Actually, Josh, if you interpret it as equal treatment to an infant or toddler, you don't need to give them preferential treatment. As has been said before, if a young child accidentally harms or kills a parent, the law wouldn't hold them legally responsible as they aren't capable of analyzing the situation. The same is true for people with certain severe mental handicaps.
No one is asking to treat a fetus the same as an adult, they're asking to treat a fetus the same as a newborn or toddler--which few would argue have a right to life.
Now, as to whether those have preferential treatment under the law, remember that in addition to lack of culpability, they also lack a lot of rights. It's different, but not necessarily preferential.
The law is objective, and justice is blind. Forgive me for lacking the legal jargon, but different status under the law amouts to preferentialism. Minors, as you point out, enjoy a different status, explicitly, with regards to their standing under the law. Sometimes they are preferred, such as the assignment of further rights and protections (and exemptions) than adults enjoy, whereas in other cases it is adults who are preferred, mostly in the arena of "adult" behaviors such as voting and alcohol consumption, from which minors are restricted.
Likewise--and perhaps this is a delicate point, since Maelstrom and others can't seem to wrap their heads around it--if the unborn were given no special treatment under the law, they would liable for their aggressions against their mothers. This is precisely as absurd as you say, which is what my poll exploits--surely you of all people could not have failed to see this basic and obvious satire. No one in this thread, myself least of all, is actually proposing that the unborn should be treated as adults. My argument has nothing to do with how the unborn should be treated; it has to do with the idiocy of those who claim that fetuses and such should be entitled to full legal rights, without qualification. This sort of claim opens up a big can of worms, which is what I was highlighting with my poll.
The anti-abortion Gestapo puts very little thought into the logical grounding of its arguments. In these people's minds, a fetus is a person--a human being with standing under the law, like you or I. They do not perturb their intellects with the nuances of what particular legal status an unborn human should enjoy in keeping with their moral beliefs; to them these details are not a part of their mindset until somebody like me makes a poll pointing out that giving fetuses equal standing makes them equally criminally culpable, at which point the Gestapo is of course forced to "clarify" (i.e., sidepedal) that by "equal treatment" they really mean "special treatment." Then I would make another poll pointing out that the unborn are thereby favored over their mothers in legal rights, at which their little Death Star explodes in defeat and I get a medal.
It doesn't matter how much a person is "valued"; what matters is his or her legal standing--in this case, their "responsibility" under the law, as Malestrom puts it. These religious nuts think that because they want to value a clump of cells on par with a human being, their moral evaluation should translate into the law of the land. Rubbish! They can sit in church and foam at the mouth all they like, but damned if they want to make laws inhibiting the freedoms of decent people. In the arena of logical thought, their moral valuations can be torn to shreds--as this poll accomplishes--because this morality game is extraneous and irrelevant. Biologically speaking, pregnancy is a war that must be fought, with no crimes committed. There doesn't need to be a law punishing the unborn, because from this secular perspective the process of pregnancy is simply a risk that willing women will have to take, no good or bad about it. But
morally speaking, the notion that an unborn human
deserves special legal standing creates all sorts of legal indigestion. Even so, it might still be possible to morally evaluate a pregnancy and the character of an unborn child in a logically consistent manner, but staking a virulent anti-abortion position precludes this possibility outright. Anti-abortionism is flagrantly sexist, and is therefore as far away from "morality" as can be, accepting the Devil's morals. (This nonsensical forced digression is, if anything, an indication of the inherent flaw of morality itself.)
There is nothing left to argue; what you are saying barely even sounds like an argument against what I have said, except you bothered to style it as such. Maelstrom's bone to pick is that:
[The Religious Right] may hold the fetus and the woman to be the same *value*, but they don't hold them to the same level of *responsibility*...
I think you can see what he is trying to say, but hopefully you can also see that it misses the point of this entire exercise. Only if my poll were seriously indicative of my feelings toward the culpability of the unborn would he have a case. If that were so, then he could rightly say "But Josh, it's ridiculous to hold the unborn to the same legal standard as we hold adults." And I would agree, and hold my head in shame for ever making such an idiotic proposal. But that isn't what this poll is about; it is only what Malestrom
thinks it is about. This poll is about the lack of critical thought of the anti-abortion nutjobs, the idiocy of their moral proclamations, and the difficulties of integrating their illogical and cruel morals with any legal system that claims to uphold justice.
And seriously, "anti-abortion miscreants?" There are plenty of zealots and genuine people (and others in between) on both sides of the argument. While it's *possible* for one side to have a significant "advantage" in the concentration of "good" people, you can't deny humanity of many (most?) people on both sides, nor can you hide the fact that many on your side are motivated by the wrong reasons (such as self-interest).
My language is not rhetorical. Well, yes it is a bit, but only as a side effect of the allusions I draw. Anyone who opposes abortion also implicitly holds that pregnant women are the property of the state and deserve marginal or zero standing above an unborn clump of cells inside their belly, and therefore is close enough in ideology to the atrocities of the Gestapo that a comparison is legitimate. "Miscreants," "nutjobs," "ignorant fools"; I would stand by every one of those phrases not rhetorically but
literally.
Let me explain a few things.
Racists, sexists, xenophobes...most bigots are as decent as the rest of us when you see them outside of their bigotry. How many of those Southern gentlefolk of old were as sweet as strawberry pie except for the "inconvenient" fact that they took part in the hideous practice of slavery? I do not dispute that many anti-abortionists are perfectly sweet people when they are not busy advocating that women are less than human. Your point has no merit at all; the Devil must be a very charming fellow too.
Moving on, there are plenty of people on the pro-abortion side who support abortion for the wrong reasons, such as for reasons of privacy or convenience. There are plenty more whose logic is inferior to the virtue of their stance on the issue. But none of their ineptitudes nullify that inherent virtue of bestowing upon women the same liberties enjoyed by men.
What you are trying to do is entirely outside the realm of this whole thread: By alleging that there are so many good people on the anti-abortion side, and so many "wrong" people on the pro-abortion, you are implying that, at best, the abortion debate is not important and, at worst, that anti-abortionism is the correct posture. This brings your motives into question. You came to the Compendium pretending to be a liberal. You have since revealed yourself to be one hell of a committed devil's advocate. Well, that's another phrase we can take literally here. You ought to be aware of who and what you are defending.