[QUOTE=FordPrefect]
… fight against birth control for unmarried people. …QUOTE]
I understand what you’re saying, but I have NEVER heard an opponent of birth control distinguish between married and unmarried people. Can you point to anything that supports this?
BTW, I HAVE seen arguments that distinguish between minor and adults, the point of that usually being about parental notification – minors either should not have access to birth control, or at least not without consent of a parent or guardian.
The pro-life camp is a large one. My family and pretty much everyone I knew growing up are adamantly pro life and encourage birth control and sex education. While they believe sex is only for married couples they think condoms are far better than abortion.
For all their faults they are not angry or looking for an excuse to start a fight. They are genuinely decent people that just happen to disagree with you.
No I can’t. Evangelicals I know, <anecdotal alert!> oppose providing condoms to kids in school, advocate abstinence to unmarried teens and yet use birth control without guilt. The pill, tubal, vasectomy, condoms, diaphragms are all fine. They will even accept teen girls using the pill if it is used to moderate their periods. On the other hand, IUDs are usually considered mini-abortion machines and are therefore rejected as evil. Anything that prevents conception is okay, anything that destroys a conceived being (other than the woman’s own body) is bad.
As long as you realize that your opinion the default position, and the people against you are a bunch of crazies, you’ll do fine. This is of course true for everyone. I know best, it’s everyone else who is nuts.
Having thought about this, and off the point of the OP more than a little, I’m not sure there is any basis here for respecting the view point of the ‘other side,’ while still disagreeing with them.
This segment of the anti-abortion movement views abortion as murder, and therefore I see no reason they should respect my belief that abortion should be legal, readily available, and funded by the state for low income people. On the other hand, I don’t see any reason to respect the opinions of someone who calls me a murderer/accessory to murder. And its not just about respecting the opinions - it is also about being basically polite to one another. I don’t think there is a grounds for that.
I would say misguided, but whatever, apparently your definition of hypocrite comes from a different dictionary than mine.
villa, if you are referring to my posts where I say “understand them” and are thinking “respect their views” you have misunderstood me entirely.
To quote Sun Tzu, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” Linky
Perhaps I misunderstood, or perhaps you did. I was asking about contraception and “married vs unmarried”, not “minor vs adult”. I don’t see the latter as hypocritical, though I disagree with it. For adults, the only reason I can see to oppose contraception for unmarried as opposed to married adults, is to punish singles for having sex at all.
No, FordPrefect, it wasn’t that. I know what you mean about understanding their views. It was more the general idea of playing nice in the sandbox, and comments like…
There are anti-abortion people whom I can view in that way, and they may well be those of whom **Thrash **is talking. But if a person thinks I am a murderer/supporter of murder, then I am not sure I can view him or her as a “genuinely decent [person] that just happen[s] to disagree with” me. In the same way, if he or she thinks that about me, I don’t expect him or her to see me as decent.
The problem is, some of them, according to the article I mentioned, take the remote possibility of a pre-conception method destroying a post-conception fertlized egg as cause for banning the method.
My objection to the “pro-life” position has nothing to do with the feelings of the pro-lifers about a fetus. They’re welcome to them, and should be allowed to act on them as it affects their own bodies. My objection is that their opinion is supposed to affect the rights of my daughters to their own bodies when my daughters and my wife think the pro-life position is bullshit. (And my wife specialized in reproductive physiology.)
Some religious people think breaking the Sabbath is bad also, but we’ve moved past enforcing that as a law.
Well, you’ve got to draw the line somewhere. I’m sure there are some people around who think female circumcision is a personal decision that the law should stay out of. Or how about NAMBLA members who think the law should stay out of their “relationships”?
My point is not to compare abortion-rights supporters to NAMBLA or anyone else. My point is that there are some issues where you can’t just say “Some people are for it and other people are against it, so let’s keep the law out of it and just let everyone decide for themselves.” Everyone is free to advocate their position, but society has to make a decision one way or the other.
You see abortion as a personal decision. Fine. But not everyone does. And if they truly believe in the pro-life position, how could they not advocate for the law to be changed?
(And just to preemptively address the objection that my examples are instances where one person is victimizing another person, but abortion only involves one person doing something to their own body, obviously we pro-lifers don’t see it that way. And yes, it’s a philosophical and theological position, not a scientific one, but there you have it.)
For me it’s about calling a spade a spade. Abortion IS eugenics. Why get all huffy about the semantics of it? It’s clearly a difference of opinion as to how one defines human. So if someone calls you a murderer why does it bother you? By their definition you are a murderer, why is that so hard to just accept?
Abortion is about taking direct control of your genetic heritage, about not bringing a child into this world that you cannot support. In my opinion life starts at conception, so you are killing a zygote. Whether or not you consider that a crime will determine whether or not you think it is murder. You can consider it a mercy killing if you like, but it’s still killing a living creature.
To me the pro-choice side seems like a lot of guilty-conscience equivocation. Not that I am saying it is that, just that’s how it seems to me. It seems like it would be more honest just to say, “I made a tactical decision based upon my lifestyle choices to end the life of my genetic offspring before it developed the cognitive faculties to understand subjectivity and thus, suffer by any further decisions I might make that would affect it.”
Too often it comes across as, “Whaaaa, Mommy that bad man called me a murderer!”, own your decisions, stand up for them.
As far as I am concerned the baby is a parasite until it is autonomous enough to be adopted by someone else. As such, you have the right to deal with a parasite that impacts your health as you see fit. However, abortion always involves killing something that had a high likelihood of being a ‘person’ one day.
Is taking a blood sample, which contain living cells with all the necessary genetic information to replicate you, and spilling the blood sample on the floor to let the cells die, murder?
No, for the same reason cumming on someone’s face isn’t murder. The process to becoming a human being wasn’t initiated. The code is there but it was not implanted into a host thus ‘fertilizing’ it.
However, the same religions that ban abortion are also opposed to spilling your seed on infertile ground. Basically, your genetic material is sacred, treat it as such. In my opinion, it’s an admirable stance. Murder is a matter of where you draw the moral distinction, not whether or not the zygote was yet a human being, because left to time, it would have become one.
My seed spilled on someone’s face however does not have the potential to become a child, no matter how long I wait.
Anyway, I wouldn’t call someone getting an abortion a murderer for similar reasons why I wouldn’t call a returning soldier a murderer. They killed for a greater cause, and that’s something they have to live with. What I’m opposed to is the creative semantics that people use to assuage guilt. You did what you had to do, but I’m not going to change my stance on that zygote being human just to make someone feel better.
I have a daughter, when I found out my wife was pregnant I contemplated abortion for all of about 15 seconds, merely because I automatically contemplate all foreseeable outcomes that I can create, but we treated it as a baby. If it’s not really a baby until later on, then why do we bother with prenatal care from the beginning of the pregnancy? Is a baby who is not going to be aborted who is getting prenatal care a human being whereas the soon to be aborted multicellular organism of precisely the same age is not? Do expectant mothers who are excited about their situation run around saying, “I have a multicellular parasite that may one day become human in my belly.”, or do they say, “I’m going to have a baby!”?
No, but the blood cells are fundamentally different from a zygote. A zygote is not going to “replicate” a life form…it IS a life form, just at a different stage of development. As mswas says, if you can justify ending that life before it has a chance to develop, then by law in the US, you are within your rights to do so…but look at it this way…a blood cell doesn’t HAVE to be destroyed to keep it from becoming a person. The mere fact that a zygote must be destroyed in order to prevent it from developing into something that will complicate the mother’s life to an uncomfortable degree proves that it is not the same thing as a random blood cell.
I see your point, in a way, but it is also true that your seed, treated properly, would have a good chance of becoming a person, and if you come outside a vagina, you are preventing that.
I agree that a zygote is human (what else would it be - canine?), but I don’t consider it a person, which is the key distinction when discussing murder. Call me a murderer all you want if I have an abortion, since clearly a zygote is a person to you, but realize that my definition of person is no more arbitrary than yours, and I don’t consider myself to be a murderer - it’s not word games to avoid guilt, it is my genuine belief.
Now come on, this is just dumb. It is abundantly clear that born children whose mothers received prenatal care (and btw, the mother is the patient, not the fetus) have better health. For people who want a baby, and are planning on its birth, it is as elementary as getting fit before becoming pregnant. No fully ensouled person required to justify it. And yes, when we want a baby, we tend to focus on the future and say, “I’m going to have a baby.” That doesn’t mean we consider what is now inside to be equivalent to a fully developed person with constitutional rights.