So you’ve cited one person (in caps, for some reason). I’m supposed to go, “hey, okay, you’ve proved your point – I’ve completed changed my mind about abortion”?
Okay.
But quite common in many Catholic countries. Many *very *Catholic countries. Like Ireland (well, less so these days, but in the not very distant past more Catholic than Vatican City).
Basically, there’s a new covenant. We understand this.
I dont understand. I dont like abortion, abortion is bad. So is forcing a woman to bear a child.
However, the Political leaders of the “pro-life” movement arent pro-life or even anti-abortion. They simply want votes and are willing to lie to get them.
I have *never *encountered a pro-lifer who is opposed to pre-natal care at all. Never. Not even the most fundamentalist, sulphur-and-brimstone, Trump-loving, born-again, Pope-hating, fundie, Jack Chick-reading lunatic.
Never.
I do not doubt you when you say that there are one or two, or even as many as a dozen, people who hold that belief, but if that position actually exists, it’s about as fringe as it’s possible to get.
On this, for the most part, we can agree.
So if they survive the abortion, now doctors have to save the life of the child or they get 20 in the hole. Gee, wondering how they’ll define “survive” and “abortion” and at which stage of the process it matters.
So if they survive the abortion, now doctors have to save the life of the child or they get 20 in the hole. Gee, wondering how they’ll define “survive” and “abortion” and at which stage of the process it matters.
There is absolutely no regard for the woman - at all. No acknowledgment that they even exist in these laws. That is why any idea that they care about life at all cannot be taken seriously. They simply don’t care about life; they use a fetus to control people. Women - all women - need to get out to the polls next year and beyond, and just blindly vote Democrat. Don’t think about a thing else. When the Taliban takes over, your first responsibility is to remove them from power. All other issues can come later.
Oh, OK. Different times back then.
Those are actually pretty important things to define. How would you define them?
The alternative to the notion that women bought into patriarchy, at least to an extent, rather than passively having it imposed upon them forcibly, is to stipulate that the world of women, free at that time, were unable to prevent its being imposed. Which does not bode particularly well for the prospects of a successful feminist transformation if you see what I mean.
Women have never been powerless; they’ve always constituted a really significant percent (if not always a majority as they are now) of the population and they’ve always been interspersed, living among men, many of whom were listening and caring and being affected by women’s perceptions and opinions.
Oppression is not as simple as the black and white model presents it; patriarchy is definitely not an even-handed system that doesn’t disenfranchise women any worse than it does for men, but it may have gotten there slowly over time and there may have been tradeoffs and sweeteners in the deal to sell some of the structured changes to women as reasonable and tolerable solutions to complex social problems. I’ve posited scarcity and the desire to control reproduction and whatnot, which is a pretty popular reconstruction, although I admit it’s conjectural.
You should at least have the humility to realise that by choosing to be labelled as “pro-life” you are, yourself, indulging in purposely self-aggrandising and divisive rhetoric. If you can successfully get people to allow you that label then it ensures the other side are implicitly “anti-life”. Which is clearly bullshit.
I don’t think I could live with the intellectual dishonesty needed to carry that off with a straight face.
Not absolutely powerless, but pretty close. Until 100 years ago women could influence men, maybe, on how to vote - but they couldn’t. 40 years ago in Louisiana my wife had no legal control over our joint property, and couldn’t get a check cashing card at the supermarket unless I signed for it - though she made more than I did.
Women got told that learning too much would make them unattractive. Women got told that they couldn’t handle money. My grandmother, after my well to do grandfather died, lost everything because she had never been educated about money.
I’m old enough to remember when a lot of pure out and out sexism was just the way things were. Mad Men was not really out there in this regard. Sure there were women who wouldn’t accept this crap, but they were the minority.
The arguments are becoming more and more ridiculous. Maybe you support abortion because you couldn’t bear sharing your mother’s love with your little brother, you could never get overt this, and you subconsciously wish that he were never born?
Have you ever heard of Occam’s razor? The simplest reason explaining why people are opposed to abortion is that they’re opposed to abortion. Anything else is adding assumptions pulled out of you ass, unless you have significant evidences that a specific person is opposed to abortion because he feels unloved and identify with the fetus.
It’s not like being opposed to abortion is an insane opinion that requires some other explanation that makes more sense. Deciding that the bodily autonomy of the mother is sacrosanct and trumps the right of the fetus to live is a pretty arbitrary moral position. You can’t exactly demonstrate that it’s objectively correct. Arguing that the mother should be held responsible for the situation she has willingly created isn’t an absurd moral position. That’s the moral rule we tend to apply in most situations (“you created this mess, you deal with it”).
So, being opposed to abortion doesn’t require any other secret agenda. Especially since, beside a moral reasoning, there’s another powerful factor : the religious belief that a supreme being condemn it as a crime. I do not doubt that many opponents to abortion share other beliefs that you might find objectionable. It doesn’t mean that those beliefs are the reason why they’re opposed to abortion. Correlation isn’t causation. And I’m sure that some people are opposed to abortion for one of the many reasons that have been listed in this thread. But you can’t assume that it applies to most opponents to abortion.
Refusing to accept the idea that someone could be opposed to abortion for reasons that are understandable is plainly demonizing the opposition. It’s of course much more confortable to assume that someone disagreeing with you does so simply because he’s evil. It prevents you from having to pay attention to his arguments, or to question yours, and frankly to even have to think at all, and of course prevents you from having to even consider the idea that your own position could be not only disputable, but even morally ambiguous or plainly wrong.
I don’t think people who oppose abortion are “evil” because they oppose abortion. I can understand the view that, if life begins at conception, abortion is therefore murdering a human being. That is an entirely rational and moral (within its specific framework) position to hold.
The problem is that the pro-life movement are also inextricably entwined with a whole raft of other beliefs, policies and practices that increase (or would increase if implemented) the number of abortions by at least an order of magnitude as well as increasing the amount of death and suffering by women (and specifically poor women) and their children, including engaging in active deceit and bullying tactics of vulnerable women. Those are not the actions of people whose priority is preventing the termination of unwanted pregnancies and the preservation of life. And it’s not an insignificant minority of people doing this; it is intrinsic to the entire political and religious side of the pro-life movement, including the booming “crisis pregnancy center” industry. By their works we know them, and we know them to be evil - again, not because they oppose abortion but because they promote death and suffering.
Of course, you persist in handwaving away the reality of this; One may ask whether this is, say, to prevent yourself from having to pay attention to these arguments, or to question yours, and frankly to even have to think at all, and to prevent yourself from having to even consider the idea that your own position could be not only disputable, but even morally ambiguous or plainly wrong.
It’s not just the bodily autonomy in question, it is a question about the impact on the whole life of one unwilling and possibly ill-equipped potential mother. Why not make two people’s lives worse seems to be the anti-abortion view. Weight that against something that has no self-awareness and no investment already put into it.
The underlying issue is sexual puritanism. They don’t want people having sex that they don’t approve of (married boy-girl sex).
Pregnancy prevention is therefore not allowed, because it abets non-marital sex. Without pregnancy prevention, the only tool this leaves on the table is the punishment of forced pregnancy. If that punishment is defanged by abortion rights, they can’t enforce their puritanical worldview.
There’s also the traditional/biblical worldview that a woman’s social position is that of being subservient to men, and younger women should be subservient to older people. If women can get abortions, that overturns the hierarchy, and the hierarchy doesn’t like that.
There’s also the traditional/biblical worldview that the event of pregnancy is God’s will. So if you’re aborting a pregnancy, you’re spitting in God’s face, and they don’t like people doing that.
When we put all those things together, and consider that the entire punishment falls upon women with none on men, we could conclude that people just want to control women to enforce the social order they think God wants.
I suspect that if pregnancy required the man to do something… I dunno, say his dick grows a conspicuous “pregnancy wart” that would end the pregnancy if cut off… it would probably be a very punishable and controlled thing as well. Or maybe not. Maybe if men understood what it’s like to have biology pointing a gun to your head, we’d all get together and realize that’s no way to live. But given how many childbearing women are part of the pro-life movement, knowing the risks and costs of childbirth, I’m not optimistic.
Oh, more nonsense. I didn’t create the terminology. I didn’t invent the term “pro-life.” It’s convenient shorthand here on an internet message board, that’s all. But if you prefer another term, go ahead and use it. That’s fine with me, as long as you refrain from being intentionally insulting.
And, of course, you’ll extend the same leeway to me when it comes to the term “pro-choice.”
As to “humility,” yeah, no.
It would rather be saving the life of one at the cost of making the life of the other worst. If a fetus is a human, you aren’t making his life better with an abortion. You’re killing him. Which is not typically considered as an improvement. Besides, a children, once born, is still likely to impact the whole life of the mother, and this isn’t usually considered a valid reason to kill him.
In your statement, it seems to me that there’s still the assumption that the fetus isn’t really a human because if he is, then abortion is the equivalent of the murder of a child, or for that matter, an elderly person, and an argument according to which you could kill children or elderly people, or whoever else, if they impact your life negatively would never fly. And you would never support this argument yourself, in all likelihood.
Bodily autonomy is mentioned much more often than “impact on the mother whole life”, for an obvious reason which is at at this point, parents are held responsible for the care of their children, whether or not they’re willing or well-equiped, and whether or not it impacts their life negatively. To give an obvious example, you can’t get out of child support regardless of the reasons you would advance.
See, I don’t believe bodily autonomy is “sancrosanct” because I really try not to have sanctimonious positions like that. I believe bodily autonomy should be a basic human right, the same as free speech. I simply believe society becomes a fucked-up place when the state can coerce us to do things to our bodies based solely on someone else’s religious beliefs.
The state should only contravene bodily autonomy when there is a serious case to made for public health. For instance, mandatory vaccinations. But being forced to get a shot in the arm is a very different thing than being forced to endure a pregnancy for nine months.
The costs of enforcing abortion laws totally outweigh the benefits, IMHO. The slippery slope of these laws is terrifying to me. Imagine the police rummaging through your garbage in search of potential abortifacients while your traumatized wife is sitting at the police precinct being interrogated, trying to convince the police that she didn’t even know she was pregnant. Imagine pregnant women who get caught smoking in public being arrested for child endangerment, because now abortion laws have paved the way for fetuses to be treated like actual human beings. There’s a rumor going around that a pregnant woman in town has anorexia and a mandatory reporter catches wind of this? Is this reporter going to get in trouble for choosing not to snitch? Is the pregnant woman going to be arrested for “attempted murder”? If her baby is stillborn, what happens next?
Are guys really in favor of being forced to pay child support payments the moment a pregnancy is confirmed? Are guys in favor of law enforcement coming after them if they don’t pay?
Only a naive fool could believe that these laws will never go beyond punishing abortion doctors. There’s no reason to trust that pro-lifers would be satisfied with stopping there. It is possible to be against abortion in terms of personal morality but be much more against the logical consequences of an abortion ban. Personally, I already don’t trust the state not to infringe on people’s rights, so I really don’t trust the state to not overstep when it comes to women’s bodies. I hope you can understand why a woman would not be eager to invite the state into her home to search for evidence that her bloody sheets are not an “act of God”. Maybe that’s not a thought a guy would ever have a reason to entertain, but for women, it’s a realistic fear. And it needs to be appreciated and respected instead of dismissed because “OMG THINK OF THE PRECIOUS BABBIES!!!”
In summary, it is impossible for a person to explain how abortion harms society without making an appeal to religious assumptions and emotion. But a rational mind can easily understand how denying people bodily autonomy can destroy society.
I actually think there’s a relatively large contingent of pro-choice people who take basically the following position
“I don’t like abortion, I’m not for abortion, I’ll never get one personally, and in a perfect world, there would be no need for abortions at all, except for the life and health of the mother. BUT… in today’s world, things are such that people see a need for it, and it’s not MY place to determine whether or not they’re right or wrong- they’re the ones who will deal with the consequences- temporal or spiritual.”
Of course, a lot of the really religious types believe in the concept that basically if you don’t do all you can to stop something like abortions (i.e. killing unborn humans), then you are condoning it and culpable to some degree in the commission of that act, and therefore committing a sin. Which really explains a LOT of their otherwise unwanted intrusion into everyone’s lives. In other words, it’s not really as much about the gayness, abortions, birth control, etc… but about what they view as their own salvation.