Well, politicians these days aren’t exactly known for their intelligence or foresight…
yeah, this is the second instance of a self-proclaimed Democrat saying that if the Democrats were just to adopt the Republican legislative agenda, they win the elections in 2012. Problems there are:
- You drop support for abortion and contraceptives, you lose a LOT of female voters.
- Even if you ARE elected, what difference does it make? You are in all practical respects a Republican.
You may have noticed that there was a lot of that going around in the several hundred anti-choice laws proposed in the last year. There was so much stupid I was expecting 1 or 2 of the laws to prohibit being female.
So why so much apologetics for this nonsense?
Because, as I’m sure you know, it’s a common way of expressing claims that the writer considers false.
‘The so-called “patriots”…’
‘The self proclaimed “moderates”…’
‘The “persecuted, oppressed Christians”…’
Or:
This. There’s no point in “defeating” the enemy by becoming the enemy.
They also didn’t take the opportunity to jerk violently towards teh left on this issue either and yet the right is scared witless taht this is what they would do the ionstant they have the ability to do so.
It reminds me of how the NRA thinks that Obama will take our guns the instant he wins reelection because the first term was just a rope a dope to lull us into a sense of security so that he could take our guns in the second term. :smack:
Remind me again of the difference?
I’ve never seen any evidence that conservatives are scared the Democrats are going to move to the left on abortion (similar to their concerns on gun control). What’s happening is that conservatives have made a mission of demonizing Planned Parenthood as an abortion mill and are doing what they can to eliminate it and reduce abortions that way. It’s not a response to what they think the Democrats will do. It’s just how they’re trying to advance their agenda.
:dubious: Um, in one case your ideals win; the the other the enemy’s ideals win.
The problem with your proposed legislation is that it is my body. If you’re going to demand the right to make laws around it you’d better have a better rationale than your Christianity or your personal morals. Which is fundamentally the difference between those of us who are pro-choice and those people who call themselves pro-life. I’m not telling you what to do. If you don’t want an abortion then don’t have one. You, OTOH, are proposing to overrule my personal morals and religion.
I dismiss pro-lifers because they deserve to be dismissed. Their argument amounts to nothing more than their desire to impose their religion on other people’s body parts.
- I support the legal right for women to have readily available, safe, inexpensive abortions.
- Your argument is some of the worst, most wilfully ignorant pablum that gets passed around on the Dope. No, the pro-life argument boils down to people’s desire to stop what they see as the deliberate killing of babies. It is not at all hard to envision why someone who thinks that a fetus is a human being would object to it being killed. The idea that they just want to “impose their religion” o,n your uterus, rather than opposing what they think is the killing of babies requires willful ignorance of truly titanic levels.
Cut it out.
Heck, I get that they feel all morally in the right about not kiling babies and stuff, it’s the stubborn refusal to recognize the specific circumstances that gets me shaking my head - morality deliberately divorced from reason.
Well that would be more reasonable, but it’s not consistent with the text of the article: Although the House – including McKillip and House Speaker David Ralston, R-Blue Ridge – initially balked, they agreed Thursday to move forward with a compromise. It was to include a definition in the bill describing what “medically futile” means: Profound and “irremediable” anomalies that would be “incompatible with sustaining life after birth.”
Other small tweaks to the bill’s language were made. And McKillip agreed to keep another Senate change that would protect doctors from civil suits brought as a result of the legislation.
In essence the loophole remained in the bill but was tightened – women seeking abortions after 20 weeks can still get them under certain circumstances. But McKillip and the bill’s supporters still declared victory. “We agreed with that to make sure we have an enforceable statute,” McKillip said. Emphasis added. It seems that the changes were only made with reluctance.
Now that’s the only article I’ve read on the subject. But so far the evidence seems to point towards the apocalyptic hypothesis that all anti-aborts without exception are History’s Greatest Monsters (next to militarists and non-atheists of course).
Emphasis dropped. Der’s argument completely falls apart in the face of a state like Ireland, which outlaws abortion but also has a fairly robust safety net and historically a generous welfare state, unaffordably so at times. It’s also compromised by the large pro-Choice block of US voters who want abortion to be “Safe and rare”.
But FinnAgain: I have difficulty getting my head around those who declare a fetus that is months away from acquiring brain waves to be a full human being: it seems to me to be an appendage of the mother. I furthermore have difficulty with the miniscule shares of the US population that both want to ban abortion and favor robust pre-natal care. It’s not that the 2 logically follow from one another necessarily, but that the overwhelming majority of self-styled pro-Lifers are uninterested in human health after birth suggests a punitive temperament at work.
This does not really stand up to scrutiny.
Yes, they believe a baby is being killed. But how committed are they to that notion?
Obviously the woman having an abortion does not see it as murder.
Do they think those who have abortions are callous murderers? Killing helpless little babies no less. A more despicable being is hard to imagine. Offing a store clerk or someone who bugs them would be peanuts. Maybe they go to playgrounds to stab little kids for fun.
Obviously that is hyperbole but that is where the notion that abortion = murder must take you.
Imagine a clinic where mothers brought their toddlers to have their kid killed. People outside would not be carrying signs…they’d be full on tackling people. The outrage and horror of it would be off the charts.
The vast majority of pro-lifers come nowhere close to that.
They know the women seeking abortions are not stone cold killers. So heartless that murdering babies is a casual matter to them.
Further, neither science nor the law has established the fetus as equivalent to a fully formed human in the first few months of pregnancy.
So, someone who feels it is wrong IS imposing their beliefs upon another. Beliefs which have no support in fact.
If someone wants to impose their beliefs on you such that they restrict your rights over your own body they need more than their religion or feelings.
And you are not paying attention if you do not see religion being invoked regularly among pro-lifers.
- I don’t agree with the logic of non-brainwave-fetus = human either. But then again, I don’t have to. They do, and their actions flow from that premise.
- I don’t believe it suggests punitive measures, at all. It suggests that they believe that murder is wrong, but that there’s no (or little to no) obligation to provide a safety net for other people. There’s no contradiction, for instance, if someone says it should be illegal to set the homeless on fire but that we also shouldn’t be funding homeless shelters and we should let them fend for themselves. It may be a position you find shitty, but it is not necessarily a logically inconsistent position.
Sure it does. Of course, if you assume that they hold your axioms it no longer makes sense. But, they don’t. They hold their axioms. And no, the idea that other people are willful murders is not a necessary consequence of their axioms, it is a necessary consequence of your caricature of them. They can, and do, quite clearly believe that some (or many, or all) women are uninformed, unthinking, unwitting, etc…
Further, the claim that anti-abortion activists are imposing their beliefs on others is true… in as much as every single law is belief imposed upon society at large. And the claim that ‘science’ has or hasn’t confirmed where humanity starts is an absurdity. Science deals in facts, data, not aesthetic interpretations. Is a blastula a living entity? Undoubtedly, and science can tell us the specifics down to the microgram. Is a fetus a human? Science must stand mute as there is no humanometer. Metrics like brainwaves and viability are well and good, but the importance we attach to them is our interpretation, and not “science”. We would do well to remember that.
People can hold all sorts of stupid, unfounded crap in their head.
Your take on it is the same take that conservatives use when claiming Obama is a Kenyan Manchurian candidate. To suggest that their axioms are as valid as mine are so much bullshit. “Hey, you think he was born in America, I don’t, so we are even” does not work. Not in any rational sense anyway.
They are not basing their axioms on any kind of reason whatsoever.
No humanmometer? We can work with that:
There is a continuum from fertilized egg to baby popping out of the mother yes?
Baby popping out of mom = human (pretty sure we can all agree on that).
1 second before it pops out? Still human, nothing much is different.
On the flip side fertilized egg = human? Nope (I know some will say yes but give them a microscope and a fertilized egg and let them point out the similarities between you and the egg…won’t get far).
1 second after fertilization? Still an egg.
So we work along the line. Granted science can not define a single spot where we say a line has been crossed. We do not need to though. We can err on the side of caution and say, clearly, up through the first trimester = not human in a meaningful sense.
While true this is a dodge.
Yes, society imposes laws. That does not mean the laws are rational or make sense merely because the society proclaimed it to be.
The Salem Witch Trials were presumably done in accordance with their laws at the time. Does that mean, since they were “legal” because society said so, it made their beliefs that they were getting witches tenable?
Wrong, and your comparison is disingenuous. Whether Obama was or was not born in America is a factual matter. Whether a fetus is or is not human is a matter of interpretation. Otherwise find me a humanometer and we can settle the debate. Barring that, drop the bombast. You’re also not served by declaring that your opposition is " not basing their axioms on any kind of reason whatsoever."
Unless, of course, your goal is an inchoate shouting match. In which case, game on, I guess.
On the flipside, your definition of human is obviously post hoc and self-serving, arrived at via fiat. Someone who has decided that a fertilized egg counts as a human has just as much support as your ‘Nuhn uhnnn!’ You can, as mentioned above, shout at each other about it, I suppose. How many rounds of “Is too!” “Is not!” “Woman-oppresser!” “Baby-killer!” would you care to engage in?
There is no scientific definition of what constitutes humanity. There cannot be, as humanity is not an objective metric measurable like joules or grams.
Nor is the fact that all laws are the imposition of belief a ‘dodge’. It means that pointing out that a law is an imposition of belief is a non-started, a rabbit trail, semantic noise with the value of the null set. If the folks you’re preaching to aren’t in your choir, all you’ve actually said is ‘Stop trying to impose your view that murder is wrong, I can murder babies if I wanna!’ Not, perhaps, the most effective tactic unless we’re dedicated to the “Is too!” “Is not!” school of, ahem, discussion.
Ireland’s historical mistreatment of women is well known.
Nonsense. First, those “babies” are only “human beings” according to their religious* and self-justifying** definitions of the term; no better than them saying “they are people because we say they are people”. And second, as has already been said they simply don’t act like they believe it. And third, they’ve never shown much concern over actual death and killing; when their ideals and policies kill people, they either ignore it, don’t care or outright gloat over it.
- Claiming they have souls; a religious concept.
** Using definitions of “person” that are created for and used almost exclusively for trying to ban abortions.
It is not disingenuous. It is the same thing.
It is someone presenting facts and the other side refusing to heed those facts all the while claiming that their version is every bit as valid an argument as someone else’s version.
Define a what a human is.
Now stand someone next to a microscope with a fertilized egg and have them point out the similarities between a human and that egg.
All I can think of is the both have human DNA. But then so does a blood cell or skin cell and we do not cry murder when we lose one of those.
If you have a blueprint for a house and trees nearby (for materials) and some basic tools do you have a house? Of course not. There is a potential for a house but it is not a house. So too with a fertilized egg.
People can rant all they want that really you have a house. Does not make it so. You are a long way from a house.
When in the construction of the house can you say it is a house? I don’t know but it is not just when you have the blueprint and it is not when you nail the first two boards together. Somewhere, even before it is fully completed, I think you could say it is a house but you need to be pretty far along in its construction.
What?
Yes… and some define “human” as “anything from a fertilized egg to a 105 year old man about to drop dead of systemic organ failure.” Your claim that people are ignoring facts is either disingenuous or, if you insist that it’s not, myopic; either you are casting the debate in artificially restrictive terms or you are unable to conceive of the discussion from another point of view.
On what basis do some people define a fertilized egg as a human?
You are accepting anyone’s opinion as valid. If they define a fertilized egg as human than you suggest that is as valid as someone who doesn’t.
Would you consider it valid if they defined a loaf of bread as human? If not why not?
If they need no rationale beyond their belief then all viewpoints are as valid as any other.
If that is the case then they can still fuck off because they have no right to impose their beliefs on my equally valid opposite belief.