Actually, suffering could be said to exist in these cases because of the “it might happen to me” fear instilled in everyone. Even though a sniper might kill me instantly, with no suffering, it would most definite cause a panic if arbitrary murder in this manner were legal. This suffering only arises through our developed sense of self and our awareness of our own mortality, which a tadpole-like organism has none of. I cannot become a tadpole, but can become comatose or anaesthetised.
You didn’t give me evidence. You gave me what you know about biology, without one single cite. That’s okay, I enjoyed it. The fact is that some women behave responsibly and some don’t. If someone wants IT more at mid-cycle, they still have a choice. We’re already living in a world where they have to put warning labels on ladders. We don’t need more excuses to avoid personal responsibility.
Nobody has complete free will. It is affected by upbringing and experiences. As an adult, every attempt should still be made to stay in control of our lives.
Show me where I said abortion law should be changed. You’re playing with my words. Quote me, cite, show me the post!!!
Are you sure you’re reading my posts??? You seem to be seeing something that isn’t there. And don’t defend a woman’s right to choose and then act like there’s something wrong with my “disastrous” choice. I would hold myself accountable, no matter what choice I were making. It is my body after all. I never said sex was a sin. I never brought God up at all. You are NOT paying enough attention.
We have already covered this several times. If you don’t understand self-esteem, I don’t think I can explain it to you. Just for fun, when you get a chance; put abortion and remorse in your google search and read the thousands of letters from women who did not realize the emotional pain that would go with an abortion. Nobody should ever have to spend their lives with that kind of regret, if it can be avoided. You seem to think that I have something against women who get abortions and I don’t. If it hurts them, I feel very bad for them. Pain is not good for self-esteem, either.
Did a baby do something bad to you once? My kids were great, but I don’t really like other people’s kids that much, so I’m not going to defend the little parasites. Okay?
I never said that. Are you okay??
I don’t plan to implement it at all. I’m doing just what you’re doing. Saying how I feel. I raised my daughters and my son to understand personal responsibility, to feel good about themselves and I also let them know that chances were, one day they would meet someone and they wouldn’t be able to keep from “doing it” with them. I explained the biology of lust. I told them not to be dumbasses, right before I sent them out into the big bad world. Oh and I gave them access to birth control. I did my part. Good parenting is the only way to limit the need for abortion. Kind of odd that it works that way.
It is quite difficult to converse with someone who does not remember what they have written and/or who is unwilling to scroll back up a few inches to read their own words. It is doubly challenging to discuss an issue with a person who cannot see that certain statements of theirs would lead another person to draw a logical conclusion about what they think or how they feel.
But I can certainly go into it, per your request.
I can cite you specifically regarding the legal issue. You said (and I quote) that “Abortion law should be for women who have tried to prevent pregnancy and failed. It should not be backup birth control for idiots.” From this, I concluded that you imagined women who became pregnant “by accident” instead of by birth control failure to be “idiots” and that “abortion law” should be for women who tried to prevent pregnancy and failed. I mean, you did say exactly that.
I am also extrapolating, a common instrument for argument analysis. You make statements, and I interpret them. You have said that “Aborting an unwanted fetus means that someone was unwise enough to allow herself to become pregnant”, that “Abortion should be a lot more rare and should be utilized when all else fails,” that you “maintain that someone who cares about herself as she should will probably never find herself in the position of needing an abortion”, that “too many abortions are performed each year” and that you are “strongly pro-life”. It is from this that I conclude that you do not like abortion much, that you think it is “over-utilized” (that was your word too) and that women who get pregnant accidentally - or who do not know how to use birth control/are coerced against their use by the men in their lives - are stupid.
And while I yawn at the prospect of pointing this out, your accusations that I have not read your posts are actually efforts to deny that you meant what you are clearly saying.
For example, I said that other cultures don’t think of “human life” as being sacred in exactly the same way we did. You responded that “somehow your comparisons with other cultures that don’t value human life, don’t convince me that it is normal, acceptable or a good thing.” I answered - and I will admit that perhaps it was a bit premature to conclude that you felt this way - that “it is quite narrow to claim that everyone everywhere values human life like we do, or even just about everyone. That isn’t true.” You said that you “didn’t claim that” (which may be technically true in that you did not say so outright, and then you claimed I wasn’t “paying attention”). But you then went on to say, “You can play with words all you want, but the term human life is pretty descriptive and there’s not near as much variation or room for justification as you would like to believe.. Having personal values that aren’t cultural, but are based on humanism is not being close-minded. I don’t happen to see countries or races nearly as clearly as I just see other people, other human life”
As you can see, I read your posts very carefully, carefully enough to predict that you felt a certain way on the basis of a little evidence, a prediction which you then verified. This was that you believed in a single standard for the value of “life” that crossed cultural boundaries, which you labeled “secular humanism” - which is decidedly a cultural value popular in the Western world, a region from which I gather you hail. Like many people, you seemed to be saying that your personal belief system transcends “culture” per se, and that there was a more concrete “right and wrong” to worry about. I assume you felt you were in the right, because you said it was a “shame” that others didn’t agree with you. The icing on the cake is that you THEN proceeded to claim that you “never denied” that your belief was culturally influenced.
I suppose I could also provide citations for the MANY articles that support the conclusion that proceptivity increases midcycle for humans and closely related primates, but I give people enough credit to imagine that they could check it out on Medline themselves if they were really curious. It’s well-documented.
Then you bring god into this. The term “sin”, while perhaps bearing a religious connotation, needn’t necessarily be a religious reference. People refer to chocolate cake as sinful, in a good way. People sometimes call violations of their own ethical codes “sin”, even if they do not mean that a diety objects to their behavior. This is what I meant by sex as sin. I also meant that our culture seems to regard (on some level anyway) sex as seamy, a dirty behavior (which perhaps hearkens back to religious doctrine, like St. Jerome’s statement “est crater ad bibendum, et matula ad secretoria naturae” - yick!). I think that is why people seem to imagine that those who engage in “irresponsible” sex should be punished for it in one way or another (or held “accountable”, to use your words - there isn’t much difference). You also link low “self-esteem” to unwanted pregnancy.
Hence, based on the abundance of evidence I’ve accumulated on your stance on abortion, please correct me if I would be mistaken in assuming that you would agree with the statement, “If a woman gets pregnant because she is irresponsible about birth control, through her own stupidity, then that’s tough. She will just have to live with the consequences of her actions.” Even if I am mistaken, can you see how someone would draw that kind of conclusion on the basis of your statements?
As for my statement that you believe a woman’s rights end when pregnancy begins, I drew that conclusion because you said you were “strongly pro-life” in one instance and “personally completely pro-life” in another! You seem to object to abortions strongly enough to write pages of rebuttal to my statements. You say you “feel bad” for those poor women who come to “regret” their choices. You also say that you feel it isn’t your business to impose your beliefs on other people, but then again you have spent quite some time arguing that you thought abortions should be a “last-resort” option, that “good parenting” would prevent it, and that reduction in the number of abortions would be evidence of societal improvement. This would indicate that you think there is something WRONG with abortion on a fundamental level. Correct or incorrect?
As an aside, your statement that “Abortion law should be for women who have tried to prevent pregnancy and failed. It should not be backup birth control for idiots,” would soon populate the world with idiots. Not that we’re doing much better than that right now, but if we’re talking about what’s good for the human race, then perhaps the opposite of what you suggest should be our policy. Since you object to stupidity, which is to some extent heritable, maybe we should abort the children of stupid people to prevent stupidity from spreading any further (as you have tried to do with your own children) and force bright people who get pregnant by a product malfunction (because according to you legitimately making a bona-fide effort to prevent pregnancy by use of reliable birth control is evidence of their intelligence, as well as their high-self esteem) to have children they do not want. They can give away their offspring for adoption, to nice people like you.
As you can see from this totally insincere argument, we cannot draw these kinds of distinctions, either legally or in terms of should-haves.
I am in favor of dropping this lengthy debate at this point, since I am clearly not communicating in a way you understand or appreciate.
nothing exists in the future
nothing exists in the past
things only exist in the here and now
Well, your last statement is the crux of the whole problem that we have in communication. You don’t know how to draw a logical conclusion from a statement, without adding your own personal agenda to it. Pity.
Nowhere in my statement did I say that abortion law should be changed. Your conclusion was faulty. Saying what a law really should have been in place for, i.e. emergencies rather than just another birth control method, is my opinion. Again, no where do you find me advocating a change in abortion law.
You did have most of your conclusion right this time. There is a different in getting pregnant accidentally, which means that you generally made an effort not to become pregnant and getting pregnant through carelessness and disregard for your own health. I indicated in an earlier post that I consider some behaviour stupid and indiotic and did not intend to actually call a person any of these names. I even apologized if it seemed that way. What did you not understand about that?? Should I go back and find the statement for you, since I do believe you missed it.
You may have read them, but you do not have the ability to process them logically, without your own personal bias perverting their real meaning.
<snip, yawn, big waste of time, proof that you can indeed copy and paste>
Again, you weren’t paying attention. Everyone is culturally influenced. The one thing that YOU said people had in common was the “survival drive” or howevery you put that. I’m not re-reading the posts again for the exact wording, but I did agree that we had that one thing in common. That was the one thing that “transcends” the lines we have between cultures. I indicated that it was a shame we couldn’t build on that.
You’re the one that excused your long boring biology dissertation by claiming that it was some sort of validation for your argument. It’s your argument. Don’t expect me to go find cites to back it up for you. I wasn’t even disagreeing except to point out that hormones do not make cognitive processes cease to function.
\Sin, n. [OE. sinne, AS. synn, syn; akin to D. zonde, OS.
sundia, OHG. sunta, G. s["u]nde, Icel., Dan. & Sw. synd, L.
sons, sontis, guilty, perhaps originally from the p. pr. of
the verb signifying, to be, and meaning, the one who it is.
Cf. {Authentic}, {Sooth}.]
- Transgression of the law of God; disobedience of the
divine command; any violation of God’s will, either in
purpose or conduct; moral deficiency in the character;
iniquity; as, sins of omission and sins of commission.
<snipped your ridiculous justification for using the wrong word>
Nice generalization, but I did not say that women should be forced to carry unwanted babies. I am free to have an opinion that “generally” a woman with good self-esteem will protect her body from unwanted pregnancy and disease. What you don’t seem to be able to connect is that unprotected sex can also kill you or cause the remainder of your natural expressions of love/sex to be tainted by an incurable disease. Women who love themselves are less likely to risk their future. My opinion and yours don’t need to agree.
You are not just mistaken, you are deliberately ignoring all the statements I made, that indicated my belief that abortion law should not change. Shall I go find them for you? How could someone draw that conclusion, when I said just the opposite, if they were paying attention.
Listen closely. I can be as strongly pro-life as I want to be and still not believe that the laws should be changed. That would not stop abortion. It would stop safe abortion. I have written pages of rebuttal to your statements because of your inability to understand simple sentences and statements. I object to you coming to any conclusions about what I think. I have told you what I thought. Clearly, you have a problem understanding me.
Do you disagree that abortion should be a last-resort option??? Do you disagree that raising daughters with a better sense of self and how to protect themselves would be helpful??? You are correct though. I do think there’s something wrong with abortion. It’s happening too much and there are many reasons why it would be better to avoid ending up in that position. Not having a child is desirable, but abortion certainly is not.
<snip, pointless conjecture, unrelated to the discussion>
I am in favor of dropping it too. I just could not leave your last post unanswered, with so many patently false statements in it. Thank you for your time.
More than that, you can actually become temporarily “brain dead”–i.e., flat-lined in brain activity. During that period you (or anyone else) would be capacble of no brain activity, not even a vague dread. You’d merely be a non-sentient mass of tissue, with no current sense of self (or anything else). Could someone kill you then with impunity?
To the OP,
If we’re talking future here, and “potential” then not only are you creating life by giving birth/conceiving, you are also destroying. Because somewhere down the line some descendent is going to be responsible for some other’s death. Also, that by the time they reach 1000’s of offspring, you will be indirectly killing others just by using up their resources.
And int turn they will be consuming and killing many, many animals. So if you really want to get into “potential” and “futures”, not having an abortion will almost certainly lead to killing someone else. (And many animals, but with humans it’s abortion, with chickens, it’s an omelette(sp?) ;))
What I understand is that you are attempting to retract statements you made earlier because you now see that they are either insupportable or insulting. I am happy to allow you to withdraw statements/apologize for them - that is how one gets somewhere in an argument. You are at what is called the “I’m just saying!” phase. This is where you deny you meant what you clearly said and accuse your partner of deliberate misinterpretation, twisting your words around, etc. etc. I hardly need to point out that people at this phase generally lose the argument.
But I’m not trying to insult you. Both of us have a point to make. It is our job to draw logical conclusions from a statement on the basis of our own personal beliefs, opinions, or agendas. That’s what a debate is.
All anyone has to go on in message boards are the concrete, written words of other people. I extended you the courtesy of believing that you meant what you said. When you suggested that “abortion LAW” should be one thing for one kind of woman and another for another, I took you at your word and thought you meant legally. From your statement, I concluded that if laws were changed in the way you certainly seemed to be suggesting, then certain negative consequences would result. Now you say that this isn’t what you meant. All right.
Since you have retracted your statement that women who had abortions are stupid/idiots, and you are now claiming that abortion laws shouldn’t be any different than they are, well, our argument is officially over. My argument was also that abortion laws are good as they stand, and I agree that women who have abortions aren’t doing anything different than what humans have been up to for thousands of years, i.e., it is consistent with human nature. I hope to talk to you in another thread soon.
Delusions of grandeur? I had to go to the “I’m just saying” phase because of your tendency to jump to erroneous conclusions. I’m not going to point them all out again as I’m sure that you won’t understand. In order to win an argument, you would have to have a valid one first.
That would be fine if you did draw logical conclusions, but you did not.
You determined from my statement that I thought abortion law should be changed, in spite of the many times I repeated that abortion law should not be changed?? That indicates a lack of attention to detail or you just wanted to fight over something, so you had to make it up.
I clarified my statement about idiots, etc., because I meant the behaviour and not the person. I believe that’s the only thing that you almost interpreted correctly in all of my statements. I never claimed that abortion laws should be any different. That was not a change of heart or mind. Our argument has been officially over for three or four posts, but you failed to realize it. I would hope if we have another exchange, there would be less time wasted on what you think I meant and more time spent on what was actually said. Have a nice day.
On the one hand we have a real live adult human female, with hopes, dreams aspirations, plans, values, beliefs, etc.
On the other hand we have a fetus that has none of these but may have the potential to have all those at some later point.
What exactly is the rationale for subjugating the first to the second?