There’s very little that I’d consider absolute, in the sense that no conceivable evidence or situation would cause me to reconsider them. There’s nothing specific to women’s rights that gets immunity from this.
Heck, under a Children of Men scenario, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if any and all the atrocities proposed in this thread came to pass. They’re all already happening in various corners of the world to various degrees, anyway.
What a strange thread.
First of all, the notion that outlawing abortion leads inevitably to rape, shackles, and lobotomies is kind of…hysterical. There are places in the world today where abortion is outlawed, correct? And yet in none of those places are women routinely shackled and raped and drugged and lobotomized and turned into sub-human baby factories.
Sure, there is a certain correlation between access to abortion and rights for women, and if you were about to be dropped into a country or culture at random, and all you knew about it was whether it outlawed abortion or allowed abortion, in the majority of cases you’d be better off if you chose the place that allowed abortion. Not that the correlation is perfect, there are totalitarian societies that allow (or require!) abortion, and fairly liberal ones (say, Ireland prior to the 1990s) that prohibit it. But the correlation is there.
And there are countries today were women are literally second class citizens, and are bought and sold by men, and the owner of that woman (usually called her “husband”) has the right to rape that woman. And yet even in these countries women do not commit mass suicide, or strangle their baby girls.
Heck, we just had a story in the news about an 11 year old girl who was literally kidnapped and locked in a prison cell and raped as a sex slave for years, and who bore two children to her rapist. Yet she didn’t kill herself or her children. Did she make the wrong choice? And there has been slavery for millennia, and while some people preferred death to slavery, a lot of others preferred to live, even if they were going into sexual slavery.
And it’s odd to see people say that outlawing abortion is worse than murder. That they’d give up their pacifism and kill to keep abortion legal. Weird. Is it a worse violation of bodily autonomy to kill someone, or to not allow them to abort a fetus? It seems there’s a spectrum here, where murder is the top. And perhaps outlawing abortion is pretty high, and we could argue about how high it is, but worse than murder?
Plenty of people lived as slaves without killing themselves, but I’m sure there are people who would give up their pacifism to fight slavery or who would say they’d die rather than be enslaved.
It’s possible to get used to some horrible things, but I think it’s hard to go back once a source of oppression is lessened or eliminated.
This thread is basically asking pro-choice people what it would take to make them anti-choice. That is, would this scenario be awful enough to drive you to abandon your morals?
The reaction you are seeing is basically “if it’s bad enough to make us do that, then all hell will break loose.” It’s very long leap from pro-choice to anti-choice, and (from way back here) a relatively short step from anti-choice to forced insemnation. Particularly since without forced insemnation, anti-choice wouldn’t work. If your goal is not to save concieved babies, but to actually make babies, it’s not enough to force the latter half of the process. You need to stop those reluctant women from circumventing your ‘fix’ to the population problem by shunning sex.
Personally I don’t ‘get’ the “the anti-choice would happen because they hate women, ergo, beatings!” angle that Der Trihs is putting forth, but then, I’m don’t think that the woman’s right to her body is the only factor under discussion. Logically of course the circumstances aren’t that women have become less important, it’s that babies and potential babies have become drastically more important. So, general abuse doesn’t follow. Limiting the women’s rights and freedoms regarding things like smoking and drinking and not having sex does, though.
If you have trouble following this logic, it’s probably because you’re anti-choice. To an anti-choice person, the OP is a no-brainer, and there is no shift in morals required to drive them to reach this conclusion. So, they don’t think about it long enough to realize that to get the job done, anti-choice alone isn’t enough.
One can be pro-life and understand your post fine. It’s a big leap from protecting an unborn human from destruction for convenience to forcing pregnancy on people. A person could have no preference if people get pregnant or not, but once there’s another human life there, think it should be protected from harm in all but the most dire of circumstances. Thus it’s fine to want to protect the unborn but to still think forcing pregnancy on the unwilling is abhorrent.
Enjoy,
Steven
Sure it’s possible. I was responding to somebody who didn’t.
And this has nothing whatsoever to do with anything. The thread isn’t about the sanctity of the “baby” - quite the opposite. It’s asking people who have the stated position of NOT caring about the sanctity of the baby if they would become anti-choice for the sake of the sanctity of the species. And it’s a very, very tiny step from there to forced insemnation. Nearly nonexistent, really.
If you think that this is about protecting an unborn human from destruction for convenience, then you don’t understand my post - or this thread.
It doesn’t make it wrong, either. Expecting anti-woman bigots to act like anti-woman bigots is not unreasonable.
It would be an act of mercy.
Women and children do tend to be routinely raped and abused and oppressed in those countries. The anti abortion movement is about the hatred of women.
And this thread is about forced breeding, not simply outlawing abortion.
It’s right up there with slavery; it IS a form of slavery even if the word isn’t used. I would consider it justifiable to kill to obtain an abortion if there was no other way, just as I feel it would be justifiable to kill to escape slavery or fight off a rapist.
Murder is NOT at the top of the evils people can commit.
And I think you tripped over yourself in that last sentence, and put roughly one more negative in than you liked. I really think there is a difference between “turning women into brood mares because you like it” and “turning women into brood mares because you have to”, and if you don’t think the disappearance of the entire human race qualifies as “have to”, I really have to ask what you think would.
In any case, there was certainly no suggestion on my part that women would spend all their lives doing nothing but bearing child after child - nor that I thought any of this was in any way a good thing, or anything but a desperate expedient, for all that certain citizens hereabouts are advancing slippery-slope fallacies for all they’re worth and saying “Well, if you’d refuse abortions to women as an alternative to letting humanity die out, clearly you’re cool with raping fifteen-year-olds and holding competitions between men to see who gets first crack at the prettiest”.
But I shook my head in wonderment as I took the dog for his evening walk. You see, my worldview would allow me to say “Well, so this is the way God chooses to end the world. It’s not what I expected, but so be it, and beyond is more than memory”, and decide that, after all, women should not be forced to bear children, even if it means it’s the end of everything; but most of those who are arguing against taking extreme measures to allow humanity to survive are doing so, as far as I can tell, merely for the warm fuzzies it gives them to consent to their own castration and the satisfaction of murmuring with their latest breath “At least I never denied a woman an abortion”.
I’d value your input to my related thread. 
So when you said
You really meant “It’s very long leap from pro-choice to [anti-choice due to the circumstances which caused our impending extinction], and (from way back here) a relatively short step from [reluctantly anti-choice due to impending extinction] to forced insemnation.”? Because this thread has gone back and forth between the hypothetical and the real-world pretty frequently and it’s hard to tell when someone uses common terms like “anti-choice” which world we’re talking about. It may well be the case that I don’t understand this thread at all if using the common term “anti-choice” should have been clear shorthand for a hypothetical group as opposed to a real world group which is labeled such when both have been used in the thread.
Enjoy,
Steven
Why not? You are already asserting that you, not they own their bodies.
There is no slippery slope; if you are forcibly impregnating women you are already at the bottom.
So; an implication that atheists can’t possibly have some sort of moral objections to rape; and outright equating the refusal to rape with castration. And I’m supposed to believe that you would treat women well in this sort of hypothetical, especially given the latter?
“Anti-choice” is a policy position, like “pro-choice”. Motivation has little to do with it; if you oppose allowing women to choose to have an abortion, for whatever reason, you are anti-choice. (It may surprise you that there are at least two distinct motivations to be “pro-choice”; you can see us duking it out towards the end of this thread).
So, when I said, “anti-choice”, I meant “anti-choice” - the so-called pro-life position, the banning of abortions. And I was indeed speaking from within the context of the thread, which is not stated from a position where things are anti-choice without impending extinction. (Though it should be noted that rather than reluctant anti-choice, it could easily be “what the hell, morality is broken, now everything goes” anti-choice instead.)
It might be worth noting, though, that a lot of people on both sides have a hard time internalizing that other people have different worldviews and belief systems from them. So, to a lot of anti-choice people, pro-choicers are seen as amoral and murderous as they’d have to be to be pro-choice with the anti-choicer’s beliefs. And many pro-choicers see anti-choicers as being similarly far gone in morality to be able to act they way they do - leading to Der Trihs ranting wildly about pro-choice people in a way they don’t feel describes them at all.
Ranting about anti-choicers. And I regard most of them as liars who have a pretty good idea of just how nasty they are.
Look; I regard the anti-abortion movement as something on the same moral level as the KKK. I don’t believe the anti-abortioners who claim to be well meaning any more than I believe a KKK member who claims to be well meaning.
:smack::smack::smack::smack::smack:
You know, sometimes I think I’m pretty clever, and then I do something like that. :smack:
Heh; I once had to go through a whole post changing polarity like that. “Anti . . pro; anti . . . pro; pro . . . anti”.
Nonsense. Once again, there’s a huge chasm between doing something for shits and giggles and doing it because the alternative is extinction. It’s like the difference between eating your dead fellow-passengers after your plane has crashed in the Andes and you’re faced with inescapable starvation otherwise, and going out and bashing the nearest stranger over the head in order to barbecue him just because you feel like it.
And once again you display a Rorschach-like grasp of nuance. I did not say that atheists can’t have moral objections to rape - I believe, on the whole, that most of them do - and I did not equate a refusal to rape with castration. That was a reference to this slavish adherence to the apparent principle that men are such unworthy creatures that it is better that humanity should die out than that women should be denied the right to condemn the race to extinction on a whim.
I have to doubt that you believe I would treat women well in any circumstances anyway. I have advanced anti-abortion arguments before now, and on your own say-so, you have concluded that I’m morally indistinguishable from a rapist. You appear not to give me much reason for seeking to earn your approval. :dubious:
I agree. Social mores and ideas of right and wrong seem to me predicated on the conditions they exist in.
It’s nice to believe that things would carry on as normal, should the rug get pulled out from under us all, but in reality it’ll be pretty horrific. And I can’t imagine not reevaluating all my ideas of right and wrong in such a scenario.
No, this is more like the men in the airplane deciding to eat the women alive.
Mass rape and forced impregnation isn’t “nuanced”. It’s the sort of thing war criminals do.
Yes, you did.
If half the population are rapists and the other half their victims that makes it quite desirable for the human race to go extinct. And a woman’s ownership of her own body is more than a “whim”. And if the men in question are all rapists, yes they are “unworthy creatures”.
“Self-hating” is a ridiculous term, one that shows serious contempt for a person’s autonomy, especially when it’s applied as a blanket term to an entire class of people with whom you disagree. It betrays exactly the sort of arrogance that pisses off so much of the rest of the world when confronted with European and American middle-class and upper-class ideologues.
No, most slaves in the antebellum South weren’t fine with their lives. So what? That’s totally irrelevant to this thread. Just as irrelevant as pointing out the plenty of slaves who, when freed, became slaveowners themselves would be.
I do, however, think that plenty of men in our current society who are forced to register for the draft are fine with their lives. I, for one, am–even though I’ve been robbed of the autonomy of my body in this crucial respect. Do you think I’m self-hating because I’d not prefer to see the destruction of the species than register for the draft? Shit, I registered for the draft on the off-chance I could get student aid.
Let’s take this ridiculous hypothetical further. We could take it down the “I’d melt Hitler’s kneecap down into glue and glue babies on the prolifers” route pretty easily. But let’s try not to laugh it off for a bit, and let’s imagine the worst-case scenario exists.
The president has noticed the drastic decrease in births, and mandated a program by which all able-bodied Americans must get pregnant. Currently the program is headed up by Mike Tyson and Phyllis Schafly, and it consists of herding all women who menstruate into massive harems that are visited by Tyson and his cronies at their pleasure. When the Tyson entourage isn’t raping the women therein, Schlafly is overseeing the harems, guaranteeing that the Bible is the only reading material, whipping any woman who protests her condition, and kicking puppies thrice daily.
Your sister’s been in one of the camps for a couple of weeks.
The president is catching some flak for the conditions at the camps. She calls you into her office. “Look,” she says. “I’m busy. I don’t especially like what’s happening–but the survival of our species is my main concern. If you can submit a program to me, an alternative to the Tyson-Schlafly Plan, I’ll put you in charge of the program. The one non-negotiable is that your proposal must require all able-bodied Americans to get pregnant and to do what they can to complete the pregnancy with live birth.”
Given the situation, what do you do? Do you make a proposal? If so, what’s your proposal?
In case it’s not obvious, the point of continuing the absurd hypothetical thus is to get some people to think about the least horrific conditions under which such a program might exist, instead of the most horrific.
Only the worst of people would go along with the plan, so the “most horrific” is what you would get.
So Der Trihs would let his sister languish in Mike Tyson’s rape pit, rather than come up with an alternative. Got it.
Anyone else?