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From old thread:quote:it's a great thing that yes, we can find out if the child would have some kind of horrible disease or mutation that would make it endure a short, painful life. Its legal and safe abortion, if the mother wanted it, would be a tragedy, but still a good thing. Why is this a tragedy? Inconvenient, but she can try again. You argued that we should cry for aborted babies because they have heartbeats and brain activity and that we shouldn't cry for eggs shed during the menstrual cycle because they don't but didn't provide a convincing argument why a heartbeat and brain activity alone are enough for personhood. You know that pigs can have rich emotional lives but I see no indication that you have given up pork. The difference between a fetus and a pig is that a fetus may some day become human - but the potential future attempt at pregnancy can also some day become human. Why should the potential wanted pregnancy be sacrificed for the unwanted pregnancy when both are just potential and are not anything in their own right? quote:it's not much of a step from Downs syndrome to, let's say a genetic disorder that will eventually cause blindness. Which I wouldn't wish on anyone, but that doesn't mean that person can't live a full and great life. My wife is blind from that sort of thing. I myself have a severe learning disability. I worry that those increased tests will make people like myself and my wife a thing of the past. I don't think that's right. Our flaws are part of what make us who we are. People with inherited genetic defects often already screen for the gene and use in-vitro to conceive, so these traits are already being selected against. It's a poor reason to look down on people who choose to abort. (from USPol thread)
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Jan 22, 2015 22:21
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Talmonis posted:I don't think it's even close to the same thing though. That adoptive parent isn't consigning that other child to death, that lovely country is. Choosing to not take an action is still an action in my book. Perhaps we would fundamentally disagree on the solution to this problem: quote:The trolley problem is a thought experiment in ethics. The general form of the problem is this: There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person on the side track. You have two options: (1) Do nothing, and the trolley kills the five people on the main track. (2) Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person. Which is the correct choice? In my eyes it would be wrong not to push the side track man into the path of the oncoming train. Sounds like you believe it would be better to let "nature take its course". quote:Hell, for even going that far, and adopting a kid in need, that parent is awesome in my eyes. quote:But if it's your baby, you make that choice whether to terminate it or not. It's between you, and your doctor and whatever morality system or lack thereof that you have. It doesn't matter that I think it's a terrible and preventable tragedy. I'm imagining I'm pregnant and learn the fetus will develop a severe mental disability, but because of attitudes like the above, my partner pressures me (possibly emotionally blackmails me) into carrying the child to term. I now I have a developmentally disabled child who, as an adult, can never be independent or advocate for him/herself. I pass on in my old age and then rapacious relatives circumvent the trust fund I set up for the care of my child when I was still alive and spend all the money I left behind and put my adult child in a terrible nursing home where they are abused, sexually and physically, for the rest of their life. That is a terrible and preventable tragedy. quote:I've worked with disabled kids in the past, and wish that I could get through the schooling needed to do it for a living. Those kids deserve better than we give them. 
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Jan 22, 2015 22:43
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Talmonis posted:I don't look down on people who get abortions. I pity them. I feel sorry for what they did. Sad for the life lost before it had a chance. Most of them don't want your pity. Many people don't want to be pitied. It's a rather paternal view. Pitying someone suggests they are a victim. If you pity someone for a choice they made, that implies they are a victim of their own choice, which is pretty hosed up. quote:Sure it's sappy and internet uncool to have an emotional attachment to anything, but there it is. Nice strawman. Not sure if you've read my other posts, but if you did you wouldn't come to the conclusion that I'm arguing from that vantage point. quote:No, my solution is to treat it as a tragedy for the choice you've made. Either way you're damned in that situation. You've killed a man. Or on the topic, your unborn child. You get to then live with that. Ho hum, just go about my day? gently caress that. That's really callous to me. quote:More grateful? No. But they should definitely be grateful that someone loved them enough to give them a home and a family. quote:Do you consider miscarriages to be just an eye rolling inconvenience, or a tragedy? If a family had been trying very hard to have a baby and wanted one very badly and then the baby miscarried, it would be a tragedy, just as if a family who had been trying very hard to adopt suddenly found their case rejected. In both cases there's been a huge emotional and financial investment and a lot of hopes and expectations that are suddenly dashed. It's always a tragedy when you're anticipating something wonderful and then it gets taken away. In that sense it can be tragic when a woman aborts a fetus with a developmental issue because her expectations are dashed, but it's not a tragedy because she chose abortion. In fact, I would say, going back to your comment on the trolley problem, the point that the sequence of events becomes emotionally distressing is the one where the expecting parents learn that the baby will be a harlequin fetus (or whatever is wrong with it). That's the moment where their future plans have been derailed. The abortion itself is not the cause of distress. Not to mention the word tragedy is pretty loaded and implies a uniquely bad thing that dogs you forever. If you abort a downs baby it's definitely an emotionally fraught time if you were highly anticipating the arrival of a healthy child, but if you manage to have a healthy baby after, I doubt you're going to think of aborting the downs baby as this touchstone moment in your life. quote:Why is it wrong for a father of a child to be distressed when it dies? What I want is for people who think getting an abortion is a morally bad choice and that those who had abortions require pity to be quiet about their beliefs so that women aren't further shamed for being female and having things that happen to human women happen to them.
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Jan 22, 2015 23:53
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All this talk of women who have had an abortion needing to be pitied remind me of people who run up and gush over veterans wearing civvies upon learning that the person is a veteran. It seems to reflect a fundamental lack of understanding of the circumstances involved. My best friend from high school and her fiance got pregnant (in the sense that she was physically pregnant but he was involved) and she got an abortion but she plans to have a kid with her fiance once she gets her career going. She isn't scarred for life or anything. She doesn't bring it up unless it's relevant to the conversation but she's not ashamed or hosed up in the head or anything. Every now and then you'll see an article by someone who had an abortion who mentions "sometimes I think of what might have been...they would be five years old now..." Not sure if men do this, but I often think of kids I might have had if my life had been different. I knew a girl who had a kid when she was 16, so every now and then as a thought experiment I think of how my life would be different if that happened to me and I had a nine-year-old kid. I do this for other things too. My parents got married when they were 20 so sometimes I think about what my life would be like if I married whoever I had a crush on at that time. I think everyone has times in their life where they reflect on what could have been; it's not unique to people who have abortions. I think people who have had abortions are uniquely vulnerable in that society is constantly trying to make them re-frame their decision as uniquely bad. I once had a 50 euro amazon gift card I won in a contest that I forgot about and let expire. drat, I still think about that one sometimes. All the books I could have bought... EDIT: ^ Zeitgueist posted:"If you can't afford a kid maybe you shouldn't have one" Speaking of eugenics, this attitude is pretty hosed up because it implies only the wealthy are worthy of passing on their precious genetic material.
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Jan 23, 2015 00:37
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SpiderHyphenMan posted:What's the latest that an abortion can safely be performed without seriously risking the life of the mother? All surgery is dangerous to some degree, so when it comes to late term abortions I believe you have to weigh the chance of death from the abortion against the chance of death from not extracting the fetus. Hey, I know, let's ask Savita Halappanavar. Oh wait, oops.
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Jan 23, 2015 00:40
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poopinmymouth posted:Could we get a TL:DW?  http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Savita_Halappanavar Also note that most late term abortions are due to severe birth defect. The people who are getting them are not those who lack "reproductive rights and education" as you imply. They're those who wanted to have a baby and then discovered something went horribly wrong. People who get abortions because of birth control failure overwhelmingly get them as early as possible. Xibanya fucked around with this message at 16:08 on Jan 23, 2015 |
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Jan 23, 2015 16:05
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SurgicalOntologist posted:At no point is abortion any more dangerous than giving birth, although I would guess toward the end of the pregnancy they're more equivalent. But birth is fairly dangerous and abortion is, at worst, like birth but with fewer constraints on the procedure. Not to mention early first trimester abortions don't have to be surgery at all - they have pills for that.
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Jan 23, 2015 18:12
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poopinmymouth posted:So... no response for this? The list in your quote is from 1987, at least use the more recent one, where defects found later in pregnancy is 13% rather than 2% (quite a jump!) I imagine part of the difference is accounted for with advances in prenatal screening. It's also unclear how many late-term abortions were reported total from 1987 and how many there were in 2004. I'm aware of the sample size of each survey, but without the total population they are meant to represent it is difficult to compare the two surveys. The same wikipedia article also says that the number of abortions total has been decreasing dramatically since 1990. More recent survey posted:74% Having a baby would dramatically change my life The results do not necessarily suggest that poor sex education causes late-term abortions. (To be clear, I am most certainly in favor of improving sex education.) Your original question was essentially "Why does the US need late-term abortions when European countries don't?" The question implies banning late-term abortions is desirable, but I'll set that aside for now. It looks like the top results involve social and economic situations that would create a suboptimal environment for raising an additional child. My argument would be we need to permit late-term abortions because it is bad to force people to have babies they know they aren't capable of supporting (financially, emotionally, etc).
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Jan 30, 2015 00:52
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Think of it this way. A woman has two kids already and doesn't want more so she gets a tubal ligation. Is that hosed up or unfair because some person won't exist now just because they have older siblings? After all it's not their fault two children were born before then. The only difference between that and a fetus conceived in rape is that the fetus is somewhat farther along the process of turning into a person. A cluster of cells is not aware enough to even know it's alive. The only people who might argue that in good faith are those Buddhist monks who carry brooms everywhere so they don't squish an ant.
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Jan 30, 2015 17:57
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A lot of people who make the debate personal by saying, "You're saying we should allow women with [circumstance] to abort. I was born under [circumstance], you're saying I should never have been born!" are missing that nobody is going to force people to have abortions. Let's say a woman is pregnant but she is not financially solvent so she opts to have an abortion. Because she does not have a dependent child, she is able to advance her career, fall in love with a nice person of her preferred gender, and buy a house in a well-funded school district. Feeling emotionally supported and financially stable, she then conceives again and has a baby. We can see that it is likely that if she had not aborted the first pregnancy, she would not have been able to advance in her career or her advancement would have been slowed by the demands of parenthood (studies have shown women who are not physically present in the office due to childcare-related concerns are seen as "less dedicated" and are often paid less or passed over for promotion) and she may not have met her ideal partner (dating as a single parent is difficult). Without a two-income budget, she would not have been able to buy the house in the rich neighborhood. Her child in this scenario is likely to have a poorer outcome than the child in the first scenario. Let's look at the two likely outcomes - 1. The child grows up disadvantaged and never achieves a middle-class lifestyle 2. The child grows up with every possible advantage and achieves a middle-class lifestyle Anyone can see the second outcome is more desirable. But does that mean we're telling children of broke single parents that, even though they beat the odds and turned out OK, they should have been aborted? After all, there could also be this story: A woman is pregnant but is not financially solvent. However, she decides to carry the child to term. Due to a combination of hard work and good luck, she gets by on her own and now her kid is living a middle-class lifestyle. We're clearly not saying this particular successful child of a single parent should never have been born since we can see before our very eyes that this is untrue. But should we ban abortion so that there's never a chance that a potential "net positive" outcome is lost? The fact is, you can't know if someone will live a happy life or not until they have lived it, so when we're looking at a fetus, we can only go on likely outcomes, which we can predict with reasonable accuracy. Let's put it in the inverse. Are we saying that if a wealthy person wants a kid, even if they aren't that fit to be a parent, we should just go ahead and let them have one? I mean it's likely the resulting children could do well, but there's always the chance that one will grow up to be an rear end in a top hat with "affluenza" who runs over pedestrians in his dad's company truck. It's quite clear for that case that we'd be better off if Ethan Couch had never been born, but should we ban conception so that there's never a chance that a potential "net negative" outcome happens? Fact is, you can't know if someone will live a dumb murderous life until they have lived it, so when we're looking at a rich baby-wanter we can only go on likely outcomes, which we can predict with reasonable accuracy. We don't ban conception on the off chance a kid will turn out to be a bad egg, so we shouldn't ban abortion on the off chance a kid will beat the odds and not have a terrible life.
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Jan 30, 2015 19:32
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McAlister posted:This link is a must read for anyone debating this topic. I'll read it but I'm arguing for abortion for all regardless of fetal brain activity or pain. A woman's autonomy has more value than any fetus, end of story. When you start going into an entity's rights based on brain activity you start going down a weird rabbit hole that brings you to bizarre conclusions. Just to hint at what I mean, if we need to save fetuses because of their brain activity, we are obligated morally to also stop sows from killing their piglets, which sometimes happens. If that's "in the natural order of things," and therefore doesn't merit intervention, why isn't abortion? Because a human is doing it? Why are humans worth more than pigs or held to higher standards? Because God said so? Or because of something else? I don't think a human life has greater intrinsic value than a pig's life, though if I had the choice to save a human life or a pig life I would pick a human life because I prefer humans to pigs. I carry genetic material that makes me biased toward my own species, as my ancestors who had this bias were more successful at reproducing than those who lacked this bias. Xibanya fucked around with this message at 19:50 on Jan 30, 2015 |
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Jan 30, 2015 19:47
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The way I see it is that before birth, the fetus is a part of the mother and, late term, aborting it is like having any other body part removed (like an appendectomy). After birth the child is not a part of the mother's body and is a member of society. As permitting the wanton murder of members of society is detrimental to that society, once a child is born it should be afforded the protections to which members of that society are entitled. We feel an urge to protect babies at all costs because at some point in the distant past, that was a trait that was selected for in society. (It seems in broader western society that those who didn't care so much for babies were not successful in passing on their genes.) However, this is not some universal value. Some hunter gatherer tribes have been observed to commit infanticide in order to achieve a rate of one child per woman per five years. In these areas (like New Guinea) it's likely that tribes that permitted unchecked reproduction exhausted the ecosystem of food and experienced a population crash. Those who wanted to have unrestricted numbers of children either died out or were absorbed by those who were more amenable to infanticide. Of note, in some societies, the infant is not even considered a member of that society until it reaches an arbitrary age. In western culture you can see this with the period of time that passes between a catholic child's birth and its baptism. In some societies a child is not named (or is given a false name) until it passes an arbitrary milestone of some number of days after birth. It's not some crazy new concept to put an arbitrary threshold for society membership.
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Jan 31, 2015 02:58
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Another reason why abortion must be legal during all stages of pregnancy is that if a woman miscarries during that phase of pregnancy, if she lives in one of those awful places where it is illegal (el salvador, mississippi, etc) it's likely that fetuses are afforded the legal protections of actual people and she is then a suspect in a murder investigation and can possibly be jailed. This is abhorrent from multiple angles. The emotional angle - it is awful to subject someone who just had a possibly traumatic medical event (or heartbreaking loss of desired pregnancy) to a criminal investigation. The social angle - as it stands now the investigations are used to jail "undesirables" for having lifestyles the prosecutor does not approve of, such as "drinking sometimes," "taking prescription medicine," or "being black." The economic angle - the jailed woman is now a drain on the state's coffers and can make no contributions to society, not even more babies, unless she gets raped by a prison guard  . Her already born children are now also missing a parent with all the disadvantages that implies.In these states there is no equivalent circumstance in which a man could have some spontaneous medical event and then go to jail for years. It is absolutely a sexist policy. Of course, if that doesn't move you, let me describe a hypothetical in terms you may understand. Let's say you meet a woman and fall in love. The two of you have an awesome relationship and you feel like you've met your soulmate. Then she feels abdominal pain and starts bleeding. Upon a visit to the doctor, it's discovered that she was actually 7 months pregnant but had one of those wacky pregnancies we discussed on the other page where they don't show until really far in for some reason - but she has now miscarried. Because abortion is illegal in the third trimester, an investigation is started to see if she killed her baby. They find that she was taking lexapro daily on the recommendation of a medical professional. Despite a doctor testifying in court that lexapro, while associated with fetal abnormalities and not recommended in pregnancy, is not known to cause miscarriage, your significant other is charged with manslaughter and thrown in jail. How do you feel about that. The state came and took your girlfriend away! Does that make you sad? The one thing I've heard from people irl who don't like this argument is "when a drunk guy hits a pregnant woman and he causes her to miscarry, he faces a manslaughter charge, so if he can face that it's only fair the pregnant woman face the charge as well." I see the aggravating charge on the DUI as indicating the degree of bodily harm incurred by the victim. Also why do we need to level the playing field between drunk drivers and non drunk non driving random women?
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Feb 1, 2015 17:42
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twodot posted:I don't think this last bit is true. If you are caring for a sickly relative/friend, they could spontaneously die. A vindictive prosecutor could try to unjustly prosecute you for murder, but we generally trust our prosecutors to not be assholes instead of re-writing legislation. I definitely think abortions should be safe and accessible, but it's not because prosecutors would conduct inappropriate investigations if they weren't. I meant a spontaneous medical event to his own body. Both men and women could care for a sick relative - and the event is something happening in the body of the person they are caring for, not their own body. Only women can miscarry. Laws that persecute people who miscarry only target women. There is no law that persecutes men who have something happen in their own body. And if you think women haven't gone to jail for miscarriages, I have a long list of examples that will make you really depressed.
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Feb 1, 2015 20:25
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There are so many things to address but I'm phone posting so I'll just examine the last one. The argument is "just because the law will cause people whose attempted suicide induced their own miscarriage to be jailed doesn't mean the law is a bad idea." This only makes sense if you view a fetus as a full person. However, even if you do, it makes the law target only women, which is pretty unfair. Yes, if someone attempted to commit suicide by shooting themselves and they misfired and shot someone else in the room, they would rightly be prosecuted for the injury/death of that person, but there is just no way a man could swallow poison and spontaneously cause some other human to die. So right out of the gate, this type of murder charge affects women only. Given that some of the women who have been prosecuted under this law didn't even know they were pregnant, it means that we have breakdowns like this: Of all men in that state, x% will attempt suicide in their lifetime and x% will not succeed on at least one attempt. Of all women in that state, x% will attempt suicide, of those x%, x% will not succeed on at least one attempt, and of those x% will have been pregnant during that attempt and x% of those will lose their pregnancy as a result of the attempt. That last group is now subject to criminal prosecution. You may say that group is small - but I can guarantee you that the number of men being prosecuted for same is 0. Bear in mind also that unless a person is terminally ill, the decision to commit suicide is never a rational one. It is one made by a person whose thinking is disordered in some way (probably by depression). Statistically speaking, most suicides are spur of the moment. Furthermore, going back to the stats above - women are more likely to attempt suicide by poisoning themselves than men. Men are more likely to use firearms, one reason why they tend to succeed more often than women. Looking at it that way, given that poison is the suicide of choice for women, personhood laws have the perverse effect of targeting depressed women disproportionately. And how is society served by jailing a woman whose suicide induced her own miscarriage? Is it because they are dangerous and need to be locked away from the general public? Absent a history of violent crime, the person has proved themselves to be a danger only to...themselves. "Ah, but she'll serve as an example to other suicidal women! Don't try to commit suicide or you might miscarry the pregnancy you may or may not have!" one might say. Research has shown, however, that people who attempt suicide are not behaving rationally. Suicide is nearly always a "crime of passion," as it were. Not to mention it's pretty gross to tell women to behave as if they might be pregnant at all times - by that logic women should never be allowed to drink or run in marathons until menopause. The other argument would be "she committed manslaughter, no two ways around it," which brings me back to the above point, there is zero way for a man to commit manslaughter by poisoning himself (unless you dream up some crazy scenario like "pilot takes 300 sleeping pills while flying passengers," which, come on, is deliberate murder-suicide.) a manslaughter charge should come when someone does something that a reasonable person knows could endanger the life of another. And on to the economic concerns - this jailed person is now without a job, probably now unemployable, and is living on the taxpayer's dime. Any children she may have in the future are more likely to make use of taxpayer funded welfare programs. Any existing children she may have are either now in a one-parent household (if they're lucky) or are now wards of the state. Just to cap it off, I think it's entirely within reason to put the following hypothetical person in jail: a depressed woman gets in her car and decides to kill herself by driving the wrong way down the interstate at 100mph. She crashes head on into a motorcycle, killing the driver. She should receive a manslaughter charge because even a suicidal person knows doing that will hurt somebody. So someone who believes fetuses should be considered full people may say "yep this law makes men and women unequal under the law, but so what, it will punish baby-killers." Here's another angle to consider - the women going to jail are almost all poor. They are almost all minorities. Wealthy white women don't get in trouble for this. In supporting this law you are supporting terrorizing more poor families. Because fetuses are people, but white women's fetuses are less people than others. White people do get off easier in aggregate for manslaughter charges, but for these self-induced miscarriages where it all comes down to a doctor's subjective opinion, how many will see the suffering white woman whose suicide attempt caused her to miscarry and think "she looks like my daughter!" vs a POC he can write off as "ugh, another one of those irresponsible blagh people!" Personhood laws are insane and cause undue suffering. If you care about human life you must oppose them.
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Feb 2, 2015 20:19
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Theory - a weaker group will be treated poorly because they don't have the power to resist poor treatment. Those treating them poorly then come up with a justification ex post facto on why the weaker group deserved such treatment. Because they now believe the weaker group deserves it, the stronger group will treat the weaker group poorly. If the weak group resists being abused by the stronger group the stronger group feels wronged by them as they are attempting to avoid the treatment they clearly deserve. Thus, in times of yore, men thought women were inferior because they treated them badly because they were inferior because they treated them badly, and so on. Follow up theory - these abortion laws are being dreamt up by transplants from the Stone Age.
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Feb 5, 2015 03:48
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twodot posted:The plural of fetus is fetuses. While fetus is Latin, the word referring to offspring is fourth declension (while words ending in us are often second declension), meaning it is its own plural and using feti wouldn't make sense. Fetal fait accompli.
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Feb 24, 2015 19:32
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I just looked up the case of Martina Greywind. She was a homeless Native American who was arrested while 12 weeks pregnant for endangering a minor (the fetus) because she was huffing paint. While out on bail, she got an abortion. Because she got an abortion, the charges were dropped. Good work, defenders of the unborn!
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Mar 31, 2015 17:35
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