I am not talking about well-being. I am talking about life versus choice.
I feel that life becomes more important than choice at about the third trimester.
I never say you don’t matter anymore, I say “your right to choose is not as important as this healthy third trimester fetuses right to live”
I really don’t know how many different ways i can say the same thing.
I understand your position that a womans right to choose is absolute no matter what. That is a hard position to debate against. There is nothing i can say or prove or do that would move you from your position.
I have told you exactly what you can do to move me from my position. Prove to me that these sort of abortions don’t exist. The only evidence I have found on these third trimester abortions of healthy pregnancies say that they do exist and happen by the hundreds. I would still believe that these abortions shouldn’t happen but if you prove they don’t happen then I can be as bothered about them as I am about unicorns keying my car.
Prove to me that a fetus is such an incredibly special thing that it has rights that no other creature on earth has, like superseding my ownership of my body.
I’m not questioning your position - I understand that.
What I am pointing out is that the numbers you’re throwing around of “elective third-trimester abortions” INCLUDE all of the abortions you say are OK.
So by making “elective third-trimester abortions” illegal, you would be sentencing women to death and torment.
“Elective” doesn’t just mean what you want it to mean, it has an actual, technical meaning. It is misused by anti-abortion people because they can use the term to lie about what’s happening.
As far as your “cite”. Yeah, because I’m going to believe an anti-abortion website that claims to be quoting someone who belongs to an anti-abortion terrorist organization. A person who, if she actually worked for the clinic at all, was a secretary, NOT medical staff, and therefore was not qualified to understand the medical circumstances of these cases. A person who was considered a “disgruntled employee”, because the clinic fired her.
Yeah, not really what I’d call factual evidence of hordes of women lining up to abort their 40-week perfectly healthy pregnancy.
Well, honest mistakes happen. The thread is pretty long.
I’ll be the first one to admit that this isn’t the most convincing cite I have ever seen but I just haven’t been able to find very much and int the absence of any other information I am inclined to say that this is enough that you can’t categorically state that this sort of thing doesn’t happen. I thought the burden rested with your side of the argument to begin with (burden of proof usually rests with the person who makes an assertion not the person who contests the assertion) but even if I had the burden of disproving your unsupported assertion I think that this shold be enough to at least shift the burden.
Yes I agree we are assuming away all alws and discussing what SHOULD be. I thought the cite talked about third trimester abotrions of healthy fetuses (I noticed that the cite did nto mention if the pregnancy threatened the life of the mother and I don’t think the pro-life lobby is beyond omitting pertinent information, but I am not inclined to assume that they were all life threatening pregnancies either).
I am pretty sure I have spoken in terms of the state’s interest in preserving the life of the fetus.
You don’t offer any arguments, only assertions. And I am asserting that you cannot always do what you want with your own body if it mean killing someone else.
You know, references to political sides are metaphorical. If you agree with someone about abortion you don’t actually go and stand on the same side of the room with him. I don’t think people become pro-life and then suddenly get conservative on taxes and immigration through osmosis. This doesn’t make sense. And it’s still a bad strategy: compromise can work, but giving in to people does not lead to victory.
Denouncements are empty lip service, and I think most people have caught on to that by now. It does not matter if you get up and denounce someone in public and then go on condoning or supporting them in private. You’re also comparing someone who hypothetically supports a last-day abortion to someone who murders a doctor, which is ludicrous.
Try judging people by their actions and not their words.
And you’ll notice the pro-life movement hasn’t gone anywhere.
What exactly would prove you wrong? Neural activity in the fetus? Fetal dreams? Fetal pain?
I think we’ve largely undercut the 60 year old hooked up to you in the middle of the night analogy (at least in the case of a viable fetus). What exactly could I prove that would make you change your mind?
OK, then if I have not been clear in the past, do you at least understand what i am talking about now?
OK then provide a better cite. I never thought the burden of prrof was on me in the first place. So please provide a cite saying that the type of abortion I am concerned about never happens, it might even make me change my position. I am not interested in prohibiting somethign that actually never happens any more than I am interested in zoning laws for dragons.
Lots of places allow you to kill a home intruder, even if they don’t directly threaten you. Their very presence on your property without your consent is considered a killin’ crime.
Not entirely no but the ideas percolate together. I have seen pro-life socially liberal friends of mine start to develop some wierd stances on global warming and taxes. Thats just anecdote but what isn’t anecdote is that the diversity of opinion on the republican side has diminished and now there is something like a Republican orthodoxy that comes in a single package.
I’m not talking about giving in, I’m not even talking about compromise. Several postere here have said: “well, I’d be against third term abortions of healthy pregnancies but they don’t happen so I will continue to support third term abortions of healthy pregnancies”
I suspect that some of this is because they don’t want to alienate people that they agree with 80% of the time in order to admit they have common ground with people they agree with 20% of the time.
I’m just giving examples of extremism.
Not really sure how that applies in the context of a message board.
And you’ll notice the pro-life movement hasn’t gone anywhere.
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And neither has the pro-choice movement. What’s the point? If your point is taht we can only admit to things if it will make the pro-lifers disappear then we will never get anywhere.
Now, please note that this is talking about SECOND trimester, under the name “late-term abortions”. Another favorite lie of the anti-abortion crowd is to lump all 2nd and 3rd trimester abortions together as “late-term abortions” and then make claims about third-trimester based on data from second-trimester.
Yes, I know that you are OK with 2nd trimester abortions. But if a teenager doesn’t realize until the 4th month of pregnancy that she’s even pregnant - she no longer has “6 months, half a year, 26 weeks, 180 days” to take care of the problem. In order to get a 2nd trimester abortion, she has less than two months (7 weeks) to decide what to do, find a doctor (if she can - it’s not easy), scrounge up the money (not just for the abortion, but most likely for transportation costs and a place to stay for at least one night if not more), find someone to take her (generally clinics aren’t going to allow her to leave on her own), and so on.
That’s just a little different than your pretend scenario of thousands of women just sitting around pregnant waiting so that they can embrace the grand joy of having a third-trimester abortion.
And even then you think it’s OK to force her to be further emotionally traumatized in order to make anti-abortion fanatics happy by punishing women that are “allowed” to end a pregnancy. I’ll bet you’d love the new Oklahoma law that provides for state-enforced rape by instrumentation, in the pretense of providing “informed consent” to women trying to get an abortion.
I understand your position. If you’ll quit talking about “elective abortions” like they’re all some joyride in the park, then I’ll quit bitching about your misuse of the term. OK?
But the burden of proof IS on you. Current law only allows for third-trimester abortion if the abortion is necessary to preserve the woman’s health. Where’s your proof that any change in the law is needed?
You seem to be completely missing the point - the DianaG argument is that we don’t let fully-born adult people, with neural activity, dreams, and pain use women as life support systems, and so why should fetusus get to? Objectively speaking, the argument is very solid - there is no other instance in law where you are obligated to donate the services of your bodily functions to another person. Not even if it will keep them alive, and not even if it only cost you a blood transfusion.
Let’s reiterate - the law is consistent across the board on this. It doesn’t matter if the person is sentient and aware; it doesn’t matter if the person is fully recognized as legally a person, it doesn’t matter if the person needs your aid; it doesn’t matter if the personal cost to you is very very short. Your body is yours to share or not as you please, period.
Objectively speaking, this argument is very, very, very strong. Sufficiently so that I personally see no way to counter it. And as long as you’re resorting to “but what if it’s sentient, feels pain, and is able to write dissertations on world peace”, then you can’t counter it either. It’s not that we want women to get abortions. It’s that we don’t have the right to stop them - not if we want to be consistent with the way we deal with legal situations where there are men’s body parts on the line.
How has the 60-year-old man analogy been undercut, again?
I am not entirely familiar with the castle doctrine but every case I have come across has an element of self defense. I don’t think you can shoot a baby that crawled onto your lawn in any state in the union, not even West Virginia.