Demea wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Demea wrote:
I don't think that anybody would (publicly) disagree with the notion that aborting solely due to the gender of the fetus is reprehensible.
More reprehensible than dealing drugs, or under aged drinking?
You think that underaged drinking is more reprehensible than aborting a fetus because you don't like the gender?
No. Which is exactly my point.
If you walk up to a store clerk with a case of beer and tell the clerk "Some kids in the parking lot asked me to buy this for them", and the clerk sells the beer to you anyway, said clerk is subject to legal action.
If you walk up to an abortion doctor and tell him "I want to get an abortion if my fetus is a girl", and the doctor performs the abortion for you anyway, he is subject to no legal action at all.
If one really is more reprehensible than the other, then why is it ok to place such a burden on the involved professional in one case, but not in the other? Remember, I'm responding to the argument that we shouldn't do this because it's somehow impractical to implement or we can't determine what the doctor knows about the motives for the abortion. I think that's a BS response though. We do this in many other cases.
Is anyone seriously arguing that a store clerk should be more capable of determining the motivation of someone buying beer than a doctor determining the motivation of a woman seeking an abortion? Cause that's pretty darn silly.
Quote:
You're talking about definitive actions, not internal motives. One is easy to observe and prove; the other is not.
I'm using cases that are more or less identical to the proposed laws. If a doctor knowingly performs an abortion in which the gender was a determining factor, then he can be held legally responsible. How is that any different than a store clerk who knows someone's going to provide the beer he sells to a minor? Or a landlord who knowingly continues to rent his property to someone distributing drugs? Or a gun store clerk knowingly selling a gun to someone planning to kill someone else.
We can toss our hands up and say "They can't possibly know what someone else is going to do or why", but that's not the point. If they can't know, then the law doesn't affect them. It's designed to make it so that if someone walks into a liquor store and says "sell me some beer so I can provide it for those kids", or walks into a gun store and says "sell me a gun so I can kill my boss", or walks into an clinic and says "give me an abortion because I don't want a girl", the law will compel the person providing the good or service to refuse it.
We do this in other cases, so the argument that it's somehow impossible to do it here is just plain false.
Edited, Jun 14th 2012 6:51pm by gbaji