According to a story I just read the legality or illegality of abortion doesn’t affect the number of abortions that are performed. Many abortions are done in poor countries where even legal ones are performed by undertrained personel, often under substandard conditions. Interestingly in Europe there are more abortions than live births.
I pose a hypothethical question: if it were demonstrated that the legality of murder was no indicator of how many murders were committed, could we conclude that we may as well make murder legal?
I think purely from an interventionist standpoint murder needs to be illegal. For example, suicide is illegal not because they will fine you if you commit that crime (they obviously can’t if it was successful) but because if an member of law enforcement were in a position to stop a suicide they would have the authority to do so – they would be “stopping a crime”.
Within that, it is clear that law enforcement is never going to be 100% effective, so the reasons for laws aren’t just to give members of law enforcement the authority to stop crimes if they see them but also to codify values.
It depends, if you think that saving one “life” is worth it, then you’d wanna keep on bothering with it. If you’re looking for a 100% reduction in abortions when you pass the law that says so in order to justify the time it takes to get that done, then you’ll probably just wanna give up.
Let’s say for the sake of argument that there will be 1,000 abortions this year if abortion is legal and there’ll be 1,000 abortions this year if it’s illegal. For the purposes of discussion let’s say the law won’t impact the numbers at all.
Social order? I guess we all pay a little bit of our freedom “to” for a nice chunk of freedom “from”. I think it helps raise the minimum standard for everyone.
If there’s no effect to the numbers, the law as it is applied now is probably just wasting resources. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the law is worthless. It may be that the application of the law is faulty.
Phaed - I read the article, and I cannot divine how it establishes that legality has no effect on abortions. It is, of course, simply a lobbying effort for contraception.
As to your question, the reason that murder is illegal is not to prevent revenge, but to institutionalise it. It’s just better, more instrumental to civil order, that revenge be exacted in a formalised way, than to have continual blood feuds. It’s easier to measure the revenge - and to determine its limits. Think Hatfield-McCoy, and those nasty Firenziens.
For example if the numbers of people in slavery remained the same, legal or not, should we legalize slavery again?
For example the NPT, the number of nations which sign is no indicator of how many nations will get a nuke, but we do not make nukes legal for all nations.
What a part of people do does not nessicitate throught the whole.
The article doesn’t precisely say that, no. It implied that the legality or illegality was not a meaningul influence on how many abortions were done. I merely used this as a jumping off point to frame a hypothetical question.
Didn’t notice your reply- it was timed right between me & Smears (kind of an oogie place to be ). Your points are excellent and I’d agree. I just wanted to see what ILP’ers think the purpose of law is.
Laws are created to reflect the do - don’t values of a society. Laws that do not reflect the social consensus are ignored. This has nothing to do with expressing societal mores (in law) but how the law ‘matches’ the realities on-the-ground. I read the article and it is rather simplistic in that it doesn not address any of the reasons behind the numbers. The question is whether abortion should be accomplished in a hygenic “safe” environment or whether we should ‘close our eyes’ to the illegal procedures. But the same could be said for drug laws, could it not?
Laws may be an expression of ideals, but not necessarily of reality.
). Your points are excellent and I’d agree. I just wanted to see what ILP’ers think the purpose of law is.