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Wednesday, January 22, 2003 |
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40,000,000 dead over 30 years. That is a big number. That number alone should give us pause for reflection today. How can we justify such a number of deaths? The death toll of the holocaust pales by comparison. 9:30:21 AM 
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Following up on the Roe v Wade thread I found a Gallup poll on Roe v Wade that was published just this week. The poll suggests that many of us are confused about our positions (or I am just confused by the statistics). 53% view Roe v Wade as a good thing. 80% approve of abortion in at least some cases. At the same time 46% of the country consider themselves pro-life. I guess that means the pro-life label is sometimes adopted by those who favor abortion under special circumstances. On the flip side, 60% of the country disapproves of abortion in all but extreme circumstances.
If the Roe v Wade decision was a good one, why does only 47% of the country support it (identified by pro-choice support)? More interesting is that 18% of the country feels it should be illegal in all cases while another 42% feel it should be illegal in all but a few exceptional cases. That means roughly 60% of the country is opposed to the convenience abortions so prevalent today. |
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Dave Winer asks us to to pause a moment today and think about the issues on both sides of the Roe v Wade decision made 30 years ago today. As Dave accurately points out, the decision has forever chaged our culture, our society, and our lifestyles. Has any other supreme court decision been so hotly contested 30 years after its making? This fact alone ought to give us pause for consideration. The Brown decision leading to school desegregation in 1968 was certainly controversial, but the value of desegregation is no longer contested (although its implementation is). The two cases offer an interesting comparison. In both people wanted to have more control over their lives (e.g. who their children went to school with, the choice to kill a child they did not want) even though said control defies socially accepted norms for good behavior.
I was reading Seth Dillingham's site yesterday and stumbled across a conversation about the origin of morality. One of the points made was that the negative variant of the golden rule is self-evident: "Don't do unto others as you wouldn't have them do unto you". That one's easier to remember, because if I punch you, you'll probably punch me back [from Seth]. Sometimes the desire to control our own lives results in controlling the lives of others as well. For those on the receiving end, this is not a good thing. The downtrodden and the dead, however, have no means to punch back. |
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From Simon Fell: .... Seems to me that all the Web Services & .NET bloggers have xbox's now. Perhaps its time for a bloggers MechAssault session? Count me in Simon. My Gamertag is "Thorongil". What's yours? 8:35:18 AM
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