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I wonder if instead of the US spending $1 trillion a year on murdering innocent people, if we directed a nice chunk of that to helping pregnant women and new mothers with options to keep their babies if we could help reduce a large amount of those abortions.
And here's where I'll disagree with you...and noting that I think you're one of the more intelligent posters here, I think I might be able to have an intelligent discussion about this with you.
There are times when I'd prefer someone have an abortion than have a child. Actually, given that about 2/3 of abortions happen within the first 8 weeks...if someone wants an abortion during those time, I would vastly prefer that they have one over having a child and giving it up for adoption or raising a child they don't want to have.
I understand that makes people uncomfortable, and I wouldn't mention that sort of thing if we had some sort of firm protection of abortion nationwide...but given that we have a democracy, I don't think I have a choice but to try to push as many people to see the world the way it really is (at least as I see it).
If someone has a fetus with sickle cell anemia...I don't want the parent to be pressured into anything (I am very pro-choice) but the fact is, so far as I can tell...the simple math is that sickle cell anemia leads to prolonged pain, whereas an abortion leads to, at maximum, temporary pain. Furthermore, every time someone gets an abortion that's early...I have no idea how any fetus would feel pain during the first 8 weeks...and probably much later...meaning that such an ending of life has no negative consequence to the fetus, most likely, and can be only be neutral, or benefit it.
Yeah, embryos and fetuses are living things, and in the later stages they're really not hugely different from babies...but I do think my fellow pro-choicers need to go on the offensive a bit more. We need to emphasize that this is more than just an issue of whether or not it's about a woman's right to have control over her body, or a fetus's right to life. The aspect aspect of this discussion that nobody talks about because it makes people deeply uncomfortable is a fetus's right to not live...and talking about that, I think, is the only surefire way to turn this discussion into something that inevitably leads to the pro-choice arguments almost always being right. Otherwise, if we just do what most people do and weigh the rights of the unborn to life against the right of a woman over her own body, which is the more right just kind of depends on one's subjective opinions.
If I start talking about a fetus's right to not live...I can argue about how I see abortion as typically simultaneously protecting the fetus, as well as the woman's rights over their own body. I can therefore win arguments a heck of a lot more easily than most pro-choicers who stick to the more polite "my body, my choice" sorts of talking points.
I think we need to get society to understand that life is not inherently a positive thing, and death is not inherently a negative thing...and if you disagree with that, which it sounds like you might because you want a general reduction of them...I think I might need to be talking to you just as much as I need to be talking with the other people I've been talking to. That makes people uncomfortable...but I don't think I have a choice anymore, given what happened in Texas, and what can happen elsewhere.
OK, so it sounds as if you are saying, yes, let's not do anything to prevent unwanted pregnancies, but let them happen because we're doing the embryos/fetuses a favor by terminating them...then yes, you are correct. We are not in agreement. We don't know what that life might have become, positive or negative, any more than we know what kind of human being any baby will grow up to be.
I do not disagree with your statement that life is not inherently positive and death is not inherently negative, but to me, that's a different conversation that lies outside of the legal-abortion debate.
I wonder if instead of the US spending $1 trillion a year on murdering innocent people, if we directed a nice chunk of that to helping pregnant women and new mothers with options to keep their babies if we could help reduce a large amount of those abortions.
That's a liberal idea, so it's a non-starter for the conservatives here.
That's a liberal idea, so it's a non-starter for the conservatives here.
And yet republicans who pretend to support small government have no problem with the government spending $1 trillion+ a year murdering innocent people.
OK, so it sounds as if you are saying, yes, let's not do anything to prevent unwanted pregnancies, but let them happen because we're doing the embryos/fetuses a favor by terminating them...then yes, you are correct. We are not in agreement. We don't know what that life might have become, positive or negative, any more than we know what kind of human being any baby will grow up to be.
I do not disagree with your statement that life is not inherently positive and death is not inherently negative, but to me, that's a different conversation that lies outside of the legal-abortion debate.
*I've never implied I was opposed to safe sex and discouraging promiscuity anywhere on this thread...so that's not an idea you could have gotten from my statements. I never implied I wanted to do nothing to prevent unwanted pregnancies.
*You stated the following: I would prefer that no one have an abortion. If they do, I would prefer that it's done in the first trimester. I'm aware that the world is not going to operate via Mightyqueen's preferences, though, and that life is not black/white, right/wrong, good/evil.
But as has been said time and again, women have been aborting their pregnancies since our ancestors lived in caves. They used plants with poisonous properties, they used pointy sticks or otherwise injured themselves. Or they had unqualified and unscrupulous persons help them abort in unsanitary ways that result in infection or bleeding to death. Until we come up with some realistic way of never having any unwanted pregnancies occur--which is not realistic, but FEWER could be--and a way to keep women from terminating pregnancies, then a civilized country has to keep it legal and safe for a woman to abort, because they are going to do it whether it is legal or not. Not wanting to bear a child should not be punishable by the potential death of a woman.
What my post was about, primarily, was that I, unlike you, would view it as terrible if people stopped having abortions. I want people to hold the view that abortions can be, and typically appear to be, helpful to the aborted, because I think that's the most accurate and healthy way to look at things, given the damages I see taking place as a result of the alternative. I think the spreading of that way of looking at things would probably desensitize people to this issue...and I think that would be for the best. I think unemotional, cold, desensitized, robotic-logic is the most powerful form of caring we have, and the source of most good things in the world, so that's the mentality I like to encourage the most. I want it normalized, so that's how I tend to talk.
Now, regarding your view that "we don't know what that life might have become...positive or negative."
That doesn't matter if you simply cause that life to cease existing before it can comprehend the future. It could not possibly gain anything more from a positive life than from not existing before that point. Bringing a life form into existence cannot benefit it in any possible way, period. The only possible way not bringing it into existence could harm it before it can comprehend death, or the future, is if that leaving existence would cause it some form of suffering before it no longer exists.
Finally, you are definitely incorrect regarding your opinion about death not being inherently negative and life not being inherently positive being unrelated to this topic. We cannot possibly argue the ethics of this topic much without delving into that. That's the entire root of many people's perspectives on this issue. People all over this thread are talking about life as if it's inherently a good thing. If I can convince them it's not, the foundation of their perspective is gone. That said, I think you and I share a similar enough perspective on that that there is no need for us to discuss that with one another.
That said, thanks for your posts. They've pretty much all been good and thoughtful.
We call a microbe on Mars life.
We call an unborn baby a cluster of cells.
There's your arguement.
You know a "cluster of cells" would also be "life," right?
I think I get what you're saying. You're concerned about the term "cluster of cells" insufficiently personifying the organism, and you think "life" personifies it more.
It still makes people sound like they don't realize that a cluster of cells is also life when they make statements like that though.
That said...if we're going to claim that using the term "cluster of cells" to describe a fetus personifies them too little...we'd be totally hypocritical not to also say that calling an embryo or early fetus a baby personifies it too much.
I could understand making fun of people who describe all fetuses in any stage of development as a "cluster of cells," (we'd be potentially calling a 30 week old fetus a "cluster of cells") but only if such people also make fun of people describing embryos as "babies." (Embryos are the unborn developing human life form in the first 8 weeks).
I wonder if instead of the US spending $1 trillion a year on murdering innocent people, if we directed a nice chunk of that to helping pregnant women and new mothers with options to keep their babies if we could help reduce a large amount of those abortions.
If a woman gives birth and doesn't want to, there's a great deal of unpleasantness for her, and the baby would probably have lost nothing from never having come into existence.
I will say people would be a lot more consistent if the people who consider abortion murder would more often do the Kanye West thing and focus a ton of money on making it easier for people to afford giving birth to the child.
That said...there's a much easier solution here. That's also keeping in mind that every scent spent on making it easier to give birth to those children could providing mosquito nets to Africans or something. That solution is those children never having existed in the first place. On a side note, there's a suspicious correlation between the instigation of Roe v. Wade, and a massive drop in crime rate that would have occurred right at about the time those unplanned pregnancies that became youth would have reached the age at which they're most likely to engage in crime.
Kanye's heart is in the right place. His head needs to be way more involved with the big picture though.
Pro-life........we keep being told by the left that we need to increase our population growth as we are short of workers, taxpayers etc. blah, blah, blah all the while they want abortion on demand. Their answer is to import millions of foreigners and have them procreate on our soil instead. Most of whom don't even share our culture and language. They talk out of both sides of their mouths.
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