Hey, who doesn’t?
I never used the term “legal precedent”. I merely said that a particular concept was precedented ie not novel ie comparable to an existing or previously existing thing. Are you truly such a moron that you think that every idea has been fully implemented in every way that it can be and thus if it hasn’t been implemented in that way then it can’t be? How do you work out how to breathe?
A decision as to what we consider to be lawful to kill has to be made. You are drawing the line somewhere but where ever you draw it, it could be drawn earlier and by drawing it where ever you do you are making as much of a decision about worth as anyone since whatever lies outside your line you are regarding as of less worth. You have just hidden your decision by adopting a particular definition of a particular word and accepting that definition as your boundary, such that you can kid yourself that you have made no decision. You aren’t fooling me but you seem sincere, so you are probably fooling yourself. Though how hard would that be, really?
At the logic level, I am as able to not rationalise killing off the poor etc as easily as you are. You are committing a basic slippery slope fallacy if you think that merely because I make a decision to draw a line closer to the slope than you, I must fall down it. At the utility level, killing off the poor etc is and always has been a bad idea and the few groups that have tried it have generally been disasters. The same simply cannot be said of killing off fetuses. I could attempt to speculate further on the reasons for this, but simple historical experience is a sufficient empirical basis for me.
Invoking human rights isn’t a justification of your position; it is just an attempt to avoid having to justify your position. Whatever you might say, it is quite clear that your argument is one of slavish insistence that everyone fits within a law or body of laws you call “human rights”. Your argument runs that a fetus is human, born humans have human rights so a fetus must have human rights, and the nature of human rights can’t be questioned so abortion should be illegal. You aren’t going to convince me of anything by defining your position as unassailable.
In my view rationality and utility suggest abortion should be legal. If someone doesn’t want to have a child, it is of significant utility for them to be able to correct the position if they discover they are going to have one. I don’t feel any necessity to justify rational and useful laws by fitting them into some nebulous concept you call “human rights”. If for you this is essential, then feel free to fiddle around with definitions in order to do so, or not, as you choose. Meanwhile the smart people will be doing something useful.
I’m not a great believer in “rights” in this sense because I think they are just an attempt to convert one’s preferred proposition into an axiom. Having said that, I think what you are really asking is whether I think that upholding a woman’s preference for bodily autonomy is practical. My answer to that is that I’m sure it is not always practical, but it is a goal to strive for.
If it comes to a conflict between a woman’s rational and in my view well justified preference for bodily autonomy, and preventing the abortion of a non-sentient fetus that the woman doesn’t want and which will never be born, I’ll prefer the former every time. I don’t see any significant value in the latter.
“MrsZer, I don’t think we can afford to have a baby right now, we should get an abortion.”
See, I’m only claiming my intellectual superiority to STUPID pro-lifers, like yourself and classyladyhp. Note, for example, the difference in how people reacted to Bricker(an intellectually capable pro-lifer) as opposed to yourself.
If you’re intelligent then I’m the Queen of England:rolleyes:
Just because you have a warped sense of how intelligent you are doesn’t mean it’s true.
and that other scientist Meyers that you pro-choice people have quoted is an atheist. What’s your point?
You act like you’re the first women to ever carry a baby or give birth or have an episiotomy. The epidural is just a fucking needle. It hurts for a minute and then it’s done.
Been there sone that. Cry me a river. Seriously. I can understand needing someone to move in and help for a month if you had twins, triplets etc. Newborns basically sleep a lot during the first 2 weeks of life.
You’re being melodramatic just because you’re pro-choice.
Well, Your Majesty, when you’re done deciding which monotone outfit and pert little hat you’re wearing today, maybe you could try answering **Czarcasm’s **question regarding the plethora of statements you’ve made concerning when human rights apply.
Try reading my post again, where I said I wouldn’t choose to cite someone with an axe to grind (although atheism and opinion on abortion are not really related, PZ Meyers is just a dick (albeit a smart dick)).
Man, where were you six months ago to explain that to my daughter? “You’re just snidely minimizing the difficulty because you’re pro-life”.
You’re suffering from the delusion that everyone is exactly like you, and anyone who experiences something different must be wrong.
You may wish to check out this site to see if there is anything you can do to fix this.
FINALLY! Wait. No! You were doing so well there. Really. Quite well. I thought, “Hey, he finally, for once, considered the argument.” You laid out the problem statement nicely and then attempted to deflect the argument in the very last sentence.
If you care about us understanding your viewpoint, this is where the debate to the bodily integrity issue has to go. You can say, "I understand that we do not force people to submit to donating their bodily substances or have other sorts of invasion of their person to save another person’s life. I think pregnancy is a special case. I think an embryo/fetus has more compelling “right to life” than others (or a pregnant woman has less rights than others), because [insert reason here]." At least the debate with you, for once, would not be from a strawman argument and we could finally understand your position.
The only argument I see is that the woman loses rights by become pregnant. After all, she had sex. I do not find that a compelling enough argument to lose a fundamental right to her own body to something that may or may not develop into a baby. Also, someone may make a decision in their life which directly causes someone to require a blood transfusion. Maybe they do a high-risk but legal extreme sport and one person suffers a serious trauma. The government would still not force one person to give the other person their blood (if it were a match).
BTW, I still don’t know what the special sauce is in the embryo that gives it such preferred status over people. Bricker was mentioning very ambiguous things like societal respect for life. I don’t see evidence for that.
Yes, and it does nothing to refute my point about the different aspects of consciousness. In fact, it nicely fleshed-out exactly my point, which is that there is a difference between awareness (lacking in PVS) and arousal (or being awake). I related that to a fetus with or lacking a cerebral cortex (there’s also the connection to the thalamus that needs to be considered).
I am absolutely NOT saying that. I’m saying that personhood regarding embryos and fetuses is difficult to define. Therefore, the government should not enforce a definition.
A strawman. The general consensus is that newborns, unlike embryos and fetuses prior to third trimester, are aware as well as awake. Unless you have a different definition of aware than I do. Science also supports that newborns are sentient. Furthermore, a newborn is no longer in a woman’s body. What is the point of this example when it is not a pro-choice argument?
Again, the complete lack of consideration of the woman’s right to her own body in the argument. A key point to the whole issue. I am extending you the same courtesy. I am not proposing any laws forcing women to abort an unwanted pregnancy or a fetus with serious congenital defects or even when the woman’s life is in danger.
When does a fertilized egg become a human being, classladyhp?
Uh-huh… See, I made a point on page 29 that went spectacularly ignored, so I’ll reiterate it.
How can one be forced to give up their body to the whims of another when that individual was not forced into the situation which naturally required them to give up their body to the whim another? It’d be like arguing that I’m being forced to pay my credit card bill after racking up thousands of dollars in charges. If I didn’t want to pay the charges, it will be asked as to why I racked up thousands of dollars in fees. You see, you’re misusing the word “force”, for no real reason that I can see otherwise to obfuscate. One cannot be “forced” into a naturally deriving consequence of one’s actions. You can only be forced into the action which begets a certain consequence. The reason we do not force people to submit to donating their bodily substances or have other sorts of invasion of their person to save another person’s life is because those people’s, for lack of a better word, neediness aren’t a direct result of them simply existing as due to the actions of another. It’s really quite simple.
You keep labeling stuff as straw men when they’re not. It’s even more ironic, because your posts are the ones which contain a rather liberal number of straw men, though you seem to be okay with that. While I understand both my and your argument, you seem to understand neither.
And here we go with the implicit assumption that the unborn are different from ‘people’. Why are they, exactly? Assuming that which you’ve yet to prove is always priceless as an arguing technique.
Ummm, I’m going to say that no, you really didn’t. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be trying to
Now you’re moving the goal posts. Aside from the fact that you can’t define personhood period– and you most certainly don’t have a stranglehold on the definition of personhood-- you’re trying to speak out of both sides of your mouth. You and about ten or so other pro-choicers in this thread claim that everyone is entitled to their own beliefs, but then qualify that with a “before they’re born”. You and about ten or so other pro-choicers say that it’s wrong to force your morals on someone else, but only “after they’re born”.
Well, again, I ask you, what if someone’s beliefs dictate that personhood is tied to something outside of sentience? What if someone-- hypothetically speaking, of course, because no one would ever argue this-- that human babies are not born self-aware, or capable of grasping that they exist over time, and are thusly not persons? Are you going to extend to them the same philosophical consideration you somehow assume you are entitled to?
lol, of course you won’t. That makes you nothing more than a damn hypocrite who throws out portions of your own argument when it suits you to do so. Apparently, everyone is entitled to their own beliefs so long as they coincide with yours.
You’re going to be hard pressed to argue that newborns are aware. In fact, I utterly challenge you to do so. I’ll be waiting.
The woman in my example doesn’t care about sentience. Again, you’re treating your definition of perosnhood to be the de facto definition of personhood, when this is absolutely not the case. Again I ask you, why must we accept your definition of personhood over the one I can construct, or the one offered above? Why is your definition ‘right’ and ours ‘wrong’? The bottom line is that you can offer no justification as to why one must accept your definition while disregarding all others.
I’ve noticed how none of the definitions of personhood you offered up are constrained by whether or not the unborn is in the woman’s body. If, as you want to assert, sentience is the defining characteristic of personhood, then neither the 22 week old still in his/her mother’s womb nor the 22 week old born prematurely are persons, for they both lack sentience even though the location of the two is different.
So I can take it you believe that abortion should be legal right until birth? Because unless you do, then your post isn’t to be taken seriously.
(Oh, and I’ll get to those other posts later. Just wanted to respond to this one first.)
Counterargument: If we match exactly enough that I could donate organs to you, and I stab you in both kidneys, no court will force me to donate a kidney to you even though my choice was the proximate cause of your life-threatening injury AND my bodily substance could save you.
You’re stupid. Thanks for the armchair diagnosis imbecile.
You’re suffering from the delusion that you make any sense.
Okay, here’s what I think will probably result after abortion is banned in the U.S.:
[ul][li]Attitudes toward unwanted pregnancies do not change. They never have before, after all, in past societies that banned abortion. Women will still get pregnant and a significant number of them won’t want to be.[/li][li]There is a dramatic increase in Canadian gynecological clinics popping up in the major cities (probably near the airports) and along the U.S. border.[/li][li]American women who have sufficient resources will travel to Canada for the procedure.[/li][li]American women will also drive the demand for chemical abortifacients. Sympathetic doctors will prescribe certain medications, for example to patients presenting with (wink-wink) Cushing’s syndrome, which can be treated with mifepristone, a/k/a RU-486. Unscheduled (i.e. over-the-counter) drugs that are known to disrupt pregnancy will sell in larger quantities, with blazoned warnings printed on them like “DO NOT TAKE THIS IF YOU ARE PREGNANT” serving as advertising, in a modern-day equivalent of a prohibition-era “wine brick” (look this up, it’s quite amusing).[/li][li]American lawmakers, seeing that the ban is being bypassed in the above two ways, will be under pressure to step up law enforcement. They might not bother (figuring just talking about the ban is enough to mollify and gets the votes of pro-lifers for whom abortion is critical issue) or they might start accusing rivals of being “soft on abortion” and calling for tougher enforcement. Women taking day trips to Canada will be questioned. Abortifacients will be regulated, even if they serve other medical purposes.[/li][li]The results of these:[list][*]The disruption of cross-border tourism and trade, with the border states starting to complain about long wait-times.[/li][li]Useful medications become harder to get, with more regulatory hoops to jump, and people who were not and never intended to be pregnant (i.e. men with Cushing’s syndrome) will find it more difficult to get their medications.[/li][li]American doctors who were giving wink-wink referrals to Canadian clinics or prescribing off-label abortifacients are driven out of the states where enforcement was the most aggressive (I expect quite a lot of variation even within the U.S.). The states that enforce the ban the hardest will rapidly find themselves with far fewer gynecological services of all kinds, and even women are pregnant and want to stay pregnant will find it more difficult to get prenatal care.[/ul][/list][/li]
Should I go on? Am I already way off base? People who opposed abolition may have lived in terror that their white daughters would have sex with black men, but I’m pretty sure I’m not expressing any comparably irrational concerns.
Well, I daresay what actually allowed slavery to cease to exist was the 18th- and 19th-century beginnings of mechanization, making slavery obsolete. If one could travel back in time to ancient Sparta with the noble goal of freeing all its slaves, I daresay that society couldn’t handle it.
As an incidental note, I cheerfully acknowledge on further reading that “person” could indeed refer to women and slaves, even in the earliest days of the U.S. republic, i.e. Constitution Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3. But what I take from this is being a “person” doesn’t guarantee anything, let alone equal treatment under the law. The 14th Amendment tries to address this, but it’s still a matter of contention and it’s never been successfully applied to fetuses as far as I (and the judges in Roe) know.
“Morally wrong” is not an absolute, though, and makes for a lousy basis for forming policy. We casually do things our parents might consider morally wrong, they casually did things we’d consider morally wrong. You casually do things your neighbor considers morally wrong. He casually does things you’d consider morally wrong. Some immigrant comes to America and everything about it is morally wrong. What is “morally wrong” varies so wildly by time, place and individual attitudes that using it alone as a basis for law is pointless.
Naturally we have some near-universal agreement that murder, theft, rape, assault etc. are morally wrong and disruptive to society and should be prohibited by law. If someone wants to define abortion as murder (and thus morally wrong), fine. I disagree.
Now that’s odd - the idea of a woman becoming pregnant on purpose just so she can have an abortion. If I’m reading you correctly, I can only assume you’re reading me wildly incorrectly, if you think I was suggesting something along those lines. Yes, it’s an extreme example - so much so that I dismiss it with a chuckle. Seriously, if your definition of “odd” means “could be made ridiculous” then you might as well say “it’s raining today” is an “odd” statement, since it could mean that angels in the clouds are weeping from peeling too many angel-onions as they prepare some angel-onion soup.
I’m okay with it, though. I can picture scientists experimenting in laboratories (that might conceivably be in their houses but I admit are more likely in universities and commercial buildings) coming up with new lifeforms. Heck, it’s probably happening right now - some scientist is gene-splicing even as I write this (and later as you read it), forming some new hybrid lifeform. The people who own those buildings can still dictate what goes on in them (at least in regard to the new lifeforms), and someone is going to have to convincingly argue that the new lifeform is deserving of state protection, allowing government agents to intervene on the lifeform’s behalf.
Buh? No, it doesn’t. The key is that the woman can decide the relative merits of staying pregnant vs. not staying pregnant by her own standards and given her own situation, and then choose what she thinks is the better option.
I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I suspect you don’t know, either. I get that you have an interest in relabeling pro-choicers as something you perceive as more negative (i.e. pro-abortioners) but even you could successfully argue for the change (and you have not) it doesn’t strengthen our arguments to ban abortion, nor does it address your refusal to consider the consequences of such a ban.
But just for laughs, let’s say that from now on the term “pro-choice” will be replaced with “evil Satanic Commie-Nazi baby-killer.” What does that accomplish, aside from a blatant appeal to emotion?
In any case, I’m not indulging this foolishness further. I’ll continue using the terms “pro-choice” and “pro-life” as convenient labels. Your semantic arguments about what “choice” really means are fallacious and pointless.
Not entirely - if she’s denied a medically-safe D&C abortion and tries to induce by, say, throwing herself down some stairs or talking someone into punching her in the abdomen or by jamming a coat-hanger into herself or by eating large quantities of some herb that she read about on some website, the end result could be an aborted pregnancy and a woman suffering serious injuries and/or infection.
So, yes… it matters. If it’s going to be done, why not do so in the safest manner possible? To teach her about “responsibility”, or something?
How should should we expect this? Abortion’s been fully legal in Canada for almost 20 years, now. When should we expect to see another group being defined out of rights?
Or is there something exceptional in the Canadian character that you fear Americans lack?
Because “our” definition leaves everyone free to decide for themselves what is the right decision for their own bodies, while “your” definition comes with legislation that takes that ability (to decide for one’s own self) away from everyone.
Do you know what the fallacy of petitio principii is?
Perhaps because the justice system doesn’t work that way. This is not Iran. We don’t do eye for an eye justice. The person in question would be charged with attempted murder for that action and murder if the person dies.
You have no point.
Nobody seems to understand this. And this is why we’ve been talking past one another for the last 30 or so pages.
You have to first settle the question of whether and when a person is a person deserving of protection under the law.
If the entity-to-be-aborted is not deserving of protection under the law, the question is settled – it’s the woman’s body, she can do what she pleases.
If the entity-to-be-aborted is deserving of protection under the law, then we must “balance” the death of that entity against the woman’s inconvenience of pregnancy (leaving aside for the moment “at-risk” pregnancies).
*Heavenly Father,
Thou hast given us the gift of freedom
to love and to follow in Thy ways and commands.
Some parents choose to abuse this freedom
by destroying the gift of life
which Thou hast given to their offspring.
Please forgive those who destroy human life
by aborting their unborn babies.
Give these unborn children the opportunity
to enjoy Thee for all eternity,
if it according to Thy ordinance.
Assist me in being one in solidarity with Thy little ones
by taking to heart the words of Thy Son,
“whatever you did for one of these least brothers of Mine,
you did for Me.” (Mt. 25:40)
Therefore, allow me today, Father,
to adopt spiritually an unborn child
and to offer my prayers, works,
joys and sufferings for that little one,
so that child will be able to be born and live
for Thy greater honor and glory.
We pray this in Jesus’ name,
in union with the Holy Spirit one God forever and ever.
Amen.*
God only logs on between midnight and 3 am US Eastern Time.
:rolleyes:The Devil on here 24/7 though.