and loveless world.
It’s sad. I could not imagine how cruel someone would have to be to be anti-abortion and yet so willing to effectively let a child’s life be aborted once they’re born.
Flax_vert@feddit.uk 1 year ago
I have the same question for the opposite as well. Or for being for abortion and also vegan.
pyre@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I’m a non vegan dude but this is gonna be my easiest argument… here goes:
consent.
barsquid@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Well, one difference is that the prisoner is not housed inside an unwilling woman’s womb. That’s not where steaks and pork chops come from either. Hope that helps.
blackris@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
A (human) mother that carries a growing fetus is a living being a pig, dog or a cow as well. They feel physically and emotionally and can be hurt.
A fetus is, up to a certain point, just a slab of meat.
As a vegan I don’t care about slabs of meat, I care about living beings.
Flax_vert@feddit.uk 1 year ago
Foetus can also feel pain and hurt, though
C126@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
My understanding is that they consider it ok to kill someone who committed a heinous crime but not ok to kill someone who is completely innocent.
atx_aquarian@lemmy.world 1 year ago
This is exactly how I used to see things when I grew up in a conservative echo chamber.
And now that I recognize a person’s right to choose and tend to think capital punishment should probably* not be legal, I’ll add that it’s not that my underlying beliefs changed, just how I now understand things. Some people do deserve capital punishment. And innocent people should be protected. But personhood doesn’t start at conception, a person conceiving has a right to decide what happens to their body, and the state can never be trusted to administer capital punishment.
*I say “probably” because I also think it might be necessary to allow it in extreme cases. My reasoning is that if people don’t believe the justice system will adequately punish, they have incentive and no ultimate detergent for taking justice into their own hands.
fine_sandy_bottom@lemmy.federate.cc 1 year ago
It doesn’t work as a deterrent though. In states that have the death penalty people still do bad things.
BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
But should we even punish?
I don’t mean to troll, so let me explain. Why do we punish? I think it’s two fold, we punish to deter crimes and we punish to exact revenge. But the fear of punishment doesn’t deter crime nij.ojp.gov/…/five-things-about-deterrence and that leaves revenge as the only both intended and actual outcome of punishment.
Is the current costs of running a complicated criminal justice system really worth it, if all we get from it is revenge? Does revenge make society better? I don’t think so.
I’m not advocating for anarchy either. There should be consequences for criminals. I’m just not sure what the consequences should be, but punishment is ineffective. I get that we have personal responsibility, and free will. And I’m not trying to excuse criminals, I’m just saying that punishment doesn’t work.
beefbot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
They’re both cruel to anyone “below” them (this is a simplistic argument.) They’re easy to cry wolf about in order to draw people over to your side, people who vote and act emotionally
Free_Opinions@feddit.uk 1 year ago
The thing I’ve yet to figure out about the abortion debate, and what likely gets me labeled as a right-wing bigot for even daring to ask, is where ‘pro-choice’ people draw the line. The ‘pro-life’ view is clear: life starts at conception. However, I don’t know where the left draws the line, and in my mind, refusing to do so seems to suggest it would be fine even a day before birth, which seems like an equally extreme position.
Moobythegoldensock@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Clear and simple makes things easy, but easy is not always better. Also, the “life begins at conception” position only seems clear on the surface, but if you look deep enough things get quite muddled.
For example, is a zygote a single person? What if it later divides and becomes twins or triplets: did the twin’s life begin at conception? Did one life become two? Is a zygote a ball of life that can become one or more people?
What about miscarriages? It’s thought as many as half of all pregnancies end in miscarriage, but most happen so early that the carrier is not even aware they’re pregnant. If you come across a family with four kids, do you assume they likely had another 3-4 lost lives via miscarriage and hold a funeral for them?
Should people start getting child tax benefits as soon as they have a positive pregnancy test? Or is “life starts at conception” only relevant when we’re talking about abortion, but conveniently ignored everywhere else?
And what if there is a complication with pregnancy, where if an abortion is not performed both the carrier and developing human will likely die, but if an abortion is performed only the developing human will likely die? Is it now permissible? What if the carrier is a 14 year old who was raped, is suicidal, and has a high chance of stabbing themselves in the abdomen to try to self-abort if they’re not able to get an abortion: should they be restrained in a padded room until the baby is born, forced to serve as an incubator for a baby that the state will then take?
Even when your cutoff is strict, it is not always “clear” because this is a complex issue without a clear answer.
But to answer your question specifically:
Pro-choice people generally recognize that abortion is not desirable, but disagree exactly what the rules should be. Abortion does the least harm when the pregnancy is a single cell (zygote,) and in the embryo stage where most abortions occur the developing human is essentially a collection of multiple cell lines becoming differentiated into tissue but not yet developing functional organs (you’ll often hear this called “a clump of cells.”)
As the embryo develops into a fetus, the heart and brain develop and start functioning, which is where some pro-choice people start to draw a line. Others point toward viability: at about 22 weeks, a few fetuses have been known to survive with extraordinary health measures. By 36 weeks, fetuses can be live born without any extra health issues from being born early. So starting about 20 weeks, we start to recognize that pregnancies become more and more viable: that’s where a lot of people draw the line.
A very small percentage of abortions are done late in pregnancy, typically for health reasons. Not all pro-choice people are in favor of legalizing this, but many feel that in these situations, abortion is a tough decision that is best made by a patient in a careful discussion with their doctor, not by a politician they will never meet. So while these pro-choice people may not wish to see an abortion performed within a week or two of natural birth, they do not want to outlaw it so that the option is there for people who truly need it.
Free_Opinions@feddit.uk 1 year ago
I mean the pro-life stance is clear in the sense that they generally don’t accept abortion unless the mother’s life is in danger. So when someone is ‘pro-life,’ I know what that means. However, when someone says they’re ‘pro-choice,’ I don’t always know what they mean. I’ve assumed most people draw the line somewhere around three months, after which you’d need a medical reason and a doctor’s statement to proceed. But based on the replies I’ve gotten here, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Many seem to suggest that no such lines should be drawn at all and even go as far as calling the baby a parasite, which seems a bit crazy to me to put it lightly.
barsquid@lemmy.world 1 year ago
If we have reached the day prior to birth the person carrying doesn’t want an abortion. It’s therefore fine to leave the decision to them and their medical team.
Grimm665@lemm.ee 1 year ago
For at least pro-choice voters, many are more concerned with the line being drawn by doctors, and not by politicians. So it’s less about where the line is being drawn and who, with the proper education, is doing the drawing.
Free_Opinions@feddit.uk 1 year ago
Maybe I should’ve been more specific - I meant the point after which you need to consult a doctor to go ahead with an abortion. I think most people agree that a fetus just a few weeks old is barely a living thing, so aborting it is hardly different from, cumming in a sock. However, there is a point after which we’re no longer talking about a lump of cells but a sentient being, and to me at least, it seems reasonable that after that point, you’d need a medical reason to do it.
Where I’m from, that line is at 12 weeks. Until then, you’re free to do it for whatever reason you want. The unwillingness to draw any line like that means they’d be okay aborting an 8 month old too even for financial reasons and that just sounds fucking insane to me.
purplemonkeymad@programming.dev 1 year ago
Not everyone agrees on an exact time, typically the viability of the fetus outside of the womb is the consideration.
This would mean a baby that would be just premature wouldn’t be aborted. As you move back the viability would end up varying for each pregnancy, which is why after a set point doctors are involved. They then make a medical judgement balancing the viability and safety to the carrier.
So there is no hard date. The insistence on getting one simplifies a complicated issue where nuance is important.
I’ve noticed that a lot of anti-abortion laws target doctors, specifically to make the fuzzy nature of the cuttoff difficult.
TheLadyAugust@lemmy.world 1 year ago
For all the left people I know, including myself, The reason we don’t want a line drawn is because sometimes special circumstances arise. There may be medical complications in the third trimester that would result in the mother’s death and it’s not feasible to exhaustively list every scenario that could land her in this situation so it’s better to just not a put a limit on it so she doesn’t have some bullshit hoop to jump through later while she’s dying.
That said, I don’t think there’s anyone genuinely arguing that people should be allowed to get abortions super late into the pregnancy just for funsies. Third trimester is the logical cut off to me, and most of the people I know agree or want it slightly shorter. We just don’t want the law to specify that since it can cause legal complications. It’s better that it be considered a medical standard.
Free_Opinions@feddit.uk 1 year ago
I don’t think that drawing a line means it wouldn’t be allowed under any circumstances after that. Before the line, it would be at the mother’s discretion, and after passing the line, you’d need a statement from one or two doctors and a valid medical reason for it.
Barometer3689@feddit.nl 1 year ago
To answer your question. They consider the argument of “where do you draw the line” to be a red herring.
Consider the following: if a person is in need for a kidney transplant, or else he would die, would it be ethical to force someone to donate their kidney against their will? I think not.
Same applies to abortions. You are being forced to feed a parasitic being in your body, a being that destroys your body in the process. And not having an option to abort would be to take away your bodily autonomy.
As for the line, I think that the person making that choice is the one that draws that line. It is not for us to decide.
Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Surely you can get rid of that ‘parasite’ in the first few months instead of waiting for the last minute? I don’t see how drawing the line at, say 12 weeks now somehow takes away a person’s bodily autonomy.
Speaking of a red herring, a comparison to a forced kidney donation is completely irrelevant here.
Free_Opinions@feddit.uk 1 year ago
Okay, let’s take this reasoning even further then. Why can’t this same logic be used to a 3 year old?
beefbot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
are you a sleeper account? 7mo old acct & in 1h you’ve responded 2x to emotionally charged political topics with sidelining , near-no-commitment comments that take up space & try to dilute the issue
Abortion is a human right. Death penalty is cruel & horrifying.
Free_Opinions@feddit.uk 1 year ago
Death penalty is justice. Abortion is cruel & horrifying.
See? That’s how convincing your reasoning is. Luckily the other people responding are atleast addressing the question.
minibyte@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
- Momma’s threat “I brought you into this world and I can take you out of it” hits harder.
Nosavingthrow@lemmy.world 1 year ago
IS it a contradiction? I don’t agree with the death penalty or anti-abortion position, but I don’t see some essential link between either position. You can hold two different beliefs about two different things is how come.
CileTheSane@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
They literally call themselves pro-life and then express support for the death penalty.
Nosavingthrow@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Sure, but OP didn’t ask, ‘How can people call themselves pro-life but are be for the death penalty?’ I’m not one to hang onto whatever catch phrases or name a movement lands with. I expect the land back movement to, say, lay down on the ground as a for of protest? ‘BUT LAND BACK IS IN THE NAAAAAAAME’. Do we think defund the police want there to be nobody to apprehend, say, right-wing terrorists?
linearchaos@lemmy.world 1 year ago
In the end, it’s because they’re told that that’s the way it is.
Abortion makes a an easy political point. Vote for the children.
Being hard on crime and executing people, That’s another easy political point. Vote for the law abiding citizens.
They don’t care that those two things are at odds They don’t care about life or death. They care about their own exact situation, and don’t really give a rat’s ass about anyone else. They believe that the team they’re backing gives them the best advantage, and that’s absolutely all they care about. Beyond that, it’s simply consuming and regurgitating the propaganda, self-perpetuating.
mechoman444@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Because it’s not about saving the lives of unborn babies and it never has been.
It’s about curtailing choice.