Why should I accept yours then? I’d say by rejecting mine you have discredited yours in the process. This is the stalemate solution.
Amen and thank you. Perhaps it was not such a stalemate solution afterall.
It is murder, but its legal so its accepted. What we Need is better birth control or people willing to use birth control properly.
Charged with assault and bodily harm. Manslaughter? If you go that way, would you charge a woman who fell down the stairs causing her fetus to die with involuntary manslaughter?
While anti-choicers call a fetus a person, miscarriages don’t get treated the same as the death of someone after birth. Are pro-lifers donating money to stop the high death rates for these “people?” If not, perhaps they don’t really think they are people after all, except when it is in the context of preventing women from having autonomy over their bodies.
We have pretty good birth control, but I agree on your second point. However that involves making people more responsible when it comes to sex, and that ain’t going to happen.
Oddly enough, many “pro-lifers” are also against birth control, calling it dangerous and calling for chastity, as if that’s going to work. Really good birth control would eliminate most abortions, you think they’d be for it.
In fact the anti-abortionists (They are not pro-life), do just the opposite. They fight hard against Prenatal care as it is often mixed in with birth control and even abortion advice. For example in the liberal Pro-choice state California, the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative, reduced the rate of child or mother deaths due to childbirth by half:
*In the last 10 years, U.S. mothers have been dying in childbirth at shocking rates: Compared to other developed countries, three times as many U.S. women die during or shortly after pregnancy. Nationally, maternal death rates are still rising.
But, as an excellent new story in Vox explains today, California has successfully fought the trend. As of 2013, California women died during or shortly after pregnancy at a rate of 7.3 deaths per 100,000 live births, which is half the state’s 2006 rate and a third of the current national rate.
The difference is largely due to the work of the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative,…Texas, which has the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world. There, 36 moms die per 100,000 births, or five times California’s maternal mortality rate. Texas has also closed down Planned Parenthood clinics and rejected Medicaid expansion — changes the GOP would like to see ripple across the US. The state boasts the largest uninsured population in America.*
Now this article focuses on Maternal deaths due to childbirth, but a similar issue can be shown with miscarriages and babies who die right after birth.
*So the "Pro-Life’ movement is killing Moms and children. *They are not “pro-life” at all- in order to fight the dreaded abortion, they are killing more than they save.
And, oddly- there is no clear Biblical order against abortion. Some verses in the OT can be even taken to be in favor of abortion.
I am pro-life, but I am not about to try and change the laws to make abortion illegal, as with drugs, its going to happen whether legal or not. If most abortions were unneeded because of nobody getting pregnant when they didn’t want to be, Planned Parenthood would go out of business.
No they wouldn’t.
There is a gaping valley full of possibilities between a person and an appendix. If you think that the consensus on the pro-choice side is that a 6 week old fetus is a person, you’re crazily wrong. So why the hell would should we just admit to something which we don’t actually believe?
Why don’t pro-lifers just say “It’s a person, but it’s the mother’s body, so their business.”? We pro-choicers would then no longer be able to make the body autonomy argument. See, you’d take one of our arguments away. Go forth and make it so!
I believe that is the true, reasonable, pro-choice position. There is a pregnant person and an unborn person she is carrying. Since that relationship is without any parallel among born people, in terms of the unborn’s person dependence on the pregnant person, the pregnant person’s rights should be pre-eminent, including her right to kill the unborn person to preserve her own well being (not just her own literal survival, which is usually not disputed).
Why isn’t that the common argument? I think two reasons. First it’s an age (I mean the last century plus not just the internet age but more so now) of popular democracy and thus appeal to the lowest common denominator. You’d lose most average people possibly amenable to pro-choice at ‘OK abortion is killing a human, but…’ It would also be at this point perceived as a huge concession to pro-life, though it’s not really, but rather just what the pro-choice position really is, even if pro-choice people are understandably reluctant to say it.
Second reason is that ‘unique relationship between mother and unborn child’ gets progressively less unique closer to birth. If the argument is ‘I don’t have to explain to you why it’s the mother’s categorical right to terminate the pregnancy till birth, it just is, end of story’, you don’t have to deal with gradations of uniqueness of the unique relationship as the unborn develops from a few cells to moments before birth. It’s just the mother’s right to end the unborn person’s life till birth, that’s the rule, period. Which works if you have the votes to sustain it.
But because I think a lot of people subconsciously realize it is a matter of competing rights of mother and unborn person, that’s why hardline pro-choice has trouble with public opinion on late term abortion. It’s the same reason hardline pro-life has trouble with public opinion on ‘rape and incest exception’: at least subconscious realization of competing rights of two people, where rape as reason for conception (and accompanying greater emotional burden it generates for mother) could reasonably tilt the balance in favor of allowing the mother to kill the unborn child in that particular case even if it does not in other cases.
IOW admitting the situation is between a pregnant person and an unborn person, would at least in some cases force pro-choice or pro-life to give ground, and nowadays in polarized politics the rule is to never give any ground on anything.
The first figure I could google said that Planned Parenthood spent 3% of their budget on abortions, I don’t see why you would expect them to go ‘out of business’ from stopping about 3% of what they actually do. I would expect an actual pro-life person to cheer planned parenthood for doing things like treating diseases and screening for cancer, but I think most people here have figured out what pro-life means in practice.
There is a odd offshoot about this.
Many pro-lifers are republicans. End abortion, end birth control and we will have many home grown babies who will more tend to vote republican. So some of this may be about the long term health of the Republican party.
The opposite of this is that democrats more are for on lower domestic birth rates through legal abortion and available birth control. Thus for our replacements we need immigration, and some of those immigrants will achieve US citizenship and would be more likely to vote democratic, along with their children.
Currently we see Trump attack both abortion rights and legal immigration and path to citizenship, which would seem to favor votes long term for the republican party.
How much of the abortion debate is about votes? Well close to zero, how much do votes influence abortion rights, that I’m not so sure of.
The Roe Effect- which addresses this - takes largely the opposite conclusion. Children tend to follow in the political footsteps of their parents - but pro-choice people are likelier to have an abortion (although yes, some pro-life people hypocritically abort anyway) - hence abortion reduces the number of future pro-choice voters.
Because mine does not require magical thinking, nor does it tell women what they must and must not do with their own bodies. Pro-Choice: It’s not just a pithy slogan.
If I could rephrase the title of this thread, I would phrase it as “Why don’t pro-choicers say ‘fetus personhood doesn’t matter?’” That title would have gotten more to the point I meant to convey.
As we can see from several posts in this thread thus far, there are indeed some who argue that fetus personhood is irrelevant and that a woman should have complete control over what happens in her uterus:
I would be curious to see how many people in the overall U.S. pro-choice movement ascribe to this viewpoint. 30 percent? 40 percent?
Your not counting immigration in that equation, and that changes the equation. We need replacements, either home grown or immigrants.
Note Trump is working both of them, ending abortion rights & ending immigration and the republicans are eating it up.
Abortion or not, we will need people to debate this subject into the future.
But I’m pretty sure you think abortion is morally wrong, so I’m not sure you contribute to the consensus of pro-choice thought.
That’s a religious position; and as such can’t reasonably be expected to have an impact on the opinions of anyone who doesn’t share that specific religious opinion, and shouldn’t be expected to control secular law.
In scientific mode, in an ordinary meaning of the word ‘understanding’, the heart can’t ‘understand’ anything; it hasn’t got any of the necessary wiring.
That’s a pro-life argument? I suppose it might be; but what I see much more often is a pro-choice argument that the anti-choice side is being unscientific, in attempting to assign capabilities to early-stage fetuses that just aren’t there yet.
Many modern anti-choicers draw a line in the sand: at conception.
Pro-choicers, IME, aren’t drawing a line in the sand as to when there’s a person, but are acknowledging that as a blurry grey area while simultaneously acknowledging that as a matter of practicality any law on the subject does need to draw a sharp line. The practical line often suggested, of ‘at the moment of birth’, is so suggested not because this defines a logical moment of ‘becoming a person’, but because it defines a logical moment after which separating the fates of mother and progeny is easily physically possible.
It ought to be a crime; and it ought to be a serious one. If the death of a wanted fetus is either intended by the assaulter, or could reasonably have been a foreseeable result of the assaulter’s actions, I’d treat it as seriously as rape with grievious bodily damage. It’s an equally serious crime against the woman: her body has been invaded against her will and permanent damage has been done. But it ought to be its own crime; not the same crime as killing a legal person.
That makes no sense whatsoever to me.
Anyone’s entitled to reject anyone else’s religious belief.
At least, unless you took that to mean that you thought Quicksilver was saying they rejected it on your behalf: that is, that you thought Quicksilver was saying you’re not entitled to believe it. You are entitled to believe it; but you’re not entitled to expect anyone else to.
I agree that responsibility in this area is a very good idea; but, even aside from the existence of rape, we don’t have birth control anywhere near good enough to guarantee that responsible people taking reasonable precautions will never get pregnant. Failure rates of even less than 1% will amount to a significant number of unwanted pregnancies in a population of hundreds of millions or billions of people.
No they wouldn’t. Almost all of what they do is provide general health services, including both to those who wish to become pregnant and to those who don’t or at least don’t at a given moment; and provide birth control. If there were almost no abortions, Planned Parenthood would cheer, and keep on doing their main work.
Attempts to close down Planned Parenthood are going to result in more abortions, not fewer, because they’ll make it harder to access birth control.
Hope it’s not a hijack, but this one keeps coming up. Where is this idea that late-term abortions are generally due to some whim of the pregnant woman coming from? Late-term abortions are at least almost always due to something having gone seriously wrong with the pregnancy, whether with the mother’s health or with the fetus’ health, that either hadn’t gone wrong until late in the pregnancy or hadn’t been discovered until late in the pregnancy. Why are people imagining large numbers of women who carry willingly for eight or eight and a half months and then decide to abort for entirely non-health-related reasons in a fashion causing the death of the fetus, plus significant numbers of doctors willing to perform such procedures?
Wouldn’t that demolish pro-choice arguments in one fell swoop? It would be acknowledging the pro-choice argument (that a woman has a right to bodily autonomy) while also brushing it aside at the same time.
And more dead Mothers and babies. Lots more. So much for “pro-life”.
There are numerous ways to demonstrate that so-called pro-life people don’t actually believe abortion is murder and don’t actually care about the death of children. Two other big ones are that if abortions were actually murder they’d be rioting in the streets over so much government-condoned murder happening, and if they actually cared about the death of children they’d make damned certain that mothers were given the support of the state after having a child via supporting social welfare programs for the poor.
The evidence is ironclad that so-called pro-lifers fall into three categories:
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Persons who think that abortions are sorta kinda bad, but only bad enough to barely lift a finger and check a box on a voting ballot and maybe carry a sign around for a while. While also not giving a crap if they die after birth, because they’re supporting the party of abandoning mothers and children at birth.
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Persons who don’t give a crap about abortions and child death and really see this as an issue of control - they think that women should be controlled, having abortions only when THEY want women to have abortions and no other time.
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Persons who are in prison for murdering doctors and firebombing planned parenthoods.