Roe v Wade is on deck

[Arctish]

I still think you are confusing allowing abortions at any stage of development and not having a specific list of conditions that must be met in order to justify them, with having no regulations or medical ethics at all.

The code isn't the important thing, providing needed medical care is.

For all intents, I agree - providing MEDICAL care matters. When there's no medical need and the fetus can survive on its own with very high likelihood of survival and very low likelihood of problems, I see no meaningful difference between them and a premie. If you wouldn't support the killing of a premie on the basis of it being inconvenient for the mother, then you shouldn't support abortion at the same stage of development.

I don't support killing a fetus at a late stage of development if a live birth is possible.

I thought I made that clear.

Terminating a pregnancy is not the same thing as terminating a fetus.

The only difference is geography. And that's not a meaningful difference to me.

I get it that you don't trust doctors and their patients to always make the calls you want them to make, but no one can accurately predict what doctors and their patients might be facing over the course of a pregnancy. IMO we must allow doctors and pregnant women to make those choices about treatments, code or no code, because they are the ones with the information needed to make the best choice.

What are you considering to be in the realm of "best choice"? Can you outline a scenario in which you would support a third trimester abortion and which you believe I would oppose?

I have no idea what scenario you would not oppose.

I'm still trying to figure out why you keep discounting the live birth option for ending a pregnancy early and insisting late term abortions mean killing babies, except for those times when you say you don't oppose the live birth option you just think it shouldn't happen.

 

[laughing dog]

Perhaps more to the point… do you think that a baby prematurely delivered at 28 weeks is not a person, and that the mother should have the right to opt for the killing and destruction of that premie?

I don't think that my opinion matters. The decision needs to be made by the mother and her medical provider.

Her response was clearly in reference to an abortion not a live birth. So she supports killing premies as much as you support women dying in forced labor.

Her response clearly indicates that she didn't read the question being asked. And she keeps doubling down and defending the answer she gave to my question - which was very clearly NOT about abortion.

If you realize that, why continue?

I'll go out on a limb and add some explanation. …..

. No offense to those arguments, but I I see no reason will readdress why I disagree.

Barring those situations, I have not yet seen a cogent argument that supports killing a healthy baby, but does NOT also support killing a prematurely delivered baby of the same developmental stage.

You have. You just don’t like them.

If you have a good and convincing argument for why there is a meaningful difference in the humanity of each of those 28 week old individuals other than location, please have at it.

Your religious/moral beliefs are unshakable. But no one is required to accept them as convincing or universally valid.

 

[Emily Lake]

Emily: I stated repeatedly that I am done with this discussion and that I find your hypotheticals to be abhorrent and disgusting.

You have pointed out tat you believe that I did not correctly read your last disgusting hypothetical —and you are perhaps correct. Like you, I have other thjbegs going on in my life.

Despite your understanding that o did not read something correctly you are persisting in berating me and attempting to drag me into a discussion that I do not wish to be part of, especially given you are willing to co to ur after you acknowledge that I probably made an error.

I acknowledge that you probably made an error. It would be nice if you acknowledged that you did so, and reconsidered your response in light of that. I would very much like an answer to the question that I actually asked.

I’m really done.

If you're done, then be done. Stop saying that you're done and then continuing to engage.

Here's the rub: You consider it disgusting and abhorrent to even consider killing a 28 week prematurely delivered baby. I want you to consider why you find it disgusting and abhorrent in the first place. And then I want you to take the next logical step and consider why location seems to make a difference to you for whether it's disgusting and abhorrent, or whether it's acceptable and nobody's business.

It's not a challenge to what you believe; it's a challenge to why you believe it.

 

[laughing dog]

Sure. And anyone who can read and reason above a 1st grade level would have taken the opportunity I presented and revised their response to the question I actually asked, rather than continuing to defend an answer to a question that I did not ask.

Not necessarily. Some give the inquisitor the benefit of the doubt and assume they will figure it out (like you eventually did). Why you feel the need to beat this poor dead horse is beyond me. To be fair, I cannot figure out why I feel the need to enable this mutiliation.

 

[Emily Lake]

I still think you are confusing allowing abortions at any stage of development and not having a specific list of conditions that must be met in order to justify them, with having no regulations or medical ethics at all.

The code isn't the important thing, providing needed medical care is.

For all intents, I agree - providing MEDICAL care matters. When there's no medical need and the fetus can survive on its own with very high likelihood of survival and very low likelihood of problems, I see no meaningful difference between them and a premie. If you wouldn't support the killing of a premie on the basis of it being inconvenient for the mother, then you shouldn't support abortion at the same stage of development.

I don't support killing a fetus at a late stage of development if a live birth is possible.

I thought I made that clear.

Terminating a pregnancy is not the same thing as terminating a fetus.

I know they're not the same thing. What I don't follow is why you keep bringing it up in a discussion about abortion - which in common usage is not the same thing as terminating a pregnancy. You've changed terminology in a way that doesn't directly connect to the discussion topic.

The only difference is geography. And that's not a meaningful difference to me.

I get it that you don't trust doctors and their patients to always make the calls you want them to make, but no one can accurately predict what doctors and their patients might be facing over the course of a pregnancy. IMO we must allow doctors and pregnant women to make those choices about treatments, code or no code, because they are the ones with the information needed to make the best choice.

What are you considering to be in the realm of "best choice"? Can you outline a scenario in which you would support a third trimester abortion and which you believe I would oppose?

I have no idea what scenario you would not oppose.

I'm still trying to figure out why you keep discounting the live birth option for ending a pregnancy early and insisting late term abortions mean killing babies, except for those times when you say you don't oppose the live birth option you just think it shouldn't happen.

Up until this post, it was not at all clear that you advocate for induced premature birth late in the pregnancy rather than abortion.

I honestly haven't considered that. At present I don't have much of a basis to form an opinion. My gut reaction is to think that an early induced delivery is preferable to an abortion when there's no medical need to terminate the fetus... but I'm also a bit uncertain about whether that would be safer for either the mother or the baby. I suppose it's still a lesser evil, but I kind of feel like just going to term would be far better for everyone involved.

Give me your argument and reasoning. Why do you believe inducing a premature delivery would be preferable to continuing the pregnancy to term?

 

[Emily Lake]

Perhaps more to the point… do you think that a baby prematurely delivered at 28 weeks is not a person, and that the mother should have the right to opt for the killing and destruction of that premie?

I don't think that my opinion matters. The decision needs to be made by the mother and her medical provider.

Her response was clearly in reference to an abortion not a live birth. So she supports killing premies as much as you support women dying in forced labor.

Her response clearly indicates that she didn't read the question being asked. And she keeps doubling down and defending the answer she gave to my question - which was very clearly NOT about abortion.

If you realize that, why continue?

I'll go out on a limb and add some explanation. …..

. No offense to those arguments, but I I see no reason will readdress why I disagree.

Barring those situations, I have not yet seen a cogent argument that supports killing a healthy baby, but does NOT also support killing a prematurely delivered baby of the same developmental stage.

You have. You just don’t like them.

Reiterate them to me.

If you have a good and convincing argument for why there is a meaningful difference in the humanity of each of those 28 week old individuals other than location, please have at it.

Your religious/moral beliefs are unshakable. But no one is required to accept them as convincing or universally valid.

I don't think it's a religious belief, but it is inarguably a moral one. I don't believe that location has a role in determining the morality of an action.

Stealing from someone in Seville is not morally different from stealing from someone in Savannah.

 

[Emily Lake]

Not necessarily. Some give the inquisitor the benefit of the doubt and assume they will figure it out (like you eventually did). Why you feel the need to beat this poor dead horse is beyond me. To be fair, I cannot figure out why I feel the need to enable this mutiliation.

Because I asked a question for a very specific reason. And I would like an answer to the question that I actually asked.

Also, because part of me finds it both shocking and humorous to watch someone continue to repeat the same errant answer, especially when the answer comes across as so incredibly wrong minded. It might be petty, but there's a bit of "Are you sure that's your final answer?" with some side-eye involved.

 

[Elixir]

I am definitely an ill-intended renegade. 100%.

Oh wow. Thread drift is so cool.
GN says they have "broken rules more than a few times", which raises an important question that we should answer before we launch our full on retribution campaign.
Is more weight given to the number of times a poster has broken rules, or is more weight given to the number of rules they have broken?
Personally I think the latter, because one could continually break and re-break some given rule just out of habit, whereas breaking numerous rules identifies one as a truly ill-intended renegade. Like, getting an abortion while in Texas, then doing it again in Louisiana and again in Alabama and once more in Mississippi wouldn't be nearly as bad IMO, as having an abortion in Texas then holding up a bank in Nashville, then shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die.
What say ye?

I think accusing someone of being pro-killing babies is far worse than anything I've accused others of being, personally.

I have to admit, most babies are better than anybody I ever killed. At least I’d like to think so, despite the fact that they are going to be the ruin of humanity if they fail at being its salvation.

 

[laughing dog]

You have. You just don’t like them.

Reiterate them to me.

Being born is not the same as being unborn. Or as you seem to reintrepret 'Geography matters".

Not necessarily. Some give the inquisitor the benefit of the doubt and assume they will figure it out (like you eventually did). Why you feel the need to beat this poor dead horse is beyond me. To be fair, I cannot figure out why I feel the need to enable this mutiliation.

Because I asked a question for a very specific reason. And I would like an answer to the question that I actually asked.

We don't always get what we want (apologies to Mick Jagger).

Also, because part of me finds it both shocking and humorous to watch someone continue to repeat the same errant answer, especially when the answer comes across as so incredibly wrong minded. It might be petty, but there's a bit of "Are you sure that's your final answer?" with some side-eye involved.

Even when it makes you resemble Ahab chasing the white whale? Whatever sinks floats your boat, I guess.

 

[Toni]

I still think you are confusing allowing abortions at any stage of development and not having a specific list of conditions that must be met in order to justify them, with having no regulations or medical ethics at all.

The code isn't the important thing, providing needed medical care is.

For all intents, I agree - providing MEDICAL care matters. When there's no medical need and the fetus can survive on its own with very high likelihood of survival and very low likelihood of problems, I see no meaningful difference between them and a premie. If you wouldn't support the killing of a premie on the basis of it being inconvenient for the mother, then you shouldn't support abortion at the same stage of development.

I don't support killing a fetus at a late stage of development if a live birth is possible.

I thought I made that clear.

Terminating a pregnancy is not the same thing as terminating a fetus.

The only difference is geography. And that's not a meaningful difference to me.

I get it that you don't trust doctors and their patients to always make the calls you want them to make, but no one can accurately predict what doctors and their patients might be facing over the course of a pregnancy. IMO we must allow doctors and pregnant women to make those choices about treatments, code or no code, because they are the ones with the information needed to make the best choice.

What are you considering to be in the realm of "best choice"? Can you outline a scenario in which you would support a third trimester abortion and which you believe I would oppose?

I have no idea what scenario you would not oppose.

I'm still trying to figure out why you keep discounting the live birth option for ending a pregnancy early and insisting late term abortions mean killing babies, except for those times when you say you don't oppose the live birth option you just think it shouldn't happen.

I do believe that abortion is equivalent to killing the fetus.

Yes, babies are often delivered prematurely. My husband and his siblings were all premature. One of my offspring was premature. My grandchild was premature. In the case of my offspring and my grandchild, the early delivery was done because of safety concerns. In the case of my offspring, it was a precaution: I opposed early delivery and reached a compromise with the ob and still think that early delivery was unnecessary for either of us. Fortunately, the baby was fine, if small. My grandchild was delivered early because of preeclampsia.

Babies are often delivered early, either to preserve the life and health of the mother or of the baby or are spontaneously delivered prematurely. If late enough, the child survives without serious medical issues. If too early, the child often dies or suffers serious medical complications, often lifelong. We are able to mitigate some of these today but the issue can be very serious, expensive and come with life long medical complications and permanent financial difficulties for the family.

 

[Emily Lake]

Being born is not the same as being unborn. Or as you seem to reintrepret 'Geography matters".

Being tall is not the same as being short.

Why does geography matter to you? Why is it okay to kill a 28 week baby as long as you kill it while it's inside a womb, rather than outside? Is it somehow less developed, less able to feel and respond to stimuli, less able to survive and thrive?

To me, that's pretty much like saying you think it's okay to kill a 10 year old as long as you do it inside the house, rather than in public.

 

[laughing dog]

Being born is not the same as being unborn. Or as you seem to reintrepret 'Geography matters".

Being tall is not the same as being short.

Why does geography matter to you? Why is it okay to kill a 28 week baby as long as you kill it while it's inside a womb, rather than outside? Is it somehow less developed, less able to feel and respond to stimuli, less able to survive and thrive?

We’ve been over this. A fetus is not a baby, so it is not a person. A woman is a person. People matter more than beings who are not people.

I think the being born standard is easy to understand, observe and confirm. It requires no intrusion on the part of state in the birth process, and the very personal and private decisions.

Your position holds true for 27 week old fetuses. With improving technology, the threshold will diminish further. No matter where it is drawn, the same arguments crop up.

 

[Arctish]

I still think you are confusing allowing abortions at any stage of development and not having a specific list of conditions that must be met in order to justify them, with having no regulations or medical ethics at all.

The code isn't the important thing, providing needed medical care is.

For all intents, I agree - providing MEDICAL care matters. When there's no medical need and the fetus can survive on its own with very high likelihood of survival and very low likelihood of problems, I see no meaningful difference between them and a premie. If you wouldn't support the killing of a premie on the basis of it being inconvenient for the mother, then you shouldn't support abortion at the same stage of development.

I don't support killing a fetus at a late stage of development if a live birth is possible.

I thought I made that clear.

Terminating a pregnancy is not the same thing as terminating a fetus.

I know they're not the same thing. What I don't follow is why you keep bringing it up in a discussion about abortion - which in common usage is not the same thing as terminating a pregnancy. You've changed terminology in a way that doesn't directly connect to the discussion topic.

My SIL got an abortion.

The fetus she was carrying was severely malformed. Some of its organs were developing on the outside of the skin covering the abdominal cavity, others were either missing or so small they couldn’t be seen on the scans, etc. She opted to continue gestation until around the 25th week and to deliver the fetus via C -section despite grave risk to her health. The procedure resulted in the almost immediate death of a fetus that would’ve probably gone on living for at least a few more weeks if it hadn’t been removed from her uterus and cut off from the umbilical cord.

You might want to mince words and carve out alternate terminology but she had an abortion. It’s what she had to grapple with. And as someone raised in a conservative Christian denomination who was taught all about the wonders of self sacrifice and the horrors of a woman choosing to evict a fetus from her womb out of blatant self interest, she was pretty broken up about it despite having 3 young children at home who needed their mother.

You are the one trying to change the terminology to suit your argument. If you want to talk about late term abortions then we will talk about the one my SIL had. If you want to talk about the deliberate destruction of an apparently healthy fetus then we will go back to talking about the one denied to Savita Halappanavar following the rupture of her amniotic sac. If you want to talk about Cruella deVille getting an abortion because she got too big to fit into her favorite fur coat, we’ll talk about her too.

The only difference is geography. And that's not a meaningful difference to me.

I get it that you don't trust doctors and their patients to always make the calls you want them to make, but no one can accurately predict what doctors and their patients might be facing over the course of a pregnancy. IMO we must allow doctors and pregnant women to make those choices about treatments, code or no code, because they are the ones with the information needed to make the best choice.

What are you considering to be in the realm of "best choice"? Can you outline a scenario in which you would support a third trimester abortion and which you believe I would oppose?

I have no idea what scenario you would not oppose.

I'm still trying to figure out why you keep discounting the live birth option for ending a pregnancy early and insisting late term abortions mean killing babies, except for those times when you say you don't oppose the live birth option you just think it shouldn't happen.

Up until this post, it was not at all clear that you advocate for induced premature birth late in the pregnancy rather than abortion.

I said it explicitly, more than once, when I was talking about aborting pregnancies without destroying fetuses.

I honestly haven't considered that. At present I don't have much of a basis to form an opinion. My gut reaction is to think that an early induced delivery is preferable to an abortion when there's no medical need to terminate the fetus... but I'm also a bit uncertain about whether that would be safer for either the mother or the baby. I suppose it's still a lesser evil, but I kind of feel like just going to term would be far better for everyone involved.

Give me your argument and reasoning. Why do you believe inducing a premature delivery would be preferable to continuing the pregnancy to term?

I gave you a hypothetical case in which a pregnant woman is suffering from a severe case of pregnancy induced insomnia and her doctor believes an early delivery is preferable to waiting as her insomnia induced psychosis and hallucinations get worse, perhaps to the point where she attempts to induce labor herself.

We can start there.

What do you think about terminating her pregnancy early rather than waiting to see what happens?

 

[Jarhyn]

I still think you are confusing allowing abortions at any stage of development and not having a specific list of conditions that must be met in order to justify them, with having no regulations or medical ethics at all.

The code isn't the important thing, providing needed medical care is.

For all intents, I agree - providing MEDICAL care matters. When there's no medical need and the fetus can survive on its own with very high likelihood of survival and very low likelihood of problems, I see no meaningful difference between them and a premie. If you wouldn't support the killing of a premie on the basis of it being inconvenient for the mother, then you shouldn't support abortion at the same stage of development.

I don't support killing a fetus at a late stage of development if a live birth is possible.

I thought I made that clear.

Terminating a pregnancy is not the same thing as terminating a fetus.

The only difference is geography. And that's not a meaningful difference to me.

I get it that you don't trust doctors and their patients to always make the calls you want them to make, but no one can accurately predict what doctors and their patients might be facing over the course of a pregnancy. IMO we must allow doctors and pregnant women to make those choices about treatments, code or no code, because they are the ones with the information needed to make the best choice.

What are you considering to be in the realm of "best choice"? Can you outline a scenario in which you would support a third trimester abortion and which you believe I would oppose?

I have no idea what scenario you would not oppose.

I'm still trying to figure out why you keep discounting the live birth option for ending a pregnancy early and insisting late term abortions mean killing babies, except for those times when you say you don't oppose the live birth option you just think it shouldn't happen.

I do believe that abortion is equivalent to killing the fetus.

Yes, babies are often delivered prematurely. My husband and his siblings were all premature. One of my offspring was premature. My grandchild was premature. In the case of my offspring and my grandchild, the early delivery was done because of safety concerns. In the case of my offspring, it was a precaution: I opposed early delivery and reached a compromise with the ob and still think that early delivery was unnecessary for either of us. Fortunately, the baby was fine, if small. My grandchild was delivered early because of preeclampsia.

Babies are often delivered early, either to preserve the life and health of the mother or of the baby or are spontaneously delivered prematurely. If late enough, the child survives without serious medical issues. If too early, the child often dies or suffers serious medical complications, often lifelong. We are able to mitigate some of these today but the issue can be very serious, expensive and come with life long medical complications and permanent financial difficulties for the family.

The one sense/condition in which I personally do support abortion over premature birth is simple: when someone refuses responsibility for the consequences of that birth as "premature".

At that point, someone else either needs to fully volunteer, personally, to take the blame for the demand (and be willing to cover all the costs thereof and essentially prepay the "insurance premium" for that), or they can just sit down and shut the hell up. That someone can be "the whole society", but then society takes that blame squarely, willingly, and most importantly financially.

 

[Elixir]

Yet, you feel the need to double down on the misinterpretation after Toni has objected to it. While you maintain complaints of others misinterpreting your position!!!

Where is Bomb#20 when you need him?

 

[Bomb#20]

I’m not assuming that though; I’m hypothesizing that and then testing the hypothesis. He keeps offering explanation after explanation for his moral judgements, so I construct tests that yield one prediction if his explanation is correct and the opposite prediction if his framework resembles that of normal people; and his explanations keep failing and my hypothesis keeps passing. He proposes life as the distinguishing factor so I bring up geraniums. So then he proposes his special relationship with dogs, so I bring up kangaroos. So now he’s proposing our shared mammalhood, so next I’d ask him if he’s okay with karate-chopping a parrot, and he won’t be, so he’ll dream up yet another explanation for why he agrees with normal people without doing moral judgment like normal people, and on it goes until one of us tires of the experiments.

Parrots are also alive, so any one capable of reasoning and paying attention would know the answer of your tiresome experiments.

Yes, they’d know we already talked about life and you flipped away from that criterion because of geraniums so your pointing out that parrots are alive implies you’d treat them at least as well as geraniums, and therefore object to karate chopping them because it’s stupid and callous, but they’d also notice you haven’t specified whether it’s cruel like if someone chopped an animal in the same class as you, such as a dog or kangaroo. And they’d know you were flipping criteria again to evade the obvious explanation that you object to people karate chopping vertebrates because we can feel pain. And they’d probably guess the reason you’re so resistant to admitting you think like a normal person is because then you might need to address whether a third-trimester fetus feels pain when it gets aborted.

 

[laughing dog]

I’m not assuming that though; I’m hypothesizing that and then testing the hypothesis. He keeps offering explanation after explanation for his moral judgements, so I construct tests that yield one prediction if his explanation is correct and the opposite prediction if his framework resembles that of normal people; and his explanations keep failing and my hypothesis keeps passing. He proposes life as the distinguishing factor so I bring up geraniums. So then he proposes his special relationship with dogs, so I bring up kangaroos. So now he’s proposing our shared mammalhood, so next I’d ask him if he’s okay with karate-chopping a parrot, and he won’t be, so he’ll dream up yet another explanation for why he agrees with normal people without doing moral judgment like normal people, and on it goes until one of us tires of the experiments.

Parrots are also alive, so any one capable of reasoning and paying attention would know the answer of your tiresome experiments.

Yes, they’d know we already talked about life and you flipped away from that criterion because of geraniums so your pointing out that parrots are alive implies you’d treat them at least as well as geraniums, and therefore object to karate chopping them because it’s stupid and callous, but they’d also notice you haven’t specified whether it’s cruel like if someone chopped an animal in the same class as you, such as a dog or kangaroo. And they’d know you were flipping criteria again to evade the obvious explanation that you object to people karate chopping vertebrates because we can feel pain. And they’d probably guess the reason you’re so resistant to admitting you think like a normal person is because then you might need to address whether a third-trimester fetus feels pain when it gets aborted.

I hope that writing that word salad was did not exhaust or pain you. After all, putting words into other people’s mouths is a big bugbear to you when others do it.

 

[Toni]

It is not universally held that plants do not feel pain.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

Didn't you know that people have third trimester abortions just for fun and there's no other reason?

 

[Elixir]

Didn't you know that people have third trimester abortions just for fun and there's no other reason besides that?

Even if that was true, it’s none of your (or Emily’s) business.
Third party handwringing never seems to improve things for fetuses or pregnant women.