Roe v Wade is on deck

[Emily Lake]

Whether or not an action that deprives someone of their life is considered to be murder is a legal decision.

Whether or not performing an abortion deprives anyone of anything has still to be answered.
It is dishonest to presume your opinion to be fact.

A fetus developed to 30 weeks can live outside the womb with minimal risk of long term health impacts.
If that fetus is prematurely delivered, then terminated outside the womb... do you consider it NOT murder? Do you consider that to have NOT deprived them of life?

Survival for how long? And at what cost (monetary, health, family structure, etc.)? A child delivered at 30 weeks faces immediate challenges but also life long risks.

My husband was born at 34 weeks gestation. He has had a lifetime history of various respiratory illnesses, including asthma and for one entre year, repeated bouts of bronchitis and pneumonia. I seriously thought I would be left a widow with 2 children in my mid-20's. Whether or not that was connected to his premature birth, I have no way of knowing. AFAIK, no doctor ever inquired and I did not attend every medical appointment.

I understand that you care very much about babies --me, too! But I also care very much about people being able to control their own bodies and to make their own medical and reproductive choices. I may not agree with those choices but I made my own choices and have lived with them.

I support people making their own reproductive choices... but at 6 months gestation, I'm pretty sure that the reproduction has already happened. At that point, I do think it should be a medical choice, and only a medical choice.

I'm no more sanguine about a mother 34 weeks along 'choosing' to abort a health fetus than I would be with your mother in law having decided to terminate her 34 week premie. I understand that you feel differently, and that you seem to draw a meaningful distinction between a highly developed offspring inside the womb and a highly developed offspring outside the womb. That's your choice, based on your belief. I just disagree, and I don't think that a difference in location of a few feet makes enough of a difference.

 

[Jarhyn]

Frankly, I think we can do both? It's just psychotic to allow government genital inspectors into our reproductive health care at any stage of it... and this is, ultimately, where all this is going.

In a giant leap for mankind toward sanity, it would be great to get the government out of our reproductive healthcare decisions altogether. Seems pretty far out of reach for now.

Yeah, which is kinda the point.

Rather than push for formalization of reproductive healthcare laws that liberate government from health care altogether, these Nazis push first and hard for repeal of the few protections we have with no care for presenting an alternative first.

It's really the fact that all this time, we pushed for sex education and family planning education, and the availability of birth control, but the fact is, these people don't WANT to prevent unwanted pregnancy. If they didn't, want unwanted pregnancies to happen, they would be pressing for those laws from Congress and doing everything in their power to get those laws through Congress rather than boosting the Genital Inspection Party.

Instead, we have Betsy Bowers or whatever, in whichever flavor of gender you prefer, pretending they're perfect enough to throw stones at women (and men) who should have every reason and right not to have genetic offspring.

 

[laughing dog]

Do you get dizzy from that spinning?

There's no spinning, LD. Legislation is involved because we, as a society (albeit local) are making the decision to grant exceptions to what would otherwise be deemed murder. Whether or not an action that deprives someone of their life is considered to be murder is a legal decision.

Requesting assisted suicide is one thing. Having the request granted is another.

That's slippery language.

No, it isn't. It is precise language.

With requested suicicde, I think it should be speciality with extensive training in psychology, psychiatry and medicine.

Do you think there should be some hoops that requestors of assisted suicide need to jump through? Do you think they should have to have a full psych eval, for example? Or perhaps they need to try certain other types of therapies and treatments first, and assisted suicide be granted only as a last resort?

All of that would be the point of requiring a speciality with such training.

 

[ZiprHead]

There's no spinning, LD. Legislation is involved because we, as a society (albeit local) are making the decision to grant exceptions to what would otherwise be deemed murder. Whether or not an action that deprives someone of their life is considered to be murder is a legal decision.

And there's the problem in a nutshell. Legislators are not doctors and they have an agenda, that agenda being the desire that there are no abortions under any circumstances

It's a political agenda, not a health based agenda.

 

[Bomb#20]

Certainly: the same authority our society places over nearly everything in life, democracy.

You misspelled “law enforcement”.
I must have missed where Ems suggested putting abortion to a vote, case by case.

I must have missed where "democracy" means "We don't have any laws; the entire population just votes on whether to put somebody in jail, case by case."

 

[Bomb#20]

Whether or not an action that deprives someone of their life is considered to be murder is a legal decision.

Whether or not performing an abortion deprives anyone of anything has still to be answered.
It is dishonest to presume your opinion to be fact.

Dude! You wrote that the same day you wrote this:

The facts remain: abortion laws kill people and benefit nobody (but lawyers).

Whether or not preventing a late-term abortion benefits nobody but lawyers has still to be answered. You are simply presuming your opinion that a fetus doesn't count as "someone" to be fact. Your own stated principle implies if Emily's dishonest, so are you.

So no, it is not dishonest to presume your opinion to be fact -- it's just vanilla insufficient reasoning, something all of us are guilty of from time to time. Christ, the way people throw around dishonesty accusations in this thread, you'd think it was a randroid forum.

 

[Jarhyn]

And there it is again, just forgetting history when it's convenient.

No, forced births do not benefit anyone.

No, society is not better off without abortions.

Hell, there isn't even a plausible pathway to harm either, it's just people presenting the "harm" that "psychopaths" cause for not reproducing (which to me seems like, well, the opposite of harm).

I mean, I suppose how this could be seen as an existential threat to the selfish psychopath population? But that would only matter to you if you were a selfish psychopath, and nobody likes those guys, except themselves when they cover for each other.

 

[Elixir]

Certainly: the same authority our society places over nearly everything in life, democracy.

You misspelled “law enforcement”.
I must have missed where Ems suggested putting abortion to a vote, case by case.

I must have missed where "democracy" means "We don't have any laws; the entire population just votes on whether to put somebody in jail, case by case."

How is democracy going to regulate abortion? My suggestion is via professional medical regulatory boards.
You and Ems gravitate to law enforcement.

 

[Elixir]

Whether or not preventing a late-term abortion benefits nobody but lawyers has still to be answered. You are simply presuming your opinion that a fetus doesn't count as "someone" to be fact. Your own stated principle implies if Emily's dishonest, so are you.

So the criteria for personhood raises it ugly hard again.
You’re right. My presumption is that no fetus has equal default value to that of a person who has friends, memories, likes and dislikes, maybe even a favorite color and a number of people who know their name, food preferences and all the other stuff I associate with PEOPLE.
YOU have refused to state your own beliefs under the guise of belief that it doesn’t matter. I take it that this is supposed to elevate your statements to some level of objectivity that cannot be attained except by presuming fetuses to have equal or greater value to that of a person.
Standing on your high horse and talking down to me for voicing my opinion without voicing your own and without offering any reason to disagree with mine, seems kinda smarmy to me.
Tellya what - let me know why I should consider a fetus to have the same value as my wife, and you can change my mind.
I’m waiting.

 

[Jarhyn]

Certainly: the same authority our society places over nearly everything in life, democracy.

You misspelled “law enforcement”.
I must have missed where Ems suggested putting abortion to a vote, case by case.

I must have missed where "democracy" means "We don't have any laws; the entire population just votes on whether to put somebody in jail, case by case."

How is democracy going to regulate abortion? My suggestion is via professional medical regulatory boards.
You and Ems gravitate to law enforcement.

Not to mention an eminently suspicious gravitation away from actually caring for the sake of people after they are born.

There is a well observed heuristic that identifies 99.99% of bad faith arguments:

Do they propose and push solutions to the consequences of policies they claim to want before pursuing those policies?

Seriously, it's really that simple.

Propose abortion bans before laws helping parents of unwanted children actually raise them? Bad faith.

Propose laws concerning supporting the welfare of children after they are born, and comprehensive sex ed and subsidizing research into screening for (as far as we know) late-presenting life-threatening conditions pursuant to a world where late term abortion just never happens? That's some pretty good faith.

The problem here is that Nazi fuckwits out there in the world are going to constantly reference nebulous harms without ever pointing at a mechanism and process of harm, all the while proposing something that creates harm all over.

We have already discussed how this kind of prohibition is just going to reinforce class structures and divides, and make all those children worse off.

They will claim fetuses are being harmed, when that viewpoints not necessitates a belief either in the afterlife or in population growth and "birth" in general.

Seriously, who is being harmed here? The dead party that never contributed anything to anyone but back pain, a cesarian scar, and a colostomy bag?

Even if they eventually were born, didn't die of horrific birth defects, and eventually made it into the foster system, what then?

40%+ of homeless people are from the foster system.

Like seriously, these are the same fuckwits who hem and haw over their plan to "do something" about the homeless population*, and outcomes for the remainder are really quite shit.

Even as an adopted child myself, my brother ended up on the edge of society and my sister is cutting the middle between us. I only barely am managing to scrape out of a corporate grind and only because my husband was from a wealthy family and had years to throw away growing his unprofitable business and customer reach into one that would support a product we could live well enough off of for real. That wasn't skill but mostly unbelievably good luck.

So what the fuck! This is more for the growth of an underclass, what you guys are proposing.

So if this happens to describe you, why are you proposing a "solution" to a non-existent problem apparently engineered to grow an underclass while avoiding any attempt to preemptively reduce such consequences, unless you actually want somewhere in that shriveled little Nazi heart of yours for that underclass to grow and be enslaved?

*Aka slave/concentration camp.

 

[Elixir]

The problem here is that Nazi fuckwits out there in the world are going to constantly reference nebulous harms without ever pointing at a mechanism and process of harm.

I wouldn’t give a rats ass about their specious arguments, except that those arguments become a vehicle for the pursuit of their perverse interest in gaining access to other people’s reproductive systems.

 

[Jarhyn]

The problem here is that Nazi fuckwits out there in the world are going to constantly reference nebulous harms without ever pointing at a mechanism and process of harm.

I wouldn’t give a rats ass about their specious arguments, except that those arguments become a vehicle for the pursuit of their perverse interest in gaining access to other people’s reproductive systems.

And, that, in service of creating an underclass.

You know, 40% of homelessness starts as people age out of the foster system?

Where do they think all these unwanted children end up? They certainly don't on average end up on the trading floor on Wall Street, or in the C-Suite. I mean, I expect they know.

They end up in places where folks demand loudly and completely transparently to "do something*" about them, and so that they can claim how dirty and awful and dangerous cities are for having "those people" around and about (which brings us back to the "doing something*")

Instead of, you know, making it actually tenable to be a parent in today's society.

 

[Elixir]

They end up in places where folks demand loudly and completely transparently to "do something*" about them

What a shame. And they were such well loved, productive members of society back in the day. You know, back when they were fetuses.

 

[thebeave]

Whether or not preventing a late-term abortion benefits nobody but lawyers has still to be answered. You are simply presuming your opinion that a fetus doesn't count as "someone" to be fact. Your own stated principle implies if Emily's dishonest, so are you.

So the criteria for personhood raises it ugly hard again.
You’re right. My presumption is that no fetus has equal default value to that of a person who has friends, memories, likes and dislikes, maybe even a favorite color and a number of people who know their name, food preferences and all the other stuff I associate with PEOPLE.
YOU have refused to state your own beliefs under the guise of belief that it doesn’t matter. I take it that this is supposed to elevate your statements to some level of objectivity that cannot be attained except by presuming fetuses to have equal or greater value to that of a person.
Standing on your high horse and talking down to me for voicing my opinion without voicing your own and without offering any reason to disagree with mine, seems kinda smarmy to me.
Tellya what - let me know why I should consider a fetus to have the same value as my wife, and you can change my mind.
I’m waiting.

And neither do newborn babies. I take it you're not OK with killing newborns?

 

[Jarhyn]

Like seriously, they just unlawfully deported a father to a concentration camp in El Salvador and were like "can't do anything about it now".

The harm created by a lack of abortion access, especially "on demand" access, in fact, directly contributes to the next people these folks are going to target.

Do not be fooled.

The folks on these forums I have been critical of for well over a decade, the folks long and loudly involved in the "breakdown of civil order thread" (may it rot in hell) demanding measures against homelessness, often tangential with sending them to work camps, or the ready observation that's what "doing something" really means, are the same folks who are contributing to the unwanted, unplanned, and unsupported pregnancies that lead to filling the ranks of the homeless in the first place.

They were told again, and again, and again "do not ask for this, this is "camps" and "fascism".

And now here they are harping in a way that exacerbates and creates the homeless population they want to "do something*" about.

You know, I just found out today that 40% of homeless people originate from the foster system?

It makes me utterly fucking livid when bad faith goons talk about abstract harms when they are exacerbating the real, demonstrated harms directly from their rush to impose laws on reproductive care, followed by their utter contempt and lack of motivation when being told to first focus on the consequences of the children who are born to parents who actually want them.

But, alas, we cannot magically grant them a spine and conscience and the sense that they have been wrong, and this is sadly something that some folks lack an ability to do entirely.

This puts me back on the thing that I probably said some hundred times here before, and just recently up thread: if you want to do something about abortion, support comprehensive sex education -- not abstinence based, but information based; support and subsidize all children; expand the power of social services; support expanding education in general; describe the limits of any laws that will be acceptable to constrain laws capable of interfering with medically necessary procedures.

After and ONLY after doing ALL these things, will it be appropriate to propose some law or standard.

That last thing depends on all the earlier parts.

This is not something I just made up myself; those things I mentioned will measurably and demonstrably reduce homelessness and unwanted pregnancy leading to abortion, and we have discussed the mechanisms of all these too many times.

Whether or not preventing a late-term abortion benefits nobody but lawyers has still to be answered. You are simply presuming your opinion that a fetus doesn't count as "someone" to be fact. Your own stated principle implies if Emily's dishonest, so are you.

So the criteria for personhood raises it ugly hard again.
You’re right. My presumption is that no fetus has equal default value to that of a person who has friends, memories, likes and dislikes, maybe even a favorite color and a number of people who know their name, food preferences and all the other stuff I associate with PEOPLE.
YOU have refused to state your own beliefs under the guise of belief that it doesn’t matter. I take it that this is supposed to elevate your statements to some level of objectivity that cannot be attained except by presuming fetuses to have equal or greater value to that of a person.
Standing on your high horse and talking down to me for voicing my opinion without voicing your own and without offering any reason to disagree with mine, seems kinda smarmy to me.
Tellya what - let me know why I should consider a fetus to have the same value as my wife, and you can change my mind.
I’m waiting.

And neither do newborn babies. I take it you're not OK with killing newborns?

Newborn babies can be handed to someone else if they are unwanted.

It's not like a fetus can just go find another placenta: they're committed to the "crime" of being an "illegal", in lacking a "sponsor" and suffer the penalty of "deportation" until they can find a new "sponsor".

It's not their original nominated sponsor's fault that they were nominated unilaterally.

If you don't want the situation, support every measure for improved "border security", and better incentives for "sponsorship" and an easier path to "citizenship".

We can talk about addressing deportation members of these unwanted "illegals" so they can stay and be "dreamers", after we have the means to support them.

 

[Elixir]

Whether or not preventing a late-term abortion benefits nobody but lawyers has still to be answered. You are simply presuming your opinion that a fetus doesn't count as "someone" to be fact. Your own stated principle implies if Emily's dishonest, so are you.

So the criteria for personhood raises it ugly hard again.
You’re right. My presumption is that no fetus has equal default value to that of a person who has friends, memories, likes and dislikes, maybe even a favorite color and a number of people who know their name, food preferences and all the other stuff I associate with PEOPLE.
YOU have refused to state your own beliefs under the guise of belief that it doesn’t matter. I take it that this is supposed to elevate your statements to some level of objectivity that cannot be attained except by presuming fetuses to have equal or greater value to that of a person.
Standing on your high horse and talking down to me for voicing my opinion without voicing your own and without offering any reason to disagree with mine, seems kinda smarmy to me.
Tellya what - let me know why I should consider a fetus to have the same value as my wife, and you can change my mind.
I’m waiting.

And neither do newborn babies. I take it you're not OK with killing newborns?

Less okay, yeah.
People generally gain value upon participation. At first they gain value with every breath. Do you disagree?

I don’t expect proponents of abortion laws to offer the kind of straightforward answers that I provide, but I urge y’all to think about it so that some day you might gain that ability.
It’s too simple, convenient and easy to simply deem every living human cell of equal value. Declaring their value to be infinite obviates any need to make hard decisions, and makes every blastocyst’s value equal to that of every philanthropist, artist or professor. I think that’s BS right on the face of it. But admitting that it ain’t so, forces hard decisions and judgments of relative value.
That’s life and IMHO a human responsibility.

 

[Playball40]

I did suggest creating federal legislation.

Thank you for confirming.
May I assume that the intent of such federal legislation would be to reduce the incidence of abortion, by dissuading some of those who would seek an optional late term abortion from doing so?

The objective is to disallow late term abortions that do not have a solid medical indication for them.

Put bluntly: The objective is to make it illegal to kill babies for convenience, even if such situations would be rare.

I don't get this. It was ALREADY illegal to abort beyond viability in Roe v Wade. So what are you going on about? There is 'no such thing' as "late term abortion". That phrase was made up by the RTL nutters and is NOT a medical term.

 

[thebeave]

I did suggest creating federal legislation.

Thank you for confirming.
May I assume that the intent of such federal legislation would be to reduce the incidence of abortion, by dissuading some of those who would seek an optional late term abortion from doing so?

The objective is to disallow late term abortions that do not have a solid medical indication for them.

Put bluntly: The objective is to make it illegal to kill babies for convenience, even if such situations would be rare.

I don't get this. It was ALREADY illegal to abort beyond viability in Roe v Wade. So what are you going on about? There is 'no such thing' as "late term abortion". That phrase was made up by the RTL nutters and is NOT a medical term.

You have not been keeping at all. A "late term abortion" (aka third trimester abortion) FOR ANY REASON is perfectly legal in some states. Its been gone over multiple times. Check out abortion laws and rights in Oregon, for example and get back to us with your research.

 

[Elixir]

I did suggest creating federal legislation.

Thank you for confirming.
May I assume that the intent of such federal legislation would be to reduce the incidence of abortion, by dissuading some of those who would seek an optional late term abortion from doing so?

The objective is to disallow late term abortions that do not have a solid medical indication for them.

Put bluntly: The objective is to make it illegal to kill babies for convenience, even if such situations would be rare.

I don't get this. It was ALREADY illegal to abort beyond viability in Roe v Wade. So what are you going on about? There is 'no such thing' as "late term abortion". That phrase was made up by the RTL nutters and is NOT a medical term.

It’s what Emily refuses to address that is the problem. Her implication remains
“The objective is to disallow late term abortions that do not have a solid medical indication for them in the opinion of a third party from the law enforcement community, whose opinion must be rendered prior to the performance of an abortion”.
And that is how PEOPLE end up dying.
All to address a vanishingly rare chance that some psycho nutter who wants to abort a viable healthy fetus, will find a corrupt doctor who is willing to perform that abortion and kill a healthy fetus.
Happens all the time I’m sure.
The fact that the case count can be tallied on your fingers, notwithstanding.
A very bad trade for people’s suffering and lives. YMMV, but I have yet to hear a rational reason why I'm wrong.
If it offends your sensibilities, maybe they aren't really sensibilities.

 

[thebeave]

Whether or not preventing a late-term abortion benefits nobody but lawyers has still to be answered. You are simply presuming your opinion that a fetus doesn't count as "someone" to be fact. Your own stated principle implies if Emily's dishonest, so are you.

So the criteria for personhood raises it ugly hard again.
You’re right. My presumption is that no fetus has equal default value to that of a person who has friends, memories, likes and dislikes, maybe even a favorite color and a number of people who know their name, food preferences and all the other stuff I associate with PEOPLE.
YOU have refused to state your own beliefs under the guise of belief that it doesn’t matter. I take it that this is supposed to elevate your statements to some level of objectivity that cannot be attained except by presuming fetuses to have equal or greater value to that of a person.
Standing on your high horse and talking down to me for voicing my opinion without voicing your own and without offering any reason to disagree with mine, seems kinda smarmy to me.
Tellya what - let me know why I should consider a fetus to have the same value as my wife, and you can change my mind.
I’m waiting.

And neither do newborn babies. I take it you're not OK with killing newborns?

Less okay, yeah.
People generally gain value upon participation. At first they gain value with every breath. Do you disagree?

I don’t expect proponents of abortion laws to offer the kind of straightforward answers that I provide, but I urge y’all to think about it so that some day you might gain that ability.
It’s too simple, convenient and easy to simply deem every living human cell of equal value. Declaring their value to be infinite obviates any need to make hard decisions, and makes every blastocyst’s value equal to that of every philanthropist, artist or professor. I think that’s BS right on the face of it. But admitting that it ain’t so, forces hard decisions and judgments of relative value.
That’s life and IMHO a human responsibility.

No, I don't agree. I see no substantial difference in life value between a baby that will be delivered in 10 minutes versus a baby that was born 10 minutes ago and breathed, for example. Sounds like what you're saying is that there is some point in a newborn development between birth and, say, a few months (years?) wherein the baby can officially be declared a person with full value. Care to take a stab at that age? Seems like we're back in the same dilemma as trying to decide when we consider them to have made the transition between fetus and human baby.