Former Senator Kelly Ayotte is the GOP candidate for Governor of New Hampshire. She is also one of the long-time Roe v. Wade opponents who is being targeted by pro-abortion groups in attack ads. If you listen closely, some of the ads reveal the dark and ominous heart of the ‘We Love Abortion!’ movement.
I have had to watch one such ad repeatedly while following the Boston Red Sox as they are just-barely contending for a wild card berth. A sad-eyed mother reveals that when she was pregnant, a doctor who checked out the embryo (that was well past the usual legal abortion period in many states including New Hampshire) told the mother that “my baby would not survive.” She goes on to say that Ayotte is so cruel that she would make a mother like me “carry” a baby for months knowing that “it would not survive.” Ayotte supports the current 24 week limit on abortions.
There is so much that is intellectually dishonest about the ad and its implied argument. Because of this mother’s unusual dilemma with an unhealthy unborn child, mothers should be allowed to abort healthy, even viable unborn children if they awake one morning and decide, “Eh, this is too much trouble. Time to kill the thing. Thank goodness I hadn’t named her yet!” Is this part of what Ayotte is “cruel” for opposing?
More ethically suspicious is the ad’s careful use of the word “survive.” What did the doctor say, exactly? That the baby wouldn’t survive birth? That it wouldn’t survive a month? That it wouldn’t survive childhood, or adolescence? None of us “survive” eventually. What is the difference ethically from aborting a living unborn child because it won’t survive some minimum period of time after it is born, and wanting to kill a child who is diagnosed after birth with a fatal condition?
I don’t see any. The mother, meanwhile, frames the issue with her inconvenience and misfortune, as if the life of the unborn child is irrelevant. The doctor might be wrong. I believe that a shot at life, however short, is preferable to no life at all.
The anti-Ayotte ad confuses and obscures the real issues in the abortion controversy rather than clarifying them.
Ethics Alarms 
The sign says keep your law out of my body. That would mean she or anyone could do as they wish with her body.
Without specifying what if we were to accept the premise then that sentiment would apply to the unborn currently gestating would it not? Obviously, we don’t make laws specific to her so a law allowing abortion until some point would also apply to the person in the womb.
Her sign also assumes that the baby is inside her body.
Consider the from mouth to anus, the path is a tube which is outside of the body… The body being protected by a mucus membrane. Similarly, the uterus can be considered outside of the body as well. And when there is a baby located there, there is a temporary mucus plug that protects the baby from infection while gestating.
By this reasoning the laws would still be outside her body.
I suppose my point was that laws that proscribe what you can do with your body includes laws proscribing what others can do to your body. That is how I interpreted the literal meaning of the sign to be.
This highlights what I think is wrong with much of progressive politics. You can define it a couple of ways: 1) the exception creates the rule; or 2) protect the lowest common denominator (there has to be a better way to say that).
As far as the first formulation, you see it in this argument and many other arguments. We define the rule based upon the most extreme outcome of it. As you suggest, they oppose the general rule because they found this one person in an exceptional circumstance and want to frame the rule so that the extreme outliers are not affected by it. They do this with abortion all the time. When Dobbs came down, they worried about the 10-year old rape victim who would be unable to cross state lines to get an abortion. To modify a saying by Martin Luther King, Jr.: a denial of abortion to someone anywhere is a denial of abortion to everyone everywhere. Any bad result requires scrapping the whole system.
You see it in the voting issues regularly as well, but it more fits the lowest common denominator formulation. You had a quiz today about what to do with people who could not follow directions closely enough to enter a date on an envelope. If it is voter ID, they focus on the people who can’t get an ID, even if it is free, with free transportation to the ID Center, with subsidies for meals and a hotel stay if you live more than 60 miles from the center, and free Uber rides from the hotel to the ID Center, with paid attendants who will carry any legless voter from the curb to the service desk at the ID Center so that EVERYONE will be able to get a state issued ID.
EXCEPT-someone will ALWAYS fall through the cracks. When you cater to the lowest common denominator, there will always be someone just a little bit lower.
I am not quite sure if it is a form of a slippery slope argument, or reductio ad absurdum, but I tend to see this style of argument more on the left than on the right.
It’s why we have free or reduced lunches. Or, in Minnesota, free breakfast and lunch for school children. It was another example of the lowest common denominator. Some kid out there did not have parents that were responsible enough to get them fed, even with SNAP benefits, and free Uber rides to the grocery store, etc. etc. etc. There will always be some kid who will fall through whatever crack there is. So, we cater to that extreme example in setting policy. (Aside: when Walz started funding breakfast and lunch for all public school students, I was annoyed. I took a bag lunch to school for almost my entire time in school. It is not that hard. My children would either make their lunch or they would draw on a payment account that we set up with the school. Now, they both pretty much get their free school lunch everyday. I have since reconciled myself (rationalized?) with this in two ways: 1) it is NOT a federal program and many of my problems with schooling comes from federal interference in the state school (e.g. free and reduced lunches subsidies); and 2) I acknowledge that the public educational system is a legitimate state function that is in the State Constitution (or so I am told; I suppose I could check that), and a provision for meals within that system seems to fit within the parameters of the mission as much as something like bussing is. it would not necessarily be my policy, but it is a defensible state policy.)
But, part of this is why I did not respond to today’s quiz about ballots in Pennsylvania. Part of me is inclined to respond that they should get the date right. How hard can that be?! At the same time, if it is something that will disqualify a vote, and we believe voting is an important right, we should not set up silly obstacles that will disqualify a vote. Any obstacle should have a valid purpose. As some suggested, a postmark on the mail-in ballot should suffice. If there is a reason it won’t, that rationale should be plainly stated (such as: we want Voter ID because we want to verify that the person voting is an eligible voter).
Of course, where the Left will not cater to the lowest common denominator is any requirement that can disqualify a candidate that could take votes away from their candidate: https://ethicsalarms.com/2024/08/19/stop-making-me-defend-michigans-proto-totalitarian-democrats/#comments
(I had to agree with your analysis there.)
-Jut
If a woman is free to do whatever she wants with her own body, why is prostitution still illegal in most places?
I’m curious as to which of the three people holding the white signs is responsible for their construction? Or did some person/organization make them and hand them out for the demonstration?