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[quote=camping!;7875664][color=blue]As I have said before, I would attach the morning after pill and condoms to all corsages during prom season if I could
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Don't fool yourself -- there are plenty of ideological zealots on the prochoice side as well.
True in the same sense that there are plenty of four-leaf clovers. If we put all zealots on a scale, however, the gross tonnage associated with the so-called pro-life side would dwarf that of all other viewpoints combined.
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Originally Posted by camping!
Besides, a crooked dr can take a womans fertility quite easily -- look up Ashermans Syndrome. A crooked dr can also allow needless pain and suffering. To give a potential crooked drs a pass to keep the sacred cow of abortion blemish free is incredibly short sighted and self serving.
What do you mean by "crooked doctor"? I doubt that poorly trained hacks are welcomed in any specialty. I don't personally see poorly trained hacks gravitating toward abortion practice what with the added risks and harassments that it brings, nor do I see any effort at all to shield such unskilled practitioners as may be in the field. Large numbers of those who perform abortions come from respected private practices and donate their time at the clinic once or twice a week. This is not some shady, underworld off-shoot of medicine here. Asherman's Syndrome meanwhile has many causes. Abortion is a candidate, but one might be more concerned about a d&c performed after an incomplete miscarriage or to clean out undelivered remains following a normal birth. The risk that any particular abortion will result in actual damage to the uterus is extremely small.
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Originally Posted by camping!
As I said, it is a self serving way to go -- and ultimately it will be the women whose rights you want to protect that will be the ones injured or killed by it.
This is dragging unwarranted drama into play. Statistically, abortion is a very low-risk procedure.
BS. One doesn't have to be christian or any type of religion to be prolife. Granted many of them are -- but then, many in our society are religious to one degree or another so no big surprise in that.
I was not addressing the bases of personal aversions to abortion. People are free to decline to have an abortion for whatever reason they like...religious, other...it doesn't matter. The point was that, unlike past partisans on issues such as slavery, suffrage, and war, those opposed to abortion lack any convincing secular argument to put forward. An entire branch of pseudo-science has grown up around this glaring shortcoming in an attempt to conceal it.
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Originally Posted by camping!
I don't believe in god, I don't believe abortion is bad because the bible told me so. I believe abortion is the ending of a life and ought to be done with the utmost gravity because of that fact.
I have yet to meet a woman who has not taken either a wanted or unwanted pregnancy seriously. Particularly past 24 weeks, by which time the unwanted category comprises only those pregnancies that either have failed or will fail or that do or will pose grave risks to the mother.
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Originally Posted by camping!
There is confusion as to the frequency of these types of abortions, and the truth is that one done to a healthy fetus by a healthy woman is one too many.
There is much less confusion than is claimed. Third trimester abortions are thankfully rare, and any involving both a healthy mother and fetus would be extraordinarily rare, what wirh being illegal under the laws of virtually every state.
You consider Matt Wallace to be a group? No page within his less than 10-page website appears to have been updated in more than two years. The site is in flat HTML that was hand-coded...i.e., the sort of thing middle schoolers used to do in their first stab at creating a webpage. What does the AAPL actually do? Is there an e-mail list? A newsletter? Meetings? Anything? Answer to all of the preceding is NO. To claim this site as evidence for the existence of organized atheist pro-life groups is a bit of a stretch on your part, wouldn't you say?
I don't think other womens decisions should be up for debate in the first trimester. After that, yes - I do believe that there needs to be more veting involved. To abort at the point of viability is imo cruel and inhumane, if it is done on a healthy fetus by a healthy mother. As I have said before, I would attach the morning after pill and condoms to all corsages during prom season if I could
A wonderful suggestion. Prom night is 'the' night for many high school girls (and boys).
Your premise is incorrect. #1. I believed abortion to be wrong long before I was a Christian and I assure you that I certainly wasn't basing my belief on doctrine or dogma. I know several women who have no belief system whatsoever that believe abortion to be wrong.
More power to all of you. Choice includes the choice never to have an abortion. Now consult with those other women and come up with a convincing secular argument for the position you have taken.
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Originally Posted by LML
#2. The belief that abortion is wrong is based on much more than religious beliefs. When we can look at ultra sounds and see the baby's heart beating, see them sucking their thumb, see them playing with their fingers and toes it is impossible to dismiss them as a blob of fetal matter.
No, not much more. Heartbeats can be detected quite early in a normal pregnancy. The proto-heart is at that point located where the mouth eventually would be, and it has no valves or chambers. There is no blood or circulatory system to drive, and the beat itself is a spasmodic tic. That situation will change in the second trimester. Digits and the exercise of the nascent muscles controlling them is also a second trimester event, coming into play at a point where roughly 99% of all elective abortions have already been performed. To wit, there is nothing here but emotion and anthropomorphism. It is easy for a sympathetic observer unwittingly to project onto a fetus characteristics that it simply does not have. It is easy to see potential and say, oh heck, close enough. But that potential is no different from that which is ended by the pill, or an IUD, or half the time, by the crude and haphazard nature of human reproduction itself. There is nothing here to be convinced by unless one had been otherwise convinced beforehand.
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Originally Posted by LML
When premature babies are being saved at earlier and earlier stages...
This is not occurring. We are merely learning how to provide a better (though still dismal) prognosis for ultra-preemies. The boundary of 23-24 weeks hasn't really been moved at all.
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Originally Posted by LML
#3. It is neither secular or religious to say that one minute before birth the child is fetal matter to be discarded at their mother's whim and one minute after birth it is a human being with civil rights. It is just mystical thinking and hypocrisy.
And this is a false and unsustainable argument. Firstly, there is not and never has been in this society an argument for elective abortion at one minute before delivery. It is a diversion to raise the matter at all. It is further illustratively insulting for you to presume that a rational woman might have a sudden "whim" in the delivery room. You couldn't paint yourself as being any more divorced and remote from the reality of the situation. You further make an improper assertion with respect to civil rights. Like life itself, rights are a continuum. A neonate is not at all granted its rights, but rather a teeny tiny subset of its rights, the remainder being still vested in its parents as trustees. It will be a long time and many steps before this newborn can progress to claim full rights on its own account, the last perhaps being the right to serve as President which does not obtain until the age of 35. In brief then, this item #3 is a fraud throughout.
#2. Can we be absolutely honest here. EXCEPT in cases of rape or when the mother's life is at risk, what are we talking about? We are talking about 9 months of pregnancy, during which the woman can pretty well do everything she was doing before she was pregnant. In exchange the child is looking of the possibility of 80 years of life. 80 years of feeling the sun on their face, running in the rain, playing with their pets, going to school, having fun with friends, having their first date, their first broken heart, their career, their marriage, and their own children. To take all that away because you don't want to share your body for 9 months seems to me not a choice but an act of supreme egocentric selfishness. If the woman were forced to raise that child you might have a bit more of an arguement. But she is certainly not. There are hundreds of thousands of people longing to love and raise the child.
Well, we could have been absolutely honest I suppose, but what followed certainly wasn't. It's more emotionalism that upon examination would rule out birth control and family planning altogether, returning women to the caprice of the biological imperative of 18-20 children over the course of a reproductive lifetime, perhaps a few more in some cases. Choosing to have the perhaps three children that one might both want and be able to support will wipe out some potential for 80 years of playing with pets about 17 times. So if we're going to be all about honesty here, let's put the actual cards on the table. No abortion...and no birth control.
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Originally Posted by LML
In all this talk about others not making choices for the woman, why is it that you are not concerned about someone making a permanent, fatal choice for the baby. Whether you like to admit it or not, that child is a seperate and unique human life and it is not choosing to die.
More projection, I'm afraid. Whether anyone likes to admit it or not, no fetus at all has any capacity for choice in any matter. You may as well consult it for stock tips or re what color to paint the nursery. Even by the third trimester, there is not even a rudimentary basis for thought processes that even resemble the type contemplated. This oft-heard argument invents a circumstance out of thin air merely so as to be able to argue for its preservation. This is far from an absolutely honest approach to the matter.
Perhaps you ought to read my post again -- nowhere did I say that the state needed to take decision making away from poor feeble minded females. What I did say was that in my experience delivering a dead baby was psychologically beneficial to me and to other women in the same boat. Furthermore, those women that chose to use an abortion like method i.e. they were put under and woke up no longer pregnant and no body to hold, touch etc... well those women did not seem to heal as well or as quickly as those of us that went through the birth process, naturally.
As noted earlier, this is one reason why IDX (aka partial-birth abortion) was originally developed. It results in an intact conceptus that can be held and grieved over. And in variious cases that result in late-term abortion, the very possibility of a natural delivery is precluded. Again, the bottom line is that the events under discussion here are very trying times for all involved. There is no one-size-fits-all answer. Pertinent information should be made known and discussed among the individuals involved, and they -- the ones who know themselves, their needs, their circumstances, and their futures best should come to their own decision. This is not a place or time for outsiders.
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Originally Posted by camping!
The truth in this case and in others when the woman has to make a choice of carrying a dying fetus or wait for natural death is this --- women do better letting nature take its course.
For some women, not all women. And it is not for any but them to decide which it is that they are. And as noted, some women do not have this choice at all.
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Originally Posted by camping!
It has nothing to do with robbing women of their empowerment, of infantilizing womens capacity to decide their own fate. It has everything to do with the way our culture shys away from death, and that is not healthy.
The culture basically does not deal with death at all. It may be trivialized here and overhyped there, but it is rarely dealt with in a direct and honest manner for long.
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Originally Posted by camping!
But no, god forbid we speak a truth that doesn't fall in a prochoice zealots line of thought. Obviously I must be a man, a misogynist, a hater, a fundie because I do not believe abortion is always the best and only option. Ironically the one thing you and other rabid prochoicers have in common with rabid prolifers is this -- neither of you want to admit to some truths that make your positions weak and perhaps even a little hypocritical.
This may be a problem across the range of human debate. There is at least not much in P&OC to belie it. There is still a collision over this issue of two important and heartfelt positions. One has its basis in religion and emotion and one does not. One seeks to compel action by others and one does not. In a culture that values individual freedom and responsibility, and particularly individual religious freedom and responsibility, it is hard to see how the one that seeks to compel on religious and emotional grounds can ever be declared the winner.
The term "partial-birth abortion" is not a medical term, it is a term coined to inflame people who are already against abortion. The medical term is "dilation and extraction", and it is used in pregnancies where the fetus is anencephalic or has other terminal defects, and will not survive after birth. If any doctor is performing dilation and extraction on a healthy fetus, that doctor is already breaking the law, unless the mother's life/health is in imminent danger.
Dilation and extraction does not equal partial-birth abortion because the expulsion ("birth") of the fetus happens in the abortion process, making the fetus abortion product as if it were at 10 weeks, just bigger and better developed.
I doubt there are many people who would support aborting a healthy fetus in the later months of a pregnancy without a compelling health reason. I know I wouldn't.
Late term abortions are something like 1% of all abortions, if I remember correctly. Don't quote me on it; I have to go make dinner & don't have time to look up cites.
^^^ This, all the way.
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