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Razhie. Advicenators Member Since: June 13, 2005. Answers: 5077. Visitors: 211514.
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The Question
Governmental overreach is fine as long as other taxpayers pay your bills? If it's bad for the state to decide whether a woman can have an abortion or not, then why not have that same independent spirit over paying for healthcare? How can Hillary Clinton really say she supports people that are pro life if she will sees no problem with making them pay for people's abortions under universal healthcare? Personally, I'm pro life, but I can rationalize why abortion should be legal, and I can also rationalize why we should have some form of universal healthcare, but an abortion is an elective procedure, unless it has been determined the woman's life is at sake, but the majority of the time people get abortions are not cause of rape, birth defects, the life of the mother and other reasons pro choice people always bring up. The majority of the time it's due to a woman's lack of responsibility, simply, and I don't think it's justified for tax payers who disagree with a child being killed for no good reason to have to pay for that. What next, taxpayers should have to pay for people's traffic tickets? that goes against the reason traffic tickets are issued in the first place, to discourage bad driving.
The Answer
I live in a nation where there is both universal health care, and no criminal laws against abortion. Abortion is governed by the our Health Act, not the criminal code, and it is deemed a medically necessary procedure regardless of the any other medical concerns.
As a taxpayer, I pay for many things I don't agree with. I pay for military action I disagree with, I pay for criminal prosecutions I disagree with, I pay the salaries of politicians, police, and even researchers and academics who I disagree with, I pay for churches and religious activities I don't agree with, and I also help to pay for medical treatments that I don't agree with.
I pay taxes to make sure my fellow citizens have freedoms - a bunch of which they use to do things I think are immoral, irresponsible or just plain stupid as fuck. I don't get to withdraw my support from the police station because I think they should just let the gangs kill each-other or because I don't think they should fine skateboarder or pot smokers, or from the hospitals because I think they should let drug addicts die, or even from cancer researchers if I don't like that they are testing on rabbits.
You may well believe that abortion is murder, but why should your belief - a spiritual belief about the definition of life - trump someone else's belief that isn't not murder and their understanding of when life begins. Why do you - personally - get decide what is medicine and what is not? Not the health board, not a doctor?
Jehovah Witnesses believe blood transfusions are immoral and counter to God's will. Doctors know damn well that blood transfusions save lives and are sometimes the only thing that standing between a patient and death. Should that groups belief deny all the rest of us blood transfusions? Of course not! No one has ever argued that! Instead, we just respect their beliefs and don't give THEM blood transfusions since they believe they are sinful and counter to God's will. Doctors spend a great deal of extra money, and extra effort and tons of research and energy into saving their lives without the use of blood transfusions. That is how far we are willing to go as a society to respect their beliefs and their bodies - we wont just let them die even when they are making an objectively stupid decision based on a religious belief. And in turn, they do not attempt to force those beliefs on anyone else's' body by making their beliefs about God's will and the nature of human life into a law that would force people to behave the way that they think God wants us too.
Because in a free society, we allow space for disagreement without punishing one another for acts and beliefs that don't infringe on the freedoms of others. I want the police to try and decrease gang violence - even if nothing really solves the problem and people still wanna shot one another! I want people who take illegal drugs to get emergency care - even if they are going to keep taking drugs! I also want women to who wish to terminate their pregnancy to do so early, easily and without unnecessarily hurdles - even if they ARE irresponsible sluts! I don't think it's murder, and I think it's deeply immoral to infringe on a woman's freedom by forcing her to carry a pregnancy to term because someone else think God wants her too.
I may not be comfortable or agree with the reasons many women choose abortion, but my comfort and agreement are NOT the ways we determine a person's rights under the law. When someone has a right to do something, it doesn't matter if they are doing that something because they are slut. They are still free to do it. They still have a right to choose, even if they are choosing for reasons I don't like.
The job of the government, and our fellow citizens, isn't to defend the souls of other people, it's to respect their autonomy and freedom as thinking, living people. You may believe a fetus is a living person - but I don't - and if we are going to agree that medical care is an important function of a secular government, then that secular government shouldn't be prioritizing your religious belief over mine lack of unless there is significant objective evidence to support one position or the other. There just isn't that. The evidence that we do have, and the agreement that we've come to as a society, is in favour of open abortion access during the early stages of pregnancy.
We can talk about where the line is when it comes to abortion, whether that is 12 weeks, 20 weeks, or whatever, but when you start saying "I shouldn't have to pay for things I disagree with" you are making abortion a special case - because you pay for a ton of shit that you don't agree with in order to respect the freedoms and beliefs of others. There is no solid argument for abortion to be a special case, where your beliefs get to force other people to live a certain way. There is no other situation where some people's religious beliefs change what medical procedures are available to others who don't share that belief. That is an argument we only have when it comes to abortion, because in any other situation we all recognize how absurdly unethical it would be to force one person's religious beliefs on another.
Universal medicine morally demands abortion access for those who would choose it. Just as it is morally demanded that no one woman who doesn't want an abortion should ever be forced to have one, and someone who doesn't want a blood infusion shouldn't be forced to have one of those. The state understands it can NEVER have the authority to force those things on a people. Why some people think the state should have the authority to force pregnancy, and a religious belief about the nature of human life, on someone else baffles me.
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