In all fairness to Scylla, I believe I started that whole silly business in post #24.
Ok. I see where you are going.
I don’t see how the “adversarial opponents” parts follows. I don’t think I agree this is true. Please explain more so I am certain I understand what you mean here.
I absolutely get you and agree on the risky endeavor part though.
Assumptions here are that not being able to abort at will necessitates social stigma. My goal in my OP is to be dispassionate and logical. Staying within that framework, I don’t think that stigma is an automatic consequence of unwanted pregnancy.
If your argument is that an unwanted pregnancy sets a women at a terrible and significant disadvantage, one from which she may perhaps never recover, than I agree. That is a logical consequence of not allowing abortions.
The other part about we had that system before and it sucked is arguable. I tend to your stance on the argument, so we are allies here. The problem is that I don’t think I can prove that a system that forces women to carry pregnancies to term isn’t better than one that allows abortions, based on a given mutually acceptable value set between both sides of the argument. The pro-lifers have the edge here because traditional values have been around for a very long time. Pro-lifers, including many women. Think you are wrong and prefer them. We are still figuring out the implications of abortion so we don’t have a time tested culture on which to compare. Pro lifers are also invoking the nuclear bomb of moral values which says, don’t kill people.
Again, while I actually agree with you. It is really tough to prove that things are better for society or the women in it with abortions than without them.
Why not just advocate for better birth control? Make birth control so ubiquitous easy and foolproof that an unwanted pregnancy becomes ridiculously rare.
I think for them it is resolved by saying they regret interfering with freedom and equality (if they concede they are doing so, and, as we’ve said, it’s a reach to prove it,) however, if that is a consequence of stopping murder, so be it. It is, after all, better to hurt than to kill. You can solve a lot of this with better to near perfect birth control, better social services for unwanted pregnancies/ adoptions etc. all better than murder.
If you place a high value on human life, and if you think a fetus is a human life, than I think your argument (as I understand it) doesn’t hold up against the pro life argument.
This is because if you give the pro life argument that human life is sacred and that a fetus is a person than those two things are almost impossible to overcome and are almost 100% incompatible with abortion.
Oops. Yes.
Whoops, I do believe you’re right. I’ll absolve Scylla of having started that.
Scylla did continue it, however, at some length.
I’ve got to disagree with this only to avoid giving pro-lifers more talking points about how irrational pro-choicers are in their arguments.
Firefighters aren’t trained to rescue frozen embryos. She would have been trained to rescue the 5 year old and I would hope she would follow that training. I don’t think it should be judged as an obvious inconsistency in her pro-life stance.
Canada also has a clear and healthy understanding for the necessity of separation of church and state. Something America consistently fails to comprehend. There are deep deep flaws in American society that lead to these kinds of violations of womens rights.
I think you know why. For the same reason that the Catholic Church admits that while AIDS is a terrible thing, condoms are much worse.
My, that would be nice. And lots of people are advocating for it. Get back to me when it’s been accomplished, will you?
Even aside from political problems, which aren’t minor, that’s nowhere near technically possible right now; we’ve got far better birth control than we used to, but it’s very far from perfect even when used perfectly – and using it perfectly relies, for many methods, on the consistent willingness and conscientiousness of one’s partner.
Plus which, there are things which can go seriously wrong during the course of a pregnancy, either with the pregnancy itself or with the life circumstances of the pregnant woman. Some of these things can ruin lives without coming under your exception of directly killing the woman.
You’re using “fetus” instead of “zygote” again. And you’ve made it clear enough in this thread that you mean “zygote”. If you mean “fetus”, you have to move your supposed bright line from conception to eight weeks; a point at which you’ve already granted that there is no bright line.
“Sacred” is a religious term.
And the argument you’re making here only works if not only are those two arguments accepted, but also if “sacred” is taken to mean “keeping a human zygote alive is held to be more sacred than anything else about human lives”. It’s perfectly possible to disagree with that (and/or with the argument that a zygote, or even a fetus, is a person) but still place a high value on human life.
Oh, but it’s not better to coerce an entire population into a subservient position than to allow them to kill when they deem it necessary and appropriate. Life is not more important or more sacred than freedom. The right to life people may wish to argue that, but in doing so they are wrong.
Backtracking a paragraph or two…
Never mind social stigma in the sense of social disapproval; being pregnant when you do not wish to be pregnant is a major physical encumbrance. The miracle of life and the special condition of being able to bear life and feel it grow within you, etc, is one side of a two-sided story. When it is not a situation you wish to continue, but you have no means of bringing it to a safe and speedy end, it is not so much like this, but more like, umm… this, according to people who have been in that situation and described to me what it was like.
The prospect of being pregnant and prevented from doing anything about it is a powerful disincentive to acting on sexual appetite and interest unless it is directly combined with a situation in which you’d like to become a parent.
Now, the “adversarial opponents” thing. Young people do, in fact, have strong biologically-based urges to engage in sexual behavior; they do experience quite powerful appetites and a degree of sexual interest that, while not rising to the level of fully imperative at any specific moment or with any specific person, is designed by evolutionary forces to be pretty damn close to imperative over the long haul: you WILL do this or you will be miserable. Add to that the social forces that also promote landing this as an experience and you’ve got a compelling pressure on a lot of young people. (And yes, DO understand this in the plural, the collective sense of zillions of young people being simultaneously affected by this overall situation).
The male folks don’t get pregnant; if we make it so that female people are stuck with being pregnant if they get pregnant, we’ve given them conflicting goals; we’ve established a situation where the urges and appetites of the males will make them interested in tricking or manipulating or otherwise getting past the self-preservationist reactions of the females. We’ve also made for the female people an enemy of their own appetites and sexual interests, they will tend to see those feelings as self-destructive at worst or dangerously self-indulgent and worrisome at best.
I would like, at this point, to discredit a statement that no one has made yet, but it lurks and looms in these discussions, which is the statement that birth control and abortion technologies are new and “unnatural” and that the “natural” state of affairs is that the female folk get pregnant when they have sex and can’t do anything to prevent that. DISCREDITING POINT #1: We have reason to think that the physical responsibility for feeding and otherwise taking care of infants was “of the tribe” rather than specifically “of the biological parents” for a long time. Anthropological cites may be forthcoming if you wish to see them. DISCREDITING POINT #2: Through most of the history of our species, the age of puberty was roughly equivalent to the age of being able to do useful work and be what we of the 21st century call “self-supporting” or as much so as any tribal members, but that isn’t how it is in the modern era, where all those beforementioned urges and appetites kick in big-time long before the male or the female participants are in a social position where being parents is going to look like an appealing prospect.
Does this clarify what I said in the first go-'round?
The argument that you are making is that it is greater evil to force someone to carry a child to term against their will, than to allow them to murder that child. I.e. that this is a case of justifiable homicide.
That is what a pro life counter argument would need to overcome. I wasn’t sure if that was what you meant. Is it?
Ok. I need to be careful how I phrase this. There is a “good argument” in the sense that it is rational, self-consistent and holds water within it’s own framework that considers this a feature and not a bug. It is not “good” in the sense that it holds water as a reason to outlaw abortion though.
The argument is that sex has more consequences than just pregnancy. Choosing sexual partners without very careful consideration of these consequences can be damaging to one or both parties and to society as a whole. This is because sex can’t Be separated from a whole bunch of baggage related to power and emotion and what have you.
I don’t buy the whole argument, but I do think there is something to it based on my own experience and the experiences of those I have seen. Do I think this is enough to tell anybody else what they should do or to attempt to interfere with their rights? Absolutely not.
There are some that consider what you are saying to be a good thing, though. To the extent that anyone is basing their stance on the idea that it is, I believe they are making a bad argument. I think that makes the converse true as well.
You are presenting a one-sided argument here. What I am trying to do is present both sides of every argument in order to evaluate them. If you take one side that pushes me to take the other. It makes it look like I am endorsing or arguing for something I don’t necessarily believe. Just saying this, so you keep that in my mind as I respond, I think there is a lot of truth in what you just wrote, and I tend to believe along those lines as well.
But
A lot of what you are saying here could be argued as to be inherent sexual differences between men and women and not the consequences of unavailable abortions. Consider now that abortions are, more or less, generally available, but men and women still act in the negative ways you describe. Therefore, it is not abortions or lack of them creating these sexual tensions. Maybe abortions are actually making them worse.
My point is that it is tough to prove that abortions are to blame for boys being coercive horn dogs, and girls being wary.
In fact, there probably is a good reason why this is evolutionarily, since women have historically carried the burden of pregnancy. Eliminating the burden is not going to eliminate the evolutionary imperative to selectivity.
I jumped ahead. This also addresses your next point so I will just say “see above” after it.
See above.
I don’t see how that discredits the idea that birth control or abortions are new. I think you accidentally discredited a point you didn’t make but were thinking about, and forgot to discredit the one you arguing against.
I’ve done that a lot. Is that what happened?
I think you arguing that when Thag Jones the caveman hit 13 and was capable of being sexually active, he was basically considered a full adult (if still a bit of a punk.)
Our societal maturity now takes a lot longer, but our sexual maturity remains the same and that is screwing things up.
I’m with you. I don’t get what this means or what point this is discrediting though.
Well then don’t get your condoms from the Catholic Church. 
I might have stayed with you if you hadn’t so ignominiously killed off my character. Who do you think you are? George RR Martin?
Thorny:
I too saw the monkey thing with the leopard. It looked heroic and self-sacrificing. Can’t know for sure that’s what it was. It could be enlightened self-interest in that he was protecting his genome in the group, or, it could have been a really stupid monkey “guys watch! I am totally going to take out this leopard… aahhhhhh!” Or maybe the monkey thought the whole gang was going to attack and his last thought was “ooops” when he saw that he was by himself.
Maybe he was sacrificing himself altruistically. At the end of Armageddon Bruce Willis gets to make a speech and say why he was doing what he was doing.
The monkey made no speech.
Honestly, my impression was that the monkey realized it had made a big mistake. I think I saw a definite “oh shit!” Expression.
Thorny:
I don’t care about semantics. Zygote, blastula, Dracula whatever. Who gives a shit?
Words mean something. If they don’t, it becomes very difficult to have a discussion.
If it doesn’t matter to you which word you use, then why not use zygote?
– if I were George RR Martin, I’d have a whole lot more money. You seemed to be cheerfully killing off people in your scenario; I was just pointing out that this can go both ways.
– and I don’t know what you saw with a monkey and a leopard, but I don’t think it’s what I mean. I’m remembering an article, not a video, that I read some years ago; and there was more than one primate involved, though I couldn’t swear that the primates were apes and not monkeys (or for that matter that the big cat was a leopard and not some other species of big cat). I’m pretty sure that what was being discussed was not a single incident, but a pattern of behavior seen more than once in the same species with different individuals, though I wouldn’t swear to that part either.
quote=Scylla]The argument that you are making is that it is greater evil to force someone to carry a child to term against their will, than to allow them to murder that child. I.e. that this is a case of justifiable homicide.
That is what a pro life counter argument would need to overcome. I wasn’t sure if that was what you meant. Is it?
[/quote]
Not quite. It is greater evil to force a whole lot of somebodies – to the point of defining what it means to be that particular kind of somebody – to carry a child against their wills, hence categoricallly oppressing that entire category of somebody – than to allow them, collectively, to decide whether or not to kill (not murder) their child (fetus, embryo, whatever) and hence, as with self-defense, war, and other such things, a type of people-killing that must be permitted as as social necessity.
I had been focusing on pregnancy as a serious impediment to being sexually expressive of one’s own sexual appetite and interests, saying that what really makes it that way is when you can’t just terminate it, you’re stuck with it.
When Gina Jones the cavegal hit 13, she didn’t have access to abortion but she also wasn’t going to be expected to raise any babies all on her own (it was the entire tribe’s responsiblity) nor was she a minor but instead a regular contributor like any other adult. So pregnancy had vastly different consequences not merely on a “shame and disapproval” level but on a concrete physical level.
Just because you may have decided that anything not fitting this framing is “bad” does not automatically make it so.
I once knew a person who straight-facedly told me that abortion should be allowed because “the soul enters the body at birth”. I had no way to refute that statement because there is no way to prove that the soul does or doesn’t enter the body at birth. All I could resort to is “what is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”
Your points 1-4 are asserted without evidence. That doesn’t automatically make them bad points, but it also means you have no grounds to dismiss arguments that do not address them as “bad”.
She and her baby were also far more likely to die during chidl birth. We’ve become much better at preventing that from occurring. Far worse at offering the kind of support that Gina Jones need to help raise her baby.
If the state can’t compel a man to donate a kidney to his twin, because his body autonomy trumps the states interest in keeping a grown man alive, it has no business over riding a woman’s body autonomy to save a bunch of cells, not yet a living breathing human being. Unlike the twin, a grown man with a family.
If the state can’t over ride my body autonomy to harvest my organs WHEN I’M A CORPSE, it should be self evident it has no standing to break a woman’s body autonomy because of someone else’s religious beliefs.
Nah.
One point Harris touched on recently is the idea that we might have to engineer morality to advance as a species. Consider how much damage a lone psychopath could currently inflict - it’ll be in proportion to the tools at his disposal. With 20th-century chemical explosives and firearms (same thing, arguably), a deranged killer could take out a few dozen or a few hundred people by, say, gunning them down at a crowded music festival or planting a bomb on a commercial jet. Imagine what a psychopath could do with 22nd-century 3D printers capable of assembling viruses. We may reach a point where humans have to engineer morality simply because if they don’t, they’re held hostage by the millions or billions to the whims of tech-empowered psychopaths. I don’t see how JudeoChristianity or indeed any religion can effectively address this. They certainly haven’t so far.