It’s a clear statement: I do not say “there’s no difference.” I note one obvious difference to prove the point that I don’t say “there’s no difference.”
There are differences. There are also similarities.
It would be a strawman to ascribe to me the argument “there’s no difference.”
I don’t say “there’s no difference.” I don’t believe “there’s no difference.” I don’t advance the theory “there’s no difference.” When someone claims I do, I try to immediately correct the mistake. That’s precisely what happened in post 1342, in which I replied to this:
With this:
Well after I did that, you tried the same trick:
You had no reason to believe that was my premise, since I had explicitly and repeatedly denied it, and there are the posts in which I did so.
That case tracks perfectly with what I’m saying. I assume you’ll agree that, had the woman hacked her child to death, or suctioned out her brain with a vacuum after piercing the base of the child’s skull, the crime and the penalty would have been much more severe. At the same time, obviously, what she did was wrong.
But not as bad as the hacking.
So what?
I have no opposition (as far as secular law) to mifepristone’s role preventing ovulation. When mifepristone is used in conjunction a contraction-inducing therapy like misoprostol, or in conjunction with any analogue of prostaglandin E[sub]1[/sub], I would ban that usage.
I disagree that the demand for abortion isn’t likely to go down. It’s fascinating how you feel entitled to simply drop these assertions in the middle of a discussion as though being handed down from Moses after his trip to the mountain. It seems obvious to me the demand will go down, at least to some degree, because the lack of available legal abortion options will create more incentive to manage birth control. I don’t speculate how much or how little that change will be except to state my confidence that it won’t be ‘zero.’
Oh, to be sure; it’s also clearly not an exploration.
Okay, so for the purposes of a discussion about abortion, what is the difference? Terminating one is “bad” and terminating the other is “worse” ? So far, I’m not getting a sense of anything more substantial.
Okay, it’s not your premise. What is?
Just to be clear, is hacking now an example you create to show contrast that is tied in its particulars to the issue of abortion? Because you’re very flexible about invoking horror when it suits you and backpedaling when it doesn’t. You could have described the woman actively murdering her child in any number of ways, but that might lack the emotional punch of invoking a D&X procedure.
The alternative being “hacking” and “brain-suctioning”, I don’t see why you would do so. I’m glad you’re not Supreme Leader.
So I’m wrong to say “isn’t likely” (‘zero’ is your comment, not mine), but you’re right to say “at least to some degree.” Right.
Of course, it’s little hard to measure “demand” against “still demanded but forced to seek out alternative or black-market remedies”. I guess we’ll see what happens in Wisconsin. I wonder if there’s any reliable way to keep track of women who leave the state for their procedures?
Again you try a trick – using the word “terminating” to describe both actions, as though you’ve reluctantly agreed to hear the differences between a born infant and an embryo, but surely there’s no discussion required about the fact that vacuuming up and destroying a body is going to be described as “terminating,” and so is thinning the endometrium to lessen the chance of implantation. Then, wide-eyed, you ask about bad or worse.
The “bad” and “worse” refers to the methods used. In both cases, a human life is lost. It’s bad for that to happen by deliberately taking steps to thin the endometrium, but it’s not awful; as I pointed out that happens naturally fairly often: implantation can simply fail.
It’s worse to attack an implanted and growing embryo, suction it away, in order to kill it. Both cause deaths, but one is passive – marooning someone in a desert – and one is active, like pointing Jason Voorhees at the intended victim and yelling, “Go get 'im!”
That from the moment a unique genetic individual appears, he or she is a human being and deserves the general protection of the law.
That’s why I switched to Jason Voorhees. Maybe Freddy would also work?
It’s unquestionably a physical attack, so any fair analogy would also involve a physical attack.
Under my rule, there would be no death penalty, but as this conversation continues I am seriously considering decreeing flogging or caning for logical error and lack of reading comprehension.
Precisely. It’s not correct to say “…the demand for abortion isn’t likely to go down…” is not accurate. The demand for abortion is virtually certain to go down. How much it goes down is certainly speculative. Your sentence would be fine if you had said, “…the demand for abortion isn’t likely to go down much…” I wouldn’t be so sure, but you’d be on defensible grounds. To assert it’s not likely to go down, period, is absolutely unsupportable.
I don’t know. But I remind you that I am willing to change my support for this law if practice reveals little or no change in the actual abortion choices made after seeing ultrasound. So far as I can recall, not one person on the other side of the debate was willing to allow the reverse: that if the numbers show many women see the ultrasound and change their minds, it’s worth doing.
Why is that? You’d think that the paragons of choice would be happy that with additional information, different choices were being made.
Even if we agreed…the problem still is that the law doesn’t give anyone the right to camp out in someone else’s body. Try it with me, and see how quickly you get an eviction notice.
We believe the right to control over one’s own body is more important than the right of the fetus to live. The additional fact that the fetus is unformed, non-viable, non-aware, and insensate makes the decision easier for us, and a lot harder for you.
Your opinion, our opinion. We don’t agree. You continue to state your opinions in the form of facts, but that doesn’t wash the dishes around here. The best solution to the problem came in the Roe v. Wade “trimesters” compromise. It gave as much consideration as possible to both viewpoints.
Trick? Please. Feel free to substitute “killing” for “terminating”, if you like. Personally, I think “terminating” is sufficient if we are looking for a single term to cover post-fertilization birth control, abortion and murder. The alternative is to liberally sprinkle comments with qualifiers and sidebars and footnotes, which I’ve occasionally found myself doing in this thread in an effort to forestall your obvious fondness for semantic tangents like this one.
Anyway, you’re obviously grossed out by vacuum aspiration, D&C and D&X procedures (and the abortive use of mifepristone, I gather), but implantation-inhibition is (barely) okay. That’s fine, for a personal and arbitrary choice. For me, I’m okay with whatever procedure is safest for the woman based (among other factors) on how far along the pregnancy is, because dying from complications isn’t all that arbitrary.
Pregnancy in general can simply fail, and often does, but does this mean you’d be okay with abortion if the method was sufficiently humane for the fetus? You can assume that I’m not going to be moved by any description of an abortion procedure, now matter how grotesque, because I’ve already put my priorities elsewhere.
I get where this position comes from - Catholicism not being the first religion, or even the best, at carving out tiny niches that protect dogma from messy reality - so there’s as little point challenging you on it as challenging you on your favourite ice cream flavour.
When you say “appear” are we back at the meiosis stage? If so, I don’t see why stopping a pregnancy by “thinning the endometrium” is not considered involuntary homicide (or whatever charge would apply to starving to death one’s child or another person toward whom one has a duty to act) if “general protection of the law” applies to all unique genetic individuals.
By the way, I asked earlier about identical twins. Still waiting for a reply on that. And human cloning will become an issue sooner or later. If you’re going to propose an application of law, you might want a more robust phrase than “unique genetic individual”. Would that concept apply to any situation other than abortion? I get what you mean when you say it, i.e. creating a sciencey justification for a state interest that overrides the woman’s wishes at the earliest possible stage, but it would probably be easier and more honest to just say your premise is “ban abortion, no exceptions.”
Yeah, but I can’t help but notice that’s where your argument went first, and the included attempt at emotional appeal.
I thought Catholics frowned on self-abuse. bDOOM kssh
See? That was an “I know you are but what am I?” riposte that was actually clever.
I just hope this doesn’t lead to a tangent on the death penalty.
If I parse your intent correctly, something that is by no means certain, you’re talking in absolute terms about the difference between “isn’t likely” and “virtually certain” - two phrases that have built-in qualifiers, I can’t help but note, while an alternative phrasing with the qualifier “much” would been acceptable - about a subject each of us is only speculating about.
I’ll gladly concede this point, as I’ve conceded other of no importance to anyone but you.
I’m not really seeing the virtue in this, so I can’t praise you for it.
Personally, I object to this kind of information being forced on anyone - with “forced” meaning to include forcing their compliance in gathering the information (i.e. having to undergo the nontrivial hassle of an ultrasound) whether they view it or not. At the very least, it contains the implicit insult that women are simply too stupid to understand their situation until it is explained to them. I object to the built-in delays the requirement creates (and you should, too, since they allow the fetus to grow and develop and thus make the eventual hacking and brain-vacuuming even grosser), the additional expenses, and more generally political interference in medical matters.
Some women might choose not to abort after seeing an ultrasound? Fine. You can pay for the ultrasounds and let any woman who wants one to get one, and then tally up the result with my bestest wishes. If you feel the need to have government do it for you, well, I’ll argue against, thanks.
Well, it was probably the best that could be hoped for at the time. Possibly the best that could be sustained in the U.S. even now. The best is to just junk the laws altogether and let medical professionals handle it.
**Bricker **is on record as being approving of creating a legal right for a child to have access to his parents organs as needed. Although I am sure he is aware that society as a whole is not yet ready to take this leap.
Can you expand on why you feel we should be willing to allow the reverse? After all, our goal is not torreduce the number of abortions but to minimize the delays and difficulties placed in the way of exercising a right. Our goal is not dependent on how many people do or do not change their minds.
But that’s the key difference – even assuming I took anything there as “the Roman Church,” the most they’re discussing is whether the use is sinful or not. And my question was in response to this:
So if you come back and acknowledge that there’s no talk of criminalizing, just talk of what’s sinful or not, you’re agreeing with my objection to what BigAppleBucky posted – right?
Sorry. The problem is that I have interlocutors like Fear Itself in the mix; my only defense is to treat everything he says as serious argument, because this defuses the faux-idiotic (and actual idiotic) posts he makes. Unfortunately that means the dearth of respectful humor; I wish it were otherwise.
Neither my wife nor I have used artificial birth control.
No, my wife and I have used natural family planning. I know the bad rap it has, but most of that comes from the bad results of people who simply follow a calendar rather than observing cervical mucus and using an ovulation predictor kit – typically used for those who wish to get pregnant, of course, but also perfectly useful for those that don’t.
Well, that’s sort of a key element in being religious, at least in the Judeo-Christian line of practice. And you must observe that many objectively intelligent people are in fact religious. So… yeah. Some intelligent people do in fact think that “sin” is a viable concept and they have guilt because of this religious notion. Other intelligent people reject this concept.
