Redux: Rape, Abortion, and "Personhood"

[ElectricFetus]

As I have stated before, there is a living effect. In the early pages of the thread you'll find the following:

Legalized abortion on demand is not without societal benefits. Women's physical health has improved, as has their educational and economic standing in society, and as a result their mental health as well. Some might find the access advocates' arguments about putting women back in their places somewhat hyperbolic, but it is also a logical outcome of granting our Puritan streak free rein.​

Can you prove cause and effect? I may vary well be all those thing happened because of the women's movement and not because of legalize abortion.

Okay, fine. So, personhood at conception. What happens next?​

As often as we go through this, the people who push back against the misogyny accusation can't seem to answer this question. That was the whole point of conceding LACP at the outset: What happens next?

Well first I don't quite understand the question, are you suggesting the social implications of making abortion illegal (the next consequences?) are too heinous? You would need to prove that making abortion illegal also keeps women "in the kitchen" metaphorically or literally.

Well, it misses their point, as the personhood of the woman is completely absent from their view. That is, in and of itself, misogyny. Think of it this way: Under LACP, there would be "people" (men), "people" (fetuses), and "women".

How?

The burden is on the extension of this condition called personhood. It is attempting to assign an ontological attribute to a different existential condition.

The whole abortion issue is one where reality and law meets unanswered/controversial metaphysic of what is alive, personhood, existence.

"Abortion is murder!" they cry. But they also don't like to be seen as misogynistic. They don't want to be seen as hostile to rape survivors.

Well that an emotional weakness, not a logical approach, If abortion is murder then it mus have all the legal consequences of murder, like forcing women to grow and birth rape babies or else charge them with murder. Attempting to create some kind of special case, granting a fetus status as a semi-person and semi-murder if killed leads to all sort of problems of arbitrariness.

And that's all it is.[/indent]

And I disagree with it, it either for abortion or against, sort-of-legal abortion does not make logical sense to me.

And every time I raise the implications of "personhood", someone will point out the extremism and absurdity. What this suggests to me is that life at conception really is just about abortion and putting women back in their place.

That sounds like a serious jump in logic to me, can you go through the connective steps there for me.

After all, the practical juristic implications of "personhood" include Equal Protection. Thus, if a blastocyst is a "person", what are the implications of the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment?:

No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

(Boldface and bold-italic accents added)​

What are we going to do about that?[/indent]

I'm not seeing the problem, if your claiming there is a paradox that either the mother or the fetus gets shafted, yeah I've gone over that.

Depends on who you ask.

Well yes some pro-lifers are specifically out to suppress women, but I still don't see how its not possible as you claim to be pro-life and not gender equalist.

It's my opinion that life at conception is one of those things that sounds nice to the anti-abortion argument, but isn't actually genuine. As we see in this thread, LACP isn't really about the organism inside the woman; it's about the woman.

Probably because certain people keep twisting it to that, the whole misogynist tactic has been very affect world wide in twisting the abortion debate.

 

[billvon]

The impact of the issues that I present here will become obvious to every pro lifer or pro choice person once they answer this simple question: There are 7 billion people born and dying right now. One has a choice, one may save those born people or they may let them die and save a fetus instead. Which do you choose to save?

Please answer my question.

I'm not a pro-lifer but I will answer it anyway.

I would save both.

 

[RussellCrawford]

I'm not a pro-lifer but I will answer it anyway.

I would save both.

It is impossible to save both. There are 7 billion people on earth, all are dying and each new person born is also dying. So there are more born people dying than you can save. In fact they are dying at the rate of 1.8 per second. So you can't save them all. If you spend 1 second saving a fetus then in that period of time 1.8 born babies will die. So any attempt to save a fetus actually leads to the death of a born baby. If you try to save a baby, a fetus dies. If you try to save a fetus a baby dies. So any time you attempt to save a fetus, a baby dies that you could have saved.

The only way to save life for certain is to save the innocent born babies, children and adults that are out there dying. Any choice to save a fetus is a choice to let a born baby die.

 

[billvon]

It is impossible to save both.

No, it's not. If that were true populations would hit the limit and then stop increasing. Since that is not the case - since population is still growing - your statement is false.

 

[RussellCrawford]

No, it's not. If that were true populations would hit the limit and then stop increasing. Since that is not the case - since population is still growing - your statement is false.

No you wrong, the current situation is that both are not saved (abortion is legal) and the impact is not noticeable.

 

[Captain Kremmen]

There is no child in the womb.

Complete the following sentence.
Mary is pregnant. She is having a ..............

a. Fetus
b. Baby
c. Potential person.

 

[RussellCrawford]

Complete the following sentence.
Mary is pregnant. She is having a ..............

a. Fetus
b. Baby
c. Potential person.

The answer is a if she is intending on getting an abortion and b if she intends to give birth.

Now one for you. Mary is going to have an abortion.

She is going to abort a _______________

a) Fetus
b) child
c) baby

The important thing to remember is that if you attempt to stop her from aborting a fetus you will cause the death of a child, baby and adult.

 

[billvon]

No you wrong, the current situation is that both are not saved.

If you have two sons, and your wife is pregnant with a third - who comes along to kill one of your other sons? If not your sons, who else do they kill?

 

[Tiassa]

Everybody Jumped for Joy, and Joy Jumped Out the Window

Can you prove cause and effect? I may vary well be all those thing happened because of the women's movement and not because of legalize abortion.

Which leads right back to misogyny in general, and the question of the abortion movement's place within it.

However, proof is one of those tricky things in our individual hands; primary social sciences literature is expensive, and I don't have access. However, we can start building the mosaic, such as this citation posted almost a year ago:

A study of low-income women in New York City in the 1960s found that almost one in 10 (8%) had ever attempted to terminate a pregnancy by illegal abortion; almost four in 10 (38%) said that a friend, relative or acquaintance had attempted to obtain an abortion. Of the low-income women in that study who said they had had an abortion, eight in 10 (77%) said that they had attempted a self-induced procedure, with only 2% saying that a physician had been involved in any way.

These women paid a steep price for illegal procedures. In 1962 alone, nearly 1,600 women were admitted to Harlem Hospital Center in New York City for incomplete abortions, which was one abortion-related hospital admission for every 42 deliveries at that hospital that year. In 1968, the University of Southern California Los Angeles County Medical Center, another large public facility serving primarily indigent patients, admitted 701 women with septic abortions, one admission for every 14 deliveries ....

.... In the late 1960s, an alternative to obtaining committee approval emerged for women seeking a legal abortion, but once again, only for those with considerable financial resources. In 1967, England liberalized its abortion law to permit any woman to have an abortion with the written consent of two physicians. More than 600 American women made the trip to the United Kingdom during the last three months of 1969 alone; by 1970, package deals (including round-trip airfare, passports, vaccination, transportation to and from the airport and lodging and meals for four days, in addition to the procedure itself) were advertised in the popular media.

(Benson Gold)​

And here we run into another problem; as I write, I'm searching for a prior post in which, on one of the major anniversaries of Roe v. Wade, a sympathetic organization detailed the progress women have made over time. While that won't be primary data, it will point us toward more source information to chase down.

But this also leads to a note aside about how frustrating it is to devote time and thought and effort to these discussions only to have them brushed off with no effort in favor of an anti-abortion slogan. Remember our discussion on misogyny? And the anti-abortion summary thereof? Talk about a non-sequitur. My only question about your approach to the issue is what progress you expect it to accomplish.

Still, though, this is a case we can certainly build; I just don't intend to spend the hours gathering all the sources today, given the probability that what our anti-abortion neighbors have been told repeatedly will be ignored.

Well first I don't quite understand the question, are you suggesting the social implications of making abortion illegal (the next consequences?) are too heinous? You would need to prove that making abortion illegal also keeps women "in the kitchen" metaphorically or literally.

How?

That's at the heart of this discussion; assigning a new context of personhood to the fetus would trump a woman's right to govern what takes place in her own body.

The whole abortion issue is one where reality and law meets unanswered/controversial metaphysic of what is alive, personhood, existence.

True, but there is also the point that zygote personhood is a new phenomenon. Very well, zygote personhood is the assertion; how, exactly, does that work?

Go back to my random note about vampirism; is there really no existential difference between me standing beside my partner and the organism existing entirely inside her body, attached to her by a feeding tube that consumes nutrients from her blood? It does seem a silly note, but if there is no existential difference between me and the fetus, why should anyone not be able to drink your blood? You know, as long as it doesn't kill you.

Well that an emotional weakness, not a logical approach, If abortion is murder then it mus have all the legal consequences of murder, like forcing women to grow and birth rape babies or else charge them with murder. Attempting to create some kind of special case, granting a fetus status as a semi-person and semi-murder if killed leads to all sort of problems of arbitrariness.

I would agree, but remember that these people consider it unfair to consider the broader implications that don't cast them in a saintly light.

And I disagree with it, it either for abortion or against, sort-of-legal abortion does not make logical sense to me.

Yeah. It's ... er ... right. I would suggest that a review of that discussion will look rather quite familiar. And it kind of looks like the four-hundred post thread from 2008. Another thread from 2008 includes an early form of the question in the 2011 thread about pregnancies from rape.

That sounds like a serious jump in logic to me, can you go through the connective steps there for me.

Of course it sounds like a serious jump in logic if one ignores the long record of these discussions, both here at Sciforums and in the world at large.

To the other, it's behaviorally evident. What we see here isn't an isolated web phenomenon; it is not an exclusive behavior of Sciforums members. As I noted earlier, granting the presupposition at the outset in order to explore what happens next? Yes, of course I consider the consequences of the pro-life argument heinous. To wit, there is some prima facie evidence of societal benefits of abortion on demand to be observed from the simple fact that a large number of women have not become parents the way they otherwise would have.

And consider this: A teenage girl is not old enough, under the law, to consent to sexual intercourse. But she is old enough, under the law, to have a baby.

Look at what that does to her education, to her body, and so on. The prima facie evidence of societal benefits is seen in the drastic reduction of septic abortions, the greater potential—widely realized—of individual economic stability, improved physical health from lack of problematic pregnancy and the lack of effects of a normal pregnancy, and vastly improved mental health resulting from a number of factors including all of the above.

Getting to the technical papers? The actual research data? Maybe I can't afford to be paying thirty to a hundred dollars a pop for a paper that may or may not include the information I'm looking for, but well-funded political organizations can. And while the pro-choice side does in fact distill those statistics in other releases (they can't straight-up publish someone else's work, as such), the anti-abortion side generally ignores that data. For instance, as Planned Parenthood (.pdf) expressed last year:

In 1965, abortion was so unsafe that 17 percent of all deaths due to pregnancy and childbirth were the result of illegal abortion (Gold, 1990; NCHS, 1967). Today, less than 0.3 percent of women undergoing legal abortions sustain a serious complication (Boonstra et al., 2006; Henshaw, 1999). The risk of death associated with abortion increases with the length of pregnancy, from one death for every one million vacuum aspiration abortions at eight or fewer weeks to 8.9 deaths after 20 weeks' gestation (Boonstra et al., 2006). In 2007, the maternal mortality rate in the U.S. was 12.7 deaths per 100,000 live births — a significant difference in maternal mortality rates between ending a pregnancy by abortion and carrying it to term (Paul et al., 2009; Xu et al., 2010). The risk of death from medication abortion through 63 days' gestation is about one per 100,000 procedures (Grimes, 2005). In comparison, the risk of death from miscarriage is about one per 100,000 (Saraiya et al., 1999). And the risk of death associated with childbirth is about 14 times as high as that associated with abortion (Raymond & Grimes, 2012).

The ability to make this personal health care decision has also enabled women to pursue educational and employment opportunities that were often unthinkable prior to Roe. The Supreme Court noted in 1992 that “the ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives” (Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 1992). Justice Harry Blackmun, the author of Roe, called the decision “a step that had to be taken as we go down the road toward the full emancipation of women” (Greenhouse, 1994).​

The notion of societal benefits of abortion on demand has been around at least since Roe. It is reflected, medically, in professional academic literature. And if one really needs an explanation of how abortion on demand "has also enabled women to pursue educational and employment opportunities that were often unthinkable prior to Roe", they're ignoring the self-evident: Eighteen years old; a mother or a student, since not everyone can be both. Which condition leads to financial stability that empowers better physical and mental health, and thus better empowers women as individuals?

Now consider that none of that really matters to the anti-abortion advocates. They want what they want and don't care about the implications for women. And that last sentence is behaviorally evident, not just in this thread or at Sciforums in general, but for the last forty years in the United States.

I'm not seeing the problem, if your claiming there is a paradox that either the mother or the fetus gets shafted, yeah I've gone over that.

It's not about the shafting of mother or fetus, as such. Rather, it's about the implications of LACP as a juristic issue. Once that "personhood in utero" [PIU] is established, a whole bunch of other things happen. And that's according to the Supreme Law of the Land.

The first problem I raised in this context, years ago, is that society cannot simply deny a class of "people" equal protection under the law simply because it is too complicated or expensive to do so; there is no constitutional exception.

Thus, if it really is absurd to investigate so many women for potential miscarriages, the outcome is that a class of "people" (i.e., PIU) will not enjoy the equal protection of the law. Was this a miscarriage? Did someone deliberately induce it (murder)? Did some accident cause it (manslaughter/negligent homicide)? If we're not going to investigate those deaths, we're not affording PIU equal protection.

There is no constitutional escape from this consequence. And if I consider those outcomes heinous, I might wonder why I shouldn't.

Unless, of course, LACP is just about putting women back in their place. That is, PIU gets personhood against abortion, but not in anything else.

Perhaps this is a unique question to the United States; I haven't studied the equal protection laws in other nations as thoroughly as I should.

Kenji Yoshino (.pdf), a constitutional law professor at NYU, considering the changing nature of equal protection, noted in 2011:

The jurisprudence of the United States Supreme Court reflects this pluralism anxiety. Over the past decades, the Court has systematically denied constitutional protection to new groups, curtailed it for already covered groups, and limited Congress's capacity to protect groups through civil rights legislation. The Court has repeatedly justified these limitations by adverting to pluralism anxiety. These cases signal the end of equality doctrine as we have known it.

The end of traditional equality jurisprudence, however, should not be conflated with the end of protection for subordinated groups. Squeezing law is often like squeezing a balloon. The contents do not escape, but erupt in another area, in a dynamic that Professor Louis Henkin once dubbed “constitutional displacement.” The Court's commitment to civil rights has not been pressed out, but rather over to collateral doctrines. Most notably, the Court has moved away from group-based equality claims under the guarantees of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to individual liberty claims under the due process guarantees of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.​

To the other, as Yoshino explains, the United States is "arguably the most religiously diverse country in the world", points out that the "visibility of women, sexual minorities, and individuals with disabilities has skyrocketed", and observes that the "Census Bureau now acknowledges sixty-three possible racial identities".

It may well be that this version of the equal protection consideration within the abortion and LACP issue is unique to our society.

Well yes some pro-lifers are specifically out to suppress women, but I still don't see how its not possible as you claim to be pro-life and not gender equalist.

If one is willing to visit documentable harm on a class of people in order to fulfill mere sentiment, that pretty much makes that person antithetical to the class. That is, if this sentimental PIU is granted, there will be vast repercussions; first for women of childbearing age and faculty, and then for everyone else. Forced motherhood has observable detrimental effects on women.

But, you know, those don't matter, apparently. That is: Sure, I want this to happen to women, but it's not because I hate them. I'm not a misogynist, I just want an outcome that hurts women as a whole.

One might as well say, "I'm not a racist, I just hate black people."

Probably because certain people keep twisting it to that, the whole misogynist tactic has been very affect world wide in twisting the abortion debate.

I suppose you're right. After all, assessing people according to their behavior is unfair. We should, instead, assess their behavior according to how they want to be viewed.

"Truth will out" generally doesn't mean truth will take a flying leap out a thirtieth-floor window.
____________________

Notes:

Benson Gold, Rachel. "Lessons from Before Roe: Will Past be Prologue?" The Guttmacher Report on Public Policy. March, 2003; v.6, n.1. Guttmacher.org. January 6, 2014. http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/tgr/06/1/gr060108.html

Planned Parenthood. Roe v. Wade: Its History and Impact. 2013. PlannedParenthood.org. January 6, 2014. http://www.plannedparenthood.org/files/PPFA/Roe_History_and_Impact.pdf

Yoshino, Kenji. "The New Equal Protection". Harvard Law Review. Vol. 124:747. 2011. HarvardLawReview.org. January 6, 2014. http://www.harvardlawreview.org/media/pdf/vol124_yoshino.pdf

 

[RussellCrawford]

If you have two sons, and your wife is pregnant with a third - who comes along to kill one of your other sons? If not your sons, who else do they kill?

A woman is a dynamic not a static individual. If she wants another child after an abortion, she simply has one. If you force her to have a baby when she cannot afford a baby, you may limit the number of children that she has. Why, because if she had aborted the first child, she may have continued her education and had a series of babies. But because you forced her to give birth, she may have only enough money to have a single child. Your theory is simply false.

 

[Bells]

on the contrary, if you read through those threads you will see I give the same answer.

I have mentioned several times that given the current state of things, outright prohibition of abortion is not practical. I even compared it the failure of prohibition of alcohol in the states.
This of course doesn't mean it should be available on every street corner.

On every street corner..

Some 87% of U.S. counties do not have an abortion provider and 35% of women aged 15–44 live in those counties.[32] The proportions are lower in the Northeast (53% and 18%) and the West (74% and 13%). In 2005, nonhospital providers estimated that while more than seven in 10 women traveled less than 50 miles to access abortion services, nearly two in 10 traveled 50–100 miles and almost one in 10 traveled more than 100 miles.​

Exaggerate much LG?

You make it seem as if women just nip down for convenient abortions around the corner on a mere whim. The reality is far, vastly far, from your exaggeration.

regulate it, as opposed to wholesaling it as a procedure available anytime for any woman at any stage of her pregnancy,

*Chortle!*

I want you to show me proof that people are wholesaling abortion that is available anytime for any woman at any stage of her pregnancy. Do you have links to support this?

It is strictly regulated.

Or are you simply trying to blow it out of proportion for personal reasons?

IOW much like any other morally questionable norm with dire consequences that contemporary society has become heavily socialized around, it requires heavy restrictions and sanctioning.

It is heavily controlled and sanctioned, to the point where some women needing one for medical reasons - ie to save the life of the mother - are denied the right to have one. In some hospitals, even if a woman is miscarrying and is bleeding out or even becoming septic or has an ectopic pregnancy, they will refuse to treat the mother if there is still a foetal heartbeat. Perhaps you can explain how it is not restricted or sanctioned?

Given that the model of triage doesn't lower itself to the defense of the indefensible (IOW it doesn't apply retrograde definitions to life to make the notion of killing in the womb more palatable), its their prerogative not to provide such services or to participate in disseminating an "awareness" that abortion is not tantamount to killing life in the womb and so on.

Contrary to what you may believe LG, women are very much aware of what happens and what is going on when they have an abortion. They are also very much aware of what it is they are doing.

Infact its a crucial requirement if society is to elevate itself off teh slippery slope of the degraded standard becoming the new standard.

Could you please explain what you mean by this statement?

Why is it a crucial requirement for women to be lectured to prevent society from slipping into "the degraded standard becoming the new standard"?

Do you think women do not know or understand what is going on in their own body? Do you think women do not know or understand their decisions?

Do you think women are to blame for dumping society down the slippery slope that you deem has become the new degraded standard of society?

hence consent and will remain malleable on the front of morals for all parties involved... so its natural that service provision reflects the moral barometer of wherever a society may be situated, for better or worse.

Like in the highly moral society where a woman, 14 weeks pregnant, is being kept on life support against her and her family's consent and pumping her full of drugs to keep her alive, because she is pregnant and the family do not even know if the baby even has a functioning brain yet because of all it suffered in the life saving attempts made to keep the mother alive? Is that a moral society? Or the society that forces a woman to nearly die as she goes septic in a miscarriage because there is still a foetal heartbeat? Is that a moral society? Or is a moral society one that respects the rights of women and allows them to access safe and necessary medical care for all of their needs as required?

As far as guiding its citizenry, you tend to see that society's have one prong aimed at getting people to act by their highest qualities and another prong by having contingency plans for when things go awry. One prong operates by dictating a social standard of acceptable behaviour (IOW people are pressured to refrain from certain acts and engage in others ) and another prong operates through the avenues of rehabilitation, administrative endorsement or criminal justice for when things go off the rails.
To say that abstinence is unrealistic not only defaults everyone to an inferior grade of existence (ie robs people of the opportunity to be encouraged to perform at a higher grade ... I mean sooner or later if one wants to make the transition into adulthood one has to learn self control, which incorporates abstinence ... or alternatively work in several jobs to pay the fees at the family courts) but increases the demands of rehabilitation, criminal justice etc.
Or to say it another way, if the state is forced to facilitate the role that is commonly served by the family/extended society, it will not only be a poor substitute but produce a citizenry of welfare clients that will ultimately sink the system.

Abstinence is unrealistic and often fails. Society that fail to prepare their children for the eventuality of sex, who fail to educate their children about sex and safe sex, who force their daughters to undergo chastity pledges, fail dismally.

Education is the key and people who have all the information in front of them are able to make the correct decision for themselves with all they need to help them make it. Trying to keep women stupid about sex does not work.

IOW the end result of what you advocate will be a more degraded society that creates more demand than it can provide.
This is of course taking the subject of abortion beyond its immediate borders to a broader spectrum of long term vision for a civilization. Needless to say, I don't expect you to agree with this, but I think its sufficient to say that your deriding of abstinence because it is not as effective as short term solutions is typical of the sort of problem solving that sustains an illness while treating the symptoms.
IOW whatever benefits we may see in society having a liberal attitude to sex life, its certainly not present in the form of cohesion of the family unit.... and with the dissolution of the family unit comes an environment that generates less effective people

I deride abstinence when that is all it is taught.

I would rather my children know and are educated about sex and all the responsibilities of what can happen if you have sex, I would rather they know and understand why if they do have sex, why protection is essential, than to tell my children 'sex is evil and bad outside of marriage unless they want to have a child' and strike absolute fear and terror of sex into them.

Sex is normal and it is a normal part of life. We would not be here without it.

What I advocate is education and understanding and providing safe environments for people to talk about it and to provide people who are sexually active with contraception and the ability to take responsibility for their actions as they feel is necessary.

I use that term to identify you as defaulting to weighing in favour of the rights and support of the mother to abort in any situation she chooses over the right of the child to live in all and any circumstances.
In fact its more than that, you don't even register the child as having any rights.
As such the direction you can actually move in accordance with models of triage is severely limited.

Should the potential for life have more rights than the mother who is alive?

I don't think it should.

I'll put it this way LG, as I type this, there is a woman in Texas who is being forced to remain alive, against her wishes and that of her family's wishes, on life support, because she was 14 weeks pregnant when she initially died and became brain dead. She is immediately denied any dignity because she was 14 weeks pregnant and she is forced onto life support, because there was a foetal heartbeat. I cannot imagine anything worse. 14 weeks.. There is no chance of viability here. We aren't talking about keeping her on life support for a few weeks. But until May. Five months away. Society and the law in Texas has deemed her only valuable enough as an incubator and her dignity and her very identity and her wishes and that of her family are no longer worthy of consideration. In the meantime, the family do not even know if the child is brain dead like its mother.

And you complain that women have the right over their body and as you stereotype it, abort in any circumstance or when she chooses? How dare she have rights over her sexual organs and her reproductive organs!

IOW triage is about making the best use of a bad bargain ... as opposed to standardizing the bad bargain as the new standard

As one said earlier. If men could get pregnant, we would not be having this conversation.

IOW the rights of the child in the womb never appears on the radar of your moral barometer

There's a child in the womb?

When my placenta ruptured and as I bled out, literally, I bled out, the only thing that mattered to me was the rights of my son, so much so that I begged the doctor to let me go, to let me die, to save my son as I went into shock and then lost consciousness. So I'd suggest you be careful about what you think I feel for the rights of the "child".

I would never ever force my personal standard on anyone else. Women should decide for themselves.

and how far back are you prepared to follow the chain of cause and effect?
At what point does the factors that actually cause pregnancy and produce a need for abortion in the first case become an unmanageable variable?

Well we could advocate not having sex until you want to have a child, but most people are normal and actually enjoy sex LG.

 

[billvon]

Good to see you gave up on your "someone has to die" nonsense. On to your post:

A woman is a dynamic not a static individual. If she wants another child after an abortion, she simply has one. If you force her to have a baby when she cannot afford a baby, you may limit the number of children that she has.

So by having one more child than she wants, she will have fewer children overall? Maybe, maybe not; it depends on how they feel about it. Heck, some might have a child they otherwise wouldn't have had, fall madly in love with them, and have three more because of their experience. Those are all based in individual feelings.

The only SCIENTIFIC part of this is that an abortion results in less fertile time in her life, so overall she has less of an opportunity to have kids. Usually not a factor for most people, but it is a biological fact that women have a limited period of time during which they can have children.

Your theory is simply false.

I have not proposed any theory, only refuted your silly "someone has to die unless you get an abortion" claim.

 

[Bells]

Good to see you gave up on your "someone has to die" nonsense. On to your post:

So by having one more child than she wants, she will have fewer children overall? Maybe, maybe not; it depends on how they feel about it. Heck, some might have a child they otherwise wouldn't have had, fall madly in love with them, and have three more because of their experience. Those are all based in individual feelings.

Lets say she has the baby at 17. Where she could have gone to university and been in a financial and secure in a relationship afterwards to be able to have say 3 children. Having a child at such a young age, it restricts her ability to get an education and be able to provide for her child. The cycle then continues because she will then not have more children, because she is unable to afford to have more.

 

[billvon]

Lets say she has the baby at 17. Where she could have gone to university and been in a financial and secure in a relationship afterwards to be able to have say 3 children. Having a child at such a young age, it restricts her ability to get an education and be able to provide for her child. The cycle then continues because she will then not have more children, because she is unable to afford to have more.

Agreed, that might happen. She might also have a child at 22 and decide that motherhood is her calling and have 6 more - something that may have not happened had she aborted the first child. Up to her.

 

[Bells]

Agreed, that might happen. She might also have a child at 22 and decide that motherhood is her calling and have 6 more - something that may have not happened had she aborted the first child. Up to her.

Yes, it is up to her. That's the whole point of this debate.

 

[RussellCrawford]

I have not proposed any theory, only refuted your silly "someone has to die unless you get an abortion" claim.

No one ever said "someone will die unless you get an abortion."

 

[RussellCrawford]

Agreed, that might happen. She might also have a child at 22 and decide that motherhood is her calling and have 6 more - something that may have not happened had she aborted the first child. Up to her.

Regardless of what your beliefs are, if you are to force the birth of the fetus you must allow a born baby to die. So what is your point. Pro lifers murder born babies to save fetuses and you are concerned about trivial issues?

 

[ElectricFetus]

Which leads right back to misogyny in general, and the question of the abortion movement's place within it.

Still, though, this is a case we can certainly build; I just don't intend to spend the hours gathering all the sources today, given the probability that what our anti-abortion neighbors have been told repeatedly will be ignored.

That's at the heart of this discussion; assigning a new context of personhood to the fetus would trump a woman's right to govern what takes place in her own body.

True, but there is also the point that zygote personhood is a new phenomenon. Very well, zygote personhood is the assertion; how, exactly, does that work?

Go back to my random note about vampirism; is there really no existential difference between me standing beside my partner and the organism existing entirely inside her body, attached to her by a feeding tube that consumes nutrients from her blood? It does seem a silly note, but if there is no existential difference between me and the fetus, why should anyone not be able to drink your blood? You know, as long as it doesn't kill you.

I would agree, but remember that these people consider it unfair to consider the broader implications that don't cast them in a saintly light.

...

Ok lets work on your vampire argument because I think it covers all this and more that I did not quote.

In a world where vampires are real, demand for blood is high, and there is not enough twilight fans volunteering to freed them. Random people need to get mugged for blood, rarely killed, but often a pint short of death. You would say "well lets get the death camps built and the sunlight focusing mirrors on them, the right of the "don't suck blood" gender to not have blood stolen by force trumps the right to life of millions of millions of vampires. If you don't want to do it for your self give me a moment to pull up references to show that there are social benefits to this mass re-deading of the undead" Frankly pro-lifers sympathizing with rape victims are less heartless then you... maybe your a vampire trying to kill off the competition?

Of course this whole ethical problem could be avoided if we establish that vampires are not people. A feat that hypothetically would be harder then establishing a fetus is not a person on account that vampires can walk and talk and beg for their lives "Please don't kill me, I count cookies on sesame street!" Thus (and I say again) the personhood of the fetus is the primary, fundamental question that must be answered. If we leave personhood to question and claim that women's rights is more important it leads to us having to accept the murder of millions of "people" simply to assure women's right to control of their bodies, a stance more uncaring then accepting rape victims have to deliver to term rape babies, and frankly makes our world just as much of a strange hell as the one with vampires and glorious lit death camps. All the social benefits (which I'm inclined to believe do hinge on right to abort, but playing devils advocate, remmeber?, because the pro-lifers here are rather pathetic) of those rights would need to be tampered against the mass murder, the genocide... or that is right, lets argue about definition of terms instead, No NO focus, personhood of fetus?, PERSONHOOD OF FETUS?

The first problem I raised in this context, years ago, is that society cannot simply deny a class of "people" equal protection under the law simply because it is too complicated or expensive to do so; there is no constitutional exception.

Seriously you don't see how your argument could be turned against you? Fetuses may be a class of people and as such are being denied their constitutional right to life! If we don't disprove the personhood of the fetus first, someone loses their (constitutional) rights, we have to shaft either the fetuses or the women. Now for those that choose to shaft the women, you can logically call them misogynistic all you want, many of them probably don't "hate" women and some of them probably don't want to oppress women either, but these misogynists can logically call you an "advocate of mass murder", which I believe has a simple single word term that is used so often it has lost all meaning and is kind of silly to use, sort of like "misogynist" only more forgone.

 

[Captain Kremmen]

The medical profession has a medical Latin word for everything.
The words are more precise, and less emotive, than their day-to-day counterparts, but no more valid.
When a pregnant woman is startled by an energetic kick, and is asked what is the matter,
she say's "It's the baby". She does not say "It's the fetus".
Seems to me that the only time a non-medical person calls it a fetus is when they want to kill it.

 

[Bells]

In a world where vampires are real, demand for blood is high, and there is not enough twilight fans volunteering to freed them. Random people need to get mugged for blood, rarely killed, but often a pint short of death. You would say "well lets get the death camps built and the sunlight focusing mirrors on them, the right of the "don't suck blood" gender to not have blood stolen by force trumps the right to life of millions of millions of vampires. If you don't want to do it for your self give me a moment to pull up references to show that there are social benefits to this mass re-deading of the undead" Frankly pro-lifers sympathizing with rape victims are less heartless then you... maybe your a vampire trying to kill off the competition?

Is this you still failing at devil's advocate?

Of course this whole ethical problem could be avoided if we establish that vampires are not people. A feat that hypothetically would be harder then establishing a fetus is not a person on account that vampires can walk and talk and beg for their lives "Please don't kill me, I count cookies on sesame street!" Thus (and I say again) the personhood of the fetus is the primary, fundamental question that must be answered. If we leave personhood to question and claim that women's rights is more important it leads to us having to accept the murder of millions of "people" simply to assure women's right to control of their bodies, a stance more uncaring then accepting rape victims have to deliver to term rape babies, and frankly makes our world just as much of a strange hell as the one with vampires and glorious lit death camps. All the social benefits (which I'm inclined to believe do hinge on right to abort, but playing devils advocate, remmeber?, because the pro-lifers here are rather pathetic) of those rights would need to be tampered against the mass murder, the genocide... or that is right, lets argue about definition of terms instead, No NO focus, personhood of fetus?, PERSONHOOD OF FETUS?

Here is a human blastocyst.

Should it have the same rights as you? After all, it is 5 days old. 5 days prior to that, a human male sperm penetrated a female egg. Whereupon a new person came into existence.

So is it a person?

Should it have the exact same legal protection as you do and thus, be granted human rights? Because if we are going to talk personhood, then we are going to have to talk it at the moment of conception.

Lets call it Frank. Because Frank is a person. Now imagine Frank's mummy is a professional kickboxer. She does not know Frank exists yet and so, continues about her day to day life, as you do. She goes out and eats soft cheeses, sushi, drinks alcohol and takes a pounding in training for her next match. She also takes regular herbal medication that could be harmful to Frank. 7 weeks later, she realises she is late and then discovers she has Frank, growing in her tummy. 33 weeks later, Frank is born and has severe physical issues because in the first 6 weeks of his life, his mother drank, ate the wrong foods that are harmful to Frank... Now remember, Frank is a person and was a person from the very moment his father's sperm wiggled it's way into his mummy's egg.

Personhood means that Frank has legal rights. Should Frank be able to sue his mother for the harm she caused him in the first 6 weeks of his life? How about if at 7 weeks, you are driving along and accidentally ram your car into his mummy and his mummy is given numerous drugs and medicines to make her better and he is born, severely affected because of those medications. You'd find it acceptable if Frank sued you for all that you were worth and them some, because when he was 7 weeks old in his mother's womb, you saw fit to cause injury to his person when your actions resulted in Frank's mother being given life saving drugs?

And if we are going to apply the personhood argument, women will also have to be investigated for murder each time she miscarries and every single month, her menstruation will need to be investigated to make sure she has not committed murder. This is acceptable for you?

Another example. You and your 2 year old child are involved in a major car pileup and you are badly injured. Help arrives and commence triage, where they assess who gets what emergency care when, and prioritise who goes first. You are mildly injured but your child is even worse off, with severe abdominal injuries. So help arrives and they assess your child and know that your child will die if it does not get immediate care. Then your wife tells the paramedic that she is 9 weeks pregnant. She is not badly injured and only has a broken wrist. Since the 9 week old embryo is a person, it has equal rights to care as your badly injured 2 year old. Who is more of a person to you? Who do you think should be put in that ambulance first? Your wife with the broken wrist because the 9 week old embryo could die by miscarriage because of the accident? Or your 2 year old child who has life threatening abdominal injuries. Granting personhood means you can say sweet fuck all if they leave your 2 year old to die while they try and save the embryo that they have no control over, nor can they really save it.

Seriously you don't see how your argument could be turned against you? Fetuses may be a class of people and as such are being denied their constitutional right to life! If we don't disprove the personhood of the fetus first, someone loses their (constitutional) rights, we have to shaft either the fetuses or the women. Now for those that choose to shaft the women, you can logically call them misogynistic all you want, many of them probably don't "hate" women and some of them probably don't want to oppress women either, but these misogynists can logically call you an "advocate of mass murder", which I believe has a simple single word term that is used so often it has lost all meaning and is kind of silly to use, sort of like "misogynist" only more forgone.

If fetuses are a class of people, then you had better be prepared to tell your wife and daughter that their menstrual pads and tampons need to be inspected in case they have accidentally murdered a person every month.

If you are going to tell me that blastocyst is a person, then you had better damn well be prepared to make sure no woman passes a fertilised egg as that fertilised egg passing without attaching to the uterine wall would amount to murder. You want to talk about millions being murdered? More are miscarried without even the mother's knowledge than anything else, and thus, are being denied their constitutional right to life. So many murders, so little time.

I mean of course they don't hate women. They just don't think women are intelligent or responsible enough to be able to make that decision. That isn't misogynistic, is it.