Or you could turn it around the other way. To buy a gun you first have to watch videos of various gunshot victims.
I hope you’re not a Roman Catholic, or if you are, that you no longer have sex.
Have sex without any chance of procreation and you’re on your way to hell.
It’s a medical condition of having another person inside you, if you believe a fetus is a person. It’s qualitatively different than any other medical condition.
OK, then I plead insensitive boor.
But you seemed to get the analogy, anyway, since you said if one twin was, essentially, a parasite of the other, then the functionally independent twin has the right. That’s a fair answer. I was just trying to reframe the question in neutral terms, as a person who sees a fetus as a person might see it. Can you at least respect that in that situation, a reasonable person might have a different answer than you? Especially if (please indulge me this crazy hypothetical), one twin was completely dependent on the other now, but had a good chance of growing into an independent, separate-able twin?
I think probably, since you already acknowledge Bricker’s position on abortion is like yours with guns.
See the thing is I don’t think I should have to give a damn about what pro-lifers think. I don’t care if they believe a fertilized egg is a person. After multiple failed IVF’s I know personally a fertilized egg is not a person. And I have the pics to prove it. I certainly don’t agree with them that a fetus is a person. If they are going to attempt to legislate based on what I view as an idiotic belief not backed up in science and one that directly threatens the health of women I’m going to treat them as nothing more than people who have an idiotic belief.
A 6 wk fetus is no more a person than a newborn baby girl is a good mother.
They have the potential, yes, but there is an awful lot that has to happen correctly for that potential to be realized.
Not really, no. I firmly believe that the rights of actual existing people trump the rights of maybe potential people.
We had some abortion protesters on campus last week, complete with scary shock pictures. I stopped to talk to them (two young women; I’m a guy), and it was interesting. Their entire rhetorical strategy was to convince me that a fetus was a living human. I had no problem with that; I just feel that a woman’s rights over her own body trumped the right to life of a fetus. That upset their usual rhetorical strategies (mostly slippery slope), and in the course of trying to argue me around to their position made it clear that they felt that by engaging in sex, a woman incurs the obligation to carry any child conceived to term. They volunteered an exception in the case of rape, which I felt was logically inconsistent, but that’s beside the point.
In 40 years on the planet I’d never actually talked to the pro-life crowd. It was fascinating how quickly their arguments boiled down to two fundamentials, (1) babies are cute and (2) women shouldn’t be allowed free access to sex. I don’t know how typical they were of their ilk, but it certainly does seem consistent with the lawmakers’ positions.
You realize that is pro-choice?
'cept that one presumes most pro-choicers would not support a constitutional amendment to reverse the right to abortion that was deemed to exist in Roe v. Wade.
Well, given that I believe fundamentalist type of religion is not only counter-factual but dangerous to liberty, I say we require all fundamentalist congregations to see a series of lectures by atheists on the historical inaccuracy of their beliefs and the logical absurdity of the Bible. They can continue to believe, but they should be informed. Have a problem with that?
I wonder if they ever think about things like short-rib polydactyly syndrome…http://www.enotes.com/short-rib-polydactyly-reference/short-rib-polydactyly
…which will cause the infant to die if delivered. Many parents will opt to abort so they won’t have to go through that and then a funeral.
And then there’s the case of the woman whose 11-week pregnancy had to be aborted in order to save her from a life-threatening condition brought on by the pregnancy: http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2010/05/15/20100515phoenix-catholic-nun-abortion.html
She already had 4 kids at home who would have been left motherless had she continued with the pregnancy.
No, because it isn’t a person inside of you. Anyone who actually believes that is ignorant or delusional.
So why don’t the Repubs in Congress ever introduce an amendment and then trumpet that introduction and push it as an issue? It isn’t like Republicans aren’t permitted to introduce legislation and then run with it.
The reason is that most Republican elites are also pro-choice. They say they would choose not to have an abortion. They get the rank and file all riled up, but never really do anything about it. The reason being is best illustrated by the current right wing war against women: when they say out loud how they really feel about women the Republican women go into the voting booth and vote Democratic.
I had a fascinating experience…quite a good many…um…decades ago…
It was on a college campus, and there were two competing protests, pro-life and pro-choice. There was a lot of yelling, but no violence. I’m pro-choice… I got to chatting with a guy from the pro-life side. We spoke quietly, kept it civil, agreed from the outset that we weren’t going to change our minds, but that we just wanted to see if there was any kind of “meeting of minds” possible at all.
What was eerie was that we attracted an audience. We became encircled by a small crowd, listening attentively to how we were engaging in (gasp) actual conversation.
Then…some jackass shouted a slogan, and the crowd broke apart in mutual name-calling.
The other guy looked at me, I looked at him, and, kind of sadly, we shrugged and backed away. We were willing to talk, even if we thought it was ultimately pointless, but the crowd around us wasn’t.
How can you say they “never really do anything about it” when the entire topic of thread is about a horrible thing they’re doing about it? And we had this same thing last month with Virginia. And South Dakota’s legislature has run all the abortion providing medical doctors out of the state.
Obstacles to Abortion in the United States - Page 3 <-----And that’s copyright 2005, it doesn’t even include the last 9 years of insanity.
“Never really do anything about it?” Really?! They’re eroding access all over the place, and have been ever since Roe v Wade was put into effect. It’s not just starting now, it’s *snowballing *now.
By the way, WhyNot, you’ve been anti-pitted in MPSIMS in thanks for your contributions to this thread and elsewhere.
I’ve talked to a lot of pro-lifers over the years, and in my experience that’s pretty much it. I dislike the idea of abortion, and am very glad I’ve never had to make that decision. I would be pro-life except that so many pro-lifers I’ve talked to are also against birth control. A world without safe, reliable birth control scares the heck out of me, so my votes and my donations land solidly in pro-choice candidates and groups.
That mindless rabble, interrupting your noble attempt to go halfway to a guy who thinks women are whores who must be punished for it.
It’s worth noting that the flipside of this – conservative opposition to mandatory health insurance – is of questionable ideological sincerity.
The idea came from the Heritage Foundation, and while of mixed reception through the 1990s was certainly not viewed as the heresy it now is.
And while appeals to federalism to distinguish national insurance requirements from manifold state requirements are perfectly believable coming from someone like Bricker, they’re not very believable coming from your average member of the GOP base who is all about the war on drugs, banning gay marriage, banning assisted suicide, banning so-called “partial birth” abortion, etc. etc.
You sound a bit hysterical. Here, have a dildo.
Isn’t that a cute little blob? Looks just like grandpa. 
Um… Huh? Where, pray tell, do you get any of that? I don’t mind a reasonable interpolation, but nothing, whatever, of this is in any way true. At least try to make your straw men a little realistic, okay?