Until the early nineteenth century no one opposed abortion. The reform movement of the time viewed it as an evil, just as they viewed all products of sex as evil. Basically, the anti-abortion position was invented as an accessory to the anti-prostitution crusade of Victorian England, out of the belief that someone who does something so evil as have sex should not be able to escape consequences for that action.
The anti-woman attitudes of present-day Christianity have continued to make this an issue.
I was on the first page, and…The only thing I have to say is do you even realize, OP, how offensive and crass and insulting it is to compare any adult Jew, from the Holocaust or from today, to a lump of fetal tissue? Because I’ve seen what results from an abortion and mostly that’s all it is. Forget all of the horror stories you’ve heard about third-trimester abortions; they make a staggeringly small percentage of all abortions.
Any Jew, that’s lived his/her life, made friends, made an impact on the world, is worth so much more than a lump of fetal tissue, and to reduce them to being worth no more is a disgrace to both them and us as humans. Yes, I find human life important - but not sacred.
And the bit in your video where he talks about sins just makes me laugh. If I don’t believe in your god in the first place, whence sin? I don’t believe in blasphemy, right off the bat. He’s not my God.
It seems to me that the basis for objection to abortion or religious grounds is that there is an assumption that babies have a soul.
I’d like the religious people to provide evidence for this soul, and that it is damaged in an abortion before I consider their objections to be worth my time.
If you tell me that I can’t get asthma medication because it kills elves, you better show me that elves exist.
I think bodily sovereignty is extremely important. I think using the analogy of a parasite or an occupied womb right off the bat leaves the impression that pro-choice people don’t care about children or hate them, which isn’t good. There’s a place for that analogy, but I don’t think that’s the place. That being said, I don’t think it’d make a difference to lockmat anyway.
And they should also come up with a reason why we should care if it has a soul at all. If a mindless blob of tissue has a soul, so what? What makes an ensouled blob morally more important than a soulless one?
No dear, that’s popularity. When I’m making moral decisions, I don’t seek the agreement of people who will be unaffected by my decision.
I said that should should a woman request the extraction of a viable fetus, I’d be okay with a law requiring that efforts be made to keep that fetus alive. The problem here is that you like to think I wanna kill babies, when in reality I just don’t want babies inside unwilling bodies. Their deaths are incidental.
I see the light. All of these examples are totally comparable to passing a law giving someone else greater rights to your organs than you have.
No wait… those examples are dumb.
Well, I suppose that’s partly because the idea that a fetus is a “person” in the same sense that you or I are is silly, but it’s mostly because even if it is a person, who gives a shit? You’re a person, that doesn’t give you the right to live in my uterus.
I’m not gonna blast you as pro-life. I’m gonna blast you for some seriously poorly thought-out arguments.
This is really about being able to live in a free society according to the beliefs you cherish.
No one faced with choosing an abortion should do anything other than follow their own beliefs, whether you share those or not.
It seems a self evident fair trade that if you don’t want me telling you when you ‘have’ to have one, then you don’t get to say I ‘can’t’.
If you want your system of beliefs shaped by a fictional work about a virgin raping, risen from the dead zombie, who wants everyone to ‘eat his body’, and ‘drink his blood’, I say, you go right ahead. (Your story, not mine!) Feel free to convert anyone who’ll listen.
But don’t think we have any obligation to let your beliefs, or your silly book, shape ours.
Thing is I *don’t *care about children, at least not substantially more than I care about people in general, and more importantly I think that the idea of whether abortion should be legal has anything to do with the question of liking children is ridiculous, and I refuse to let it be framed that way.
This misses the fundamental dynamic. To people who are anti-abortion, they really honestly and truly believe that it’s murder. Saying “it seems self-evident that if you don’t want to murder babies then don’t, but if I want to then you shouldn’t get in my way?” Well, it’s not particularly persuasive.
Now, true, neither side is likely to convince the other ever, but handwaving away the core of the debate for cheap sloganeering isn’t helpful.
