Rather than arguing over which side gets to have blood on its hands, why can’t we build resources to extract living embryos faster, safer and cheaper than dead ones, with no strings attached legally or financially? Why disallow others from seeing value in life? Save everybody.
That said, there are things in this world which could not and should not be forgiven mind you, especially when forgiveness is no less enabling than voting. There are people who beat their own babies to death, people who rape toddlers to death. I don’t care what sorts of rehabilitation they can undergo, they don’t get to play monopoly with everyone else after the fact.
I’d even go so far as to insist that the one and only occasion when someone’s civil rights may be infringed is when they forfeit their own. When you take the life of another, the ethical cost must be fair trade. Not blood for blood, but removal from what this world has to offer. For people with more resources or opportunities than me wanting my arm or my leg, the bible says something about eye for an eye.
And so the only people who have a place behind bars are rapists, murderers and bankers, those who have absolutely destroyed the lives of others. A free society REQUIRES personal responsibility. In a perfect world free from evil there’d be no piper to pay, but this is reality.
I feel that if we have to incarcerate anybody, it should only ever be rapists, murderers and bankers, those persons whose contributions to the world around them have done only harm. And in places not run for profit. Very few people are capable of change. There has to be objective lines in the dirt, and when crossed, so go their second and third chances. My big sis was strangled by her boyfriend in ’00. We had to have a closed casket. I wrestled with this for years, me having homeless stints while he got full healthcare, 3 hots and a cot. But he would only have hurt others. There are people as evil as the system.
The Chinese have a system where infrastructure repairs are done with prison labor instead of contractors underbidding each other. I think that’s going way too far. Give them a fair life, but removed from making matters any worse for themselves or others, and without exploitation. But easily 90% of the people locked up in the USA today have no business being there, and could be helped far more through other methodologies. And no death penalty ever, because any state empowered to kill its own needs to be toppled ASAP. If the meek are inheriting the Earth then the entire political class is fucked. Pissing contests aren’t putting out the fires begat by systemic governance.
Attempted suicide is a felony only because it deprives the system of a taxpayer, a worker and a consumer. Americans are seat-filling crash test dummies for the ego-trips of the most selfish among us. We could stop voting en masse and self-entitled would install themselves.
What terrible things am I advancing by whatever I try to say or do? That no death is ever justifiable? That nobody deserves lesser resources or opportunities than myself? What clock am I riding? How am I getting enriched?