In the immortal words of They Might Be Giants: I don't understand you! Conservatives and Liberals can upset each other in just a couple words! Here we discuss a few phrases that can send another party flying off the rails. Enjoy!
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On the point of "baby safe havens":
ReplyDelete1. Massachusetts has a similar law, so I walk by this sign quite frequently (it's on the fire station near my home).
2. While that's part of the context of the abortion debate, it's a small part of that context. I think few people are making decisions on whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term based on their ability to anonymously surrender the infant. Though it is interesting to note that it's a rather striking policy that's found both liberal and conservative support. Nebraska was the last state to pass such a law, in 2008.
I'm looking forward (though perhaps with a bit of dread) to you covering the abortion debate. I don't think you'll find any common ground on the question of "just how bad is it to force someone to carry a pregnancy to term?"*. The conservative answer seems to be "certainly not as bad as killing an embryo"** and the liberal answer seems to be "as bad as extreme violations of bodily autonomy like forced medical experimentation or rape". Both sides compare actions the other side finds permissible in the circumstances to actions that could be justifiably resisted by violent self-defense. Fortunately, there is some common ground in that both sides (for the most part) think the issue shouldn't be solved by vigilante violence or civil war.
(I just realized while thinking about this comment that accusing people who wield "abortion is murder" rhetoric of being insincere based on their relatively restrained response is wildly off-base. I am embarassed to admit I have made that blunder myself. There are some really compelling reasons one might not try to resolve irresolvable ethical conflicts through violence, no matter how bad those conflicts are.)
The abortion debate is also really frustrating for liberals because of their inability to find common ground on policy that liberals support that incidentally would reduce the abortion rate: Comprehensive sex education, policies that subsidize contraception and make it easier to access, policies that subsidize pre- and post-natal medical care, policies that subsidize childcare in general, especially those that mitigate the timing-dependent impacts on education and career development. But no! The conservative counterpoint tends to be, "We don't need those things to limit abortion once we outlaw abortion!" (Doubly galling: It's not clear to me that outlawing abortion would even be as effective as such alternate policies in lowering abortion rates, though I recognize that's not the extent of the argument conservatives are making on that point.)
* Much less any agreement on "what is the moral status of a zygote, fetus, or embryo?" But I think the former question is much more important, especially given that some pro-choice proponents (including myself) would bite the bullet and say, "Even if a zygote did have the moral status of an adult human being, I'd still be pro-choice."***
** Though they'd use the word "fetus" (or even "baby"). The greatest conservative rhetorical victory in the abortion debate was eliminating the word "embryo" from the public vocabulary.
*** Though I might be donating quite a bit more money to artificial womb research if I believed the dilemma was that bad. Take note: There's the near-ish-term future technological development that's going to have the weirdest possible effect on American politics.
P.S. This comment is about a million times longer than I originally expected it to be, and this isn't even an episode actually on that topic.