Thanks for putting the final nail in DtC coffin, the issue is not choice but the gov’t acceptance of the proedure, the choice is still there.
They would prefer the term anti killing their own offspring for evey mom, but whatever floats your boat.
Again confirmation that the issue of ‘choice’ is really a non-issue, abortions will happen the choice is there. The only issus on the table isif the gov’t will allow it or not.
While to some extent every child is wanted (thank religon for this), you are wishing for a paradox, either it is safe and legal or rare, almost like the NASA moto of cheaper, faster, better, choose 2.
The issue is whether women should be able to legally CHOOSE to terminate pregnancies. Soame people want to deprive women of that choice, therefore they are anti-choice. The argument that they would still be able to choose illegal abortions is disingenuous at best.
Yes, they would prefer that all people bought into their own religious belief that an embryo is exactly the same as a real live baby but its better if our terminology is rooted in some kind of objective reality. There are animal rights activists who would like other people to join them in imagining that killing a chicken is the same as killing a person. The contention that terminating a pregnancy is “killing one’s offspring” is grounded in no more objective reality than that. Pointing out that they want to remove the right of women to make reproductive choices, however, IS an objective statement about reality.
Again, this is a distinction without a difference. If you want the government to punish people for making a particular choice, then you are “anti” that choice. Why can’t you just admit that?
Cite?
What is this supposed to mean? What does religion have to do with whether people want their children? I would guess that if anything, religion helps to drive abortion rates up since religion is responsible for the social stigmas faced by unwed mothers.
I’ll just settle for safe and legal. I don’t care how frequent it is. 100 safe, legal abortions are preferrable to a single unsafe, illegal one.
The government doesn’t actually have the power to disallow it. All it can do is punish people for doing it. In other words, the issue is whether the government should punish women for making a particular reproductive choice.
I doubt very much that your agenda (and your question) has been proven to drive this house’s property values down. I think your question was meant to be very provocative and not very honest. You sound as if you’re pro-life??? i.e. opposed to abortion under any circumstance???
OK Lets put this to the test, lats say you (DtC) have to decide if a fetus or a spotted owl have to be saved so the other may live, given no other information, which one would you chose?
Bold mine, and if it isn’t killing ones’ offspring you don’t live on the same planet as I do (which I suspected for some time).
Again a difference without a distinction - your talking points don’t earn you any.
note composit Kanicbird and DtC posts
you have to be kidding me.
Where did I EVER address if a mom wants her offspring, in my 7000+ posts on this board??? again you are on your own planet with no connection to real life.
I can accept it from a pro abort POV - from a anti-abort POV I can’t see a safe abortion except if it failed and we have a health child.
But I must say I was content to call the sides pro life/ anti abortion and Pro life till this thread, now I am pretty firm that the options are pro/anti abortion.*
Note some time ago I did use the term anti abortion for pro choice, but I changed it to pro choice due to my own POV change.
** Further note due to this thread I now revert to pro/anti abortion as the preferd terms.
If it’s not my fetus, it’s not my choice. Personally, I would have no preference. I wouldn’t give a crap about either one (if we’re talking about a single fetus vs. a single owl).
I just don’t share your religious opinion that a blastocyst is exactly the same as a full grown adult. There’s absolutely no objective reason I should believe that.
I’m confused. You just said that “every child is wanted,” did you not? is that not a comment on whether women want their offspring? If notm then what are you saying. What do you mean when you say “every child is wanted?” There are lots and lots of unwanted children in the world, I assure you.
There is no “child” involved with an abortion unless you’re talking about a pregnant minor.
My wife thinks abortion is wrong but also thinks it should be legal. What side is she on?
I think you are the one who is reaching here. Yes the choice exists…you can either have an illegal, unsafe abortion, very possibly resulting in death for the person seeking the abortion because of an untrained professional, or you could have a, legal, sanitary, safe abortion performed. If you make it illegal to go to a doctor to have your appendix removed, sure you can still have your appendix removed, you just might die as a result…some choice.
First Cite to the statement you made and second you can’t deny that the number of fatalities resulting from abortions would go up if it was made illegal because of women trying to do it themselves and those seeking help of people without the proper medical training.
Mary Steichen Calderone, M.D., M.S.P.H., F.A.P.H.A., “Illegal Abortion as a Public Health Problem,” American Journal of Public Health 50:948-954 (July 1960).
*Dr. Calderone is medical director, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Inc., New York, N. Y.
This paper was presented before the Maternal and Child Health Section of the American Public Health Association at the Eighty-Seventh Annual Meeting in Atlantic City, N. J., October 19, 1959.*
Ok so I’ll grant you your point on this though if only 10% of abortions are not done by a physician thats still above 100,000 people at today’s rates if abortion were made illegal. or what about victims of rape or incest?
What is the point of making it illegal for these groups to seek abortions?
As the law stands the government neither endorses or opposes abortion because noone is forced into getting one, but no one is kept from getting one either. Isn’t that good enough?
I personally would view that kind of abortion as “taking sugar on its porridge” and much more like the ERPC (Evacuation of Remaining Products of Conception) that Mrs M had when our first-conceived died intrauterine at six weeks.
Broadly agreed, but we are getting into the realms of arguing that some elephants may have had a leg amputated and/or their tusks removed, and so we should abandon the definition “large tusked quadrupedal pachyderm”.
I personally wouldn’t, although I know there is disagreement on this. Something still has to happen to a sperm or an ovum before it will develop into a human being. A foetus need only be left where it is.
I believe that’s two mighty fine pieces of rhetoric, but we can surely put some meat on the bones:
a) Cite for countries where abortions became rare when they became safe and legal. AFAIK making abortions safe and legal in the UK and USA alike has served to make them - or at any rate, been correlated with their becoming - a sight more common.
b) Cite for countries where children have become more cherished and better treated as a resulting of abortion ensuring that “every child is a wanted child”. Presumably there are stats showing that in the states where abortion is most widely available, child cruelty and neglect is at its lowest. :dubious:
Har-de-har. Since my question was not of the have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife type, it probably deserved to be answered, not mocked.
Not necessarily, as I explained above. Sometimes abortions are more rare in places where there are fewer legal restrictions on them. Abortions are legally easier to get in the Netherlands than in the USA, but they are less common in the Netherlands. Abortions are legally easier to get in the USA than in most of Latin America, but they are less common in the USA. You cannot assume that making abortions illegal will necessarily reduce their frequency.
Abortion rates appear to depend much more on other factors, such as the availability of effective birth control and the numbers of unwanted pregnancies, than on the legality of abortion procedures.
Well, you can avoid that kind of argument by making factually defensible statements about “many abortions” or “most abortions”, instead of excessively sweeping ones about “100% of abortions”.
And I’m not sure it’s such a trivial nitpick as you suggest, either. AFAICT, between 10 and 100 out of every 10,000 abortions (based on these numbers) are performed due to “fetal anomalies incompatible with life”: in other words, they aren’t killing a fetus that would eventually become a living human being. That’s somewhere between 0.01% and 0.1% of all abortions, which is a small percentage but non-negligible in terms of absolute numbers.
This sounds pretty arbitrary to me, though. Plenty of stuff “still has to happen” to an embryo or fetus before it will develop into a human being. (And very often, something crucial doesn’t happen and the fetus never does develop.) And a fertile ovum in a fallopian tube with sperm swimming through the cervix “need only be left where they are” for fertilization to occur.
a) Kimstu already gave you a cite for that. Scroll back up, and you’ll find that the highest rates of abortion are in the places where it is completely forbidden. Here in the US, where state laws of restrictions and harrassment of clinics and doctors make abortion expensive, time-consuming, and (for clinic workers) dangerous, the rate of abortion is a bit more than half of that in countries where it is prohibited. In the more enlightened countries, where a woman is truly free to make her own reproductive decisions, abortion is rarer still.
b) My statement was, “I believe that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. Every child a wanted child.” I made no claims that you are demanding I provide cites for. My goal of “Every child a wanted child” goes farther than just abortion rights. The goal is not just reproductive freedom, but sexual responsibility and full availability of birth control options (so that few abortions will be needed) and realistic sex education programs that include full information about contraception instead of “abstinence only” programs. Even the adoption of children given up by the birth parents is restricted by irrational laws.
Now, about the wife-beating joke. Malacandra, you dragged wife beating into a discussion that had nothing to do with domestic violence. That was absurd, and it genuinely deserved to be mocked. It had already been answered by another poster.
and much more like the ERPC (Evacuation of Remaining Products of Conception) that Mrs M had when our first-conceived died intrauterine at six weeks.