I am convinced! Good approach. ------------- mbs: You're much too easy. If abortion is murder (not my position, BTW), then Yoshie's remarks about women are beside the point. The pro-life position, rightly or not, begins from the standpoint of the unborn *person*. The fact that mothers fare differently and unfairly under an abortion ban, while regrettable in its own right, is irrelevant from the standpoint of the unborn. That some murders can never be prevented does not mean that one should not try to prevent them. > . . . > There are other arguments as well, but I doubt that there are many > *progressive* women who are anti-abortion enough to disregard *other > women's needs*. I don't think that any such women disregard the needs of women; but they have made the decision that the needs of the unborn have greater standing. Yoshie understands the pro-life movement as an anti-woman movement, as in: >> . . . The root problem for them is not abortion per se; what they rage against is the changed and changing social capacity and status of women--our independence from men, marriage, motherhood, and other gender-defining institutions. . . . >> I think this is a very inaccurate generalization. It is certainly true of some. To my 'bargaining' point, Y said: >> One can bargain about prices of properties, which are things separable from persons; but one can't bargain about a degree of pregnancy, unless one is ready to reduce a woman's body to a thing. . . . >> >From an individual standpoint, I quite agree. But as above, the rhetoric of 'reducing a women's body to a thing" would be said by the other side to apply to the fetus. In these terms, it is true that there is no middle ground. If one or the other has inherent rights, there is no ground for dialogue or compromise. There is ground for compromise if it is acknowledged that the rights of both woman and unborn are not absolute. Any compromise would not involve groups whose entire constitution is premised on promotion of one or the other absolute. Rather, it would reflect the middle ground where most people are. The purpose would be to create a political consensus for the pursuit of major goals, not the least of which should be addressing the access problem. mbs
