Silly Interloper (that’s his user ID, obviously not my characterization) at W4 takes aim at legal-abortion excusers:
It really amazes me how often the “what’s your comprehensive legal formula” canard comes up in these discussions. Usually it’s an attempt to imply that pro-lifers are a bunch of sadists who want to persecute mothers with hard time and whatever cruel and unusual punishment they can imagine. Here it’s used as a supposed “argument” that law would be ineffectual.
But it completely ignores reality.
Reality 1: Difficulties at implementing law is always a problem, and should not prevent us from making evil things illegal. That applies to abortion, murder (the complexities of dealing with murder and all of the possible mitigating circumstances is beyond most peoples’ pay-grade), slavery, drugs, whatever. Making reasonable, effective, and compassionate decisions of law is a darn difficult thing to do no matter what the issue is.
Reality 2: Concern about effectiveness is always a problem and should not prevent us from making something illegal. Especially when the crime is the killing of innocent human beings.
Reality 3: Coming up with solutions that implement the law in reasonable and compassionate ways requires the cooperative effort of a lot of people. Most of the interlocutors here would probably be willing to examine various possibilities of enforcement with varying focus upon the “class” issue. Most of them would also probably be too humble to insist that their solutions were the complete and best answers. Everybody knows that there will be challenges to the prospect–deal with it.
Asking for the all the specifics isn’t an argument. It’s just a way to make the obvious problems that we always face seem somehow more pertinent to abortion than to any other law that has ever been made.
[I moved this over from the old blog]
