Excellent 2 cents, IMO. Hey** Lonestar88** what do you think of this post? If you agree, I think we have common ground.
Sure it will matter. Until it doesn’t. Where there’s a will, there’s a way, and it’s not a strange twist of fate that the majority of abortion-related deaths are in developing countries where abortion is restricted or illegal. There’s no button, but there is a convenient opening where a stick/chicken bone/herbal mixture/dung can be shoved. And women requesting abortions are pretty good at gauging trauma – many are already mothers to at least one child, and all are already pregnant.
I agree mostly, but Roe v. Wade has already stated that the state may have legitimate interest in regulating abortion.
This has nothing to do with religious beliefs.
Well, I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on this one.
To expound on this slightly, if the state wrote the law in such a way as to explicitly and inarguably defer to some specific religious tradition, then it could be struck down right quick, but if the law was written without such an explicit reference to religion, such as by deferring to some scientific conclusion or just asserting arbitrarily, then it wouldn’t be subject to a first amentment smackdown - even if it arrived at the same conclusion as some religion does.
I mean, the bible says “thou shall not kill”, but that doesn’t get murder laws struck down.
And this is a good argument for keeping first trimester abortions legal and available.
Abortion on demand up until birth, not so much.
The constitution cannot be amended in a way which is found to violate the principles and text of the document ITSELF, however. It can be amended to EXPAND rights (from “all men” originally meaning “all White, property owning males” to “all Males, regardless of color or ownership” to “all HUMANS, male or female”, for example) but ameding it to REMOVE rights, esp. those arguably granted/not specifically denied, is a whole 'nother animal.
I realize that those seeking to ban legal abortion consider fetuses “humans”, but considering that they are, for all intents and purposes, PART of an existing human’s body, a human with existing rights, the problematic nature of this proposition is obvious.
I have always found it more than a little interesting that so many on the anti-choice side also happen to be right-wing politically. You know, the ones who argue that the government should stay out of our lives and let the PEOPLE and the MARKET decide and run things. EXCEPT, it seems, when it comes to issues like this (and other sexual/“moral” issues like gay rights/marriage, drugs, prayer in schools, etc…).
Very large discrepency between their position on certain issues and their positions on others and it always seems to come down to RELIGIOUS views (anti-gay, anti-sex-ed, anti-evolution, anti-abortion) which mesh with one particular perspective (fundamentalist Christianity). Coincidental, I’m sure. :rolleyes:
Very easy to say that the abortion issue has nothing to do with religion and quite another to offer any rationale for restricting or banning a very safe medical procedure (much safer than birth, cessarian or otherwise, ftr) that does not rely upon the idea that humans have souls and that terminating a pregnancy is somehow a “sin” in the eyes of a creator/god.
The women I’ve known, including myself, who’ve had an abortion did so as a result of an accidental fertilization (in spite of being responsible and taking precautions) and made the decision based on what they KNEW to be in the best interests of all involved (including the POTENTIAL child).
In my case, my late husband was already ill and on disability with the genetic condition which killed him. We had 2 children already (thankfully both escaped inheriting his condition, which wasn’t diagnosed until late in life), were struggling to support ourselves already, MY health and age were not such I should have been having another child, and the potential child had a 50/50 chance of being born with something which would kill it by 40 or so,or even sooner, even with constant medical monitoring.
Another woman I knew some yrs back was in a similar situation; her 13 yr old son, a hemophiliac, was dying of AIDS from a tainted transfusion. She had another child. She was in her 40s and had been on 7 mths of bed rest with both pregnancies. She and her husband both worked full time and still struggled with medical bills and being there to support the family emotionally and otherwise. She WEPT onm my shoulder over terminating what she (like me) knew to be her last chance to have another child. But she knew it was the right, the only responsible, choice.
It really pisses me off when people, esp. those WITHOUT a uterus, characterize abortion as a flippant decision made by irresponsible women. :mad:
There are so many factors involved in most cases that NO-ONE but the woman and/or her Dr. should have a say. Most late-term abortions are done due to serious fetal malformations and terribly wrenching for the woman. They are NOT “on demand” in the sense of, “oh, gee, I just got around to it.” Give women a little more credit than that.
The right to self defense? Either I don’t understand your point or you don’t understand self defense. I already said that a woman should not be forced to continue a pregnancy that was going to kill her. If her special situation is that she doesn’t want to give her child up for adoption then I don’t think self defense kicks in.
This is not a religious stance, it is ethical. She doesn’t have to raise her child, she can give it up for adoption. I am all for good information and the morning after pill.
The only thing I need to know about her circumstance is how far along she is and whether her pregnancy is threatening her with death and disability. If she is far enough along and her pregnancy is not going to kill or disable her then yes I think at some point abortion becomes murder. I don’t know how you compare my apples to her oranges but I don’t find them to be moral equivalents at all.
If they are so rare, or non-existant, then why not just make them illegal and shut me up? I have provided cites, I have not seen any cites from those who claim that elective third trimester abortions do not occur.
Then cut their legs out from underneath them and eliminate elective third trimester abortions.
That sounds like a bit of a conspiracy theory. First they get people to be against elective third trimester abortions, then they get people to be against all abortions, then maybe they can convince us that birth control is unethical as well.
I am just talking about elective third trimester abortions.
Define “viable”. Because to me there’s a difference between “we can save it - we have the technology (if you have the money)” and any definition of ‘viable’ that is useful in this discussion.
I strongly suspect that when the fetus is developed enough to actually survive outside the womb on its own physical strength, that the policy is to induce birth absent other medical complications preventing that from being safe. You have yet to show otherwise, and until you do I will not join your windmill tilting. So, when I post about abortions, I am not talking about viable fetuses. Because I am trying to talk about the real world.
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I have provided cites, noone else seems to be able to come up with anything saying that they were incorrect. Why do I have to provide cites of increasingly higher quality before you have to provide any evidence at all?
I am not even anti-abortion in the first trimester. I am anti-abortion but still pro-choice in the second trimester. I am anti-abortion in the third trimester unless the pregnancy poses the threat of death or disability or if the fetus is badly deformed or disabled.
Ever heard of cutting off your nose to spite your face? Why should pro-choice people ban a type of abortion just to shut you up?
Choice is not and should not be absolute if there is another person involved.
And if you can provide some evidence that elective third trimester abortions do not exist (we already know that elective late term abortions exist), then my argument fades into irrelevance. If I can prove a single elective third trimester abortion exists, you can’t pooh pooh it away. I have provided what cites I could find, what have you found? This Guttmacher instutite seems to be the most reliable heavily cited source. do they have any info? I couldn’t find any.
Yes, I agree. I think a bit more education might be useful but generally I agree that the mother can make her own bed.
The focus at this point is not on the woman, the focus shifts to the rights of the fetus.
cite?
Just because you are unpopular does not mean you are right.
Well the Supreme Court is supposed to protect us against a tyranny of the majority (and tyrannies in general). They created the constitutional right to an abortion out of whole cloth and as a purely judicial construct and with such a flimsy constitutional grounding, it is susceptible to being reversed.
I don’t think most pro-choice people are quite THAT pro-choice.
Coul;dn’t you use the same logic going the other way and call the pro-choicers “pro-death”?
They may be the ones that jump up and down about it but its not merely spiritual.
Not really. Abortion is not strictly a religious issue any more than murder is strictly a religious issue.
And to the extent they are right, why wouldn’t you want to?
Yeah I was pretty flattened by how much resistance I got to the notion that third trimester abortions should be restricted to cases where the pregnancy posed a threat to the mother’s health or life or where the baby was horribly disabled.
I must have missed that part of constitutional law.
We have amendments that makes senators elected in direct elections, same with the President and VP. Contrary to the language of the original text of the constitution.
We have a constitutional amendment that outlaws slavery despite the fact that the constitution gave states 3/5ths representation for slaves (i.e. explicitly acknowledged slavery).
The right to an abortion is a judicial creation. It is a “penumbra right” e.g. a right that kinda sorta seems to make sense based on all the other rights we have. There is nothing in the text or principles of the constitution that gives a right to an abortion.
You ever hear of prohibition?
You ever hear of the constitutional amendment that strips property rights in slaves?
Not me. I’m a pretty firm believer in government’s ability to do good.
Yeah I don’t think most men would rape their daughter’s either but I think there ought to be a law against it.
Its not literally just to shut me up. Its to close down that argument. To show that they are not standing behind the Diana G’s of the world who insist that a woman’s right to an abortion extends to the moment of birth.
Why do we insist that the right expel its radicals and extremists when we are not ready to expel the radicals and extremists in our own ranks?
I get that. Why do I care about shutting down that argument?
And why do we need to do that?
Why are you asking me? I think demanding denunciations is a moronic political exercise. It’s a smear tactic, that’s all. People should be judged by their own opinions, not the views of people who have a roughly similar point of view.
Well, that assumes we can trust the people making the argument to act rationally. I don’t see why they would accept that issue as “closed down” when they can keep equating fetuses to newborns and whatnot in their posters and leaflets and websites. What concession are the pro-lifers offering in response? I’d consider trading the third trimester for the first two, i.e. ban third-trimester electives in exchange for no efforts to restrict first- and second-electives. Pro-lifers must take their partial victory and partial loss as pro-choicers do the same, and we’ll have no more shooting of doctors and protests outside clinics, thank you very much.
And I like to think DianeG stands behind me, thank you very much.
I have provided cites, noone else seems to be able to come up with anything saying that they were incorrect. Why do I have to provide cites of increasingly higher quality before you have to provide any evidence at all?
I am not even anti-abortion in the first trimester. I am anti-abortion but still pro-choice in the second trimester. I am anti-abortion in the third trimester unless the pregnancy poses the threat of death or disability or if the fetus is badly deformed or disabled.
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It depends a lot on the circumstance of the woman,if she has the possibility of dying, and or, leaving other children to be mother less) it should be her choice(SElf Defense). A lot depends on her state of mind, financial situation etc.( will it mean they can’t afford another child, her own health etc… I have a friend who gave a child up during the 40’s and spent a life time mourning the fact that she couldn’t keep the child. Adoption may be okay for some, but it can also be a traumatic experience for a young mother. Some have given a child up for adoption and learned later that the child had been abused. And I wonder if Mrs Hitler knew her son would grow up to kill so many people if it would have been better if he had been aborted.
One cannot judge what another does in the privacy of their own homes if it is legal,and should not have someone elses beliefs pushed on to them. Suppose you lived under the laws of some religions who allow a parent to kill or maim their child or another. We should be grateful that our founding fathers had separation of State and Religion. Should a majority become a radical group, then freedoms that were fought for would no longer exist!!
Well, I’m okay with it in part because I trust doctors to make that determination, rather than legislators pandering to fundamentalists.
Besides, the point is to present an example that some would find egregious, much like a defender of free speech recognizes that Larry Flynt has it, too, and regardless of how one feels about Larry Flynt, the overall principal is more important.
You haven’t provided a single cite that supports your assertions that elective post-viability abortions happen. Not. One. Single. Cite.
You’ve provided a cite or two that doesn’t support your conclusion, but I’m afraid the our reading comprehension isn’t poor enough to be fooled into thinking they matter. The number of “late” abortions in general doesn’t tell us a single thing about the number of elective abortions after viability.
Okay. Having corrected your erroneous assertion -
Suppose for a moment that you actually could prove that one or two elective post-viability abortions have happened. I mean, I suppose it’s possible - perhaps at the last minute the woman learned that the fetus had Horrific Necrotic Flesh-Eating Disorder* and decided a mercy killing was the only moral thing to do. Okay, entertaining that hypothetical for a moment:
I can still pooh-pooh it away.
Yeah, you heard me.
Why? Because I can do a cost-benefit analysis. On the one hand we have a theoretical maximum of, what, maybe one or two elective abortions of viable fetuses per year on the entire planet, maybe? And on the other hand we have you wanting to completely screw the whole law up.
I mean, what do you want to have the law say? “After viability?” What’s viability? After third trimester? But that’s an arbitrary cutoff that proves that fetuses have rights, and there’s this creationist doctor over here arguing that fetuses are viable (or close enough) at the start of second trimester. And you know with the advance of technology it’s only a matter of time before we can extract them at conception and grow them in a test tube - so that would make them “viable” the entire time. So we might as well save time and ban abortion from conception on now.
- not a real disorder. I hope.
Or have the abortion doctor to make it for her, yes.
Or rather, on the fetus’s immortal soul.
We were specifically talking about the hypothetical world where all the abortions in the world were performed in third trimester. Please try to keep up.
Why? What about the fetus makes it inherently more valuable or important than the woman?
nm