You want people to make a refreshing summer drink out of…babies??? You are twisted… {twisted lemonade quite good actually}
Well, don’t ask me to help.
I was actually asking for your opinion on the comment from the LA Times story you cited. Given that the story you provided indicates that making abortion illegal would not lower incidence of abortion, why does it make sense to make abortion illegal?
And in response to your question why it wouldn’t make the incidence of abortion less, well, the article provided doesn’t indicate, but I’m guessing because women who truly want or need an abortion would seek one out anyway, whether it was safe or not.
Here’s a link to a different article, which references a news piece Walter Kronkite did way back in 1965, when there was apparently an “epidemic” of illegal and presumably unsafe abortions. My thought is that said epidemic would resume.
And here’s a link to an articlethat discusses the study that concluded that restricting access to abortion does not reduce the numbers of abortions. Apparently preventing women from getting a legal abortion just makes abortions less safe and increases maternal death.
I also have another question based on your comment above (I think it was something like, “If you don’t want to get pregnant, don’t have sex”), and I’d really like your response to this (and classyladyhp’s): is it reasonable to demand abstinence in a married couple to prevent unwanted pregnancies? For example, when I got pregnant earlier, I was using birth control and was also breastfeeding. My doctor gave me to understand that the combination of contraception and breastfeeding would’ve given me less than .5% chance of getting pregnant, if that. Yet I got pregnant anyway. Is it reasonable for a wife to tell her husband she doesn’t want to have sex again until she hits menopause because she doesn’t want to get pregnant? Or should she just tell her husband that she never wants sex again? I’m guessing that such a declaration would essentially ruin the sanctity of that marriage unless the couple were both ok with celibacy. However, sexual intimacy is crucial for many marriages. So what’s more important - preserving the marriage or preventing a pregnancy?
Part of my problem with the pro-life argument is that it seems to presume that only about unmarried sexually active women ever want abortions or regret getting pregnant. What it ignores is that many unwanted pregnancies occur in committed relationships, even when one or both partners is using effective birth control. It’s easy to say, “Well, just don’t have sex,” but is that a reasonable “solution” for married people?
Yeah, no. I assure you I’ve got a far better understanding than you’d ever hope to have. Seriously.
You didn’t click on the link and read, did you?
I snipped all the earlier stuff so I could just respond to it in one space. You want to play this game? All right. I’ll play this stupid game, if only to demonstrate how completely and utterly retarded it is. In essence, your argument boils down to two basic premises; (1) everyone has the right to decide for themselves personhood and act according and (2) it’s wrong to force someone to adhere to a definition of personhood which is not necessarily their own. Okay. Fine. Whatever. Let’s roll with it.
This thread is filled with a bunch of philosophical mumbo-jumbo concerning human personhood, but I really don’t care about them. What if, for shits and giggles, some woman decided that personhood entailed awareness and that there is nothing wrong with killing things which are not aware, which would include newborns? What then? Are you going to tell this women, even if she just gave birth to a newborn, that she cannot kill her newborn even if she does not perceive it to be a person? That would violate premise one. Are you going to force her to adopt a view of personhood which is contrary to that of their own? That violates premise two. So what do you do? To be consistent, you would have to let that individual act according to her own consciousness and according to her own beliefs since you, as you flatly stated, “I would never impose my personal views on another woman”. But everyone here knows you won’t do that. You’ll flippantly disregard all the mumbo-jumbo about not imposing your personal beliefs on anyone when faced with a situation you find less than palpable, making you nothing short of a hypocrite who doesn’t even believe his/her own arguments or at least doesn’t even apply them unilaterally.
You see, any idiot can come up with a definition of personhood. Why should the definitions pro-choicers construct be used as the standard? Why not use the one I can construct? Why not use the one the aforementioned women constructed? The fact is that pro-choicers use personhood as a manner by which to define some segment of the population out of rights (in this case the unborn), arguing that everyone is entitled to their own, personal beliefs, but they will NOT extend the same courtesy to individuals who definition of personhood would exclude individuals that the pro-choicer’s definition of personhood would. Go figure!
The fact of the matter is that my posts aren’t straw men in the slightest. They highlight the verbal wordsmith and logical fallacies pro-choicers like to engage in. If, as you have been doing, you want to conflate being a human with philosophical interpretations of personhood, and that with being a person under the law, then you’re going to have to explain why individuals cannot do to someone else as they please according to their own, personal interpretations of person..
I would absolutely love to see you try to rationalize that without supremely contradicting your. Good luck, because you’re seriously going to need it. When I mentioned mental gymnastics earlier as one of pro-choicers favorite pasttime, I definitely meant it for reasons just like this.
Oh, and as to your “I’m more interested in minimizing suffering in making my personal moral choices” quip, I’d like to introduce you to this modern invention called anaesthesia. So long as we sedate someone before hand, then what problem would you have with something like, say, infanticide? No wakey, no awareness, no pain, no suffering, no problem, right? Or is this one of those instances where you’re going to cast aside your own arguments?
In the context abortion, show me on what planet, in what country, which state and what jurisdiction this is true. And don’t friggin’ run off either, as has been the norm when some pro-choicer in this thread has made some otherwise highly incorrect statement and I’ve asked for proof of that assertion. This is where those arguments you deem as straw men, even when they’re not, come into play. If we accept the axiom (this is the correct usage of the word, for all you people misusing) that a woman’s body always belongs to her, then the unborn can only have a right to life so long as the woman agrees to gestation. If a woman later on changes her mind, then the fetus loses’ its right to life, as it having a right to life would encroach upon the woman’s bodily integrity. If, therefore, the fetus has no right to life, and the woman has a right to bodily integrity as you say, then the natural consequent is that the woman should be able to have an abortion, as the unborn has no right to not be killed and the woman has no obligation to continue to gestate the unborn.
Now, knowing this, show me where a woman is able to have an abortion at any point in gestation.
…But what’s that? You can’t. Well, as Aubrey II would say, “no shit, Sherlock”. You see, you’re either flat out lying when you say that a right to life simply does not exist if it encroaches on the right of someone else to their own bodily integrity, or you’re just flat out ignorant of abortion laws and have absolutely no idea what the hell you’re talking about. Personally, I’m thinking its both. The fact is that every country in which abortion is legal restricts it after some point in time because it will be assumed that the unborn has a right to life greater than that of the woman’s right to bodily integrity. It won’t matter one lick if the woman wants to be pregnant or not. But continue to live in your fantasy world and make factually incorrect statements-- you’ll still have your pro-choice cohorts with their pompoms there to cheer you on. I know you want to.
Straw men my ass. Guess what? You have no understanding of the very debate you’re trying to engage in. Logic 101-- you might want to try it. Pro-choice is a misnomer. The correct term would be pro-abortion.
I know you are, and that you’ve expressed no opinion or indicated that you’ve given any thought to the ramifications of such a ban.
Ehhh, yeah, actually. I’ll defend your right to kill entities that are in your body, too, once you’ve decided you no longer want them there, and I’ll argue against anyone who says you don’t get to make that decision.
I posed this hypothetical to you in the Great Debates thread and didn’t get a response, so I’ll repost the relevant portion here, since you’re pretty much repeating the same line:
I’m not sure what you mean by “misnomer”. I’m not even sure from your sentence that you know what “misnomer” means.
Any way? I’m just talking about the choice to abort or not to abort. How many “ways” did you think I had in mind? If and when the technology becomes available for a woman to end a pregnancy and not kill the fetus in a procedure that poses no more risk to her than a straightforward abortion, I’m sure I and a great many people will rethink the situation. Until then, the options are pretty much limited to deliver the baby or don’t deliver the baby. I have no moral objection to the latter. I have several practical objections to trying to ban the latter.
Uh-huh… and what symptoms would a society that has slid into a moral black hole present? What, if anything, should I keep an eye out for?
By the way, my skunks’ names are Bitey and Spritzy. I can’t really tell them apart, though, so I suggest you be careful with both of them.
I must have missed that. Where did it indicate such a thing? At any rate, it’s not true.
If the incidence of abortion doesn’t go down, then why would the birth rate go up?
I can’t believe I actually watched that whole thing. First, a graph detailing the number of deaths per year due to illegal abortion in the U.S. Even if you were to argue that the number of deaths were understated, you’d see a clear downward trend (even before Roe v. Wade or the first state legalized abortion. Second, here a link to an to a 1960 article by the then director of Planned Parenthood.
I’d really like to know where Kronkite pulled out some of his facts.
So after finding the actual study, you’ll see that it says none of that.
Of course, from a purely logical standpoint, you’d realize that the notion that making abortion illegal doesn’t reduce its instance to be nonsense. Abortion is like anything else-- people are more apt to do it when its legal than when its illegal. Just look at the abortion rate data for any country prior to legalization and immediately post legalization. You’ll find that the rate skyrockets immediately after the years it’s made legal, and then tampers off after that. Plus there’s this which examines the effects of anti-abortion laws on the abortion rate. If you can’t be bothered reading, then the gist is that the abortion rate goes down.
Oh, and the argument isn’t that couples engage in abstinence, but rather that they shouldn’t be having sex if they cannot handle the prospect of pregnancy and childrearing. It’s actually quite simple, really.
I feel we’re going in a circle. Again the ramifications are immaterial if the thing being banned is, indeed, wrong. I, again, make reference to my slavery example which continues to be ignored. Would you argue that it would be better to keep slaves as slaves then to emancipate them into a society which could not absorb the shock of them being free? Surely, you wouldn’t, because you would argue that the effect on society is irrelevant.
And thusly we have an issue where you deem the right of the woman to act in a way to trump the right of the unborn to not be acted against which, if I do say so myself, is quite an odd argument to make.
Actually, no. If that individual is only in your house because you dragged them there, and they cannot leave because of something you did to him/her, then your right to expel them is rather limited. You cannot place an individual is a precarious circumstance where they are dependent on you (without them explicitly agreeing to it, mind you) and then argue that you have some right to not be impeded upon by that individual. It’s ridiculous and would require a hell of a lot of mental effort to try to justify. Well, that is, unless you’re going to argue that the other individual has no rights, which is quite convenient for pro-choicers.
mis·no·mer
[mis-noh-mer] Show IPA
–noun
1.) A misapplied or inappropriate name or designation.
As to what I meant, exactly what I said. Pro-choice is a misnomer. It’s really pro-abortion.
Yes. You said “as she sees fit”, which doesn’t necessarily mean abortion, but any way she chooses. You’re free to amend that as you want.
You should keep an eye out for arguments which designate one human as being worth less than another. That’s always a sure sign.
So people who never want to have children, and really shouldn’t be having them, must never have sex in your world? :dubious:
I’m going to explain this in the nicest possible terms. I am pro-choice. If I were pro-abortion, I would not have had a baby with my wife, I would have had an abortion and no baby. If I were pro-abortion, I would not be defending birth control and sex education access, I would be actively campaigning to reduce birth control access and neuter sex-education so there were a lot of unwanted pregnancies to be aborted. If I were pro-abortion, I would not describe my idea world as having “safe, legal, and rare” abortions, I would describe it as having “safe, legal and common” abortions.
I’m now going to explain this in the simplest possible terms: You are so obstinately stupid, I have no idea how you manage to find the power button on your computer. I suspect you were actually wrestling the dog because he looked at you funny and one of you managed to bump it.
Yes?
Now see, that’s just stupid. How would you have had an abortion?
Well, for those of us living in the real world, ramifications kind of matter.
Well, I won’t ignore it, but I’ll question its relevance. The practical difference between a white person and a black person is superficial (skin-deep, as it were), but this isn’t true for a live baby vs. a dead fetus.
But of course, ramifications don’t matter to you, as you’ve stated repeatedly.
Different from your opinion, surely. Hardly “odd”, or even unusual. And to clarify a minor point, I don’t see that the fetus has any such rights, though I’m willing to play along for the sake of argument - give the fetus tons of rights, slather them on - but why at any point any of its rights should override the woman’s right to decide how her body is used… that’s going farther than necessary or, in my opinion, wise.
Is it? Hypothetically, if someone kidnaps someone, do they have to keep them indefinitely? Anyway, you’re adding additional and I daresay unlikely elements to what is a straightforward analogy. A homeowner controls who gets to use his house. I don’t see why a body-owner should have less control.
Oh, not that much mental effort at all. Assume I find an unconscious and injured person on my lawn (I may or may not have caused these injuries). I bring them into my house and being treating their injuries. I cannot later decide that this person must leave? I can’t call police and/or an ambulance to take this person off my hands and return to a state where my house is for my use alone?
I don’t agree the substitute label is a more accurate one. As far as I’m concerned, women are free to choose to continue their pregnancies or not. I’m pretty sure I’ve never argued the abortion should ever be forced on anyone and I don’t recall any self-identified pro-choicers on this board doing the same. I’m sure it’s happened - mandatory abortions in China and such - it’s not happening in Canada, nor am I aware of any efforts along those lines.
So, in short, I don’t understand why you claim “choice” is a misnomer. Since you’ve cited the definition of “misnomer”, perhaps you don’t know what “misapplied” or “inappropriate” mean, or are at least using one (or both) those words in a way quite different from how I use them.
Anyway, if pro-choicers want to be called “pro-choice”, and pro-lifers want to be called “pro-life”, I admit I can’t see the value in challenging these labels. It invites round after round of pointless nitpicking.
Suffice it to say, if a woman can decide to continue a pregnancy or not, I figure she has a choice to make. I support her right to make this choice. I feel the choice should be hers alone. I accept the existence of situations where the woman cannot make this choice for some reason - she’s severely mentally ill or in a coma or something and medical choices are being made on her behalf by next-of-kin or a legal guardian or power-of-attorney holder or whatever. This muddies the issue somewhat, I acknowledge, but I felt it needed to be recognized.
If somewhere in the above paragraphs I’ve misused the word choice, feel free to point it out. If you do, I ask you to be very specific in your objection.
No, I’ll leave it as is and I admit that when I wrote that, I figured “as she sees fit” had two possible outcomes - continue the pregnancy or terminate the pregnancy. Other options hadn’t occurred to me. I was a little confused by your rephrasing this as “any way she wants”, because this suggested to me multiple options. I’m okay with “as she sees fit” being considered equivalent to “any way she wants”, though I prefer the former phrasing for reasons I admit are purely arbitrary.
Uh-huh… So let’s assume a society has no ban on abortion and (apparently) this carries the implication that human fetuses are worth less than human women. What happens next?
So the only value women have in your world is as breeding stock, eh?
This is the most blatant example of trolling I believe I have ever witnessed. I cannot believe that with OMG’s repeated allusions to his comments being facetious, anyone engaging in this discussion takes anything he says with any seriousness at all. He’s just trying to get a rise out of y’all with comments like this.
He knows damn well it’s not true. Logic 101! How can anyone not detect the smirk he’s wearing while posting this tripe?
[QUOTE=overlyverbose]
Here’s a link to a different article, which references a news piece Walter Kronkite did way back in 1965, when there was apparently an “epidemic” of illegal and presumably unsafe abortions. My thought is that said epidemic would resume.
[/QUOTE]
Thank you for this link. I clicked through and watched the 1965 CBS News Report: Abortion and the Law. What a compelling piece of reporting. This was filmed five years before I was born, so I’m not at all familiar with that world at all. I had no idea it had gotten this bad. The statistics were depressing and the accounts of the women subjected to abortions restrictions were horrifying. Historical records such as this are exceptionally useful for reaffirming my stance that abortion should remain legal, accessible and safe.
Are you deliberately ignoring the women who get pregnant as a result of rape or incest. What, were they ‘asking for it’?
And what about a woman who already has children but cannot possibly afford to raise another child, and cannot afford pregnancy both in terms of the medical bills and the loss of income? She should either choose to never, ever have sex with her husband again, or just accept that she must gamble with her kids future? Those are actual, living children, don’t you care about them?
No, I’m not really taking him seriously. But I really can’t tell if he’s attempting to yank our chains or if he really believes what he says. The claims that he understands science, logic, philosophy, history, etc, etc, etc (and better than everyone else) are getting pretty over the top though.
I don’t quite remember who said it, but the notion that one much have all the answers before instituting policy change is ridiculous. You fix the problem and address the issues as they come up. Isn’t that what happened with slavery (a hundred years later)?
Who cares about the practical difference, whatever that means/entails, between a White and a Black? We’re talking about whether an institution (i.e., slavery) should be allowed to persist because society might not be able to handle that institution ceasing to exist.
Of course not. And in the above situation, I’ll go out on a limb here and say that they wouldn’t matter to you, either. Your refusal to address such a simple question attests to this fact. As I said, if an action is morally wrong, then policy becomes irrelevant, as a wrong which is allowed to persist is, well… Wrong.
No, I mean odd. Essentially, your argument is that a woman could, conceivably, become pregnant with the sole purpose of having an abortion, and you would argue that her right to do so trumps the right of the fetus to not be subjected to her whim. Yes, it’s an extreme example, but it gets the point across.
Here, let me provide you with a better scenario that is probably more comparable than the scenarios you provided. You have a house. In that house, through some modern miracle of science, you create a new life form. However, because of its physiology, this life form cannot leave your house for nine months. Your argument, essentially, is that while said life form only exists because of your actions, you are not responsible for its welfare due to it existing, and that as such you can remove it from your house even if it dies. The question, though, is why you shouldn’t be held responsible for its welfare due to it existing, which it only does because of you. Because it’s “your house” is kind of irrelevant.
“Choice” does not exist in a vacuum. Simply stating that you are pro-choice assumes that there are no qualitative differences between the options being chosen. This is fallacious because, as we all know, the two choices in this case are not qualitatively equal, as one results in a dead child while the other one does not. It’s more accurate to assert as you are pro-abortion, as then you’re not advancing some nebulous concept of “choice”.
Or she could induce a miscarriage, or cause herself to go into early-term labor. Though, really, why should it matter the manner in which she does it? The end result is ultimately the same.
They’ll find another group to define out of rights.
Trolling? Please. I’m being absolutely serious. Oh, and one comment, not comments.
Luckily for us all (well, maybe me and that other chick whose name escapes me at the time), I do. Of course, let’s not pretend that the pro-choicers in this thread weren’t claiming, or at least trying to claim, their intellectual superiority to pro-lifers before I showed up.
(Forgot this.)
Yes?
Like, I seriously have to wonder. Are you even trying to win this argument? Because with arguments like these coupled with the fact that the majority of people already view abortions done because the woman cannot afford any more to be a tad bit repugnant, it seriously doesn’t seem like you’re trying. If you want to argue that a woman should be allowed to kill her unborn child to better care for her children relative to what she would be able to if that child was born, why not extend this logic to one of her born children? If she could better care for the rest of her children by killing one of them, then why not argue she be allowed to do that? You know? Utility and all that.
But anyway, since you’re pining for a certain response, yes. If you can’t afford to take care of a kid, you can’t afford to be having sex, either. A novel idea, I know. Now I’ll just wait for the accusations of misogyny or whatever.
Anyway, I really hope someone takes a shot at post #1584, especially the middle portion of it.
As someone who gave birth nearly a month ago and currently caring for a newborn I sincerely think all prolifers can go fuck themselves.
My entire pregnancy was one endless series of scary side effects including high blood pressure, heart palpitations, breathlessness, aching back and feet that looked like golf balls.
Actually giving birth involved oxygen, incredibly painful contractions and a needle in my back.
The aftermath of the pregnancy included stitches in my reproductive organs, stretch marks, swollen breasts and ankles so swollen I could barely move for a few days.
Caring for my newborn daughter has so exhausted my husband my emotional and physical resources that I literally begged my parents to come stay in my house for a month to help out. This is the first time I’d had some time to think in about four weeks.
I regret none of this. I love my youngest daughter. I would do anything for her. But that kind of effort should be entered into lightly. It certainly should not be entered into because the birth control failed or you got raped or because some idiot religious fanatic wants to feel better about themselves.
A pregnancy should be carried out out of joy and love.
Any asshole who truly thinks otherwise – who has the ludicrous stupidity to ignore just how hard it is to carry, give birth and care for babies – can come here. I have a few dirty diapers I’d like to lob your way.
Women who were raped were asking for it. Really. This is where you’re going to stake a position?
If the majority of people consider that repugnant, which I don’t concede, it would only serve to underscore the fact that our society has absolutely no qualms or concerns about women and children living in poverty. We begrudge them the social safety net that keeps them from being homeless, cut programs geared toward lower income families and children regularly, label low income mothers as universally neglectful by virtue of existence and denigrate them with slurs.
That a poor woman would exercise a measure of control over her own life by managing her fertility is repugnant on the general basis that it’s exceedingly threatening to the status quo when any woman exercises her autonomy, but also because anything a poor woman does in this society is wrong, even when it’s done for the good of her existing children.
If a parent does not have any ability to care for a born child, that’s what extended family is for, that’s what the foster system is for, that’s what adoption is for. None of those can carry a pregnancy in a woman’s stead so that she can keep her job, keep her home, keep food on her table. And again, the obvious answer applies: born children do not require the sacrifice of the mother’s own body to live.
This is just silly rhetorical posturing at this point. You’re unwilling to recognize any difference whatsoever, scientifically or legally, between born and unborn. You’re unwilling to recognize that pregnancy is a serious condition and childbirth a serious process, neither of which any woman should be forced to endure. You dismiss the importance of sexual intimacy within marriage. You dismiss the incredible impact of rape and other forms of sexual violence and impugn the integrity of survivors of the same.
The comments you have made in this thread belie a worldview based upon a notion of women that reduces us to our reproductive role. Useful for our uteri only and if we’re not willing to use them in the manner that you see fit, we’re not worthy of the least of your consideration. If that’s how you wish to live your life, fine, but when you start advocating against my interests and my rights based on your beliefs? You’ve crossed a line.
Not misogyny just rampantly self-righteously stupid. This is the purpose of contraception, to avoid pregnancy. Sometimes it doesn’t work. Hence, the necessity of access to a means of ameliorating the problem which arises from that failure.
Saying that forced pregnancy that creates financial ruin for a family (or devastation to woman’s physical or mental wellbeing) is the price that someone must pay for having sex while unwilling or unable to be pregnant? It’s like saying “if you can’t afford to be maimed in a traffic accident, don’t get in a car.” Or more to the point, saying that if you took the risk and got into a car anyway, you don’t get medical care when you’re mangled in an accident, because you chose to engage in a risky behavior and need to face the consequences. No more medical care after MVAs. If you die, or lose a limb, or never walk again, oh well, should’ve stayed home. You didn’t need to go out, you just wanted to.
How about “if you can’t afford to drown, don’t swim.” No lifeguards, no lifesaving, if you can’t swim, sink, tough. Like that one any better?
Well, since abortion is the same as infanticide, and I am allegedly in favor of both, you’ve got to have something to do with all those newborns that we couldn’t murder in the womb. Plus I really like lemonade, and killing babies.