From: LeoCasey <LeoCasey-AT-aol.com>
Date: Sun, 25 Jan 1998 23:41:42 EST
Subject: M-TH: Abortion and Moral Agency


Yoshie:
<< Through this comment, you are dismissing my agency and autonomy by
 asserting that not making this a moral affair is an invalid perspective.>>

Leo:
In other words, by having the nerve to disagree with you, I dismiss your
agency and autonomy. That is as silly as it is pompously self-righteous.

Yoshie:
 <<You don't have much respect for an *actual* woman's agency, do you. You
 want me (and other women) to justify my (and their) decision to terminate
 pregnancy in moral terms; if a woman refuses to do that, she is "cretinous"
 in your mind.>>

Leo:
An argument demonstrates its lack of good faith when it asserts the same point
and imputes the same position to an opponent, again and again, when the error
has been pointed out. What I have said is that all the evidence shows that
women do consider the moral aspects of decisions whether or not to abort a
pregnancy, and that is a very powerful argument for a pro-choice position.
Time and time again you and Carroll ignore what I say and attribute a complete
misrepresentation to me. It seems that you have a little trouble arguing with
the real position -- we still have yet to hear from either you or Carroll
whether or not it is wrong for an individual to abort for sex selection, nor
have you addressed the consequences of depriving teenagers of reproductive
freedom which flows from treating abortion as a simple surgical procedure --
so you would rather argue against a straw man of your own construction. 

What I called cretinous is the idea that abortion is a matter of 'whim', which
my Oxford dictionary defines as "sudden fancy, caprice, freakish idea." Even
if  we accepted your premise that abortion is nothing but a surgical
procedure, what rational person undergoes surgery, with all of its risks and
all of its discomfort, on a sudden fancy or out of caprice? And if we consider
the moral aspects of the question, only an amoral person, a sociopath, would
act on 'whim'. Yes, this notion that women act on whim is utterly thoughtless
and cretinous, and if you stopped long enough to think about it and you were
intellectually honest, you might actually realize that. My partner had an
abortion, as did several other women with whom I have discussed the issues in
depth, and everyone of them would be horrified at the idea that their
decisions were the results of 'whims'.

Yoshie:
 <<Your post shows that you desire to be in a position to judge
 women's moral rectitude and intellectual capacity. Misogyny makes a
 self-righteous idiot out of a man, it seems. The only virtue of your posts
 is that they end up proving my point.>>
 
Leo:
So now it is misogyny to disagree with you. Too bad that only those who deny
all moral agency and subjectivity to women qualify as feminist in your book.
Thank you very much, but your approval is not the guideline that I will use to
inspect my conscience on this issue. I don't recall having been baptized into
a church in which infallible you are the pope.
 


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