DDL on 23/2/2009 at 17:44
Quote Posted by Beleg Cúthalion
.. that would be a woman's right of avoiding nine months of...well... discomfort and pain..
I don't think you realise quite how destructive even perfectly normal pregancies can be. Discomfort and pain doesn't quite cut it. Humans are really not optimised for giving birth.
If you were a bit careless at work and accidentally got exposed to some chemical that meant for the next nine months you would develop a huge tumour that stretches your all your belly skin, pancakes your abdominal muscles and screws up your back, get osteoporosis as the tumour sucked all the calcium out of your skeleton, get fucking
bone softening (srsly?) so the tumour can more easily squeeze its way out of your pelvis, probably doing a decent job of mangling your genitals on the way, and then you'd also have to pay to have the tumour maintained on a heart-lung machine for the rest of your life..
...would you consider that a single, unpleasant, but simple treatment to stop that ever happening is possibly not a bad idea?
Quote Posted by Beleg Cúthalion
..versus the child's right to live at all. And you think that trumps it? I'm just asking because the way you put it into words reads like one life against another.
Calling it a child is misleading. You start there, you might as well call a big sack of frozen fertilised eggs "a sack of children".
I would refrain from calling it a child until at the very least, it can survive on its own (like many others have noted). This doesn't happen until quite a looong way through pregancy, along with any form of higher mental development (which is also, I would consider, a key factor). It might start looking like a baby fairly early on, but it's still just a brainless baby-shaped bag of cells.*
There are a ton of additional issues that are either not considered or presumably dismissed as too complicated (right? I've not heard much about it ever, anyway): IVF and ICSI, for instance, usually generate a sustantial number of fertilised eggs, of which only the healthiest are chosen. Are ALL these effectively children? Coz the rest go straight in the (biohazard) bin. And the implanted ones usually die too, which is why they stick a few in (with the result you occasionally get people like ms. OMG I HAZ 8 MOAR KIDZ). Would you rather these people were denied the chance to have children just because the process inevitably "kills the unborn"?
But yeah, I too will probably regret posting in commchat. In a religion/abortion thread. Again. :erg:
*Incidentally, the 'new medical science'-derived increase in survival rates for premature babies isn't actually terribly significant: it turns out most of that stems from massaged statistics ("here at the hospital where they now only send premature births that they think have a decent chance of survival, we're showing a significant increase in survival!"). Premature babies by and large die in proportion to their degree of prematurity at the same rates they ever did.
Jadon on 23/2/2009 at 18:35
I wish more pro-lifers cared about the actual women getting the procedure. They care enough about the kid (or at least make it look like they do) but they don't care enough about the women to let them have proper medical care if they decide to actually get the abortion. The choice then becomes have the kid or coat hanger. makes me sad. :(
Swiss Mercenary on 23/2/2009 at 18:41
Guys you are forgetting.
When does life start?
Kolya on 23/2/2009 at 18:46
While we haven't emphasized this point it's being discussed all the time, eg for me and DDL it starts with a baby that can survive outside the mother.
Nicker on 23/2/2009 at 18:55
Quote Posted by Swiss Mercenary
Guys you are forgetting.
When does life start?
No one is forgetting this question. Some are just discounting its relevance.
Even if we allow that life begins at conception the matter becomes one of prior claim and a woman must always be allowed the right to determine what happens to her own body. This right supersedes any claim which any other person may make, including a fetus.
You don't have to agree with their choice to respect their right to make it.
jtr7 on 23/2/2009 at 19:02
Quote Posted by Jadon
I wish more pro-lifers cared about the actual women getting the procedure. They care enough about the kid (or at least make it look like they do) but they don't care enough about the women to let them have proper medical care if they decide to actually get the abortion. The choice then becomes have the kid or coat hanger. makes me sad. :(
Yes. It's odd, isn't it, especially all the women pro-lifers. You'd think they would show more understanding, being women. I think, perhaps, they are expecting women to be mature in their decisions, and not so reckless with their bodies, and the lives of others, being women, the cultural embodiment of life-givers and nurturers. I don't get it. Everyone's just justifying their mistakes.:( It's got to be hard to watch women seem to give in to a moment of weakness, and to make up for it with a series of weak-seeming decisions, without having been in their shoes.
It would go a long way towards success if people stopped arguing as if quoting from a propaganda pamphlet, or as if one is only mimicking what one has heard. Has it been calmly and maturely--not snidely, or angrily--explained how a foetus is, in fact, the mother's body, for instance? And how come the pro-choicers always offer such a narrow band of choices? A woman can choose to have unprotected sex, and follow it up by choosing to be embarrassed, frightened, inconvenienced, have an abortion, have discomfort and pain, etc., but not choose to avoid all that to begin with? Can the other side be educated instead of bludgeoned? As a person who lives in a cave--well, a truck--I keep hearing the snotty catchphrases minus a sense of the bigger picture. I keep hearing people defend a person's right to choose badly when there are other choices, which are rarely even mentioned or given real acknowledgment. I hear screaming and frothing without any useful information to actually sow the seeds of change in the opposing view. Rise above! Show the opposing side's
how they lack education without parroting useless arguments that have done little to convince these past decades, but seem more like a rally cry to make one's own side feel powerful, while the other side remains baffled. That goes for pro-lifers, too!
SD on 23/2/2009 at 19:11
Quote Posted by Jadon
I wish more pro-lifers cared about the actual women getting the procedure. They care enough about the kid (or at least make it look like they do)
I disagree. They care about the
foetus. By the time it's a kid, they couldn't give a shit, and they'd happily see welfare payments etc to newborns slashed. The whole thing is about punishing people for having an unplanned pregnancy, not about saving "lives". If they were that big on preventing death, they wouldn't all be massively in favour of state-sponsored murder.
jtr7 on 23/2/2009 at 19:14
So punish the child anyway? Preemptively? Oh wait. We're arguing from our scripted conversation again.
jtr7 on 23/2/2009 at 19:16
So punish the child anyway? Preemptively? Oh wait. We're arguing from our scripted conversation again.
Don't cause pregnancy to begin with, dammit! Cures many ills.;)
Jadon on 23/2/2009 at 19:16
Like I said they at least make it look like they care about the kid, not that they actually do.
also i was i was using kid as generic for both fetus and child
