npyati's Comments

You're right. I guess I was sympathetic to the protesters because they seemed caught unawares, but that's not an excuse. If they want people to hear their message, they should be able to answer at least the most basic questions about it.

"No matter how many comments we see here (or don't due to scoring), we're not going to make a dent in what others believe. Is it fair to conclude as much?"

It seems that way to me most of the time, but people's minds on important issues have always been changed, sometimes by something as unexpected as a post in an internet forum.

Anyway, it may be difficult to change the minds of some, but there are often plenty of people who haven't yet made up their mind (especially on an issue like abortion), and witnessing a debate can help them do so.

That's a fair point, but the question of punishment for women receiving abortions is critical for a more subtle reason.

If abortion law is changed such that it is punishable for a doctor or other practitioner to provide an abortion but not for a woman to receive an abortion, then surely the most likely outcome will be a marked increase in attempts at self-provided abortion, or back-alley abortions. Such abortions would be extremely dangerous and very often unsuccessful. This is an outcome that, I hope, nobody wants.

If anti-choice advocates are serious about using government to end abortion, they need to start thinking about punishments for women who receive them. Given the deep anxiety and panic that often accompany the decision to abort, indeed even in life-threatening ways when safer abortion is not possible, the punishment to women would have to be severe enough and the likelihood of getting caught high enough that women would prefer to have the baby, despite whatever reasons they might have for aborting, rather than risk prosecution. The cruelty of such punishment (given that women are likely already traumatized by the procedure) and the invasion of privacy necessary to discover illegal abortions should be enough to make almost all anti-choice activists think twice about advocating criminalization. It seems from this video that they haven't yet thought once.

All of that being said, it seems that the goal of these particular activists is not actually to criminalize abortion but rather to express popular disapproval of the practice in the hopes of changing the culture around abortion so that women will voluntarily choose not to abort. This is certainly the only ethical way to reduce the number of abortions. The inerviewer here is exploiting their inability to articulate this distinction.