Planned Parenthood 2.0

[ArcadiaGP]

Can we [STRIKE]abolish [/STRIKE] abort the term "pro-life" and change it to "pro-science"? I feel it has a nice ring to it.

Henceforth, if you find yourself typing "pro-life", please reconsider.

 

[jamil]

When confronted by a "pro-lifer" I ask, why do you hate freedom?

What's freer? To live at all, or to not have to be inconvenienced?

Tell him he's too binary. Go ahead. You know you want to

No. Actually I don't. HoughMade has never struck me as a binary thinker on just about any topic. He can have this one.

 

[oldpink]

What about consent?

Doesn't a person have a right to say to another person: "I don't want you inside my body anymore"? I believe we do.

Pregnancy changes a woman's body permanently. Motherhood changes a woman's life permanently. What if she has weighed the potential costs and benefits and she does not want to experience these changes? For me, a person who will never have to choose whether or not to have an abortion, that is ample reason to keep legal abortion on the table.

Once a baby has been born it no longer requires the consent of its mother to survive. For me this changes a great many things about the situation.

And yet the abortion absolutists conveniently either ignore or criticize adoption, deliberately making the entire thing a false dichotomy, when there are actually three options.

 

[Bill of Rights]

Hough, with respect, I have to disagree with several points you make here.

I'll preface all of what I say with a clear statement. As PaulF said, I'll never be in the position of deciding to get or not get an abortion. Were I to be placed in that position somehow, my default would be "carry to term", and I would require some serious convincing to change from that default. That said, though, I do NOT trust a government bureaucrat to make a better decision for someone's life than that person themselves will make. That bureaucrat probably has never met the people for whom he (usually "he", anyway) is making decisions. I don't trust them with something as trivial as money and knowing what is and is not an appropriate expenditure, so that eliminates any chance of me trusting them with something important like life or the possibility thereof.

The philosophers among the pro-abortion ranks may debate life...as will the pro-abortion people who don't even know the legal basis for their claimed right, but legally, when a new life begins is irrelevant.

There is one point in time when a new, genetically distinct entity comes into being- that is conception. From then on, all changes are simply the natural growth and progression of that genetically distinct entity. Objectively- a new life begins at conception. Every other argued point of development ignores the genetics and is arbitrary.

It's not at all irrelevant. When life begins is central to the discussion. It may not have been central to Roe, but that point is the absolute defining point of when something can be called "alive", and since one must be alive before one has the potential to be killed, there can be no more central point.
Some religions define life beginning at conception. Some define it as the emergence of the head, or in the circumstance of a breech birth, the majority of the body. Some individuals define it each of those ways as well, and still others, myself included, define it as the point of viability. There is a point in gestation, no earlier than 24 weeks, when the fetus is capable, with extreme amounts of support, of living outside the womb. Prior to that point, no power on earth can make it("it" will be used here not to dehumanize, but to limit "him/her") live. The simple fact is that mankind has not and may never advance to the point where it can be definitively stated that *this point* is the beginning of life. Until that can be determined without equivocation and without "belief" entering into the question, any statement about when it happens is nothing more than opinion.

This new life (which, of course, is a new human life because what else could it be?) is completely dependent upon the mother for 9 months. No two ways about it. However, after birth, that new life is no less dependent, it is just that the more than one person has the ability to fulfill its needs. I fail to find a moral difference between a caretaker killing a dependent human life when there is one caretaker, vs. a caretaker killing it when there could be more than one caretaker.

Legally, abortion was found to be a right based upon the idea that the rights of the mother (a term loosely used in this context) outweigh any right of the new human life, at least until the third trimester- and what could be more arbitrary than that. Personhood, humanity...pfft, irrelevant. Regardless of what this new human life is, for it's first 6 months of life, it can be killed by its caretaker. In some places, the last three months aren't ant safer.

It's not at all arbitrary. As shown above, for those first not-less-than-24-weeks, that fetus, which usually will become a living human child, is dependent wholly upon the mother-to-be to provide everything from nourishment and protection to oxygen dissolved in her blood, passing across the placenta. After that arguable, variable point of "viability", the fetus may be capable of living. It is still dependent for nourishment and protection, and obviously for hygiene, which was not a concern before, but no longer is it dependent for the air it breathes.

More important than the genetic truth of when a new human life is created, more important than the fact that females are aborted at least as often as males and more often when abortion is used for sex selection (and it is) is the idea that a woman who chose to partake in activities which have a fair to middlin' chance of causing pregnancy should be absolved from the consequences of that choice. This is needed, they say, for equality purposes, because men have no consequences. The child support offices of your local county's legal system may demonstrate otherwise.

And for this reason, I think the father-to-be should have veto rights on any abortion, and be entitled to compensation if she does not have his consent and aborts the pregnancy anyway. If he would have been willing to raise the child, he should have the opportunity to do so.

But, they say, it's not always a choice. Pregnancies can result from rape, incest or some other form of duress. While I wonder why an innocent new human life should pay for the crimes of others, I'll tell you what- how about we outlaw all abortions except those resulting from rape, incest, or physically endangering the life of the mother- I'll sign on to support that bill right now and I'll go to war against the "no exceptions" crowd to make it happen.......from the other side? Crickets.

No crickets here. I just disagree. I don't favor the idea of government or for that matter, one person employed by the people as a group, telling other people what they may and may not do with their bodies.

There is no logical consistency, no morality other than self from the pro-abortion side. "I won't tell a woman what she can and can't do with her own body." Really? When a woman grabs a knife and goes after her own 6 month old dependent child, what about then? Will you tell her she can't use her body to kill her child? Let's be consistent.

One religious principle I read when I was researching this recently (before this thread was posted) is that "we do not choose one life over another." While your position is that abortion is doing exactly that, that position is based on your opinion that life begins at conception. There is no getting around the demonstrable fact that that baby is a separate and distinct life. There is no question of that point after birth. If a woman miscarries at her 6th week of pregnancy, is there a funeral? Is there a death notice in the newspaper? Is there a death certificate? For that matter, our Constitution describes citizens as those naturalized as such or born in the US. This obviously does not include those not born.

Despite my disagreements with your post, I respect your position. I appreciate you presenting your point of view in a calm, rational manner, without levying insults or slurs. Sometimes, that can be very difficult to do.

The simple fact is that in this discussion, there are no simple facts. Questions of life and death are necessarily loaded questions. They HAVE to be difficult to answer, because many factors come into play, not the least of which are both ethical and biological, and that's presuming that there are answers we're able to know.

Blessings,
Bill

 

[Woobie]

I used the good old Dr Phil reference in the text of " how's it working for you so far " and that's it. Sorry I forgot the quotes.
The point is, the religious right always beats up the woman, always..
.and its not working for you guys..
Remember what's the definion of crazy ?
The results are the same for the religious right every time, you all rant and rave, picket, burn, murder, threaten and on and on.. its still legal.. Again it's still legal....
Maybe it's time for you all to change your game plan ?
Go beat up the men for awhile. Maybe then the laws will be changed.




Oh this is JMHO here.. And I hate these threads,,

I mistook your meaning on the quote. That is my fault.

I will not say that there are not people beating up on the women in these discussions. However, as a society, we have said that it is the woman's right to choose, because it is her body. If then the woman is the person making the decision, the discussion will naturally center upon her. That being said, I know a lot more people working at pregnancy care centers and pushing alternatives to abortions, including coming alongside the mother through the process, than I do people who shake their fingers at women.

I appreciate your point about men, and I think you are spot on. They should be held accountable and responsible as much as the women they sleep with. It's called a family, and it has fallen out of fashion. The UN recently resolved to advocate the concept of family. The U.S. Delegation opposed and voted against the resolution. I see a pattern here. Those last three sentences were not directed at you, by the way.

Is the fight being won? Well, it's slow, but PBA did get banned a decade or so ago, so it has not been without victory. But even if this is a losing struggle, some fights are worth losing, when winning is no longer possible.

 

[steveh_131]

No. Actually I don't. HoughMade has never struck me as a binary thinker on just about any topic. He can have this one.

It seems your opposition to binary thinking is rather arbitrary.

See what I did there?

 

[oldpink]

All this chatter about what a woman should do and to the best of my knowledge not a woman among you.
How about men stop telling a women what to do with there body and start telling other men to be more particular with how and whom they deliver their seed to. No fish = no pregnancy... What a novel idea.

Okay, men should just sit down and shut up and not speak up in opposition to something objectionable...you know...just as women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were told to sit down and shut up and not vote.
To hell with conscience.

 

[jamil]

It seems your opposition to binary thinking is rather arbitrary.

See what I did there?

A binary thinker would leave no room for discretion.

 

[Woobie]

Hough, with respect, I have to disagree with several points you make here.

I'll preface all of what I say with a clear statement. As PaulF said, I'll never be in the position of deciding to get or not get an abortion. Were I to be placed in that position somehow, my default would be "carry to term", and I would require some serious convincing to change from that default. That said, though, I do NOT trust a government bureaucrat to make a better decision for someone's life than that person themselves will make. That bureaucrat probably has never met the people for whom he (usually "he", anyway) is making decisions. I don't trust them with something as trivial as money and knowing what is and is not an appropriate expenditure, so that eliminates any chance of me trusting them with something important like life or the possibility thereof.


It's not at all irrelevant. When life begins is central to the discussion. It may not have been central to Roe, but that point is the absolute defining point of when something can be called "alive", and since one must be alive before one has the potential to be killed, there can be no more central point.
Some religions define life beginning at conception. Some define it as the emergence of the head, or in the circumstance of a breech birth, the majority of the body. Some individuals define it each of those ways as well, and still others, myself included, define it as the point of viability. There is a point in gestation, no earlier than 24 weeks, when the fetus is capable, with extreme amounts of support, of living outside the womb. Prior to that point, no power on earth can make it("it" will be used here not to dehumanize, but to limit "him/her") live. The simple fact is that mankind has not and may never advance to the point where it can be definitively stated that *this point* is the beginning of life. Until that can be determined without equivocation and without "belief" entering into the question, any statement about when it happens is nothing more than opinion.

It's not at all arbitrary. As shown above, for those first not-less-than-24-weeks, that fetus, which usually will become a living human child, is dependent wholly upon the mother-to-be to provide everything from nourishment and protection to oxygen dissolved in her blood, passing across the placenta. After that arguable, variable point of "viability", the fetus may be capable of living. It is still dependent for nourishment and protection, and obviously for hygiene, which was not a concern before, but no longer is it dependent for the air it breathes.
And for this reason, I think the father-to-be should have veto rights on any abortion, and be entitled to compensation if she does not have his consent and aborts the pregnancy anyway. If he would have been willing to raise the child, he should have the opportunity to do so.
No crickets here. I just disagree. I don't favor the idea of government or for that matter, one person employed by the people as a group, telling other people what they may and may not do with their bodies.

One religious principle I read when I was researching this recently (before this thread was posted) is that "we do not choose one life over another." While your position is that abortion is doing exactly that, that position is based on your opinion that life begins at conception. There is no getting around the demonstrable fact that that baby is a separate and distinct life. There is no question of that point after birth. If a woman miscarries at her 6th week of pregnancy, is there a funeral? Is there a death notice in the newspaper? Is there a death certificate? For that matter, our Constitution describes citizens as those naturalized as such or born in the US. This obviously does not include those not born.

Despite my disagreements with your post, I respect your position. I appreciate you presenting your point of view in a calm, rational manner, without levying insults or slurs. Sometimes, that can be very difficult to do.

The simple fact is that in this discussion, there are no simple facts. Questions of life and death are necessarily loaded questions. They HAVE to be difficult to answer, because many factors come into play, not the least of which are both ethical and biological, and that's presuming that there are answers we're able to know.

Blessings,
Bill

As always, your post is thought-provoking and valuable.

When we consider a simple organism, such as an amoeba or Protozoa, we would say that the creature in question is alive. You can kill it. It needs certain inputs to sustain, otherwise it will die. It is alive.

Upon conception, a sperm and zygote interact, the DNA code is written, and the new organism begins to multiply its cells. It is in fact alive, by biological standards. You would have to kill it to stop its movement, growth, life-sustaining processes, etc. Furthermore, the DNA of that creature is distinctly human, and unique to that particular organism. None of what I just stated is philosophical, but based upon current science as it would apply to any creature studied in a laboratory. That we make an exception for humans seems to be a construct of philosophical convenience.

 

[Dead Duck]

So INGO turned this into a Choice vs Life debate.
Nothing new here but I thought I'd repost the OP anyway.

Planned Parenthood 2.0
Another Planned Parenthood Doctor Haggling Price of Body Parts

Come to Planned Parenthood for all your tissue purchasing needs! Now with new "non-crunchy" procedures . . .

Obviously this is suppose to be a debate between Crunchy vs NonCrunchy.

 

[oldpink]

Skeptical of "global warming/climate change/climate disruption" = anti-science
Believes it's an inviable tissue mass until the moment that the woman carrying it wants it = pro-choice

 

[oldpink]

So INGO turned this into a Choice vs Life debate.
Nothing new here but I thought I'd repost the OP anyway.






Obviously this is suppose to be a debate between Crunchy vs NonCrunchy.

What's particularly funny (were it not so craven and disgusting) is seeing all the PP allies excuse this and the earlier video.
One clod on IndyStar even says the comment about the Lamborghini was made sarcastically.
Yeah, as if making light and being ironic about selling baby body parts somehow makes it any less ghastly.

 

[ArcadiaGP]

So INGO turned this into a Choice vs Life debate.
Nothing new here but I thought I'd repost the OP anyway.

Yeah, you saw how well my thread went on the subject. I'd say this one will be aborted similarly, once it's no longer viable. We might even be able to salvage some good posts off of it and let them go for top-dollar! :P

 

[Dead Duck]

Yeah, you saw how well my thread went on the subject. I'd say this one will be aborted similarly, once it's no longer viable. We might even be able to salvage some good posts off of it and let them go for top-dollar! :P

But this thread cant die.
It's on the internet, therefore it's alive.

 

[JTScribe]

House Dems have sent a letter to AG Lynch asking her to open a probe into the Center for Medical Progress.

So, to recap, illegal uses of abortion procedures and selling of tissue, no problem, videotaping about it, problem. SMH.

Like I said in the earlier thread, this is not a debate about choice vs. life. This is a debate about violations of Federal law regarding proper medical procedures and the sale of human tissue. It's just like ACORN - wanting them to be shut down for breaking the law didn't mean you were against minority voting rights. It's a straw man.

 

[Woobie]

Yeah, you saw how well my thread went on the subject. I'd say this one will be aborted similarly, once it's no longer viable. We might even be able to salvage some good posts off of it and let them go for top-dollar! :P

Well done, sir.

 

[spencer rifle]

Upon conception, a sperm and zygote interact, the DNA code is written, and the new organism begins to multiply its cells. It is in fact alive, by biological standards. You would have to kill it to stop its movement, growth, life-sustaining processes, etc. Furthermore, the DNA of that creature is distinctly human, and unique to that particular organism. None of what I just stated is philosophical, but based upon current science as it would apply to any creature studied in a laboratory. That we make an exception for humans seems to be a construct of philosophical convenience.

^^ This. It is a matter of science and biology, not political opinion. The new human is genetically distinct from all others. Don't want to participate in the Creative Act? Keep your pants on.

In the spirit of compromise (a disgusting thought here) how about we define life beginning the same way we define life ending - heart and brain activity? This puts the beginning of life (and rights) at about 6 weeks?

 

[HoughMade]

So INGO turned this into a Choice vs Life debate...

And a thread about the selling of body parts obtained through abortions which is defended by saying "it's just tissue" isn't a choice/life debate to begin with?

 

[Bill of Rights]

Thank you.

The amoeba or protozoa are simple organisms, yes. Not only that, they do live on their own, so yes, they are alive and can be killed. This is not a discussion of the complexity of the organism being discussed. I raised the point of viability. A human cannot live as a zygote, which would be the single-celled parallel to your examples.

Again, my objection to abortion law is simply that government has yet again overstepped its bounds. We don't want them telling us how much water our toilets can flush or what kind of light bulbs we can purchase or what kind of guns we're *cough* allowed *cough* to own, but we're perfectly OK with them telling us something they have even less of a clue about. They don't know what the shoulder thing is that goes up, but they speak on guns. Most of them do not have uteruses, and many of the few who do no longer function as an effect of time, yet we allow them to tell us what we can or must have in our bodies. Oh wait, that's not true. We allow them to tell women what they may or may not and must or must not do with THEIR bodies.

I don't see any laws that tell a male that he MUST wear a condom.
I don't see any laws that require him to abstain from sex.
I don't see any laws requiring "chemical castration", other than for convicted rapists.
I don't see any laws requiring him to step up, rather than force the woman with whom he had sex to take him to court to obligate him to paying support for his progeny.
Leaving money out of it, I don't see any laws that force him to spend something far more valuable...TIME... with his children.
Of course, given some of the examples of sperm donors out there, I think that latter may be for the better.

Blessings,
Bill

As always, your post is thought-provoking and valuable.

When we consider a simple organism, such as an amoeba or Protozoa, we would say that the creature in question is alive. You can kill it. It needs certain inputs to sustain, otherwise it will die. It is alive.

Upon conception, a sperm and zygote interact, the DNA code is written, and the new organism begins to multiply its cells. It is in fact alive, by biological standards. You would have to kill it to stop its movement, growth, life-sustaining processes, etc. Furthermore, the DNA of that creature is distinctly human, and unique to that particular organism. None of what I just stated is philosophical, but based upon current science as it would apply to any creature studied in a laboratory. That we make an exception for humans seems to be a construct of philosophical convenience.

 

[Dead Duck]

And a thread about the selling of body parts obtained through abortions which is defended by saying "it's just tissue" isn't a choice/life debate to begin with?

So your answer is NonCrunchy?
It's so hard to tell.