Abortion

[Elixir]

that you find human life transcendent

You could stop right there.

Because I do.

I don't. I find human lives transcendent. Life is a quality not a thing.

 

[TomC]

And so again, even were the fetus "TomC" and I tethered to you, and for you this a necessity for your survival, I would be within my rights to revoke this tether and leave you to die.

And if you ever tether me to you I will consider it my right to kill you and your whole family.

Possibly your whole city.

 

[prideandfall]

that you find human life transcendent

You could stop right there.

Because I do.

Young or old, male or female, rich or poor, useful or not, American or not, white or not,

Yeah. I value human individuals. All of them. More than I value people's rights to do whatever they want to do.

To me, this is the grand sweep of moral improvement and sophistication. Leaving people out of the Human Family is the old, primitive, ethics and moral principles. Including everyone, including fetal children, is better. Same as including women and black people improved the USA. The more people we include in the Family of Humanity the better off we are as a whole.

Like the genocidal slavers of yore, you might disagree.

So, it's not that fertilization is sacrosanct. It's that human beings are. And while you might think that fetal children are unimportant, like 18th century Christians thought that indigenous people were unimportant, I disagree.
I probably won't change my mind.
Tom

ah, ok... so you have this belief that you use to verbally crucify anyone you disagree with, but you won't or can't give any kind of explanation or rationale for it, and you assume it means you are smugly superior to anyone who doesn't instantly abdicate to your authority on the matter.

thank you for laying that out for me and showing how utterly pointless it is to even attempt to engage with you intellectually, it'll save me a lot of time.

 

[TomC]

you have this belief that you use to verbally crucify anyone you disagree with,

It is:
"I value human individuals."

Humans have never been very good at that. We've gotten a little better over the last few centuries. But we're still not great at it.
Tom

 

[prideandfall]

you have this belief that you use to verbally crucify anyone you disagree with,

It is:
"I value human individuals."

Humans have never been very good at that. We've gotten a little better over the last few centuries. But we're still not great at it.
Tom

no, it is:
"i claim to value human individuals. i can't or won't explain what 'value' means, nor how it applies to the real world. however, the fact that i have this random and ill-defined zeal means you must instantly capitulate to whatever judgment i have about a given situation or else i'll just resort to throwing out childish insults"
pretty big difference there.

 

[TomC]

you have this belief that you use to verbally crucify anyone you disagree with,

It is:
"I value human individuals."

Humans have never been very good at that. We've gotten a little better over the last few centuries. But we're still not great at it.
Tom

no, it is:
"i claim to value human individuals. i can't or won't explain what 'value' means, nor how it applies to the real world. however, the fact that i have this random and ill-defined zeal means you must instantly capitulate to whatever judgment i have about a given situation or else i'll just resort to throwing out childish insults"
pretty big difference there.

Got it.
You don't value humans. You don't even know what value means.

 

[pood]

To compare pro-choice people to Putin, the Ulvade shooter, the genocidal salvers of yore, and to say they don’t value humans or even know what value means, is really sick, sick stuff.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Life has never been rigorously defined, and probably can’t be. It’s one of those ‘I know it when I see it’ things; An attempt to impose a strict dichotomy onto a spectrum of conditions, that always fails to both include everything that we want to include, and/or to exclude everything we want to include.

Yeah. Challenge to the pro-life side:

Define exactly what deserves protection and why.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I know enough elementary biology to know when an individual human being comes into existence. I value all of them. We are all somewhere on the trajectory from fertilization to death. People feeling entitled to choose death for other people is anathema to morality.

Identical twins, chimeras. At the moment you say an individual human being comes into existence you don't know whether that's actually going to be an individual human being or not.

At least my morality. Obviously, not everyone agrees. Plenty of people don't see that as a moral issue. Jarhyn and Putin and the Uvalde shooter come to mind. Some people feel entitled to choose death for other people.

Note that you are making a jump to "people". What exactly defines a person?

What property does the zygote possess that a brain dead "person" does not? (And, yes, there have been cases of brain dead people who were "alive". So long as some of the lower functions survive the body can continue on for a while (I've heard of over a year) even though there's no higher brain function. Family hauls the dead person to doctor after doctor looking for a different answer.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

that you find human life transcendent

You could stop right there.

Because I do.

Young or old, male or female, rich or poor, useful or not, American or not, white or not,

Yeah. I value human individuals. All of them. More than I value people's rights to do whatever they want to do.

Henrietta Lacks. She no doubt lives on in laboratories around the world. Person or not? And if not, why not?

 

[bilby]

It's human beings that are sacrosanct(whatever that means).

You don’t know what it means, but you are certain that it’s axiomatically true.

Have you any idea how batshit crazy that is?

 

[bilby]

He will claim that this isn’t a current element of his position; And I have no doubt that he honestly believes that.

Back in early 2003 the Pope declared Bush's Invasion of Iraq a crime against humanity. I agreed with him.

Do you think that's because I was brainwashed by the RCC?
Tom

No.

Do you think that’s remotely relevant to the current discussion? It’s not about you. It’s about your irrational but strongly held nonsensical beliefs.

Belief in some specific nonsense doesn’t imply that everything else you believe must also be nonsense.

 

[pood]

When I first read TomC’s stuff, I began to wonder whether this was a thread devoted to the discussion of whether it’s OK for a woman to kill her one-month old child, maybe cuz he/she cries too much or shits too much is otherwise an inconvenience.

But no, it’s about first-trimester abortion, when more than 90 percent of abortions occur, and the first eight weeks of that trimester the subject is called an embryo and before that a zygote, and only at the end of the first trimester is it considered a fetus.

But a fetus at the end of the first trimester is a child, we are invited to believe.

Fetal children, TomC calls them.

If you want to believe such crap, go right ahead, but please think twice before comparing those who are pro-choice to Putin or the Uvalde killer or Idi Amin or Hitler or whatever your preferred bogey is. Because obviously if a first-trimester fetus were identical to a post-natal child you’d have a point. But it isn’t and you don’t.

 

[bilby]

that you find human life transcendent

You could stop right there.

Because I do.

Young or old, male or female, rich or poor, useful or not, American or not, white or not,

Yeah. I value human individuals. All of them. More than I value people's rights to do whatever they want to do.

To me, this is the grand sweep of moral improvement and sophistication. Leaving people out of the Human Family is the old, primitive, ethics and moral principles. Including everyone, including fetal children, is better. Same as including women and black people improved the USA. The more people we include in the Family of Humanity the better off we are as a whole.

Like the genocidal slavers of yore, you might disagree.

So, it's not that fertilization is sacrosanct. It's that human beings are. And while you might think that fetal children are unimportant, like 18th century Christians thought that indigenous people were unimportant, I disagree.
I probably won't change my mind.
Tom

Of course you won’t change your mind.

It’s an emotional response that was beaten into you as a child, and you don’t have (and never had) a reason for it, beyond the fact that it feels to you like a fundamental truth of reality.

You can’t reason yourself out of an error you never reasoned yourself into. And changing your mind would feel like changing who you are, at the most fundamental level.

You should be angry at the people who did that to you, but the wounds they inflicted on your mind are too well established for you to even see that they’re not part of yourself.

 

[TomC]

It’s an emotional response that was beaten into you as a child, and you don’t have (and never had) a reason for it, beyond the fact that it feels to you like a fundamental truth of reality.

Why do you believe this?

I'm being as nice as I can at this moment. It's a struggle. You are making assertions about me. Utterly false assertions.

You don't know what you're talking about. You know almost nothing about me. But you think you know more about me than I do. It's extremely insulting.
Extremely.

 

[ramoss]

Technically you'd be the one sounding like a slaver because you are going on about your rights to inhibit the rights of another living / breathing human being.

So, we're back to the question of whether or not a fetal child is living?
Tom

It's not a 'fetal child'. It is a fetus. The question is 'not if it's living'.. but 'if it is a person'. I figure, by the time it potentially will be viable, then the woman who is pregnant wants a child. If they , for what ever reason, decided to get an abortion at that point, there will have to be strong extenuating circumstances. So, those circumsances are none of my business, and I would leave it up to that woman and her doctor.

 

[bilby]

It’s an emotional response that was beaten into you as a child, and you don’t have (and never had) a reason for it, beyond the fact that it feels to you like a fundamental truth of reality.

Why do you believe this?

Experience.

I'm being as nice as I can at this moment. It's a struggle. You are making assertions about me. Utterly false assertions.

Am I? I see no reason to think that you are an exception to the very well established trend that people who had Catholic upbringings make the exact arguments you make, and people who didn’t, don’t.

You don't know what you're talking about. You know almost nothing about me. But you think you know more about me than I do. It's extremely insulting.
Extremely.

I am sorry you feel insulted.

But regardless of your feelings, I remain right as regards the facts. You don’t have any obligation to like reality, but you also don’t get to exempt yourself from it because you find it insulting.

“I feel insulted” isn’t a logical reason to accept or reject an argument.

Perhaps you arrived at the exact same arguments about the ‘sanctity of life’ used by all the Catholics and ex-Catholics, (and almost never used by anyone else) completely independently, by pure chance. I see no reason to accept this hugely improbable possibility, though.

Is it possible that your feeling of being insulted is a defensive response to having people challenge beliefs that you refuse to examine? You said yourself that you don’t actually know what the “reason” you give for one of your core beliefs even means.

 

[prideandfall]

Why do you believe this?

I'm being as nice as I can at this moment. It's a struggle. You are making assertions about me. Utterly false assertions.

You don't know what you're talking about. You know almost nothing about me. But you think you know more about me than I do. It's extremely insulting.
Extremely.

huh... so you're saying that when you don't understand why someone believes something, and all you're getting out of them is personal insults and wild assertions about your own character just because you hold a point of different from them, you find that insulting?

fancy fucking that.

i wonder if there's maybe some kind of teachable moment here where you could reflect on your own behavior towards others and maybe realize something about how you.... nnnnnnaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh nevermind i'm sure there's nothing to that.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Of course you won’t change your mind.

It’s an emotional response that was beaten into you as a child, and you don’t have (and never had) a reason for it, beyond the fact that it feels to you like a fundamental truth of reality.

You can’t reason yourself out of an error you never reasoned yourself into. And changing your mind would feel like changing who you are, at the most fundamental level.

You should be angry at the people who did that to you, but the wounds they inflicted on your mind are too well established for you to even see that they’re not part of yourself.

Thank you!!

I have long been unable to comprehend the mindset of many "pro-life" people and finally I see something that makes sense--that it doesn't make sense, it's rationalizing a point of faith.

 

[Jarhyn]

that you find human life transcendent

You could stop right there.

Because I do.

Young or old, male or female, rich or poor, useful or not, American or not, white or not,

Yeah. I value human individuals. All of them. More than I value people's rights to do whatever they want to do.

To me, this is the grand sweep of moral improvement and sophistication. Leaving people out of the Human Family is the old, primitive, ethics and moral principles. Including everyone, including fetal children, is better. Same as including women and black people improved the USA. The more people we include in the Family of Humanity the better off we are as a whole.

Like the genocidal slavers of yore, you might disagree.

So, it's not that fertilization is sacrosanct. It's that human beings are. And while you might think that fetal children are unimportant, like 18th century Christians thought that indigenous people were unimportant, I disagree.
I probably won't change my mind.
Tom

Of course you won’t change your mind.

It’s an emotional response that was beaten into you as a child, and you don’t have (and never had) a reason for it, beyond the fact that it feels to you like a fundamental truth of reality.

You can’t reason yourself out of an error you never reasoned yourself into. And changing your mind would feel like changing who you are, at the most fundamental level.

You should be angry at the people who did that to you, but the wounds they inflicted on your mind are too well established for you to even see that they’re not part of yourself.

You can always reason yourself out of things you didn't reason yourself into. It's other folks who can't. The problem is that most people lack the power to or understanding that they may reason with themselves in such a way, as to reflect doubt inward.