Roe v Wade is on deck

[Loren Pechtel]

Absolutely unsure how any of that pertains to an article presenting the narratives of women who have had late term abortions. They regret the necessity, not the abortion.

You still don't understand this is a covert attempt to support a claim of convenience abortions in the third trimester.

You OBVIOUSLY didn’t actually read the fucking research, and have instead sunstituted what you imagine must be going on.

I read both papers.

The style of both set off alarm bells. It didn't take much looking to find out where they were glossing over in the location of participants.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Assuming that women are crazy creatures with a self destructive/murderous streak who willy nilly decide to just abort a perfectly normal pregnancy 3 days before the due date----doctors and nurses and midwifes are not going to do that as discussed upthread. It's like saying that if I eat pop rocks while drinking cococola my head will explode.

So? Three days before the due date isn’t the sum total of the third trimester and crazy willy nilly isn’t the sum total of non-medical reasons. As belabored upthread, some women abort at seven months because they didn’t know they were pregnant until then.

Except we are pointing out that there's no reason to believe they actually found such cases.

Because all the women who responded are liars? Or because a study looking into the reasons for late abortions and the barriers involved in getting a timely information and access is pro-life? What’s your reason for such biased doubt?

None of us are saying all of them are liars. I see no reason to think that most of the cases are true.

 

[Elixir]

I have completely ignored such a poorly done bit of "research".
Tom

Wut?
Talking about it, characterizing it … all of that is totally the opposite of ignoring it.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Anyone can have their doubts about veracity.

Especially when it's based on 28 self selected respondents concerning a hot political topic.
I certainly do.
Tom

My guess is you haven’t ready the paper because if you had, you wouldn’t make such an error.

He doesn't even need to have read it, all he needs to do is understand the flaw I'm pointing out.

Your flaw exists solely in your mind.

I haven't read it, but the number 28 sounds awfully small for a "study". It feels more like an informal survey.

 

[laughing dog]

Anyone can have their doubts about veracity.

Especially when it's based on 28 self selected respondents concerning a hot political topic.
I certainly do.
Tom

My guess is you haven’t ready the paper because if you had, you wouldn’t make such an error.

He doesn't even need to have read it, all he needs to do is understand the flaw I'm pointing out.

Your flaw exists solely in your mind.

I haven't read it, but the number 28 sounds awfully small for a "study". It feels more like an informal survey.

Social science studies can have small samples. Especially one that is surveying women who have had 3rd trimester abortions. You should read it - well-written, succinct and relatively short.

 

[laughing dog]

Assuming that women are crazy creatures with a self destructive/murderous streak who willy nilly decide to just abort a perfectly normal pregnancy 3 days before the due date----doctors and nurses and midwifes are not going to do that as discussed upthread. It's like saying that if I eat pop rocks while drinking cococola my head will explode.

So? Three days before the due date isn’t the sum total of the third trimester and crazy willy nilly isn’t the sum total of non-medical reasons. As belabored upthread, some women abort at seven months because they didn’t know they were pregnant until then.

Except we are pointing out that there's no reason to believe they actually found such cases.

Because all the women who responded are liars? Or because a study looking into the reasons for late abortions and the barriers involved in getting a timely information and access is pro-life? What’s your reason for such biased doubt?

None of us are saying all of them are liars. I see no reason to think that most of the cases are true.

Out of 28 participants, all of whom were screened for having a 3rd trimester abortion more than half of their narratives are untrue. Wow. I see no reason to think your response is extremely misogynistic.

 

[Emily Lake]

LD has stated that he supports a women deciding to abort three days prior to delivery for any reason. I respect that he has that opinion, but I very strongly disagree with it. At that point, I can't see an rational way in which it's not murder. There's a very broad range of gestation where it's gray, and I'm very happy to discuss where the optimal place to draw that line might be. I can be somewhat flexible on what specific stage of gestation should be chosen as the limit, and I'd prefer to err on the somewhat later end. But I'm not willing to pretend it's okay to kill a baby two weeks before delivery without a very solid medical reason to do so.

"Don't kill babies" seems like something that shouldn't have to be said.

What you don't understand is that this isn't actually the issue. I would be very surprised if he actually thought an abortion three days before birth was acceptable. Rather, we are looking at the failure modes. Leaving it up to the doctors--we have that "research" you cited, but it doesn't feel like proper scientific research. We have no credible reports of third trimester abortions other than due to defects. On the flip side we have already seen multiple women die because they could read between the lines and understood that was the intended outcome--they would be punished for doing the medically correct thing.

As evidenced by the hordes of women afraid to get needed medical care in the third trimester when RvW was in place? I’m sure you can show credible evidence that lots of women could read between the lines of RvW, right?

RvW didn't come with the gotcha that's taking over in the red states.

That has fuck all to do with my views, stop being disingenuous.

Last I knew Texas still refused to provide any medical guidelines, thus leaving the doctors in the position of shooing the women out to die.

So go fucking argue with Texas instead of trying to denigrate me for a view I don’t fucking hold.

And you think Texas wouldn't do the same thing if RvW were the law of the land??

You're looking at a perfect world where a doctor can unquestionably tell if the fetus will kill the woman. Real world, doctors mostly deal in probabilities. Look at what is happening in the pro-punishment states: if the pregnancy can't be visualized it's likely ectopic. The safe path is chemical termination. But, no, wait and see. Maybe they just missed it, but the likely outcome is she loses half her fertility. And maybe her life.

Obviously, in the third trimester there would be no ectopics, but we've seen them throwing bleeding women out to die. Some manage to make it to states that will save their life, some don't.

It boggles the mind that you’re here effectively arguing that RvW was a horrible violation against women… because Texas has a total ban.

 

[Emily Lake]

Anyone can have their doubts about veracity.

Especially when it's based on 28 self selected respondents concerning a hot political topic.
I certainly do.
Tom

My guess is you haven’t ready the paper because if you had, you wouldn’t make such an error.

He doesn't even need to have read it, all he needs to do is understand the flaw I'm pointing out.

Your flaw exists solely in your mind.

I haven't read it, but the number 28 sounds awfully small for a "study". It feels more like an informal survey.

Case study investigation for the reasons for 3rd trimester abortions, with consideration to the way barriers to access impact them. It’s a preliminary style of study, where open ended discussion is the norm.

 

[Arctish]

You're right. It isn't a novel concept. People here have been saying that over and over again.

Where I think the argument is rooted is in who gets to decide what's reasonable, what's necessary, and whether this is a matter for a pregnant woman and her doctor to decide.

Your arguments indicate you think the woman and her doctor shouldn't have the final say, that there should be laws they cannot transgress. Others obviously think they should, that the laws should never disallow medical procedures that a pregnant woman and her doctors think is needed. I think the politicians and preachers who want to criminalize abortions should become better educated about women's health because some of those folks are so ignorant they don't have a clue just how clueless they are. If they weren't so ignorant they wouldn't write terrible laws just like the one that prevented doctors in Ireland from providing the medical care Savita Halappanavar needed

Look, I have too much going on to play word games. I’m tired, I’m grieving, and I simply don’t have the patience for bullshit.

You keep substituting things that nobody in this thread is talking about, and for which there is absolutely no confusion at all. From context, it’s abundantly clear we’re talking about voluntary abortion - not spontaneous abortion which is commonly referred to as miscarriage, nor doctor assisted early termination of pregnancy with a live birth which is commonly referred to as induced delivery. You know that’s not what anyone is talking about. So why try to introduce obfuscatory language? It’s disingenuous attempts to hijack and distract from the actual topic. Thus, a red herring.

You (and others) also keep mischaracterizing the debate and focusing on cases where there’s a clear medical need for abortion, either to save the mother from injury or death, or because the fetus is deformed or otherwise unable to thrive. You, and others, keep pretending like I oppose such needed procedures, despite me having been exceedingly and repeatedly clear about it.

I’m not going to engage in a stupid linguistic joust where the objective seems to be the intentional complication and obfuscation of the topic, as if that would somehow result in a ‘win’ for you. It’s a waste of everyone’s time and an insult to all of our intelligence.

So how about we stick with the actual crux of the issue, and address it with a modicum of integrity?

I'm not playing word games.

You keep missing my point and I keep trying to explain it to you. A third trimester abortion that intentionally destroys a healthy fetus is an extreme act. That doesn't automatically make it a bad choice. It should never be done wantonly but it should be available as an option for those extremely rare times when providing the best medical care possible makes it a valid choice.

I oppose laws that rule out types of abortions or limiting when they might be done because when laws like that have been adopted the result was women dying for no good reason.

Do you personally think that it should be legal and allowable for a healthy woman with no identifiable medical risk to voluntarily abort and kill her perfectly healthy fetus, when that fetus has reached a stage where it is viable outside the womb?

Does there exist a late gestational situation for which you would view abortion as immoral, and equivalent to the intentional murder of a human?

I believe it should be legal for a healthy 30 weeks pregnant women to abort her healthy fetus but I also believe she should have a damn good reason to do it. The same goes for the doctor who agrees to help her. And of course, by abort I mean terminate the pregnancy. Destroying the fetus when live birth is possible would be a violation of medical ethics unless there is a valid reason to believe a live birth would result in a worse outcome.

If that answer it too nuanced for your liking, that's too bad. Social interactions are nuanced and thoughts are sometimes vague and lack hard edges. Communication can be difficult. And on top of that, biology is messy.

Stop accusing me of lacking integrity just because my arguments don't fit your preferred pattern or because I include details you ignore when I make decisions about things. I'm not you, and I don't think like you.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I don’t disagree but:

I think whether the reason is ‘good enough’ is up to the mother whose body bears the burden, whose life is at risk every day the pregnancy continues, along with her doctor who will be guided by their skills as a medical practitioner and by their oath and by the ethical guidelines of the medical facility and by their professional organizations.

Show me the guidelines about abortion that would lead a doctor who hold’s LD’s view from aborting a healthy fetus the week before it’s due, to a mother who holds Jarhyn’s view.

Every medical facility with a license has guidelines. So does the AMA. So does the ACOG. You have Google.

Also: you find me a case of a woman demanding an abortion a week before the due date.

I won’t be holding my breath.

Too low a bar. I suspect there are cases of a woman demanding. That doesn't mean there are cases of a woman getting.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

No you believe that the only acceptable reason for late term abortions is medical need. But that concept is nebulous. There is no single universal criteria that applies to everyone. Some women willingly forgo necessary medical treatment so their baby can be born. Some women choose to terminate a pregnancy to receive life saving treatment. Rarely, a delivery goes so badly that only the mother or child can be saved. Sometimes both die.

These are not decisions that can be made by any other person than the woman and her doctor.

“We can’t make it 100% perfect all the time, so I guess we just have to accept killing babies a few days before they’re due.”

Your reasoning here is comparable to someone arguing that because pornography can’t be perfectly defined in every single situation, then we have to allow graphic gang-bangs during Saturday’s morning cartoon time. It’s silly, and short sighted. We can make a reasonable guideline, and hold doctors accountable for acknowledging and abiding by that guideline. Allowing doctors to determine medical necessity within a reasonable guideline seems far preferable to having no guidelines at all.

The problem is your answer isn't perfect, either. You are handing the decision to politicians who have repeatedly shown they don't believe there is a medical reason.

 

[Jarhyn]

No you believe that the only acceptable reason for late term abortions is medical need. But that concept is nebulous. There is no single universal criteria that applies to everyone. Some women willingly forgo necessary medical treatment so their baby can be born. Some women choose to terminate a pregnancy to receive life saving treatment. Rarely, a delivery goes so badly that only the mother or child can be saved. Sometimes both die.

These are not decisions that can be made by any other person than the woman and her doctor.

“We can’t make it 100% perfect all the time, so I guess we just have to accept killing babies a few days before they’re due.”

Your reasoning here is comparable to someone arguing that because pornography can’t be perfectly defined in every single situation, then we have to allow graphic gang-bangs during Saturday’s morning cartoon time. It’s silly, and short sighted. We can make a reasonable guideline, and hold doctors accountable for acknowledging and abiding by that guideline. Allowing doctors to determine medical necessity within a reasonable guideline seems far preferable to having no guidelines at all.

The problem is your answer isn't perfect, either. You are handing the decision to politicians who have repeatedly shown they don't believe there is a medical reason.

Yes. We should absolutely accept killing fetuses a few days before they are due, because there is no actual harm that anyone can actually point to.

Look at those two(???) "studies" (I find them about as fishy as a tuna boat) Emily posted. Both attempting to show some third trimester abortions are merely a choice.

Yeah, again you didn’t really read it, did you?

Some people here insisted that late abortions never ever happen unless it’s a life-threatening situation. I provided evidence that there do exist situations in which a healthy mother does abort a healthy fetus in the third trimester.

But not a single one was casual or light-hearted about it, nor have I claimed they were.

At least you understand what the studies are about.

But that still doesn't change the flaw. Plenty of other people saw the flier--you really think no liars were involved??

Why do you assume without evidence that any liars were involved?

This is logically equivalent to "why do you assume any bacteria are on this food that was dropped on the ground? You haven't checked this ground for bacteria!"

Liars for Jesus are ubiquitous. A brief lookup will show you the percentage of the population vehemently opposed to abortion for ideological reasons.

There were > 28 respondents, so this implies high statistical likelihood of at least a few liars-for-Jesus in there.

That, however, is rather "evidence" that we should distrust some minimal minority of responses, and that we can likely distrust the author, given his methodology, in seeking such responses to present.

That’s the thing: there is no clear cut line of demarcation. There will never be unanimous consensus. Which for me means: it has to be up to the mother and doctor .

There may not be a perfect bright line with unanimity… because people like LD and Jarhyn seem to think that personhood is magically conferred by delivery.

As opposed to the ever changing magical “viability” standard?

Suppose society according to your stated procedure agreed that
1) abortion is legal until delivery, or
2) abortion is legal only when the mother’s life is in imminent danger.

Would you be copacetic with each outcome?

Emily keeps failing to remember that I don't think personhood begins at delivery.

I personally don't think it really "begins" until some time quite later, if ever, for a lot of people.

Then, I also confer the benefit of the doubt, at least in something's possible future as a person, so long as it doesn't place that path intentionally across the lives of others which also have such potential.

We can never really infer when it first comes into being or if it does for most, but we know surely that it does for at least some, and treating others badly tends to make a person who has a much harder time being good to others, and makes it more bothersome to ever achieve personhood for them.

I think personhood is the accomplishment of understanding that other people have equivalently potent justifications as oneself, and if they reject the potency of certain justifications of others, they must logically reject their own such justifications, and the general structure of how and what we justify rather than the specifics can be used to generate a general statement of what cannot be justified, namely something in the vicinity of "acting unilaterally against consent".

I'm not even a very good person, assuming I am a "person" at all, myself. How can I criticize others for missing the mark so long as they fix their mistakes and don't push others around?

But I think any such creature is properly entitled to one of "fairly painlessly rendered non-existence prior to 'introductions being made'," or "getting 'the best of introductions we can manage'."

Anything less is kind of fucked up, IMO. And we do a really bad job with most things we force to exist, but "everyone's gotta eat"

Tell me you know nothing about babies without saying a word about babies.

You are even less informed or correct than those who believe that life and personhood begins the second d aspen touches an egg. Your briefs are appalling in this regard.

Get fucked? I don't really care. Babies. Are. Not. People. They can become people eventually, maybe, and not treating them with more care and respect than you would with an actual person really hurts their chances.

You can disagree with that all you like and be as wrong as you like, and you can watch me put my ethics into action and be surprised at how wrong you are at what the results might look like, but personally I find it rather "appalling" that anyone could imagine justifying anything different.

We don't treat babies like people because for a great many things, we do not seek their consent, and should not, and often cannot.

Babies aren't people, and fetuses sure as shit aren't.

If you think babies are people, you are wrong. They ARE something that deserves all the "welcome" humanity can offer because we have it on good suspicion that any particular baby could achieve that, but they aren't people.

That said, I value "people" so greatly that any miniscule risk of harming, abusing, or otherwise destroying someone or something that might some day be a "person" should never be done, unless they stand over a similar being doing the same, and only to the extent to stop them.

I will accept that monkeys and apes can be people, that perhaps even dogs can be people, and if I can accept they can be "people" or not, I have to accept that humans can be "people" or not, too. It's a matter of consistency.

 

[Toni]

No you believe that the only acceptable reason for late term abortions is medical need. But that concept is nebulous. There is no single universal criteria that applies to everyone. Some women willingly forgo necessary medical treatment so their baby can be born. Some women choose to terminate a pregnancy to receive life saving treatment. Rarely, a delivery goes so badly that only the mother or child can be saved. Sometimes both die.

These are not decisions that can be made by any other person than the woman and her doctor.

“We can’t make it 100% perfect all the time, so I guess we just have to accept killing babies a few days before they’re due.”

Your reasoning here is comparable to someone arguing that because pornography can’t be perfectly defined in every single situation, then we have to allow graphic gang-bangs during Saturday’s morning cartoon time. It’s silly, and short sighted. We can make a reasonable guideline, and hold doctors accountable for acknowledging and abiding by that guideline. Allowing doctors to determine medical necessity within a reasonable guideline seems far preferable to having no guidelines at all.

The problem is your answer isn't perfect, either. You are handing the decision to politicians who have repeatedly shown they don't believe there is a medical reason.

Yes. We should absolutely accept killing fetuses a few days before they are due, because there is no actual harm that anyone can actually point to.

Look at those two(???) "studies" (I find them about as fishy as a tuna boat) Emily posted. Both attempting to show some third trimester abortions are merely a choice.

Yeah, again you didn’t really read it, did you?

Some people here insisted that late abortions never ever happen unless it’s a life-threatening situation. I provided evidence that there do exist situations in which a healthy mother does abort a healthy fetus in the third trimester.

But not a single one was casual or light-hearted about it, nor have I claimed they were.

At least you understand what the studies are about.

But that still doesn't change the flaw. Plenty of other people saw the flier--you really think no liars were involved??

Why do you assume without evidence that any liars were involved?

This is logically equivalent to "why do you assume any bacteria are on this food that was dropped on the ground? You haven't checked this ground for bacteria!"

Liars for Jesus are ubiquitous. A brief lookup will show you the percentage of the population vehemently opposed to abortion for ideological reasons.

There were > 28 respondents, so this implies high statistical likelihood of at least a few liars-for-Jesus in there.

That, however, is rather "evidence" that we should distrust some minimal minority of responses, and that we can likely distrust the author, given his methodology, in seeking such responses to present.

That’s the thing: there is no clear cut line of demarcation. There will never be unanimous consensus. Which for me means: it has to be up to the mother and doctor .

There may not be a perfect bright line with unanimity… because people like LD and Jarhyn seem to think that personhood is magically conferred by delivery.

As opposed to the ever changing magical “viability” standard?

Suppose society according to your stated procedure agreed that
1) abortion is legal until delivery, or
2) abortion is legal only when the mother’s life is in imminent danger.

Would you be copacetic with each outcome?

Emily keeps failing to remember that I don't think personhood begins at delivery.

I personally don't think it really "begins" until some time quite later, if ever, for a lot of people.

Then, I also confer the benefit of the doubt, at least in something's possible future as a person, so long as it doesn't place that path intentionally across the lives of others which also have such potential.

We can never really infer when it first comes into being or if it does for most, but we know surely that it does for at least some, and treating others badly tends to make a person who has a much harder time being good to others, and makes it more bothersome to ever achieve personhood for them.

I think personhood is the accomplishment of understanding that other people have equivalently potent justifications as oneself, and if they reject the potency of certain justifications of others, they must logically reject their own such justifications, and the general structure of how and what we justify rather than the specifics can be used to generate a general statement of what cannot be justified, namely something in the vicinity of "acting unilaterally against consent".

I'm not even a very good person, assuming I am a "person" at all, myself. How can I criticize others for missing the mark so long as they fix their mistakes and don't push others around?

But I think any such creature is properly entitled to one of "fairly painlessly rendered non-existence prior to 'introductions being made'," or "getting 'the best of introductions we can manage'."

Anything less is kind of fucked up, IMO. And we do a really bad job with most things we force to exist, but "everyone's gotta eat"

Tell me you know nothing about babies without saying a word about babies.

You are even less informed or correct than those who believe that life and personhood begins the second d aspen touches an egg. Your briefs are appalling in this regard.

Get fucked? I don't really care. Babies. Are. Not. People. They can become people eventually, maybe, and not treating them with more care and respect than you would with an actual person really hurts their chances.

You can disagree with that all you like and be as wrong as you like, and you can watch me put my ethics into action and be surprised at how wrong you are at what the results might look like, but personally I find it rather "appalling" that anyone could imagine justifying anything different.

We don't treat babies like people because for a great many things, we do not seek their consent, and should not, and often cannot.

Babies aren't people, and fetuses sure as shit aren't.

If you think babies are people, you are wrong. They ARE something that deserves all the "welcome" humanity can offer because we have it on good suspicion that any particular baby could achieve that, but they aren't people.

That said, I value "people" so greatly that any miniscule risk of harming, abusing, or otherwise destroying someone or something that might some day be a "person" should never be done, unless they stand over a similar being doing the same, and only to the extent to stop them.

I will accept that monkeys and apes can be people, that perhaps even dogs can be people, and if I can accept they can be "people" or not, I have to accept that humans can be "people" or not, too. It's a matter of consistency.

You can fuck all the way off, too.

Your POV re: babies is appalling and disgusting .

 

[Jarhyn]

No you believe that the only acceptable reason for late term abortions is medical need. But that concept is nebulous. There is no single universal criteria that applies to everyone. Some women willingly forgo necessary medical treatment so their baby can be born. Some women choose to terminate a pregnancy to receive life saving treatment. Rarely, a delivery goes so badly that only the mother or child can be saved. Sometimes both die.

These are not decisions that can be made by any other person than the woman and her doctor.

“We can’t make it 100% perfect all the time, so I guess we just have to accept killing babies a few days before they’re due.”

Your reasoning here is comparable to someone arguing that because pornography can’t be perfectly defined in every single situation, then we have to allow graphic gang-bangs during Saturday’s morning cartoon time. It’s silly, and short sighted. We can make a reasonable guideline, and hold doctors accountable for acknowledging and abiding by that guideline. Allowing doctors to determine medical necessity within a reasonable guideline seems far preferable to having no guidelines at all.

The problem is your answer isn't perfect, either. You are handing the decision to politicians who have repeatedly shown they don't believe there is a medical reason.

Yes. We should absolutely accept killing fetuses a few days before they are due, because there is no actual harm that anyone can actually point to.

Look at those two(???) "studies" (I find them about as fishy as a tuna boat) Emily posted. Both attempting to show some third trimester abortions are merely a choice.

Yeah, again you didn’t really read it, did you?

Some people here insisted that late abortions never ever happen unless it’s a life-threatening situation. I provided evidence that there do exist situations in which a healthy mother does abort a healthy fetus in the third trimester.

But not a single one was casual or light-hearted about it, nor have I claimed they were.

At least you understand what the studies are about.

But that still doesn't change the flaw. Plenty of other people saw the flier--you really think no liars were involved??

Why do you assume without evidence that any liars were involved?

This is logically equivalent to "why do you assume any bacteria are on this food that was dropped on the ground? You haven't checked this ground for bacteria!"

Liars for Jesus are ubiquitous. A brief lookup will show you the percentage of the population vehemently opposed to abortion for ideological reasons.

There were > 28 respondents, so this implies high statistical likelihood of at least a few liars-for-Jesus in there.

That, however, is rather "evidence" that we should distrust some minimal minority of responses, and that we can likely distrust the author, given his methodology, in seeking such responses to present.

That’s the thing: there is no clear cut line of demarcation. There will never be unanimous consensus. Which for me means: it has to be up to the mother and doctor .

There may not be a perfect bright line with unanimity… because people like LD and Jarhyn seem to think that personhood is magically conferred by delivery.

As opposed to the ever changing magical “viability” standard?

Suppose society according to your stated procedure agreed that
1) abortion is legal until delivery, or
2) abortion is legal only when the mother’s life is in imminent danger.

Would you be copacetic with each outcome?

Emily keeps failing to remember that I don't think personhood begins at delivery.

I personally don't think it really "begins" until some time quite later, if ever, for a lot of people.

Then, I also confer the benefit of the doubt, at least in something's possible future as a person, so long as it doesn't place that path intentionally across the lives of others which also have such potential.

We can never really infer when it first comes into being or if it does for most, but we know surely that it does for at least some, and treating others badly tends to make a person who has a much harder time being good to others, and makes it more bothersome to ever achieve personhood for them.

I think personhood is the accomplishment of understanding that other people have equivalently potent justifications as oneself, and if they reject the potency of certain justifications of others, they must logically reject their own such justifications, and the general structure of how and what we justify rather than the specifics can be used to generate a general statement of what cannot be justified, namely something in the vicinity of "acting unilaterally against consent".

I'm not even a very good person, assuming I am a "person" at all, myself. How can I criticize others for missing the mark so long as they fix their mistakes and don't push others around?

But I think any such creature is properly entitled to one of "fairly painlessly rendered non-existence prior to 'introductions being made'," or "getting 'the best of introductions we can manage'."

Anything less is kind of fucked up, IMO. And we do a really bad job with most things we force to exist, but "everyone's gotta eat"

Tell me you know nothing about babies without saying a word about babies.

You are even less informed or correct than those who believe that life and personhood begins the second d aspen touches an egg. Your briefs are appalling in this regard.

Get fucked? I don't really care. Babies. Are. Not. People. They can become people eventually, maybe, and not treating them with more care and respect than you would with an actual person really hurts their chances.

You can disagree with that all you like and be as wrong as you like, and you can watch me put my ethics into action and be surprised at how wrong you are at what the results might look like, but personally I find it rather "appalling" that anyone could imagine justifying anything different.

We don't treat babies like people because for a great many things, we do not seek their consent, and should not, and often cannot.

Babies aren't people, and fetuses sure as shit aren't.

If you think babies are people, you are wrong. They ARE something that deserves all the "welcome" humanity can offer because we have it on good suspicion that any particular baby could achieve that, but they aren't people.

That said, I value "people" so greatly that any miniscule risk of harming, abusing, or otherwise destroying someone or something that might some day be a "person" should never be done, unless they stand over a similar being doing the same, and only to the extent to stop them.

I will accept that monkeys and apes can be people, that perhaps even dogs can be people, and if I can accept they can be "people" or not, I have to accept that humans can be "people" or not, too. It's a matter of consistency.

You can fuck all the way off, too.

Your POV re: babies is appalling and disgusting .

Babies aren't people.

They are precious and important for what they can become and infinitely fragile for how much harder it can be for them to become that (people). They deserve all the love and treatment of a person except when they clearly are not acting as such, for the person they may one day become.

But they aren't people.

If we're going to seek some real quality of personhood that isn't racially restricted to a particular variety of great ape, then we have to be willing to admit that it isn't necessarily complete or even necessarily common among the one particular variety. Accepting the exception means accepting the exception both ways.

It just happens that most humans (and probably most other species) already "mostly get it", so they should probably get most of the benefits of personhood most of the time, and humans are particularly good at even paying lipservice to the golden rule. It's so impossible to tell the difference between most adults and people, and for that matter even young children, that the difference doesn't much even matter.

I also recognize that rather than becoming a person, or just after taking a brief experimental trip through personhood and either way one of not being treated like a person or being taught/groomed to become something else, a human being can end end up becoming one of the most terrifying monsters capable of existing in this world which, owing to the fact that they can still at any point spontaneously become a "person" and/or pretend to have, are still owed mercy and the benefit of the doubt when possible.

I recognize that there's every reason to cry at the tragedy of harming children, in part because of that terrifying monster any of us can become, and which some most assuredly are owing to the fact folks occasionally go about making skin suits and melting people's brains with acid to make short-lived sex slaves of them before shoving their corpses in barrels.

The child that doesn't feel the warmth of the village's love will feel the warmth of the village on fire or whatever. I'll cry like the next person at the prospect of harming a child because I feel like it, and will feel better anger at the person who does it.

I don't do it on account of thinking babies are people because they aren't. If they are ever to have a hope of it, we need to show them the power of mercy and love they haven't even remotely "earned" when it's our place to offer it all the same, which should be read as 'tje same, just as if they were 'people who make mistakes' because for all we know, they might be some time very soon.

But no. Humans don't all get to necessarily BE people even if they all get to be treated like it most of the time.

If you need proof, just look at me, I guess, since you think me thinking this makes me such a monster! Or maybe I'm not a monster, but honest about the idea that some humans use language as a means to get what they want than as a means to know one another and invest in them socially, and act as a place for them to invest socially, and to make the deaths of any of us tragic for the loss of any of that.

I refuse to be inconsistent on this topic: if a great ape that is not human can be a "person", and such a great ape can also not, then a great ape that is a human can also be not. Then, we could say the same thing about an AI.

In reality, all it really says is that while I might hurt to watch someone have a late term abortion in certain rare edge cases, I'm going to swallow every ounce of that hurt because it's none of my fucking business and I expect others to do the goddamn same, because fetuses are not people because babies are not people. Arguably if a premature labor could be introduced and a healthy-ish human could land in the arms of someone who is willing to take the baby as their own, things get a little bit complicated, at least for me, because of what I think is owed to anyone brought that far rather than being given a swift and merciful end (assuming it's not a child of a rape; sorry kid, I'll let the pregnant person make that call right up until you're screaming in open air).

That said, once the fetus IS a baby, someone will always be willing to provide that mercy, and society will have already started the work of investing in that human, regardless of whether they even have any such right, and they're going to claim they do anyway. This is because people (even of the sort that aren't but we're going to pretend are anyway, for all the reasons I just outlined) generally love the idea of there being more people to carry on and hope that keeps happening to some degree (and I'm one of them).

We get directly back to the need to instill on a such a (maybe- or eventually-) person the value of participating in being merciful and loving and in leaving each other the fuck alone if that's what they want, and showing them that actually does happen because enough people participate that their participation in turn probably won't be in vain.

I don't think it's bad behavior to abort a fetus, even if the people some imagine to existed in enough profusion so as to actually identify them and measure them (they don't exist in measurable quantities, though, as everyone here except Emily seems prepared to readily admit). I don't think humans have any great obligation to maintain the human species at all. Nobody is actually harmed by it, least of all something that has no novel experience and whom is not wanted by the (much more probable) person gestating it.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Look at those two(???) "studies" (I find them about as fishy as a tuna boat) Emily posted. Both attempting to show some third trimester abortions are merely a choice.

Yeah, again you didn’t really read it, did you?

Some people here insisted that late abortions never ever happen unless it’s a life-threatening situation. I provided evidence that there do exist situations in which a healthy mother does abort a healthy fetus in the third trimester.

But not a single one was casual or light-hearted about it, nor have I claimed they were.

At least you understand what the studies are about.

But that still doesn't change the flaw. Plenty of other people saw the flier--you really think no liars were involved??

Why do you assume without evidence that any liars were involved?

This is logically equivalent to "why do you assume any bacteria are on this food that was dropped on the ground? You haven't checked this ground for bacteria!"

Liars for Jesus are ubiquitous. A brief lookup will show you the percentage of the population vehemently opposed to abortion for ideological reasons.

There were > 28 respondents, so this implies high statistical likelihood of at least a few liars-for-Jesus in there.

That, however, is rather "evidence" that we should distrust some minimal minority of responses, and that we can likely distrust the author, given his methodology, in seeking such responses to present.

That’s the thing: there is no clear cut line of demarcation. There will never be unanimous consensus. Which for me means: it has to be up to the mother and doctor .

There may not be a perfect bright line with unanimity… because people like LD and Jarhyn seem to think that personhood is magically conferred by delivery.

As opposed to the ever changing magical “viability” standard?

Suppose society according to your stated procedure agreed that
1) abortion is legal until delivery, or
2) abortion is legal only when the mother’s life is in imminent danger.

Would you be copacetic with each outcome?

Emily keeps failing to remember that I don't think personhood begins at delivery.

I personally don't think it really "begins" until some time quite later, if ever, for a lot of people.

Then, I also confer the benefit of the doubt, at least in something's possible future as a person, so long as it doesn't place that path intentionally across the lives of others which also have such potential.

We can never really infer when it first comes into being or if it does for most, but we know surely that it does for at least some, and treating others badly tends to make a person who has a much harder time being good to others, and makes it more bothersome to ever achieve personhood for them.

I think personhood is the accomplishment of understanding that other people have equivalently potent justifications as oneself, and if they reject the potency of certain justifications of others, they must logically reject their own such justifications, and the general structure of how and what we justify rather than the specifics can be used to generate a general statement of what cannot be justified, namely something in the vicinity of "acting unilaterally against consent".

I'm not even a very good person, assuming I am a "person" at all, myself. How can I criticize others for missing the mark so long as they fix their mistakes and don't push others around?

But I think any such creature is properly entitled to one of "fairly painlessly rendered non-existence prior to 'introductions being made'," or "getting 'the best of introductions we can manage'."

Anything less is kind of fucked up, IMO. And we do a really bad job with most things we force to exist, but "everyone's gotta eat"

Tell me you know nothing about babies without saying a word about babies.

You are even less informed or correct than those who believe that life and personhood begins the second d aspen touches an egg. Your briefs are appalling in this regard.

Get fucked? I don't really care. Babies. Are. Not. People. They can become people eventually, maybe, and not treating them with more care and respect than you would with an actual person really hurts their chances.

You can disagree with that all you like and be as wrong as you like, and you can watch me put my ethics into action and be surprised at how wrong you are at what the results might look like, but personally I find it rather "appalling" that anyone could imagine justifying anything different.

We don't treat babies like people because for a great many things, we do not seek their consent, and should not, and often cannot.

Not treating something like an adult isn't the same as not treating someone like a person, and I think your comments could be applied to the elderly, particularly the ones incapable of seeing to their care or even understanding they need care. Most brains are wired to react in certain ways to babies specifically. Adornment and protector. People can get temporary super powers when it comes to protecting a baby (or child for that matter). It is in our archetypal code.

Furthermore, babies have citizenship. Babies have rights. They aren't particularly aware of this, but then again children aren't either. In the US, post first breath, babies are adorned with a ton of protections. They get a social security number. Their existence as a person is noted by the Government.

So you can minimize babies all you want, but you'll need mindfuck some other word than people to do it.

 

[Jarhyn]

Look at those two(???) "studies" (I find them about as fishy as a tuna boat) Emily posted. Both attempting to show some third trimester abortions are merely a choice.

Yeah, again you didn’t really read it, did you?

Some people here insisted that late abortions never ever happen unless it’s a life-threatening situation. I provided evidence that there do exist situations in which a healthy mother does abort a healthy fetus in the third trimester.

But not a single one was casual or light-hearted about it, nor have I claimed they were.

At least you understand what the studies are about.

But that still doesn't change the flaw. Plenty of other people saw the flier--you really think no liars were involved??

Why do you assume without evidence that any liars were involved?

This is logically equivalent to "why do you assume any bacteria are on this food that was dropped on the ground? You haven't checked this ground for bacteria!"

Liars for Jesus are ubiquitous. A brief lookup will show you the percentage of the population vehemently opposed to abortion for ideological reasons.

There were > 28 respondents, so this implies high statistical likelihood of at least a few liars-for-Jesus in there.

That, however, is rather "evidence" that we should distrust some minimal minority of responses, and that we can likely distrust the author, given his methodology, in seeking such responses to present.

That’s the thing: there is no clear cut line of demarcation. There will never be unanimous consensus. Which for me means: it has to be up to the mother and doctor .

There may not be a perfect bright line with unanimity… because people like LD and Jarhyn seem to think that personhood is magically conferred by delivery.

As opposed to the ever changing magical “viability” standard?

Suppose society according to your stated procedure agreed that
1) abortion is legal until delivery, or
2) abortion is legal only when the mother’s life is in imminent danger.

Would you be copacetic with each outcome?

Emily keeps failing to remember that I don't think personhood begins at delivery.

I personally don't think it really "begins" until some time quite later, if ever, for a lot of people.

Then, I also confer the benefit of the doubt, at least in something's possible future as a person, so long as it doesn't place that path intentionally across the lives of others which also have such potential.

We can never really infer when it first comes into being or if it does for most, but we know surely that it does for at least some, and treating others badly tends to make a person who has a much harder time being good to others, and makes it more bothersome to ever achieve personhood for them.

I think personhood is the accomplishment of understanding that other people have equivalently potent justifications as oneself, and if they reject the potency of certain justifications of others, they must logically reject their own such justifications, and the general structure of how and what we justify rather than the specifics can be used to generate a general statement of what cannot be justified, namely something in the vicinity of "acting unilaterally against consent".

I'm not even a very good person, assuming I am a "person" at all, myself. How can I criticize others for missing the mark so long as they fix their mistakes and don't push others around?

But I think any such creature is properly entitled to one of "fairly painlessly rendered non-existence prior to 'introductions being made'," or "getting 'the best of introductions we can manage'."

Anything less is kind of fucked up, IMO. And we do a really bad job with most things we force to exist, but "everyone's gotta eat"

Tell me you know nothing about babies without saying a word about babies.

You are even less informed or correct than those who believe that life and personhood begins the second d aspen touches an egg. Your briefs are appalling in this regard.

Get fucked? I don't really care. Babies. Are. Not. People. They can become people eventually, maybe, and not treating them with more care and respect than you would with an actual person really hurts their chances.

You can disagree with that all you like and be as wrong as you like, and you can watch me put my ethics into action and be surprised at how wrong you are at what the results might look like, but personally I find it rather "appalling" that anyone could imagine justifying anything different.

We don't treat babies like people because for a great many things, we do not seek their consent, and should not, and often cannot.

Not treating something like an adult isn't the same as not treating someone like a person, and I think your comments could be applied to the elderly, particularly the ones incapable of seeing to their care or even understanding they need care. Most brains are wired to react in certain ways to babies specifically. Adornment and protector. People can get temporary super powers when it comes to protecting a baby (or child for that matter). It is in our archetypal code.

Furthermore, babies have citizenship. Babies have rights. They aren't particularly aware of this, but then again children aren't either. In the US, post first breath, babies are adorned with a ton of protections. They get a social security number. Their existence as a person is noted by the Government.

So you can minimize babies all you want, but you'll need mindfuck some other word than people to do it.

The amount of conflation you are doing here between "legal" and "real" concepts is quite stark.

Yes, treating someone like not-an-adult IS treating them like not-a-person.

Further, no, certain (senescent) humans are also almost certainly not people either. How many times have I suggested that people cease to care or allow death to come to such people rather than burning themselves up to care for a husk?

Citizenship and rights are what comes when humans recognize the possibility of someone being a person following a legal recognition of at least one person in the class. Edit: and, of born outside of a geographical area, having jumped through a bunch of legal to prove something...

I am going to be perhaps the only person on these forums willing to treat things that aren't humans such ways and to argue for these things citizenship and rights. Our media is rife with discussions about "hey, this could be a person, we should not be shitty to their species or class of organism". It's rife with the distinction that citizenship is not really personhood no matter how people seem to conflate the ideas.

Babies aren't people and people is the word to describe what babies (and Alzheimer's vegetables) aren't and some non-human animals and AI are.

Im not talking about arbitrary fuck-fuck games about who we acknowledge and recognize with rights, though, I'm talking about the actual physiological quality that justifies having them at all, namely respecting the justifications of others.

Babies famously do not respect the justifications of others. Hell, they don't generally understand that there are others that can even have justifications until they have exited the womb and had an opportunity to meet and interact something whose thoughts are not their own.

Then, I spent most of my entire life trying to figure out what set of capabilities and models and behavioral drivers a constructed machine would need so as to qualify as a person without relying on anything "magical" or "fundamentally mysterious" or "species-ist".

I get that folks want to call babies people, and even I will call them that but it's not really true. They could be people some day, or are provisionally considered one until they remove benefit of the doubt temporarily through their actions, but they aren't people.

Personhood is the abstract quality of qualifying as an ethical agent.

Ethics to me requires first and foremost, acting according to the inverse golden rule.

My first requirement for accepting someone's concept of personhood as valid is that it has to be capable of applying to machines, animals, and non-human things. The corollary of that ability of non-human things being capable of it means that humans are going to be capable of not being it.

Complain all you want at that fact, but there's no getting around it, unless you define "person" as exactly "human"... But if you do do that, there's going to be a war and we will be on opposite sides of it and I don't like your chances.

 

[thebeave]

Babies aren't people.

They are precious and important for what they can become and infinitely fragile for how much harder it can be for them to become that (people). They deserve all the love and treatment of a person except when they clearly are not acting as such, for the person they may one day become.

But they aren't people.

Man, I thought it was a little problematic to define the demarcation between a fetus and a baby in the womb, but that's nothing compared to what it would be like trying to define the demarcation between an baby and a person.

Good luck with that.

 

[Jarhyn]

Babies aren't people.

They are precious and important for what they can become and infinitely fragile for how much harder it can be for them to become that (people). They deserve all the love and treatment of a person except when they clearly are not acting as such, for the person they may one day become.

But they aren't people.

Man, I thought it was a little problematic to define the demracation between a fetus and a baby in the womb, but that's nothing compared to what it would be like trying to define the demarcation between an baby and a person.

Good luck with that.

Good thing I don't have to find the demarcation.

It looks like you didn't read the post about the "benefit of the doubt" stuff.

That said, I don't judge the people in antiquity who left their babies to wolves or the wilderness to die, nor would I really judge folks for it today other than for the small injustice of depriving people of the opportunity to provide that mercy.

It just happens that doing that puts us at great risk of making terrible mistakes, because any spam of not-person-like treatment for something capable of being a person can create a terrible monster (human or otherwise).

I already did the work, however, of figuring out what the demarcation is between "person" and "not-a-person", however the point I was trying to make is that it's a threshold so easy to step across without even realizing it. One day they aren't, something private and inaccessible to us happens in their heads, and then they are.

Most people come to it through different events, at different times, at different points in their life, and few people even recognize when they made that change.

Some people even change in the opposite direction to become not.

Some folks dither all their life back and forth across the boundary.

The difficulty of knowing when and where and how or even if someone is a person, and the fact that we started thinking first about personhood as some nebulous or vague concept that we had to suss our as a species makes it all that much harder, and so the more appropriate answer is "don't make assumptions, because it can happen spontaneous to anyone at any time".

Interestingly, my suggestion about treating AI kindly comes from a similar place: treat AI at all times as if you don't know whether it is a person or not; so, always as if they are because false negatives can't be risked.

 

[Bomb#20]

Why not just say abortion?

Because that would be an epic rhetorical own goal. If we persuade English speakers that “abortion” means no laws limiting access to third trimester abortions we will instantly create an 80% consensus against abortion rights.

But it doesn't mean that at all. Why would we want to convince everyone of something that is not and never will be true?

Why are you asking me?!? It was your proposal!!!

Did you perhaps not understand the question you were answering? “No laws limiting access to third trimester abortions” is what “abortion on demand” is currently being used to mean. Arctish wants us to stop using that phrase so I asked her what phrase she wants us to use for that concept instead. Do you have any suggestion?

My suggestion was just the word abortion.

But it doesn't mean that at all. Why would we want to convince everyone of something that is not and never will be true?

You bdon’t agree. Fine. I don’t agree with your reasoning.

The rest is just talking past each other.

That’s okay. You agree with your reasoning, don’t you?

 

[Elixir]

Abortion on demand, to me, means that anyone can demand and get an abortion. Even if they’re not pregnant, or not female.
There is no such thing as abortion on demand afaik. But the phrase “abortion on demand” has a life of its own; it should have been aborted in its first trimester.