Abortion

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Varislintu
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Re: Abortion

Postby Varislintu » 2013-02-05, 16:36

johnklepac wrote:Wow, that unexpectedly made me feel a lot better. Neither are mine, for what it's worth.


:)

johnklepac wrote:
Varislintu wrote:I gather, then, that you don't base the right to early abortion on bodily autonomy (the right not to have to support another person with your body), but on the opinion that early on, the cells are not a person. Later on, however, they are. The most obvious question here is why it matters at all, then, whether the fetus was conceived from rape or not? I think this is a question that deserves some thought.

I'm not saying that women should, overall, have to carry babies they don't want to - only that if they don't want to, they should try to get it taken care of as soon as possible.


I agree. I'm pro-choice, not pro-abortion. I think we as a society could do a lot to reduce abortions in a constructive way if we put effort into it. Sadly some anti-choicers aren't as interested in that.

johnklepac wrote:I came to much the same conclusion as tenereef for late-term abortions: they aren't really safe for the mother, and they definitely aren't for the baby, who would be able to survive anyway.


But hold on, now. Late term abortions are no more dangerous to women than childbirth.

Also, I think I said somehwere above that I think if the child is viable, i.e. can survive outside the womb, then there's no conflict of interest anymore, and they should be helped to survive. Serious defects and diseases taken into account first, though. Not sure how to organise that in the best way, but I'm sure it could be done.

johnklepac wrote:
Varislintu wrote:Would you be willing to approve a law which made you legally required to donate a kidney to your child if they needed it?

I don't know, but that doesn't seem like a fair comparison.


It's the best comparison I can come up with that might make a non-pregnant person understand what they are asking pregnant people to do when denying them a right to abortion. Your body is invaded, you are donating resources to another person, you are risking your current and long-term health, even taking a risk of dying. And the state sees you as a resource farm and will prosecute you for homicide if you don't play along. Nobody will take your circumstance into account, how it might set you back economically to have to stay away from work (or be fired), or that you are perhaps depressed and in no condition to deal with another person sharing some of your body. The child's life is simply more important than you. The rules are rigid, and you agreed to it when you had sex.

Now, I'm sure most parents gladly donate a kidney voluntarily, but I'm trying to make you feel that sense of invasion to the right you have to rule over your body that women may feel if they know they are not allowed to abort if they need/have to.

johnklepac wrote:I think they generally have that same ideal in mind. If they were generally mean people, I don't think most of them would take the time and effort required to become a successful enough politician for their opinions to have real impacts.


That's pretty much simply not true in my experiense.

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Re: Abortion

Postby Varislintu » 2013-02-05, 20:56

HoItalosPhilellen wrote:
TeneReef wrote:Because of abortion of female babies, there are no enough girls for men to date,
and women get gang raped.

I think we're supposed to distinguish between dating and mating here, aren't we? :?

EDIT: I forgot. In that part of the world, it's one and the same thing. :oops:


Not to mention that I find the idea that rape-crazy men need to be placated by a steady supply of women to be just a tad offensive to both men, women, and the girl children that this idea would allow to be born.

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Re: Abortion

Postby johnklepac » 2013-02-05, 22:50

Varislintu wrote:But hold on, now. Late term abortions are no more dangerous to women than childbirth.

Also, I think I said somehwere above that I think if the child is viable, i.e. can survive outside the womb, then there's no conflict of interest anymore, and they should be helped to survive. Serious defects and diseases taken into account first, though. Not sure how to organise that in the best way, but I'm sure it could be done.

I didn't say they were more dangerous. That second part, though, I didn't see.

Varislintu wrote:It's the best comparison I can come up with that might make a non-pregnant person understand what they are asking pregnant people to do when denying them a right to abortion. Your body is invaded, you are donating resources to another person, you are risking your current and long-term health, even taking a risk of dying. And the state sees you as a resource farm and will prosecute you for homicide if you don't play along. Nobody will take your circumstance into account, how it might set you back economically to have to stay away from work (or be fired), or that you are perhaps depressed and in no condition to deal with another person sharing some of your body. The child's life is simply more important than you. The rules are rigid, and you agreed to it when you had sex.

Those are all adequate circumstances. Waiting six or seven months and then chickening out doesn't seem like one to me.

Varislintu wrote:
johnklepac wrote:I think they generally have that same ideal in mind. If they were generally mean people, I don't think most of them would take the time and effort required to become a successful enough politician for their opinions to have real impacts.


That's pretty much simply not true in my experiense.

Mind you, being uninformed or even openly ignorant isn't the same thing as being mean. Politicians generally aren't going to try to keep women down just to make them feel bad. The ones who try to at all - and those are rarer in the U.S. than you'd guess from reading or watching our news - typically genuinely think women who want abortions don't have their babies' interests at heart and, as such, aren't really capable of deciding.

Not that this makes them any more fit to judge; it just may have different implications on the best way to deal with them.

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Re: Abortion

Postby ceid donn » 2013-02-27, 19:02

I haven't posted in this thread so far because, wow, so many of these comments are just...wow. But I have something to say to all the pro-"life" people ("life" in quotations because you and I both know you're very selective and subjective about what that means) and all the waffley if-and-but sayers:

Basically my stance on abortion is: I am a woman who had an abortion and you need to stay out of my life decisions. I could not find an single commenter here who likewise can say that they themselves have had an abortion (if anyone did in this thread, I overlooked you and I'm sorry). Any discussion on abortion should start with the women who need or needed an abortion, like me. We're the ones getting the abortions, we're the one most immediately impacted by them. You need to listen to us--first. No exceptions.

Granted, in an ideal, civilized world, women like myself shouldn't have to come forward to assert themselves into conversations about them that have not bothered to include them. We would have been included from the start. Likewise, I should not have to discuss such a personal and entirely justified choice with complete strangers, included ones I would regard as hostile to my dignity and rights, because they got some ass-brained idea that my reproductive health, my body, my quality of life and ultimately my right to be alive, healthy and safe is open territory for them to moralize and judge from afar. That is an egregious display on one's privilege, not to mention misogyny (yes, thinking you don't have to listen to women about something that is a woman's issue pretty much qualifies you as someone who thinks woman have no personal agency that you need to respect, i.e. a misogynist).

That you don't know why women seek abortions is entrely because you haven't bothered to find out. You just assume. You take an issue about real people (women--yep, we're real people) and their rights over their own lives, and you make it an argument of definitions, like such and such trimesters, "personhood" or how the woman got pregnant. By doing that, you cut out the human being--and the fully human, fully living person who is the woman--from the picture and reduce her to mere mention, a thing that can't speak, can't voice her choices, wishes or fears, can't defend herself and cannot demand you respect her rights, her personhood, her dignity and her agency. And for those who somehow think the embyro or fetus is a victim and a "person", that you need to victimize the woman first and deny and dismiss her personhood and agency to make your argument makes your argument null and void--go take Logic 101 & Social Justice 101 before rejoining the discussion.

You likewise haven't bothered to get an education on reproductive health and all the many, many things that can go wrong with it that no one can control. You likely don't know many of the basic stats about abortion that reveal the intricate social implications and burdens of having children that fall upon women but, not surprisingly, rarely impact men with children in the same way, like how most women who get one are already mothers and have to make the choice to limit their family size themselves, or how women who cannot get an abortion are far more likely to stay in an abusive relationship than ones who can, or that single mothers living in poverty who cannot get abortions have a far less likely chance to get themselves and their children out of poverty.

Additionally, you probably don't know that by leading medical experts' estimates, 50% of all fertilized eggs are spontaeously aborted, many of which end up being flushed down a toilet or thrown out on a used maxi pad without the woman or anyone else knowing she was even pregnant. Think about that the next time you fret over whether or not an abortion by choice is "killing a person." What about all those "persons" rotting away in a sewage treatment plant or a landfill? Where's the outcry for all those thrown-away souls?! You probably haven't really given thought about what "personhood" is, so you haven't realized that idea that nature or God would give "personhood" to something so physiologicaly incapable of possessing personhood is absurd. Thomas Aquinas understood that--in the bleeping 13th century. Please try to catch up.

And lastly, having never been pregnant yourself (or perhaps, for a slender few of you at this largely male user site, you were pregnant, wanted to be pregnant and your life circumstances, health and relationships all supported you pursuing your choice to stay pregnant) you have never known what it's like to be pregnant and know in your heart and gut that this is not the right time to be pregnant. You don't know what it's like to know it's a wrong time to bring a child into this world. You also don't know what it's like to want a pregnancy but know something is very wrong and that child will never be. This is why abortion has been part of our society for as long as we know, because a woman's drive to not be pregnant when it's not the right time or when something is wrong is as strong as the drive to be pregnant when it is the right time. It's not abnormal. It's not immoral. It's perfectly natural and right. It's how we evolved as a species.

I tell you want, anti-abortionists and fence-straddlers: when YOU get pregnant and it's not the right time for you to be pregnant, for ANY reasons, be it physiological, medical, emotional, finanical, relationship-wise, or if you got preganat from being raped by your father/stepfather/uncle or any other man, or something unforeseen went wrong with a pregnancy you wanted, get back to me and I will be HAPPY to dump loads of clueless moralizing, uneducated debating and other irrational, pretentious nonsense on you to make you feel isolated, guilty, powerless and vicimtimized in the middle of an urgent personal matter that is none of my bleeping business. Agreed?

TeneReef wrote:Because of abortion of female babies, there are no enough girls for men to date,
and women get gang raped.


You have got to be kidding me.

Ignoring the silly heteronormativity of that comment...

If you are worried about women aborting female fetuses, then make this a world where women don't have to be afraid to bring a female child into it. Try, if you can, to imagine thehorror of this woman's motheras she watchd her daughter die from the horrific injuries from being viciously, savagely raped and left for dead. BY MEN. If there are women in this world who are afraid to have female children, it is because they are afraid of what MEN will do to their children--whether it's condemning them to a dehumanizing life of poverty, domestic violence and no opportunities to escape, or being sold into sex slavery, or being brutally raped like this Indian woman--and they feel they have no other option. I can't blame such women. On the other hand, I am also among countless feminists and women's advocate worldwide who very strongly advocate for change so no woman anywhere has to be afraid to have a daughter. You're welcomed to join us.


<trigger warning, for sensitive readers>

<Note to mods--what I'm about to say is very graphic, but given that someone said something so ignorant about the nature of rape, I think it warrents being this explicit. I hope you don't get squeamish and delete it, because that would be allowing people to continue kidding themselves about the horrific violence that is rape and how it is NOT about sex, but about controlling others>


Additionally, TeneReef, about this Indian woman who died after being gang raped, tell me how--PLEASE, you really need to explain this to me so I can understand--HOW IN THE WORLD is shoving a metal rod up a woman's vagina--repeatedly--until it punctuated her cervix and uterus and did massive, horrific and ultimately fatal damage to her internal organs about men needing to satisfy their sexual urges? Seriously--tell me how that is. Were they just boys being boys and just get carried away? Did they mistake this woman's undoubtedly agonizing screams for pleasure, hmmm? Do you think the sight of blood of the weapon increased these men's pleasure in the act? Do you see yourself and other men you know getting off to that?

I hope you're as sick to yoru stomach from reading that as I am from writing it. But that's how so very far away from reality your notion of why men rape is.

Rape is not about sex. It uses sex as an avenue for violent, truamatizing acts of control. The worse thing anyone could do when talking about rape is blame the victim, because that's PART OF THE CONTROL. Rape is used worldwide to control women, but also men. Whenever there are people not behaving how the dominant, most privileged group thinks they should, rape get utilized as a weapon. The most common targets of rape are indeed women, as worldwide men are the most privileged group, but also gays & trans/queer people as well as men and women of ethnic, religious and cultural minorities. Anywhere you find a dominant group in conflict with a less powerful group, there is rape being using to control the less powerful, to punish them, to police them, to break and crush them. It is a worldwide epidemic, fueled by people's refusal to hold the rapists accountable for their own actions but instead blame victims. As species we ought to be profoundly disgusted with ourselves, and if we have any decency, we should commit ourselves to ending what has been rightly called "rape culture."

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Re: Abortion

Postby Varislintu » 2013-02-28, 15:58

Ceid donn, that was a brilliant post! :y:

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Re: Abortion

Postby TeneReef » 2013-02-28, 17:01

Even aliens know a child is not a part of woman's body. :wink:
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Re: Abortion

Postby Michael » 2013-02-28, 17:09

TeneReef wrote:Even aliens know a child is not a part of woman's body. :wink:

What do you mean by this? :?
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Re: Abortion

Postby Lur » 2013-02-28, 17:39

HoItalosPhilellen wrote:
TeneReef wrote:Even aliens know a child is not a part of woman's body. :wink:

What do you mean by this? :?


An embryo or a fetus is not a part of the woman's body. It's inside, which is different. It behaves like a parasite.
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Re: Abortion

Postby Michael » 2013-02-28, 18:35

Luke wrote:An embryo or a fetus is not a part of the woman's body. It's inside, which is different. It behaves like a parasite.

I didn't know a fetus was a person.
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Re: Abortion

Postby JackFrost » 2013-02-28, 19:24

It's not. Under common law, personhood is bestowed once it exits the mother's body. So, while it's in the mother's body, it's considered a foreign object (different genetic makeup) and the only thing that prevents the mother's immune system from viciously attacking it is the anti-immune suppressant produced by the ovaries, uterus, and placenta.
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Re: Abortion

Postby Lur » 2013-02-28, 20:11

HoItalosPhilellen wrote:
Luke wrote:An embryo or a fetus is not a part of the woman's body. It's inside, which is different. It behaves like a parasite.

I didn't know a fetus was a person.


I'm not saying it is? :?
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Re: Abortion

Postby Michael » 2013-02-28, 23:42

Luke wrote:I'm not saying it is? :?

Oh. Well, I asked TeneReef to disambiguate what he said ("children are not part of a woman's body"), and you replied with something about fetuses, and I thought to myself, "Ok, and? We're talking about children here, not fetuses."
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Re: Abortion

Postby Varislintu » 2013-03-01, 16:39

Well, is and isn't. The building material for the embryo/fetus does come from the mother, after all. The embryo/fetus also uses the mother's organs to supply functions it can't supply itself. In a way, the embryo/fetus is building itself out of the mother.

Not sure how this advances the anti-choice argument, though.

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Re: Abortion

Postby Lur » 2013-03-01, 21:46

HoItalosPhilellen wrote:
Luke wrote:I'm not saying it is? :?

Oh. Well, I asked TeneReef to disambiguate what he said ("children are not part of a woman's body"), and you replied with something about fetuses, and I thought to myself, "Ok, and? We're talking about children here, not fetuses."

Aah, gotcha. I was confused there.

I end up using fetus and child interchangeably when a fetus starts looking like a child. I don't mean anything with that, it's just the way it comes out.
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Re: Abortion

Postby johnklepac » 2013-03-04, 2:52

Varislintu wrote:Well, is and isn't. The building material for the embryo/fetus does come from the mother, after all. The embryo/fetus also uses the mother's organs to supply functions it can't supply itself. In a way, the embryo/fetus is building itself out of the mother.

Not sure how this advances the anti-choice argument, though.

"Anti-choice"? C'mon, be nice at least. They could just as well call our side "anti-life."

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Re: Abortion

Postby Johanna » 2013-03-04, 8:18

johnklepac wrote:"Anti-choice"? C'mon, be nice at least. They could just as well call our side "anti-life."

Considering that where their side gets what it wants the rate of abortions don't go down, but the number of women dying from unsafe abortions goes up, it's hard to really call that pro-life...
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Re: Abortion

Postby md0 » 2013-03-04, 8:51

If anything, it's the pro-choicers that value life.
Talking with anti-choicers always ends with them admitting that they don't care about the life of the born, and the mother, but she has to give birth. For them pregnancy is seen as punishment for sex, and that's why they care about the unborn so much.
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Re: Abortion

Postby Varislintu » 2013-03-04, 20:05

johnklepac wrote:
Varislintu wrote:Well, is and isn't. The building material for the embryo/fetus does come from the mother, after all. The embryo/fetus also uses the mother's organs to supply functions it can't supply itself. In a way, the embryo/fetus is building itself out of the mother.

Not sure how this advances the anti-choice argument, though.

"Anti-choice"? C'mon, be nice at least. They could just as well call our side "anti-life."


I find your reaction strange, actually. In my opinion, I'm just being accurate, not offensive. They are explicitly pushing for a removal of choice. That is precisely their agenda. They aren't ashamed of it, are they? They do it openly. Wheras, pro-life is less describing, because you can be pro life even if you are pro-choice. Pro-life is just a term that attempts to label the other side as being pro-death or anti-life, i.e. it's an appeal to emotion.

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Re: Abortion

Postby Car » 2013-03-04, 20:37

Varislintu wrote:
johnklepac wrote:
Varislintu wrote:Well, is and isn't. The building material for the embryo/fetus does come from the mother, after all. The embryo/fetus also uses the mother's organs to supply functions it can't supply itself. In a way, the embryo/fetus is building itself out of the mother.

Not sure how this advances the anti-choice argument, though.

"Anti-choice"? C'mon, be nice at least. They could just as well call our side "anti-life."


I find your reaction strange, actually. In my opinion, I'm just being accurate, not offensive. They are explicitly pushing for a removal of choice. That is precisely their agenda. They aren't ashamed of it, are they? They do it openly. Wheras, pro-life is less describing, because you can be pro life even if you are pro-choice. Pro-life is just a term that attempts to label the other side as being pro-death or anti-life, i.e. it's an appeal to emotion.


Exactly. That's why I'm really glad that pro-lifers are called "Abtreibungsgegner" ("abortion opponents") in German, that sounds much more neutral. Sure, I can see why they'd want to call themselves "pro-life", but for this to become the standard term? That doesn't sound right to me.
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Re: Abortion

Postby ILuvEire » 2013-03-04, 21:06

Car, on the Wikipedia page, the German is called "die Lebensrechtsbewegung" ("the right to life movement"). Have you ever heard that term before? Regardless, I agree, I really think that the pro-life/pro-choice thing is silly, it should just be pro-abortion and anti-abortion, because at the end of the day, I don't think that any of us pro-choicers have any qualms about saying that we think that women should have access to abortion.
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