What did you mean by “so in other words you are OK with the starve to death thing now”
You can free yourself from the duty of care by giving up guardianship of that child. Give it to the hospital, it becomes award of the state and the state feeds it at which point you can sit by and watch it starve to death if the hospital is breaching its duty of care.
I think you can even surrender guardianship before birth so you never have the duty of care, not even for a second (at least in most states).
If you meant something else then it was not clear to me what you meant when you said “so in other words you are OK with the starve to death thing now”
That doesn’t address my issue. Once again, I simply do not recognize any responsibility for a child I’m forced to bear. Yeah, I can take it to the hospital and give it up for adoption. I can also have it in a deserted parking lot and leave it where it lands. And since you’re the one who brought up the ‘I can let the baby crawl off a cliff, I can’t push it’ thing, I’m going to need you to explain how the latter is qualitatively different from ‘letting it crawl off a cliff’, using an argument that isn’t ‘because it’s *your *child’. Because once again, and listen carefully, I do not believe that I have any ethical responsibility to care for a child I was forced to bear against my will because people like you believe that my body ceases to be mine the moment YOU say it does.
You did. And then you jumped from “C-sections have a lower mortality rate than abortion if high-risk C-sections are excluded” to “C-sections have fewer risks than abortion.” They are different claims.
If the woman doesn’t want a child, then yes, an abortion is better than giving birth. If you’re saying I made relative health claims about the procedures, you are wrong. I did say that you are in favor of forcing her to give birth (as opposed to deciding what she wants to do with the pregnancy because that’s of no interest to you), which you are. And I said that you are now arguing that a woman who wants an abortion at six months should be required to have a C-section and give birth prematurely to a child who would then have a lifetime of health problems. Apparently you don’t see that this is less than compassionate toward the fetus.
How nice of you. Do you want a cookie? You’re still arguing that woman who doesn’t want a child should be forced to have one because… well, we’re still kind of fuzzy on the “because” part. But fetutes feel pain! Apparently if the woman has been pregnant for six months but hadn’t decided to get an abortion earlier, or couldn’t afford one, then she’s made an implied promise to the fetus and she shouldn’t be allowed to break it.
I cut most of the text out of this post. Because of limits on nested quotes and maybe some coding mistakes, it was not at all clear who made which post, who was responding to what, and which posts were made when. monavis, I think your only new comment was “Maybe we both are,” but please let me know if I deleted something I shouldn’t have. Please don’t quote entire posts (especially very long posts with extensive use of nested quotes) and if you’re only responding to one statement. It’s confusing. Just quote the part you’re responding to. Ok?
Oh I was - but I can handle being wrong, as long as I don’t have to admit I was wrong. So, given a reputable cite of an objective fact, I assess how it affects my arguments and adjust accordingly. Ignorance fought and all that.
That could have been clearer, yes - lately in the thread you’ve mainly been focusing on arguing against the pro-choice theoretical world as opposed to putting forth your view of your ideal partially-anti-choice world.
So. What is your position if this world does not come to pass? You have at a prior point commented that we are only discussing abortion law, and that other laws should be presumed for the sake of argument to remain as they are now. The current law does not provide a (massive?) fund to pay for the extraction and care of unwanted fetuses.
So, succinctly: what should the abortion law be if the government keeps paying the same thing for extracted unwanted fetuses that they do now?
Depending on how you define “premature baby”, I’d say that there are at least two counterexamples to this claim. I’d say it’s demonstrably obvious that there are at least a few doctors who will perform a surgery that is guaranteed to kill a fetus even though there are alternative surgeries they could do that would extract it alive, with some chance of a (medically-)normal healthy life.
I’m not at all sure that’s how adoption does work, though. My knowledge here is very fuzzy, but I thought that not all states had child abandonment provisions, and that in the rest you retained responsibility, at the very least until some private citizen stepped up an completed the adoption procedure for it.
Also I’d ask what happens if the woman wants to abandon the child, but the man doesn’t. I know that the law doesn’t allow the man to cut ties with a child if the woman doesn’t; is the woman similarly restricted?
And, again, I might have the completely wrong idea about the current legal state of things on this issue. IANAAdoptionL and all that.
Basically this was a reiteration of my earlier questions: in the world where nobody’s paying for the prematurely extracted infants, what happens then. You answered “the governement foots the bill”; I now am asking “what if it doesn’t?”
The choice argument is still quite strong, though admittedly your rebuttal is stronger than it was before too. Before I was hearing “The woman has no choice but to sit through two months of absolutely confined bed rest until the birth can take place”; now I’m hearing “The woman will be forced to undergo this kind of surgery, even if she’d rather have that one.”
It’s a pretty obvious fact that people don’t have complete control over what surgeries are performed on them - they are limited by what the doctor is willing to perform. It would be very difficult to get a doctor to extract a perfectly healthy heart and replace it with an artificial heart, for example. However, until now we leave the determination of what operations are best to the professionals. Now you want to legislate that C-Sections are the only way left to go.
If I knew for a fact that at every point in the third trimester of the pregnancy a C-Section was always the safest and least arduous possible option for ending a pregnancy in all cases, then you could convince me that it should be the operation performed - presuming of course that the government is waiting in the wings with bags of money and a desire to take full parental responsibility (which it isn’t). I don’t feel that you’ve shown this though - even putting aside the payment/adoption thing.
So, to put it short and simple, there is still a full-pro-choice argument to be made that you might be requiring the woman to choose a more dangerous and unhealthy operation to do on her own body than she might otherwise prefer. It is her body, and so you don’t really have a right to ask her to imperil it even that much - even if a fetal life is at stake. We don’t even require people to give blood to save babies, so we shouldn’t require them to get C-Sections to achieve the same goal.
Nope - it’s simplicity is its strengh, and backed by all other relevent law. You have control over what is done to your body, period. You cannot be compelled to donate a kidney, bone marrow, or a single platelet to save anyone’s life; your body is yours to donate or not donate at your whim. It is the ultimate personal possession, for your own use only.
This is a very strong argument, which explicitly overrules your own. You want to force her to do certain things with her body to keep the fetus alive; the principle of one’s soverignty over their own body explicitly accounts for this situation. With a big resounding NO.
This is not to say that you mightn’t be able to convince me that there is insufficient potential harm in this case relative to the potential and that the right can be thus be abrogated, but you can’t really do that without first acnowledging the right is there. We have a right to free speech - but can’t yell fire in a crowded theater. But you certainly haven’t demonstrated that the harm is that low; the government doesn’t pay for premees, and as far as I know state-sanctioned complete child abandonment is not yet universally available. (Though, again, I could be mistaken.)
Except the cite you presented gave examples of pro-lifers interpreting natural deaths as murder. Are you quite confident that they will shut up once your imagined world comes to pass? It would be a touch rude to make 3rd trimester abortions criminal, C-Sections mandatory, and then leave an avenue for calling 20% of the C-Sections abortions.
I understand that YOU don’t think you have an ethical obligation but you DO have a legal obligation to care for your child. You can free yourself from that obligation (probably even before it is born) but you do have a duty of care towards your children that strangers do not have towards one another unless you relinquish your guardianship. You can give up your child (even before birth) but you can’t simply abandon it in a deserted parking lot. You can make what arguments you want about what the law should be for the fetus but the law is clear regarding the baby once it is born.
We must be talking apast each other because you seem to keep asking the same question abnd i keep providing the same answer.
In our hypothetical, we are ignoring the current state of the law regarding abortions to figure out what the law should be regarding abortions, we are not assuming away ALL laws. The duty of care of a parent towards their child is a law not an ethical obligation.
I would have thought that the cliff example is pretty self evident.
I thought I had explained it before but I will do so again.
A stranger can sit idly by and watch a child crawl off a cliff. He cannot shove the child off the cliff.
A parent CANNOT sit idly by and watch their child crawl off a cliff and they CERTAINLY can’t shove their child off a cliff.
I think it bears repeating, I am responding to YOUR statement “so we are back to letting the child starve agains huh?” (or something to that effect).
But here’s the thing dear, if the law changes to forbid abortion, as far as I’m concerned it SHOULD change to relieve me of any responsibility for a baby YOU wanted.
I think you might have misread my cites (I must be really bad at providing cites because people keep misreading them). I wasn’t excluding high risk c sections. My cite noted that it wasn’t fair to compare C section mortality rates to vaginal birth mortality rates because because of high risk C section.
“In 2000, the mortality rate for Caesareans in the United States were 20 per 1,000,000…However, it is misleading to directly compare the mortality rates of vaginal and caesarean deliveries. Women with severe medical conditions, or higher-risk pregnancies, often require a Caesarean section which can distort the mortality figures.”
For all abortions, the “risk of maternal death is between 0.2–1.2 per 100,000 procedures” or about 2-12 per million, that is compared to 20 per million for ceasarian.
BUT
“[late term] Abortion related mortality statistics show 16.7 deaths per 100,000 procedures” or about 167 per million. That is compared to mortality of 20 per million for ceasarian."
So as you can see, the UNIVERSE of Ceasarians cause about 20 deaths per million but it is not fair to compare it to the EVEN LOWER rate of death among vaginal births.
The UNIVERSE of abortions cause about 2-12 deaths per million (which is lower than the risk for Ceasarians) BUT the risk of death among third trimester abortions is about 167 per million.
Now it might not be fair to directly compare mortality rates between Ceasarians and third trimester abortions because the circumstances might be very different BUT it does rebutt the notion that “a caesarian poses far more risk to the mother than an abortion. You’re hardly granting someone rights over their own body if you require them to to put their body and life in greater jeopardy to do so.”
Then what was the point of the statement? Did you mean to say, “well C Sections are safer than abortions but they still carry some risks so we shouldn’t force a woman to choose a c section over an abortion”? Explain what you meant by: “I said “Birth always includes the risk of complications and health problems.” Those complications are not limited to death.” What else could you have meant.
I’m not saying she has to keep the baby. She can surrender it before it is even born.
I thought I was reading your posts reasonably but if that is not what you meant then please explain what you meant.
OK convince me that it is better to die than be born premature.
You know what, I’ve been trying to be polite (maybe not always sucessfully) in this argument despite a torrent of snide remarks that seem to assume that I want to chain women to the stove barefoot and pregnant. I stopped trying to be polite to folks Der Trihs (and to a lesser extent Diana G) but I expected a bit better from you. If you want me to start peppering my posts with snark and snide remarks I am perfectly happy and reasonably capable of doing so. I’ll keep it within the bounds of the GD rules but I am happy to elevate the temperature in this thread if you think that would be more interseting (I certainly would like to get a few things off my chest).
So YEAH I want a fucking cookie.
Despite all continuous attempts from your side to equate me to the “conception at birth pro-lifers” I have not been able to identify a more radical pro-choice position to demonize you with by association because you guys are about as radical as it gets short of shooting abortion protesters.
You guys are so fucking out there that if people really thought that your views on the woman’s right to choose had a chance of becoming federal law, we would get a constitutional amendment allowing states to ban abortions.
Have you not been paying any attention at all during this thread, or are you being deliberately obtuse?
I don’t think anything will ever convince you. Tell me what facts would make you change your position? I’ve told you SEVERAL facts, any one of which would cahgne my position and in each case someone on your side asserted that that was indeed the case (but refusing to provide any cites to support the assertion). So I find cites saying the exact opposite of assertions made by your side and ask you to rebutt those cites and all I get is the sound of crickets chirping.
So I ask you. What facts or set of facts would make you change your mind and say “Gee Damuri, You’re right, Third Trimester abortions are wrong and should be illegal except in special cases.” If there is no set of facts that can convince you that you are wrong AND you are unable to provide a reasonable rebuttal to my position then I don’t know how this debate continues.
The point of the statement was that you were saying a C section is safer than a late term abortion by comparing only the mortality statistics. I was pointing out that there are other potential complications, so this was not a complete view of the facts. And further, you’re posting in favor of forcing a woman to take the risks associated with C-sections or birth rather than allowing them to decide what risks are acceptable to her even though she will be the one who has to live with the consequences.
Already done. (See above.)
You can’t die unless you’re already alive, so the comparison is nonexistence vs. premature birth. And the difference is that if you don’t exist, you’re not suffering. If you’re born prematurely, you face a huge array of potential health problems:
Essentially you’re arguing that abortion after six months is wrong, but forcing women to have C-sections that result in children with severe disabilities is the compassionate thing to do. I think that’s a nonsense position.
That’s a strawman. No one here has advocated harming anyone, so no one here comes within light years of that argument. The discussion is about what people have the right to do, and that’s all. I wouldn’t use the phrasing or the arguments some other people here have used, but they’re closer to having the right idea than you are.
It wouldn’t. An amendment banning abortion is never going to happen. Even the Republicans don’t want it: the Democrats would be energized and the single-issue pro-lifers would stop voting. Both parties get some benefits from the current state of affairs.
I’ve paid attention. I think your reasoning is that fuzzy.
I’ve already been convinced on this subject, so it’s more accurate to say I will probably never be convinced your position is correct. This is not the first time I have discussed abortion, you know. I don’t think your position makes any sense, and I have told you why at length. I see no reason a woman should be forced to have a child regardless of how pregnant she is. I don’t think the state legitimately has that kind of power at all. You can’t tell me on the one hand that you’re supporting the fetus and simultaneously support a law that would turn some of those fetuses into children with severe lifelong disabilities. If abortion bothers you, why doesn’t that bother you? I don’t think these are reasonable positions. I think they’re derived primarily from emotion and from emotional reactions to the upsetting idea of dead children. I can understand that but it’s a bad basis for policy.
While we have assumed that the abortion laws did not exist so that we could craft them any way we want to, I would have thought that laws regarding the predictiable issues that arise from the new law woudl be part of the new law. However if the new law simply said, no abortion of healthy third trimester pregnancies without making any provisions for the resulting fetuses, then…
I would not support the new law unless it came together with the funding.
Yeah but I don’t think that any of them will beak the law on purpose to kill the fetuses.
There is a foster care system that you can put them into. You would no longer be the guardian and if you change your mind about the child I believe that you can reclaim your rights more easily from the foster care system.
Well, once the baby is out of the womb, why should there be any difference between the rights of the father versus the rights of the mother.
IANAAL either but it seems to me that if the couple isn’t married, the birth father can successfully petition the court for custody. If the couple is married and the husband wants the baby and the wife does not, that is not a marriage that si going to last very long.
Do the mortality statistics for third trimester abortions (compiled by some folks in Vermont) compared to the mortality statistics for C-sections make you thinki that perhaps C-sections are safer than third trimester abortions (I think I will have a hell of a time proving that “at every point in the third trimester of the pregnancy a C-Section was always the safest and least arduous possible option for ending a pregnancy in all cases” Its a REALLY high information threshhold to overcome.
Viewed purely from that perspective, I can see your point but does the distinction the law presents between a death you could have prevented but didn’t and a death that would not have occured if you didn’t cause it also play into the analysis?
Especially in the case where there is an option besides killing the baby (remember we agree on what the law should be in the first two trimesters so we are only talking about the third trimester).
I wasn’t ever implying that teh right doesn’t exist. I think that the right is not absolute and that at some point during gestation, the right of the fetus becomes important enough to restrict the woman’s choice.
Actually I am quite confident that they will NOT shut up. Nothing we do or say is going to get that crowd to shut up. IANA Obstetrician so I don’t know how easy it is to distinguish between an abortion and a natural death I suppose we can increase the standard of review or soemthing but I just don’t know enough to know if this sort of thing will have some sort of chilling effect so that doctors will refuse to perform early inducements any more than they refuse to perform third trimester abortions. If I was a doctor I would certainly be willing to perform a third trimester c section much sooner than I would be willing to perform a third trimester abortion of a healthy pregnancy. MUCH sooner, no matter what certainties or uncertainties existed. but that’s just me
Progress! I do not believe for even one nanosecond that in the real world (as opposed to hypotheical worlds) that the government is going to hitch “all expenses will be paid” to a “third trimester abortions are verboten” law.
Maybe if we get full-on universal health care the situation could come to pass from the back way, but I don’t think any such provisions would be attached to the law itself.
So. Making the assumption that there will be no additional funding, and that the only law being adjusted is the one setting the span of time in which abortions are allowed (ranging from “not at all” to “the whole time”), what would a law you could support say?
Weren’t you the one with the cite that claimed that those evil satanic abortion doctors were doing it as we speak? Forging records, lying to patients, all that?
Okay, I’ll accept that.
I agree - but here are the options:
The woman can dismiss her rights over the fetus you forced her to bear (as DianaG demands). If she can do this, then the man can dismiss his obligations as well - and child support will never be paid by any man again (with a handful of exceptions, but seriously). Is this where you want to go?
The woman can’t dismiss her rights over the fetus you forced her to bear, and DianaG is going to hunt you down and beat you to death with a bible.
Do either of these options seem desirable to you?
Well yeah. The bigger question is, does the unwilling woman (or unwilling man) have to pay child support?
The standard you have to meet depends on who you’re trying to convince of what. If you’re trying to convince me that it’s so safe that we shouldn’t allow the woman to even consider other options as to which surgeries she’ll have done to her own body, then yeah - you’d have to demonstrate that the other options are so obviously unsafe by comparison that all other options would be nearly sucidal - without considering the opinion of the fetus. That’s a hard bar to clear.
However there’s a lower bar - the doctors. If c-sections are so obviously the best option, why aren’t doctors insisting on doing them exclusively already? Doctors are moral-bound to do what’s best for their patient, within the limits of their patients’ desires. It seems to me that if we ensured that there were avenues for removing the responsibility of the resulting fetus from the mother (like having the government pay for it), you’d rapidly see the doctors all refusing to do anything else without you having to force them with laws. This is, of course, assuming that you are right about how awesomely safe c-sections are.
So yeah - who are you trying to convince? As long as you keep talking about putting it into law, I assume you’re trying to beat the woman’s inviolable right to control over her own body, which is indeed a high standard.
Nope, it actually doesn’t.
Still doesn’t.
The woman’s rights argument has the inherent power to bulldoze through everything, philosophically speaking; it asserts its own inviolable authority. You technically can’t beat it at a philosophical level; your best bet is to convince people that it’s a defense that doesn’t need to be used. That is, first get the systems and funding in place so that women can have the fetus extracted alive with no fuss, muss, or lasting cost or obligations - and then, if c-sections are as awesome as you say, they seem poised to replace late-term abortions with very little prodding at all. IMHO.
But the fetus doesn’t have rights. If it did, we’d know it - pregnant women wouldn’t be allowed to do anything that might recklessly imperil it from smoking to drinking to doing jumping jacks to possibly getting out of bed. Anything else would be reckless endangerment of the ‘child’, and prohibited out of hand.
So it’s clearly not the case that fetuses have rights that transcend the womens’ rights, not even the easily-dismissed rights like the right to drink booze. So clearly the woman’s much stronger right to decide what use her organs are put to is completely unchallenged.
Assuming, as usual, that there’s to be any sense or consistency to our laws at all.
And I have asked for cites regarding the relative magnitude of risks between C-sections and third trimester abortions. I think that is a reasonable request.
OK, so we are back to “a fetus isn’t even a person until they are born” I thought we had at least gotten as far as saying that they are people but that the mother cannot be forced to give it free room and board in her womb. It sounds like the debate didn’t really advance for you at all after about page 2 of this thread.
I thought I was drawing the line at about 26 weeks (or 6 months). The difference must be pretty huge because here is what the march of Dimes has to say about babies born before 28 weeks: “Unfortunately, about 25 percent of these very premature babies develop serious lasting disabilities, and up to half may have milder problems, such as learning and behavioral problems”
Between 28 and 31 weeks: Babies born at 28 to 31 weeks are at risk for the complications discussed above. When complications occur, however, they may not be as severe as in babies born earlier. Babies born with very low birthweight (less than 3 pounds, 4 ounces) remain at risk for serious disabilities.
Between 32 and 33 weeks:Babies born at this time are less likely than babies born earlier to develop serious disabilities caused by premature birth, though they remain at increased risk for learning and behavioral problems.
Between 34-36 weeks: These babies remain at higher risk than full-term babies for newborn health problems, including breathing and feeding problems, difficulties regulating body temperature, and jaundice (17). These problems are usually mild.
If these babies always resulted in severe disabilities, then you would have a point but even bfore the 28th week, only 25% develop severe disabilities. Not to play down how bad severe disabilities can be and not to minimize how even mild disabilities can affect your life but I think you are overstating your case.
Yeah, and I’ve never advocated “life begins at conception” either and yet people I have been compared to that crowd and that crowd is about as radical as it gets short of shooting doctors.
Single issue pro-life voters won’t stop voting until abortion is actually banned, not merely allowed to be abnned in 50 states. Plenty of states are going to protect first and second trimester abortions, that’s where the pro-lifers will spend their weekends being holier than thou.
How so? You don’t think I have presented any decent arguments for my position?
And I think that is a ridiculous position. At the extreme (and your position explicitly allows for this extreme), a woman on the delivery table cand decide that she doesn’t want to go throughy labor (or get a ceasarian) can demands an abortion and she should get one because the child is still inside of her and she doesn’t want the baby anymore. That is the limit of your position isn’t it? I understand that your rule is simple and easy to apply but it is horribly wrong. I have not engaged this deeply in an abortion debate before but I don’t know how you can ever convince me that that is OK unless the mother’s life is at risk.
Of course taht is a ridiculous extreme but that is how we test principles. when we see these extreme cases, we usually say “well, OK, there should be an exception in cases wheere the fetus is far along” But you seem to pretty unapologetically say that you would be ok with this.
That is because you don’t recognize the state’s intetrest in fetal life.
Of course it bothers me. I would much rather have the mother carry tot erm but I can’t force her to do that. I can force her to deliver early instead of having an abortion. I think there is more value in 1000 living children (with maybe 250 severely disabled and many other mildly disabled) than 1000 dead fetuses. IF the cost of those lives is forcing a woman to carry a baby to term, I can’t support that but if the cost is forcing them to have one type of low risk operation instead of higher risk operation then I am OK with that.
I think dead babies are pretty bad policy regardless of how emotional it is.
I think we would. I think we are at core a decent society.
Well if it didn’t then I live right here in DC so it wouldn’t be much trouble to show up at the march Der Trihs organizes.
We have already established (I think) that the only financial difference to the woman is the difference between the cost of an early terminducement or C section and the cost of a third trimester abortion. It looks to be about $10K+. I think insurance covers a lot of this and medicaid covers the rest and pretty soon Obamacare will cover what remains.
I have not really thought about how much of a financial burden I am willing to place on a woman in her third trimester in ADDITION to limiting her choice in order to preserve the life of the fetus. Part of me says that one time financial concerns pale in comparison to a human life, another part of me says that the financial burden on top of the truncation of the woman’s rights might tip the balance back the other way. I’m not really sure.
A man can only dismiss his obligations if the woman dismisses hers. So you’re right, that is NOt where I wanted to go.
:EEK!:
I bet that if Diana met me she would have no problem with me. I’m not some ogre that wants to subjugate women. She wouldn’t leave her husband for me but she probably wouldn’t beat me to death and she might not beat me at all for fear I may enjoy it.
I think the mother does not and the father must unless the mother does not.
I did some research on C-section when our doctor told us that was hwo we were going to have our kid and they seem pretty darn safe.
Are you saying that you don’t think there can be ANY incremental increase in risks between a live birth and an abortion before you can sign on? So if there is a lower risk of death but a higher risk of infection (which will debilitate for a few weeks you but not disable you) then you would say that teh woman should have the right to choose?
So the rights of the fetus never play into the analysis at all?
So you think that the fact that a woman can get fall down drunk every day of her pregnancy means that we do not place value on the fetuses rights to begin with… hmm. let me think about that.
My first reaction is that several states seem to think that a stranger killing a fetus is murder… hmm.
I wish someone else would come in here and do a little heavy lifting for my position.
The risks of premature birth get less severe as the birth gets less premature. No surprise there. There may also be some differences in disability definitions at work.
You did just play it down, actually. The statistics are a bit different at 26 weeks but I don’t think a one out of four chance of severe disability is something to be ignored.
Not by me.
Correct. This shows why your earlier proposal about banning elective third trimester abortions was pointless.
I think the reasoning underlying the position you are taking is inherently fuzzy and irrational. Your willingness to subject children to permanent disabilities out of compassion makes it that much more evidence.
No, that’s reductio ad absurdum. I told you probably ten pages ago that I wasn’t going to get into that. If you have to take my position to the most ridiculous extremes or past them to argue against it, you don’t have an argument.
A test of a scenario that would never actually happen is a waste of time.
Correct.
Just not enough to do anything about it.
Why not? If you think it’s sensible and appropriate to force her to have invasive surgery, why can’t you force her to wait it out and have the child?
Thus causing harm to two people at a time instead of one.
About 20 percent of them are going to die, so you don’t have 1,000 living children. You have 200 dead children, and depending on how it’s calculated, 200 or 250 with severe disabilities and 200 or 250 with milder disabilities. Is this really preferable to letting a woman have a healthy child later when she chooses?
They’re not dead babies. They’re fetuses that don’t get to grow up and be people. Did you ever get around to explaining why it’s a problem that a potential life doesn’t become a life?
I for one think we’re somewhat semi-decent on every third tuesday, but I don’t think that extends to putting anything on this bill that will make it less passable. After all your bill without the rider is basically current law in a lot of places, is it not?
Are you marching?
I’ll just second that I hope Obamacare is as expansive as you say and leave the rest here to simmer.
Rearranging slightly:
Okay, but does this mean you see no issues with removing the woman’s right to divest herself of the cost and responsibility of the premee if the man refuses to give up custody?
Okay, yeah, this seems just a hair contradictory with “Well, once the baby is out of the womb, why should there be any difference between the rights of the father versus the rights of the mother.” Unless you’re saying that the man should be able to denounce his rights before the birth and thereby avoid child support, which I’d be okay with if we could account for issues of imbalanced information.
But I don’t think that’s what you’re saying. I think you’re saying that you support an unjust and sexually discriminatory difference in the eyes of the law. Which I think may be unconstitutional to put into writing. Is my interpretation of your position correct here? Because if so, I’m afraid I can’t agree to it - it is too defamatory to women, to assume that their income is less important than the man’s in raising the child.
I’m saying that in my opinion there is no possible justification for writing it into the law. If you are actually correct about the awesomeness of C-section, sell it to the doctors, and you will get your end results without having to meet the strict requirements I require to convince me that the rights of the women need to be abrogated in law.
(Though the fact that these early c-sections are apparently bad for the resulting infant might lead the doctors to rejoct your proposals too.
The fetus, as noted, doesn’t have rights. But even if it did, they still wouldn’t matter, the same way they don’t play in when you refuse to donate blood to save an infant’s life.
We grant personhood rights, like citizenship, at birth. Note that having your (unborn) anchor baby inside state lines when you cross into the third trimester doesn’t count - its personhood, and citizenship, only kick in when it sees air. That’s just the way it is - consistent across law, with only the one seeming exception that you note.
The laws for murder in the case of punching the pregnant women don’t have much argumentive foundation, as I understand it. They’re purely an emotional thing. And in my opinion they’re not worth striking down because when you punch that woman you are (in all likelihood) damaging her property (to put it in the most distant terms) in s way that deprives her of incalculable value. Severe punishment is certainly merited…even if ‘murder’ is a misnomer for the specific act in question.
So, given a reputable cite of an objective fact, I assess how it affects my arguments and adjust accordingly. Ignorance fought and all that.