Date: Mon, 26 Jan 1998 22:03:39 -0500 (EST)
From: Justin Schwartz <jschwart-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Justin, Think of Doctors and Workers at Clinics



Actually the key S.Ct case is casey v. Planned Parenthood (1992), not
Webster. It was Casey that stated that the central holding of Roe was
reaffirmed.  Casey speaks of the state's  important and legitimate
interest in protecting the potentiality of human life, quoting Roe. The
case then rejects Roe's trimester framework, which allowed abortions
without restriction in the first, allowed restrictions to protect the
woman's health in the second, and any restrictions in the third.
It replaced this with a doctrine that the state interest starts at
coinception, but may not be protected by imposing an undue birden or
substantial obstacle on the exercise of the right to abortion. (Later
cases have found that almost no restrictions do this, except for required
parental notification.) Viability remains the magic line; a woman has the
right to terminate until then. There is no mention of any interests the
fetus may have.

> BTW, have you had the time to check the language of the Webster decision to
> see if it says it is the State that has interests in the fetus or it is the
> fetus that has interests?

Yoshie insists that abortion is really morally neutral. I guess she and I
have to disagree on that. She says:

> and abortion providers will be better off if abortion becomes generally
> regarded as morally neutral.
> 
Maybe, but taht doesn't show that it _is_ morally neutral.

> One of the reasons I think the way I do is that in most people's minds,
> morality is inseparably intertwined with concepts such as guilt, innocence,
> justification, and normality. 

And quite rightly. People who do immoral things are guilty. People wgo
don't are innocent, morally speaking. Acts with moral content require
justification. 

> A focus on morality of abortion, in a society where (hetero)sexism, racism,
> and capitalism structure our lives, inexorably leads to the question of
> morality of women: whether a woman's character is good or bad, her sexual
> conduct is correct or incorrect, etc. Moral questions become instruments to
> control women and our sexuality.

Only if you give up morality to the other side, in which case you've lost
the battle. The proper reply is that the woman's character and her conduct
are morally irrelevant to the real moral issues.

> Why do you think that most people cannot accept [the morally neutral
theory Yoshie espouses]? Are you not saying this
> because _you_ don't want to accept it? 

No. I don't make the mistake of identifying my moral views with the
majority's. I'm saying it because of what I observe and experience in the
abortion debate. In this country at least, abortion is a moralized issue.
I happen to agree that it should be, but that's neither here nor there.

> 
> I happen to believe that people's real experience is more complicated than
> that. Abortion is harder for some than for others. For people like myself
> who do not think that a fetus is a person, having a cyst removed (which I
> have last fall) and having an abortion are not very different.

Not my experience or my wife's. She didn't actually have an abortion, byt
we found the thought of taking steps to find out if she needed it very
disturbing. Neither of us believe that fetuses are people. I suspect taht
our experience may be more common tahn yours, which is partly why abortion
is so morally loaded.

--jks




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