I pit women who "backslide" long enough to have an abortion, then repent

The BBQ Pit
81

[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
I care how the fetus is developing. I want it to be healthy. I just don’t mistake it for being equivalent to my born children yet.
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If at some point you found out it wasn’t healthy, or was just GONE, I assume you’d feel sad about that.

This is somewhat at odds with your statement that your only concern is your wife’s health, an unborn child is the equivalent of a fantasy character, and men who’s wives have abortions have lost nothing, and are sad about a bloodclot.

The fetus that you want to be healthy is the same fetus that this man (Silthy Tove’s friend) was sad about, maybe he wanted that fetus to be healthy and instead it was aborted. Even if it’s not his place to say yes or no to the abortion, he has just as much right to want that fetus to be healthy, as you do with your own. He has the right to be sad if something happens to it.

82

[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
This is my third time around and I do all the same stuff with my wife. I care how the fetus is developing. I want it to be healthy. I just don’t mistake it for being equivalent to my born children yet.
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Show me where someone has said that regretting or lamenting an aborted or miscarried fetus is equivalent to grieving the loss of a born child. You’re arguing against a position that nobody here has actually taken. And then accusing the rest of us of being the ones who can’t tell fantasy from reality.

You said that someone lamenting the loss of an aborted fetus was a douchebag loser equivalent to someone mourning the death of a character in an online game, and then when called on your bullshit jackassery, backpedaled into, “Well, I’m just saying that it’s not equivalent to the loss of an actual, born child.” Nobody said it was, jackass.

83

[QUOTE=vivalostwages]
I wonder what the hardcore pro-lifers’ stance is on abortions in cases of severe fetal abnormalities (trisomy 13, microcephaly, caudal regression, etc.). They never seem to mention this… Do they?
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I read Randy Alcorn’s “Pro-Life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments.” He states that medical tests could be wrong (he “knows” a couple who were told their baby had a genetic abnormality and was born normal), that even severally abnormal pre-born babies have every right to be born, and that holding them, bonding with them, and grieving for their natural death is healthy for the parents, and they deserve to be born and given up for adoption instead of being aborted.

Alcorn is so hardcore pro-life that when a health care provider won a $8,000,000 judgement against him, he suddenly managed to have no income to pay the lawsuit.

84

[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
Like I keep saying “potential” is not reality. A dream is not a child. An expectation is not a child.
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Pray tell then, King Asshole the arbiter of emotional propriety, what feelings are allowable when someone’s hopes of having a child end in a miscarriage? Do we get a box of kleenex, or do just get a chuck on the shoulder with a hearty “better luck next time?”

If you’re arguing just to be arguing, you need to learn when to just let an abstract point go. If you think the grief that follows a miscarriage is just a fantasy, then you’re just a dickhead.

85

[QUOTE=vivalostwages]
I wonder what the hardcore pro-lifers’ stance is on abortions in cases of severe fetal abnormalities (trisomy 13, microcephaly, caudal regression, etc.). They never seem to mention this… Do they?
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One of the things to keep in mind is that for at least some Christian sects, a person must be baptized to be saved. Therefore, by carrying the child to term and delivering it, even if it dies shortly thereafter, its soul has been saved. Where if you abort it, it never has a chance at salvation. If you keep a focus on the afterlife and understand its importance - why WOULDN’T you bear and baptize every possible conception.

To someone who doesn’t think in such terms, the idea of continuing a pregnancy where the end result will be the birth of a child who lives for perhaps minutes might be a form of torture. To someone who does, its the best thing they can do for their child who has no other chances. (And by extension, of course, everyone else’s child - which is where I start having issues).

86

In the case of George Will, quite often. Whether everyone in the same situation should be compelled to follow his example (raising a Down’s syndrome child) is another story.
[QUOTE=Annie-Xmas]
I read Randy Alcorn’s “Pro-Life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments.” He states that medical tests could be wrong (he “knows” a couple who were told their baby had a genetic abnormality and was born normal), that even severally abnormal pre-born babies have every right to be born…
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Of all the inane wordplay used in the abortion debate, “pre-born babies” is about the worst. When I hear it, I think of some sleazy dealer trying to sell me a used car. :dubious:

87

If the severely deformed baby is born only to suffer and die after a few days or so, I can see why the parents might not want to go through with the pregnancy, all the way to term. Some would and others would not. I would respect the choice.

88

[QUOTE=missbunny]
I’ve run into a couple of situations this week of religious persons becoming pregnant and saying they won’t get an abortion because it’s against their religion. Fornication and adultery are against their religion too but that didn’t stop them from fucking.
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One way to look at it: When you misbehaved as a child, I imagine your parent(s) at some point tried to impress upon you that lying about it was only going to make your punishment worse, while admitting your disobedience and apologizing would go a long way toward possibly receiving a lighter punishment.

With abortion, the woman is compounding her mistake twice. First, she has committed adultery/fornication. Then, in deciding to abort, she’s attempting to hide what she’s done. Hiding the evidence is a form of lying. And finally, she commits murder when she actually goes through with the abortion. So technically speaking, she’s trying to erase one broken commandment by breaking two more. (And yes, I believe that the man who impregnated her is just as guilty of breaking all three commandments as she is.)

89

[QUOTE=Guinastasia]
“The only moral abortion is MY abortion” types. I don’t have a cite at the moment (I’ll look one up when I get home from work), but don’t quite a bit of women picket one day, go in to have an abortion the next, then are right back out on the picket line?
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Wait…what? That’s not passing the sniff test for me.

90

[QUOTE=pulykamell]
Wait…what? That’s not passing the sniff test for me.
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You’re just not getting it. The key to a successful abortion debate is to demonize the other side. And if you want to make sure that men have no say about their partners having abortions, one must deny that men have any feelings at all about a fetus and that any who do are living in a fantasy world. Rational discussion just won’t do!

91

[QUOTE=Phase42]
With abortion, the woman is compounding her mistake twice. First, she has committed adultery/fornication. Then, in deciding to abort, she’s attempting to hide what she’s done. Hiding the evidence is a form of lying. And finally, she commits murder when she actually goes through with the abortion. So technically speaking, she’s trying to erase one broken commandment by breaking two more. (And yes, I believe that the man who impregnated her is just as guilty of breaking all three commandments as she is.)
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Bolding mine. So, really, it’s that she’s “hiding” her “mistake” (mistake being having sex that leads to a pregnancy), When really, she should be punished for her first mistake by being forced to look at her pregnancy and the way it changes her body as encouragement to never do it again. So much for the “every child is a blessing” routine.

Incidentally: Lying isn’t against any commandment. Bearing false witness is a particular kind of lie, and we have laws against it. It’s called perjury.

Honest question: How is using effective contraception any different? You’re having sex, you’re just not publishing it to the world (by not getting pregnant). Also, how do you propose we punish boys who’ve had sex but don’t get anyone pregnant? After all… how will they learn not to do it again? Or is it just the girls who deserve punishment?

92

[QUOTE=Slithy Tove]
When Patricia Neal visited my college, a rude young woman in the audience asked her about her affair with (married) Gary Cooper. Ms. Neal handled it by observing the young woman’s youth and suggesting that she too might make some mistakes while she was young. Much of my admiration Patricia Neal earned that day was lost when I read that she’s addressed pro-life events with her own regrets at having aborted Gary Cooper’s baby.

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Good call. I’ve seen clips of her speeches and she’s exactly the same: devout Catholic, gets pregnant, gets abortion, then many years later devout Catholic crying “mea culpa” over her abortion.

She was on (I think) CNN once and they had a “surprise” guest who had the opposite point, Polly Bergen , who was the perfect “other country heard from” to Neal. They’re about the same age (Bergen’s 4 years younger), Bergen also became pregnant when just starting her acting career (though I’m not sure if it was by Gary Cooper- wouldn’t be surprised either way) and had an illegal abortion. Unlike Neal, Bergen almost died from her illegal abortion and had complications with her later pregnancies because of it- the abortionist was unqualified and unsanitary- and because of this Bergen is rabidly pro Choice because she feels no woman should have to go through the ordeal she had.
She also told Patricia (I’m paraphrasing because this was years ago) “How do you know that you regret having an abortion? If you had been unmarried and pregnant it would have destroyed your career, without your particular career you never would have met Roald Dahl and had the [however many] children you had with him, your life would have been extremely different and you have no idea whether it would have been for the better or for the worse”, and that’s an excellent point.
A woman who regrets having an abortion has, strangely as it may seem, no idea whether or not she did the right thing. The woman last night for instance: she clearly envisions an alternate timeline where the little boy or girl she would have given birth to instead is either raised by her and somehow they make out alright, or else was adopted in a happy loving family with “picnics by a lake and noodle salad” prominently featured, and maybe she’s right and it would have been. But she doesn’t consider the timeline in which she kept the child and could not make ends meet and life became a living hell for her and the kid, or that the adoptive family turned out to be dysfunctional, or that the child was born with advanced CP or with Down’s Syndrome and couldn’t be adopted and had to be institutionalized because she couldn’t provide for its special needs, or even the endless number of middle case scenarios. There are just too many unknown variables and she doesn’t know which one would have happened.

Also I can’t help but feel that if whatever nerve endings control PTSD could be activated so that the emotions and exact feelings of that time could be recalled to active duty, she’d remember why she had the procedure. Now she’s at a safe distance from them, but I think that’s the main difference twixt now and then to her. Then it was real, now it’s a “damn why’d I do that”. I’d love to Samantha my nose and make her remember and then we’d really see if she’d do it again.

Anyway, one thing I’m absolutely positive of is that while tiny and almost formless at first, if not taken out too soon this will grow to become something special and much loved.

93

[QUOTE=Maureen]
Bolding mine. So, really, it’s that she’s “hiding” her “mistake” (mistake being having sex that leads to a pregnancy), When really, she should be punished for her first mistake by being forced to look at her pregnancy and the way it changes her body as encouragement to never do it again. So much for the “every child is a blessing” routine.
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I think that’s an unfair characterization of someone who truly believes that abortion is murder. It’s not that she needs to be punished by pregnancy, but that she shouldn’t punish her “unborn child” by aborting/killing it. Nor should she compound her sin of fornication by committing the sin of abortion. (Note: I don’t agree with that position, I’m just explaining it.)

94

Hmm- really perfect I just realized in the above- Polly Bergen and Patricia Neal are both from Knoxville TN, even, so they are perfect foils.

Ben Stein is a major pro Life activist who makes speeches all across the country on its behalf. I think as a scared teenager he had his critical thinking terminated and now regrets it sincerely.

95

[QUOTE=John Mace]
I think that’s an unfair characterization of someone who truly believes that abortion is murder. It’s not that she needs to be punished by pregnancy, but that she shouldn’t punish her “unborn child” by aborting/killing it. (Note: I don’t agree with that position, I’m just explaining it.)
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But Phase42 said her crime was trying to “hide” her whoredom. I think there’s a lot of that beneath the surface of anti-abortion fanatics – that women need to be punished for having sex, and that terminating a pregnancy allows them to escape the scarlet lettering they so richly deserve.

96

[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
This is my third time around and I do all the same stuff with my wife. I care how the fetus is developing. I want it to be healthy. I just don’t mistake it for being equivalent to my born children yet.
[/QUOTE]

Jesus Christ, Diogenes, you’re a total barking baboon on this issue.

The baby is the same baby the day before it is born and the day after it is born. It’s a human being the day after it’s born, right? So what turned it from an bloodclot into a human being? The vagina is not lined with pixie dust such that passing through a vagina magically transforms a lifeless bloodclot into a human being.

You’re engaging in magical thinking. You’re a jibbering witchdoctor, a cargo cultist who reasons backwards. You decide abortion must be legal, and reason backwards from there to the moral status of the unborn baby, except that turns you into a fucking tool.

Look, the issue is very simple. A sperm cell is not a human being. An egg cell is not a human being. A day old baby is a human being. I’ll go so far as to say that it is incoherent to call a fertillized egg a human being, or even an early embroyo.

But that one day old baby is a human being. So was he a human being the day before he was born? How about two days? Still a human being? Babies are born prematurely every day, a baby born at 7 months of gestation is still a human being, right? So is a 7 month fetus a human being? What makes the one entity a human being and the other a bloodclot? Nothing. That clump of cells gradually accumulates human characteristics until it becomes an unarguable human baby.

But there is no magic thunderbolt moment that transforms a nonhuman clump of cells into a human being. Anyone who asserts otherwise…like you…is an idiot who believes in magic. It’s like imagining that a man who has sex with a 17 year and 364 day old girl is a rapist who should be castrated, but the same man having sex with an 18 year and 1 day old woman should be congratulated.

97

[QUOTE=John Mace]
I think that’s an unfair characterization of someone who truly believes that abortion is murder. It’s not that she needs to be punished by pregnancy, but that she shouldn’t punish her “unborn child” by aborting/killing it. (Note: I don’t agree with that position, I’m just explaining it.)
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I didn’t take any issue with that part of his post, John. The only part that really bridled was “She’s hiding evidence of her misdeed!” (paraphrasing). People who screw like rabbits with benefit of birth control are hiding evidence of their misdeeds, too. Wanting to see evidence of whether or not a woman is having sex crosses a line.

98

[QUOTE=Lemur866]
Jesus Christ, Diogenes, you’re a total barking baboon on this issue.

The baby is the same baby the day before it is born and the day after it is born. It’s a human being the day after it’s born, right? So what turned it from an bloodclot into a human being? The vagina is not lined with pixie dust such that passing through a vagina magically transforms a lifeless bloodclot into a human being.

You’re engaging in magical thinking. You’re a jibbering witchdoctor, a cargo cultist who reasons backwards. You decide abortion must be legal, and reason backwards from there to the moral status of the unborn baby, except that turns you into a fucking tool.

Look, the issue is very simple. A sperm cell is not a human being. An egg cell is not a human being. A day old baby is a human being. I’ll go so far as to say that it is incoherent to call a fertillized egg a human being, or even an early embroyo.

But that one day old baby is a human being. So was he a human being the day before he was born? How about two days? Still a human being? Babies are born prematurely every day, a baby born at 7 months of gestation is still a human being, right? So is a 7 month fetus a human being? What makes the one entity a human being and the other a bloodclot? Nothing. That clump of cells gradually accumulates human characteristics until it becomes an unarguable human baby.

But there is no magic thunderbolt moment that transforms a nonhuman clump of cells into a human being. Anyone who asserts otherwise…like you…is an idiot who believes in magic. It’s like imagining that a man who has sex with a 17 year and 364 day old girl is a rapist who should be castrated, but the same man having sex with an 18 year and 1 day old woman should be congratulated.
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Here we go with the typical dishonesty of trying to pretend we’re talking about full term babies instead of 1st trimester bloodclots. That’s just bullshit misdirection.

What’s the difference between a child and an adult? A person is the same one second after his 18th birthday as before it, is he not? Therefore a newborn baby is exactly the same as an adult and should be afforded all the same rights and priveleges.

Of course it gets grayer the further along a pregnancy becomes. But we aren’t talking about 8 or 9 months along, we’re talking about 6 or 8 weeks along (which is where the vast majority of both miscarriages and abortions occur) and I just don’t have the patience to humor some idiot in the delusion that he’s lost an actual child because his girlfriend terminated an embryo. Any equating of that tissue clump with a real, born baby (because they think it’s imbued with a magical fairy spirit) is self-absorbed and inane and insensitive to people who really have lost children. Anybody ritually marking the “birthday” of his aborted bloodclot is just a pathetic attention whore, IMO.

Also, how does he even know it was his? What if it was mine? I bet he’d feel like a right chump then?

99

[QUOTE=Maureen]
I didn’t take any issue with that part of his post, John. The only part that really bridled was “She’s hiding evidence of her misdeed!” (paraphrasing). People who screw like rabbits with benefit of birth control are hiding evidence of their misdeeds, too. Wanting to see evidence of whether or not a woman is having sex crosses a line.
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Although I disagree with his opinions expressed in that post, I have to say you missed the point a bit… he was explaining why someone might be OK with committing adultery but not with having an abortion. No big mystery there, it’s just a comment that that 2 supposed wrongs don’t make a right, although he phrased it in a titanically ham-handed way.

100

[QUOTE=Cosmic Relief]
Although I disagree with his opinions expressed in that post, I have to say you missed the point a bit… he was explaining why someone might be OK with committing adultery but not with having an abortion. No big mystery there, it’s just a comment that that 2 supposed wrongs don’t make a right, although he phrased it in a titanically ham-handed way.
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Ah, then my apologies for misreading. I was under the impression he was voicing an opinion, not offering an interpretation.