A Request Directed to Sciforums' "Atheists"

[Sarkus]

The life of the child is irrelevant; nobody has the right to force someone to give up control of their organs.

Those who advocate for the death penalty would disagree: executed prisoners give up the right to life itself.

If I needed a kidney, I would not have the right to force someone to give up their kidney. I would not have the right to force someone into a temporary connection with me so that their kidneys could filter my blood.

And that is because there is no exclusive life-depending relationship between you and the other. There is no physical responsibility between one and the other. An unborn child is physically dependent upon the mother.

Unless you are willing to demand of adult male human beings that they sacrifice their organs in order to save the lives of those who will die without them then you are merely taking a position against women.

If the relationship was as exclusive as that between mother and unborn child, you might be on to something. But it isn't. The relationship between mother and unborn child is currently rather unique in human affairs.
Comparisons that fail to address that uniqueness are thus lacking, and arguments that rely on them are subsequently flawed, imo.

 

[PhysBang]

Those who advocate for the death penalty would disagree: executed prisoners give up the right to life itself.

Do you equate women with prisoners? At least you would be honest.

And that is because there is no exclusive life-depending relationship between you and the other. There is no physical responsibility between one and the other. An unborn child is physically dependent upon the mother.

Of course, that's why the fetus will probably die if removed from the mother. That doesn't mean that the mother may be forced to continue to support the fetus. I could enter a hospital and discover that someone there would be physically dependent on my blood to survive. That doesn't mean that I am forced to give up my blood.

If the relationship was as exclusive as that between mother and unborn child, you might be on to something. But it isn't. The relationship between mother and unborn child is currently rather unique in human affairs.
Comparisons that fail to address that uniqueness are thus lacking, and arguments that rely on them are subsequently flawed, imo.

The unique thing seems to be that it is women that are involved and that it is OK to force a woman to do something.

 

[Tiassa]

Objectivity and Abstraction

So now you consider it a "moral duty" to endanger the lives of women.

I'm curious as to the objective pathway of that proclaimed "morality". Yes, it would seem our neighbor sees a moral duty in denigrating the humanity of women, but the biggest doubt I have about that assessment is the fact that for all the years we've heard about this moral duty to denigrate and endanger women from similar religious zealots, none can explain that moral duty in objective terms. It's all subjective, matters of aesthetics and presumption. And just like the whole "rape exception" to "pro-life" policies is mere cosmetics, so also is this "moral duty"

Which in a way is both curious and convenient, insofar as it points back to one of the underlying issues of this thread.

So ... objectivity.

Rational argument.

Principles formed around real things, not abstract, untestable higher authority.

I would suggest our neighbor has a specific rhetorical obligation to objectively explain the abstract higher moral authority to which he appeals.

Meanwhile, this is still exactly what I suggested a couple days ago, that our neighbors are attempting to revive the argument without ever addressing the underlying question.

What has revived this thread from requests to close it because it had finally passed an abstract threshold is this attempt to revive that issue without ever addressing the underlying question.

There are reasons our neighbors don't wish to objectively address the question; it's a hard one to resolve if one seeks an excuse to denigrate women's humanity while pretending one is doing something good.

Our neighbor has appealed to an abstract moral authority. Let him identify that authority clearly and objectively.

 

[PhysBang]

Your comparison is, again, irrelevant - asking someone to give up an organ (something entirely unnatural) is not the same as asking someone to finish carrying their six or seven month old fetus to term and deliver (a totally natural sequence of events).

Nature has nothing to do with it. It is a question of what is possible.

We know that organ and blood donation literally saves lives. Yet we do not force people to donate organs or blood. You want to force women to donate organs and blood.

However, the fact that you deem the life of anyone, be it the child, mother, or otherwise, irrelevant says a LOT about your moral character... and is honestly quite terrifying.

Yes, I am sure that you are terrified that I would consider women allowed to decide what they will and will not do with their bodies.

Tell me PhysBang... what is your price? If a human life is irrelevant,

I didn't say that human life is irrelevant in general. I merely said that it was irrelevant in this debate. I am not willing to force women to do something that you would not force men to do.

 

[PhysBang]

Oh, I see what you're saying now: no, that doesn't appear to be any kind of parallel.

Sure, if you are unwilling to see the parallel.

 

[Kittamaru]

Nature has nothing to do with it. It is a question of what is possible.
We know that organ and blood donation literally saves lives. Yet we do not force people to donate organs or blood. You want to force women to donate organs and blood.

Not at all - I simply want to require a responsible decision to be made - if you haven't aborted the fetus by the third trimester, and nothing medical is stopping you from carrying it, then what's the reason for a late term abortion?

Yes, I am sure that you are terrified that I would consider women allowed to decide what they will and will not do with their bodies.

I didn't say that human life is irrelevant in general. I merely said that it was irrelevant in this debate. I am not willing to force women to do something that you would not force men to do.

Oh, so the human life is only irrelevant when it suits your needs? Okay then.

 

[PhysBang]

Not at all - I simply want to require a responsible decision to be made - if you haven't aborted the fetus by the third trimester, and nothing medical is stopping you from carrying it, then what's the reason for a late term abortion?

And this decision is to be made to your satisfaction, not the women who's body is in question?

So it is your default position that women are not to be trusted with this decision?

Oh, so the human life is only irrelevant when it suits your needs? Okay then.

It is not my need. It is, in this case, the need of the women involved. Preserving human life is not something that one can pursue at all costs; we can not force people to donate their organs or blood to save the lives of others.

 

[billvon]

You are. You are asking women to donate all their organs, if only temporarily, to their fetus. That you ignore this part of your own position is your moral failing.

I am not asking women to do any such thing. Your insistence that I am is evidence that you had a knee-jerk reaction to something someone posted, and responded without even reading my post.

Yet the kidney's of a man are his own. You are ignoring that in this case you want to identify a separate being that you are forcing a woman to support with her organs. Something that you won't force a man to do.

?? Not at all. You cannot have your kidney removed on a whim, even if that means the doctor is forcing you to support that organ against your will. Women CAN, in most places, have a fetus removed on a whim. That means women have more rights in that regard than men.

That doctors will not accept the rights of a person to control their own body is a shame. That you want to accept this in order to prevent women from control over their own body and grant it to another being is also a shame.

You seem to be remarkably clueless. Perhaps you are answering someone else?

 

[Kittamaru]

And this decision is to be made to your satisfaction, not the women who's body is in question?

So it is your default position that women are not to be trusted with this decision?


It is not my need. It is, in this case, the need of the women involved. Preserving human life is not something that one can pursue at all costs; we can not force people to donate their organs or blood to save the lives of others.

Give me a single reason, outside of extenuating medical circumstances, that a woman should choose to wait until the third trimester to abort a fetus.

 

[Sarkus]

Do you equate women with prisoners? At least you would be honest.

So in providing an example of where someone may be forced to give up their rights to their body, and thereby disproving your claim that no-one can be forced, you seem to think I am equating women to prisoners? If I am equating them it is only in as much as both can be forced, by current laws, to give up rights to their body under certain circumstances. As can anyone under certain circumstances. The equating would be in that they would all be prisoners to their circumstances. There is no equating beyond that, and to see any equating I would think is merely a blinkered agenda on your part. That is me being honest.

Of course, that's why the fetus will probably die if removed from the mother. That doesn't mean that the mother may be forced to continue to support the fetus. I could enter a hospital and discover that someone there would be physically dependent on my blood to survive. That doesn't mean that I am forced to give up my blood.

That person would not be your physical responsibility. And there the difference lies.

The unique thing seems to be that it is women that are involved and that it is OK to force a woman to do something.

The unique thing is that someone else is involved. That the someone happens to be a woman is irrelevant. If men could get pregnant the same would apply to them.

 

[GeoffP]

The Bearable Lightness of Ignorance; or, Knowing What You Know You Don't Want To Know

Comparisons that fail to address that uniqueness are thus lacking, and arguments that rely on them are subsequently flawed, imo.

Well said.

I'm curious as to the objective pathway of that proclaimed "morality".

I'm curious too: I mean, first I'm curious as to whether there really is such a thing as this abstract morality, or whether what you claim is abstract is really the subliminal aggregate recognition of the biological underpinnings of late-term differentiation. Then I'm curious as to whether 'restricting' access to something is the same as 'banning' access to something; I know, I know, it’s a pedestrian question to some people, but there’s this thing about grounding an argument that one side calls ‘rational’ and ‘real’ because it consists of the simplistic and observable that sort of makes me wonder. I mean, it almost sounds like a pedestrian position itself! And I'm even more curious as to why people keep trying to shove a middle-ground opinion into the same camp as orthodox Catholicism, even when the difference between them is ridiculously clear.

I think a famous statesman of SF said it best when - and I'm paraphrasing here; no expression of mine could do its dichotomy justice: am I expected to believe that the speaker is really that ignorant of the construction of the argument, or is it more parsimonious to believe they're just making shit up? I mean, it's difficult to see where the confusion could possibly come from - the language of the expression being pretty unambiguous - so what am I expected to believe here?

But let's examine that question of our neighbour’s again.

Maybe, like digging in a cesspit, something solid will come up.

What he ignores is something that is important because it is at the heart of this particular chapter in the thread. Remember that this is a proposition of personhood versus guaranteed equal protection of all people, and the question of what happens when one of those "people" exists inside another.

At the time the fetus emerges and exists outside the mother's body, this question disappears.

About that fuzzy line: actually the question disappears at the point of viability. I mean, we can go on pretending that the fetus doesn’t exist up until birth, I guess. Maybe we could say it was just a nasty case of nine-month indigestion coupled with limb movements and responses to external stimuli from an unknown, unknowable and, most importantly, unseen enemy entity. And who really – really, now! – really knows anything at all about these life-draining creatures and their bulky, moody, liquid-filled port-a-sacs wrapped in Old Navy maternity jeans? Certainly, no state of medical knowledge exists about these parasites and their ways – lazily sleeping all the time; and is it mere metaphorical coincidence that they spend their days concealed in the dark? – so that we must be completely unable to judge their state of existence, let alone sentience or voting habits. And who can say what their carbon footprint might be? It’s just that it doesn’t seem particularly smart or well-informed to pretend that because we don’t know anything about these sneaky womb-hijackers that we should only accept that they really exist when we can no longer ignore their shrill, all-about-me cries for cleaning, attention and breathing.

Let's pretend for a second that we're meant to consult Tiassa’s question as written. We’ve discovered already on this thread that obviously a biological solution simply won't do, as I summed up earlier from Tiassa's comments: A biological solution leaves no room for law-nifying!. What can our neighbour possibly mean by this?

I think I did suggest a likely meaning for our neighbour’s comments:

This biological definition removes, possibly ad infinitum, my side's chances of overturning existing law in favour of a DFA policy that I would rather see instituted. I wish to remove the present and actually more conservative limitations in favour of no limitations whatsoever, and this biological concept is founded a little too well for my liking. It represents a logical - and probably more ethical - barrier that I cannot overcome, and it frightens me on behalf of my ethos.​

And I think you have to agree with his passionately and none-too-adroitly delivered (another pun there) thrust (and another!): by making this argument all about reality (tchuh!), we overlook the dialectical need to dial back the time frame over which abortion can occur. It would be a bad thing for the movement to have a solution that’s a little too apt for its socio-political goals: what if they didn’t give the answer wanted?

And has no one any respect for lawyering and process and prejudgement any more? Hell, even the mention of such a consideration threatens the production of reams of legal argument and their lawyers; fretting mothers all, each hovering over their own piles of print, each pile unique and beautiful: did you know my very own little motion in the South Carolina upper chamber produced a recess of council? He’s so special! What about that kind of parenthood, GeoffP, you hypocrite?

And after all, in his view the movement is political and legal. Justice? That’s for plebians. It’s not for nothing that the United States has a quiet class system, you know. Justice is for the unknowable gods to dispense; or, well, whatever. (Unknowable fetuses can be aborted, it seems; unknowable gods… not so much.)

Still, that would be an unconscionably skeptical view of the process in this thread. Why, next I’ll be musing about how someone or other has been setting up false contrasts between the absolute freedom of abortion and the complete restriction of that permission; of course, that could only be true if DFA supporters were running around the thread claiming that the bad posters were trying to turn women into imprisoned baby-vessels or something.

 

[Kittamaru]

I'm gonna be gone a few days ya'll... have fun beating each other about the head.

 

[Bells]

Except here we are again - you are talking about an unusual situation, one that is far from the norm, where it is an "either or" choice.
I'm saying third trimester abortion should not be allowed when those kinds of situations are not present - ergo, in a perfectly healthy pregnancy with no complications, what reason is there to abort that late?

In the event of actual risk to the mother, obviously she must be saved first - not just because she is the "wife", but because if SHE dies giving birth, there is a good chance the child will die with her.

As for what happened with you - while I am sorry to hear about that, I do not understand - what happened to cause such a situation? It sounds like you carried "to term" and were in labor when something went wrong... they tried to save you while another team worked to save the child... right? Or did they simply put your child on a nearby shelf and ignore it while they worked on you?

I don't see the connection between what happened with you and the choice for a late term abortion... I don't know, since you didn't specify, but it sounds like they had cut the umbilical cord and everything... so at that point the baby was "delivered". If he did not survive (which is what it sounds like), I am very sorry to hear that... but it wasn't because he was any less important...

I was 39 weeks pregnant, my obstetrician had not bothered to look at the scan results taken the week before because she was running late to catch a flight, the scan results clearly showed my placenta partially covered my cervix. My GP had suspected it was and so had sent me to have the scans done in the hospital I was meant to give birth in with the express bid and instructions that the results be sent directly to my obstetrician, and the results and images from the ultra-sound were being processed and she'd (obstetrician) have had to have waited 10 minutes for the scans to be sent down to her office, where I was waiting for the results. In Australia, sonographers take the images in the scan and send them to specialist doctors who revise them and then provide the results. In short, the sonographer, while experienced, saw there was something there over the cervix. When my obstetrician, impatient about her flight, realised it would be a 10 minute wait, she then rang the sonographer and asked her what the scans showed. My sonographer reported what she saw, that there may have been part of the placenta over the cervix but the bulk of the placenta gave approximately a 5cm clearance.

At that point, I should have been booked in directly to have a c-section within 24 hours. She booked me in to be induced the next week because I 'looked tired and worn out and was in pain'.. So the next week, I was induced, and then when nothing throughout the day happened, sent up to my room and told to eat dinner and rest as they would induce again the next day as nothing was happening today and I needed to build my strength up for the birth. My obstetrician had yet to make her appearance at that point. My then husband was sent home, told to get some sleep, and within about 15 minutes, I started to have contractions.. 5 minutes after that, my placenta ruptured and by the time a midwife walked into the room 30 seconds after I hit the buzzer when I realised it was blood and not my water's having broken, half the bed was covered in blood. I was rushed down to this room off the theater as they tried to determine what the hell was happening and I was quite literally bleeding out in front of them.. my cervix had dialated 2 cm which caused the rupture. I started passing in and out of consciousness and was saved just in time. The only reason I am alive and my son is alive is because it happened in hospital. Had I been allowed to commence labour naturally, I'd have died before the ambulance would have had a chance to get to my house. The next morning, because I had lost so much blood and I was struggling, the head of the obstetrics ward, who saw me being rushed by as he was doing his final walk down the corridor for the day before going home and who ran into the trauma room in the maternity ward to see what was going on and who then took over my case and delivered my son, told my husband to gather my family as they did not think I would have survived the day due to the blood loss and because whatever they were pumping into me, I was just bleeding it out after the surgery, the damage done to my uterus from the placenta ripping away and breaking off was so great, they couldn't stop the bleeding and I was given numerous transfusion and I was losing more than I was taking in. My son spent several days in the neonatal intensive care unit because they weren't sure if had suffered from a possible lack of oxygen from the bleed from the placenta. I got to see him once that day, they dragged him into the private and large room they had moved me into in the birth suite section to allow my family to come in and spend time with me on what they thought would be my final day.. because I begged them to let me see my son and hold him. I still remember the midwife crying as she handed him over to me and held my arms so that I could hold him close to me as I was so weak, I didn't have the strength to even hold him.

And frankly, that experience only reminds me of just how important it is for a woman to have access to safe health care, even if it means she is aborting. I fully understand the repercussions of what that entails and all evidence provided shows that women who abort in the third trimester fully understand what it is they are doing and I think focusing on the small percentage of women who many believe simply waited that long for what they consider to be unworthy reasons and banning it because of those women will result in women dying from unsafe abortions which lead to complications, scarring to the uterus and cervix and then infections which ultimately kill women. Ultimately, we'd ban abortions with the explicit knowledge that women would die as a result, regardless and I find it astounding how so many can be so blase about that.

We have already seen what happens when personhood is assigned to the unborn. Women lose their rights. No may, no 'if's', no analogies to describe the possibility. They do and have and still continue to lose them. There are hundreds of women in jail in the US because someone believed they did something that may have harmed their unborn and wanted child which led to a miscarriage or stillbirth. No proof is required to prove she did anything to harm her child directly. Drinking alcohol and driving while well below the legal limit saw one woman arrested and charged with child endangerment because she was pregnant.. Women are being arrested and charged and kept in jail for not having diabetes tests while pregnant or if they have a history of drug abuse and drug tests show they are clean because they kicked the habit, they are being arrested and kept in jail because they refuse to take the equally dangerous drugs their doctors think they should take to kick the habit they no longer have. This is what happens when you prescribe personhood. Laws are being passed requiring doctors lie to their pregnant patients to stop them from getting an abortion in the first trimester and others are now allowed to lie if they detect a foetal abnormality because she may decide to abort it.

While you may think that banning it and having exceptions will make things all better. Those very exceptions are being used to deny women abortions in the first and second trimester. You actually believe it will allow them to have it in the third?

Balerion's careless comments about how he does not care about her welfare because she's trying to kill her child only proves my point. She is deemed secondary, her needs and her rights are secondary. Her dying is of no consequence.

And I find such positions to be galling and reprehensible and inexcusable.

Letting women die because we refuse to allow them to access a safe medical procedure is not acceptable to me.

And never will be.


Do you want to reduce the numbers of 3rd trimester abortions of what all of you are demanding be banned for women who apparently "wait" until the third trimester to decide? Those women get to that point because they are not able to access one earlier on in their pregnancy because there is none available close to where they live. Some women have to travel across several states to be able to access an abortion. 90% of counties do not provide abortion services in the first trimester. Think about it. 90% of counties in the US do not provide any way for women to abort in the first or second trimester. And you think restricting access in the 3rd trimester is going to stop these women unable to access one in the first and second trimester is going to mean they just have the baby? Unless you are exceptionally naive, these women are going to resort to illegal and backyard abortions which will endanger their health and their lives. To reduce those figures, then you need to make sure that that 90% figure goes away, which means allowing women in all counties to have access to safe and cheap abortions. So instead of further restricting access to abortions as the laws being created are doing, you need to make sure women are able to access them from much earlier on. That will significantly bring down that 1% of women who have to wait until the 3rd trimester to be able to abort. You also need to provide free contraception to men and women and improve sex education, not further restrict access to birth control (which laws being enacted are doing at present) and not lessen the amount of sex education receive (no, teaching kids abstinence only is never going to cut it).

Thus far, instead of trying to help women earlier on in their pregnancy laws are being enacted to restrict women from not only preventing pregnancy, but also from accessing abortions in the first trimester. And now you think that banning abortions in the third trimester is going to be a good idea? Really?

I have to say, some of the things that have happened in this discussion have disgusted me beyond belief, from the outright dismissal of women's rights and her right to life even, to what you know full well what I am angry about in this thread. And you know full well what I am talking about Kitta. I don't give a shit what side you're arguing from. You don't pull stunts like that and think it's acceptable.

I'm done here. I am so disgusted that I now need to consider my options on this site.

 

[Tiassa]

¿A Testament to Irrationality?

About that fuzzy line: actually the question disappears at the point of viability.

You should probably try explaining that rationally instead of just saying so.

So let us be clear:

• What about viability means there is no longer a conflict of one "person" asserting rights inside and and authority over another person's body?​

Should be simple enough to explain, right?

 

[GeoffP]

You should probably try explaining that rationally instead of just saying so.

I did. Are you not really down with the English thing? Think that viability thing through and get back to me.

 

[Tiassa]

The Obvious Point, Again

I did. Are you not really down with the English thing? Think that viability thing through and get back to me.

You'll have to be more specific:

• What about viability means there is no longer a conflict of one "person" asserting rights inside and and authority over another person's body?​

 

[GeoffP]

You'll have to be more specific:

• What about viability means there is no longer a conflict of one "person" asserting rights inside and and authority over another person's body?​

Welllll, you're basing your stance off the idea that the fetus is now independent of the mother. I have to believe that you think that, because the other possibility is that you only think the fetus is a person just because you can see it in the open air, and that would seem a little like mysticism, y'know? Sort of an "oh my god, where the hell did that thing come from? Oh well, he's here now" moment. But the fetus is usually viable before then. So where does that leave you and DF?

 

[cluelusshusbund]

I am so disgusted that I now need to consider my options on this site.

Most people prolly have ther mind made up... an eventho its interestin... its doutful that all this arguein is gonna change opinions much.!!!

You'r prolly jus wore out... rest up an you will be good as new.!!!

Whatever the reasons may be... my morals says that woman shoud have the right to choose (no reason need be givin as to why) whether to abort or not... even late term... an proper medical help shoud not be illegal.!!!

 

[Kittamaru]

Bells is pissy about this post:

The thing is, a fetus IS aware inside the womb:

The Journal of American Medical Association says - at 26 weeks it can feel. Being able to feel connotates consciousness and sentience (or at least the rudimentary beginnings of it).

Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded in a meta-analysis of data from dozens of medical reports and studies that fetuses are unlikely to feel pain until the third trimester of pregnancy. There is an emerging consensus among developmental neurobiologists that the establishment of thalamocortical connections (at about 26 weeks) is a critical event with regard to fetal perception of pain.

Functional maturity of the cerebral cortex is suggested by fetal and neonatal electroencephalographic patterns...First, intermittent electroencephalograpic bursts in both cerebral hemispheres are first seen at 20 weeks gestation; they become sustained at 22 weeks and bilaterally synchronous at 26 to 27 weeks.

That would be about the 6 month mark - beginning of the third trimester. This is part of why I feel that, if you haven't terminated by then, you shouldn't have the option to terminate without just cause as, at this point, the fetus IS capable of experiencing pain (as well as reacting to voices, sounds, etc as they continue to develop)

In which I quoted from Yahoo Answers:

The Journal of American Medical Association says - at 26 weeks it can feel. Being able to feel connotates consciousness and sentience (or at least the rudimentary beginnings of it).

Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded in a meta-analysis of data from dozens of medical reports and studies that fetuses are unlikely to feel pain until the third trimester of pregnancy. There is an emerging consensus among developmental neurobiologists that the establishment of thalamocortical connections (at about 26 weeks) is a critical event with regard to fetal perception of pain.

Functional maturity of the cerebral cortex is suggested by fetal and neonatal electroencephalographic patterns...First, intermittent electroencephalograpic bursts in both cerebral hemispheres are first seen at 20 weeks gestation; they become sustained at 22 weeks and bilaterally synchronous at 26 to 27 weeks.

Here is the post in full:

Apparently, unbeknownst to me, the wiki article goes on to contradict itself and state that fetal pain may not be possible.

I didn't know this because I posted it at midnight... on my cell phone. I, quite literally, copied the text, pasted it here, and edited out the links.
She's claiming I edited the links as a form of intellectual dishonesty - let me showcase WHY I did so:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_pain#...
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/sho...
http://discovermagazine.com/2005/dec/fet...

if you click on them, the first one (the wiki article) works... the other two don't. Now, remember, I was looking at this on my cell phone whilst laying in bed. I saw the truncated URL's and realized that they would convert into BROKEN links on the forums. As a result, I simply deleted them - I didn't have the energy or care to try and copy the corrected hyperlink in in place of the auto-generated URL - for that matter, i'm not sure HOW to do that (copying and pasting on my phone is a rather interesting process, in part because I don't do it but once in a blue moon so I always have to figure out HOW to do it all over again)

I did nto CLICK the links myself to read the articles linked - I assumed that, since they were linked, they were supporting citations.

My bad, I made an assumption - I should have known better.
Apparently, this is enough to warrant a Crucifixion in Bells eyes.

None the less, there are several articles expressing the opinion that fetuses can in fact recognize pain, sounds, and other stimulation.

Apparently, though, Bells knows me better than I know myself:

The two studies had completely different results. You posted both as one, left out the hyperlinks which clearly showed that it was two studies and you represented it as being from the same study.
In short, you knowingly misrepresented scientific findings to support your views.

...

So again, what the fuck were you possibly thinking misrepresenting these two studies like this and doing it knowingly (since you know, you removed the links and passed it off as one study) and then you refused to respond to repeated requests that you link and cite your sources and I even explained why I was asking and you kept refusing to acknowledge it and in fact, knowingly dodged it in the thread.
This is fucking reprehensible. I don't care what side you're on in a debate. But misrepresenting scientific studies (ie lying) is not acceptable.

...

Your first link, based on the belief that because the pain receptors have connected in the 3rd trimester, then it may feel pain, but there is no evidence that it is able to recognise or have the ability to 'feel pain' as you seem to be trying to represent it. Your second link says nothing about it.. It's a week by week brief explanation of what's happening with your baby.. Third link, which I had already copied and pasted also gave and correctly represented studies which clearly state that there is no actual and real evidence to show that a foetus can recognise pain. It may feel it, but it may not have the ability to know what it actually is at the start of the third trimester.. Fourth link, said the same thing. No clear evidence that it can feel or recognise pain, just the belief that it may feel pain after the 29th-30th week but no clear evidence that it is able to psychologically understand emotionally that it is pain, but what painful stimuli in utero can alter its pain receptors and its pain response after it is born.. Fifth link, inconclusive and not enough studies have been done to be able to give a definitive answer.. Sixth link, from a pro-life religious site that not only claim a foetus can feel pain, it is able to apparently differentiate pain from touch.. Really Kitta? Really?

So, apparently, even though the pain receptors are there and functional, and the nervous system is functional, and the fetus has neural activity, and the fetus can FEEL pain, and so on... despite all of that, the fetus apparently cannot recognize pain, simply because we cannot say, 100% for certain, that it recognizes pain the same way we do...

I didn't realize adult human beings with developed psychological profiles were the ONLY things capable of feeling and responding to pain... so, apparently, if I were to go and kick my dog, it isn't yelping in pain... *rolls eyes*

So, in short:

GeoffP, Balerion, et al - it seems I owe you all an apology...

As for Bells - Sod Off.

DISCLAIMER - large swaths of Bells posts have been omitted here, partly because they are more full of hot air than your average hot air balloon, partly because at this point, I don't give a fuck enough to bother posting and replying to all of it... she has made her viewpoint clear - I am an evil on the level of Satan himself, both for "intentional and gross misrepresentation" and simply because I feel the fetus has as much a right to life as the mother so long as granting such a right to life would not endanger the mother.

With that said, I am going to take my leave - tomorrow is mothers day, and my wife and I plan to spend it with our family. I don't want to be in a piss poor mood because of more random bullshit accusations.

 

[GeoffP]

No worries, Kitta. I think that the situation has gotten away from some of our 'neighbours'. No apology necessary and sorry if I was upset with you.

Freakishly, regarding pain, I once met a worker with a government agency who was trying to prove fish 'felt' pain.

Er... well, shit, I would think they do. Kind of a no-forebrainer, if you follow me.

EDIT:

Bells: "It may feel [pain], but it may not have the ability to know what it actually is at the start of the third trimester."

Holy shit, really? So other tetrapods respond to pain without knowing what it actually is. Well, maybe! Maybe it feels like a tickle. Maybe it reminds them of warm cookies, just coming off the stove. Or maybe the tetrapod response to pain looks the same across the board because it freaking is. Jesus Christ. One of the most basic responses a vertebrate can have, and you think it just might not know what it is, because that way its potential suffering can be dismissed for the sake of your arbitrary endpoint, the validity of which you don't seem to want to consider. Awesome.