Thursday, September 22, 2011
Kaczor responds to O'Brien
Prof. Christopher Kaczor (Philosophy, Loyola-LA) joins the conversation, here (at Public Discourse), with Dennis O'Brien about abortion. (I linked, here, to the Commonweal discussion among Peter Steinfels, Cathy Kaveny, and O'Brien.) Kaczor writes, in the reponse to the (I think entirely unconvincing) claim that principled opposition to abortion requires that one be committed to punishing abortions in the same way, and to the same extent, as one punishes the intentional killing of a human being who has been born:
[A] penalty’s severity is not determined solely by the wrongness of the criminal act, but also by the likely consequences of that wrong for the community. . . .
So, one can hold that abortion and the murder of an adult both intentionally kill an innocent human being without being forced to also hold that abortion and the murder of an adult should be punished in exactly the same way by law.
Read the whole thing!
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2011/09/kaczor-responds-to-obrien.html
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"So, one can hold that abortion and the murder of an adult both intentionally kill an innocent human being without being forced to also hold that abortion and the murder of an adult should be punished in exactly the same way by law."
But can one hold that abortion and the murder of an adult both intentionally kill an innocent human being without being forced to hold that at least SOME punishment, however minimal, however rarely meted out, ought to exist for a woman who procures an abortion?
Louisiana has a “trigger law,” set to go into effect if Roe is overturned. The penalties for doctors performing abortions would be $100,000 fines and up to 10 years in jail. Is there any other crime where the person who commits it is punished so severely but the person who arranges to have it done and pays for it is completely innocent before the law?
As I have said in a number of recent discussions in various forums, if I were in favor of criminalizing abortion, being purely pragmatic, I would not seek any penalties for women who procure abortions. The public would not accept it. But if I believed abortion was murder, I can't see how I could argue that women who procure abortions should not be punished because they weren't *morally* culpable.
By the way, about 50% of women who procure abortions in any given year have had at least one abortion previously. The recidivism rate for those who commit homicide is around 6% to 7%. It is much less likely that someone convicted of homicide will kill again than a woman who has her first abortion will have a second abortion *and* a third abortion.