I wouldn’t be friends with someone who was “pro-life”, any more than I would be friends with someone who advocated that women be chained to beds and be raped nine months straight. I would never respect such a person or trust them in any way.
So, in other words, you demonize everyone on the other side, without even bother to talk to them and get their side of the story.
It’s easier for you to simply make up some boogeyman, rather than actually, you know, bother to actually speak to people, and to find out how they truely think. Life isn’t as black and white as you seem to paint it. It’s all shades of grey.
Seems to me that you have already decided what it is they will say, why it is they hold that opinion, and everything else about these people.
I’ve met some pro-lifers like you. They disgust me.
:rolleyes: They support something that is as utterly evil as anything I can imagine, and have demonstrated a complete lack of empathy and a strong dose of sadism by their actions. I don’t need to know “their side of the story” any more than I need to know the story of a KKK member to know that I condemn them; and since they are known liars there’s no point at all in talking to them. They’ll just lie to me too.
IMO, anti-choice individuals are fellow human beings who hold a different view of reality. Some are a group of would be do gooders, who believe that they are saving innocent lives, and do not see that they might just be a convenient tool for marketing the controversy that is bringing more and more money and power to the religious right.
Pro-choice are made to look like “baby killers”, and it does not seem like enough to remind rational people that a gross violation to our right of self determination is happening.
When Der Trihs uses the term “evil” with such strong feeling, it is probably out of frustration over the disguise it takes as a good cause, which attracts it’s flocks into battle against us pro-choice “baby killers”. And the battle can get down and dirty.
I know many anti-choice individuals, and some of my own family members near and dear to me are anti-choice; so I can become frustrated and angry, but I also understand the “shades of gray”. They want to be part of a righteous cause, and they listen to their church leaders, but unfortunately, they would also allow church leaders to lead government, and make our laws; and I would not choose the politics of the religious right in government.
And saving a fetus, or pushing the agenda of forced motherhood before first prioritizing already born people? I mean there must be some already born people who could benefit from their desire to help. Why can’t they focus on saving the innocent lives of already born starving or sick children, or ending wars, etc,?
My apologies to the Dope, I forgot Sidney Smith’s wisdom for a while. My bad.
“Never try to reason the prejudice out of a man. It was not reasoned into him, and cannot be reasoned out.”
And since when is it “prejudiced” to judge a political/religious movement on its actions?
You equivocate a pro-life position with nine-months of forcible rape?
Seriously, Der Trihs, you can’t see the other side of an argument as someone with just as good of intentions as you, but simply disagrees?
My position has always been that abortion without one of the three exceptions is plain murder. A lot of radical pro-life people believe that and have the same attitude as you that associating with pro-choice people is akin to being friends with murderers.
Such hard lines have no place in civilized society. We can disagree with each other without imputing motives that are absurd.
In all of my times with pro-life people, I have never heard or been given the impression that it was done for any other purpose than a sincere believe that a fetus is a human being entitled to protections. I’ve never heard or been given the impression that it is about killing or subjugating women, or wishing ills on sluts and the like.
Likewise, I know pro-choice people and they have a sincere belief that a fetus is not a human being entitled to protection and that a woman’s right to be free of pregnancy overrides whatever rights a fetus may have. I disagree with that position, but I don’t impute any ill motives such as “baby killers,” a desire to whore around with no consequences, or any such thing.
The statements that you make are ridiculous, over the top and IMHO belong in the Pit and not in GD. How the mods let these continuous taunts and outright insults go un-warned is a mystery to me.
For many years my boss and I had very different political opinions. I’m somewhat liberal; she’s somewhat conservative. But we rarely discussed politics at work, and she was a fantastic manager, so I respected her greatly. It was a wonderful job and I was highly paid.
What would you have done in that situation? Would the fact of her conservatism clouded your working relationship?
If you are trying to match Der Trihs’ unhinged vitriol, you have succeeded. Throwing words around like “murder” is silly hyperbole and you making conditions upon which other women - not you - make their decisions is arrogant.
If abortion is murder, then why wouldn’t associating with pro-choicers be akin to associating with murderers?
Because pro-choice people, in good faith, do not believe that abortion is murder. It’s my personal belief, and I can sit and have a beer with someone who is pro-choice because we simply disagree on a political issue.
I used to feel like this- that pro-life people, for example, or Republican voters, or evangelical Christians, must be actually bad people.
Then I served in the Navy. There were pro-lifers (and pro-choicers) who would risk their lives to save mine. And there were pro-choicers (and pro-lifers) who you could not trust to make the right call in a tough situation. It’s awfully hard to think someone is a bad person when he would risk his life to save yours- especially when there are people on the “good” side (politically) who wouldn’t.
I learned that there is one way- period- to judge whether someone is a good person or not: how they treat you and other people. That’s it. It doesn’t matter how they vote, except perhaps at the very extreme fringes… and that’s probably more often an indication of mental illness then evilness.
Yes. In both cases the predator is asserting that a woman’s body is theirs to use as they see fit no matter how much she objects or how traumatized she is by it.
When they consistently act as if they are motivated by misogyny and sadism and don’t actually believe what they’re saying, no I don’t buy that they are well meaning or that they “simply disagree”.
Regarding the stats OMG cited (young people being more pro-life than older generations) - does anybody think that the decreased abortion rates (and indeed decreased unintended pregnancy rates) has anything to do with it? Nothing changes a woman (or a man, for that matter) from pro-life to pro-choice more effectively than being faced with an unwanted pregnancy (either for herself or for someone close to him/her). Fewer and fewer women are facing that choice.
If you look at abortion rates you’ll see they peaked around 1981. It certainly seems possible that this peak time-shifted by 13 years could explain the 1994 peak for pro-choice sentiment.
Perversely, more effective contraception (both education and availability) may be hurting the pro-choice cause.
Pro choice has always supported effective contraception availability, education, and family planning; so it would be incorrect to assume that higher abortion rates, or more unwanted pregnancies, would be anything more than a reversal to our original goals.
But it is possible that the younger generations who have been reaping the benefits from gains made in the reproductive rights struggle, are not fully aware of the past devastation and loss of life, before abortion was made legal in the US.
It has been a long and winding road, and we never imagined that our doctors would wear bullet proof vests in order to practice medicine, our clients would be harassed and need the service of escorts to help them enter our clinics, our staff threatened, our buildings vandalized, fundings cut, etc. And it is true that fewer are left that still remember what it was like in the days when women died of hemorrhage and infection from botched illegal abortions.
The incorrect idea that we will always have reproductive choice, that the battles are all in the past, and now we can take for granted our rights, which will never be taken away from us in the future…may be a part of what produces the stats OMG cited.
A similar thing could be said for the Civil Rights Movement as well. Or any of the wars our country has taken part in. We study and read about the kind of hatred, pain and destruction humans have inflicted upon one another(and eachother) throughout history. In fact, in a lot of cases, it’s beaten into our heads over and over. So it’s not like we don’t know. We just don’t KNOW, if you get my drift.
And we miss a lot of inner lines and personal costs behind the issues. Things that are painfully obvious to people who lived in the times these kinds of things took place are simply lost on the younger generation. And it’s not inherently a flaw on the side of the young, but it is fact. Without the personal connection to it, a lot of the feeling is lost to us. We see it impersonally, and that changes how we view the isses. Hence, like you said, sometimes the young simply don’t get how much progress has been made. Girls go to college nowadays, and they take it for granted. Men don’t have to face the idea of being drafted into the military to fight a war they don’t support.
Ah, the joys of being young and ignorant of and how much it took to get where we are.
I’m surprised he didn’t mention it, but Der Trihs is no fan of the armed forces, either. I don’t think talking about people who willingly joined that as being good people is going to convince him.
And, as far as I can tell, he lives in a thoroughly black and white world–there is no such thing as someone who is good save for this one aspect.
Oh, I have not even the slightest expectation that I could convince Der Trihs of anything. I am curious what he thinks about what I said, though.
Agreed completely. One can imagine a world in which contraception is 100% effective and women only get pregnant exactly when they want to. Such a world would obviously have no need for elective abortion (only medical abortions in cases where there were issues during pregnancy - either for the mother or the fetus).
One can also pretty easily imagine that in such a world, one where nobody ever had to make the choice to get an elective abortion, that it would be seen as odd and perhaps barbaric that there was ever such a thing available. When every pregnancy is wanted the idea of terminating one is often seen as morally repugnant (I should perhaps point out that I do not see it as such, merely that this is often the “default” position for religious people that have never been faced with an unintended pregnancy).
As contraception becomes more and more effective (imagine wide-spread use of IUDs), supporter of abortion-rights (myself included) will need to deal with this reality.