Bricker, there’s a misunderstanding here somewhere:
These two statements seem contradictory:
Which is it? Are you unwilling to favor one human life over another, or is one mother’s death not worth ten unborn children saved?
Gardasil is a good thing, yes. However, Perry didn’t try to mandate the vaccine for school age girls because he was concerned about the health of women or girls (or any sexual partners they might have). He was far more concerned about the health of his campaign chest. Perry would never even have considered making Gardasil a mandatory vaccine if he and his buddies weren’t profiting from it in some way. And THAT’S why I said what I did.
I think that Gardasil is wonderful. I think that Merck’s campaign to get it required as a mandatory vaccine was…less than wonderful. Far less than wonderful. In fact, I’d call it pretty damn unethical.
I’m as pro-vax as they come. However, Perry and Merck handed the anti-vaxxers all kinds of conspiracy theory fodder when they went about getting Gardasil required for school girls.
So you think he should be prosecuted? He doesn’t have the right to make the cowardly, contemptible choice?
Whether he should be prosecuted depends on the laws he’s subject to at the time.
A law that imposed a non-draconian penalty for making a choice like that would be fine with me.
Pre-eclampsia is a not a goddamned pinprick. Gestational diabetes and the very real risk of diabetes for the rest of your life afterwards is not a pinprick. Gaining twenty-five pounds is not a pinprick. The roughly one in three American women who wind up with a C-section that typically takes several weeks to fully recover from are not being pinpricked.
It is not a goddamned moment of discomfort. For a significant number of women, it is months of misery followed by hours of hell. I was personally in labor with my last for over twelve hours. Those twelve hours spent on an IV with hours of life threatening high blood pressure and a two hour wait full of serious labor that hurt so much I could barely talk until I finally got my epidural were not a moment.
Why is so fucking hard for you to admit that bringing a baby into this world involves months of sacrifice for many of us who voluntarily choose to do so? Why must you anti-abortionists insult women by refusing to admit what happens when they get pregnant?
The only reason garbage like the nonsense in Wisconsin exists is because ultimately you know that you will never convince the majority to agree with you. So you and your fellow anti-abortionists focus on petty shit. You’re perfectly comfortable minimizing the very real difficult experience of pregnancy and putting into place a form of legalized harassment just so you can advance your worldview.
It’s not about saving lives. It’s about you feeling good about yourself and very little else.
You keep saying things like “significant” numbers, but never actually providing any numbers.
Why is that?
LavenderBlue brings up some points and a perspective that I can’t.
Suppose, Bricker, that at least for some women, being pregnant and giving birth are extremely unpleasant and involve significant amounts of suffering, in addition to the risk to health/life we’ve already discussed. Let’s say it’s equivalent to 9 months of general serious discomfort and periodic bouts of pain equivalent to the greatest pain you’ve ever felt, capped by the much greater pain of labor. Does that change your calculus at all? If pregnancy involves great suffering for at least some women, do you believe all women (setting aside victims of rape/incest/etc, as I assume you’re ok with abortion in those circumstances) should be mandated to continue their pregnancies against their wishes?
Is there an amount of pain and suffering that would change your mind, or is ANY amount of pain and suffering worth saving the unborn child?
The one in three chance of serious and major surgery like a c-section that is currently faced by American women is not a small risk. As long as you fail to admit that pregnancy involves real risks for the woman in question, it is impossible to take you seriously when you natter on about this subject.
I have been accused of being patronizing and insulting to the anti-abortionist in this thread but it is very hard to see someone as anything but a jackass who hates and loathes women when he refuses to admit that pregnancy carries serious risks.
I would never demand any man take a roughly one in three risk of major surgery just to adhere to my moral beliefs. Especially when those moral beliefs were in conflict with my own.
Seriously, Bricker. A C-section is major surgery. I’ve been lucky enough to avoid one but the tales my friends have told me about their own were pretty horrifying.
You’re the one arguing that all life is sacred. Yet you turn around and blithely dismiss the literally deaths of actual women as being minor compared to the number of births.
Why is that? Is all life sacred or isn’t it?
Well, I guess it serves me right for trying to suss out what reasoning you might be using to make the claims you’re making.
So a strict abortion ban, if implemented, will leads to the deaths of some random percentage of women even if it is difficult to precisely evaluate the danger faced by any particular woman.
The trade-off is that many more women will have babies they didn’t want. Perhaps it’s an arbitary determination on my part, but that doesn’t sound like much of a benefit, let alone enough of a benefit, to me.
Okay, so a tresspasser in your home, whether armed or not, is a “threat”, then?
What about one that’s in your body? I suppose we could play the definition game for a while, debate what constitutes a “threat” or a “trespasser”, but in any case an unwanted trespasser has no right to stay in your home againt your will, I trust.
My follow-up questions are obvious enough, regardless of how you answer (or if you don’t), simply because this thread is just a retread of numerous earlier threads on this topic.
I get that your sympathies are with the fetus and not the woman. That’s a matter for you and your conscience. It’s your attempts to argue that this formula of sympathies must or should be written into law that lack foundation. Certainly they can and have been written into various laws in various places and the women in those venues get my sympathies, and my own conscience is clear.
I agree. Perry and co. were clumsy at best in the way they handled it. But Texas girls are still probably far better off for the decision to push it. Even scum sometimes do something right.
**Bricker **does not think life is sacred. He stated straight up that he’s willing to let poor people die if seeing to it there they have access to affordable health care affects his pocketbook. He’s also an apologist for torturers.
Some numbers just to make Bricker happy:
Gestational diabetes effects about 4% of pregnancies:
Pre-eclampsia about one in twenty:
Hyperemesis (which I had where you pretty much literally cannot keep food because you are throwing up so often – affected the Duchess of Cambridge last December and she was in the hospital as a result) is about two percent of all pregnancies:
http://www.lpch.org/DiseaseHealthInfo/HealthLibrary/hrpregnant/hypereme.html
And yeah, as I said, C-sections among American women are indeed about one in three:
These conditions are not pinpricks. Pre-e is very hard to treat even today. Half of all women who get it have no known risk factors. GD can lead to life long diabetes and we all know had bad that is. The hyperemesis I suffered from for about three weeks was indeed hell. I was begging for morphine because I was in so much pain.
I would never ask someone else to take those risks against their will. Never. I am grateful that my religion and most Americans agree with me.
Literally everyone who has not given away every bit of money they have (which I imagine is every single member on this message board) is letting poor people die at the expense of their checkbook.
Why are you undertaking this arguing tactic? What percentage of women abort because of the fear of health risks from a pregnancy versus the percentage that simply don’t want the baby? I’d have to think it’s something like 99.5% abort because they don’t want to have a baby. I can’t possibly think there are any abortions where the primary reason is fear of pre-eclampsia, for example.
Bricker is completely correct that in 21st century United States pregnancies are not significant risks of death or series medical conditions. Of course that doesn’t mean they are not completely riskless, but nothing is. Further, certain demographics are certainly much riskier than others (older women, overweight women, young teenagers, already unhealthy women), and certainly women that choose to give birth at home or outside of hospitals are at more of a risk. However, if you are an average woman that gives birth in a hospital in the U.S., the risk of death is near non-existent.
Texas schoolgirls are not required to get a Gardasil vaccination, it was overturned. And I think that the backlash has resulted in more antivaxxer sympathy. If Gardasil WAS actually a requirement today, then I’d agree with you, the girls would be better off.
Girls and boys, right?
You would be wrong. I was trying to find a way to get my third pregnancy aborted when I miscarried specifically because I had pre-eclampsia/toxemia during the last three months of my second pregnancy. And yes, I was on birth control…my IUD was still in place when I miscarried, and I later had to have it taken out.
Now, it’s true that I didn’t want to have another kid, especially since I got knocked up again so soon after giving birth. But my primary reason for seeking an abortion was because I really was scared of pre-eclampsia. I very much doubt that I would have survived another pregnancy. And I know that my husband wouldn’t have survived it, because I was ready to kill him.
Perry only mandated the vaccine for girls. The boys would have benefited from herd immunity, but the boys would have been better off if they got the vaccine too.
That’s what I meant was that both boys and girls would have benefited from girls getting immunized as HPV also has numerous negative effects for boys.