[QUOTE=John Mace]
Hmm. I just got 7,680,000 hits when I googled “pro-choice likes to kill babies”. I had no idea there were over 7M pro-choice people who like to kill babies!!
[/QUOTE]
No, you didn’t. You got zero hits: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22pro-choice+likes+to+kill+babies%22&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
[QUOTE=WhyNot]
No, you didn’t. You got zero hits: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22pro-choice+likes+to+kill+babies%22&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
[/QUOTE]
I actually used Yahoo, not google. And I didn’t put the whole thing in quotes, since **EC **didn’t either. Take out the quotes in google, and you get 39,000 hits. 
1.5 million hits for Evil Captor wrong again.
[QUOTE=Bricker]
1.5 million hits for Evil Captor wrong again.
[/QUOTE]
But only 182 for bricker murderous misogynist. Still, that’s 182–kind of a lot, if you think about it.. I’m loving this new method of debate!
57,000,000 hits for: Bush wonderful president. :eek:
[QUOTE=Evil Captor]
No, says a lot of people:
Cite:
http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2007/10/17/of-sluts-and-punishments
[/quote]
This cite doesn’t support your claim. This person merely saying that OTHER people use the argument. It’s not an example of other people using the argument. It’s someone else using the same straw man that you are. A quote from that cite:
This one supports your thesis; the author equates “slutty” behavior with needing an abortion and thus being pro-choice.
This cite does not support your thesis; it involves an advice columnist debunking the idea that women who need abortions are sluts. Even the anecdote tld by the person seeking advice does describe someone using that line, but rather her own feeling and reaction:
I cannot open this link.
If there’s a slam dunk here, it may go in the other direction. Of your four claimed supporting cites, two say precisely the opposite of what you claim, one cannot be opened, and only one evinces, kind of, the attitude you claim is universal.
[QUOTE=John Mace]
Hmm. I just got 7,680,000 hits when I googled “pro-choice likes to kill babies”. I had no idea there were over 7M pro-choice people who like to kill babies!!
[/QUOTE]
Gee, John, I’d be impressed if you’d opened any of the sites and you know, cited them as evidence. As it is, piffle. Piffle on Bricker, too. Major, major piffle.
[QUOTE=Evil Captor]
Gee, John, I’d be impressed if you’d opened any of the sites and you know, cited them as evidence.
[/QUOTE]
Why? You haven’t even come close to providing evidence that:
You tried to throw some heft behind some half-baked cites by posting a google count, then calling it a “slam dunk”. You’re not a stupid guy, EC, but that was a stoopid argument.
[QUOTE=Evil Captor]
Gee, John, I’d be impressed if you’d opened any of the sites and you know, cited them as evidence. As it is, piffle. Piffle on Bricker, too. Major, major piffle.
[/QUOTE]
Um… how about the fact that you offered four links as cites, two of which say the opposite of what you’re claiming and one of which doesn’t work?
This is why it is so frustrating when people who support abortion rights go off on the tangent of the motivation of those who oppose choice. What’s important is that the effects of removing abortion rights will be damaging to women.
It doesn’t matter in the end why people want to remove abortion rights. And by focusing on that, claiming that those who want to restrict those rights must do it because they hate women, it refocuses the debate in a way that only benefits those who want to restrict choice.
If a teen girl is lying dying from a botched back alley abortion, it doesn’t matter to her whether the politician that sponsored the bill leading to her condition thinks she is a slut, hates her, or honestly believes it is in the interests of the girl, the fetus, or the 1974 Philadelphia Flyers that abortion be banned.
Don’t just shout words like mysoginist at people. All that does is create a nice, warm self-righteous feeling. Demonstrate why the effects of restricting abortion rights are to harm women, and to harm society in general. While that may not convince the people who generally are mysoginistic in their opposition to abortion rights, it might have a good chance with some of the others.
It’s important not to yell “misogynist” unless you can spell it, I think. “Mis” as in “bad” (“misappropriation”) and “gyn” as in “woman” (“gynarchy”, “gynaecologist”). As for the teen girl, I don’t want her to die from a botched abortion. Similarly, I don’t want the punk who’s about to stick up the liquor store to die when the Saturday Night Special he’s loading goes off and blows a hole in his belly. But I think he ought not to be sticking up the liquor store, and if he insists on it, I don’t think it’s my responsibility to provide him with a safe, effective means to do so. (There is, of course, no other equivalence between abortion and armed robbery.)
As Evil Captor has had his ass handed to him in mid-crow, I’ll take a run at Der Trihs’s argument, lest he think a Dogbert-style “Bah waves paw” insufficiently respectful. I believe his arguments run as follows:
Opponents of abortion rights are woman-haters, pure and simple. This is easily seen by observing that backward, woman-hating cultures deny abortion rights to women. I think that the argument need only be articulated clearly to be refuted in full. Even if it were shown that all woman-hating cultures denied abortions to women - and I’ll leave that as an exercise for the student; no fair taking “denial of abortion rights” as evidence of woman-hating, though, as that’s a circular argument - it still does not demonstrate that misogyny must be the sole motivation for denying abortion rights. It is still perfectly possible that a culture which loves and values its women - that is even regarded as in the very forefront of world culture when it comes to championing women’s rights - can say “Enough. We have tried this and we think it is a mistake”. That’s not to say you won’t find numbnut misogynists railing against abortions, of course, but what does that prove? You might as well argue that if rabid man-haters espouse abortion rights, the espousal of abortion rights is founded in hatred of men.
Causing a woman to continue a pregnancy when she does not want to reduces her to a breeding machine… Come now, that’s some mighty fine hyperbole, but wouldn’t a breeding machine be an artefact that was never used except to breed, and that had no say in when its on switch was operated, or its off switch for that matter? For women as breeding machines I think you need to go some way further than mere denial of abortion rights; I think you need to go all the way to The Handmaid’s Tale. Mightn’t I as well complain that the bank is treating me as a money machine when it wants me to keep up payments on the mortgage I took out - and wouldn’t you retort that if I didn’t want to make the payments, I shouldn’t have taken out the mortgage?
…a womb on legs… Basically the same complaint with extra snivel, for it’s not as if the woman in question is prevented from using all of her natural faculties for the duration of the pregnancy. It’s not that the only important part of her is her womb (would run the argument), it’s just that the organ comes with a duty of care to whatever is conceived in it.
…of less moral worth than a blob of jelly… Pure invention; no-one has said anything about “moral worth”, and as for the blob of jelly (denial of rights based on dehumanising the party to be denied is an old trick), the woman is still entitled to all sorts of powers, profits, privileges and pleasures which the blob cannot exercise; it’s just that we deny that “eliminating the blob of jelly just for being inconvenient” is one of them.
…and lower than an animal. Which last I find hard to even understand, for we are happy to breed animals all we like - not only make them unable to terminate a pregnancy, but see to it that one begins when we want it - and put them to death when it serves our ends, and it’s hard to find even a point of comparison, let alone justification for the assertion; and again, a pregnant woman, even one denied an abortion she wants, still has a multitude of rights we would not dream of extending to an animal.
Hope this helps. I was on fine rhetorical form while I was walking the dog, but the words are hard to pin down on the screen five hours later. 
[QUOTE=Bricker]
This cite doesn’t support your claim. This person merely saying that OTHER people use the argument. It’s not an example of other people using the argument. It’s someone else using the same straw man that you are. A quote from that cite:
[/quote]
Actually, it does. I was responding to the comment “Sez you” implying that I was the only person who thinks that there are a lot of pro-lifers out there who believe that women who get abortions are sluts who should be punished with motherhood against their wills. All four of my cites support that point.
Now, only one of my cites shows that pro-lifers think that women who get abortions are slutty, but tell me Bricker, do you really want to take the negative here? That is, do you want to assert that there are not now and in the last 50 years or so have never been a sizable contingent of anti-choice folks who have this whole “abortion=slut” meme going? Please say “Yes.”
[QUOTE=Evil Captor]
Actually, it does. I was responding to the comment “Sez you” implying that I was the only person who thinks that there are a lot of pro-lifers out there who believe that women who get abortions are sluts who should be punished with motherhood against their wills. All four of my cites support that point.
[/quote]
OK, fair enough. I missed that turn of the argument, and I agree that you’tre not the only person who believes that there are a lot of pro-lifers out there who believe that women who get abortions are sluts who should be punished with motherhood against their wills. It got a bit meta for me, but I’m with you now.
Not sure what you mean by “sizeable contingent,” and I think drawing on the last fifty years skews things consierably, because much of society still held the postion that unmarried sex of any variety was “slutty” in 1958.
But – if you’d like to look at the present, only, and if by “sizeable contingent” you mean, say, better than a fourth, then I will take the negative. I am active enough in the Knights of Columbus, a strongly pro-life organization, to hear a great many people’s views on abortion, and I can tell you that the vast majority of what I hear is simply proceeding from the idea that the unborn child, at any stage, is a human being. Indeed, there’s a fair amount of quiet dissent about contraceptive use – a Catholic no-no – because many in my organzation regard is as infinitely preferable to creating a new, yet unwanted, life.
In short: perhapps my own experiences are coloring my perceptions, but what I see and hear in the middle of a large pro-life group is a simple moral equation: unborn child=human, and killing human=bad.
[QUOTE=villa]
This is why it is so frustrating when people who support abortion rights go off on the tangent of the motivation of those who oppose choice. What’s important is that the effects of removing abortion rights will be damaging to women.
[/quote]
I was responding not to the whole abortion argument, but to the specific notion that laws which punish women for having abortion would never bve enacted because the antri-choice folks are concerned almost exclusively with the fetus, and have no interest in harming or punishing women.
There are probably some anti-choice folks who actually feel this way, but there’s also a large portion of anti-choice folks who think “abortion=slut therefore OK to punish.” It would really be dumb to buy into the mealy-mouthed claims of the anti-choice folks on this point. That is why I brought up the way anti-pot laws have stuck around long after the drug has been shown to be not all that harmful.
We’re in total agreement here.
[QUOTE=Bricker]
Indeed, there’s a fair amount of quiet dissent about contraceptive use – a Catholic no-no – because many in my organzation regard is as infinitely preferable to creating a new, yet unwanted, life.
[/QUOTE]
I was thinking about this the other day, so let me ask you a question or two(as a slight aside from the thread topic):
Is there something fundamental about the way the RCC views sex that prevents it from changing its position on birth control? I know that logic sometimes does come into play in religion, but the rhythm method seems like “artificial” birth control if you ask me. Does God want there to be a chance for conception every time we have sex? Even so, aren’t we just tricking him by trying to game the system with the rhythm method? By advocating the rhythm method, it seems that the Church is acknowledging a place for non-reproductive sex in the life of a married couple. If so, it would see (to me, at least) that it’s only a tiny step to getting to the position that “artificial” birth control like the pill or condoms is OK.
Do you see any possibility of the Church changing its position in your lifetime?
[QUOTE=Evil Captor]
Actually, it does. I was responding to the comment “Sez you” implying that I was the only person who thinks that there are a lot of pro-lifers out there who believe that women who get abortions are sluts who should be punished with motherhood against their wills. All four of my cites support that point.
[/QUOTE]
Ah, right, I see. I thought you might be after saying “No, it’s a fact that a lot of pro-lifers talk in terms of punishing the slut”. If you mean “A lot of pro-choicers say that a lot of pro-lifers think that way”, well, OK. A lot of KKKers think that “niggers spread syphilis”, too.
on thing that none have mentioned yet is that the struggle against abortion began when this decision was delegated down to the individual
A lot of nations in the west got free abortion in the 70’s, but abortion wasn’t totally illegal before that. A lot of women got legal abortions before that, but decision wasn’t made by them selves.
Some examples of currently held beliefs that women should be punished for wanton behavior via pregnancy:
A Florida judge who forced childbirth on an indigent woman:
Link: (it’s NY Times online, so free sub is required)
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE4DA1739F932A35752C1A96F948260
Link:
http://www.cbc.ca/sunday/2007/05/052707_5.html
A very long blog that, though thoughtful, ultimately endorses the idea that sex for pleasure is wrong and women who are promiscuous deserve to get knocked up:
LInk:
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1128274
Here’s a conservative commentator who clearly feels that women who have sex and seek abortions are irresponisble and should be punished.
Link:
http://www.politicalgateway.com/main/columns/read.html?col=642
I’m slowly finding the keywords that these people use to describe their ideas, and I’ll have some more examples soon. It’s been fairly easy to find them to date. I believe I can support the idea that a lot of conservatives feel that it’s OK to punish women who have what they regard as too much sex, and therefore would be OK with onerous laws prosecuting women for having abortions.
The Only Moral Abortion is my Aborftion describes how the anti-abortionist waiting for an abortion does not want to sit in the waiting room with the “sluts and trash.”
[QUOTE=John Mace]
Is there something fundamental about the way the RCC views sex that prevents it from changing its position on birth control?
[/QUOTE]
No, it’s not a dogmatic teaching on faith, or something that’s been proclaimed infalliable. It’s part of the current discipline of the church, but not something that is unalterably carved in stone.
Will it change in my lifetime? My best guess is yes, because I hope to live another fifty years; the Church is, by its very nature, very slow to change, but I suspect that this change will happen. My wife volunteers at a pro-life pregnancy crisis center that is funded largely by the Church, and the attitude there is nearly universally in favor of contraception – and the diocese hasn’t said a peep about it. Anecdotal, yes… but eventually, anecdotes become data, for large enough values of anecdote.