Watch out for this disingenuous “pro-choice” tactic
In the last few weeks, the abortion movement has been having a very public identity crisis. Some prominent voices in that movement, including Planned Parenthood, argue that they should drop the label “pro-choice.” The debate is playing itself out in outlets like Alternet and the Washington Post, among others.
If not “pro-choice” (and not, they vehemently protest, “pro-abortion”), what do they want to be called? The answers vary, but there’s a common theme: they want to ride on the coattails of genuine good causes. In the Alternet piece, Planned Parenthood talks about supporting “economic security,” while abortion advocate Monica Simpson, whose efforts are focused on the Black community, wants to link abortion to a “safe and healthy environment” for children and freedom from domestic violence. And of course, there’s the time-tested method of hiding abortion in the tent of “women’s health.” Because as everyone who’s never met a pro-lifer knows, there’s nothing that we love more than poverty, battered wives, and breast cancer. (That’s sarcasm. Don’t you dare quote me out of context.)
Why they think the 40-something-year-old term “pro-choice” is suddenly responsible for pro-life success—as opposed to more recent developments like the increasing ubiquity of ultrasound technology, pro-life groups harnessing social media, and the pro-life trend of treating the right to life as a human rights issue rather than a religious one—is beyond me. But I don’t much care what they want to call themselves. Frankly, the loftier they try to be, the starker the contrast we can draw between their language and the bloody reality of what abortion does to an unborn child. I like the way Jill Stanek phrased it: they’re seeking a “euphemism for a euphemism.”
Meanwhile, in faith-based-land, I noticed an interesting piece in the Christian Post arguing that the pro-life movement has the exact opposite problem: “pro-life” is being overused! Specifically, the authors worry that the use of “pro-life” messaging by Christian environmentalists is diluting the term. Myself, I’m not too concerned, because I suspect 1) that any conservatives who would abandon the pro-life movement because they see the term used by a cause they don’t support likely aren’t our movement’s greatest assets anyway, and 2) it may have the beneficial side effect of busting the stereotypes that the abortion movement pushes about who pro-lifers are and what we do. But in any event, it’s quite the contrast to what’s happening across the aisle.
So where does that leave us? We’re in a good position, but the conflict is far from over, and we need to remain on high alert. Based on the signals we’re getting from pro-choice media commentators, we need to be particularly vigilant in our charitable endeavors. Pro-lifers are as active in charitable organizations as anybody else, so we have the ability to impede the pro-choice strategy here. Whatever causes you are involved in, be on the lookout for activists looking to co-opt them in the name of abortion—and when it happens, speak out against it, quickly and loudly!
This tactic is inevitable. The reason "pro-choice" is failing them now is the same as the reason any other name will fail them in ten years. Once people recognize what the discussion is actually about, they make up their own minds. They're not stupid. Pro-choice (or whatever you want to call it) rhetoric has always been about one thing: talking about anything but abortion. Once you focus on the act itself, it gets a lot harder to dismiss pro-life claims.
I think the words pro-"choice" is not working is because it is not really a choice and they know it. We all know it. It is really about lack of choice, desperation or force that most women have abortions in the first place. I have been saying this for years.
Please elaborate.
Huh. So pro-abortion people are looking for other issues to tie their cause to, because pro-abortion is weaker than other causes. Whereas anti-abortion people are trying to guard against being tied to other causes, because other causes are weaker than anti-abortion.
If I understand correctly the concerns of the women of color cited in the linked Alternet article, that's essentially what they're saying. I am reconsidering what term I should use for the abortion cause.
I don't know about that. I've talked to plenty of women who have ample resources at hand, who proudly and unabashedly shout to me about how sexually active they are (ignoring that that's not the part to which I object) and if/when they become pregnant, they most definitely *will* abort their offspring/child simply because they don't "want" to be responsible for said child at all, for any length of time, in any capacity. "Me, me, me!" is priority one and only.
Or maybe they just don't want to be pregnant.
We as pro-life Americans should take heed and persist in our messaging which is making it increasingly difficult for the adversaries of the pre born child to hide in plain sight! Great insights SPL. Thank you!
Putting the want to not be pregnant above the very life of your own child/offspring, is self-centered to a deadly fault.
Nope. The right to your health, life and wellbeing comes first. It comes before single cell brainless entities, and it even comes before born people. Which is why even blood donation is not mandatory.
To me it is about a choice. It is a choice to stay pregnant or not stay pregnant. I already know what I would do if I had an unwanted pregnancy but other women deserve the freedom to make their own choice.
what thedoorisajar said…
There is nothing wrong with a woman putting her health and life first. Most people aren't going to put their life, dreams, health, and happiness in danger for something they want no part of.
"The right to your health, life, and wellbeing comes first."-great, except you get to keep those things even when you're pregnant (barring any sort of gestation-related disease/condition…not that Pro-Lifers in general wouldn't accept early induction of labor to safeguard a mother's life/health/well-being).
"…single-celled brainless entities…"-maybe the reason your side I'd having so much PR trouble is because people are becoming more educated about human development thanks to resources like the internet, and they realize you and your ilk are being disingenuous when you say things like this? By the time a woman even knows she is pregnant and abortion is even available as an option, that very young child at the least has their own heart which is beating. Not that there should be a requirement for having a certain number of cells before they are worthy of protection of their human rights under the law. That notion is rather ableist.
Blood donation is not an analogue for pregnancy. But do you know what *is* mandatory? Providing food/shelter/nourishment for your minor children of whom you have default custody.
Pregnancy, by its very nature, is not a state of wellness. Birth itself is a form of torture. If the side effects of pregnancy and birth were induced by other means, it would be classified as assault and torture.
So, why the special pleading for mindless animal organisms?
Not true. My (now) 11 year old daughter came first, and after going through my experiences with her, which caused me to become active in the Pro-Life movement, I've had the pleasure of meeting so many other women with similar experiences. I like to give mothers the benefit of the doubt and believe that our first instinct in the majority of cases is to care for our offspring/children rather than kill them. I think that better explains why the vast majority of unplanned pregnancies are carried to term.
If women would just stop being selfish and realize the role they were created for, the whole abortion issue would disappear.
Faye's argument in a nutshell.
Except it's not. We don't "force" anything. Birth is what happens on its own when gestation is complete. Along with the PR problem, poor-choicers have a fact problem.
That is great that you had the freedom to make the choice as to place your now 11 year old daughter first. It is in no way your right to force any other women to place the potential life of an unwanted pregnancy before their own.
A mother's first instinct is to protect her child but if a woman is just pregnant she is not a mother and there is no child. She is at most a mother to be if she decides she is going to carry to term.
Don't you know that to the anti-choicers women are the mindless animals…
We are supposed to just accept our role in life and happily go through the misery of pregnancy because that is what we are made for.
Denying women the right to safe, legal abortion = forced birth.
Do you advocate tying down and force feeding suicidal rape victims so they can bring to term a rape baby?
"Pregnancy, by its very nature, is not a state of wellness."
So you mean pregnancy is *not* the result of a healthy reproductive system functioning normally?! That will certainly be news to my OB/GYN.
"Birth itself is a form of torture."
I laughed out loud at this part. My grandmother raised 9 living children in all, and I'm the oldest of 6 myself. "Tortuous" and health-threatening pregnancy *COMPLICATIONS* are not the norm. That is why they are *complications*. The disingenuousness of your side often times comes off like hysterical tokophobia. I can't say I'm surprised you all are having to distance yourselves from your own descriptor that you invented yourselves. It's not a PR problem. It's a position problem.
"If the side effects of pregnancy and birth were induced by other means, it would be classified as assault and torture."
Breastfeeding is uncomfortable, too. Next time I procreate, I'll have my infant incarcerated for the heinous crime of my chafed and bloody nipples. Or I won't, because that's a ridiculous notion. Ignoring the parent/child relationship between pregnant mother and offspring really does not help your cause. That's another part of the PR problem. You guys come off looking really, *really* badly, since most functioning people are naturally repulsed by the idea that you can and should hold your oblivious minor child accountable for the circumstances of their own creation, to the end goal of depriving that child of sustenance/care/shelter to the point of death. In every. other. case. EXCEPT abortion, that would get one in *serious* legal trouble for child neglect/endangerment/abuse, regardless of what one must go through to secure such resources for their progeny.
The "special pleading" here is being done by the person (I'm sorry, I take for granted that all human organisms are persons. My apologies if you identify as one of those "non-person human" entities your side is so fond of throwing away like garbage.) who insists that parent(s) *do not* have an obligation to provide nourishment/care/shelter to their offspring at one point in their lives, yet surely would compel the same parent(s) to provide nourishment/care/shelter to the same offspring at a different point.
Wow. How "pro-woman" of you.
Did you ever stop to think that the need to tear down so many strawmen is indicative of a problem with your position?
You *do* realize that the "anti-choiers women"-this group was founded by one-are out there achieving many things besides reproducing (sometimes not even reproducing *at all* GASP!). The aforementioned SPL founder is a currently-childless lawyer.
Pro-Lifers support women giving themselves whatever role in life they want. We just don't think that obtaining that role should come at the cost of the life/lives of their offspring/child(ren). That's it.
(P.S. Being an atheist kind of precludes the notion that I was "made" for any specific purpose, since that kind of reeks of supernatural creator-ism.)
I don't think they will ever fully abandon the term pro-choice because then they would logically have to drop their favourite insult "anti-choice". From what I've seen, they are really attached to it.
You and your naturalistic fallacies. Tut tut. Just because pregnancy is 'natural' does not mean that it is healthy and risk free. And its no secret that childbirth is painful. Why do you think women are given epidurals?
And breastfeeding cannot be forced. Furthermore, born children are not entitled to your body parts, even if they will die without them.
I prefer forced birth.
You just want to control the sex lives of people who are not you
"Harping on the discomforts of pregnancy treats women as weak, incompetent: Yet we are uniquely equipped for this role and strong enough to do things much harder than this… Every woman should feel proud kinship in the earthy, elemental beauty of birth. To hold it in contempt is to reject our distinctive power, 'our bodies, ourselves.'" -Frederica Mathewes-Green
You people are the ones who want to force women into pregnancy against their will. You want to take away a woman's free choice when it comes to her body and life.
Anti-choicers do not support women because in your world once a woman becomes pregnant her life no longer means anything. She is just supposed to accept her role as an inferior incubator and give up on any hopes and dreams she many have.
Do you guys trade memos about what talking point/bumper sticker phrase The Hive Mind is going to push on any given day?
I'll tell you the same thing I told your cohort:
I am an atheist. I don't believe I was "created" by or for anything specific. However, I *do* know *how* and *why* I came into being, because I've studied Biology at length. That's the issue here, and this is why you all are losing. I began my life when the gametes of my parents fused inside my mother. I was the same entity then, being cared for by nourishment from my mother through the umbilical cord, as I was only months afterward when I was being nourished for by my mother's mammary glands and cared for by her hard work. Legally mandating that she *MUST* properly care for me only a few months after legally permitting her to literally have me killed and disposed of like trash is more than a little schizophrenic.
1. No it was a choice. You did not have to carry to term. You do not believe in abortion therefore your choice was to carry to term. However not every woman lives by your views.
2. No if it requires a host to live and has no self awareness it is only a potential life.
3. Pregnancy is a condition to where a woman has a developing potential human inside her. It is 100% her choice if she allows it to stay there.
4. The embryo/fetus is not an actual human being and it has no right to my body and my life unless I decide I want to allow it to stay there. It has NO rights to anything at the cost of my health, life, happiness, and dreams.
5. Sorry but if I do not want the developing embryo that is inside me I have NO bond with it. I do not want it there and all it is causing me is harm so therefore I have zero feelings toward it and no obligation toward it.
I had a very very pro-choice doctor. She had terrible bedside manner. She couldn't fathom why I would want expensive blood screening for cystic fibrosis (I have 2 nephews with CF) before I got pregnant because "It's easy to test for that once you're pregnant." Like she didn't understand or care about throwing away their lives like a piece of trash. She's talking about my nephews, the oldest is about 10 now and I'd say he's living a pretty good life for someone with CF. I'd rather avoid bringing a potentially sick child into the world, but to punish them for just existing is sickening to me.
She quit the practice to become an abortion instructor and I later learned from someone ON THIS SITE that she was also inept.
Oops. The choice is in conceiving or not.
Why should anyone be free to avoid the consequences of their freely chosen actions, especially at the expense of another's life?
And, unless you're going to extend fathers the option of skipping out on child support- this 'choice' about parenting after the fact… is only available to women.
There's really only an ethical case to be made for abortion in rape cases… Which to my ear, means the women's health issue is really about ending rape. So, pro-choicers: let's work together on ending rape altogether!
"You people are the ones who want to force women into pregnancy against their will."
False. I am wholly anti-rape and adamantly pro-birth control.
"You want to take away a woman's free choice when it comes to her body and life."
False. A child living and growing in utero is not his/her mother's body, and their life is not property of their parent(s) to be discarded or kept.
"Anti-choicers do not support women because in your world once a woman becomes pregnant her life no longer means anything."
False. A woman's life is always meaningful and valuable. But this goes for her life at every stage of development. That woman's life was/is every bit as meaningful and valuable now as it was when she was gestating inside of her mother. And not just women, but everyone. Equality.
"She is just supposed to accept her role as an inferior incubator and give up on any hopes and dreams she many have."
False. I'm sorry you have such a low opinion of women who become mothers. I'm every bit as valid now as I was when I graduated high school. Having my children hasn't lessened me in any way, nor did pregnancy invalidate me as a person. NEVER have I been "inferior".
This is a very disturbing, telling, and frankly rather insulting statement. I was capable of taking my college classes when pregnant/breastfeeding/parenting. I didn't lose my ability to read or wear shoes. Your thinking is entirely backward.
As much as a seed will become a plant, that ZEF would become a person, so no matter how you spin it, you are denying personhood. You are only here because someone else was kind enough not to deny you of your own personhood. The side that justifies non-existence will lose in time.
Pregnancy is by nature dangerous. It is a conflict over maternal resources, essentially. The fetus is genetically programmed, through something called genomic imprinting, to take as much from the woman as it can, in order to grow big and healthy. The woman, on the other hand, has to preserve resources, so that she can survive the pregnancy. Sometimes the fetus grows too big and kills them both. This is also where those 'complication's arise from. Women give birth precisely because the metabolic demands become too much for their bodies to take.
Here, some citations, I suggest you do some reading:
Maternal fetal conflict:
http://content.csbs.utah.edu/~rogers/ant1050/Lectures/mfconflict-2×3.pdf
Genomic imprinting:
http://edge.org/conversation/genomic-imprinting
Prenatal competition:
http://harvardmagazine.com/2006/09/prenatal-competition.html
Multiple pregnancies can kill women, because it wears out their bodies, who'da thunk it!
http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/01/health/multiple-pregnancies-mother/
The invasive placenta:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/15/health/the-push-to-understand-the-placenta.html?_r=0
Tumours and embryos are very similar:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/18/science/a-tumor-the-embryos-evil-twin.html
Women menstruate to defend against invasive embryos:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3528014/
Oh, so you admit that seeds aren't trees, and that zygotes are not yet people?
Yes if the ZEF is left inside its host it will be born a human. However you can't force a woman to allow the ZEF to use her body to come to term.
A seed *contains* a plant, just as a pregnancy *contains* a child/offspring.
Except even just on a semantic level, that's not accurate at all. (It's about as accurate as pro-lifers calling all pro-choicers, pro-aborts, when most want to simply keep the option open). We're against the action of killing another human being. Birth happens naturally given that one is restricted from destroying their in-utero offspring, but it's not the focus of the movement. If pregnancy termination resulted in the fetus, remaining viable and alive, I for one, would not be having this argument with you.
That Christian Post article was really all kinds of disgusting. It's posts like that, that make me feel ashamed to consider myself pro-life (don't worry, the shame is temporary when I remind myself that we're hardly monolithic and these guys don't speak for me) The morals I apply that inform my environmentalism are the same that inform my pro-life stance. I really don't see a wall going between my desire to work together with competing interests, to find new, innovative ways to work sustainability into our life styles, with working together with competing interests, to finding new, innovative ways to support all human life at any stage.
No more than Child Protective Services = forced parenthood.
Child protective services exist because they don't want people abusing their children.
Abortion is not 'abuse' because the prenate has no right to the woman's body – just as a born child has no right to it's parents body. Child protective services isn't going to take a child out of a home because a parent refuses to donate a kidney. That isn't abuse.
I advocate proper treatment for people suffering with mental health
issues. Anyone with suicidal/homicidal ideations should be treated with
the proper care and respect.
And what if the suicidal rape victim tries to starve herself to death, and nothing you say will change her mind?
Should she be tied down and forced to gestate to term?
"You're against women controlling their own bodies."
Good work telling me what I am for. Glad to know there is an expert on me out there who knows more about me than I do, because all this time I thought I was all for women, and men, doing whatever they want with their bodies until it hurts someone else.
Well, yeah. Pregnancy is pretty intimate. It's all about the woman's body, and her right to control what goes in and out of it. Her right to decide what can and can not occupy her body.
By denying a woman the right to decide what can use her body, you are coercing, if not downright forcing her, to give birth. Especially if exercising her right to bodily autonomy is illegal, and she is threatened with a custodial sentence if she does exercise that right.
Let's see: you are fine with denying women the right or ability to make a choice whether or not they bear and give birth to a child. Why wouldn't someone call that anti-choice? You are opposed to them making that choice, aren't you? Instead of trying to guilt and shame women into bearing unwanted babies, or trying to outlaw abortion or make abortion exceedingly hard to get, you could be working on making the choice to bear a child a more tenable one. But you aren't; you're just against other people making their own choice. Hence: anti-choice.
It's more extensive than abortion, you know. You're also against them making their own scientific, philosophical or spiritual choices. If they look at all the facts, they might come to the conclusion that a being which is only alive because another being is alive is not, in fact, an individual. They might weigh the sentience and sapience of a girl or woman against the literal brainlessness of a developing embryo, and choose to defend the girl or woman. They might notice that biologically, a pregnant woman is an individual who is reproducing (a process) rather than a woman who has already reproduced (a potential but not guaranteed outcome).
They might come to the conclusion that since nature errs on the side of the sexually mature female, causing the majority of human conceptions and 1/4 of human pregnancies to fail, we as a society should, too. Or they might have religious beliefs that God gives human beings brains for a reason, and free will, too.
So it's not just on abortion that you're anti-choice: you also don't want other people thinking for themselves, or at least living their lives according to their own thoughts and beliefs.
Whatever some voices are saying, in the end what I am is pro-choice, on all those aspects. Think and believe what you want, and feel free to live your life by your choices. Just keep your arrogant tripe out of my life.
Do you say that about men who masturbate, too? I mean, aren't they just putting a momentary bit of pleasure and relief ahead of the very existence of their own possible child?
So you oppose non-procreative sex, gotcha.
Well, you oppose it for women, at any rate.
Do you advocate tying suicidal rape victims down and force feeding them for 9 months?
Seriously. I've never understood why the pro-choice lobby calls us "anti-abortion" as a slur. Any pro-life advocate would be proud to call themselves anti-abortion, yet the ones on the opposite end of the spectrum insist that we not call them "pro-abortion." If you're not pro-abortion, why are you calling your ideological opponents anti-abortion?
"… Ignoring the parent/child relationship between pregnant mother and
her potential offspring really does not help your cause."(Fixed it for you.)
What a howler! First, aren't you the folks who suffer from such a degree of cognitive dissonance, you simultaneously call a fetus an "individual" AND insist that it must be allowed to use the woman's body because it can't survive individually?
One of us is ignoring the biological relationship between pregnant woman and developing embryo, and it ain't us, honey.
Also a howler since we're discussing women whose "relationship" with the developing zygote, embryo or fetus is that she wants it out of her body, the sooner the better.
I know that offends your vastly superior moral sensibilities, and you folks get much mileage out of unabashedly torturing girls and women with how nasty selfish and maternally inadequate they are for not wanting to have babies no matter what, but back in the real world, an intelligent human being takes actual circumstances into consideration.
The only social policy question is: do we punish them for considering their own circumstances, and make abortion very dangerous, or not? Keeping in mind that we don't punish men for doing the same, and would be punishing girls and women because they're female, and for no other reason.
I don't consider 'anti-abortion' to be a slur. I think it's accurate. As is 'anti-choice' and 'forced birth'
Thank you for availing yourself of the resources of the internet.
Don't you wish these flaming hypocrites would actually do the same?
"Especially if exercising her right to bodily autonomy is illegal,"
Except it's not, and nobody is advocating all bodily autonomy be revoked. Please, feel free to get tattoos, use BC, chop off a finger, do whatever to your heart's content. That is your bodily autonomy, and right to do that. But rights for bodily autonomy are not absolute. When bodily autonomy rights of two or more individuals compete, or any rights for that matter, we have to think outside of the box and not hold fast to one, simplistic ideal. That's why conjoined twins can't get separated unless both agree to do so. Are you decrying that fact? Because logically, you should if absolute bodily autonomy is all you care about.
Just as if you were to put a child into a burning building, you would be responsible for what happens to them there, if you put a child into your/ your female partner's uterus, you are responsible for what happens to them.
Oh, but they do! There are numerous sources on LieSiteNews that explain how pregnancy prevents cancer, diabetes and extends female life!!!
Oh, and that abortion is NEVER needed to preserve a woman's life.
Anti-choicers advocate that bodily autonomy ONLY be revoked in the case of pregnancy. And ONLY female bodily autonomy.
Now why is that?
"Should" and "must" are two different things.
Most conceptions do not result in a live birth; why can't women feel a proud kinship with their menstrual cycle, even though it ends the process of reproduction?
Sometimes women die of complications of pregnancy and childbirth. Think I'll draw the line at forcing other people to feel such a "proud kinship with the earth" that the end up six feet under it, if you don't mind.
(Now I'm hearing "Lady Madonna" in my head; you know: "Lady Madonna, baby at your breast, wonder how you manage to feed the rest?")
AMEN!
What a steaming pile of horse manure.
No, you absolutely do not support giving women whatever role in life they want. Once a man comes and conception occurs, that woman will be a mother no matter what, according to you.
Oh, do you imagine that women give birth to unwanted babies and their lives are absolutely peachy and unaffected, afterward, even if the worst that might happen, doesn't? Really?
You are defining and proscribing women's roles in life, obviously against their will, and then claiming you're not. Complete and utter misogynistic hogwash.
Did someone force you to have your children, or did you choose to?
You know what, that bit about the embryo or fetus not being the woman's body? Not true. The ovum certainly is the woman's body; what arises from it only does so because of the woman's body.
I swear, these people not only think gestation takes place in magic incubators attached and belonging to no one, they even think conception occurs without the woman's body having a thing to do with it! When, of coure, in fact, pregnancy IS the woman's body. For proof, let's put a fertilized ovum into a Perti dish and watch what happens.
They're completely delusional.
Hmm, now I'm not scientist or anything, but somebody once told me that females get pregnant, and males don't. It might be crazy talk for all I know, but that's what I've heard.
Yep, and it builds itself from HER body. If it doesn't get what it needs from her diet, it will take what it can from her tissues and bones.
And as Scott Gilbert writes:
"Instructions for Development and Heredity are NOT all in the Fertilised egg. The view that we are genetically determined by the combination of parental DNA has been shown to fall far short of the complete story. How the DNA is interpreted can vary greatly affected by things such as the maternal diet. Similarly some development requires certain bacteria to be present. Thirdly, and most surprisingly, the level of maternal care can determine which areas of DNA are 'methylated' which radically alters
how they are interpreted. As such the view that we are 'complete but unformed' at conception is far from accurate. From the moment of fertilisation, the embryo grows as the cells of the fertilised egg multiply. However, there is a problem. How can the DNA be read if the materials needed to read it have not yet been produced? The answer is that they are provided by the mother in the formof mRNA and proteins. The early stages of development are controlled directly by the mother's genotype for about the first three weeks, in humans, after which the embryo's DNA takes over.(*)"
———-
The whole 'left alone to live/self-directed embryonic development' line is utter bullshit.
You would be correct: women's first instinct in the majority of cases is to care for their children; this is why there are over seven billion people on this planet, with many more to come. (Whether we can care for them, or not.)
So, trust women. They know better than you if it's tenable to reproduce, or not. If we don't start trusting people to know when it would be better not to reproduce, we're all going to fry.
(Do yourself a favor and drop that stupid "offspring/children" construction. They are the same thing. You're just trying to pretend that birth doesn't matter.)
Yeah.
And biology/anatomy is not destiny.
Yeah. I agree. So what?
We could make abortion freely available at every Starbucks in the nation and women will still seek preventative means of birth control, because it's a safer choice, and prevention is always better than cure.
Women don't want abortions; they don't want to be pregnant. Sometimes, they become pregnant when they don't want to be pregnant. Even when they used contraception, in fact.
Let me assuage your feverish misogynistic imaginings: women are not running around having sex in order to get pregnant so they can go have abortions. There, feel better?
Good. Then you're pro-choice?
Pssst: it has his DNA.
Not at all. Still not seeing the dots you are trying to connect.
It's really simple. Women are not objects. Just because they *can* gestate, does not mean that they should be *forced* to gestate.
Women are not appliances. They are people. You don't give your fridge a choice about what it holds. To force a woman to remain pregnant against her will is to treat her as an object, and to deny her free will to determine the trajectory of her own life and health. You are essentially treating her as an appliance, based on her sex.
That's what Faye does. In fact, wait until she tells you that looking after a baby is *tougher* than pregnancy. You know, because your baby can always cause you to bleed to death.
Alright, we've been through this in prior posts, so I think I am going to cut out here. I hate being a broken record.
But let's sum up:
1) Just because a person is female does not mean she should be forced to become pregnant – yes
2) If a woman does, through her own actions, become pregnant, she, and her partner become responsible for that new human life – at least to the extent to not kill it.
3) Bodily autonomy is not absolute, for anyone, male or female. Conjoined twins, pregnant people, vaccinated children, people in the draft, all fall under this. This is because of competing or common interests.
None of the above make women, or men, appliances. Go ahead, try replaced words with "tove-top oven".
The end.
Ohh, the responsibility objection? yeah, I've been through that a thousand times.
I guess you offer a rape exception then?
This is regarding what thedoorisajar said about Faye's argument 'in a nutshell'. The role of women isn't necessarily to be a mother and Faye isn't saying that..we all know this. But, their role is definitely NOT to be the one who kills or has their child killed. Anyway, once you've conceived you're already a mother. Faye, you argue beautifully. Thank you, thedoorisajar, for giving her the opportunity.
Why isn't a woman's role to decide whether or not she will give birth? Why can't she exert that kind of control over whether or not she reproduces?
Yes, it was a choice. Plenty of women who wish they "could've waved a magic wand and turned back time to not have become pregnant in the first place" put down away their magical thinking and have an abortion. That's why, as well: to return to the not-being-pregnant state they actually want to be in.
You might get approbation from the anti-abortion crowd for your "selflessness" but you'll just get a call-out for your fundamental dishonesty from me. You had a choice, you made that choice. You did what you felt you had to do, which is the same thing as doing what you WANTED to do. Full stop. Because, no, you didn't have to carry through with giving your child life.
(I think that's a large part of why there are women in the forced pregnancy movement at all: they'll stop being "special" when they aren't seen as selfless martyrs to their kids. Well, you made that choice for yourself; you don't get to make it for any one else.)
Good grief, I'm surprised you can recognize that pregnancy is a condition of women, not fetuses! The way you go on and on about the "beginning" being the equivalent of the potential end, I would've thought you'd posit that fetuses are alive all by themselves and grow themselves in magic incubators… instead, you seem to grasp that they're alive because their mother is.
It's your side that has an accuracy problem. You think two cells dividing in a fallopian tube and a newborn infant are one and the same, despite the ease of information acquisition that clearly shows otherwise.
(I think that's a large part of why there are women in the forced
pregnancy movement at all: they'll stop being "special" when they aren't
seen as selfless martyrs to their kids. Well, you made that choice for
yourself; you don't get to make it for any one else.)
Yep. There was an interesting study, and it turned out that the women who were *most* opposed to abortion were low income women who had had abortions…
SHAME
STIGMA
I also think that this is one reason why you will find that the very people who are hurt by the GOP are the folks who willingly vote against their own interests – PRIDE.
"So you oppose non-procreative sex"
Um, no… at least I don't think so. What is non-procreative sex? But I'm very much in favour of sex, at any rate.
"Do you advocate tying suicidal rape victims down and force feeding them for 9 months?"
No.
Would you like to collaborate on ending rape?
Um, no… at least I don't think so. What is non-procreative sex?
Take a stab at figuring it out for yourself.
No.
Why not?
Would you like to collaborate on ending rape?
Rape, and reproductive coercion, will *never* end. Both are reproductive strategies used by men to force women to bear their children. In the case of rape, it's a great way to transmit your genes without using your own resources to raise the child. It's all on the woman.
No one would be punishing you. Pregnancy is one of the things that can happen when you have sex. You might get into an accident when you drive a car (and you night not even be at fault!) I don't understand why you should be free of the consequences of your freely chosen actions. Honestly, that just doesn't make any sense.
I don't quite follow the rest of your comment.
Only in your sexist imagination is the choice "conceiving or not." That's the choice for men, because conception is the role they play in reproduction, and they can indeed choose whether or not to perform it.
Conception is only the start of the role women play, however.
There is no "other life" yet. If there were, there'd be no argument here: take it out of the woman's body and let it get on with its life. What's that you say, it relies on the woman's body (her life) to live?
If it doesn't have its own life, it doesn't have its own rights. QED. There MIGHT BE another life, in the future. A potential future life does not trump the rights of a currently living individual; also QED. (Funny how denying life to possible future babies is fine if men choose it, even though no babies are born without them.)
The idea that rape is the only "ethical" case to be made for abortion is particularly ridiculous. Why would that be, because the woman didn't get to decide whether or not to conceive? So what? You already don't think women have the right to control the functioning of their reproductive organs. In fact, you make rapists look like amateurs – they just want use the woman's reproductive organs against her will for a little while. You want to use them against her will for months.
Why should the brief time a rapist did exactly what you're doing – denying any choice – make a difference regarding the so-called "expense of another's life?" Heck, we should be giving rapists medals; aren't they doing what you want, bringing new life into the world whether women want to, or not?
Work to end rape?! You might as well legalize rape, if you feel that conception is the cutoff point for women having agency over their own sex organs. "Yes, Mr. Rapist, your actions were a crime, except for what resulted from your actions – congratulations on that" is kind of a wispy dividing line to get a rapist to grasp.
<>
Seems legit? There is a great post somewhere else on here, outlining how the fundamental diff. between pro-life vs. pro-choice is that pro-lifers essentially place the same moral value on the unborn as most folks would a two-year old.
I don't understand why you should be free of the consequences of your freely chosen actions.
Yeah. So if you get into that car accident, you should be *denied* medical treatment, since you freely chose to engage in an activity that could harm you.
Are you saying women are not free to decide whether, when, and with whom they have sex?
Yeah? So why aren't they campaigning to legally obligate people to donate body parts and tissue to 2 year olds?
Nope! You should totally get medical treatment for any injury.
It's like you're arguing that if a drunk driver hit you, damaged your car and injured you, you should have to pay for the damages and the medical bills, because you chose to drive. Say what?
(You don't quite follow a lot, it would seem.)
You're right, though: no one is punishing women for having sex by making them have babies, because they can choose whether or not to have a baby.
Conception is something that can happen when people have sex; babies being born 40 weeks later is optional. Indeed, anti-choice folks have to deliberately go out of your way to try to arrange that outcome, and you'll still fail. Women will still not stay pregnant when they don't want to be. But you'll kill a few along the way; how is killing people without due process of law not punishment?
Gosh, I planted a bunch of seeds this spring.
Not all of them became plants.
Trying joining us on this planet.
Because parents are already legally bound to provide food, housing and safety for their two-year olds?
Also, some pro-lifers (not this one) *do* think organ donation should be mandatory.
Why? If you consented to it, then surely you should 'accept the consequences' right? That means NO MEDICAL TREATMENT.
The problem is, placing the same moral value on a brainless embryo as on a two year old is insane. For one, it erases women, removing all moral value from them. It also erases reality since not all embryos will actually be born, while all pregnant women are actually living people. (Back to, erasing women.)
HTH.
Pregnancy does not = food housing and safety, sweetie.
The two are entirely different concepts.
If an unborn human has a right to the body of a parent, why can't toddler also share that right?
If you hold a bunch of these in your hand:
http://www.stampritemachine.com/picts/products/sp-2000-3.jpg
Can you say that you already have a garden?
No. I'm saying that the accident can't 'un'happen, and that while any injury should certainly be treated (by universal health care, ideally) – no one should have to die to make you whole again.
And what if they die anyways, from the accident?
Are you guilty of murder?
In your twisted world, apparently… Actually, I'm saying you're not entitled to a new car, and pretending the accident never happened.
Since my analogy was unclear -I'm saying that pregnant women should receive prenatal care, but society has no reason to undo accidental pregnancy, and leave couples where they started- childless. A pregnancy cannot 'un'happen anymore than a car accident can.
Seriously- if there's no baby, what does anyone 'need' abortion for anyway?
What if who dies anyway?
No one is killing anyone in an abortion. First, there isn't anyone there. They have no sentience and no sapience, they have no will, and they have no way to exercise whatever rights you give them, not even the right to life. (More than 500 pregnant women a year die in the US, many taking their "babies" with them.)
Second, you can't "kill" what is not yet alive without you. You can choose to give them life, or to not give them life, just like men do when they choose whether or not to get it on without protection. But you can't kill them anymore than you killed one of the 14 people who died of kidney disease today by not donating one of your kidneys to them. You choose every day to let someone die when you could give them life. But I don't think you're a murderer, or even a killer, because none of us is compelled to give life to someone else.
jesuschristonacrutch, no, you're not "already a mother" when you conceive. YOU, your very own self, have most likely conceived and gone on to flush your "offspring" down the toilet when you had your next period. So if you're sexually active, I recommend you start holding a funeral service for each of your feminine hygiene products every month, being how it's entirely possible you're actually a bereaved mother…
If you get into a car accident (through no fault of your own) and the person that your car hit dies of their injuries, are you guilty of murder?
And what if the pregnancy kills the woman? Should she get the death penalty for accidental conception?
We do 'punish' men.
We expect them to pay child support.
We don't violate their autonomy and threaten their life and health.
Usually, when someone's autonomy is violated, that is because they have committed a crime and need to do jail time.
Just out of genuine curiosity, do you have any good friends or family members who are pro-life/anti-abortion?
"Once a man comes and conception occurs, that woman will be a mother no matter what, according to you."
Oops again! But I'll correct that for you:
Once a man comes and a woman freely chooses to have sex with him, and conception occurs, that woman is a mother.
Most states have jail time for men that don't pay child support.
Forcing a depressed or suicidal girl or woman to bear a child she doesn't want is not "proper treatment." It's exactly the opposite.
Previously mentally healthy women have killed themselves (and others, including their children) because of post-partum depression. Imagine if you start from a place of disturbed brain chemistry, and already want to kill yourself? Think forcing post-partum depression on that person is "treatment?"
Stop living in la la land, where cute little babies all get born to loving mommies.
So if a woman procures an illegal abortion you believe she should be jailed?
"Rape, and reproductive coercion, will *never* end. Both are reproductive
strategies used by men to force women to bear their children. In the
case of rape, it's a great way to transmit your genes without using your
own resources to raise the child. It's all on the woman."
So is that a yes or a no?
"Why not?"
Why are you suggesting it?
You want to force gestation; therefore, yes, you are forcing birth, since that's what happens on its own when gestation is complete.
A more dishonest group of people than the anti-choice would be hard to find, I swear.
Nope. I think the provider should be jailed.
What if she takes an abortion pill? Or starves herself so that the fetus will die?
Your reply doesn't make any sense.
Try again.
It does help, thanks! But I'm not sure how it erases or removes all moral value from women. Could you help me out with that one?
Most folks call me Grace, not sweetie. Do you prefer Door, or Jar? I know, I could call you JarHead for long!!
And the state does expect parents to use their bodies and minds to support their children, buy earning the money to provide their children what they need. If parents are truly egregious in their failures, sometimes those parents are imprisoned.
Also, how are those different concepts?
The state does *not* force parents to let their children literally use their organs for survival. If your child's kidneys are failing, you aren't legally obligated to hand one over, even if you caused the disease by passing on defective genes.
And parental rights can be rescinded at any time, and the child can be handed over to a safe haven, to adoption or to a foster home.
The laws vary by state, and depend greatly on the particular circumstances. But you certainly *may* be guilty of manslaughter. I don't think you'd be guilty of 1st degree murder in any state, but in some states you *might* be guilty of 2nd degree murder for hitting a pedestrian with your car. However – IANAL.
So if the conceptus dies while the woman is pregnant, should she be charged with manslaughter? 2nd degree murder?
An abortion pill? The manufacturer.
Starvation, abortifacient herbs? I'm not sure enforcecable law can be written to address those particulars. Personally, I believe those actions should remain unregulated.
Oh. So if you shoot someone, the manufacturer should be charged with murder, not you?
Does this also extend to poisons? What if you poison someone with hemlock?
Every measure should be taken to preserve a mother's life… but sometimes even medical science can not save lives. And that is a risk of pregnancy whether the conception was accidental or not… I'm not sure how that amounts to a unique death penalty imposed on accidental coneptions and subsequent pregnancies.
You are aware, that manufacturers are restricted from manufacturing some things, fined if they do, and fined if they knowingly put their product into illegal use, right?
Wait a minute… are you trying to suggest that women that seek abortions are murderers?
Also, I'm confident you can't accidentally poison someone with hemlock… and while it *can* be difficult to prosecute, we have established, enforceable law on this.
I mean, if the forced gestation results in the woman's death, you have basically stated that if a woman engages in intercourse, and becomes pregnant as a result, that part of her 'responsibility' = the death penalty. Perhaps if she's lucky she will just get away with permanent disability.
Is that a yes, or a no about ending rape?
And why are you suggesting "tying suicidal rape victims down and force feeding them for 9 months"
We are not talking about accidental poisonings. We are talking about a woman purposely taking a pill or herb that will induce a miscarriage.
Should she or should she not be charged with murder?
Gillette is mistaken. No one is pro abortion.
We're not advocating that women have abortions. Unlike you, we're not taking down the license plates of OB/Gyns who deliver babies, shooting them or killing them. We're not standing outside their offices en masse to "counsel" women about how great it is to have an abortion, and how selfish and rotten they are for having a baby, instead. (Don't they know what's happening to this planet because we're using it up too much, too fast?)
We're advocating
that if a woman chooses to get an abortion, she shouldn't have to risk
her life, or risk her future fertility, or risk her liberty. We're also advocating that women have a right to privacy; i.e., it's none of your business what's going on in her sex organs.
We're advocating that the choice is hers, not someone else's, and absolutely not the government's. (The history of government control of reproduction is a particularly gruesome one.)
But look: we can wipe out the majority of abortions easily. All we have to do is chemically castrate all males at puberty, and only reverse it when they can show the wherewithal to support a child, and an affidavit from a woman stating she wants his baby. Voila: no unwanted pregnancies, and only medically necessary abortions. As a side effect, we'd have much reduced impacts on women's health from use of contraception, and much reduced instances of testosterone fueled violence and rape. It's genuinely within our grasp. All we have to do is give government jurisdiction of reproduction, and strip men of their rights as individual human beings, just like you folks want to strip women of theirs.
Personally, I have a problem with that, and I bet you do to. But only when it comes to men… then, suddenly, bodily autonomy, the right to liberty, and the right to privacy trump any possible babies and all possible positive outcomes, hands down. Why is that?
are you trying to suggest that women that seek abortions are murderers?
Surely you are?
Or do you not consider zygotes to be people?
We can try to end rape, but it won't ever end. People will still rape.
So, since people will *always* rape, no matter what we do, simply because there will always be a criminal element amongst us…tell me, should a suicidal rape victim be tied down and force fed until she delivers?
So what are parents using their organs for while they work soul-sucking jobs to keep the rent paid and the kids fed?
"And parental rights can be rescinded at any time" – actually, parents have to do something (extreme neglect counts as doing something) to have parental rights rescinded… But yes, foster and adoptive care is preferred, but sometimes parents are also jailed for failing in their duties.
We are talking about *literal* organ use honey – as in, literally using your kidney to process wastes, your lungs to breathe etc. As in, drilling a hole into your blood vessels and leeching resources from your body.
to have parental rights rescinded
No, they can purposely rescind their rights. Give the kid away.
but sometimes parents are also jailed for failing in their duties.
Well yes. Adoptive parents can be jailed as well – because they have made a voluntary commitment to raise a child, and they can't break that contract by harming that child.
Dude. Seriously, what's the rate of death and disability from pregnancy in your parts?
The very small possibility of death and disability is part of every pregnancy- wanted or not- and pregnancy is a risk of sex… So again, I aim to make every sex act a woman engages in consensual, and fully informed about the risks. If you, knowing that there is a small chance that you could be killed in a car accident that was not your fault, and chose to drive anyway and are killed- did you just receive the death penalty for driving?
If the woman is responsible for that life, then she is responsible, not you.
She may find it responsible not to let her body proceed with bringing that life into the world. If she would make that choice, and you would prevent her from being able to, YOU are responsible, not her. (Wait, you're not responsible for other people's children? Say what?)
It's this wanting your cake and eating it too argument that makes us crazy, you know.
Here's the low down: you cannot be for what you say you're for without also stripping women of their rights. Cannot be done.
Cannot be done even if you did manage to strip women of their rights, legally. They will still end a pregnancy they know to be untenable in their lives. You just might kill a few of them along the way, but what's the right to life to women? Why, nothing, at all.
And you guys place the same value onto women that someone else would place on an inanimate incubator.
An unwanted pregnancy would be nine months of misery and would be a punishment.
No you aren't. You are denying the ZEF the right to your uterus. No one has the right to use anyone's body for any reason against their will. Why is the ZEF given special rights?
I don't go by honey either! You're most welcome to call me Grace, but Rebekah is fine too!
Are 'door' and 'jar' to informal? Should I stick with thedoorisajar? What about 'ajar'?
Oh! You mean parents voluntarily terminating their rights and responsibilities as parents. Gotcha – I thought you meant the state.
As far as literal organ use- it is fairly rare that a two year old has need of *literal* use of a parent's organs (you cited the rare possibility above) But every child that is born, required literal use of her mother's organs- it's just not that extraordinary a request of someone that put you in the position of existing.
Please inform me when the law becomes "being responsible for my child" or "being responsible for my invalid father" equals "I am able to kill my child" or "I am able to kill my invalid father". As of now, I'm pretty sure mothers have gone to jail for drowning their children in bathtubs, but please inform me when that changes.
Crazy, I know!
Why would you plant a seed if you didn't want a plant in the first place? =)
Neither your child nor your father can lay claim to your organs. Even if they will die without.
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/pdf/FallaciesPoster24x36.pdf
Yours is:
*drum roll please*
Special Pleading!
No we don't.
Actually, it's you who are doing that.
You are saying that ONLY unborn humans have the right to the body of another, and that no one else does. Not your toddler, and not your father.
And that so called 'punishment' is one of the risks of having sex.
That risk is 100% avoidable.
Except in rape. Which is why I'd like to end rape.
Anybody with me?!?
C'mon. Ending rape will be fun!
Actually, it is an extraordinary request. No person or thing can lay claim to the body of another without consent – this includes infants, toddlers, teens adults and yes, prenates.
At least women will have a lot more fun after rape is gone!
"I know you are but what am I?" Great comeback bro.
Nope, just saying you can't kill anyone. If you put a person in a precarious situation, hooked them up to your own organs and made them dependent on you, that is what locks them into the right for continued sustenance until they can remove themselves from you.
Here I go all broken record on you but: If you put a child into a burning building, you are responsible for whatever happens to that child.
The chances that you will die from being thrown out of an airplane are pretty slim. But no one can force you to skydive or hang-glide without your consent. Not even to save a life. Not even if your chances of dying are 1 in a million.
And there is no way to tell which women will die or suffer disability from pregnancy. What you are effectively saying is that fertile women do not have the right to life.
Oh, so conception = harm done?
You gonna start talking about tort law now?
Rape will *never* be ended. Get your head out of your ass.
Should rape victims be forced to gestate?
I actually do. Yay consistency!
The two individuals in a pregnancy are the man and the woman who had sex and conceived. A third individual arrives at live birth.
Wax poetical all day long about the "individual" embryo or fetus: you're lying. Furthermore, you know you're lying, because if an embryo or non-viable fetus were an "individual" you wouldn't be arguing that women have to remain pregnant, otherwise that so-called "individual" will die.
Individuals are spontaneously, biologically alive by themselves, outside another body. If they're not capable of being spontaneously, biologically alive by themselves outside another body, they are not individuals. (Preemptive note: life support machines are not bodies, and bodies are not life support machines.)
It's the core paradox of the anti-choice argument, and all you people ever do is use a mountain of sexist, shaming, holier-than-thou rhetoric to try and hide it. But it's simple: If the fetus is alive, then take it out of the woman's body who doesn't want it there, and let it get on with its life. What, we can't do that? Then we're not talking about a separate living individual, yet.
Note: conjoined twins may share a body but they aren't living inside someone else who predates them as an individual. (Talk about "thinking outside the box:" you're so far outside the box, women have completely disappeared from your view.)
Some questions for you: if one conjoined twin is mentally incompetent, can the other,
mentally competent one make the decision to be separated, or are they stuck? [I could find nothing on that question.] Can their
parents decide for them when they're babies and unable to decide for
themselves? [Yes.] Can the parents agree to separation for the health and longevity of one twin, even if the other will die as a result? [Yes.] (There's your actual analogy to pregnancy, BTW.)
It's biology; get over it. Because frankly, the disposition of an embryo the woman herself doesn't want to gestate is the least of this planet's worries. Try pulling your imagination out of other women's cervixes and look for a genuine good cause, like stopping men from bloodily killing people wholesale all over the place, or doing something about the thousands of born, sapient individuals (including the non-human) who die of preventable causes every day.
So discrimination based on gender is ok. Then, why don't we discriminate against the males that cause pregnancy? Only then can cause pregnancy, right? Let's concentrate on them.
I was just reading a fascinating paper on the ethics of end of life decisions, in which I found this:
"The centrality of consent in health care is a function of
the importance accorded to autonomy; and autonomy itself is part of our concept of the person because it is
autonomy that enables the individual to “make her life her own”. Choices are self
defining but also they are self creating. Although the importance of consent derives from our concept of the person, it’s procedural primacy in health care… is owed to the common law tradition which protects individuals from assaults—unlawful touchings."
http://jme.bmj.com/content/29/1/10.full
Pro-choice and anti-choice take two different views of that argument. To pro-choice folks, having another touching and using your body for 40 weeks without your consent is the very definition of assault, especially given the risk of harm and the certainty of discomfort, pain, bodily changes and limitations on liberty and autonomy; indeed, as you note, the imposition of involuntarily servitude.
To the anti-choice, causing the removal of the embryo is the "assault," even if it is accomplished by use of hormones, and even if the one "assaulted" has no ability to perceive or feel any harm.
No matter how I try, and I have tried since before Roe v. Wade, I can see no way to protect the developing embryo from assault without assaulting the pregnant woman; in the language of this paper, forcing her to bear unwanted touching without her consent.
In the end, I think that's the difference between the two sides: one side thinks that assaulting women – and doing so because,/I> they are women – is not justified, and the other seems to think it's a minor detail. As someone once said, they will say a fetus is a person before they say a woman is.
Yep!! I have even heard some of the people here admit that yeah, pregnancy can be awful, but hey, the life of the unborn human overrides your right not to be disabled/injured/etc.
Interesting article here:
http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2013/01/22/originalist-argument-abortion-rights-compulsory-childbearing-during-antebellum-sl/
"Why should anyone be free to avoid the consequences of their freely chosen actions, especially at the expense of another's life?"
Who says they are?
"And, unless you're going to extend fathers the option of skipping out on
child support- this 'choice' about parenting after the fact… is only
available to women."
You're right, which is precisely why I would advocate extending fathers an opt-out where abortion is available without effective barriers.
"There's really only an ethical case to be made for abortion in rape
cases… Which to my ear, means the women's health issue is really
about ending rape. So, pro-choicers: let's work together on ending rape
altogether!"
An ethical case can be made for the general permissibility of abortion on the grounds of bodily autonomy alone. So please let's work together not only to end rape, but also to make abortion generally available to whoever wants it!
"Abortion is an effort to avoid the consequences of freely chosen actions
(most of the time) at the expense of another's life. What else would
be the point of having an abortion except to avoid the easily
predictable consequences of having sex?"
What easily predictable consequences of having sex? If there is anything that isn't easily predictable, it is the consequences of having sex. And yes, that includes pregnancy.
"…Yeah, can't go with you on that, once the child is conceived- both parents are responsible, and should be held accountable by society. But I'm glad you see my point."
Wait a minute here. What do you mean I can't go with that? First you take issue with an inconsistency, but then say I'm not allowed to be consistent either? So your own double standard is noted.
"I just don't see any ethical case outside of rape. Women are grown-ups, we know how babies are made, and we understand the risks in choosing to have sex. No human has a right to kill another human. So I'm not on board with the generally available abortion idea."
An ethical case for the general permissibility of abortion builds on the same premise that prohibits rape. No one has the right to use another's body for their own purposes without consent. This is true when we are talking about rape. This is true when we are talking about slavery. This is true when we are talking about an unwanted pregnancy. Abortion is therefore just as permissible as killing someone who tries to rape or enslave you.
"What do you think we should do to end rape? I think reporting needs to be easier, and I think we need a clearer understanding of what rape is."
I think reporting does need to be easier. But there are reasons other than lack of ease in reporting that need to be addressed as well. Example include but are not limited to: fear of reprisal, anxiety about having her conduct scrutinized, guilt and embarrassment, and self-blame. We also need to address the reasons why people don't report rape beyond the difficulties of the reporting process.
And having a clearer understanding of what rape is would also help. There are cases where rape is obvious. There are cases where it is obvious a rape has not been committed. But that still leaves a lot of room in the middle. And as it so happens, I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about that middle.
So I wouldn't mind having a discussion on that topic. However, this particular blog post might not be the best place for that conversation. Do you already have a suitable place to hold it? If not, I have an idea.
That's not punishment. That's their responsibility as fathers.
So, you support men walking away from their children as if they don't exist, but think women should be forced to have them? Interesting.
I have to say, I never expected to find an anti-choice site to be a welcome home for MRA. Although it's hardly surprising, since both movements share the view that women are always the ones to punish, men never.
So, you're good with crochet hooks and wire hangers, then?
Uh huh.
The anti-choice movement is filled with the most blithe liars you'll ever come across.
Do they know that sometimes conception becomes cancer? That gestation sometimes creates diabetes? Have they heard Karen Santorum's emotional story of almost dying before prematurely delivering a nonviable fetus that she "lovingly" cradled as it slowly suffocated to death?
That will happen when your born child or your elderly father wants to crawl inside your body and live there.
It's utterly amazing how you folks can't see the difference between living inside and because of someone else, and living outside and despite someone else. Utterly amazing because the difference is plainly obvious. Here's how you can know: can you see and touch the "person" you're concerned about, or can you only see and touch the woman whose body it's living in? That's not so hard to discern, is it?
So 40 weeks of gestation, and labor and childbirth, are minor details? So minor, you ignore them? One is left to wonder just why we get pregnant at all… obviously, all we really need to do is mix sperm and ovum in a Petri dish and voila: a bouncing, fully formed, living baby!
I already answered your idiotic contention that women become mothers at conception, but let me be more clear: about 75% of conceptions do not result in a live birth. ~50% result in your next period. Are you a mother every time you have your period? (You're the most prolific breeder of all timed, I guess.)
One out of four pregnancies end in miscarriage. Are those women mothers, too? Of what, a corpse? Do they keep it in a crib and dress it up, or what?
I've seen some delusional folks in my time, but you take the cake.
The unborn child is already there – the organs have been donated. If you donated your kidney to your toddler, you could not kill your toddler to get your organ back – see the difference?
So if you have let a man use your vagina for sex, you can't withdraw consent, because your organ has been permanently donated to his penis?
He can occupy your body indefinitely?
Withdrawing his pecker won't kill him.
You stated that consent is a one time thing where continual use of your body parts is involved.
Clearly, it isn't.
Clearly, it is… when someone's LIFE is on the line. A life created by the woman. A life she should have a responsibility to CARE for.
Nope.
She can and SHOULD exert control over whether or not she reproduces. I absolutely support women taking charge their reproduction—BEFORE conception. But once conception has occurred, i.e. reproduction, then what has been done cannot be undone without killing an innocent being.
So you just want to control the sexual lives of people who are not you.
Yep.
Nope. I don't have the right to temporarily use your organs without consent and neither does a prenate.
Also, disability and death from pregnancy = permanent
For the rest of my comment I mean that the man who got me pregnant (who wouldn't be a father since no baby would exist) would be my boyfriend and he would support my choice for an abortion 100%
Women will also have fun if they aren't forced to suffer through the misery of pregnancy.
Good friends? No. Friends and acquaintances, yes. They don't think abortion should be criminalized, to my knowledge, but have sometimes said they think it's wrong. They show no judgement against others that I've detected, though.
Family members? I marched in pro-choice rallies with my mother-in-law, who had a terrifying kitchen table abortion in the 60s, and doesn't think women's lives and health should be threatened like that, and left to untrained strangers. She had an abusive husband at the time, and two young children – one of whom became my husband – at home when she got pregnant again. All three of them were beaten, burned and verbally abused continually, including my husband in his crib, and she knew she was leaving that man. Another baby just wasn't in it. (You know, that "euphemism" about women's and children's safety and health?)
My mother didn't want me, as she made clear throughout my childhood, but she did do one caring thing that particularly stays with me. When she detected I was becoming voluntarily sexually active at age 15, she brought me to her Gyn and put me on the Pill, with such alacrity – within a week – I still smile at the memory. Her message to me was clear: stay in charge of your own future. She didn't; got pregnant young and as a result got married to a mentally ill man, my sexually abusive father, who later poked holes in his condoms to impregnate her with me. No Pill, and abortion was illegal, then. So the "loving couple" had a precious little girl he could spoil and occasionally slug, and my mother could take her frustration out on, being "responsible" for the children. At any rate I can safely say she was a deeply pro-choice woman, having lived a life where her choices and wishes mattered to pretty much no one.
In part, I am pro-choice in her honor; human beings simply should not be trapped like that. One stupid teenaged roll in the hay shouldn't be followed by a lifetime of misery. Perhaps one has to grow up as the precipitating agent and target of some of their mother's rage, frustration and depression to understand why women shouldn't be forced to have babies they don't want.
Just call him/her/it a troll.
In reality? No. I was first sexually abused at age 4. Did I have a choice? Nope.
Should women be free to decide whether, when and with whom they have sex? Absolutely.
They should also be free to decide whether, when and with whom they have babies. (You do know that people have sex for reasons other than having babies, right?)
Sex may be the start of reproduction (although not always, see IVF) but reproduction is not compulsory following sex.
Look, it's simple: do you think men should be forced to sire children? If not, why not? It's a natural fact that no human baby has been born without a man being involved, isn't it? Why can they decide NOT to have children? They're denying life to possible future babies, aren't they?
Now, apply that same criteria to women.
Trolls can change names but the comments remain the same. A troll by any other name… And all that.
I have never once seen you contribute to a comment thread. All you do is childishly accuse pro choicers of being trolls.
Are you incapable of contributing for some reason?
There are many pro choice and even some pro-life comments I disagree with and generally leave alone because of the manner in which they express themselves. Trolls are not interested in discussion they are seek controversy and waste space on blog sites. You have shown yourself to fall into the later category.
Pregnancy can 'un'happen.
No one is dying when pregnancy is aborted. Someone who never lived will not be born. There really is a difference. Before you say "but they're alive!" let me remind you that they're not alive by themselves, and have no awareness.
In your car accident scenario, maybe a working limb, not to mention an undamaged car, IS being taken from someone, who IS aware of it.
Bad analogy.
They never talk about all the man who heave a huge sigh of relief after an abortion, do they?
"Society" isn't undoing accidental pregnancy. A woman is, in the privacy of her own medical care.
Women are entitled to seek private medical care, aren't they?
Society has to decide if that medical care is safe and accessible, or not. Deliberately making it unsafe and inaccessible is punishment without due process of law. "Oh, I'm sorry, did you lose your uterus because you poked at it with a knitting needle? You're own fault."
That's barbarism.
Seriously, people need abortions so there WON'T BE A BABY in the future.
You're the one who can't tell the difference between a baby and a zygote, not us.
It amounts to depriving women of their right to life.
Not all pregnant women will die, but we know that some will. We don't know which, but some.
Therefore, while you may not be depriving all women of life, you absolutely are depriving all women of their RIGHT to life. You're saying that females just have to die during pregnancy, sorry. No right to life for anyone with a functioning uterus. (No right to life for half of humanity – astonishing anyone thinks that's "pro" life?)
But that's only if women don't have a choice whether or not to stay pregnant. If they choose, they take the risk freely. If they don't, you strip them of their rights.
So, you assign rights to people based on percentages?
Funny. I thought rights were inalienable.
That's more than an interesting article; it's a devastating one. Thanks for the link.
Wonder if anyone on this site would ever read it?
We don't call you that as a slur.
We call you that because, as you say, that's what you are, so we have to call you something, because what you are not is pro life. Calling you "pro biological existence for men and embryos but not pregnant girls and women, without caring much about actual life and the people who live it" is kind of a mouthful.
No one is pro-abortion. Got any evidence of people advocating that women should get abortions for the sake of having one?
Of course not. It is pro baby killer propaganda
When I cite sources, I generally use non biased evidence. Hehee. One time I had to use Fox News to prove to a Catholic forced birther that pregnancy can kill a 9 year old. He was going on about how old enough to bleed = old enough to breed (safely)
Don't you love how its often ignorant men who assume that pregnancy is all daisies and buttercups?
When is a door not a door?
Who's going to take care of the children she already has?
You?
(LOL)
http://liveactionnews.org/does-sympathy-for-abortive-women-weaken-the-pro-life-cause/#comment-1505223754
She's been MIA for my posts, this last day. Interesting, that.
Yep… once it is born they say if you can't afford a kid don't have sex.
Indeed. Strange, isn't it?
I always say some people will have to attend a funeral or two to "get it" but I'm afraid that won't even get through to them.
Caring for yourself = selfish (but only for women). Not self esteem, but self
Just like liberty = "convenience" (but only for women).
"Why does the child suddenly become "his body" once it's born?"
It's a magic birth canal or "non-person" magically transformed into a baby by C-section. That's science! :O
Because prior to birth the fetus is not an autonomous being.
Gestation is a construction process, and the prenate is incomplete and unformed. It isn't even sentient.
Sure, let's do it. How do you propose to go about that?
Oh, I wanted those plants. They just didn't develop into plants.
I didn't accuse the parent plant of committing the murder of their "offspring." I just bought some plants.
*raises an eyebrow*
So, it's not a person until he passed through the birth canal and comes out as person like a magic ward?? Okay, I see.
You make it sound like having a baby is this easy-peasey thing that hardly effects girls or women at all. Go look up the story of "My Lost Son" about a woman who voluntarily gave up her baby for adoption in the 60s. She recently discovered he fell six miles out of the sky and died in the Lockerbie bombing at age 21. If possible, find a way to see and hear her. Your fantasy that women have babies and everything's right in their world will end, unless you're a sociopath.
One of the consequences of having sex is having an abortion. Women have been having abortions for as long as there have been people. Completely predictable.
Another consequence of conceiving is having a miscarriage, and no baby being born. Also, completely predictable.
Another consequence of conceiving is the woman dying of a complication of pregnancy or childbirth. Totally predictable.
You value a potential future life over the actual current life of a girl or woman, that's all. To add insult to injury, you pretend she isn't the one making that life possible in the first place. It just exists, like magic!
That's why we call you folks misogynists. Because women do not exist for you as human beings, just as uteri on legs. What they want, what they feel, what they experience, if they die, if they want to "wail and wail and wail and never stop" 50 years after giving birth? No matter.
Well, half those babies will be female. At the onset of menstruation, they'll cease to be people, with rights, just like their mothers. So spare us your phony concern about people. You don't give a flying leap what happens to half of them, right off the bat.
Women are grown-ups; children and teenagers are not. They get pregnant, too. Got an exception for them?
No one is killing a human being in an abortion; they're choosing not to create one. Since it's their body which does the creating, they get to choose whether to, or not.
I shudder to imagine what a girl who believes women don't have the right to control their own bodies for 40 weeks thinks constitutes a "clear understanding" of what rape "really is." Let me tell you what it is: sexual penetration without the woman's permission.
Like using her uterus against her will and having her push a baby out of her vagina because you think she must whether she wants to, or not. Rapists think women must turn their vaginas and uteruses over to others, too.
Because you continue to consider a brainless embryo as being individual, attached to no one. But that's not true. They are attached to someone: the person whose body is creating them in the first place.
Because you cannot create babies without women. And you think women should have no agency in deciding whether to go through the process of creating a baby.
You also cannot assign rights to embryos who live INSIDE OF ANOTHER PERSON without stripping that other person of their rights. You simply can not do it. In the first place, how do you propose to discover if a woman is pregnant, or not? Why she isn't pregnant when she was? When she had intercourse and might have become pregnant? Why is what's going on INSIDE ANOTHER PERSON even remotely your business?
But you don't want the day to day responsibility of any of that; you want the government to do it for you. Where does it say the government can search and seize people's bodies without due process of law. Do you think the government has the right to know when you have sex?
Once you've stripped a person of their fundamental rights without due process, you have ipso facto removed all moral value from them.
The cartoon is trying to sneak in the assumption that an embryo firstly has either the capability of or the right to a 'choice', and secondly, that it somehow has special rights that no other human being has, that allow it the right to own another person's body, because of it's 'very life', and that a person must therefore make choices that favor the embryo rather than themselves.
** I thought I was all for women, and men, doing whatever they want with their bodies until it hurts someone else.**
So, can I assume you're in favor of forcing people to donate blood, marrow, and kidneys on the same basis?
They seem to be testing two different main directions: "women" and "reproductive."
Both have been around a while. And all we need to do is question their broad name but narrow focus. "You say you're for women's rights, but I'm not seeing any outrage against women being stoned to death for getting raped." "You say you're for reproductive health, but I've not heard a word about the alarmingly high c-section rate in the US."
**Just as if you were to put a child into a burning building, you would be responsible for what happens to them there, if you put a child into your/ your female partner's uterus, you are responsible for what happens to them.**
If a child is put into a burning building, I can probably get photographs from the parents of the child, PRIOR to their having been put into the burning building. Can you get me photographs of the 'child' you claim is put into the uterus. Just one will do. Show me ONE single photograph of ONE single 'child' that has been 'put' into a uterus, at a point in time PRIOR to their having been 'put' there Or are you just babbling and trying to sneak in your assumptions about fertilized eggs and 'potential people' being the same as real people?
**2) If a woman does, through her own actions, become pregnant, she, and her partner become responsible for that new human life – at least to the extent to not kill it.**
Sorry, no. First of all, they don't become instantaneously 'responsible'. Secondly, you're trying to pull an equivocation fallacy with the word 'human' again. Thirdly, refusing to supply resources for someone in an unsustainable state does not equate to 'killing' them. They die of their own unsustainable state.
Please inform me when the law against shooting your father becomes "I must be forced to sell my house and donate my kidney against my will if my father's medical condition means his 'very life' depends on it."
Are you literate in the English language?
Rebekah, the way it erases the moral value from woman (and everyone else) is in two ways:
1. You cannot give the embryo 'rights' to own the woman's body without taking away her rights. It is impossible.
2. It's also impossible, for other reasons, to create value, where none really exists (regardless of how much some people like to pretend it does). This is why the 'no child left behind' program in schools is such a failure. There is NO way, no matter how much money and effort is poured into it, to turn an idiot into a genius. However, the opposite is not true, you can turn a genius into an idiot by screwing up their education. Which is the ONLY way the 'No Child Left Behind' program works. By lowering everyone to the lowest possible intellectual level and value. If no child gets ahead, then no child is left behind.
Ditto for the supposed value of fertilized eggs. They have very little value, regardless of how much pro-lifers like to pretend otherwise, and the ONLY way to make their pretense work (since there is no way to create value where none exists) is to reduce the value of real people, with real brains, to nearly zero, or the same value that fertilized eggs – without the pretense – really have.
What is a person?
That's one way to let the trolls take over. Which is why I don't ignore trolls on RH Reality Check. Thedoorisajar is not a troll. You, however, I cannot say for certain.
So? It has his DNA in the womb too. But it's not his when it's in the womb.
Yea and embryos become fetuses become people. That's science too, but you chose to ignore that part.
Oh it's not human? What is it, a badger? And you obviously don't know too much about the most commonly done abortion procedure if you think "they die of their own unsustainable state" Gosh you are full o' silliness.
If women don't want abortions, why does the abortion industry exist? Your argument makes no sense =)
try and ultra sound. Man lady, you are weak.
If you removed a non-viable embryo by c-section, it would *still* die, because it can't survive upon disconnection from the woman's organs.
Even if you ejected it whole, by disconnecting the placenta from the uterus, or simply cut off blood supply to the uterus, it would die because it cannot survive without the woman's body to perform all of life's functions for it.
So, how it is removed is *irrelevant* and I bet you'd still oppose abortion if every embryo was ejected whole, amirite?
Your argument makes no sense, as men do not house developing people within their bodies. Men are not forced to impregnate women and therefore cannot be "forced" to sire children. Your argument is that ending a life in the name of bodily autonomy is totes cool and empowering? Yea I beg to differ.
The temporary exercise of abortion overrides the autonomy of the unborn in a permanent way. It infringes the rights of a person who has been effectively disenfranchised by an industry looking to sell something.
So? May autonomy doesn't give me a right to anyone else's body but my own. So why should a prenate have a special right that no one else has?
Because a prenate is not a body part, it is it's own body. That's an easy question. Think of a harder one.
It infringes the rights of a person who has been effectively disenfranchised by an industry looking to sell something.
Even if there was no abortion industry, women would *still* abort – with pills, poisons, coathangers, herbs, menstrual extraction and falling down stairs.
So? I'm my own body, that still doesn't give me a right to use the body of another as life support without their explicit and ongoing consent.
I'm done arguing with someone who sees the fetus as nothing more than a worthless parasite to be removed at the slightest convenience. You know the risks of pregnancy when you have sex. Take proper precautions at that moment. Accept responsibility for your actions before the fact rather than forcing someone else to suffer at your own will.
Stop strawmanning my position.
Whether or not a prenate is a 'parasite' as you put it, or a person is utterly irrelevant.
Albert Einstein would *not* have a right to anyone's body as life support, no more than a zygote.
That right does *not* exist.
Accept responsibility for your actions before the fact rather than forcing someone else to suffer at your own will.
Embryos can't suffer. They have no self. They won't miss not existing because they don't even have a functional brain.
I tried you never answered my question you just cut and paste something to make you sound scientific-y and when I asked if that was your final authority you never answered my question just got all huffy and started calling me cupcake. I doubt you even understood what you cut and pasted as by that authority you would have to renounce abortion at the 25 week as they would by your assertion of brain functionality be a person. However your futher comment contradict this statement.
Yeah, it's called a citation. Got a problem with citations? And, considering your habit of 1) stalking me 2) not contributing to comment threads *other* than to accuse me of being a troll…
It sure sounds to me like you're the troll, doesn't it?
As for my citations, I prefer to let the experts speak. Also, knowing you, if I had chosen to go without citations, you would have accused me of trolling because you are profoundly dishonest and have a bone to pick for some childish reason.
But, it's pretty simple. I will explain. Consciousness arises from the thalamus and the cerebral cortex. An anencephalic baby, for instance, will never attain consciousness because it lacks a cerebral cortex. In a fetus, the brain is wired up differently than in a sentient infant or adult. The very necessary thalamcortical connections that enable consciousness do not start to form until past 20 weeks, and are not fully formed until 25 weeks gestation. From 25 weeks on up cortical processing is possible, and the fetus gains the capacity for sentience. Current evidence points towards the thalamus and cerebral cortex being fully functional at 28-30 week gestation.
The other stuff I pasted, about EEG readings, simply explains that prior to 25 weeks gestation, a fetus/embryo has the same brainwaves that are present in a corpse. The brainstem is functional, but there is no conscious mind.
A mind is what makes a person, not a body. This should be obvious. We value human life for our minds, not our bodies. This is why beating heart cadavers (living body but no mind), permanently comatose patients and anencephalic babies are not kept alive indefinitely. e do NOT associate personhood with a life human body – we associate it with the MIND.
So, the question for pro-lifers is, why should a non-sentient zygote/embryo/pre viability fetus be treated as a person when it' can't function like one?
Do you have an answer to that, my little stalker?
Corpses do not have brain waves off any type.
Are 25 week preborn babies now persons as they now have sentient brain waves? Or do you have more criteria for their exclusion?
Yes. Are you? Or are you just engaging in the usual game of attempting to handwave away the physical effects of pregnancy and birth on a woman?
Sorry, but our uterus only has but one function, to host another human life. You talk as though you have never even thought about your own body. The baby/child/pre-born/fetus whatever you want to call a human being at that stage of development, doesn't invade our body like the movie "alien" (great movies by the way). Our uterus is designed specifically for growing a human being. Of course we control our bodies but our rights end where another's begin, would'd you agree? A lot of children are conceived but unwanted, is that a reason to kill them just because I have a right to do what I want with my body? By that philosophy I could choose to blow myself up in a movie theatre and take the lives of hundreds…hey it's my body and I have supreme control over it…hmm I don' think you'd agree.
Naturalistic fallacy + gender essentialism
Come back when you have a valid argument.
PS: the vagina was "made" for the penis. That does not mean that penises are entitled to any and all vaginas.
Which part? Are you saying that since the uterus is designed to host life that is a gender essentialism? About the naturalistic fallacy are you saying it is ok to kill if you do jot want a child? Because I don't think it is
Your entire post was that "pregnancy is good because the uterus was designed for it"
^naturalistic fallacy + gender essentialism
It also objectifies women and reduces them to a body part, an easy bake oven
Come up with a more convincing argument. I am patient.
You might want to re-read my comment because it is clear you have misunderstood. Did I say pregnancy is good because the uterus was designed for it? Ok did you re-read? I did not. I sat the uterus was designed to host a baby. Secondly I think we can both agree that the direct and intentional taking of another human's life is wrong.
Actually, the implied goodness of pregnancy is right there in your statement. The uterus was made for the unborn, therefore pregnancy, even if forced, is good and wonderful.
Intentional killing is wrong. So you can't kill your rapist? The one who is using your vagina because that particular body part was designed for his weewee?
You are still speed reading, my friend, try again
And what responsibility is that?
Whatever the prenate may be, the one thing it is not is autonomous. And no, its rights are not infringed by abortion.
Actually, men can be forced to sire children. We call that rape.
I re read it. I'm still correct.
No person or thing is entitled to your body, even if they can "use" certain body parts of yours.
Ultrasounds can only be taken once the fetus has conceived. Ann specifically asked for a photograph taken *before* it was "placed" in the uterus.
Wait let me understand you, this time, forgive me, you are saying that you were using one of your mother's body parts at one time in your life
It's your argument that makes no sense. Do you want emergency medical treatment? If not, how do you account for the existence of the emergency medical treatment industry?
Yes. Proto – me was not entitled to that uterus.
Ok just wanted to be clear on that. You might want to check out "the radiance foundation" the founder was conceived in rape, you might be interested in his unique perspective. I enjoyed dialoguing with you, and am thankful there are platforms for civil conversations. After all being a liberal used to mean being able to dialogue about ALL points of view. Much luck to you my friend!
So you believe that rape victims should be forced to give birth because their uteri were "designed" for pregnancy?
Hey, I was sarcastic. =)
Person = human; human = person.
Well, I really tried to unseen ZEF as a "disease"/"parasite", but I can't. I still see him "baby"/"person" inside…
Are women being stoned to death for being raped in the USA? Really?? I hadn't heard about that, but YES that is a reproductive justice issue. Unfortunately, we have more than enough work to do right here. Plus, if you aren't hearing this as a reproductive justice issue, you just haven't been listening. We are also very alarmed at the high rate of C-sections, particularly where they are forced on women. I've read no less than a dozen articles about this very thing on the RHRC site in the last few months alone. So, while you might wish people here would swallow your BS hook, line and sinker, I'm sorry to inform you that you are either mistaken or lying.
What is not viable to begin with cannot be rendered "non-viable" by abortion. Non-viable is it's normal condition. It's unfit for life outside the body of a woman, and guess what? We don't have to fork over our bodies on your say-so. Our bodies do not belong to you, the state, or any random act of biology. They belong to us alone. You know what they call someone who isn't the rightful owner of his/her own body, right? They call that slavery.
Erm, NO. My vagina is designed to receive a penis during intercourse. That doesn't mean I won't KILL anyone who tries to do that without my consent. You are making a fallacious argument, and an insulting one to boot. Make no mistake. My uterus is MINE, and I alone will decide what it will or will NOT be used for. YOU get to mind your own business, and my uterus isn't even remotely your business.
Your entire post is pure, unadulterated BS. There is no "which part." The answer would be the entirety of your comment, starting with your proclamation on the purpose of our uteri and ending with your ridiculous analogy of blowing up a movie theater. If the movie theater were inside my body, I would have the right to do with it as I please. But the movie theater is NOT inside my body and isn't under my control, so FAIL, Fail, fail.
Don't fall for it's gaslighting. That's exactly what it said.
With consent, obviously. My mother wasn't forced to birth me.
Yes she is. YOU, I'm not too sure about.
Let's get one thing straight, cupcake… There are no "competing rights" to the use of my body. There is ONE person, and ONLY one person with that right, and that is ME. NOBODY else has ANY right to my body, full stop.
Exactly. And neither men nor women are compelled to bodily donation for the benefit of a child. Whether or not you consider an embryo a child. I don't. But even if I did, it would have no more rights than my born children have, and that doesn't include an entitlement to any of my tissues. Not for nine months. Not for nine minutes. My consent is required for that.
No, they really DON'T become responsible to that new entity. That's YOU saying that, and you may really believe it. What you believe is irrelevant to me.
Yeah that's pretty crazy. A child in a bathtub is obviously NOT in an unviable condition, or you wouldn't be putting it into a bathtub. You'd be sending it to the funeral home. Anything that needs my body to sustain it's life? That's under MY control. I am not obligated to fork my body over to anyone, born or unborn.
No, sweetie. That's *YOUR* fallacy. To wit: you have no right to force me to breathe for you, unless you're a fetus, and then it's totes OK. NO IT IS NOT OK.
Key phrase = "some one else." Some one else can stand behind me in the checkout line. Some one else can get me a cup of coffee. Words have meaning. I do not become two people the moment the sperm hits the egg.
There is no "person" and no "child" and conceiving isn't a negligent or malicious act resulting in harm. Even if that were your argument, let me tell you what the law says about damages. You are responsible NOT to unjustly enrich the fetus by gestating it. You are responsible for returning the "wrongfully conceived" fetus to the state it was in prior to the "negligent act." Guess what condition that would be? That's right… non-existence.
No, actually it IS a choice. Next dumb argument?
Well GOODIE! Cause guess what? There are no two-year olds with an entitlement to a donation of my body for their use.
Organ donation will never be mandatory. Do you hear me? NEVER. And my body is NOBODY'S "food, housing and safety."
They are using their organs to support their own lives. That's what.
Nonsense. I have sex to get an orgasm. I never once had sex to get pregnant.
I do not become two people the moment the ovum meets the sperm.
Yep. It's every bit as extraordinary as any other bodily donation.
You probably should not have an abortion.
If I become pregnant and I do not want it and/or I cannot care for it, it is out of me.
You may do as you like.
NOPE! I can consent to bone marrow transplant and change my mind in the midst of the procedure, and they MUST stop the procedure, even if it's to save a life.
Secondly I think we can both agree that the direct and intentional taking of another human's life is wrong.
…………..
No. We cannot agree on that. Why? Assisted suicide and killing in defense of oneself or others is not wrong. Further, we do war and police work which also involves the intentional taking of life. We differ as to whether such is wrong.
I am PRO life so naturally I am PRO choice. You are not pro life you are quite simply pro birth.
Illegal abortion and sepsis and hemorrhage in childbirth are the three leading causes of maternal death worldwide. Abortion and contraception are human rights.
I am pro abortion for any woman who wants an abortion.
I am pro birth for any woman who wants to give birth.
I am pro women handling their own sexual/family lives without coercion.
not donating your bone marrow is not intentionally killing someone. big difference.
Parents have a responsibility to take care of their offspring -i.e. provide them basic food and shelter. That responsibility starts when their offspring is created – at fertilization.
But you're not pro-future-women. You don't mind if they get slaughtered by the millions.
Plum and I want all future "women embryos" to be slaughtered so that we can move to the moon, just the two of us, and enslave men on a vast male stripper sex farm.
It is a cunning plan.
"Gillette is mistaken. No one is pro abortion."
Then all of the people who say that they are pro-abortion must be lying.
As a side note, I want to point out that I am not making any judgments of people who claim to be pro-abortion.
"All we have to do is chemically castrate all males at puberty, and only reverse it when they can show the wherewithal to support a child, and an affidavit from a woman stating she wants his baby."
Serious question–is *chemical* castration 100% effective/efficient in regards to preventing pregnancy?
As a side note, I myself am certainly open to the idea of getting myself (physically or maybe chemically) castrated.
Damn … this sounds like something that one should make a movie about. 😉
"So, can I assume you're in favor of forcing people to donate blood, marrow, and kidneys on the same basis?"
I myself am politically ambivalent on the abortion issue, but I am open to the idea of coercing people to donate their body parts in certain specific cases.
Do you oppose the draft in *all* cases (which includes historical and hypothetical cases)? If so, then I have to say that I respect your consistency in regards to this.
"If an unborn human has a right to the body of a parent, why can't toddler also share that right?"
I myself am politically ambivalent on the abortion issue, but I *am* open to the idea of letting postnatal humans use other humans' body parts in certain specific cases.
Yes.
And if a draft is somehow absolutely necessary – think Red Dawn, then draft everyone equally.
What about a case where someone's kidney was donated to someone else without his or her consent due to a hospital mix-up?
You have the right to take it back
Keep in mind that at some point in the future, technological advances will probably eliminate the need for body part donations from other people in the first place. Thus, eventually this will probably essentially become a moot point.
I admire your consistency here, but are you sure that this is actually the case?
Thanks for clarifying this part.
In regards to Red Dawn, though, I haven't seen that movie, and thus, I will need to get back to you on this.
Also, I am assuming that you mean draft everyone who is capable, correct? After all, I don't think that a 100+ year old person would be capable of fighting in military combat at that age.
I would assume so, yes. This is theft we are talking about.
Of course.
Draft the Amazon women, specifically, before they get to the moon!
I am politically ambivalent on the abortion issue, but I will nevertheless eventually take a look at this article.
OK.
In regards to Red Dawn, I took an extremely quick look at it right now, and even in such a hypothetical situation, I myself am still tempted to oppose the draft due to the fact that the draft might put some/many people's lives at greater risk than would have been the case if these people end up under Soviet rule (and aren't drafted, obviously).
Good point. I suppose it would depend on the level of threat.
ISIS Dawn? That would be genocide.
You need to be more precise. "Human" is rather vague. By that definition, I could conclude that every cell in your body, beating heart cadavers, molar pregnancies, tumours, and Hela cells = persons
I suggest you work on your reading comprehension. (Probably too much to ask, since you only seem capable of stalking and trolling).A beating heart cadaver is not a corpse. Take Terri Schiavo – her body was alive, she had brainwaves, but NOT the kind of bilaterally synchronous waves that are associated with consciousness. Her higher brain was a gooey mass – she would never have regained sentience. However, her lower brain – the brain stem – was still alive, so she still had a wake/sleep cycle and her autonomic nervous system functioned. But SHE, her very self, was gone.
I am OK with the supreme court compromise in regards to 25wk viability. However, it must be very clear that abortion should be permitted for life, health and fetal deformity. And as Lady Black has repeatedly explained, a post viability abortion is usually a delivery. Induced labour is safer than natural birth and c-section/abortion. In certain cases, however, a dilation and extraction might be safest for the pregnant person.
You are also, apparently, labouring under the delusion that women wake up at 30wks and realize that they want to party hard, so they schedule an abortion. A third trimester abortion runs anywhere from 8,000$ to 25,000$. These things are not done on a whim.
It's a moot point now.
You skeeve me.
And it will work too. FemiNazis Unite!
So you want to compel self centered women with deadly faults to produce a child against their will? Do you dislike children?
We are not having PR trouble. The abortion approval rate has been greater than 50% for more than 40 years. AntiChoice has not been able to pass a personhood bill in Misssissippi. Mississippi.
Anybody who wants to make sure that abortion is there for poor women might want to take the
http://tacoorbeerchallenge.tumblr.com/
Another way to resist whackjobs like Faye is http://www.vochoice.org/
I am PRO life so naturally I am PRO choice. You are simply a Forced Birther.
4. "that is not what happens during pregnancy" – It's different only in that, like an infant, it's not yet developed the cognitive abilities humans have that other animals don't – what ethicists call personhood. Otherwise, pregnancy does involve making a dependent human organism and connecting it to your body in a way that can't be prematurely severed without being fatal. The pro-choice line is often that the prenate is being saved by compelling the gravida to allow the use of her body and that that's analogous to forcing an organ donation. Of course, that's just bunk. It's not a question of forced saving but of prohibited killing. Prenates aren't, like Thomson's violinist, terminally ill. The only saving that might occur with regard to the life of the prenate is saving it from someone trying to kill it.
3. "consent can be withdrawn
at any time." – Can you cause someone to need something to survive and
then choose to deny them what is necessary for survival? I suppose it's
incontrovertible you can. What is at issue is if it should be legal, and
it shouldn't.
you don't deserve to make that decision
You're assuming that we'd insist the biological mother raise the baby?
Approval for elective abortion (ie, not based on maternal health, birth defects, or rape but for economic or social reasons) has never been above 45%. It's been aroundd 40% since they've been polling – which is over 40 years.
Certainly, the defendant's attempt at home repair was what caused the floor to collapse so that her visitor became trapped in her basement – but to expect her to to take water and food down there would be allowing the victim to profit from use of the defendants' groceries.
Having non-procreative sex while female isn't a negligent act.
Yeah, she does deserve the right, because her body makes that eventual infant. A zygote isn't a baby.
no- you certainly do not
The law would view the accident as malpractice, and you could sue, but if take the organ back after it was implanted without the consent of the recipient that's a crime. There's 'no two wrongs make a right' justification of violence o "undo" an accident.
Yes, you do. That's organ theft. Whether or not it was intentional is irrelevant. Intent is not magic.
The recipient never had a right to your organ in the first place.
It's darkly comic for you to call yourself pro-life while insisting that you can select a set of scenarios when human life is disposable. It's like saying you're a free speech advocate, but only for speech you agree with.
You're a 'right to kill' advocate plain and simple.
It doesn't. They're just assuming that if you don't grant women this might that you don't value women. It's patently absurd but it makes them feel better about themselves to vilify pro-lifers this way.
Please elaborate on this part; I was under the impression that people nowadays still died due to not receiving body part (kidney and/or et cetera) donations in time; am I wrong in regards to this?
Absolutely not. I don't think self-centered women should be allowed to abuse their children in *any* capacity, whether that's killing them in a "clinic" or abusing them after they are born.
That's weird, because the survey of abortion as "morally acceptable" pretty clearly trends in our favor. But I guess anything's possible when you throw literally millions of dollars towards disinformation campaigns at an issue.
What part of being "PRO life" involves killing children in their mothers' uteri, exactly?
Children are born. There is a fetus in the womb. And women have only one uterus generally.
If you cannot get things like that straight, talking to you will an exercise in nothing.
Citation needed.
Nonsense. You do not think. You emote. They have really nice pills for hysterics these days.
Whose life are you 'pro,' Piscialetto? Clearly your own. Narcissism is so unattractive.
Are you for criminalizing abortion again? If so you are a Forced Birther.
"An other human being" can stand behind me in the check out line or get me a cup of coffee. Words have meaning.
Laughing at you.
http://tacoorbeerchallenge.tumblr.com/
TACO OR BEER CHALLENGE
YOU JUST EAT A TACO AND/OR DRINK A BEER AND DONATE TO AN ABORTION FUND.
Dingus, there's an interesting ethical problem regarding Siamese twins in a book by Barry Longyear. It involves 2 siamese twins, one killed a man while the other tried (to the best of his ability, given the body parts he was able to control) to prevent the murder, albeit unsucessfully. According to the law, the guilty twin was to get the death penalty. The other twin was offered surgery to seperate him from his 'brother' and refused. What to do? The guilty brother was shot, and the temporarily surviving brother was told he now had a short period of time to reconsider his refusal on that surgery.
**Oh it's not human? What is it, a badger?**
You either don't know what an equivocation fallacy is, or are deliberately trying to handwave your way out of it. Let's pretend that you are merely stupid. An equivocation fallacy is using a word first with one definition, to get people to agree to a particular argument, then trying to use the word with a different definition, in order to extend the argument and claim that it must be agreed to.
Case in point, abortionists like to do this a LOT with the word 'human'. They will first use the word 'human' in a mental sense, to get people to agree that 'humans' have a right to life, based on their status as individual creatures with functioning brains. They then like to sneakily switch to a BIOLOGICAL or GENETIC definition of the world 'human' and claim that since 'humans' have a right to life, and an embryo is 'human', therefore the embryo has a right to life.
Sorry, no. You forced birthers have pulled this equivocation fallacy regarding the word 'human' in the past, it didn't fool me then and it isn't going to fool me now. Nor will it stick if you keep pulling it, and you merely make yourself look foolish by doing so.
**If you put a person in a precarious situation,**
And I'm sure you can show me a photograph of this 'person' at a point in time BEFORE I put them in this 'precarious situation'.
Muslims have a rate of bad recessive genes 33 times higher than any other racial group, due to their frequently marrying their own cousins. That does not bode well for their prospects as world conquerers. In fact, it does not bode well for their prospects for mere survival.
**you can select a set of scenarios when human life is disposable.**
And the usual equivocation fallacy regarding the word 'human'. Again.
Faye is pretty hardcore. She's for jail time for women who make the wrong choice. See, Faye made the wrong choice, and now her life isn't what she had wanted it to be. So she wants to punish other women because of her bad choices.
Ockraz is a philosopher. Have fun.
Then I'm sure that he'll either have a clever explanation as to the reason why, other than their status as sentient creatures with a functioning brain, human beings would have ANY rights (and also why this reason would NOT apply to animals), or admit to his equivocation fallacy.
Is this the same guy who wrote the other book you mentioned? About the fellow who cloned prostitutes?
It was cloned 14 year old girls. And no, different book.
What's the title?
The books with the highly educated serial killer who cloned his victims are 'Aftermath' and 'Starfire' by Charles Sheffield. The book with the Siamese twin who was a murderer was either "Kill all the Lawyers" or "Keep the Law" by Barry Longyear. Not sure which, I have all 3 volumes in that series in one big book.
Thanks. Added to my Google books list.
That is a great thought experiment, from Sheffield.
If zygotes are rational and the same entity as a 14 year old, then it shouldn't matter, should it, if he kills then clones? It's just another developmental stage after all!
You might also be interested in the "Unwind" series of books. It proposes a society in which abortion is forbidden (because the little fertilized eggs are so vulnerable and cute and innocent) but between the ages of 13 and 18 (when a child is no longer so cute and innocent and vulnerable) if the parent wants, the child can be sent to the local hospital to be 'unwound', which means that their body is taken apart piece by piece, including the brain, and every part is transplanted into someone who 'needs it for their very life' due to injury or illness. Since every part of their body, including various slices of brain tissue, are all still alive, and thus all that precious "unique living DNA (sob, boo hoo hoo)" has all been preserved. Since the pro-lifers have handwaved away the importance of mind and consciousness, they should have no objection to such a thing.
Thanks! That is also interesting.
Anyway, I have far too much compassion for real people, who feel real pain, to be able to feel a whole lot for fertilized eggs with all the awareness of a paramecium. Which is one reason why I would willingly give a couple of pints of blood to someone like Morbius the Living Vampire (who in the comic books feels pretty extreme agony if he doesn't get enough blood) before I would give a single drop *unwillingly* to a fertilized egg. Mind you, that doesn't mean that I also wouldn't WILLING give my blood to a fertilized egg. I most likely would. But it would have to be willingly, and I would never advocate that anyone give blood to a fertilized egg, or Morbius, or the local bloodbank UN-willingly, and I place priority over real actual pain of real peopple over the fake pain and sad feelies of fertilized eggs.
I'm also still waiting for the pictures of the 'children' who supposedly are being shoved up women's vaginas and 'put' into their uterus… I don't expect such pictures will be produced any time soon, but I'm a patient person.
Because, sex is a negligent act, well, for persons with uteri, anyway.
It's funny watching them try to say that no, they don't think that non-procreative sex is a harmful act, yet, when they have to justify the 'duty' that a woman has to gestate that embryo, they have to start using analogies that cast non-procreative sex as a criminally negligent act.
A mass of contradictions really. Same as the gender essentialist one that says you can ONLY love women if you force them to gestate unwanted pregnancies – even those from rape. We adore women, which is why we ignore their own free will and treat them like mere appliances for the delivery of a baby.
Well, that's about it. They loudly insist that their position is not *really* about 'punishment for sex', then go into all sorts of arguments as to firstly why birth control shouldn't be used, and why abortion is permissable for rape, and 'your choice to have a child starts with your choice to have sex'. All of which is just a 5 page gerrymandering about why it really IS about punishment for sex. If they'd just flat out say so, their arguments would be a lot simpler. No more valid, mind you. But simpler.
They claim to be pro-sex and pro-bc here, yet they do nothing but talk shit about how Planned Parenthood is totes evil because it purposely sells ineffective bcp so that women will get pregnant and have to abort for the billion dollar abortion industry!
"Children are born." – Not when your side has its way.
"women have only one uterus generally. If you cannot get things like that straight, talking to you will be an exercise in nothing." – Notice the apostrophe is AFTER the "s" indicating multiple mothers. Exercise in Nothing? Talk about glass houses. Yeesh.
I wouldn't expect any tears. Given what you've said about your age, your getting pregnant is no more likely than Coyote or me becoming pregnant.
citation needed
I notice they have rather little to say about the billion-dollar circumcision industry. Apparently once a baby is born, and has served it's proper purpose of punishing the mother for sex, then that 'tiny little seperate vulnerable person' instantly loses all of HIS rights (that according to them, he had only a few minutes earlier, and how come a 'few short minutes' now suddenly make such a difference?), and his parents can have normal healthy body tissue amputated without the baby's consent due to vanity or their assorted neuroses about sex.
I'm waiting to see pictures of zefs invading womens bodies. Sounds kind of sci-fi!
Fine. It's not yet a 'person' in the philosophical sense, although it's a person in a legal sense in some localities, and in the vernacular sense of 'person' as merely 'someone' it's a legitimate (albeit ambiguous) use. Let's just say "entity" so we can get more than a sentence out without getting mired in questions about word choice.
Replace:
A) "If you put a person in a precarious situation"
with:
B) "If you put an entity in a precarious situation"
We can change the verb to accommodate your timeline objection too.
C) "If your actions cause an entity to exist in a precarious situation"
I want to change 'precarious,' though. It doesn't capture what we're really arguing about.
D) 'If one causes an entity to exist in a situation of where it's dependent upon you for survival…"
Plug that back in to KB's argument and we should be good to go.
If one causes an entity to exist in a situation where it's dependent upon you for survival, then can you kill it in order to extricate yourself from the situation.
If the entity is a squirrel, then you can. It depends on the moral status of the entity. If the entity has sufficient moral status you can't justify killing it based on the idea that its continued existence is a case of it assaulting or stealing from you. Talk about blaming the victim!
"Case in point, abortionists like to do this a LOT with the word 'human'" – Actually you and your beloved abortionists do it with the word, 'person.' You omitted the "anti."
"You either don't know what an equivocation fallacy is" – I think you know what it is, but lack the ability to recognize when it is and isn't being used.
"They will first use the word 'human' in a mental sense, to get people to
agree that 'humans' have a right to life, based on their status as
individual creatures with functioning brains." – No. We don't. You wrongly infer that it's 'based on their status as
individual creatures with functioning brains.'
We don't subscribe to your moral principles which require a "functioning brain" for moral status. We think that the claims you make to that effect are false.
You're assuming that we agree with a distinction based on these claims, and use the word with one sense as delineated by the distinction and then a different sense as delineated by the distinction, but we aren't. You're just trying to dump your baggage on us.
Wrongly inferring that we use the term differently is the error and it's yours.
PS: If a PLer asks you if you agree that 'humans' have a right to life, then you shouldn't think to yourself, "I going to assume that 'humans' refers to 'human persons," because you're answering a question that's not the one they asked. They meant the biological sense. You can't turn around later and accuse them of equivocation when they later use the biological sense. They're being consistent.
Most PLers don't say, "I don't mean human person" in the first instance, but it's not because they're being deceptive, it's because drawing that distinction wouldn't occur to them. PCers accuse them of essentially cheating based on assuming a common frame of reference that isn' there.
LOL – That's cute. You're still wrong tho'
And the meaning of human being involves coffee? 😛
Prenates meet the definition for human organism but don't meet the philosophical definition for personhood.
Human being is ambiguous. It can be used either way.
Yes- exactly.
**B) "If you put an entity in a precarious situation"**
Such as eating meat?
**If your actions cause an entity to exist in a precarious situation"** Such as eating meat, and you'd have to show me that the 'entity' was in existence either at or prior to the time I committed my 'actions'
**If the entity is a squirrel, then you can.**
You're trying to sneak in your equivocation fallacy about the word 'human' here, again.
**We don't subscribe to your moral principles which require a "functioning brain" for moral status. We think that the claims you make to that effect are false.**
And I'm sure you'll prove that point by ceasing to breath, since you kill thousands of bacteria every time you do.
Also, in regards to your claim that someones 'actions' caused an 'entity' to 'exist in a precarious situation', for that even to start to be valid, you'd have to explain how the fact that people have sex is the cause of how and why embryos have the particular stages of developement that they do, which is going to be difficult, since that was determined by evolution, long before human beings even existed on the planet.
I would also assume that if one is guilty of putting an entity in a "precarious situation" that if any harm befalls that entity while in that situation, you are ultimately responsible for its death etc.
Miscarriage = manslaughter, perhaps even murder
Bacteria are entities. They die by the thousands every time you breath. Breathing=murder
Muslims are a religious group, not a race. Islam is composed of members of all races.
Just reminding her of a fact.
Never said it was,
1. To me 'non-procreative sex' excludes coitus. So, it's oral, anal, mutual masturbation, "outercourse", etc.
2. If we define pro-creative sex as coitus, then engaging in pro-creative sex while intending to prevent reproduction is like doing the home repair which you know can cause the collapse unless you take measures to prevent it.
3. The precautions you take to prevent reproduction can fail even if you do everything right, but that's rare. It's like plane crashes. 99% of the time they involve pilot error. Here it may be more like 95-98%, but it's still the reason LARCs outperform other methods: you just can't use them wrong.
4. I don't see the importance of negligence. Does it matter if it was because of a negligent error or some other more excusable variety of error? Does it matter if the homeowner anchored the brace poorly or the brace was fabricated with a flaw. I'm still stuck in a sub floor with no food or water as a result of your project going sideways and it's still nonsense to characterize that as an unjust burden to impose on you.
The woman doesn't cause the prenate to need something to survive.
And why shouldn't it be legal? After all, there are a number of situations in which consent can legally be withdrawn at any time, especially when it comes to bodily autonomy.
There are no competing rights involved. No one may use another's body without consent. Period. Even if a prenate has rights, those rights do not include a claim on the woman's body. So all that matters is the woman's consent.
I gratuitously denied a gratuitous assertion made by Jess Tommassallo. But as you are well aware, I am quite willing and able to make a sustained argument on my assertion. Where would you like me to begin?
First: a minor point: zygotes are irrelevant. if we're talking about abortion because it's an embryo prior to implantation.
Second:
It's true an embryo isn't an infant, but an infant isn't a person. Assuming a mental ability standard for an embryo puts it somewhere between flatworm and a fish, but the same standard would put an infant somewhere between a frog and a pig. You're using the wrong standard unless you really think infants have that status. Normal people think infants have rights as much as people do because they're in the process of developing personhood. Embryos are too. They just started later.
You're welcome to say how you think the law ought to e, but that doesn't chaange what it is.
If A steals a necklace from B and gives it or sells it to C, then C can be forced to return the necklace, but we aren't talking about necklaces or about stealing.
If X goes to a hospital and they mistakenly take his kidney instead of fixing his hernia, and implant it in Y, then that's not stealing. It's a mistake, the same as if you remove a gall bladder rather than an appendix. If Y wants to give permission to put it back in X, that's fine. If not X is out of luck, because you can't cut it out of Y if Y refuses.
They did this on Law & Order years ago.
That's right, he didn't. However, taking it out involves cutting into her. Looking at your right to get back your body part and weighing it against her right to refuse being cut into, the latter wins out.
Control over one's body (ie, bodily autonomy) isn't considered a terribly important value. If it were, then you could use heroin, or be a prostitute, or sell a kidney and that would all be legal. The value that is treated as important is the opposite. It's not deciding what YOU CAN do to your body, but deciding what OTHERS CANNOT do to it (ie, bodily integrity). That's why the PC side has a weaker hand than they claim.
PCers say that a gravida should be able to act either surgically or pharmacologically affect a change to their bod to end pregnancy- a bodily autonomy claim… PLers say that prenates should be protected from having someone (fatally) damage their bodies- a bodily integrity claim + right not to be killed.
So on the first comparison
-moral status: gravida vs prenate
the PC side is stronger
but on the second comparison
-the claims: bodily autonomy (weak) vs bodily integrity (strong) + right not to be killed (very strong)
we're much stronger.
That's why the 'PLers don't value women' claim is bunk. It's not just woman vs fetus. It's the X of the woman vs the Y of the fetus. There's a second variable. Most PLers I talk to think prenates and gravidae have comparable moral status, but because of the difference between X and Y. you could think prenates only have a fifth the level of moral status and still favor their claim.
I find myself curious as to your contention that people like you assign 'moral value' to something, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the mind/brain. On that basis, exactly WHY would you claim that I have a right to kill squirrels, but not 'human beings'. Do 'human beings' have a cuter head? Did you spin a roulette wheel with all the species in the world and 'human beings' happened to come up on top?
1. I don't understand your meat example. Is the meat the entity (a cow/chicken) or the meat eating what is precarious (high cholesterol)?
2. Why are you using B anyway? My point was to modify to eliminate what was needlessly problematic. A-C were discarded. D doesn't have 'precarious' at all.
3. show me that the 'entity' was in existence either at or prior' – The change from B to C eliminated that issue.
4. 'You're trying to sneak in your equivocation fallacy about the word 'human' here, again.' – You're not even using the term right anymore.
re: fallacy
H = Human (unspecified)
Hs = Human (sci)
Hp = Human (person)
If I make an argument about Hp, but using H to denote Hp, and then extend the argument – still using H, but now referring to Hs, then that's an
equivocation fallacy. That's not what is happening.
Generally, what is happening is that you believe personhood is a necessary condition for moral status, and hearing H in the context of moral status interpret it to be Hp. When a PLer makes clear use of Hs, you see an incompatibility – except based on your (mis)interpretation. The PLer meant Hs consistently.
Specifically with regard too, "If the entity is a squirrel, then you can." – I'm saying that if one causes an entity to exist in a situation where it's dependent
upon you for survival, then you can't kill it in order to extricate
yourself from the situation – provided that it's the sort of thing that has moral rights.
If the entity is your sister, then it has moral rights & you can't kill it.. If it's a cricket then it doesn't and you can. Which category does a human prenate belong to?
Saying that asking the question is employing a fallacy is just nuts.
Maybe you think that personhood is a nec cond for having moral rights. You're free to your opinion. I think it isn't a nec cond. You don't get to say I'm using a fallacy every time I say H or Hs and talk about the moral rights that human has because of that opinion.
While I do think personhood is a suf cond, I (and all other PLers) think it's not the only suf cond. Therefore, saying 'Hs have rights' isn't a fallacy. It might be false, just like saying 'personhood is a nec cond for moral rights' might be false. It's not a fallacy.
?????? ? ? ??????? ? ???????? ? ? ??????? ? ? ??????? ? ? ??????? ? ? ??????? ? ? ??????? ? ? ?
Use D, not A-C
You say two incompatible things:
> "There are no competing rights involved.">"No one may use another's body
without consent."
There's a problem.
The prenate has a body.
Abortion injures the body fatally. It to does so to end the mothers pregnant state. In effect, catastrophic harm to the body of the prenate is used as a cure for the gravida's unwanted pregnancy.
Unless the prenate, or some surrogate making decisions to protect the interests of the prenate, gives consent (which is a possibility with severe birth defects), the abortion itself violates your prohibition.
There necessarily are competing rights -unless- you deny the possibility of prenatal rights.
**I don't understand your meat example. Is the meat the entity (a cow/chicken)**
So, basically your use of the word 'entity' and the claims that the mind was irrelevent to moral status were both complete bullshit, and now you're pretending to be stupid and claim that you don't understand why (absent the mind as you claimed) a cow or chicken would be considered an 'entity' or being shipped off to the slaughterhouse would be considered a 'precarious situation'. I don't for a minute believe you are actually that stupid, so your use of the word 'entity' apparently was simply meant to be synonymous with 'human' from the get-go, while deceptively pretending that it meant something else.
This seems so self-evident as to go without saying. Did I misunderstand you somehow?
I remember you now! Yes, we had a long discussion about six months ago. 🙂
Apologies, but at the time there were a number of us, not SPL exactly, but atheist PLers (most of whom are in SPL, but we've got our own haunts on FB where we can say anything we like about religio's) and I think we were still dealing with at least six or seven people apiece. I only remember three people, and everyone else kind of blurred together. I enjoyed our conversation. There was something that you said that really stuck with me. I'll go get it…
Here…
"You may personally be the exception to the rule, but PL doesn't argue the negative right not be killed. It asserts a
positive right to life. But strangely enough, that right is only accorded to the fetus."
Around the same time pregnancy charges by the month and requires organ loss. 9_9
Wonderful. I once had a pipe full of liquid ammonia blow up in my face. Someone who examined it told me I was the only person he ever heard of who survived having that happen, but since *I* survived and am just fine, I take it you'll have no objections to my putting ammonia gas into the bedrooms of your two children.
Or are you handwaving away the fact that simply because some (or one) person survives a particular experience and is just fine, that says nothing about whether others will or not.
Does diabetes qualify (loss of kidney function)? Teeth falling out? Prolapsed uterus? Death?
The fact that you went through pregnancy 'just fine' says absolutely nothing about whether others will, much less whether they should be required to take that risk, any more than the fact that I survived having a pipe full of liquid ammonia blow up in my face says anything about whether others can, or should be required to, experience the same thing.
I'm not impressed by your idiotic argument of generalizing from the single example, your lack of medical knowledge, or your smileys. How old are you? 16?
Neither pregnancy nor having a pipe full of ammonia is a cakewalk. The fact that you survived one, and I survived the other 'just fine' says absolutely nothing about what the effects will be on others, much less that they should be required to risk the effects of either against their will. Nobody should be forced to do either against their will. Not because of your or my sad feelies. Not for my or your 'very life'. Not for the embryo's 'very life'. Not for '9 short months'. Not for '9 short seconds'.
Don't be an ass bag. I asked you to clarify because your comment was badly written and confusing.
"If you put an entity in a precarious situation" – modified quote originally from KB (I replaced person with entity.)**
You: "Such as eating meat?"
Really? You thought that was clear and my not following was feigning being obtuse?
Who in "eating meat" is putting whom in a precarious situation? It's not even a tiny bit obvious that you meant farm animals. Leading animals to slaughter is certain death. Once you're eating them they are dead. Nothing in that situation meets the definition of 'precarious.'
"I find myself curious as to your contention that people like you assign 'moral value' to something, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the mind/brain" – I never said it has absolutely nothing to do with the mind/brain.
NOTE: I'm going to talk about 'mental activity' rather than minds or brains. What a mind is, is a question that's super complicated and should probably be avoided if at all possible given that we're already having trouble with human and person. Brains aren't important in and of themselves. They're only significant because they're the nexus of all our mental activity. I'm going to say, 'mental activity' rather than 'thoughts,' because it avoids type/token questions. Someone might say, "at that moment he had the same thought as his best friend," but their mental activity would still be unique even if you use 'thought' in sense that would allow for them to be the same.
OK. There are two broad views.
A) The first view says that humans are a type of thing, which is obviously true for human in the species sense. Humans are the type of thing that produce a special variety of mental activity. That mental activity is what gives them moral value, but it's they and not the activity which possess the value. All humans (in the species sense) are of this type and have moral value.
B) The other view is about what makes killing wrong. When a person is killed, it's not wrong based on what experience she's having at the time. You could kill someone instantly so that they were never aware it happened, but that doesn't make it less wrong to kill them. What makes killing wrong isn't based on past experiences either. It's wrong because you're robbing someone of a future which would have value for them. This is true for human persons, but it's also true for a normal fetus. It's true during the entire life of the human organism.
The biggest difference between A & B is that B poses no objection to euthanasia, which many PLers oppose. In fact, B comes from a bio-ethicist who advocates euthanasia as the most moral option in some circumstances. B itself doesn't go that far. You could take a B-type view and oppose euthanasia, but you'd have to import a reason from somewhere else.. A implicitly opposes euthanasia . You can certainly support euthanasia while holding A, but you have to import an argument that that trumps A's anti-euthanasia presupposition..
Both views are alike in that they identify 'you' with the organism that generates mental activity rather than viewing the mental activity as what defines you, with the organism being merely incidental. Another way to look at it is to say that these views (but especially A) see you and me as mental activity generators, as opposed to "mind" focused views which consider 'you' and 'me' to denote the mental activity and make the body/organism more like either a container or a medium for the activity .
It occurs to me, that you didn't know what 'precarious' meant, and that that's actually what caused the whole problem. Just be less shitty next time.
"if the mind is irrelevent to moral status… on what grounds exactly do you include my sister, but not the squirrel' – Are you suggesting squirrels have no mind? That's interesting. I'd say squirrels definitely do have a mind. How do you define mind so that squirrel lack them?
"You've claimed that the mind is irrelevant to moral status" – No. I said that I rejected the claim that having a functioning mind is necessary for moral status. I never said there was no relationship of any kind – just not the relationship you specified.
"moral status is somehow granted merely by being genetically similiar to oneself" – Genetics are unimportant in and of themselves..
Explain "a pipe full of ammonia", because if you're comparing healthy reproductive function with disease, not only are you being disingenuous, but you are completely missing the point.
There is no such thing as 'healthy' reproduction. It's never healthy:
http://content.csbs.utah.edu/~rogers/ant1050/Lectures/mfconflict-2×3.pdf
The results of this maternal/fetal conflict wear out a woman's body, eventually killing her:
http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/01/health/multiple-pregnancies-mother/
Sorry, but parents/default guardians have a responsibility to provide for offspring for however long those offspring happen to be in their care.
Accidental injury =/= normal, healthy reproductive function. Try again.
That's weird, because I thought Child Support Enforcement exists, and has the power to incarcerate men who refuse to provide for offspring.
Not through the literal use of their organs, no.
Parents cannot be forced to breathe for their children.
And women. Neither are required, however, to breathe, eat, and process wastes for their children.
If you want me to take the position that only humans can be persons when we have about 180 billion galaxies in our observable distance most likely then not containing other civilizations out there just like our own can you argue why using philosophy?
So far, your movement is attempting to relay on the fact that our society comes into the debate using the word person still as a synonym for being a member of the human species which it obviously is not.
''What a mind is, is a question that's super complicated and should probably be avoided if at all possible given that we're already having trouble with human and person''
Yeah we're having trouble with human and person because BOTH MOVEMENTS ARE COMING INTO THIS DEBATE USING THAT WORD STILL AS A SYNONYM FOR BEING A MEMBER OF THE HUMAN SPECIES.
Any philosopher or those like myself who have been debating that word now for a full 3 years know that word is not a synonym at all.
Let's examine some Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) research. Multiple scientific disciplines are involved, from biologists studying the structure of the human brain, to engineers copying things learned ("biomimicry"). We have "neural nets", "multiprocessor systems", "expert systems", "natural language processing", "self-editing software", "genetic algorithms", "Turing Test contests", advances in miniaturization, and even systems that are *evolving* more and more intelligence.
ht…./en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neural_network
ht……ww.iospress.nl/book/recent-advances-in-artificial-intelligence-research-and-development/
ht……ww.i-programmer.info/news/105-artificial-intelligence/3234-rosette-wins-loebner-prize-2011.html
ht……ww.extremetech.com/extreme/105067-mit-creates-brain-chip
ht…./en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moores_law
ht…./rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2012/04/04/rspb.2012.0206.full
ht…./demesos.blogspot.com/2010/08/evolving-self-oragnizing-soccer-team.html
ht……ww.newscientist.com/article/mg20727723.700-artificial-life-forms-evolve-basic-intelligence.html
Researchers are very confident that it will be one day possible (and likely, because of continuing miniaturization progress, within 20 years) to build an electronic brain that has *greater* processing power than a human, in *every* respect. It will be a true A.I. that, just like the average adult human, will have Free Will and be able to understand ethics and experience emotions, and be able to "mentally put itself in the shoes of another". Its ancestry will guarantee that it will be rational; we could call it a "machine organism", not a biological organism.
So technically, Jenny from my Life as a teenage and Astro Boy and Bumblebee can each qualify as a person just like I did when I was born.
I recommend your movement go's and take a course in philosophy before running at the mouth.
Two wrongs still don't make a right. And at least the men still get due process before their rights are abridged.
So which view are you taking?
It would actually be the demand for meat that places the farm animal in a precarious position.
Technically speaking, either view works for me considering my neutrality on prenate's rights. However, my neutrality is an implicit admission that the prenate could in principle have rights, and so I generally proceed on that basis. So, even though the prenate could in principle have rights, being destroyed does not violate them.
If a woman is forcibly restrained, and 4 IVF embryos are implanted in her uterus, would that count as an invasion?
Why does it not occur to them to draw a distinction?
What is a biological 'person/human?'
1) Can still get pregnant from anal, as long as ejaculate can slip into the vagina
2) So, non-procreative vaginal sex = a negligent act, then?
3) What if you leave your window unlocked and a burglar falls in and gets trapped in your basement? Do you owe him compensation? What if you lock all your doors, and he STILL breaks in? Are you still at fault?
4) Yeah, negligence kinda does matter, simply being 'needy' doesn't give you a right to compensation, now does it? Least of all, bodily compensation.
Why are zygotes irrelevant?
Are they not biologically human persons?
Control over one's body (ie, bodily autonomy) isn't considered a terribly important value
Give me Liberty or give me death. I suppose you've never heard of that one eh?
If it were, then you could use heroin, or be a prostitute, or sell a kidney and that would all be legal.
All of those should be legal, actually. I would have to say that more harm is done if they are illegal. And the reasons why kidney selling is prohibited is because the extreme poor are exploited.
Should the government have the right to outlaw apple eating and throw you in jail for partaking of apple pie because 'bodily autonomy ie liberty' isn't all that important?
. It's not deciding what YOU are ABLE to do to your body, but deciding what OTHERS are PROHIBITED to do to it
Yeah, so an unborn human should be prohibited from using a female body as life support without consent? Glad we agree.
PLers say that prenates should be protected from having someone
(fatally) damage their bodies- a bodily integrity claim + right not to
be killed.
Well, if the unborn human's body isn't damaged, I guess it's ok then? So like, if a woman cuts off blood supply to her uterus, she should be well within her rights, because it's HER body she's acting on. It's not her fault that the unborn can't survive without use of the woman's circulatory system.
So if a prolonged and difficult birth rubs a hole in the woman's vagina, and her bladder wall and large colon are so damaged that they have to be removed and she has to wear a colostomy bag for the rest of her life, I guess that doesn't count as organ loss?
Anencephalic babies have bodies.
Beating heart cadavers also have bodies (no higher brain function, but the brainstem keeps the autonomic nervous system going)
So uh, I guess the above should be kept on indefinite life support, lest we 'assault' their bodies by denying sustenance?
zygotes don't have a body. Where do they fit into this?
What if the person currently in possession of your kidney kidnapped you, forcibly sedated you and removed it, implanting the organ in their body? Can you take it back in that case?
What if others did on his/her behalf?
What if you, as in Judith Thomson's argument, are simply kidnapped and hooked up to a person without kidneys and forced to process toxic wastes for them?
Would you be within your rights to disconnect yourself? Would disconnecting yourself be an example of 'immorally acting on their body?'
What if you simply didn't eat enough to enable both of you to survive, or smoke and drank, impairing your kidney function, would you be guilty of 'immorally acting on the kidney patient's body?'
Yes. I try to prevent the killing of children in utero en masse because I'm just so darned self-centered. Logic's not your strong suit, eh?
Way to totally not address what was said, Einstein.
I get it that you think of yourself as caring and ethical. i think you are out of your fooking mind. Just saying.
Irony meter splode!
Nah, she's boiling with rage because she made the wrong choices in life, so she wants to punish the sluts who made a different choice.
She's a real sweetheart, Faye is.
http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/4568789
fe·tus/ˈfētəs/
noun
an unborn *OFFSPRING* of a mammal, in particular an unborn human baby more than eight weeks after conception.
off·spring/ˈôfˌspriNG,ˈäf-/
noun
a person's CHILD or CHILDREN.
Also, plural possessive is a thing. In which grade of elementary school did you cease attendance?
eat my shorts.
Eat my shorts.
I think you are either a narcissist or a hysteric. I do not give a zizz what you think. Mkay?
"Yeah that's pretty crazy. A child in a bathtub is obviously NOT in an unviable condition, or you wouldn't be putting it into a bathtub."
If the child is young enough, and the water level is high enough, that child can become pretty darn "unviable" pretty quickly. Derp.
The child is not by it's very nature un-viable.
It can eat, breathe, and shit on it's own without the use of another body to perform all of life's processes for it.
This is why fetuses without brains or lungs or kidneys can survive in utero – the woman's organs keep it alive.
Is that typical of childbirth, or is it an abnormal condition? Also, is there something that can be cone to prevent that, like, say, a c-section or something?
Really? So, if a parent found their child unresponsive, not breathing, and the parent knew CPR, that parent *would not* be required to attempt resuscitation? Because I'm pretty sure they are, under such circumstances.
There are varying degrees of injury.
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/dec/10/torn-apart-by-childbirth
And c-sections are indeed *permanent* and can lead to other horrible permanent injuries. In fact, a c-section is a great way to develop sepsis and/or flesh eating disease:
http://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/c-section/basics/risks/prc-20014571
Good 'ol tokophobia. Never more than a stone's throw away when dealing with abortion supporters.
So…There is biological resource allocation between mother and child. Big whoop. That doesn't mean out reproductive systems are flawed.
And, way to throw in third world country statistics as if those are the norm everywhere.
*golfclap*
"It can eat, breathe, and shit on it's own without the use of another body to perform all of life's processes for it."
Your understanding of pregnancy/gestation is flawed, then. The child in utero is the one who is actually undergoing metabolic processes, thereby requiring the oxygen delivered to them, and creating their own waste products which are then removed. A child in utero is capable of all the same basic bodily system function of a child outside the womb. The only difference is the means of delivering the necessities to the child and the means of removing the resulting wastes from the child. The child in utero *IS* performing their own life processes, and the aid given to them is the same aid any neonate requires, only the *methods* of delivery and evacuation are different.
lol, so is abortion:
http://www.safeandlegal.com/
Cool. Then you can put it in a petri dish and sprinkle food on it. I am sure that it will grow just fine, seeing as how it is no different from a born child, and all it needs is food and shelter. Right?
Is a child who will only breastfeed less of a person/child/individual than one who will accept a bottle?
Yeah. And oral surgery. And colonoscopy.
Which is why we let people make their own medical decisions.
If an unborn human was truly identical to a born child, gestation would be unnecessary.
And you ignored the part about unborn humans running their own metabolic processe. Fetuses with missing organs – lungs, kidneys, liver, brain, spinal cord, intestines can all survive in utero precisely because the woman's organs do the job for them. Anencephalic babies die because they cannot survive outside the uterus without a brain. Same for babies who never developed lungs or kidneys.
That each body part has a certain purpose does not mean that it MUST used for that purpose whether you like it or not. A person's wishes matter more than nature.
Human being or not, if another individual occupies/uses your body without your consent you have the right to get rid of them.
And part of that responsibility IS to humanely euthanize them in the event you are unable to provide the future child with all the resources and love they need.
Do all humans have a
"right to life" with no exceptions?
You come anywhere near my 20 something daughters to 'prevent the killing of children' when they are on the way to Planned Parenthood for any fooking reason at all and I will break you fooking face, in a Quakerly fashion of course.
So exactly what are the pre-requisites for moral status?
No, you are not legally required to give CPR. In fact, if you don't know how, you could kill your kid by crushing their ribs.
And of course, you are absolutely NOT required to literally breathe for them.
Hard to say. In the US, only one state requires one to perform CPR, and that state requires you to do it certified or not. In the absence of specific law to the contrary, I would say that there is no specific requirement for the parent to perform CPR, either.
OTOH, legal guardians can issue DNR orders for dependent children. In a situation where a sick child is brought home for comfort care, it is doubtful the parents would face any charges if they did not attempt resuscitation.
But then again, I am not a lawyer.
It would be more correct to say I think it is wrong to involuntarily force someone into parenthood.
There are too many comments already here to have a long-lasting discussion. But I can quickly point out that, as normal for abortion opponents, You Don't Know What You Are Talking About. You are a 'right to kill' advocate, too! Otherwise you would stop eating anything that had once been alive, including seeds.
So-called "pro-life" folks care nothing for all those species being driven to extinction every day by the relentless overpopulation growth of humanity, because they idiotically think that only human life matters, when in fact human life can't exist without other life, to the extent that 90% of all the cells in your body are NOT human!
The claim that human life is special is a mere claim, unsupported by any Objective evidence. You can't tell just by looking at an ordinary zygote whether or not its potential includes ordinary development, or defective development, such as by becoming a "hydatidiform mole".
Are you idiotic enough to claim that a human hydatidiform mole, with DNA as unique as your own, deserves "human rights", including "right to life"? If you say "no", then I am completely correct regarding my first paragraph above. And for an encore, consider a brain-dead adult on full life-support, which also is perfectly alive and perfectly human, yet the Law doesn't give it any "right to life" (the plug can be pulled), since the person who had been associated with that body is DEAD.
The notion that "human=person" is proved false. They are two separate concepts, and therefore, just because some organism is human, that doesn't mean it automatically deserves any of the rights that persons deserve.
Pro-choicers know the difference between "human" and "person". Abortion opponents lyingly calling themselves "pro life", don't. (which actually makes a kind of sense, since they don't even know that their label for themselves is a worthless lie)
That is not what is happening here. Any basic genetic test would indicate a parent/child relationship between a child in his/her embryonic and fetal stages and their pregnant mother (in most cases, but even in the case of a surrogate, the responsibility would exist, as it does with temporary guardians like babysitters or teachers). Parenting begins when the child begins living, not when the parent decides.
I thought you were a woman. You could stand to lose a few pounds, Faye.
I'm not the one threatening to break people's faces.
And smoking? Get out of your basement and get some exercise. Then maybe you could meet a nice woman and stop hanging around message boards pretending to be a female fetus freak.
I think it would be a mitzvah to slaughter myintx by the millions. I am told they travels in herds, destroys grasslands and smell awful.
Balderdash. Bathos. There are a number of life situations in which killing is morally acceptable: assisted suicide and defense of self or others, for example.
Go do your shaming/blaming act elsewhere. I am not buying.
I agree. Legal persons are humans and corporations. We are now building and integrating robot soldiers. And some robots can now assemble themselves and others.
'Except it's not, and nobody is advocating all bodily autonomy be revoked.'
…………..
This is an outright lie. EPIC FAIL.
It is actually worse than that. Some religious sects do indeed physically control women.
Coercing people how?
I think we should offer drug addicted women who become pregnant a free abortion and a $500.00 bounty for coming to the clinic and having one.
Is that the kind of 'coerce' you mean?
I'm not taking the position Faye that only humans can be persons when we have about 180 billion galaxies in our observable distance most likely then not containing other civilizations out there just like our. That's the only word that matters so, drop the species and debate that word like we should've been doing already.
I've seen him debate Ignorance is Curable back then who happens to be in my mind, one of the best pro choicers out there. He and I came into this debate knowing what words mean before coming in. You saw how that pro lifer you talked to doing the usually thing until I caught her with a ET hit
It certainly did not hit you with a decent response. At least not yet.
Parenting begins when the child begins living, not when the parent decides.
……….
Not accurate. One can leave a neonate at any police station without penalty.
Yes the safe haven laws
You said everything I was about to say.
As I asked before, do you oppose killing humans under ANY circumstance, for ANY reason?
Is your objection to killing ANY life, killing ANY human life, or killing human life in-utero only?
-If it's either of the latter, could you please give reasons why your objection is limited to specific groups?
-If it's the former, obviously you lie, since you exist.
We'll cross the alien bridge when/if we get there. Do you really think any alien would want to take their chances here when we can't even grant basic rights to all members of *our own* species, though? 😉
"No, U!" – what a brilliant retort.
I really expected more maturity from someone probably twice my age.
http://youtu.be/j7leQB_Oe_k
Matters to me. I do not care how you feel about it. You skeeve me.
Then it's just your understanding of how reproduction works that must be flawed.
I too am against forcing people into parenthood. However, rape is already illegal, and contraceptives are not. If a woman is pregnant, she has already reproduced, and is already a parent/mother. Same goes for her partner, the father.
Have a woman and a man already reproduced if their embryos are sitting in a petri dish? Can they claim they have 100 children if 100 eggs are fertilized?
I'm not taking species membership to make that person/non person if you want me to, argue why using philosophy. Drop the species membership and debate that word like we should've been doing already.
It is not "to be a slave to biology". It is to be a parent. Killing one's offspring is not a "better alternative" to parenting them.
"According to your logic…"
… only if you totally miss the point of everything I am saying. I have no problem with technology, medical or otherwise. But trying to pass off the barbarism of killing one's off