Forget the semantics and the nit-picking over things which have NOTHING to do with what was said here. I don’t see the need to invoke Dred Fucking Scott into this debate.
I will spell it out:
Some people think jerking off is immoral.
Some people think drinking is immoral.
Some people think playing Lotto is immoral.
Some people think cursing is immoral.
Should any of the above be legislated?
Please reread the comment that Flymaster made in regards to (what he should have called “personal) morality” and the response given by Bob and for the love of Allah, try and stay on topic!!
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Dred Fucking Scott decreed that blacks were 3/5s a person…not entitled to legal protection…I think it has a lot to do with a debate over what kind of individuals should or should not receive protection…and what role “personal” morality or ethics play in public policy decision making…
Some people thought that owning slaves is immoral. Some people thought that owning slaves is nobody elses’ fucking business, that it was a PRIVATE/PERSONAL issue of import only to the slave owner…what is a personal matter to some, may appear to be a larger issue for society…and who says that only YOU (or anybody else) and not the slave owner gets to decide if its “just” a personal issue?
(btw…to answer YOUR question, masturbation,playing lotto would not be legislated by me…it would appear, the last time I checked, that drinking is legislated to some extent int his country)
First, Satan, thanks for adding “personal.” That was definetly intended to have been in there. Now, on to the game of nitpicky little semantic issues, just to be an ass.
Odd…last I checked, Dred Fucking Scott was a BLACK man. It was in the Dred Fucking Scott decision that the Supreme Court RULED that blacks were not CITIZENS, and thus could not SUE in court. The 3/5ths compromise was an entirely different issue, back in the day of the constitutional convention.
Good try though. Now answer the question. Pill, or Surgery? Pill is safer. Those are the only two options. You CANNOT “save the child.”
I would appreciate it very much if, in the future,when you read my posts that you paraphrase them accurately.
Here is the sum total of what I have said so far in this thread:
Since some of the other posters had asked what the state of the law used to be, and what the punishments were, I thought that it might be useful to provide a factual example.
Your interpretation was:
In a subsequent post you quoted me in support of your summary.
I fail to see how my stating the previous legal position in Canada, without further comment, allows you to conclude that I am in favour of that former position.
In fact, I carefully refrained from commenting on the merits of that position, either way, because I did not want to participate in the main debate. I simply gave an historical example.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Bosda Di’Chi of Tricor *
**
**
All tight, I’ll give it a try, before thousands of innocent Hawthorn trees fall to the axe.
Murder is prohibited in our society. That prohibition, which I think is a darn good one, does not compel me to search people’s kitchen drawers to make sure they don’t have any knives, lest they use one to kill. And people do, in fact, kill every day. It’s probably accurate to say that if any of us chose to kill, we could do so easily.
And yet we prohibit it and do, in fact, enforce the law as best we can as a society. Should we repeal any laws on the books against murder (or assault, or whatever), using your logic? I’m not using this analogy in any way except to answer your argument, in case anyone’s tempted to draw conclusions from points I’m not making here.
By “Dred Fucking Scott”… i was of course referring to the Supreme Court decision…not just the man…you’re right that I did combine two separate notions though (the citizenship issue and the 3/5s of a person issue)
I think my essential point remains unchanged…that what would appear to be one person’s definition of a “personal” or “private” matter …outside the bounds of state intervention…may be viewed differently by others.
A slave owner in that time period, would, I’m guessing, think that ownership of his slave would be a private/personal matter, of no concern to anyone else. It wold appear that a significant portion of society thought otherwise.
In my original rebuttal to Satans notion about “persnal morality”, I did not bring up Dred Scott…Satan did. I used the example of slavery.
You’re right, I shouldn’t go off on mocking pro-life viewpoints because it gives you an opportunity to ignore the real issues being brought up. But bear in mind that there are those who feel that masturbation is a sin simply because it kills sperm! Why should eggs be any different.
I don’t think fertilised eggs should even be up for debate amongst intelligent people, but here we are…
Here, I’ll connect the dots for you. If non-implantation of a fertilised egg is murder of a human being, then most women using the Pill are guilty of it many times over.
Clear now?
Now let’s get back to the insanity of your confidence in our ability to handle a 50% increase in the birth rate.
Do you realise that such an increase would result in a birth reate equivelant to that of 3rd world countries? (27 births per thousand)
Granted, our death rate here in the States is a tad higher then more socialist and civilised countries like Canada and Norway (9 instead of 7 per 1000) but still, such a population boom would be unbearable. It would result in the same starvation, overcrowding, and misery as the 3rd world is experiencing. The infrastructure for our public health system, already pathetically underfunded, would collapse. Death rates would climb, although probably not high enough to compensate for the birth rate. (reasoning behind this - Ethiopia, worst off of the 3rd world has a birth rate of 48 and a death rate of 21)
Again, please show how we would compensate for such an increase, in particular, where the additional funding would come from, where we would find 50% more qualified foster parents and so on.
BTW, since you draw your arbitrary line in the sand at implanted fertilised eggs, I assume you get off easy on whether fertility clinics are engaging in murder, and also on any moral obligation to implant those poor eggs in you or your spouse (whoever is female).
I think it is a good time to point out how arbitrary your definition is. Mine is fairly simple - neural complexity (mind) is the most important thing on this planet. Your limbs can be chopped off, your life support system duplicated, but without the brain there is no you. Human rights go up as the intelligence does. Killing brain-dead person is not murder.
Your system - a fertilised egg is not a person, but an implanted one is.
You really don’t understand, do you! A few of those are sustainable. If they become the norm, such families, which cannot bear the cost of supporting themselves (litter style has low birth weights and a host of accompanying problems - school cost tax rates in America are for average family of 2.1, not average family of 5) would crush the system. There would be no funds for it.
Fortunately, I have faith in the eventual collapse of the pro-life movement. Reproduction rates have consistently gone down as economic status of nations, and the status of women in them, go up. Hopefuly the U.S. will slowly and inevitably join E.U. countries in this regard.
In order to reach a more conservative samplling of opinions, I posted this exact very good question to the Pizza Parlor, the offshoot from the Christian LBMB many of us all remember well.
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thanks ** Satan, that was Interesting, but let’s muddy the waters a bit more:
we’ve talked about the woman.
We’ve talked about the doctor.
What about the other health personnel involved - after all, they are NOT actually performing the abortion, they are safeguarding the woman’s life.
what about the friend/lover who drove the woman to get the abortion? If it was an armed robbery, the driver (in my state anyhow) will be charged as well, same crime, probably will get less time * even if the robber agrees the driver didn’t know *.
What about the person who helped her pay for it? after all, if you help pay for a contract killing, you’re just as guilty.
and I go back to my point on the first page. When I’ve found that I’m uncomfortable with the logical progression of my moral stance, it’s time to start re-evaluating that moral stance. I would suggest to folks who have a difficult time considering the woman to be guilty of murder (in whatever degree you want to imagine) that it seems clear that you also draw some philisophical distinction between the born baby and the E/Z/F.
In this thread, porcupine claims “no one who thinks abortion is the moral equivalent to murder was willing to answer” his questions, I will now do so.
The punishment should be hell.
Thanks. Good night everybody!
OTOH, many times eggs that are fertilized don’t find a spot in the womb anyway, and do die a natural death. So I don’t consider the prevention of this implantion to be the most serious thing going.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong (as if I had to ask!), but I believe abortion was illegal in Nazi Germany. (Hitler wanted as many new Aryan citizens as he could get.) I believe the punishment for the woman was four years hard labor for the first offense, death for the second. I’m not sure how the doctor was punished, if at all. (I first read this in an edition of The People’s Almanac. I was unable to find any online confirmation of this claim.)
(If true, this puts the lie to the people who call pro-choicers Nazis. Not that any of the anti-choice people on this thread have done so.)
So you’re saying that if it happens naturally, it’s ok to take “artificial” steps to accomplish the same thing? The following statement has the same logic:
Many times, after a fertilized egg implants, it spontaneously aborts anyway, and dies a natural death. So I don’t consider abortion to be the most serious thing going.
I am not one of those people. Take this up with someone who actually believes this. I can not answer for them.
First of all your “if” statement does not apply to my opinion. I do not think the non-implantation of a fertilized egg is murder. I have never stated this, and I cannot see where I may have implied it. Why you continue to ask me to extrapolate from a foundation I do no hold to be true, I’m not sure.
There is no need to connect dots for me. I am quite comfortable with the morality of my own view. Yours is different. Ok. Also, my definition is no more “complex” than yours. I point to a specific instance of the pregnancy cycle–implantation of a fertilized egg. That is no more arbitrary than some other point someone else may take. In fact, I think it is decidedly unarbitrary. At least I can point to a specific instance. Maybe I’m wrong, but “neural complexity” implies quite a bit of wiggle room.
Many out there are much more ambiguous, such as a “point of viability.” When, exactly, is that? (Rhetorical question). That changes with technology.
But you have your position. So be it. I won’t lose any sleep over the fact that you have a different standard. Abortion bothers me greatly. Your personal opinion bothers me not at all. If I got riled every time I came across someone who disagreed with a moral stance I take, I would go through life a very angry man. I am not an angry man.
Kindof. At the risk of being redundant, that is where I’ve decided to draw the line for my own moral comfort level. A fertilized egg that never implants will perish. One that does implant will (presumably) develop into a baby (aka “person”). I do not feel once this process reaches the starting point of implantation, that we should snuff it out.
I never thought about it as “getting off easy.” My opinion is what it is. Nothing about abortion is “easy.” There are some things a fertility clinic does that I would agree with, some things I would not. If a particular practice involves implanting several embryos, and then thinning the “litter” by the process of selective reduction, well, I am against that. I am not against creating test tube embryos per se. I think it a good thing to have this technology for couples who can not produce their own. Hopefully the technology can advance to reduce the number of embryos that are discarded through fertility procedures.
As far as a moral obligation to implant poor eggs into females goes, I’ll be sure and get back to you when I meet this mythical person who suggested such a thing. :rolleyes:
Your numbers seem funky. You ask “If they become the norm…?” How would this become the norm? How could this become the norm? How does 1.37 million more live births increase average family size from 2.1 to 5? This is so totally off the base of reality, and way out of the realm of this discussion. No matter what we do with abortion in this country, the US birthrate is not going to jump from 2.1 to 5.
As such, I feel no obligation to answer such a hypothetical. And look at Skribbler’s post again. His own example is of a woman happy to have 5 children. Heck, I know several families with 5 or more children. They are happy. I’m sorry that some of you see an increase of families like this as a threat to our US way of comfortable life.
I am not insane, I assure you. I’m not sure where you get the numbers you are using. I’m not challenging them as incorrect, it is just hard for me to follow. It seems you are saying that if all 1.37 million (your number) annual U.S. abortions became live births, then we would have the birth rate of a third-world nation. You then project
Oh, I think we’d do okay! Are you basing your projection for the collapse of US civilization as we know it on a comparison to Ethiopia? I must be reading this wrong, so I won’t follow that trail to its inevitable conclusion.
Let’s see. 1.37 million fewer abortions each year. What with some that would never reach term for other (natural) reasons, can we drop it to 1.3 million live births? Spread out over the vast expanse of the US. That’s an additional 26,000 per state. It is my opinion that the US could handle this. Some areas would have an easier time of it than others, but I don’t forsee the drastic collapse of our social systems that you do. In fact, no matter how many mental gymnastics I do, I just can’t reconcile this type of population growth with your doomsday scenario.
I’m afraid I’ve indulged you way too much on this aspect. Abortion as population control is not my bag. It sickens me, actually, to consider the ramifications that this road leads to. I already posted, in general terms, how I think our society could absorb this population increase. Since I do not accept your premise, I’m afraid that will have to do. If that compels you to proclaim some sort of victory, so be it.
But here’s an example. Granted, it’s a conservative Christian nutjob who Christians may say is misinterpreting scripture, but then, pro-choice Christians might say the same of pro-life Christians.
Charles D. Provan in The Bible and Birth Control
I could get more. He’s not alone.
Some Buddhists feel the same way.