I am not saying this is the case with your mother, but it is entirely possible for a woman to be a misogynist, just as gays can be homophobic. Your attempt to make Der Trihs sound ridiculous doesn’t hold water.
Sorry for the hijack, but what does that mean?
Respectfully,
Inky
While it’s entirely possible for a woman to be a misogynist, it is ridiculous to paint an entire group as misogynist “at its core”
to be clear, I am not pro-life, but again, I know many people who are (like 90% of friends and family) and “at their core” I see no misogyny, but rather a deep love of all life, male, female and unborn.
It refers to a moment in TV history when the show Happy Days began to suck. It was an episode when Fonzi jumped a shark tank on his motorcycle.
You know what’s funny? I would say the exact same thing about people who are pro-choice.
It wasn’t on a motorcycle, it was on water skis.
… and in any case I think Steve was misusing the term “Jump the Shark”, I don’t see the relevance.
Anyway, back to the main subject – the “Salvadoran Solution” is one example of the oft-posed question of how the heck is an absolute ban on non-lifesaving abortion going to be enforced: essentially, every female with a serious pregnancy complication becomes confined under medical watch until the complication becomes critical, however long that takes, so the authorities KNOW she really NEEDED the abortion. The Salvadoran rule does seem to be more rigid than that of the Church, though – an ectopic pregancy being nonviable no matter what, nobody is required to sit around and risk death waiting for a miracle; as mentioned, they just limit what methods may be used (Why allow the most invasive and difficult method? Wild guess: probably because they fear the less-invasive could be also used to terminate regular pregnancies under pretext of medical necessity, and they don’t quite trust us). Sounds like someone in the Salvadoran Justice Ministry freaked out over the possibility that people would begin faking medical complications and took the next step further (… because, they trust anyone even less), or they are just venting a bit of the totalitarian/fascist impulse that ever since the end of the civil war they cannot channel in the direction of exterminating peasants…
One wonders how “miscarriages” are treated in El Salvador.
I have no argument with the descriptions that either of you are using for the pro-life and pro-choice groups, as a whole. There are extremists who are just as vile as anyone in this thread would care to paint them, but that doesn’t invalidate either position as being one that can be held by rational, thinking, and caring people.
If I had to categorize myself as being pro-life or pro-choice, I’d say I’m pro-life. However, I’d never vote for a candidate based on that issue, alone. I’m more likely to use the Yucca Mountain long-term radwaste storage facility as a litmus test. My preferred means to prevent abortion would be education, and keeping birth control available to all adults who want it. (I have some qualms about providing birth control to legal minors against the perceived wishes of their parents.)
It can be convenient to paint all of those who disagree with your position as monsters, but it’s rarely a true representation of the facts.
I’d like to direct a quote to Senator DeMint of South Carolina:
If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament. Florynce R. Kennedy, 1973
askeptic
Hmm let’s see, they are both anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-progress …
woah that’s fucking scary !!! :eek:
Proud to be Pro-Choice.
This whole debate actually confunses me. I wonder why it’s a debate at all. Abortion is a being-to-being issue. The only people with rights are the people involved with actually making the baby. Abortion involves no illegal substances, performs no illegal actions, and, while distasteful to some, can, in some cases favor society.
Religion is the problem.
El Salvador is worst case scenario, a really sad, sad situation.
That woman in prison for 30-50years for infanticide when the foetus was 6 weeks short of viability- that’s heartbreaking. That woman has two other children and had been sterilised, she had done everything possible not to fall pregnant again. Now her children are effectively motherless, and she’s going to be in prision for the majority of her life- how the hell is that about love?
And to not have an exception for the life of the mother because “technology has advanced so far that we don’t need one”-bullshit. Women still die in the USA and Europe from ectopic pregnany- and in South American countries PID is very common, and PID is a leading cause of ectopic pregnancy.
This is where one guy with a private jet and a doctor in another country willing to provide their services for free could make a lot of difference- legally (wrt El Salvadorean law).
QtM- you may be interested to know that in the bad old days in Ireland, Catholic run hospitals were prevented from doing salpingostomies for ectopics. In fact a woman with an ectopic pregnany had both fallopian tubes removed, and it was classed as a medically necessary sterilisation. Law of double effect- they weren’t removing an ectopic pregnancy, they were sterilising a woman who just happened to have a foetus in one of her fallopian tubes!
I’m very, very pro-choice, don’t get me wrong. But that position is derived from my belief that a fetus (at least prior to about 24 weeks of development) is a non-person. I have a great deal of trouble understanding the position you outlined above.
No illegal substances? Make RU-486 illegal, and that point goes away: it’s got nothing to do with the morality of abortion.
No illegal actions? That’s a circular argument, I think: is abortion therefore immoral in El Salvador?
The only people with rights are the people involved with making the baby? I think that ignores one of the fundamental ideas of abortion prohibitionists: they believe that the fetus also has rights, and that it’s therefore no more a woman’s choice than is infanticide.
I think it’s vital that abortion legalizers focus on that point: the central question is whether fetuses have rights that should be considered. If they do, then abortion becomes a much trickier argument. If they don’t, then it’s cut-and-dried.
Daniel
Ah yes for good old fashioned nastiness against women you’d have to try have to beat a country that is serious about it Catholic ideas of love and compassion.
I’m 35 and I can remember a stage in Ireland when it was illegal to sell condoms and also for women to even get information about traveling to England to have an abortion or sterilisation(the whole thing coming to a head when the High Court prevented a pregnant 14-year-old incest rape victim from going to England to have an abortion)
Nowadays women can get information but unless their life is in danger they have to go across the water. ~ 7000 Irish women a year have to make that trip.
And do these El Salvadoran women lose their jobs while their hospitalized and waiting for their fallopian tube to rupture? What of their other children at home, if any–who is watching them? Who raises them, if the rupture can’t be treated successfully?
Seems to me to be a punishment for ALL women in El Salvador. Got pregnant even if you didn’t want to/tried to prevent it/were raped etc? Too bad–we’ll mess with your earning power, status, and health.
It is all about controlling women–show me where the El Salvadoran government gives a shit about providing for these fetuses their so busy “protecting” (the same could be said for USA as well). It’s pro-birth, not pro-life, IMO.
I’ve been saying this for years, and if there’s anyone who can make people understand this argument, it would be you, but don’t count on it.
Heck, I’d like to know how birth defects are treated there – I wouldn’t be surprised if the woman is punished for “doing something” to her child.
You guys could just go with the old “if the fetus is viable, it has rights” school of thought. But then, the cognitive dissonance created amongst pro-lifers by the kind of research needed to move that time frame earlier into the pregnancy would pretty much kill them. I can only imagine the outrage that would be engendered by artificial wombs.
CJ
CJ, pro-lifers aren’t the only ones who’d have objections to pushing that research and legal argument any further - consider some of the arguments for keeping D/X abortions from being banned. There are a number of pro-choicers who seem to believe that until the fetus is born it’s not human, and would do anything to keep that definition inviolate.
Then there are the few medical ethicists who point out (With a certain amount of reason*.) that there’s no reason that a 2 week baby should be considered any more inviolate than a 38 week fetus.
- coldblooded reason, of course, but still reason.