Fair enough. If I may suggest, if you feel a question of yours is being evaded, restate it (as you just have) or give the number of a post where you previously asked it. It may save us some time.
Sure, it’s human. Made up of human tissue, with a human DNA pattern. It’s as human as human flesh gets. Unless it’s a clone or one of a set of identical twins, it’s genetically distinct at its earliest stages of development. It is physically distinct, I figure, when it no longer has a physical connection to its mother. There may be other answers, depending on how “distinct” is defined.
Sure. So why bother making it illegal?
Well, unless the woman is herself a doctor or medical professional, how is she bound by medical ethics and the related oaths?
Well, incidents like this happen in Canada, too, so abortion being legal or illegal didn’t create nor will it eliminate the problem. I can’t speak for the motives of the women in your anecdotes, of course, but with the understanding that this is pure speculation I expect if they’d seen OB/GYNs a few days before delivery and demanded an extremely late-term abortion, the doctor(s) would decline and (I hope) refer them to emergency counseling which would explain the options of adoption and/or getting social service support. It is remotely conceivable to me that a doctor might exist who would say “okay” and proceed with terminating the pregnancy, but the sheer rarity of this (assuming the number of incidents isn’t, as I suspect, zero) doesn’t move me to consider a policy that would affect tens of thousands of other women. Making this horrific hypothetical illegal accomplishes nothing positive that I’m aware of. Maybe it makes pro-lifers feel they accomplished something, I guess.
It’s not a human being in the first trimester - you’re right about that.
Coincidentally, it’s not a human being in the second or third trimesters, either, for the same reason.
If you (and now I’m using the general You, not you the Mole) don’t know where that line is, then You have no right to legislate it. The point most of us are trying to make is that a decision to abort should be up to the pregnant woman only, and not the state or federal governments. However, in many countries, that is not the case, and many people are actively working to make that not be the case in the U.S. as well.
Let me try to make an analogy. If I need to pee, that’s no one’s business but mine, right? Grown-ass adults don’t take kindly to being forced to ask permission to go take a leak. Now imagine a country (let’s say … ohhh, Ireland, for instance) decides that peeing needs to be regulated. It passes laws dictating when you can and can’t pee, and uses arbitrary distinctions because there’s no agreed-upon bright line saying when you do and don’t have to pee. But the laws are there, and now people who don’t know you or your situation are dictating when you can and can’t pee.
In fact, I’ll go further. Pretend Ireland’s government is mostly female. Now pretend that all those governing women pass laws about when men can and can’t pee out their penises. No equivalent laws are passed for women, because they don’t have penises in the first place. How do you think the men affected by those laws would react?
So a zygote is a human to you? Sure it has human DNA. So does your hair follicle. Is that human too?
Why not? If no one will do it anyway why the passion to protect the right? If the government made it illegal to go to Pluto would you care? Probably not since it is not going to happen anyway.
More seriously though it is the arguing for the right to kill the unborn at absolutely any time till it pops out of the mother that helps freak out the anti-choice people. As if they aren’t rabid enough this sends them into a tizzy. It also gives them a fingerhold on some rationality that, frankly, I’d rather deny them. Put in reasonable restrictions on later term abortions and the anti-choice crowd has got nothing and can be relegated to the fringe where they belong.
So? What it tells us is a doctor asked to perform a late term abortion won’t do it because it violates their oath. Basically, they would be doing harm which indicates to us that the unborn is something to be considered and not something that merits nothing more than a trashcan.
Really? So tell me, what magical thing happens at birth that makes the baby a human? What was it before? An alien?
Imagine you are baking a cake. You start with batter, put it in the oven and out pops a cake. Where is the line crossed between batter and cake? Who the hell knows? But we can definitely say it is batter at the beginning and cake at the end (before it comes out of the oven).
So too with a pregnancy. Somewhere from the beginning to the end a human develops. It is clearly a human being before birth and it is clearly not a human being at conception. The tipping point is fuzzy but we don’t really need to be exact. Just kinda close is good enough.
Since we regularly make laws that govern what humans can or cannot do to each other it is not a stretch to include very young humans.
It was a parasite* that depended on a human being for its very existence. At birth, it becomes detached from its mother and now depends on its own lungs for air, its own stomach for food, etc.
Before birth, it was a fetus. That’s not an alien, but it’s not a human being, either.
I know this is a loaded word with negative connotations for some people, but I’m not trying to bring in emotional responses (e.g. when someone is called a “social parasite” for living off welfare of whatever) or heeby-jeebies about worms and leeches. I mean it in its strictest medical sense only, and if there was a word for “thing that depends completely on another living thing for its very existence” that didn’t have those other connotations, I’d use that word instead.
Your cake batter analogy is creative, but it misses an important point: the batter does not depend on the oven for its own existence. If it’s not in the oven, it will still be batter. A fetus that’s not in a pregnant woman is either a) a baby, in which case it’s not a fetus, or b) dead.
I understand your point. However, in the U.S., the anti-choice peoplekeep trying to move that line between ok and not-ok further and further back until they can finally outlaw abortion altogether - that is their clearly stated goal. Not drawing that line in the first place gives them nothing to chip at.
If abortion is legal, period, then they can’t do this whole “Well, only if a judge gives consent, only before X number of weeks, only this that and the other…”
Sure. Why wouldn’t it be? Blood can be human or not-human too, and it doesn’t even have DNA (well, the red blood cells don’t).
Because I don’t think it’s the role of government to pass useless laws. If a law exists, it must serve a purpose or it should be repealed.
That said, I’ve proposed on a few occasions a thoroughly useless abortion law. The Federal government declares abortion illegal and that it has the sole jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute abortion cases. It creates a new law enforcement agency called the Abortion Investigation Department for the sole purpose of and with the sole authority to pursue abortion cases. Then the budget of that department is permanently fixed at one dollar per year.
There. Abortion is illegal but in practical terms the law cannot be enforced. The sole purpose of this law is to mollify pro-lifers. I sometimes ask pro-lifers on this board if this would satisfy them. I don’t recall ever getting an answer. Then I ask what kinds of laws and mechanisms of enforcement they have in mind. The responses are varied, but I don’t recall anyone advancing any workable ideas, or at least ideas that wouldn’t plausibly cause more problems.
I would indeed care, since it shows my government wasting time passing a pointless law, even worse than those ridiculous resolutions like declaring March 24 to be National Pickle Day, or some such guff. Also, would this law have a chilling effect on space exploration, where companies making parts for space probes and satellites get investigated just in case they might be assembling a Pluto-ship?
Well, Canada has no abortion law, and we’re largely freak-out and tizzy free, so it is clearly possible. If some Americans are prone to freak-outs and tizzies, I suggest it is weakness on their part and on the part of anyone who puts up with such nonsense, including easily-swayed legislators.
I am confident this will have no such effect. If policy is determined by the freaked-out and the tizzied, it won’t matter if concessions result in a 90% calming. The remaining 10% will still be freaked-out, tizzied, and demanding more, and since they represent the most extreme and determined of the freaked-out and tizzied, their demands will be the most enriched; truly weapons-grade crazy.
I’m okay with a doctor declining to perform a non-emergency procedure because it’s a Tuesday, or because Jupiter is in ascension, or because he or she just plain doesn’t feel like it. Naturally enough, if the doctor is employed by a hospital or clinic, I expect their employer will have strong feelings on the matter.
I don’t really care what the doctor’s reason is. To be honest, I’m not all that concerned about last-day elective abortions, either. I just point out that in practice, they either don’t happen or at most are absurdly rare, and thus I see no reason to outlaw them. They’re not illegal in Canada, and yet they have not become common. Thus, you (or anyone else) can’t use them as a convincing arguing point or claim last-minute elective abortions (or infanticide, or involuntary euthanasia) are an inevitable or even plausible result of loosening or removing abortion laws. Or that’s how I see it, anyway.
Sure, they see it as harm. I’m not going to argue. I’ll even agree that it is harm (if it actually happens, and all evidence I’m aware of suggests it does not), but I see a greater harm in abortion restrictions and I have to decide which is less unacceptable.
The laws in Canada are such that I don’t have make compromises. My side “won”, as it were, demonstrating that Americans can also “win”, with the same lack of negative results.
I would like to say how much **Brian’s ** post 309 made me think. My post 318 was an attempt to answer his point, and in truth it was just changing the subject.
My opposition to “unlimited abortion” (for want of a better term) is based on my horror at the Holocaust. Normal people like you and I were led by scientific-sounding, reasonable arguments to a very horrible place. We ought to always be on guard against such a thing happen again.
I said Brian’s post made me think, but please do not ask me if I have changed my mind. I am still thinking on it.
I cannot be legally compelled to donate so much as a pint of blood to my actual daughter. The one I gave birth to and raised to adulthood. Not even if she were still a minor, not even if she were dying. It bears repeating.
As someone who lost multiple relatives in said holocaust you do understand this comparison makes me want to scream as loudly as possible. Comparing a woman’s decision to end a pregnancy for reasons that many of us agree are sensible with the wholesale murder of millions of people for no rational reason is sickening on so many levels.
Please stop comparing a mindless six week old collection of cells with the ugly tatoos on my best friend’s mom’s arm and the mother and father the holocaust took from her. Please stop comparing my mom’s decision to have an abortion after she was raped with the actual murder of members of her mom’s family.
I’m pregnant. I’ve had multiple miscarriages. So far this one seems to be sticking. But at this point I still consider the fetus inside me a potential person rather than a real person. Until that baby is in my arms and outside of my womb I have a hard time seeing it as anything but a maybe.
Why is that feeling so hard to understand? Why can’t something be not quite a person? Why does it have to be person or not person?
Which is why your beliefs should be opposed. Your side is the one advocating treating half the population as less than human. As less than animals even. It is the anti-abortion side that insists on subjugating women, who are undeniably people in the name of blobs of flesh less personlike than a rat is. It is your side that dehumanizes its victims.
No they weren’t. They were led by racism, often extremely crude racismthat would be obvious to anyone today. You have the Holocaust confused with eugenics, which also happened in Germany in WWII (and lots of other places before it), but the Holocaust was racist genocide pure and simple, there was no scientific justification for it nor was it sold as such.
If you get pregnant and choose to carry to term that is your choice. If you choose to abort that is your choice. Totally behind you 100%.
Let’s say you choose to carry the baby to term.
At 30 weeks, for whatever reason, you decide you do not want the baby.
The difference here is you are not denying help to the baby. You are now actively seeking to harm it. You will either deliver the baby premature or you will kill it.
So the average American is so morally superior, better educated and thoughtful that a comparison with Germans in the 1920s and 30s is out of the ballpark. Have you seen the recent election results?
Is a person on a heart/lung machine not a human because they rely on an outside source for their survival? How about a dialysis machine?
Once again consider the baby 10 seconds before birth. Why is that not a human?
The cake needs the oven to become a cake. Without the oven the batter remains batter. The analogy has flaws to be sure but loosely the sperm and the egg mix to become the batter and the womb equates to the oven. Seems a decent enough analogy to me albeit limited.
I see your point but I think it is missing something.
There is a continuum of people who oppose abortion.
On the one end you have those who oppose it in all circumstances…period.
On the other you have some who are vaguely uneasy about it.
Demanding that abortion be available at any time in the pregnancy up till the baby is born keeps the people who are vaguely uneasy about it opposed to abortion.
The ones on the “left” side will oppose no matter what. Hell, they’ll probably be pissed about guys jerking off and women having their period.
The people on the “right” side of the graph are inclined to want the woman to have her choice but they cannot get past the concept of a baby being aborted 10 seconds before it is born.
Nevermind no baby is ever aborted 8 months, 3 weeks, 6 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes and 50 seconds before birth (I know it is not exactly 9 months…just pretend). To heat pro-choice people blather that it in theory should be the case freaks them out.
I have met people on all sides of this spectrum. Deny the worst of that group some people to support their cause.
And remember, the rabid ones will never be appeased so fuck them. Take what support you can from them and the rest of the frothing ones are weaker.
I didn’t say that. I said the racism would be obvious. That doesn’t mean it won’t be tolerated. Just have to look at various signboards from the 2008 elections and Tea Party stuff to see that.
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that I think Americans are that far removed from Nazi Germany, morally. I don’t. But the really crude stuff, your *Gifpilzs *and Protocols, they don’t get much shrift in the modern public sphere. Well, outside Iran, I guess.
I’ve been pro choice since I was old enough to form an informed opinion about the subject. But the arguments from some of the people in this thread has made me realize that there are just as many weird (IMNSHO) opinions on the pro-choice side as among the religious far right (or the Vatican) who oppose not only early-term abortions - and, for good measure, murder medical personnel performing abortions - but also all and any kind of birth control.
Thank you for killing my belief in intelligence, ethics and thoughtfulness among liberals.
ETA: And good luck with your trench warfare. Digging those trenches even deeper is a quite effective way to avoid any sensible compromise. But I guess that’s just the American way in politics?
So you are saying the America I grew up in would never tolerate crude racism? Where are you from? All you need are some pretty words. Like “purity,” “law and order” and of course “freedom.”