For a society that recoils in horror at the thought that bastardy should have any stigma attached to it, modern America holds a belief that would have caused most of the societies that came before it to recoil in even greater horror: the notion that rape babies have no right to live. Even a large number of "pro-life" people have agreed to this bargain wherein a child that is the product of rape or incest is automatically, without saying, reduced to the lowest level of untermensch. It has less of a right to live than a calf born on a farm that specializes in veal.
This issue is one of the few real unprincipled exceptions of the right. Unprincipled exceptions of this magnitude are more commonly found on the left in American politics. Conservative pro-lifers will swear up and down that a child's right to live is not dependent on the mother's mood, but will all too often sheepishly compromise if the mother says she was raped or a relative is the father. So normally, the child has a right to live, but sometimes fate conspires to create the child in the wrong way, and that empowers the mother to relieve herself of any responsibilities she would have had to the child, had the circumstances been different.
The subhuman rape baby is nothing more than an emotional argument aimed at carving out an unprincipled exception. It would be nonsensical to engage in this sort of thought on the issue of rape itself, where one would argue that if a woman sufficiently puts herself at risk for rape, that a man has a "right to rape her." I don't know anyone who would argue for a circumstance-based exception to the criminal nature of rape, yet a lot of people seem completely comfortable making the case for abortion under that logic.
I'm not surprised in the least that society has generally accepted this wholesale destruction of life, liberty and property, as I don't believe in the existence of "progress." Human civilization has always operated as a wheel spinning in place with one generation triumphing over one set of sins and foibles that plagued those that came before it, while falling prey to their own set. Thus the trees may change the color of and even lose their foliage seasonly, but that's the only part of the scenary that changes as we "progress toward a better future." There is nothing new under the Sun, just a lot of recycling going on.
I get very tired of that old argument. The right will conceed that one point when in reality the pro-baby-killing side is only trying to get them to look stupid. Quite successfully I might add. First of all, the "incest" argument is stupid. As much as it might blow some peoples minds, not all incest is forced. And if it isn't forced, then it is consenual, which makes it no different from the normal everyday matress mambo. If it is forced, then it is rape which really leaves us with only half their argument, the dreaded "rape"
But rape pregnancies number only around <a href="http://www.christianliferesources.com/?library/view.php&articleid=461">200 a year</a> and only half of those are aborted. That equates to a 50% termination rate, which isn't all that much higher than the 33% termination rate in the population at large. So the rape argument is really nothing more than a straw man and should be dealt with as such, but instead in hopes of winning ground and/or appearing compassionate (by the world's standards) the pro-lifer gives in.
I have never bought that argument. I have observed that the existence of loopholes encourages people to use them. Rape and incest are easy excuses that don't have to be backed up in court, "because it would tramatize the mother". If those are the only exceptions to otherwise iron-clad anto-abortion rules, then every little girl who wants an abortion will say the father is a relative or she was raped. Kind of like the number of girls who claim virgin birth in hispanic countries, only more believable.
The other side of that coin is, "for the health of the mother", and then broaden that to include "mental health", which essentially means the mother will not feel good if she doesn't get her way.
I have some sympathy for the health argument because a relative of mine nearly went blind because of a pregnancy. However, in the vast majority of the cases, that argument is nothing more than a crock of shit.
Let me add the three-peat in opposition to rape/incest abortions. If abortion is murder, then I fail to see how the circumstances of the conception make the abortion any more permissible. Perhaps it is an attempt on the part of conservatives to appear more "reasonable" to the baby killing set?
I have a hard time with statutory rape laws. 18 is a high and arbitrary number, and is undermined each time a 14 yo girl willingly shags her 16 yo boyfriend. Moreover, as an MRA, I regulalrly see statutory rape laws being used to asymmetrically punish men-boys who have consensual sex with sexually active and hypergamous girls. The argument is that he is more mature than her given his age...when the reality is that a 14 yo girl and 16 yo boy are equivalent in terms of maturity since girls hit puberty about 1.5 to 2 years earlier. If we are going to insist on the concept of statutory rape, then we need to stagger the laws to account for the different development paces between the sexes.
Lastly, incest has about the same risk for birth defects as are pregnancies to dams of advanced age, yet I do not hear a clamor to abort babies conceived to 45 yo women.
When the real health of the mother is at stake, doctors and patients work things out and prosecutors don't get involved. Just like every law against murder does not have to have a lenghty list of exceptions for self defense and accidents tacked onto it.
Well, they probably should since modern prosecutors tend to look for ways to bend murder statutes to prosecute what is actually a case of self-defense or an accident.
1. Birth defects happen in incest because of recessive genes for the defect. If your family has none, birth defects are the same as the general population.
2. If you do not believe that killing defective babies is morally OK, then how do you arive at the possition that it is OK to kill babies who only might be defective?
3. The only solution I can come up with for young sexually active girls getting their same-age boyfriends into trouble is some kind of convent situation from puberty to "legal age" whenever that is. strictly monitored separation. Otherwise why enforce it?
4. I dispute the whole "girls mature faster" nonsense. Since there is no objective measure for maturity, emotionally or physically. We can pretty much peg the girl's physical maturity at onset of mensus, but many at that age still have no breasts and bodies that look like little boys. What can you peg the boy's maturity to? Obviously both boys and girls are "mature enough" physically when they start playing at sex around age 12. but neither are ready for child birth and parenting.
With the regard to #3, you might find this interesting (though unsurprising) as a reference for dealing with others:
There are, of course, signs that sexuality is incredibly malleable such as the way that the victims of child sex crimes have a tendency to become offenders themselves, not to mention the way that homosexual relationships with between adults and children tend to orient the children toward homosexuality as teens and adults. A strong separation between men and women is more likely to make the American Teen Male gay rather than sexually moral.
And yet the islamic world is way ahead of ours in breeding replacement populatons. Besides oil, it is relatively their only export.
Well, Iran is certainly competing hard and fast with Russia and Italy for the largest demographic collapse.
The story above adds some insight to the strange behaviors of moslems but it does not offer an inescapable pattern. None of the little girls I grew up with were willing to give me sex, yet I did not even consider homosexuality or beastiality as a substitute. Maleability aside, there is more to this equation than is presented here.
You also had normal interactions with girls. Things might have turned out a bit differently for some of your peers if all of the girls they went to school with were covered with trashbags with eye slits and could get stoned to death for looking at naked women.
The idea behind the statutory rape laws is a sound one: preventing exploitation of teenagers by adults, sexually. That's fine. But the laws are written badly. They should not be written in such a way as to "catch" teenage boys who happen to be 2-3 years older. It should only capture people (male or female) who are 5+ years older, and the age above which statutory rape is not possible should be lowered -- probably to 16.
Those issues are very sensitive with women in particular, however.
I remember a conversation I had a few years ago with a woman about this, noting that 18 is an arbitrary cutoff and that most heterosexual men found some 16 and 17 year old females attractive. She was very upset, said that men like that were perverts, accused me of being a pervert, told me I should not see 17 year old females that way and on and on and on. I think they are genuinely afraid of exploitation, but there's also something else going on -- the kind of classical female fear of being left for a younger woman.
I don't think that exploitation is an issue for the government. A teenager is old enough to understand what the adult is seeking and to obey the moral restrictions that hopefully been taught to them by their parents, without having an external authority force them to be obedient. In the ancient days, the age of accountability was 12-13 because at that point boys and girls were much closer to being adults than children and were mentally mature enough to understand the moral requirements of living in an orthodox Jewish nation. I think that that is a better way of doing things because it eases children into adulthood by allowing them a genuine taste of adult freedom at 12-13 such as being able to drink alcohol with their parents and work with their parents in the family business as paid employees without just imposing restrictions on their behavior.
A typical reaction of most women who are raised in the bubble of modern day consent-based morality. Naturally, I guess 17 year old guys are nasty perverts since they see their female peers in a very sexual light and their female peers usually prefer it that way.
I think there is something else at work beside the normal female fear of being used. The only way for adults to be sexually liberated is to establish a belief that all sex must be between free and equal parties, but nature doesn't work like that. It's not uncommon for people 10-25 years apart to have sex, and there is a great deal of difference in their level of maturity in most cases. A 25 year old is substantially less mature than a typical 40 year old, but few people seriously argue that the 40 year is robbing the cradle.
What I have come to suspect is that the underlying tension against teenage sex comes from the fact that on some level we know that in a pure moral sense, it is no worse for a pubescent young teen to have sex than it is for a fully grown adult. The act itself is natural, it is not a crime against nature like pedophilia in which a pre-pubescent child is made to engage an adult as a sexual being. What we have done is created a utilitarian rule and draped it in a moral imperative as a way of separating the "amoral act" of an adult having sex from the "immoral act" of an adolescent having sex.
As I see it, to admit that the teenager is a sexual being capable of giving consent, even if short-sighted and stupid consent, is to acknowledge that one need not be an adult to make a meaningful decision about sex. From there, we must either adopt the position that adolescents can screw like rabbits or we have to question whether or not adults should be doing the same. Since most people are squeamish about the idea of young teens screwing like rabbits, their intuition will lean to the point of questioning whether it is right for adults to have consensual sex outside of marriage. That then causes them to look at their own actions and realize that they must change, and so it is easier to dogmatically deny the obvious fact that a 17 year old, normal, pubescent girl is every bit as much of a sexual being as a 27 year old grown woman, than it is to say to oneself "I must restrain my sexual desires."
I don't disagree that grown men going after teenage girls is problematic, even predatory in many cases. However, I don't think that it is an issue for anyone other than the teen's family if no coercion is involved. In high school, I knew a number of girls who allowed themselves to be "exploited" by men who were at least 4-5 years older than them. I think a sober assessment of the issue reveals that too often the state simply could not even figure out the truth about how the relationship worked sufficient to bring a just case to court.
An unborn baby should never be punished for the sins of its parent(s).