Trends

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

An interesting finding in recent polling on social issues. I'll let this piece give the details:

Americans are now evenly split on same-sex marriage: 47 percent support marriage rights for gays and lesbians, and 47 percent oppose them. That stalemate won't last long—critics of gay unions are dying off. According to a new report from the Public Religion Research Institute, only 31 percent of Americans over age 65 support gays getting hitched, compared to 62 percent of Americans under 30.

But strong millennial support for gay marriage has not translated into an uptick in acceptance of other sexual freedoms, like the right to an abortion. The Public Religion Research Institute notes that popular support for keeping abortion legal has dipped a percentage point since 1999, and young Americans are not swelling the ranks of abortion rights supporters. Today, while 57 percent of people under 30 see gay sex as "morally acceptable," only 46 percent of them would say the same thing about having an abortion.

The institute calls this a "decoupling of attitudes." Support for same-sex marriage and abortion rights have traditionally gone hand-in-hand, and that's changing. Though young people today are "more educated, more liberal, and more likely to be religiously unaffiliated" than their parents—all factors traditionally correlated with support of abortion rights—they are not actually more likely to support abortion.

The article goes on to give some reasons as to why this decoupling is occurring, but I believe the issue is much more simple than that - gay marriage, as it is, has been a reality for millennials (folks ages 19-29) for most of their politically/socially aware lives now, and they see quite clearly how the issue really doesn't matter - gay people getting married doesn't impact their straight marriages, or their lives at all, really. There's no harm involved. The difference with abortion is that the harm involved remains self-evident - at the end of the day, we know how many abortions occur, and such "decoupling," as it were, likely reflects that difference. I also speculate that many do not see the abortion issue as one of "rights," but rather one of life. That those who self-identify as pro-life remains competitive ideologically with those who self-identify as pro-choice for the first time in a while may be a sign of that.

Why do you think these issues are separating? Should they truly be falling under the same social umbrella? What am I missing here?

Comments

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

That's a bit of a perspective-transference there. Formed/unformed isn't under consideration on the pro-life side. Existence/non-existence is probably more accurate. Both are equally deserving of the right to exist. Abortion skews that balance one-way only. Otherwise, there is a bog of parsing which awaits over rights-qualifiers such as independence, formed, survivability, etc. Qualifiers many of which even abortion-rights advocates cannot agree upon. I have encountered many of whom which argue from these positions, but always in varied combinations of pseudo-criteria.

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

See my response here. (http://talk-politics.livejournal.com/1144626.html?thread=91077170#t91077170) I don't profess to know when "personhood" begins, but I do know that a fetus is part of a woman's body, and that's why I'm pro-choice, because this decision shouldn't be in the hands of anyone other than them whose bodies these fetuses are growing inside. To do otherwise necessarily requires ALL of us to adopt ONE standard on this, which is NOT forthcoming.

Or, to put it another way, whether fetuses are people is a question mark, but whether women are people whose lives are going to be irreversibly altered by being forced to bear children is NOT a question mark. Guess which side I side with.

[blue-mangos.livejournal.com]

It's not a question mark in Canada, our Supreme Court took a stance on it, declaring it began when the fetus is expelled in a living state from the birth canal. Yet another reason I am so happy to live here.

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

In the absence of hard-and-fast reliable evidence to the contrary, I'd favor Canada's standard, but yeah, what I'm really arguing in favor of is the right of you to not be hamstrung by my or anyone else's subjective standards on this shit. I favor the right of women to abort for any reason at all, up to and including, "Because I don't feel like it," which is frequently treated an an illegitimate justification. Fuck, the only reason I'm not having kids is because *I* don't feel like it, which is why I'm currently saving up for a VASECTOMY, because MY worst nightmare is to learn that I've accidentally impregnated a woman who wants to KEEP it.

[bex.livejournal.com]

Yet another reason I WOULD be happy to live there.

[prog-expat.livejournal.com]

Our Supreme Court also took a stance on it: if it can't survive outside the mother's body then it's part of her body and her right to privacy makes it none of the government's business if she aborts or not. The only reason there's a question mark is that some can't leave well enough alone and keep trying to spray-paint a question mark on the issue.

[blue-mangos.livejournal.com]

But did they actually define fetal personhoood? See, this is the reason Canada has no abortion laws to tamper with as there is no possible criminal act that can be involved when there is only one person involved.

Several individuals and a couple of governmnents, in 99 and I believe 08 tried to topple this ruling but our Court shuts them down every time.

[prog-expat.livejournal.com]

Is there a difference between "it's part of her body" and "it's not a person"?

[blue-mangos.livejournal.com]

Yes. Here, even though they also recognize that the rights of the women involved weigh more heavily they also took the stance on when a fetus becomes a person. Two totally separate issues yet only the latter keeps abortion laws off the books.

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

I'm dubious on the scientific accuracy of the claim that a fetus is 'part of a woman's body'. They are connected biologically to be sure, but the way it makes it sound is as if its an appendix. Every part of a person's own body contains the same genetic blueprint.

"Or, to put it another way, whether fetuses are people is a question mark, but whether women are people whose lives are going to be irreversibly altered by being forced to bear children is NOT a question mark. Guess which side I side with.

I agree with the first part. Personhood is subjective, but material existence is not The consequences, as difficult and life-altering as they are for the woman cannot compare with the consequences of being denied existence (which is a separate and scientifically observable phenomenon different from personhood). One can mitigate the consequences for the woman because she's still alive and capable of being helped. One cannot mitigate the consequences for having one's existence denied. That defines the side of the line I've come down on.

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

If they're not separately viable, then they aren't separate persons under the law, that's the short version.

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

If we are to judge criteria upon which a subject may be considered to have rights on existing law, then one is placed in the unsavory position of saying by implication that the slaves in the American south were not deserving of rights because the law did not recognize them as having such.

[curseangel.livejournal.com]

...did you seriously just compare a non-sentient clump of cells to actual, real slaves in the South? Oh my god that is disgusting.

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

I'm saying that public opinion and legal status-quo is a poor foundation to form an argument around.

As I've said, the sentience argument as well as viability, survivability, and the level of development, as well as any other measure by which others have tried to argue the line of personhood exists, is not relevant from the pro-life side. It's existence. Both the woman, and the fetus exist as observable physical beings with separate genetic identities. That's it. Every other attempt to argue personhood rather than existence is as arbitrary as skin color.

If you doubt this, then how is it that there is some rather significant division even on the pro-choice side when it comes to deciding what should determine personhood and when rights should be granted? I know from personal experience that the line is drawn differently every time I engage in such discussions. Rights from that perspective seem to exist on a sliding scale, of sorts.

[curseangel.livejournal.com]

IMO, the significant division between "person" and "not person" is, um, you've gotta be born. Excuse me for being a little brusque here, but I simply can't get through the argument that women's rights should be trampled until they no longer exist over a parasitic organism that cannot survive if removed from the woman's body. It's not a person at that point. It isn't sentient, it lives as a parasite, etc... no, that's not a person. In my opinion and that of nearly every other pro-choicer I know (which is a lot, as I refuse to associate with anti-choicers), a fetus becomes a person when it is born. Until then, it doesn't get rights.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

You're right, else we would not have had a Civil War in the first place and would have become the Domination of Draka.

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

This is so illogical of a statement that it's just as disgusting.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

That's how Chief Justice Roger B. Taney and five USSC justices, the Copperheads, and the 800,000 men and women who fought in Confederate Grey and served in the civil government, what passed for it, of the Confederacy and died to the tune of 260,000 thought of that question.

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

And that's an example of why I cannot abide the an appeal that elevates the status-quo to its own basis for justification.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Which is great and all but the number of Northerners, white and black, and Southerners white and black who died that "though he may be poor not a man shall be a slave" overrode these people and Lincoln won decisive re-election on this basis. While the Copperheads' ties to the Confederacy temporarily discredited them and the postwar consensus saw even the KKK fully aware that slavery was not simply nearly dead but truly and most sincerely dead.

[curseangel.livejournal.com]

So, basically... you believe a fetus has more rights than the woman. That's what you're saying. The fetus has additional rights to be completely dependent upon and risk the very life of the woman in order to subsist, therefore making its rights actually more important than the rights of the woman and negating all of her human rights. You're saying women who are pregnant have no rights of their own.

Lovely.

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

No, that' what you're saying I'm saying.

[curseangel.livejournal.com]

No, by saying women shouldn't have the right to abortion because fetuses should have rights, you are saying that those rights should supersede the human rights of the woman. By saying women shouldn't have the right of basic bodily autonomy, you are saying the fetus should have greater rights than the pregnant woman. Period. Nice try at dodging though.

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

Which right is more fundamental, the right to bodily autonomy, or the right to bodily integrity, when the two conflict?

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

See here. (http://talk-politics.livejournal.com/1144626.html?thread=91085874#t91085874) If a fetus is not a person, it does not have a guaranteed right to exist. Otherwise, anyone taking anti-viral medication would be guilty of committing genocide. And no, one cannot entirely mitigate the consequences on the woman's life, and realistically, in the vast majority of cases, there won't even be any token gestures to do so, because the vast majority of consequences WILL disproportionately affect the woman rather than the man, all in the name of a collection of cells whose personhood is, at best, a question mark.