Yes it does.
Because…?
All these hypothetical ‘What if it was as non-intrusive to remove the fetus alive?’ questions are pointless, because it is always going to be less intrusive to remove a fetus in pieces than to try and remove it whole and unharmed, at least until we develop fetus teleportation technology.
If you want a fetus out of you with minimal risk to your health, there is no alternative to abortion.
Aha, so my suspicion was correct. I can summarise your beliefs for you yguy, and by doing so I think it is obvious why you prefer not to state them:
You’re anti-abortion on religious grounds.
You’re a creationist.
You’re anti-gay on religious grounds.
From the beginning you have misrepresented your case. You care not about science other then to use the standard creationist tactics to miscredit it. Those attacks are based on flaws in your system of belief by the way, not science. So, please, stop trying to justify your opinions with nonsense and just say what you mean: “Abortion is wrong, being gay is a sin, the earth was created 5800 years ago. I know this because it says so in the bible and I have a gut feeling it is true.”
Someone posted a 6-step description of how creationists tend to act when they show up here. Can’t remember it exactly but I am pretty sure we are at step 3 or 4.
I thought this thread was about cleft palates and abortion. What’s all this about creationism and gays? Stay on task.
Anyway, back to the issue.
Look, if our society says the “fetus” is not a human life worth protecting, then it really does not matter what the reason for killing the little mass of flesh is, does it? Wrong gender. Wrong color hair. No high-IQ genes. Not Arian. African American. Wrong features? Kill the little mass of flesh! Right? All other agruements are irrelevant. Women’s rights. My own body. Reproductive rights. It doesn’t matter. If it’s not human life worth protecting, just kill it. Just cut it out and throw it away like a wart!
Most children believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. They obviously have the choice to not believe, but children are very much prone to believing what is told to them by authority figures . . . especially their parents.
You’re just going further and further out into left field. There is no evidence that anything that could be termed a “soul” even exists.
I don’t. In fact, I can’t 100% know that anything is ever correct. It’s all probabilities. My framework is based on sound logical arguments, and so I will believe in its “correctness” until such a time that it is shown to be incorrect.
You are correct.
How is homosexuality “dark” or “selfish”? Answer: it’s not. And this has nothing to do with sympathizing and everything to do with rational thought.
The Golden Rule has no spirit. It is a simple set of rules that basically states: “If you want something done to you, do it to someone else; If you don’t, then don’t.” No spirit there to violate.
And how do you know this?
And besides, having morality stem from a Creator means that the Creator can change morality at Its whim. If the Creator decided one day that murder was moral, while eating ice cream was immoral, then would you suddenly be murdering people and shunning ice cream eaters?
And I am of the opinion that your doubt is not reasonable. So how do you decide which one is really the most reasonable? Consensus of the majority? Divine decree? Drawing straws?
But can you prove that they’re not conscious? If not, then how is a stance that contraception should be banned based on the idea of conscious sperm and eggs any different than a stance that abortion should be banned based on the idea of consciousness of the fetus?
Well, I’m not Stoneburg, but different reasons matter to different people.
For example, suppose you look through your freezer and you find a meal that your spouse cooked and froze 3 months ago. You decide to throw it away. Does it matter why? [sup]*[/sup]
From the government’s perspective, no, it doesn’t matter. The government doesn’t get to tell you when you can throw food away. It’s yours and it’s your business what you do with it.
From a neighbor’s perspective, it might matter, but only to color their perception of you. If you threw away a perfectly good meal because you didn’t like the color, instead of donating it to a food bank, they might judge you to be wasteful. If you threw it away because it was moldy, they won’t mind. But, of course, your neighbor doesn’t get to tell you what you can do with your frozen meals either.
From your spouse’s perspective, it might matter even more. If you threw out a meal she was planning to eat, just to make room for your Otter Pops, she has a good reason to be upset.
So, to answer your question… some reasons do matter in my mind. If you want a child, but you have an abortion anyway because this particular fetus has the wrong color eyes or skin, then I’ll judge you to be, well, wasteful. If you have an abortion because the fetus has life-threatening defects, or because you simply don’t want a child, then I’ll judge you to have made a good choice. If you have an abortion to avoid a minor birth defect, you’re somewhere in between.
But, of course, I don’t get to tell you whether or not you can have an abortion; I can only judge your choices in my own mind. Even if you were doing it for (what I consider) a terrible reason, I might try to change your mind, but I’d be out of line to try to prevent you from doing it.
- cue yguy’s next non-response: “Guess I can’t complain too much when my opponents demonstrate the essential vacuity of their position by drawing such silly comparisons, as if anyone with half a brain can’t see a qualitative difference between a cute little fetus and a frozen meal. Obviously Mr2001 just wants to kill babies so he can eat them.”
Many adults appear to believe that Elvis is alive. Like children, they believe such things with their egos, not the sort of inner knowing which tells them it’s wrong to throw their baby sister out the window.
Why?
Dunno about you, sport, but I have one. Color me dead sure on that. 
Too bad for you. I do know 100% percent that some things are correct.
To someone who doesn’t know, that is indeed the inescapable case.
Not good enough if the ultimate basis of those arguments proves to be nonsense.
The answer is that it is dark and selfish for the same reason gluttony, hypocrisy, theft or murder are dark and selfish. They all spring from a common root.
If that’s the case, it is words with no meaning, subject to convenient interpretations.
What I’m getting at is that you can follow the letter of that law, as you evidently do, and yet you and whoever you relate to under its aegis can be worse off. While a person may “appreciate” that you’re sympathetic to whatever foul inclinations he may have, you do him a disservice unbeknownst to him.
Don’t know that I can tell you that, other than that it’s obvious to me.
I’ll start worrying about that some time after you start worrying about the moon deciding to hang a quick right and make a beeline towards your house.
Assuming you mean how do we decide, the legal framework for that is already in place. Those of us whose judgment has been shown to be lacking, such as proponents of abortion, must be politically disempowered.
Sure, as soon as you prove that you ARE conscious.
The first idea is patently absurd. The second is not.
Does it matter why? This particular track of conversation has veered very far away from where it started. Allow me to summarize:
Children tend to believe what they are told by authority figures (I present Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy as exhibit A). Thus, if authority figures tell children that it is moral to murder a certain ethnic group, then the children will tend to believe it.
And color me dead sure that you don’t. (And by “dead sure”, I mean “99.99999% sure”. I always leave a margin for change, because I don’t believe that we can every know anything absolutely.)
Nope. You don’t. You think that you do, but you don’t. I present to you the Matrix hypothesis, in which you are a brain in a jar being fed artificial external stimuli. Were that the case, you could not possibly know that it were the case. Thus you cannot know with 100% certainty that you are not in the Matrix, and thus you cannot know with 100% anything at all, since there is a small-but-real probability that everything is fake.
What root would that be? And what evidence do you have that it springs from that root?
According to whom? I claim that I do him no disservice at all.
How so? On what do you base your belief in a soul?
But I am not of the belief that natural laws are subject to sudden, dramatic changes. You are of the belief that morals exist solely at the decree of a Creator, and unless this Creator is incapable of changing Its mind, you must assume that morality could be turned upside-down without a moment’s notice by this Creator.
Does that possiblity sit okay with you?
How has the judgment of proponents of abortion been shown to be lacking?
If anyone were to be politically disempowered, I would much prefer it to be people who want to meddle in the personal affairs of others on behalf of a fairy-tale Creator handing down arbitrary morals from on high.
Of course, I don’t believe that anyone should be politically disempowered, no matter how silly their beliefs are, so I guess you’re safe for now.
Whose definition of consciousness are we using? Your undetectable, extra-dimensional one?
Why? You’re arguing against the abortion of a fetus because it may be conscious. Why might the fetus be conscious. but not a sperm or egg? You already said that you don’t think that brain activity is necessary for consciousness. Doesn’t that mean that the brain itself is not necessary for consciousness? Why, then, can’t anything possess consciousness?
Here, let me quote you: “My claim that science doesn’t understand consciousness well enough to pass judgment on its relationship to detectable neural activity is contradicted nowhere in the body of scientific knowledge”
Now let me adapt it to my position: “My claim that science doesn’t understand consciousness well enough to pass judgment on its relationship to sperm and eggs is contradicted nowhere in the body of scientific knowledge”
So I ask again, can you say for certain that sperm and eggs are not conscious?
Let’s back away and look at the issue – from my perspective, but in context.
Abortion is a Tier II solution to a problem for which Tier I is birth control – namely providing women with sufficient control over their reproductive capabilities that they are no longer held hostage to something we call “subject-object sexual dynamics”. Which in turn frees men from those dynamics, too. (So those who have alleged that pro-choice men are pro-choice for some selfish self-serving reasons have a point, although probably not on the level they intended – most of us do believe that we will be happier when women are freer to act as they please, even if what some of them ‘please’ is to have nothing whatsoever to do with relationships with men)
The quickest way to explain “subject-object sexual dynamics” might be to look at other (less viable, impractical) ways of freeing women from the same thing. Let’s say for example that there was absolutely no social stigma attached to becoming pregnant outside of an ongoing relationship. Zilch. Not a trace. Well, OK, maybe one single faint distant memory of having read about such a time in eons past in Ancient History class or something. Then let’s say that babies did not cost money – let’s say there’s a new Constitutional right that if you are born your food and clothing and education and shelter and anything else you need that costs money, including hiring someone to do child care, are paid for by the state on no basis that has to be proven or demonstrated, and all parents, every single one of them, avails themselves of this. In the world of employment and careers and so forth, there is not one smidgeon of attitude that holds pregnant women in lower regard as employees in any field of endeavor. Finally, let’s posit that health care technology has perfected prenatal medical care to the point that pregnant women don’t suffer backaches, diarrhea, morning sickness, balance difficulties, impediments to their tennis game, awkwardness tying their shoes, or any other reason to experience pregnancy as a bit of a pain in the ass. In such a world, you might see a lot of unintended pregnancies but on an individual personal level women would not see the possibility of getting pregnant as a dire contraindicator with regards to whether or not they should be open to the possibility of sex. Except infosar as she might want a different emotional synthesis than the males she meets who are seeking sex – which may or may not be a built-in difference between the sexes – she has no more situational reason to be reluctant to pursue sexual experiences if and when she is sexually attracted to someone than they do.
It’s a lot easier getting to that point with birth control and the availability of abortion as a Tier II backup. Birth control by itself would be insufficient, although better, more reliable, less awkward birth control would presumably reduce abortion rates considerably.
And why is it a good thing to get to such a point, or a bad thing to go in the opposite direction?
Because subject-object sexual dynamics tends to work something like this – and keep in mind that I’m not saying this is how things are right now, because right now we are midway between what I describe below and what I have alluded to above –
The fallout of sex is sufficiently destructive to women that women do not engage in sex except in situations where they obtain from their arrangements with men a safe environment in which to become pregnant, against a social backdrop in which being pregnant is massively unsafe by default. Because men tend to seek sex without necessarily seeking or desiring reproduction, let alone the hassle of providing a safe environment in which for someone to become pregnant (an expensive proposition), this creates an antagonistic, adversarial dynamic between men and women.
Because women are dependent on men to create this environment, and since, due to the adversarial situation, women cannot trust men to behave as equal partners on the basis of apparent good intentions, women are situated by necessity to ignore a good portion of what they find sexually appealing and cute, and to concentrate in a utilitarian and practical way on what they find situationally safe.
Because that effectively strips women of the majority of the spontaneous and sensuous aspects of sexuality that make sexuality enticing to people in the first place, and, again, because of the adversarial situation, that situates women in such a way that they have every reason to trade on men’s attraction to them for what they can get for it. If for a given individual woman there is an active wish to reproduce and be a mom, this may equate only to seeking out a man who can provide a good environment in which for her to safely become pregnant; otherwise, she would have to get more out of it to make the exchange desirable to her, whether it be the personal pleasures of additional wealth or social status or the opportunity to paint great paintings undisturbed or whatever.
Men, because this situation understandably leads them to feel sexually manipulated by women who use men’s appetites for sex to get what they want without having much feeling for the men, and because the situation is already adversarial in general even aside from that, have every reason to increase women’s dependency on men, if they can, to make it as difficult as possible for women to meet even their own needs without men’s help, which gives women additional incentive to want to have a man. And to the extent that pregnancy is an encumberance and a handicap when it comes to securing resources, men as a group are able to realize a substantial portion of this precisely because enough women are pregnant enough of the time that men in general end up controlling the majority of the resources.
Then you get this situation: younger men coming of age sexually are less in control of those resources than somewhat older men, who therefore hold the key to the younger men being able to gain access to sexual experience if the women aren’t amendable to it except with men who bring resources with them. The older men can make the younger men work very hard for them in ways they might not otherwise, and the younger men put up with treatment that they would not otherwise tolerate, in return for the younger men receiving the transfer of some of the material assets the older men control, which the younger men then use as collateral to negotiate arrangements with women, who cannot afford to do otherwise.
And men and women do not like each other very much, and social structures become oppressive because there is so much room for exploitation and manipulation. People put up with all kinds of societal shit they’d have too much common sense to tolerate if they weren’t spending 90% of their energy trying to make love and romance work in a world that has effectively hijacked sex and made bad use of it.
This is a horribly sinful world, an abomination in the eyes of God, if you will. We have, in large part, been there, and been there for millenia on end, and now we are coming out of it.
And we ain’t going back. Part of not going back is making sure women don’t have to be pregnant except when they want to be. The biggest part of that is birth control, but the “safety belt” of access to abortion when the woman feels it to be necessary is an essential part of it, too.
You think it is a greater sin to kill an annual quantity of unwanted fetuses and embryos in order that women can cease to be pregnant in situations where they find that necessary? Think again. Your idea of sin is very small and trivial. I don’t think you have any comprehension of how big sin can be. Patriarchy is a vast and ugly evil thing, and before I will see you push us a few steps back into it I will cheerfully help perform abortions with my own personal bare hands, legally or if necessary illegally.
And I will do so with the conviction that what I am doing is absolutely, positively, a morally correct, even morally vital, thing.
Mister Stoneburg, sir…may I enjoy the pleasure of your company in the pit?
Thank you for your input.
Any time. The pleasure’s mutual.
I wrote:
On second thought, doing it with my bare hands would probably not be a good thing, overall. I would definitely want a speculum, some dilating rods, and a curette. Bare handed is just icky.
You better believe it, bunky. If I’m correct, children have a dual nature; i.e., a part of them which knows the truth, and a part of them which is prone to believing obvious lies.
You may rest assured that I do, sir.
Are you are, I trust, 100% sure of that?
An evil intelligence. Satan, if you like.
None that I could convey to you.
Doesn’t matter. If you can’t see it, forget it.
Let me remind you of exactly what you were reponding to:
What I’m getting at is that you can follow the letter of that law, as you evidently do, and yet you and whoever you relate to under its aegis can be worse off. While a person may “appreciate” that you’re sympathetic to whatever foul inclinations he may have, you do him a disservice unbeknownst to him.
Now while you don’t see homosexuality and incest as foul inclinations, I doubt it is your belief that such things as foul inclinations do not exist in humans. Let’s say your friend is just a hypocrite. You really think you do him no disservice by sympathizing with his hypocrisy?
Why, the fact that I have one…or, more properly, that I am one.
The sort of change you are talking about would not be one of mind, but of nature.
There is no such possbility.
My experience has been that they lack the ability to see where they contradict themselves. So far, you fit the mold very well indeed.
I guess we can look forward to seeing you celebrate the day a NAMBLA member is elected to political office then.
Yes, although I’m not sure I can be said to have defined it yet. You will object on the basis that the definition, such as it is, is arbitrary, but of course it is really no more arbitrary than yours.
That’s not the issue, since bacteria can be said to possess a sort of consciousness. It’s such consciousness as human beings possess that I’m concerned about.
Actually, I rather believe you have what it takes to do it bare handed.
yguy, I do believe your presence is also request in the pit :).
Daniel
Hell, I thought was a thread with MY name on it. <sulk>
Specifically, yguy, I’m thinking about the link between brain activity and consciousness. Since no one can prove conclusively that the former causes the latter, despite evidence that it probably does, you dismiss the claim as utter claptrap. Of course, you don’t have any evidence for any theories you put forth, so why should we give them any more credence than you give other people’s theories?
Your debating style seems to consist solely of spouting your opinions as facts, then refusing to give any credit to arguments against those opinions and dismissing opposing opinions as simply wrong. You don’t really even have any cogent arguments against other opinions, you “just know” they’re wrong. Makes for a piss-poor debate, if you ask me.
Let’s turn back to the misogyny thing for a moment, if you will. It’s your claim that abortion leads to men being sexually irresponsible, and that men manipulate women into having abortions. In some cases, that’s probably true. In the majority of cases, though, having abortion as a safety net allows women to live their lives as they see fit without the constant threat of unwanted pregnancy looming over them. Even with the best birth control available, there’s always the risk, you know? And we’re not just talking about single folks of the fuck and run variety, either. We’re talking about married people and single people in long-term monogamous relationships, too. In short, we’re talking about every sexually active woman of reproductive age in the nation. Abortion isn’t about men having risk-free sex, it’s about women having what they want and need in order to be healthy and happy and live the lives they choose.
In my case, one side wants me to be able to have a happy, healthy sexual relationship with my husband without worrying about having to support some thing sucking up my nutrients and complicating the control of my epilepsy and causing permanent damage to my body. The other side wants me to always be terrified that my birth control might fail, to only rarely have sex and then be too tense to enjoy it, to live with the seizures and the nausea and the general feeling of utter horror that would be my lot if I were to get pregnant, to be unable to do my job for the better part of a year. So which side is the misogynistic one?
As I said before, that’s not my department. I was asked about it, and I gave honest answers. If they don’t work for you, then either they’re nonsense, or my presentation is lacking.
I don’t agree, but I appreciate the sincere criticism.
But did you not just say that in some cases men manipulate women into having abortions? If that’s correct, the two ideas would appear not to be mutually exclusive.
Taking your presentation of it at face value the answer is obvious, but your bias is clear. Do you really think I want you to have all that anxiety? No, I just want you not to kill the kid.