Wow. And usually it’s the pro-choicers who accuse pro-lifers of perceiving women as mere incubators.
How exactly are you perceiving this situation, in which women wait to have abortions? What do you think is happening? If anything, the culture of shame over abortion is a significant factor for women debating whether or not to terminate (encouraging them to wait longer). But it comes only after: ignorance of their own bodies and reproductive organs (women who’ve received paltry sex ed or none at all and can’t even recognize they’re pregnant), shame (girls and women who’ve been raped, especially by a family member or abusive partner, and are in denial), a change in living situation (being laid off or ending a relationship), poverty (women who have to save up for an abortion or try to borrow money, or women working jobs without benefits who’ve got to beg for time off), access (women working the aforementioned jobs, often low-paying, who’ve got to travel a day or two to the closest abortion provider – and, in many states, stay several days between their initial ‘consultation’ and the actual procedure), their medical situation has changed (e.g. being diagnosed with depression or any other condition whose meds may conflict with a healthy fetus), and finally, the most common of all, their life is in danger and the baby is likely to die shortly after birth or live briefly in pain.
Which of these situations is unacceptable to you and deserving of a fine and/or jail time?
Stunning. You have a genius for rendering plain meaning into drivel. In neither instance did the poster say anything remotely similar to your quasi-paraphrase. You didn’t just misinterpret, you took their statements, stuffed its head up its ass and pulled it inside out
This. Starving Artist, I don’t think most of us here are advocating late-term abortions as birth control. However, they ARE necessary in certain cases, and thus, should be legal. The vast majority are done in cases of medical necessity.
Does anyone know what the fuck Senior Beef is nattering on about?
These are all good points and have to be taken into consideration. Still, there is an obvious deadline to abortions, i.e., nine months. So people somehow do get around to getting it done by a certain deadline. What I propose consists simply of moving that deadline up. Just like with the nine month deadline, people will do what they have to do to get it done in time. There isn’t anything you mentioned that becomes easier in the eighth month than the forth month
Further, it seems to me it would be far less expensive, less traumatic (barring the likes of DianaG, of course) and less taxing physically to undergo an abortion in the first four to four-and-a-half months than it would be later on when the baby is much larger and more well developed and has been lived with for a longer period of time.
And on preview:
That’s fine as far as it goes, but in my opinion…and an opinion that the evidence backs up…even certain mid-term abortions result in the killing of babies that are fully developed physiologically. I would prefer that all abortions save for those that are legitimate medical necessities be done prior to the that stage.
You assume that I would answer “no” to your “rhetorical question”. To answer it, yes we should, and we often do in the real world. If a fetus doesn’t have enough of a brain, for example.
All that argument does is put the word “human” in the “not intrinsically valuable” category. A mindless fetus is a mindless fetus whether you call it a fetus, a human, or a mango. A lump of meat with human DNA is still just meat, whatever the label.
No, we aren’t. Murder is the killing of a person, not an animal.
That simply trivializes the term “human life.” I prefer to reserve it for actual people.
I don’t believe that for an instant. They’ve made it quite clear they don’t care about human rights, or the welfare of the child they want to force to be born.
Yes; it’s stupid to treat malignant woman haters as merely reasonable people with whom I disagree.
Oh, please. If that was true pain and suffering would not exist.
And you appear to be calling cancer holy. Life that exists only to make more of itself.
He’s a big believer in the idea that we should never, ever treat one side as being in the wrong, or irrational, or nasty. Even when they show up waving guns, apparently.
I didn’t twist anything. Annie-Xmas is saying that a rapist and an unwanted fetus are doing the same thing - using a woman’s reproductive system against her will.
The actual quote:
You don’t think she intends to indicate similarities between a rapist and either a fetus and/or anti-abortion advocate? If not, what was the point of her statement?
And what Diogenes the Cynic said:
Okay, so a life doesn’t become a human person before it develops a personality, and therefore there are no moral qualms to ending it before that stage, right?
Maybe I’m misinterpreting it, but I’m reading his statement to be “some time after birth” and not “instantly develops a personality at birth” - meaning that it takes some time after birth to develop a personality. Since a human without a personality isn’t really a person, and hence there’s no moral qualm to killing it, if a baby doesn’t develop a personality until some time after birth, it seems logical that there’s no moral qualm about killing a just-born child, right? I admit I may be misinterpreting his words of “develops until after birth” to mean it takes some time to develop, rather than instantly having a personality at the moment of birth - but otherwise I didn’t attempt to twist his words in any way, just examine the logical conclusion.
If you have an argument to make, make it. Otherwise this is just sniping.
This isn’t true. I’m all for treating people as wrong or irrational if they hold, for example, supernatural beliefs.
You are an extremist. You believe that every single person, even a hypothetical anti-abortion advocate who talked 30 women out of an abortion and adopted the kids themselves, could not possibly have any other motivation for thinking abortion was wrong other than a deliberately malicious attempt to harm women.
Even if I were to grant that you were right in 95% of cases, which I wouldn’t, of course, you’d still be massively wrong. You are the wrong, irrational, and nasty one here. You have an unshakable faith that every person who holds a certain viewpoint is part of one monolithic entity who all hold the exact same beliefs for the exact same reason. You are a zealot. Even in this thread full of some pretty terrible arguments, I doubt there’s anyone here who would agree wholeheartedly with you.
Yes. One does it deliberately and one mindlessly, but the effect is the same.
If Snidely Whiplash tries to run you over with a train, you blame Snidely.
If the train is a runaway bearing down on you, you don’t blame the train. But you still hope to find a way to derail it since getting hit by the train has the same effect either way.
Then you couldn’t care less if she takes whatever steps she deems necessary to keep her uterus clear for the pregnancy that she intends to carry to term.
Well done. That is what people are arguing for her right to do.
That isn’t what you said that originally drew complaints. You said that the fetus was the equivalent of a rapist. That statement is troublesome since it undermines the specific, intentional, horrors inflicted by rapists.
Nonsense, and it doesn’t need to be that high. I said, repeatedly, that they are either out to harm women, or supporting the harm of women. And the actions of a few people - ones that even you had to call hypothetical - don’t change what the whole group is about, or the results of their actions.
If I bought your logic, I couldn’t label people who support slavery and torture as bad, either. You are simply in denial that a political movement can be fundamentally ill meaning.
Yep. I have no quarrel whatsoever with “pro-life” people who believe I should have complete control over my reproductive organs. Around these parts, we tend to call that “pro-choice,” but semantics be damned.
I will never disagree with you about the effect of their desires on the real lives of women AND I think that there is a great deal of misogyny in a lot of pro-life rhetoric. But I think it’s a mistake to attribute to malice what can be attributed to ignorance or carelessness. I think that you give the movement too much credit (even if negative credit) for even considering the women. The women aren’t even really in the equation for most anti-abortion activists. That is its own issue, but not a necessarily deliberately malevolent one.
jsgoddess, your statements in the last page of posts or so have been some of the most sane, reasonable, and even-handed in the whole thread. There have been other good ones, but I like the way you respond to those whose opinions differ from yours.
The fetus is using her reproductive organs against her will just like a rapist, right? I thought that was the point of the statement. Yes, I realize it “undermines the specific, intentional, horrors inflicted by rapists” because I was saying how ridiculous the statement was.
