This. The debate will never be resolved b/c if abortion is murder, than it's never okay. Well, perhaps in the instances where the woman's life is at risk, but not with rape, not with incest, etc, etc. I'm not saying I agree with that, but I see the argument. If you believe the baby is a baby, then killing it in the womb or out of the womb is the same difference.
Michigan Anti-Abortion Bill, 'Most Extreme' In The Country
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This. The debate will never be resolved b/c if abortion is murder, than it's never okay. Well, perhaps in the instances where the woman's life is at risk, but not with rape, not with incest, etc, etc. I'm not saying I agree with that, but I see the argument. If you believe the baby is a baby, then killing it in the womb or out of the womb is the same difference.
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The thing is, passing laws against murder does not stop murder. It simply means people can be punished for it. Anti-poverty and anti-violence programs help stop murder, among copious other societal reasons.
If these people were really interested in 'stopping' abortion, to whatever degree that can be accomplished, that's where they'd be focused. Since it's not, that's why I'm also someone who believes it's more about punishing the woman involved.
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Here's my theory -- it's offensive because when you use a thing's real name, you take some of the power and mystique away from it. If we have people, women especially, going around calling reproductive organs by their proper names and being *comfortable* with it, then they'll become comfortable with the thing itself. And we don't want women to be comfortable with their vaginas. They might start exploring their sexuality and discovering that sex is good and fun. They might start wanting to have better sex. Sex that doesn't involve procreation. Sex that makes THEM feel good. Sex where they have some control. We just can't have that now, can we?
Um, I'm pretty sure jail is a deterrent to some people who might think murder is a good option. Just like its a good deterrent for people who might rob a bank.
Vagina.
There, I said it.
They can't even think of a euphemism? No, not like "hoo-hah," I mean birth canal.
I can hear one of these bills being described that would require a "trans-birth-canal examination."
There, I said it.
They can't even think of a euphemism? No, not like "hoo-hah," I mean birth canal.
I can hear one of these bills being described that would require a "trans-birth-canal examination."
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I'm going to take a step back here.
The era from 1830 to 1850 is interesting. There was a lot of change. The common man got suffrage in the UK in 1835; spirit mass production began in the 1820s (hence the temperance movement of the 1830s); the Second Great Awakening took place and European Spring took place in 1848.
A lot of the issue was focused on the male suffrage ("landholder suffrage") and the laws that followed from the imbalance of power. What little I know, it looks like the AMA's attack on quackery (commendable) also included midwifery as an artifact of removing women from medicine. Midwifery included aiding childbirth and aiding abortions. There could also have been issue with the art of abortions at the time. Midwifery could have had high incident rates of bleeding-to-death, infection and whatnot due to the state of the science then. But they never got around to seeing how things got better and just simply kicked women out of medicine. I believe Canada did not get its first female doctor until the 1880s or something?
The era from 1830 to 1850 is interesting. There was a lot of change. The common man got suffrage in the UK in 1835; spirit mass production began in the 1820s (hence the temperance movement of the 1830s); the Second Great Awakening took place and European Spring took place in 1848.
A lot of the issue was focused on the male suffrage ("landholder suffrage") and the laws that followed from the imbalance of power. What little I know, it looks like the AMA's attack on quackery (commendable) also included midwifery as an artifact of removing women from medicine. Midwifery included aiding childbirth and aiding abortions. There could also have been issue with the art of abortions at the time. Midwifery could have had high incident rates of bleeding-to-death, infection and whatnot due to the state of the science then. But they never got around to seeing how things got better and just simply kicked women out of medicine. I believe Canada did not get its first female doctor until the 1880s or something?
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Only if they couch the law in abortion = murder terms. They've been very successful in making abortion impractical by creating laws that sound reasonable.
They're using Salami Tactics (or Salami Slicing)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_slicing
For example:
Parental consent laws:
http://www.positive.org/Resources/consent.html
Justification: Parents should be consulted when minors undergo medical procedures.
Flaws in Justification: Incest and extreme parental disapproval leading to abuse of sexually active minors.
Waiting Period:
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/...among-new-Utah-laws-taking-effect.html?pg=all
Justification: Such a decision should be made carefully therefore it is sensible to require a cooling off period before an abortion can be had.
Flaws in Justification: Unbelievably offensive contempt for all women, implying that they would have abortions casually. Furthermore waiting periods require multiple visits to providers placing greater financial and life burdens on women.
TRAP laws (requirements for abortion facilities not required of other medical facilities):
http://www.prochoice.org/about_abortion/facts/trap_laws.html
Justification: Medical procedures need proper facilities.
Flaws in Justification: Then why are these same requirements not given for other facilities such as cosmetic surgery or oral surgery?
Lying to patients:
http://tigerbeatdown.com/2012/03/19...o-pregnant-patients-about-prenatal-diagnoses/
Justification: The poor ignorant women might abort on the grounds of possible birth defects.
Flaws in Justification: The justification itself and the idea that doctors should be allowed or required to lie to patients.
The point here is that there isn't enough respect for the women involved to even bring up the full right to life concept, as if any woman in that situation weren't painfully aware of the choice she is making.
Don't you mean "if you believe the zygote, embryo or fetus is a baby"?
Because a baby is a baby, and killing a baby is murder. However, a zygote, embryo or fetus is no more a "baby" than a baby is a "an adult human." Calling a thing by its potential rather than what it actually is at the moment is where this madness starts.
If I burn a barrel of acorns, which has the potential to become a forest, I can hardly be charged with deforestation.
Once again for politicians, it seems they're being disingenuous. They became "offended" by the word vagina. It seems to me what really offended them was the way she used it, but they couldn't think of how to ban her for that, so they blamed the word she used:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way...ep-barred-from-speaking-after-vagina-comments
The article text has the setup and quotes the punchline
I hadn't heard that analogy, but it looks very much like the "slowly boiling a frog" story:
http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/frogboil.asp
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I first encountered the idea of Salami Tactics as a cold war description of how to conquer nations without triggering nuclear war. One of the most vivid, memorable, and disturbingly amusing discussions of it was actually on the British comedy show Yes Prime Minister.
http://www.yes-minister.com/ypmseas1a.htm
They believe abortion is murder usually because they've been told that and it's an emotional appeal they refuse to think through. I'm sorry, but the analogy offends me because it treats the woman's body as a non entity, as if it's not her body that's getting the abortion. Her body's not a breadbox. She can't just flip open the lid, grab the fetus and attack it. The abortion = murder argument is usually made out of ignorance or prejudice rather than thinking things through. Those things are never simple to fight, but that doesn't mean you don't try.
Parents aren't required to donate organs/tissue/blood to their children unless they agree to it, even if it would mean the child will die. Other than Chrissy on this thread, I've never heard anyone claim they should have to. Believe me: to most anti-abortionists there's a difference, and it favors the fetus over the baby.
Agreed. I do think it's her usage that was problematic to them (although I think it was entirely appropriate).
"Salami Tactics" was used a lot in the cold war. I believe the term was coined by Rakosi, who was the Stalinist leader of Hungary.
ETA: It was primarily used by Rakosi to describe how he dealt with the opposition to the Communist party, how to create and maintain a one-party system.
It goes back to what I said about a pregnant woman not being a breadbox or a container. The fetus is not just inside her body, it's also attached to her body and living off of it. The fetus can't live without her bodily donations. Abortion is the choice where a woman says, "I don't want to donate my body to this." That's the analogy. That's why if abortion is murder then refusal to donate should also be murder.
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Here's the difference, though: There is never a situation in which murder is a necessity. When it is absolutely, unavoidably necessary to kill someone, it gets other names, such as euthanasia or self-defense, depending on the situation. And depending on where you are, those non-murder killings are not illegal, just like abortion is not illegal in the US.
On the other hand, abortion is a necessity. I believe the majority of abortions are done out of necessity, even the elective ones. Elective, when applied to medical procedures, only means that it's not to cure a potentially fatal or crippling medical problem. But there are other necessities in life: the necessity to work, the necessity to restrict family size so that existing children can be fed, the necessity to avoid passing on a serious congenital defect, the necessity to avoid being murdered by an abusive partner, and so forth.
People murder other people to advance their personal interests.
Women get abortions because they have to.
So while the threat of jail might deter some murderers from time to time, isn't that likely because they don't actually have to commit that murder?
But there is no deterrence against necessity. Women got abortions when they were illegal, they do get abortions where they are illegal, and they will get abortions if they become illegal here again, because sometimes a woman needs to abort a pregnancy.
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A lot of them are the same people who don't want to be taxed a nickel to make sure poor kids get breakfast when they come to school hungry.
Re: Saying "vagina" in the Michigan State House.
Did I oversleep? Did the calendar loop back to 1950?
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I actually believe that abortion should be available. But I see the argument that it's murder. No, I don't think the bread-basket analogy is a very good one. A new born baby can't live on it's own either. It's completely dependent on its caregiver. If a woman (or any caregiver) were to neglect that duty, after birth, they would be tossed in prison. And rightly so. Prebirth, the woman is the only possible caregiver, so to shirk those responsibilities ....
Abortion is its own thing. It can't be compared to something else because there's no comparison. I don't doubt that there are many women who get abortions out of necessity. But I also suspect there are many women who get it out of convenience. Again, I'm not on the side that it should be outlawed, I'm just trying to point out that this isn't a 'woman's body therefore woman's choice kind of thing.' To say it is would be a gross oversimplification.
Potential life, or true life, it is a matter of morality. It is an argument that can never be won. Side choice will never convince side life that they are right, and side life will never convince side choice that they are right. Personally, I'm not sure I think either side is wrong.
Abortion is its own thing. It can't be compared to something else because there's no comparison. I don't doubt that there are many women who get abortions out of necessity. But I also suspect there are many women who get it out of convenience. Again, I'm not on the side that it should be outlawed, I'm just trying to point out that this isn't a 'woman's body therefore woman's choice kind of thing.' To say it is would be a gross oversimplification.
Potential life, or true life, it is a matter of morality. It is an argument that can never be won. Side choice will never convince side life that they are right, and side life will never convince side choice that they are right. Personally, I'm not sure I think either side is wrong.
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I don't disagree with you, just pointing out that it's easier for a pro-choice person to say 'If you don't support abortion, don't have one" than it is for an anti-abortion person because the anti-abortion person sees abortion as murder.
Yep. Reminds me of one of the lines from George Carlin, "If you're preborn, you're fine. If you're preschool, you're fucked." He did a great routine on the whole abortion debate:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCWC4sHbIV0
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Then why did you make the comparison?
Suspicions are irrelevant. History proves that abortion never goes away. There is a bedrock of necessity that keeps it with us. Outlawing a necessity does not render it not necessary anymore.
But who else's choice should it be then? Who else is voicing a preference in this issue, and what is their qualification to do so? That's something no anti-choice advocate has ever been able to show. There's a reason for that.
Here's one of the harsh things about life: sometimes people have to die and sometimes other people have to make the decision about that happening. Every person who has ever agreed to be the health care proxy for another person is put in that position, when end of life decisions have to be made. Parents of born children have to make that decision sometimes -- whether to use heroic measures, or let their child's life end. Many people, myself included, believe that euthanasia and assisted suicide, the active ending of a life, should be legal in some circumstances, too, in order to end hopeless suffering.
So just for a moment, let's play along with the specious anti-choice argument that zygotes and embryos and early stage fetuses are people just like born babies.
If some people think a zygote is a person, why wouldn't the decision to abort a pregnancy fall under the same heading as other life-and-death proxy decisions?
As I pointed out earlier in the thread, the unborn have no voice. That's because, at the stages at which elective abortions are performed, they have no brains and thus are not alive, but setting that aside for now...
They don't talk. You can ask a zygote questions about its aspirations and hopes all day long, but you won't ever get an answer. So the anti-choice side asks, "Who speaks for the unborn?"
And I, on the pro-choice side, ask, "Who should speak for the unborn?"
Should it be some random crowd of strangers who have nothing whatsoever to do with the zygote and who will never have anything do with any born child it may someday become, except possibly to deny it collective bargaining rights and Social Security?
Or should it be the only person, the sole individual in the entire world who really does have anything to do with it, and who indeed is so intimately connected with it that, if she were to die, it would die, too?
Who is better qualified to speak to the possibilities or burdens of the potential life than the woman who is tasked with bringing it into the world and probably raising it to adulthood for 18-20 years as well?
Who is better qualified to speak to the risks and problems of the pregnancy than the woman who is pregnant?
And since the pregnancy is putting her life at risk, and risk to her life is risk to the potential life in her uterus, too, then who should be the spokesperson for both of them, if not her?
And so, if it comes down to having to make that terrible decision about whether someone else is going to live or die, who is better qualified to make that decision about aborting a pregnancy, other than the pregnant woman?
I appreciate this post; it seems to give air to both sides. And believe it or not, after all of my vehemence of last night, I'm thinking I agree with you. I've chilled out and I've thought long and hard about the way things are and the way I wish things would be.
I feel silly for the way the blood/organ donation line of conversation played out. I'd like to retract my former opinion that the law should require parents to donate such things. I think parents already willingly donate for their children whatever they are able to, and such a law would be irrelevant. In my attempt to be consistent, I lost sight of reason.
So, what do I do now? (Besides nothing, which is what I've always done in this regard.) The answer might be in what came about in a conversation with my mother, who has a friend who is affiliated with an organization here locally called Crisis Pregnancy Center. I'm going to meet my mom's friend and look into doing some part-time volunteer work--probably accounting, since that's what I know. (So long as this place doesn't get on my nerves, that is, because I'm not into proselytizing and whatnot.) The point is I'm going to help where I can, and leave the rest to be what it is. I will always be anti-abortion, but I'd rather spend my energy helping people who ask for help, and letting everyone else do what they think is best.