Lydia has a new abortion post up on “What’s Wrong With the World”. It’s a remarkable post, because of the sheer amount of digital ink spilled to make this astonishingly bad argument.
The thing is almost too absurd to take seriously. Lydia does great work finding and analyzing examples of the culture of death throughout the country, but ye cats, it almost defies description in its badness.
The crux of her argument is that folks who are arguing that women who make the choice to kill their baby are murderers, don’t really believe we should be treating women who abort their babies the same as everybody else.
When in fact that is the only thing we are arguing for. Take circumstances into account? Sure, as long as they’re based on objective things we know have occurred, and not the subjective state of the mother’s soul that we apparently are supposed to know well enough to know that mothers really aren’t guilty of the thing they consciously chose to do.
Her whole argument is an utter disaster from start to finish. Starting off with the Obligatory Trump Dig(TM), and the caveat that because Trump made the comment we really shouldn’t be addressing it at all anyway, because Trump or something.
Just take a look at this section:
A legal situation with harsh penalties for abortionists and zero penalties for the procuring woman would be just another such rough-cut distinction made by law, based on considerations like the difficulty of proving the woman’s state of knowledge or intent, information about the prevalence of mitigating pressure and even coercion on the woman, the widespread deception practiced upon pregnant women, the fact that the woman is not confronted with the humanity of the victim in the same way that the abortionist is, and so forth. (Abortion is unique in that the victim is physically hidden, and can remain hidden, from one of the people who is complicit in the victim’s destruction.) All of these could well make it both impractical and imprudent for the law to get involved in trying to exact legal penalties upon the woman.
It’s astonishingly bad in how it fails to address literally everything we have been saying. The argument here is literally that when a woman kills her baby we need to assume she’s not guilty of killing her baby. The sheer nerve it must have taken to have written that is stunning.
Much like Matt Walsh, when folks like Lydia write things like that it gets harder and harder for me to take them seriously – and to top it all off, she bans opposing arguments, because we’re all going to be mean to her or something. I suppose she would know that, since she reliably informs us that she can read minds.
Posts like this are making it harder and harder for me to defend folks like her and Matt Walsh.
Hat tip to Zippy, who makes a pretty good argument against it himself.
EDIT: As Jeffrey S. has pointed out, Lydia only banned comments on “What’s Wrong With the World”, but she indeed cross-posted it to Extra Thoughts, where “comments are fully moderated”.
So Lydia has NOT banned opposing arguments, she just picks and chooses which ones she gets to respond to and doesn’t allow any she doesn’t like. It’s just ALMOST like that, but it’s definitely not EXACTLY that.
To be clear: She mentioned that she posted to her private, less popular blog where she can moderate comments she doesn’t like and where the highest commented topic on the first page is that post, with 37.
On the first page of “What’s Wrong With the World” the post with the most comments is “Turning Against Trump” (natch) with 131. So she cross-posted to a less popular blog that she heavily moderates as opposed to allowing opposing arguments on her much more popular more lightly moderated blog because she thought people would be mean to her.
But she definitely does not ban ALL opposing arguments. My mistake.
Malcolm the Cynic 
If a mother who knows she has a life insider her decides to kill her baby, she is responsible. I say murder one. By her logic any murderer could be excused. “I didn’t know the victim, he was barely human to me. Look the guy had black skin, black skin. I don’t know anybody personally with black skin how can they be fully human like me. Further, I am almost certain he was at some time in the future be a burden on me or be a threat or maybe just inconvenient.”
You kill your child and you are just as responsible as if you kill your child after he is born..
the fact that the woman is not confronted with the humanity of the victim in the same way that the abortionist is, and so forth.
Seriously?
The only way for arguments like these to work is when paired with the view that women are, across the board, basically on the level of mid-teenage children in terms of decisionmaking. Such that ‘adult’ becomes a term that really only applies to men. To say that women – and remember, we’re including here 30-some year old women, sometimes those who have already had several children to begin with – have less of an understanding of their own child’s humanity than a doctor is an incredible act of argument desperation. This is right up there with that inane violinist pro-abortion ‘argument’.
One of the best parts of Trump running for president is how he’s exposed a lot of utter BS in conservative ranks. I knew we couldn’t trust the GOP Establishment. But now even pro-life leaders and ‘conservative Christian’ writers are getting outed as rotten or unreliable. Finally, some light.
As Zippy pointed out – thanks to a comment made by Donald Trump, we have seen liberals and conservatives alike, Trump included, come together in unified agreement that people who actually get abortions should never, even when guilty, actually be punished for getting an abortion.
It’s truly stunning.
Crude, did you see Zippy’s post? or independently come up with the same line of thought: this shows that the Pro-Life movement doesn’t think of women as moral agents.
I’m almost as stunned as Malcolm at the prevalence of this nonsense, and I don’t have the excuse of youth.
No, I did not. I should have a look at it – I used to read Zippy a long time ago, I just have to build up the habit again. (Went away for a while, didn’t he?)
That whole ‘Donald Trump is clearly not in tune with the pro-life movement if he thinks we view women as anything but complete victims’ thing was news to a hell of a lot more than Trump.
I’ve noticed for a while that the ‘pro-life movement’ had people who were trying to transform it into a ‘movement’ where abortion was at most a near-irrelevant side factor compared to ‘really important, you guys’ social justice schticks. But apparently it progressed a lot further than I realized. Trump just made them go for the reveal a bit earlier than anticipated.
I’m with Zippy – if she’s too insane to know that, when she agrees to kill a child she’s killing a child – lock her in a padded room.
Right now I feel like the insane retards are running the insane asylum while others, such as Lydia, are saying we should simply all have padded rooms to avoid any hurt, “Look at how well it does for the insane already!”
I think my favorite response to this mess has been Bonald’s:
Also something you may find interesting.
Here in Ireland a woman has been prosecuted for illegally aborting her baby recently. She could not secure a trip to Britain to get the abortion there (its illegal there too, but only in the letter of the law, in spirit it is flippantly ignored outright and never adhered to, the sole exception in the law broadened to allow any and every abortion under the sun, even for something as little as the child having a hare lip. Yes really.) she procured some drugs online and used them as abortifacents, her roommates reported her. She was given a suspended sentence but as with every previous flare up of the abortion debate the orcs are decrying she was punished at all, while our pro-life side, correctly and bravely and loudly, declare she wasn’t punished nearly enough.
But like every other life issue in Ireland, the pro-life side isn’t the one with establishment and outside support, the same reason we lost the gay marriage vote, between the stupifying outside money and support the pro-sodomite side gained and the utter beating over the heat most of the population got from the establishment, (and the fact liberalized expats were being shipped in to vote) the majority who would have voted no didn’t bother to show up to vote. It’ll be the same when, eventually, abortion gets legalised here, we have no priests and we have no prince and the Holy Father is busy with other things.
@ Servant: Pope Francis is too busy being “inclusive.”
Actually, reflecting on this further, I think I just figured out a way to completely end the abortion debate once and for all. Really, the solution just jumps out once you realize that the sentiment of the modern ‘pro-life’ leadership is that women are incapable of being culpable for getting an abortion.
Just require that all abortionists be women.
It eliminates, in one fell swoop, every guilty party in an abortion. The woman procuring an abortion can’t be guilty, because women who get abortions can’t possibly understand the humanity of the child inside of them. But if the woman procuring the abortion can’t be held liable, then neither can the woman actually performing it. Sure, Lydia suggests that the abortionist ‘sees’ the fetus… but unless we can suddenly make women culpable by exposing them to ultrasounds and fetal images, then it seems like it’s going to be simple for the abortionist to say that they haven’t confronted the humanity of the child either. In fact, the abortionist can just say that of -course- the fetus isn’t human. After all, she’s had several abortions herself in the past, and everything seemed fine. And saying that ‘Well, she should KNOW’ would invite the possibility that the woman getting an abortion could be held liable after all (we’d have to ask what she knew and understood – did she know that an abortion ended a life?), which is a non-starter.
Just like that, we get rid of anyone guilty of the crime of abortion. Granted, we still end up with a lot of dead children, but no law is perfect, right?
Zippy beat you right to it again! https://zippycatholic.wordpress.com/2016/04/15/how-to-end-political-conflict-over-abortion/
What the heck. This is actually kind of weird.
Guess I really will have to follow this guy.
Thinking about this even more, I’d add that the terms on which Lydia denies the culpability of the mother – ‘She can’t witness the humanity!’ – also denies the culpability of, basically, everyone else in the world.
I somehow suspect that ‘the woman can’t be held responsible, she doesn’t confront the child’s humanity’ doesn’t extend to the man. Is a man who urges abortion for his girlfriend’s child a victim too? He doesn’t encounter this humanity either, you know.
I somehow suspect standards are going to change greatly in that scenario.
“and to top it all off, she bans opposing arguments, because we’re all going to be mean to her or something.”
You can mock Lydia’s post all you want, you can badly summarize her arguments, but at least try not to blatantly lie to your readers. She is moderating comments and has approved quite a few that oppose her.
You can mock Lydia’s post all you want, you can badly summarize her arguments, but at least try not to blatantly lie to your readers. She is moderating comments and has approved quite a few that oppose her.
For those of you who want to see the ‘lies’ in action: Here you go.
You’re right. I thought “comments are closed” meant she closed the comments, and missed that next bit about Extra Thoughts. I will correct it immediately.
I know you’re Lydia’s friend, but this was an inexcusably terrible post. If you have something to say about what I think about it, by all means, say it.
If you or “Crude” want to engage Lydia’s “inexcusably terrible post” I suggest you do so at her blog. I also suggest you read carefully and try and engage her in good faith (hint to Crude: writing a comment like “the terms on which Lydia denies the culpability of the mother – ‘She can’t witness the humanity!’ – also denies the culpability of, basically, everyone else in the world” fails basic reading comprehension.)
Okay Jeffrey. What, exactly, am I wrong about?
Not about Lydia’s post. About the specific things I have said, the arguments independent. What was incorrect?
BTW, I notice you like using scare quotes around the usernames of commenters. Please stop doing that. His username is Crude, not “Crude”.
If you remember Crude, he HAS tried to engage Lydia before. Her response was to tell him to go to Hell with almost no provocation and threaten to ban him. Lydia is clearly not interested in engaging with Crude.
And more than that – Lydia herself says that she’d rather “put it out there for posterity” rather than engage with “particularly annoying readers”. Very well – I am not interested in dealing with somebody who quite likely thinks I’m annoying and has threatened to ban comments she does not like.
Lydia’s post is, frankly, risible. It’s dehumanizing both to women and to the innocent children harmed in the abortion crusade. I’m dignifying her post by quoting her directly and responding to it, but I don’t owe her any more respect than that.
She said she wants the post up for posterity. Consider this a response for posterity’s sake.
Malcolm,
No worries about the quotation marks, at least on my front. If you dislike what that implies, warn away, but I mostly find it a bit funny.
Jeff,
(hint to Crude: writing a comment like “the terms on which Lydia denies the culpability of the mother – ‘She can’t witness the humanity!’ – also denies the culpability of, basically, everyone else in the world” fails basic reading comprehension.
Allow me to interrupt your ‘hints’ by, intellectually, giving you one upside the head.
Let’s start by quoting Lydia, and just to help you out, I’ll add some bold:
A legal situation with harsh penalties for abortionists and zero penalties for the procuring woman would be just another such rough-cut distinction made by law, based on considerations like the difficulty of proving the woman’s state of knowledge or intent, information about the prevalence of mitigating pressure and even coercion on the woman, the widespread deception practiced upon pregnant women, the fact that the woman is not confronted with the humanity of the victim in the same way that the abortionist is, and so forth. (Abortion is unique in that the victim is physically hidden, and can remain hidden, from one of the people who is complicit in the victim’s destruction.) All of these could well make it both impractical and imprudent for the law to get involved in trying to exact legal penalties upon the woman. Moreover, the pro-life goal that every child should be recognized as a human victim and protected in law would be accomplished by harsh penalties for the abortionist as a murderer, who sees the humanity of the child in the very act of killing.
So yes, Jeff. Lydia is denying the culpability of the mother, and she is linking that denial to the mother being unable to witness that humanity.
Note that Lydia goes on to talk about in-principle situations where a woman may be responsible for her abortion. She goes on to argue against ever pursuing charges in even those cases. Too odious, don’t you know. Why, the talk of treating women as legally culpable for their decisions on this front is largely far-right new misogyny talk.
Beyond that, Jeff, I pointed out where Lydia’s reasoning will lead, not something which she explicitly says herself. If Lydia wants to appeal to ‘the difficulty of proving the woman’s state of knowledge or intent’, ‘information about the prevalence of mitigating pressure and even coercion on the woman’, ‘widespread deception’ and more, she’s in for a surprise: ‘women’ and ‘pregnant women’ aren’t the only ones who can have such considerations thrown their way.
If the rallying cry against prosecuting women for abortion – and thus, for promoting the idea that women who get abortions are making a morally monstrous choice – is ‘they aren’t confronted with the humanity, they’re deceived, they feel pressured, we can’t be sure of their knowledge or intent’, well. You’ve just provided an out for the lion’s share of not just people pushing for pro-abortion laws and policies, but just about every party involved in the act.
On pain of hypocrisy, goodbye harsh criticism, much less prosecution. of men or families pressuring women to abort.
Goodbye, harsh criticism or condemnation of whole cultures that promote ideas like ‘you need a male child, abort a female’.
Dare I say it, goodbye to the idea of harsh criticism for – to say nothing about prosecution of – a man who slips his girlfriend an abortion drug on the sly, save for the most broad and abortion-unrelated laws.
To top it all off, if you don’t think the intellectual beachhead you’ve established with these ‘pragmatic’ concessions don’t provide some ample ground to defend even abortionists, trust me: you’ve got another thing coming. In case you haven’t noticed, pleading ignorance about the ultimate humanity of the fetus, and thus the morality of abortion, is absolutely rife in these conversations.
tl;dr version: Lydia’s argument is, at best, meant to be a crafty, pragmatic way to advance anti-abortion laws in a hostile culture. It is literally counterproductive, because it helps perpetuate and worsen the culture, thanks to the inane reasoning it relies upon to justify the ‘pragmatic’ move. You walk this route and the result will be a world where abortion is jaywalking – technically illegal, everyone does it, and 99.9% of them are regarded as blameless for doing so.