I don’t wear panties, but I’m comfortable with “unborn child” as defined in the Georgia law that is the topic of this thread. Is that acceptable? Or would that put your panties in a bunch?
(I’m stepping out now for a meeting, so you probably won’t see any more replies from me for a while)
This board isn’t based in Georgia, I don’t live in Georgia, and I have a suspicion that you don’t live in Georgia, so why the fuck do you think we should adopt the obviously biased terminology of those who passed this law in Georgia(besides the fact that you support this obviously biased terminology)?
Well, the “child” part of it is grotesquely inaccurate given the time periods that make the Georgia law so special and unique, so there’s that. “Unborn” is accurate enough, though. Or should that be “Not-born”? I’m a little hazy on the varying nuances of the various negating prefixes.
Meh, I’ll stick with ‘thingy’.
I’m confused why this issue is such a big part of “conservative” identity. I get it on firearms and other issues, but not this. Any conservative I’ve ever known admires societies like the Vikings and Romans - each of whom followed practices comparable to abortion as a method of (allegedly) keeping their tribe healthy. Doesn’t that occur to anyone?
It’s astonishing to me that the accurate medical term is seen as loaded. Is carcinoma similarly unacceptable? How about epidermis?
Only to people who think ‘pro life’, is actually accurate, and that ‘unborn child’, isn’t loaded language.
It’s not a meltdown, it’s an unrequested fission surplus.
Not if you mean it should be acceptable for you to try to make everyone else use it.
About half this entire argument is about whether the fetus, or embryo, or zygote (‘from the moment of conception’) is a child. You’re expecting people to concede that argument in order to even discuss the subject.
(The other half is about whether, when, and to what extent, whatever name we use, it’s entitled to commandeer an unwilling person’s body.)
I cosign both of these posts.
That’s nice, but I wasn’t talking about the Georgia law; I was replying to SlackerInc’s post advocating a hard abortion ban after the first trimester. That should have been clear from even a casual read.
And FWIW, at this point, the thread’s not about just the Georgia law, but the Alabama law, the Ohio law, the Missouri law…you get the idea.
Most of the time, yes. But if that name is fundamentally dishonest, then no.
In the case of the pro-life movement, there are people who are genuinely pro-life. They’re not only against abortion, but against war, capital punishment, etc. (The Berrigan brothers from back in the day come to mind.)
Calling people “pro-life” who love it when the U.S. messes around in other countries and causes hundreds of thousands to die - nope.
Calling people “pro-life” who want to force a mother to carry her fetus to birth, but don’t give a damn about the welfare of the child once it’s born - nope.
They’re not pro-life; they’re pro-forced-birth. I’m not going to let them be the beneficiaries of the sweet stories they tell about themselves.
Truth be told, I’d be okay with “unborn child” if I could trust pro-lifers not to prevaricate on it, i.e. seeing them claim that support for abortion rights equals support for infanticide because if one is okay with terminating an “unborn child”, clearly one must be okay with killing an infant since there is no difference between the two, once you ignore the “unborn” part.
I have no such trust, so I see no reason to abandon the medical term “fetus”.
Why not call it an “unborn, un-grown-up adult” which would be equally accurate? Or maybe “unborn future teenager.”
Seriously, all these terms describe fetuses by a future stage of their development, rather than by the one they’re in, and add the ‘un’ terms for correctness.
Heck, it’s gonna end up dead eventually; why not cut to the chase?
How about “unborn potential terrorist”, then?
That makes about as much sense as decreeing that life starts when the sperm and egg combine, not when the male jacks off or the female has a period. *Sex *- with a real girl! - has to be involved to let a sufficient amount of sanctimony into it.
An anti-abort once tried to convince me fetus meant “young one,” which somehow implies that abortion is murder.
I looked it up. “Fetus” means “small one.”
I like that! “Unborn, not-yet-dead corpse.”
http://bonread.ru/lois-bujold-barrayar.html?page=98
(The ‘this act’ in the quote isn’t sex or conception; it’s giving birth.)
I keep thinking about this quote when I think about this thread; because carrying a pregnancy to term, whether or not the resulting child is then given to someone else to raise, does not, ah, abort that chain of causality. One can surrender legal responsibility; moral and emotional responsibility is another matter. It’s not only the body that’s likely to be permanently changed.
That position makes no sense to me. What the people in this movement are attempting to do is to legally restrict or eliminate the right of a pregnant woman to terminate her pregnancy by means of an abortion. Do you not agree with this?
If so, how is it in any way not “neutral” or “civil” to refer to this movement as “anti-abortion rights”? And if not, exactly what do you think is incorrect about the characterization of the movement as “attempting to legally restrict or eliminate the right of a pregnant woman to terminate her pregnancy by means of an abortion”?
Yes, because that particular right is what they are against.
Just as, for example, I have no problem describing people (including myself) who want to repeal the Second Amendment as being “anti-gun-rights”—because that is a factually accurate description of my position—I expect rational grownups who seek to legally restrict or eliminate the right to abortion to have no problem with being described as “anti-abortion-rights”. Because that is a factually accurate description of their position.
To claim that it’s insulting or uncivil to refer to a political position by a term that objectively and factually describes its stated goal comes across as being either
(a) too emotionally fragile to be discussing a controversial subject, or
(b) disingenuously refusing to engage with anybody who doesn’t already agree with that position.
Same thing for claims that it’s insulting or uncivil to call a fetus by the factually accurate term “fetus” rather than “baby” or “child”. Can you imagine the outraged harrumphing you’d get from a lot of these same people if they were told, say, that civility required them to call people illegally resident in the US “future citizens” instead of “undocumented immigrants”, for example? Yet they get all miffed about honest debaters calling a fetus a fetus? Seriously?
(By the way, if civility requires that self-described “pro-choicers” call a fetus a “baby” or “child” when talking to self-described “pro-lifers”, then doesn’t civility require that the self-described “pro-lifers” call the unborn child a “fetus” when talking to self-described “pro-choicers”? Why should the expectations of accommodating other people’s preferred terms go only one way?)
:dubious: You opine that self-described “pro-lifers” would consider “thingy” a more civil and neutral term than “fetus”? ISTM that that vanquishes some fairly stiff competition for the title of the least sensible thing you’ve said in this thread.