Well, by that rationale, it’s every bit the woman’s responsibility–why aren’t they just at fault?
AFAICT, the point is getting people to pay attention to Shot From Guns. She makes exaggerated or unexpectedly aggressive statements in Pit threads so that people will argue with her, subsequently retracts or modifies some of them enough so that people won’t just decide she’s a troll and give up on arguing with her, and re-launches them when it looks as though the argument might be in danger of being resolved.
It seems to work pretty well, too.
The only people I would consider “pro-abortion” are those who commit acts of violence against the anti-abortion movement. I’ve never heard of anyone being killed or having their building bombed for being against abortion.
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Yeah, I suppose you could say an egg or sperm cell are alive just like my skin cells are alive. If my skin cells get together and create a clump of tumour, we’re not going to call that tumour alive or a person. I think a fetus is alive in the same way - a fetus that is not viable outside of the mother is not a person.
They are. But they aren’t in this thread. The point is that there’s equal responsibility, but unequal consequences. Imagine a bank robbery gone awry, perpetrated by two people, one male, one female. They both were equally involved with the crime. But the man gets a year of probation, while the woman gets five years in prison. The disparate sentences were predictable based on some weird law about the treatment of male and female bank robbers. You wouldn’t be more inclined to be pissed off at the man in that instance?
It’s a fucking message board, you retarded twat. The point is to engage in discussion with other people. So I discuss. I respond with my opinion, and then other people respond with theirs, and we move forward from there. I love the completely nonfalsifiable version of me you’ve created–because I’m willing to admit when I’m wrong, I must be a troll. I’m guessing if I never backed down, either, that would *also *prove I’m a troll. Why don’t you go make out with Freud–he can tell you how everything in your dreams proves his theories, especially if there’s nothing in your dreams that matches them, because that just shows you’re *extra *repressed.
I’m not about to defend clinic protesters, I think they’re pretty much as low as you can get on the humanity scale. But as a pro-lifer, I gotta say that I think the “fetus/tumor” metaphor is about as weak as it gets. Come on, CW…you can do better than that.
Oh, and:
Viability is a dangerous road to go down when defining personhood, because it’s strictly related to technology. There are fetuses delivered early today that survive where 10, 20, 50, 100 years ago they would have died. Does that mean that they’re magically more “people” than they were at those points in history? It’s entirely conceivable (no pun intended) that at some point, we’ll be able to support the entire gestation of a human being outside the womb, starting from conception. Does that mean the single-celled zygote is now a person, because it can survive outside a natural womb?
Clearly, there’s some kind of fuzzy border in the development of the nervous system after which point pretty much everyone would agree that the living human fetus becomes a person. I doubt that few would agree that a baby that’s about to be delivered after a full-term pregnancy isn’t a person, just because it hasn’t passed through the birth canal yet, and a lot of people don’t think that a small clump of cells is any more a person than a tumor or my left foot.
If I’m not allowed to be pissed at the law, I’d be more pissed at her for knowing the consequences and being stupid enough to do it. In terms of the abortion situation, I’m not pissed at anyone. Both parties seemed to have made a mistake. They had an abortion. Conflict resolved. Since we don’t know exactly what happened, I don’t see any reason to view the pregnancy as something the guy made the woman do. For all we know she might have forgotten to take a pill or something–don’t really see how the guy’s at fault in that one.
Now, if the guy was saying, “If you use birth control I’ll kill myself” yeah, he’s a dick, but I’m not seeing any evidence of that.
But that’s just the thing–“they” didn’t have an abortion. *She *had an abortion. She did. Not him. Not *ever *him. Regardless of who is careless, it is always the woman who has the worst consequences, because the man can’t ever get pregnant.
I never said it was something he *made *the woman do. My problem was that I was seeing the abortions as something that his carelessness contributed to, but that he avoided the brunt of the consequences of.
Query: What would you think of a guy who knew he was a carrier for HPV but never used a condom?
Well, yeah, but we don’t know that they both weren’t careless. That is, I don’t see why you’re putting on the blame on him based on the consequences.
I’d think he was an ass. But it’s not the same situation. In the case of pregnancy the man and woman both know pregnancy can ensue. The woman has the opportunity to protect against pregnancy–in fact, even more. She has a lot of birth control methods at her disposal as well as Plan B in case they fail.
I am not putting, present tense. I was putting, past tense. And I never said that he was *solely *responsible–we do, in fact, know that both parties share pretty equally in the blame. I was just disgusted that, as I viewed it at that point, he’d been so careless repeatedly, when it wasn’t him who’d be dealing with the worst repurcussions. It would be like, oh, I don’t know, a drunk driver striking three different people, all of whom were at the time crossing against the light. Sure, the accident could have been avoided by either party, but my sympathies are going to lay more heavily on the person who just got run over.
As I’ve observed already, though, it didn’t really apply for anything but the first pregnancy, since as far as **FGIE **knew his girlfriend was on birth control for the second pregnancy and his wife would have welcomed another child for the third.
In the case of HPV, both participants know their partner could be infected with an STD they could pick up. HPV just happens to be one that has much more negative consequences for women than for men… like pregnancy. So, IMO, it’s pretty similar. Why wouldn’t you be mad at the woman in that scenario for not insisting on the man using a condom?
And Plan B is a very recent development–and only really useful in the case of something like unplanned unprotected sex or a condom break, where you can use it in the ~72 hours or so after you’ve had sex. It’s not like you could miss a couple of birth control pills, have sex, assume you were protected, then find out a month later that you’re pregnant and take some Plan B.
I think the borderline of viability is why abortions are restricted to before a certain date like they are now. If we develop artificial wombs that can grow a fetus from conception to birth, we’d have to re-visit abortion laws. In fact, if you could transplant a fetus from a woman to an artificial womb, abortions might become obsolete.
I went into a tumour analogy because someone was saying sperm and egg cells are alive, and I was comparing the life of egg and sperm cells to skin cells, which also have the capacity to grow and change. I don’t actually think a fetus and a tumour are the same thing, mostly just because tumours don’t have the potential to become a human being. Although that would make an EXCELLENT movie!
I get it, you were arguing the viability angle. Sorry about that. Still, it seems like there’s a huge quantitative difference between something that eventually will become a viable human and something that never will.
I think the medieval idea of ensoulment-at-quickening (18 weeks or later) might actually have been a more accurate and reasonable boundary territory. By the medieval understanding, only a small fraction of today’s abortions would be considered the killing of a person. (Modern readers, substitute “personhood” for “ensoulment” as desired.)
(You mean “qualitative.”)
A zygote might become a person–not “will.”
By some estimates (which vary widely), as many as three-quarters of all egg cells which become fertilized never become viable humans. Either they don’t implant in the uterine wall (5-20% “casualty” rate right there), or something goes “wrong” at any of the successive stages.
Agreed, but the problem is if you don’t answer the anti-abortionists, you end up looking like you support them. I don’t care if they want to pretend to believe that abortion is murder, but no matter what, they have no right to impose that on anyone else. People who have decided it isn’t murder shouldn’t have to put up with their yelling, and those who haven’t made a decision shouldn’t have to put up with their attempt at guilt trips.
Why? That is extremely counter productive.
No. I don’t think any scientist would agree that a clump of stem cells is alive any more than any other excised body part is. A clump of cells is a clump of cells.
I suggest then you have a look in the mirror and decide if you loathe yourself, since my holding different opinions than you do does not make me stupid (or vapid or a twat). And, again, “I hate stupidity” doesn’t answer the original question. However, I now believe you simply don’t understand the question rather than you are trying to duck it, so forget it.
Again you simply show that you make (stupid) assumptions - these ones here and others, such as no birth control is 100% effective. So FGIE could have easily been more careful and still the women could have become pregnant.
As to abortions being a reasonably traumatic experience for many women - so? Are you again making the (stupid) assumption that abortion must have been traumatic for all of these women? There are many women that find getting pregnant to be far more traumatic.
That is a decision you have made. You do not have the right to impose that decision upon anyone else.
All-
I really wasn’t trying to make this thread about me, it was more like a spontaneous decision to share some of life’s less than glorious decisions that some of us can potentially face, as I did.
The OP was about abortion protesters and their aggressive behavior and their lack of understanding that places like Planned Parenthood aren’t “abortion clinics” because that implies exclusivity of purpose, which PP is not.
The first pregnancy I was a party to I experienced this kind of active protest (as did Kim, my long-ago ex) and I jumped into the thread without consideration to sharing my priest story.
Before I knew it, I was using the Dope as a weird kind of therapy to recount everything else and the keyboard spilled over and I said what I did. I don’t regret saying what I did, because its true, but I have regret over what has occurred and I still do.
I cannot erase history, and after two abortions and then getting married, I didn’t envision that there would be a third. It bothers me still, but I can’t talk about it with my wife as she gets too upset, even though she’s the one that carried the banner on that decision.
Fuck it, what the hell do I know.
Life is certainly weird…
No, I used the word quantitative purposefully. My point was that there is an objective, scientific, observable difference between the two clumps of cells. I wasn’t trying to necessarily put a subjective value on either, but rather trying to emphasize why what argument doesn’t hold up from a scientific standpoint.
Granted, but if you want to put the word “might” into my sentence, it doesn’t really change my point at all:
“…between something that eventually might become a viable human and something that never will.”