“There are two - count 'em, TWO alive surgeons in the united states who are even willing to perform third trimester elective abortions.”
So do these two surgeons that are willing to perform elective third trimester abortions actually perform any elective third trimester abortions? If so, doesn’t that mean that elective third trimester abortions exist?
BTW I don’t understand why my reason for putting the burden of proof on you doesn’t make perfect sense.
Right, but like I said the analogy had previously been modified to account for that. (The thread is long, so you probably missed it.)
And of course I just argued that its absence wasn’t weakness in the analogy, except from the perspective that the woman should be punished with a pregnancy because “she asked for it.” To think that it is a weakness is a failure of critical thinking - not that I haven’t make mistakes like that before myself, but I’m hoping that reading my analysis will help you correct this one.
And you’re welcome to have such reasons! Personally I don’t care what a woman’s reasons are for choosing to keep a baby: I’ll honor her wishes regardless. Just as I’d honor her choice to abort it.
Hate to tell you this, but you’re not pro-life. The word has a definition, and in this case it’s “not perfectly content for abortion to be legal”.
Where are the doctors willing to perform such abortions?
The claim that such abortions occur hasn’t ever been anything other than an anti-abortionist lie. Claims like your were trotted out when one of the three doctors willing to perform late term abortions at all was murdered, in an attempt to justify his killing. Naturally none of the pro-terrorist side - and let’s be honest, that’s what we are talking about - was able to come up with any actual examples. Just as you are unable.
Slander; lies designed to justify terrorism and murder, nothing more.
Because the only result would be lawsuits from anti-abortionists trying to harass women who are getting medically necessary abortions. If they make some women miserable or kill some that way, they’ll be happy. Just as the only result of the “Partial Birth” (not a real medical term) abortion ban was to forbid the safest method of late term abortions. It didn’t prevent a single abortion - but it DID put the lives and health of women in greater danger, so they were happy.
Hate to tell you this, but you’re not pro-life. The word has a definition, and in this case it’s “not perfectly content for abortion to be legal”.
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Pure semantics. I am very much against abortion, but if you want to call me pro-choice because I choose to not force those views down other people’s throats, then so be it. I know where I stand.
Maybe. If I were interested in proving that elective third trimester abortions had occured, then that might be a good place to start looking.
There are a few reasons, but the main one is that I don’t care about convincing you of the point. The reason I don’t care is that I have you pegged as arguing from a position of dogma, such that I don’t think you can be convinced by dogma.
Regarless, because I’m not in a position of caring what you think, I am able to respond to your demand for a cite with “Cites? Cites? We don’t need no stinking cites to declare your baseless opinions wrong! Unless of course you have something to back them up with…like say a cite perhaps?”
The other reason I don’t need a cite is because the answer doesn’t matter to me - my precise position is that there are not enough elective late-term abortions for me to get overexcited about. Does that require there to be no late-term abortions? That would certaintly work, but no. I only require there to be few enough that it’s not worth me worrying about. And because I think that there is not legal cause to ban abortions regardless, that number would have to be respectably high to get my outrage going.
Instead, of course, we’re talking about numbers comparable to the number of humans that get eaten by sharks in a year and the like. Does that mean we should ban ocean swimming? Hunt down and kill all sharks? Um, no. Page me when this is happening in numbers. Like, say, car accidents. I guarantee you that car accidents kill more children in a year than elective third-trimester abortions do. Are you fervent about banning letting children ride in cars? No? Then don’t try to tweak me with the sensationalist overexaggeration of third-term fetal fatalities.
Of course it’s pure semantics - we’re talking about word meanings. That’s what semantics is.
And we know that you respect other people’s views, now that you’ve told us, but absent that if I heard you were pro-life I would interpret you as saying that you are on a religious crusade to ban all abortions out of a desire to enforce your religious morality on everyone else. And you couldn’t really blame me for arriving at this conclusion.
(And preview/edit is your friend. It’s all our friend. Preview/edit FTW!)
You excel at missing the point I was not the person trying to argue that viability is some sort of morally significant status. That’s the anti-abortionists.
I wouldn’t trust anything from an anti-choice website. Maybe that woman’s testimony is true but we don’t have context. Tiller actually went to trial and was acquitted.
Anyway, glad you brought up Tiller. The quote from Tiller appears to support what people have been saying all along. 80% of late term abortions are due to fetal anomalies. The rest, according to Kansas law, have to be due to some impairment of the woman’s health. Two other physicians, without any monetary conflict of interest, have to support the decision to abort. That came out in the trial. You should also know that Tiller was one of only 3, yes I said 3, Drs who performed late term abortions. Now he’s dead so there may only be two. (?)
So what you are asking for is that the federal government has to step in and go through medical records of clinics/hospitals that do abortions. That’s exactly what John Ashcroft’s Justice Department did. And somehow, magically, the Justice Department can do a better job at determining whether the late term abortions were proper than hospital panels or two independent doctors. That just sounds like a great idea!
Fair enough. If you came to that conclusion, that would be your prejudicial error, but I promise I won’t blame you for it.
The reason I explained my position is because neither label really works for me. If I call myself pro-life, you’ll assume what you stated above. If I call myself pro-choice, you’ll assume that I have no problems with abortion. Neither of those are true. So label me what you like, but I guess that’s the problem with labels. It makes people come into these discussions with preconceived notions.
P.S. I know that preview/edit is my friend, but I’m not sure why you told me that. Please excuse my ignorance.
Pure semantics. I am very much against abortion, but if you want to call me pro-choice because I choose to not force those views down other people’s throats, then so be it. I know where I stand.
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Yep, thanks again for your input. You are anti-abortion but not anti-choice. That’s why I specify anti-choice or pro-choice. It is precise language and gets to the crux of the matter. Pro-life is extremely misleading and sometimes outright wrong (some of these people are warmongers and are execution-happy). Anti-abortion is not really correct because the issue is a legal one. Should we outlaw the woman’s right to chose abortion? If the answer is yes, you are anti-choice. No? Pro-choice.
JRG1976, if you want to elaborate, you can say you’re anti-abortion but pro-choice.
I wouldn’t be making a prejudicial error - my conclusion would be justified, becuase the word “pro-life” means “opposed to allowing other people to get abortions”, and honest to Vishnu in the practical forum of real life there seems to only be one reason for that.
I won’t assume you have no problems with abortion, but you’re right that this is a common misunderstanding about the pro-choice position.
'Cause you messed up your quote. It’s something that’s going around lately.
No, I don’t believe that cite at all. Haven’t you been saying there are 1,000 late term abortions a year - and I found a cite saying it’s only 100? This woman says she saw 600 in six months at one clinic. Even granting there are few of these clinics and that abortions are on the decline, I’m struggling with that. By the way here is a Slate article that says 1 percent of abortions are done post-viability. That would be 12,100 (as of 2006), and that’s not the third trimester yet.
Because that’s unnecessary, pointless, and it’s such a bad way to make policy that I’m left wondering if you are a high ranking Democratic Party official. Doing someone else’s bidding is not stealing their thunder, it’s giving in to their demands. It wouldn’t exactly stop the pro-life movement in its tracks either.
Interesting. Notice how they redefine late abortion to 20 weeks. They also say they don’t trust the reported numbers. And they go on and on about how later abortions are not delayed for medical reasons, and are often done for teenagers, the poor and naive, and those who misjudge the stage of their pregnancy. All of which I find believable. A kid who got pregnant can easily be in denial for well into the second trimester. A kid whose parents will kill her for getting pregnant might take some time figuring out where to go. A kid with no money and no transportation is going to have a hard time getting to a clinic in some places.
If these people were really in favor of reducing the number of late term abortions, they should be in favor of more education and more clinics and free places to go. Even better, easy access to morning after pills. I won’t be holding my breath.
