But there’s more to be said here. Of course the ethical issues surrounding abortion are not empirical & objective scientific questions, but that doesn’t imply that all possible views are therefore equally reasonable. It’s certainly a subtle and complex question exactly what rights a developing unborn human should have at what stage, and how those rights should be balanced against the rights of the mother. But (for example) a view that a single celled zygote should have the same rights as a mature human based on evidence-free superstitious nonsense that it has been imbued with a soul by a sky-fairy is deserving of ridicule, and deeply harmful to rational discourse on a difficult ethical question. And how about the closely related opposition to stem cell research?
You also have to take into account legitimate slippery slope arguments though. One of the criticism pro-lifers have had about pro-choicers is that it’s mainstreaming a culture of death. So you get into situations where we’re now helping depressed people commit suicide rather than trying to cure their depression:
The connection between the issues is unclear at best.
But there’s no scientific way to find out, other than to note that there are no countries where abortion is illegal but euthanasia is.
Hardly a paraphrase of his actual statement and a bit ironic given that he is, himself, a deeply religious person.
Well, by that standard there are any number of “notes” one can make. The U.S. is one of the most religious of the western democracies. It’s also one of the only western democracies that has the death penalty. We could make a note of that.
Our abortion laws are also probably the most liberal, or among the most liberal, in the world. In most European countries you have to ask permission to get an abortion after the first trimester or so.
Although that’s not so hard to explain. Due to our religious nature, we don’t do nuance so well. Our Constitution enshrines certain rights and those rights are a lot closer to absolute than they are anywhere else. So when a court says a certain thing is a right, that’s pretty much it. It just happens that Christians don’t always like the rights judges choose to recognize.
But you can see progressions in many places. Gun control is another example. Countries that ban guns usually also end up restricting pepper sprays, combat and hunting knives, batons, stun guns, etc. Sometimes the slope is real. or at least there is enough evidence to support certain people being really worried. You know who else doesn’t like euthanasia? Disabled rights groups. They have a very real fear of where that’s going to end up, since it’s a VERY short step from people being allowed to choose it for themselves to others being allowed to choose for them if they are judged mentally unfit to decide.
Ethics is a field of study of philosophy, separate from both science and religion. You don’t need to be religious to be ethical. And, believe me, I’ve seen a multitude of ‘religious’ people whose ethics were, shall we say, highly questionable?
ISiddiqui was claiming that because science as a system supposedly rests on a series of subjective precepts that it is not valid, which is flat-out BS. It proves itself every day, which religion can never be said to do, at least not while one is alive.
If you want to seriously debate those effects, let’s compare violent crimes rates in the U.S. versus other nations, though not necessarily in this thread.
And their concerns may well be reasonable, but what does it have to do with abortion? For that matter, Canada’s abortion laws are so liberal… we don’t have any laws at all! If the slope was that slippery, we’d be in a perpetual state of Purge.
We don’t need to, because the argument would have little basis in science anyway. Science can tell us certain facts about the situation, such as, the fact that crime is lower in most Western countries than in the US. What it can’t tell us is whether people have the right to defend themselves, which has nothing to do with the level of crime in a given place. I live in one of the safest cities in the country, yet women carrying pepper spray or stun guns is pretty common and I’m not sure what moral policy justification there is for denying women such equalizers. I’m also not sure what public policy goal is accomplished by preventing civilians from owning such things. Were European countries suffering from a rash of innocent people getting pepper sprayed?
I don’t know how much disabled rights groups care about abortion, but Christian conservatives see a Culture of Death as some call it.
BTW, since the death penalty was mentioned, there’s even a slippery slope there. In places where the death penalty has been abolished, many have also abolished life sentences.
I dunno. Get some cites.
I’m sure they call a lot of things a lot of things.
So have crime rates or recidivism rates gone up as a result?
Don’t know, but I don’t know why that would be relevant to all people. Sometimes the facts don’t adequately decide an issue. If you see the purpose of prison as rehabilitation, then recidivism rates are an important fact. If you think it’s about punishment, or “justice”, whatever that means in that context, then it wouldn’t matter.
That’s why applying science and empiricism to political questions isn’t often very useful. If I was building this board, I wouldn’t even have a politics section actually, except for some Great Debates about issues where facts actually matter, like climate change, economic policy, government effectiveness, etc.
Yes, I can see that in the effort to link abortion to anything bad, however tenuous the connection.
I suspect the anti-GMO, and to an extent the anti-vaxx liberals as well, are motivated by a deep mistrust of big business. I think people of all political stripes tend to trust the government when it does what they want and mistrust it when it doesn’t. Remember “l love it or leave it”? Now it’s “make America great again.” I’m sure the left has had similarly contradictory slogans.
And don’t even get me started “liberals think their opponents need to be smarter and conservatives think their opponents need to be more moral” thing. I’ve been saying that for longer than I can remember.
I’m saying that’s how conservatives view it. The empirical observer attributes nothing to divine action. The empirical observer says “I see two cells dividing,” not “I see the miracle of life taking place.”
This goes way back to when Galileo’s scientific observations were thought as blasphemy by the Church. Galileo could have been the most warmhearted person on Earth, but the prevailing religion saw him as an enemy to their cause.
Aren’t you conflating conservative with religious? About 13% of atheists and agnostics self-identify as conservative. Are there not many religious Democrats?
I need to see a cite on this. I’m not aware of any, let alone many.
I’m talking about a fundamental aversion Conservatives have to science, and by extension, liberals. That’s the root of the left-leaning political nature of this board. Are 13% percent of the SDMB conservatives atheists?
I don’t really agree with this notion. Certain types of conservatives are anti-science to one degree or another and I agree there are certainly more of them than anti-science liberals. But I can’t in anyway regard it as ‘fundamental’ to conservatism. I’ve known too many conservative scientists.
No, but I’m pretty sure we’ve had more than one ( I can think of one off the top of my head, but I think I’m just blanking on names on others ).
Secular conservative here. I have an engineering degree for whatever worth that is. My reasons for rightward leaning have to do with the rejection of the premise that spending other people’s money to pay people not to work is somehow a virtue. I believe people like any other organism respond to the environment and to sets of incentives. There are certain behaviors that I feel shouldn’t be highly rewarded.
I don’t need college women’s approval to have an opinion. I’m married and don’t need to impress co-eds with my compassion or sensitivity. I know a lot of conservatives in the engineering field.