Aboration ban

@livinglava,

You are making two different arguments. When you say you consider abortion a form of killing and should therefore be restricted, you are staying a logically reasonable opinion. There is a spectrum of opinions about abortion. Polls say most Americans support some level of restrictions on abortion.

Your argument that the government should promote abstinence is ridiculous.

There are very effectice, reversible forms of birth control. I like sex. I don't want more children, I has a simple outpatient surgery that solved the problem. IUDs are also quite effective and are usable by people who might want to have children in the future.

If you want to reduce abortions, you should be advocating for government policy that works; comprehensive sex education that teaches about birth control... And policies that make birth control accesible and affordable to everyone.

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@livinglava,

Bravo

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@maxdancona,

Quote:

It is funny how similar Neptuneblue and Livinglava are.

You make a few excellent points and then you have to go and post some smug **** like this. Too bad.

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@Finn dAbuzz,

Sorry about that. It is not my intent to make intelligent points. I will try not to do it again.

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@Daveconfused,

Daveconfused wrote:

If there about 1,000,000 abortions/year for all reasons and about 75,000 adoptions/year. Where do we care for, shelter and pay for the 925,000 babies/year who are not adopted? Do we require families to adopt babies, have the mother care for a child she can't afford or set up large orphanage facilities around the country to house a large number of orphans?

Do States or the Federal government step in to pay?

What happens year after year?

Help me understand the solution.

Your question is specious.

There are countries where, for whatever reason, the resources are insufficient to prevent famine.

An earnest sounding political leader promotes the idea of culling the population so that the resources are enough.

Outrage follows, and you ask "Well what are we going to do about all those starving people?" As if culling them is actually a reasonable proposal.

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@maxdancona,

maxdancona wrote:

You are making two different arguments. When you say you consider abortion a form of killing and should therefore be restricted, you are staying a logically reasonable opinion. There is a spectrum of opinions about abortion. Polls say most Americans support some level of restrictions on abortion.

Your argument that the government should promote abstinence is ridiculous.

I don't know who should promote it, but somewhere in the media/culture, the idea has been propagated that sex is normal, and even an entitlement; and that cultural idea can only work with abortion as a backup plan. Otherwise, pregnancy is too big a deal to risk it.

Think of the old fashioned culture where it was simply improper to pursue sex in any way before marriage. Do you think that culture was present in ancient societies where infanticide on poor children because surgical abortion didn't exist? No, it evolved with Judeo-Christian morality not to kill.

Quote:

There are very effectice, reversible forms of birth control. I like sex. I don't want more children, I has a simple outpatient surgery that solved the problem. IUDs are also quite effective and are usable by people who might want to have children in the future.

Idk how effective IUDs are. Vasectomies and fallopian tube-'tying' as it's sometimes called might be reversible, but I don't know why anyone would want to have surgery to avoid abstinence unless they were addicted to sex.

Quote:

If you want to reduce abortions, you should be advocating for government policy that works; comprehensive sex education that teaches about birth control... And policies that make birth control accesible and affordable to everyone.

I think many people want to end abortion, not reduce it. The question is what it would take to end it. You are going to have some people who insist on defying the law and then the question is how to treat that. Are they going to throw the book at people, declare them temporarily insane, or what?

I wonder if it might ultimately happen that fake abortionists will pose to entrap desperate women, who will then be forced to carry their pregnancy to term in some kind of jail. That would be strange, but maybe not as disturbing as it sounds. I found it interesting what the one rapper said about the Alabama law, that forcing rape victims to carry their rapist's baby to term is slavery. It's a valid point, but then the question becomes whether to allow the abortion or just tack 'slavery' onto the list of crimes the rapist would be tried and punished for.

Abortion, once you accept it, is a very convenient fix that avoids a pandora's box of potential situations and issues. It's really too bad the culture of sexual liberation has flourished so much since Roe v. Wade, because that makes it that much harder to come to terms with actually having to deal with these issues if Roe gets overturned or modified to allow more regulation of abortion.

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@livinglava,

Quote:

the idea has been propagated that sex is normal, and even an entitlement

You are being ridiculous. Sex is normal. Sex has been normal since before our primate ancestors climbed down from trees. Abstinence is not normal, which is why most people need the fear of some angry deity in order to stop them.

Something tells me your mom didn't tell you about the birds and the bees.

(Go ahead Finn... tell me that LivingLava isn't being silly).

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I didn't write this, but find it compelling:

‘Reasonable people can disagree about when a zygote becomes a "human life" - that's a philosophical question. However, regardless of whether or not one believes a fetus is ethically equivalent to an adult, it doesn't obligate a mother to sacrifice her body autonomy for another, innocent or not.

Body autonomy is a critical component of the right to privacy protected by the Constitution, as decided in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), McFall v. Shimp (1978), and of course Roe v. Wade (1973). Consider a scenario where you are a perfect bone marrow match for a child with severe aplastic anemia; no other person on earth is a close enough match to save the child's life, and the child will certainly die without a bone marrow transplant from you. If you decided that you did not want to donate your marrow to save the child, for whatever reason, the state cannot demand the use of any part of your body for something to which you do not consent. It doesn't matter if the procedure required to complete the donation is trivial, or if the rationale for refusing is flimsy and arbitrary, or if the procedure is the only hope the child has to survive, or if the child is a genius or a saint or anything else - the decision to donate must be voluntary to be constitutional. This right is even extended to a person's body after they die; if they did not voluntarily commit to donate their organs while alive, their organs cannot be harvested after death, regardless of how useless those organs are to the deceased or many lives they would save. That's the law.

Use of a woman's uterus to save a life is no different from use of her bone marrow to save a life - it must be offered voluntarily. By all means, profess your belief that providing one's uterus to save the child is morally just, and refusing is morally wrong. That is a defensible philosophical position, regardless of who agrees and who disagrees. But legally, it must be the woman's choice to carry out the pregnancy. She may choose to carry the baby to term. She may choose not to. Either decision could be made for all the right reasons, all the wrong reasons, or anything in between. But it must be her choice, and protecting the right of body autonomy means the law is on her side. Supporting that precedent is what being pro-choice means.’”

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@neptuneblue,

Neptune,

Up to what point do you think a woman has a right to end a pregnancy? Are you arguing that the day before the due date, a woman has the legal and moral right to terminate a healthy pregnancy.

This is an important question.

If the answer is "yes", it run afoul of Roe V. Wade and of public opinion.

If the answer is "no" then your philosophical argument fails.

Most American women and men believe their should be some legal restrictions on abortion including preventing women from terminating a healthy pregnancy after some point of development (i.e. the third trimester).

The argument that a woman has an absolute right to terminate a fully developed healthy fetus is an extreme position.

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@Finn dAbuzz,

Finn dAbuzz wrote:

You make a few excellent points and then you have to go and post some smug **** like this. Too bad.

You really shouldn't be surprised when he does this. He's smug all the time because he believes he's superior to everyone else. He's also one of the most hypocritical members of A2K, and that's saying a lot!

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@maxdancona,

maxdancona wrote:

Quote:
the idea has been propagated that sex is normal, and even an entitlement

You are being ridiculous. Sex is normal. Sex has been normal since before our primate ancestors climbed down from trees. Abstinence is not normal, which is why most people need the fear of some angry deity in order to stop them.

Sex was always normal among people who were expected to be having babies. It was not normal to do it before marriage or outside of marriage, so the people who broke the rules and did so anyway, were extremely discreet about it, and if they got caught, they got punished and/or humiliated. Didn't you read the Scarlett Letter?

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@neptuneblue,

neptuneblue wrote:

I didn't write this, but find it compelling:

‘Reasonable people can disagree about when a zygote becomes a "human life" - that's a philosophical question. However, regardless of whether or not one believes a fetus is ethically equivalent to an adult, it doesn't obligate a mother to sacrifice her body autonomy for another, innocent or not.

Infanticide is not absent through human history, but who condones it ethically? It is just something that happens sometimes when a mother doesn't want the baby to starve or otherwise suffer and die another way. I would be surprised if it ever occurs because the mother doesn't find it convenient to keep the baby, i.e. even though there is adequate nutrition to feed herself and thus nurse it. Maybe it happens sometimes because the father is married to some other woman, who would be humiliated if it became public knowledge that her husband had fathered a child with another woman.

Quote:

Body autonomy is a critical component of the right to privacy protected by the Constitution, as decided in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), McFall v. Shimp (1978), and of course Roe v. Wade (1973). Consider a scenario where you are a perfect bone marrow match for a child with severe aplastic anemia; no other person on earth is a close enough match to save the child's life, and the child will certainly die without a bone marrow transplant from you. If you decided that you did not want to donate your marrow to save the child, for whatever reason, the state cannot demand the use of any part of your body for something to which you do not consent. It doesn't matter if the procedure required to complete the donation is trivial, or if the rationale for refusing is flimsy and arbitrary, or if the procedure is the only hope the child has to survive, or if the child is a genius or a saint or anything else - the decision to donate must be voluntary to be constitutional. This right is even extended to a person's body after they die; if they did not voluntarily commit to donate their organs while alive, their organs cannot be harvested after death, regardless of how useless those organs are to the deceased or many lives they would save. That's the law.

I think even the new Alabama law, which has people up in arms, doesn't punish the mother for the abortion; only the doctor.

Prior to Roe v. Wade, abortion was legal in Texas, but 'Jane Roe' had to report the rape to the police in order to get the abortion. Modern DNA analysis makes it easy to know exactly who the father is by analyzing the aborted fetal tissue, so it takes the pressure off women to lie about who the father is to get access to abortion.

Quote:

Use of a woman's uterus to save a life is no different from use of her bone marrow to save a life - it must be offered voluntarily. By all means, profess your belief that providing one's uterus to save the child is morally just, and refusing is morally wrong. That is a defensible philosophical position, regardless of who agrees and who disagrees. But legally, it must be the woman's choice to carry out the pregnancy. She may choose to carry the baby to term. She may choose not to. Either decision could be made for all the right reasons, all the wrong reasons, or anything in between. But it must be her choice, and protecting the right of body autonomy means the law is on her side. Supporting that precedent is what being pro-choice means.’”

Self-mutilation isn't protected by the constitution. If you try to carve yourself up, you can be arrested and deemed a harm to yourself and put in a padded room without shoelaces.

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@livinglava,

At no time is there ANY reference to self mutilation, so I have no idea where that came from. It really makes me wonder if the only stuff you read is based on "The Red Room Of Pain" from 50 Shades of Grey, over and over again.

As Max said, sex has been around since the beginning of Time, only YOU make it seem like it's dirty and unnatural.

You may have all the opinions you want in this world, makes absolutely no difference to me. But you cannot and will not regulate what I do with my body autonomy.

My body, my choice.

1 Reply

@neptuneblue,

neptuneblue wrote:

At no time is there ANY reference to self mutilation, so I have no idea where that came from. It really makes me wonder if the only stuff you read is based on "The Red Room Of Pain" from 50 Shades of Grey, over and over again.

As Max said, sex has been around since the beginning of Time, only YOU make it seem like it's dirty and unnatural.

You may have all the opinions you want in this world, makes absolutely no difference to me. But you cannot and will not regulate what I do with my body autonomy.

My body, my choice.

My mention of self-mutilation was in response to the claim that the constitution can't prevent abortion because it falls within the personal sovereignty of oneself over one's body.

Doing things to endanger the health of your body cancels the right to personal sovereignty.

So to the extent that the fetus is part of the mother's body, it is an act of self-mutilation to attempt to kill/remove it.

It's similar to cutting yourself up as an act of self-hatred (when you're not pregnant).

If you have the baby and you still don't want it, or if you can't take care of it, you can give it up for adoption. Why isn't that a sufficient solution, provided the mother's health isn't endangered by the pregnancy?

The only time it would be wrong to expect the mother to carry the pregnancy to term would be in cases of rape, because then even if she gives the baby up for adoption, she has still effectively been used as a vessel to carry someone else's baby against her will, which would be a form of slavery, as the rapper Offset noted.

Even then, however, you can't automatically say that killing the fetus is a legitimate response to rape. You might just have to add severity to the penalty for the rapist because the rape resulted in pregnancy and still require the woman to carry the pregnancy to term, i.e. because killing the fetus is too inhumane to allow.

1 Reply

@livinglava,

livinglava wrote:

If you have the baby and you still don't want it, or if you can't take care of it, you can give it up for adoption. Why isn't that a sufficient solution, provided the mother's health isn't endangered by the pregnancy?

That isn't a solution, that's why. It's condemnation.

My body, my choice.

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@maxdancona,

But it is, clearly your intent to be smug.

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@Finn dAbuzz,

Finn dAbuzz wrote:

But it is, clearly your intent to be smug.

Sure, I have never denied that. I believe that NeptuneBlue and LivingLava are both being silly arguing from opposite extremes.

Neptune is arguing that third trimester abortions don't exist and seems to be arguing that a woman has the right to abort a healthy fetus the day before its due date. LivingLava is arguing that non-procreative sex is unnatural, and that if everyone just denies their sexual urges we all all become asexual as God intends.

What is your intent?

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@maxdancona,

To point out your smugness

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Apparently, no one wants to take on my dismissal of the very common Pro-Choice argument that if you are anti-abortion, you must commit to personally caring for every unwanted child in America.

The darker side of this argument is that these children are better off dead than born.

My wife and I adopted our first child and we thought that would be it because we were told that there weren't enough infants for adoption that we could go back for seconds or thirds. We would have and so would have a great many other couples who could not conceive.

It's a canard that infants not aborted are somehow doomed.

Beyond that, if you are opposed to the murder of an adult, it doesn't make you responsible for that person's life.

Murder is wrong.

And it's not, by any means, an either-or proposition.

This is the 21st Century

An "illegitimate" pregnancy doesn't doom a woman. She will no longer be "forced" into a back alley unless she is utterly selfish.

Contraception is available to ALL.

By virtue of their bearing the renewal of life, women hold an esteemed position that should be recognized, but not perverted into a right to end that life.

It's horrific.

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@neptuneblue,

neptuneblue wrote:

livinglava wrote:

If you have the baby and you still don't want it, or if you can't take care of it, you can give it up for adoption. Why isn't that a sufficient solution, provided the mother's health isn't endangered by the pregnancy?

That isn't a solution, that's why. It's condemnation.

My body, my choice.

Individuals have the right to personal sovereignty over their own bodies, provided they don't harm themselves and/or others.

When you get an abortion, you are harming both yourself and the fetus.

There are some cases where harm is justified, even killing. Those are called, "justifiable homicide."

There are also some cases where you fail to prevent an otherwise preventable situation that leads to harm, and this is called negligence.

If you have sex and conceive a child and then abort the fetus, you were negligent in having sex and/or the abortion is either justified or not, depending on the circumstances.

If your health is not endangered by the pregnancy, how does the life of the fetus not outweigh the inconvenience caused to the mother?

If it was your choice to have sex (i.e. not rape), then you knowingly risked pregnancy.

Currently the problem is that Roe v. Wade has allowed a culture of total dismissal of fetal humanity. A fetus may change a lot through the different stages of embryonic development, but it is becoming more a baby with each passing day.

Fetal heartbeat bills attempt to establish a line before which abortion won't be criminalized, but it is possible that the fetus should have rights even before the heartbeat is detectable.

It's not sufficient to leave it up to individual women, because they can be easily biased in favor of terminating the pregnancy based on various personal and social issues besides the interests of the unborn fetus.

1 Reply

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