Slavery was properly abolished at the federal level by the passage of the 13th amendment. Prior to that amendment, it was not a federal issue.
Or are you asking what the wise choice is? Are you asking if abortion should be a federal issue? In other words, you’d certainly answer my complaint about the legitimacy of Roe and Casey by passing the 28th Amendment, which explictly established abortion as a right that was not subject to state or federal regulation.
I think it would be unwise, for the reasons I’ve previously offered. But if such an amendment were to pass, I wouldn’t bicker about the legitimacy of the law - just its wisdom.
No, I’m not. I’m hoping scientists could try and come up with better birth control (the best option). Also, abortion is legal and anything legal is okay with me. If killing the elderly were legal, I would not object either. After all, if something is legal, its okay.
First,while I can’t find a cite, I’ve heard of studies showing that politicians who vote against abortion tend to vote against rights/aid to women and children.
Second, there’s simple observation. The Cathoilic Church ? Anti-abortion pedophiles. Republican party ? Anti-abortion, and would cheerfully see every poor child in America starve to death.
I did provide support; our attitude towards the brain dead and organ donorship. If you suffer enough damage to the brain that your mind is gone, we regard you as dead and can dismantle you for parts; before that, we can’t.
As I said, I neither know nor care about some archaic definition of personhood; ask someone else.
It’s simply a semi-arbitrary cutoff mark; a necessary thing in situations where there is no objective hard line between two legal condition. Age of consent laws are another example.
Conservatively, i’d say the fetus begins to develop personhood about 6 months into gestation, when it begins producing human brainwaves. It’s probably really only later it becomes a person, but we don’t know enough about the brain/mind to pinpoint it. If I were declared king, I’d make abortion legal for any reason in the first two trimesters, but only legal to protect the mother’s life/health in the third.
Any drug/device that prevents embryo implantation will do this.
Human life began at least a hundred thousand years ago when we evolved. If human life is your concern, then scratching yourself is mass murder; you kill millions of cells when you do that. That’s not handwaving, it’s the simple fact.
Don’t be obtuse; people tend to use “mind” and “consciousness” interchangeably. It’s sloppy language, not a philosophical position.
As far as your other question, mind is the determining facter in our culture’s definition of personhood. Mentally disabled people have minds, just not good ones. Someone who’s permanently unconscious is dead.
They aren’t the brainwaves produced by a functioning mind, and the brain tissue involved is destroyed in the developmental process anyway.
No, but that is the driving force for the pro-birth movement. It’s not pro life; thry don’t care if women die in childbirth, or actively cheer it on ( I think it was Randall Terry who said “Every woman who dies is a victory for morality” ). They aren’t notably more anti death penalty or anti war; all they care about is forcing women to give birth.
Maybe? Definitely not. It was meant to be sarcasm directed at Good Egg, and it was addressing the issue of abortions, as in the post it was under, #237, not the issue you seem to be covering, post #236, et al.
I do not care to address the issue of hypocrisy, since I have not read the past posts in this thread on this subject, and was simply poking fun at someone who is guilty of just the same thing…
So you’re making the argument that people who believe that people who believe fetuses are human lives worthy of protections don’t actually care about children after they’re born based on . . . a gut feeling?
With all due respect, that’s a pile of shit. Unless you’re calling Bricker, Tom~, and the rest of the Catholics on the board pedophiles, in which case you’d be best served making your “case” in the Pit.
With all due respect, that’s a similar pile of shit.
I respect and understand your vehemence. I realize you’re very passionate about the subject. But these dogmatic, knee-jerk falsehoods aren’t helping you convince anyone of the rightness of your position.
You asked me for examples. I gave them. You take a lot of time to see them for what they are.
Not an assertion. Scientific observation. Based on a lot more objective criteria than you claim to use.
Until the viable age, the mother’s autonomy over her own body takes precedence over a non-person. After the non-person can sustain itself outside of the mother’s body, the mother’s autonomy over her own body becomes a smaller issue, though as long as the child hasn’t been born naturally, I maintain that the mother’s right to decide over her own body takes precedence. However, since normally four months is sufficient time to make up your mind about if you want to have an abortion or not (not to mention that earlier = healthier generally), I can live with a cap on abortions from 16 weeks onwards. However, I consider that a safety margin far greater than, say, assuming that man contributes to Global Warming (which, by the way, I do).
When a child is born, it is no longer a physical part of the mother. Its status as a person is less relevant to the discussion of abortion. But if you ask for a strict definition of personhood, then that would be it, and yes, those would be the consequence. If a child would be so far retarded that it is no longer capable of higher brain functions (there is in fact a condition that results in a child being born that has all the basic functions needed to keep the lungs and heart moving, but naught else), then it would have a similar status to a comatose person who’s brain has been, say, deprived of oxygon so far beyond repair that he will never be able to wake up from that coma again.
Here we get into a quality of life discussion, that is related to this subject, so I will stop here for the moment.
While I’m not sure that a (healthy) newborn is technically a person, a child is still valuable enough to many that it can be taken care of by other willing parents, which there are plenty.
I could also conclude that any criteria for personhood that justifies pro-choice is contrary to your preconceived position, but where would that get us? But can I ask you at least if you think that objective science can give the answer to this question? Because if you don’t think so, we two aren’t going to get a heck of a lot further in our discussion.
Except that Bricker understands, I think (he may correct me if I’m wrong).
The reason why Bricker has so far failed to see why I saw any hypocricy in his actions, is because we have a different position on the meaning of choice.
I say that if you make something illegal, you remove the choice to do it. He says that if you make something illegal, you can still choose to do it (and face the consequences).
So when he says that the first step to ban the evil of abortion is to make it the more life-affirming choice, and the second step is to make it illegal, I say that is saying one thing (having the child the more life-affirming choice, which sounds nice and isn’t all bad - not all good, but definitely not all bad), and doing another (actively voting to remove that choice). After all, to a law-abiding citizen, making something illegal is very much like removing that option altogether.
But he does not think this is hypocrytical, because if something is illegal, then you can still do it. You are just much, much more strongly discouraged in doing so. You can still steal a car, but you’ll have to face the consequences.
Bricker’s definition of choice is an understandable one, especially as a lawyer who as I’ve learnt from our discussions, recognises that choices and options don’t necessarily run along the same line as the bounderies of the law.
But if you choose to go with my definition of choice, which I think is not an outrageous one either to any law-abiding citizen reading this, then I think my accusation is also quite understandable (at least I should hope).
Get out of Great Debates. Get out now. You have no business participating in any rational discussion if the above is your idea of a legitimate contribution.
Except for one tiny problem: my use of “choice” is consistent across all the arguments I’m making. The key element of hypocrisy is inconsistency. You are using a different view of the word choice, and then ascribing to me the inconsistent consequences of that difference.
Precisely. I have explained how in your world-view, you are not being hypocritical, but in my world-view, you are. The key difference is whether making something illegal is taking away someone’s freedom, someone’s choice to do something, or not. The difference between interpreting making something illegal as in “you can’t do that, and if you do it anyway, we will punish you”, or something illegal as in “just one way of many things we’re doing to help you make the choice to do the right thing.”
So to me, and I hope at least some other personhoods, you will remain a hypocrite. Unless of course someone can convince me that the definition of hypocritical cannot be applied to someone as long as his words and actions do not conflict within his own belief-system.
You seem to be using “hypocrite” either as a generic term of abuse, similar to the earlier ad hominem about the male-only Knights of Columbus, (in which case it is merely meaningless), or as a label for someone who wants to limit choice by making something illegal.
If you mean the second, then anyone who advocates making anything at all illegal - speeding, cheating on your income tax, bombing an abortion clinic, whatever - is a “hypocrite”.
I don’t know the technical term for this, but I call it the Humpty-Dumpty argument.
Even I am not silly enough to try to argue with someone who doesn’t use language the way the rest of us do.
Bricker and I understand each other. So it apparently does make some kind of sense to some people involved in this debate.
To help you reach the point that Bricker and I have reached, here are a few pointers:
I have been very clear and nuanced about how I use hypocrite. Read again, and carefully.
The Knights of Columbus wasn’t an ‘ad hominem’. I wanted a clarification on how far Bricker’s interest in protecting women’s rights and considering them as equals went. Bricker answered those questions honestly, and I can only commend him for that. In a discussion on something that affects women as much as the right to an abortion, this is relevant.
Making something illegal and thus limiting choice isn’t hypocritical. It becomes hypocritical if you say it in one breath with wanting to make pro-life the more life-affirming choice. Look at Bricker and my last few posts on this subject to see how we have come to a mutual and respectful understanding of each other’s position.
Nobody uses language exactly the same as the next person. That is the root cause for much disagreement in this world, or at least the liberal spill of words on those disagreements where few would have sufficed to determine each others positions. This is what makes the exact sciences so appealing an international language.
Socrates once said that true knowledge is knowing what you don’t know. He also warned against Sophists, people so skilled at arguing a point that they could be hired to argue any case. He suggested that you have a moral obligation to seek the truth, not to win an argument. (You could argue he was an early Cecil Adams. )
At any rate, he inspired me to learn to value people who make you question your beliefs. Without them, this hard but important moral obligation will fall upon yourself only, and you may not be as well equipped to the task as they might have been.
