“…Abortion can be another word for mercy.”
—Actress Anne Hathaway, revealing her ethical deficits and intellectual limitations while appearing on “The View”
Oh, hell. I’ve always liked Ann Hathaway. Now I have to continue liking her despite knowing she’s a brain-dead, self-awareness-lacking, ethics dummy.
Just so I’m not accused of misrepresenting Hathaway’s moronic and offensive claim, here is her full sentence:
“[In] my own personal experience with abortion and I don’t think we talk about this enough, abortion can be another word for mercy. We don’t know. We don’t know. We know that no two pregnancies are alike, and it follows that no two lives are alike, it follows that no two conceptions are alike. So how can we have a law, how can we have a point of view on this that says we must treat everything the same?”
Someone can only make such an absurd statement by refusing to acknowledge what an abortion is, and that two lives are involved, not just one. If she were arguing for abortion when a fetus is hopelessly deformed or certain to have devastating maladies, that’s a legitimate ethical debate to have. Abortion then might be described as merciful. (But some advocate aborting Down Syndrome babies as similarly “merciful.”) Hathaway wasn’t considering the unborn at all, however. In her warped (but too common) view, it is mercy for the mother to allow her kill the child for her own benefit.
If she were saying something this outrageous anywhere but among the den of fools that populate “The View,” someone might have challenged her by asking, “How is killing an unborn human fetus merciful to that fetus? Wouldn’t genuine mercy be giving the unborn child a chance at life?”
Of course, nobody said that, and I pronounce the failure as public discourse malpractice. Hathaway, meanwhile, went on to say something almost as dumb later. “And by the way, this is not a moral conversation about abortion,” the actress said. “This is a practical conversation about women’s rights, and by the way human rights, because women’s rights are human rights.”
Well sure, if you ignore the ethical and moral issues in abortion, the topic is easy. The question that intelligent and fair abortion debaters must wrestle with is whether it can be morally and ethically acceptable to give anyone, mother or not, a right to end the life of another human being.
Hathaway’s callous, ignorant and unethical quote should be a rallying cry for the anti-abortion movement. It is signature significance.
______________________
Pointer: Steve Witherspoon
Ethics Alarms 
I don’t think the law treats everything the same. For any case there seems to be a measure of discretion when it comes to sentencing. For the same result, a number of different charges could be filed, depending on how that result came about, and what the intent was.
I don’t think the law treats everything the same now, because now we have 50 laws, some more permissive toward abortion, others much more restrictive. Before, it was one federal law, with 50 attempts to finagle it closer to or further from unfettered abortion.
I do want to be sympathetic toward rape victims. I do want parents in tough financial situations to have the aid they need. I do understand how taxing a new child is, and how that can be difficult psychologically, not just physiologically, for each individual. Some women absolutely love being pregnant. Some women, like my wife, have intense discomfort during pregnancy. For others, pregnancy can be very dangerous. All of this real and should never be ignored.
However, I think it is important to state clearly and repeatedly: abortion kills a human being. A defenseless human being in the one place that is supposed to be safest for him. I think it also bears repeating that abortion is detrimental to women for one very important factor: with abortion as an option, she no longer has the defense of pregnancy to prevent a man from using her and discarding her with no further care for the fact that sex is geared to procreation.
I’ve tried asking some women what they are really afraid of if abortion were not an option. I’ve only had a tiny handful of answers, and they really seem to fall into one category. If they don’t have abortion, they can’t engage in all the sex they want, which really is about keeping the attention of the men they desire. Again, that’s a small sample, hardly a survey and much less scientific study, but it strikes me as reasonable. With first contraceptives and then abortion, women lost control of their bodies. They had to offer more and more of themselves for less and less in order to keep the affection they wanted and needed. And it was a cycle: the more they gave of themselves, the more they needed abortion, and the less men respected them because anything that actually tied a man to the woman he just slept with is easily disposed of.
Giving her the benefit of the doubt, it is easier to be empathetic toward a grown human than to an unborn baby.
Your position is principled and clear.
That does not mean it is manifest.
However principled you may want to be on this question, it is reasonable to observe that empathy toward a person may be stronger than the empathy felt toward the unborn.
-Jut
Whoa! I would not have written a post if she had said,”Abortion can be another word for empathy.” I don’t even necessarily disagree with that. Empathy for the woman’s plight, and thus justifying the sacrifice of a less substantial life, albeit human.
But mercy shouldn’t be used in any context that involves killing. I could understand a justification for capital punishment that cited empathy (with the victim’s family). But using “mercy” would be ridiculous.
I believe the argument of the left is that children born to (or adopted by) parents with complex feelings towards them is sentencing the un-aborted person to a life of “abuse” and “trauma,” and many of them do seem to believe it would be better to never have been born than have to endure that. Remember, these are the same people who see white people adopting black children as an act of racism; who see acknowledging that someone was previously another gender as a hate crime; who see the 225 black men killed by police as a genocide; who think climate change will destroy the world in a decade. Their own skins are almost too thin to sustain life these days, I think many of them really see it as an act of love to snuff out a life that might start out faced with any kind of adversity. Many of them report that they refuse to have children themselves just based on the general adversity that humanity faces right now. They also tend to be supporters of assisted suicide. I think considering abortion as “mercy” is entirely consistent with their warped worldview.
I think you may be giving abortion advocates like Hathaway to much credit, or maybe not enough. I don’t think they consider that another human life is involved at all. The “thing” that is removed is just abstraction, an inconvenient, maybe malign part of their bodies. They can’t afford to consider it a nascent human life. Then they would have to actually do some ethical balancing.
I may have said this here before but I want to make it really clear again that the issue is women’s refusal to accept personal responsibility. Attending a women’s college in the late 60s was a real eye-opener. The argument always came down to wanting to be as free as men when it came to sex. There was a refusal to acknowledge that as a woman we have the distinct privilege of motherhood but that requires a rather heavy dose of self-sacrifice. The suggestion of saying no to your date and accepting the probable result that there would not be another date was too much of a sacrifice. As the saying goes “Ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” but abortion seemed to provide an easy out. My observation after 50+ years is that the issue of personal responsibility is more necessary than ever and applies to both men and women.
Why not simply adopt the language they use: “Abortion is violence.” It is far truer than silence is violence or words can be violence. Learn from them and use their strategies against them.
Watch them squirm trying to argue against the idea that abortion is violence. The best they can do is getting to the point that like all violent acts, violence is sometimes necessary it should be minimized.
I think this is another one of those things that shows how the political left has become completely unhinged and disconnected from reality.
Here’s another one…
EU Warns Twitter Not to Restore Free Speech Protections After Calls from Clinton and Other Democratic Leaders
It is anti-American, anti-Constitution and pure political persecution for Democratic leaders, like Hillary Clinton, to call on the EU to pass censorship laws to prevent Elon Musk from restoring free speech protections on Twitter. Actively encouraging foreign entities to do the things we cannot do in the United States because of our constitution is a clear betrayal of values set forth in the United States Constitution and the culture that it created, this is a form of treason.
This is an existential threat to Democracy. I also believe the word disinformation must use quotation marks to distinguish between non-approved speech and information that has no basis in fact. Without quotes around the word it carries the connotation of legitimacy.
“The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; those who are in the shadows of life; the sick, the needy and the handicapped” Hubert Humphrey although Pope John Paul and others have said similar things, according to the internet.
One day our current society will be tried, judged and found lacking in the court of public opinion based solely on how dismissive we are of the most vulnerable of us all without the ability to speak for themselves, the unborn and very young.
Oh, hell. I’ve always like Ann Hathaway. Now I have to continue liking her despite knowing she’s a brain-dead, self-awareness-lacking, ethics dummy.
I don’t think she’s actually brain-dead, I think she’s just so willing to be indoctrinated on things like this that she searches hard for rationalizations. I’ve always found that if you search hard enough, you can rationalize anything. To be perhaps too fair to the Hollywood left, it’s very difficult to have any position in opposition to their groupthink and not negatively impact your career. These non-ethical considerations (Being on the outs with the in-crowd, cancellation to a greater or lesser extent, and possibly losing lucrative jobs) are, as you have written, powerful alarm blockers.
I think that’s what animates many celebrities that appear intelligent on paper but sound stupid and ethically vapid when they speak. Hathaway, in her semi-defense, has been steeped from birth in Hollywood leftism and comfortable in her cocoon of Leftist thought. Critical examination of her views would upset this pleasant little apple cart, and the motivation not to do so must be very powerful.
But she deserves the award nonetheless. None of these non-ethical considerations are justification for such a blatant, biased search to justify the unjustifiable, and to say, using Yoo’s Rationalization, “Abortion isn’t the merciless killing of an unborn child, it is rather mercy toward the mother” (i.e. “it isn’t what it is”).
When abortion apologists speak of “women’s rights,” it’s frightening that they don’t bother to consider what “right” they are actually defending when it comes to abortion. Why should any woman have a right to kill her child unborn? How is it that her comfort and non-ethical considerations trump the natural rights of a child to live? After all, isn’t life itself the most basic and fundamental right of all? It’s a mystery for which I expect there is no rational answer.
Hathaway is brainwashed and has no desire whatever to allow that brainwashing to be challenged. She is comfortable in her little tiny circle of moral certitude, and desires no intrusion for reason, logic, or actual morality.
What about the last sentence:
“So how can we have a law, how can we have a point of view on this that says we must treat everything the same?”
And here’s me thinking that is exactly what all laws do.
“So how can we have a law, how can we have a point of view on this that says we must treat everything the same?”
So . . . Anne . . . I’m just curious . . . what’s your hot take on those Jim Crow laws? You wanna advocate for bringing those back now . . . ? Since . . . you know . . . you seem to think that treating everything (or in this more specific case, everyone) the same is Bad Thing™ now . . . right . . . ?
Your thoughts, Anne . . . ?
–Dwayne