The FAST Approaching Gun Ban

[trish]

If you're going to call it anything, call it what it is; when is still just a few hundred cells along, it's a blastosphere...not a person, not a baby, not soul, not a even fetus. Instead of trivializing the issue, let's make some distinctions between phases of development and as well as practical, safe and effective modes of contraception vs impractical or ineffective modes.

The war against Planned Parenthood is a war against planned parenthood. What the right wanted all along is not just to end abortion, but contraception. Children are not blessings, they're to be used as punishments levied against women and girls who who think sex can be more than just for procreation.

http://nyti.ms/1KrEqrQ

[martin48]

A few thoughts on the right of women to have abortions

The foetus is not necessarily a 'person' with the right to live
a collection of human cells does not have the right to live just because it is of the human species otherwise amputating a limb would be murder

a collection of human cells only has the right to live by virtue of certain facts. These are either:
it has reached a particular stage of development that makes it a moral 'person'
it possesses certain properties that make it a moral 'person'

It is not always wrong to end the life of an innocent person
there are many cases where we have to choose which of two innocent people will live and which will die:
conjoined twins, where the operation to separate them may cause one twin to die
any case of a woman who had to abandon one of her children to save the other

'Potential human beings' don't have rights
only "actual" human beings have rights

The pregnant woman has moral rights too
under some circumstances these may override the foetus's right to live
these moral rights include:
the right to ownership of her own body
the right to decide her own future
the right to take decisions without intervention by others

the pregnant woman has the right to life - where not aborting the foetus would put the mother's life or health in danger she has the moral right to abort the foetus

Morality is never easy – but do we leave some choices to individuals?

[broncofan]

That's a really great post on the issue. There is of course great disagreement over when the collection of cells attains the status of personhood. Assuming it's at some point prior to birth, then the latter part of your post kicks in. What right does a pregnant woman have to get an abortion after the fetus has crossed the threshold of personhood and there is not a serious threat to the mother's health? I think the personal autonomy of a woman is enough to justify the abortion even without a threat to her safety, and even after the fetus is a moral person. This is a position a lot of people would probably be uncomfortable with and so if they support abortion rights at that point they would be more likely to claim the fetus does not achieve personhood until after viability. Of course I do not know when a fetus becomes a moral person..perhaps when the fetus is aware of its existence...

The interesting thing about the cases of conjoined twins is that in the cases I've read about the twins will not survive without surgery. So it is a choice of either both twins dying, or the "parasitic" twin being excised to save the dominant twin. I wonder if courts would decide that personal autonomy would permit one twin to force a surgery if it meant the other would die but they would otherwise survive and live a compromised existence with one twin essentially stealing nutrition and vital functions from the other for their natural life? Probably not. We are much more comfortable with the calculus here when we end up with a net savings and we can defend the action on utilitarian grounds rather than personal autonomy.

[buttslinger]

Even if a fetus is not human, or women have rights, can Trish and Martin at least admit that an abortion occurs because of an error, a mistake, a boo boo, ??????? That there a no such thing as being "a little pregnant???" Step up to the plate, admit abortions are, if not illegal, at least BAD!! Jesus!
I am pro-choice, but I don't think all the millions of pro-lifers are wrong, they have a different point of view, they have different priorities than me. I don't even believe life has a beginning or end, I believe notions do, acts do.
I notice the Pope just talked about climate change and illegal aliens, but he didn't talk about abortions or pedophilia. I think maybe that Pope has an agenda!
If the blastopheres get a good lawyer and a sentimental judge they become human beings. And abortions become murder.
You cum shooting transsexual heathens need to put a clothes pin on those reproductive organs of yours and let the righteous family types judge what is right. You stick to your pornography and orgies where you belong. Do the world a big favor and get sterilized! Stay away from the children!!!!!!

[trish]

Did I anywhere suggest that women who don't want to get pregnant deliberately get pregnant? If a woman is contemplating an abortion it may be because in a moment of abandon she had unprotected sex. This is the more likely scenario for young girls who are taught or forced into circumstances where abstinence is their only mode of birth control. Outside the Bible Belt most sexually active young girls wishing to avoid pregnancy are on the pill, use an iud or condoms. One can forget to take the pill. Condoms leak, sometimes tear, and in moments of abandon the couple may fail to use them. An iud can involve other risks and discomforts and so are less frequently used.

but no, not everything that is the result of a mistake is bad. An abortion may be in some circumstances exactly the right choice for a woman. It depends on the woman and her circumstances.

Yes the strident pro lifers who want to get rid of the right of a woman to choose and make effective birth control illegal have a perspective, an immoral perspective. They are simply wrong. I'm open to negotiate lot's of middle ground. But those who say it's all murder simply want to force their religious views on others. And that's wrong. It's a matter of wanting to control what others do. It's power tripping. If they don't want to use birth control or have an abortion they are free to live by the tenants of their religion. No one's forcing them to have abortions or to use the pill. But other women too should be allowed to decide according to their conscious. The choice is always a hard one. Too often people make the mistake ( and I think this may include you) that women who do choose to abort do it without conscience, without thought and without regard for the moral consequences. You are wrong. Rare is the woman who ever takes this choice lightly.

Many think abortion is a religious matter and having one is in defiance of the religious prohibition against the taking of a life. But to make this argument work they update the religious doctrine to declare life begins at conception. They then want to see this religious injunction made into law. Ironic that most these people are against the heavy hand of the law interfering in their other affairs. No legislator can enact a law for these reasons and remain consistent with the Constitution.

As for your characterization of the transgendered as whores and pornograhers, and your opinion that we should not be expressing ours: go fuck yourself.

[buttslinger]

.....As for your characterization of the transgendered as whores and pornograhers, and your opinion that we should not be expressing ours: go fuck yourself.

Hey Trishikins, how about expressing your real life photo on here?????
I notice the MOTHERS of the World have exercised their pro choice right to not even visit this site. And kids under 18 has exercised their zero-rights to not visit here. I'm kind of glad I don't have any bastards out there running around, but I'm not going to give my DNA to Ancestory.com either. Better safe than sorry.

You don't have to be a religious nut to hope the woman you marry doesn't start fucking everything in pants, or hope your daughter doesn't start exercising her constitutional rights to an abortion every six months.

I actually wonder how many transsexuals out there aren't whores and pornographers. Because all the ones I see are. I guess the ones I don't see are leading quiet peaceful lives. Abiding the Law. Maybe some of them are religious......... Those FOOLS!!!!!!

[trish]

You don't have to be a religious nut to hope the woman you marry doesn't start fucking everything in pants, or hope your daughter doesn't start exercising her constitutional rights to an abortion every six months.

Both of these are pretty much mythological creatures whose existence is promulgated respectively by producers of porn (in the case of promiscuously cuckolding wives) and the producers of right wing talking points (in the case of girls who regularly use abortion for birth control). So if not a religious nut, what kind of nut is it who worries his wife and daughter will manifest myth?

[broncofan]

If the blastopheres get a good lawyer and a sentimental judge they become human beings.

Martin's post discusses this doesn't it? It's an interesting question to figure out when someone attains personhood status. Someone can have personhood status but so depend on another's bodily functions that the other person in some circumstances should be able to cut the cord (ie. conjoined twins). There's also a famous and elaborate hypothetical involving life support machines that is an "even if" argument in favor of robust abortion rights. I am not going to look for it.

Anyhow, I think as a matter of policy there is nothing wrong with reasonable regulations requiring a woman to get an abortion within a certain period of time. If a woman can get an abortion before the fetus reaches any reasonable threshold of personhood status then it's unnecessary to argue that even in such circumstances a person's autonomy overrides the interests of someone dependent upon the use of their bodily functions for survival. But I don't think there should be any restrictions in the case of a genuine health threat to the mother, which is essentially a choice question, since the mother might otherwise die during childbirth.

[buttslinger]

What part of the word ABORTION don't you understand? You are aborting a life. It is located in the WOMB.
Of course they don't attain personhood if you go in there and cut them out. That's the whole point.
Hey, listen, parents are saps. Kids are a pain in the ass, have you ever been on a plane with one?
God, please kill me, right?

[Stavros]

A few thoughts on the right of women to have abortions

The foetus is not necessarily a 'person' with the right to live
a collection of human cells does not have the right to live just because it is of the human species otherwise amputating a limb would be murder

a collection of human cells only has the right to live by virtue of certain facts. These are either:
it has reached a particular stage of development that makes it a moral 'person'
it possesses certain properties that make it a moral 'person'

It is not always wrong to end the life of an innocent person
there are many cases where we have to choose which of two innocent people will live and which will die:
conjoined twins, where the operation to separate them may cause one twin to die
any case of a woman who had to abandon one of her children to save the other

'Potential human beings' don't have rights
only "actual" human beings have rights

The pregnant woman has moral rights too
under some circumstances these may override the foetus's right to live
these moral rights include:
the right to ownership of her own body
the right to decide her own future
the right to take decisions without intervention by others

the pregnant woman has the right to life - where not aborting the foetus would put the mother's life or health in danger she has the moral right to abort the foetus

Morality is never easy – but do we leave some choices to individuals?

The weakness of this argument lies in its inability to decide what the moral core of the argument on abortion actually is, or indeed if there is one. Life is sacred, life is not sacred. It is wrong to take life, sometimes it is right.

As opponents of abortion have argued, mostly but not always from the perspective of their Christianity, 'life begins with conception' and clearly, from a scientific point of view, this is irrefutable for as long as those cells continue to develop into the human being that ultimately emerges from the womb.

If the same people take the position that it is morally wrong to terminate that life through an abortion because it is morally wrong to take life, the moral problem does not limit itself to the foetus, but to all of life, whether it is the tomato flourishing on the vine, a lamb grazing in a meadow, or the mosquito buzzing around your bed. The absolute nature of the judgement can only become practical for those who take the 'life is sacred' position if they then create a separate set of moral judgements -which they may claim are derived from God- for humans, animals, plant life and so on, and this indeed is how the development of human societies incorporated a multitude of dietary rules in order to take advantage of the food and drink that sustain life, even though eating animal flesh is not an essential need to sustain life; but it remains the case that Jews and Muslims say a prayer of forgiveness for the soul of the animal they are about to kill and eat.

A second moral dilemma for those opposed to abortion, moves on from the basic claim about the 'sanctity of life' to address those who for some reason -like the conjoined siamese twins- are in a perilous situation in which their lives are painfully insecure for reasons of nature; or who have suffered such grievous injuries that medicine and surgery offer no hope that life can be sustained. Yet even here some Christians (and Jehova's Witnesses) have argued that it is wrong to interfere because only God can make that decision so that the conjoined twins must be fed for as long as they can be until they die, and that the person severely injured must also be left to die, and if the doctors can mitigate the pain all the better, and because, crucially, it is not the business of medical personnel to occasion death, but to prevent it.

The third dilemma emerges with the contradiction between the 'sanctity of life' argument if the same people who advocate it support the death penalty and the use of military force in war; while a fourth, which is perhaps the most moral of them all, relates to the quality of life and whether or not the same Christians or Muslims (for example) who believe in loving communities, take care of an unwanted child born to a woman refused an abortion.

For those who take the moral argument for abortion as addressed in Martin's post, but who do not do so from a religious perspective, the right to take life can easily lose a narrow right as something essential at the time, to become a relative matter of choice, be it suicide, euthanasia, or war, so that this argument has no moral value at all, unable as it is to hold on to a secure concept of what the moral position on life should be, collapsing into a relativist -valid here, not valid there status which, for example, justifies a war against the Russians in 1853 but not in 2015. This might be pragmatic politics, but is it morality? Hans Morgenthau argued in his book Politics Among Nations that morality had/has no place in international relations.

There is an alternative way of looking at this, and that is to focus more closely on the law, where in the case of abortion, as also hinted at in Martin's and later in Trish's posts, the right of an individual is taken to be the primary interest. This shifts the moral argument from a general, sometimes vaguely stated theme about life, to an actually living person with legal rights, giving the moral content of the law a more secure foundation.

What has been clear from what some Republican candidates think from their Christian perspective, although I believe they may have changed their opinion, was revealed in the case of the girl in Paraguay who was (allegedly, as not proven in a court of law) raped by her step-father and who as a result became pregnant, but was denied an abortion. The baby was delivered by caesarian section when she was 11, presumably because a natural birth might have killed her. There are some difficult issues here -to begin with can a 10 year old decide if she wants an abortion or not? Second, because a 10 year old is not legally old enough to be regarded as an independent person, either her family/guardian or the state must make decisions for her and in this case her mother applied for an abortion which was turned down because in most cases abortion is illegal in Paraguay unless a life is threatened, which it was decided was not the case here. More worrying for Paraguay is the claim that at least 2 girls under the age of 16 give birth every day in Paraguay, though their precise ages may not be known but some may be much younger than 16.

If a focus on the right of the individual is the primary interest, this does not in fact remove the vexing problem of 'the taking of life' as quite clearly, unless it is dead, there is a foetus in the womb. Moreover, my own experience having known three women who had an abortion, one a close friend, is that the decision is not taken lightly, it can haunt the woman concerned for years after and is in every way a most disagreeable experience.

The fundamental problem that thus remains is that an abortion terminates life, but making abortion illegal takes away the right of an individual woman to make a decision about her own life as a free person, indeed, it takes away her freedom.

The sad fact of the matter is that abortion has been part of human society since earliest times, that infanticide has also been and in some parts of the world, still is a common occurrence (I am thinking of China), most commonly of all when the baby is born female. A pragmatic approach is to argue that if a woman has so completely rejected her pregnancy that she is determined to end it, she will find a way so that making abortion illegal just makes it harder for a woman to obtain one.

As a pacifist I am opposed to the taking of life on principle, be it abortion or war, but I cannot prevent either from taking place and only in my Utopia are all children born to loving parents, and thus I take the view that the law must guarantee the liberty of the individual, that in these cases we cannot grant legal recognition to a foetus but we can to the woman carrying it.

Ultimately it is she who must live with the consequences of her decision, whether it is relief or regret.