America transitions into Gilead

[Skeptic Ginger]

No. We're saying this human being has as much a right to life as the woman impregnated with her, and unless the mere existence of this human being poses a threat to the life of the woman nourishing her, then you have no plausible right to terminate that person's life.

Pregnancy itself poses a threat to any woman's life.

 

[The Don]

Or has Alabama not thought this all through yet?

I presume that the lawmakers think that the despicable hussies who find themselves pregnant out of wedlock should have listened to the "abstinence only" contraception advice in sex education and kept their knees together. Their pregnancy is just (and just) punishment for their wanton sinning.

Those who are victims of rape or incest should also consider what they did to stir such passion in the perpetrator and dress/act more modestly in the future.

 

[The Don]

Those votes you are counting as the "vast majority" are the legislators, many no doubt from gerrymandered state districts.

What is your stance on abortion? - Results from Alabama votersI don't call that a "vast" majority.

Perhaps the districts were gerrymandered (or not), but the bill had bipartisan support.

Even if the split was just 55%/45% as the poll suggests, that's still a bigger majority than the one that is taking the UK out of the EU and that 45% are not making an impression on the manifesto of either party.

USA Today: 25 men voted to ban abortion in Alabama. Do they reflect the rest of America?

This is not just a play to ban abortions, it is a move to re-elect Trump. The bills won't pass the SCOTUS and the GOP will use it (as planned) to keep Trump in power under the guise of getting one more SCOTUS judge from all those single issue voters.

I hope it backfires.

Such a tactic wouldn't work if there wasn't a huge number of people who agree with the underlying premise. IMO the error is in thinking that the GOP and religious right are somehow the cause of all of this. IMO they are merely a symptom of a set of belief systems which a majority of people in a large number of states have. Remember there are polls out there which show that a majority of US voters are creationists, no wonder they have other beliefs which may look odd to others.

 

[Puppycow]

From 2004 to 2010 the average cost in the US to have a baby at a hospital was $30,000. $50,000 if a C-section. It has probably increased since then.

 

[Puppycow]

From 2004 to 2010 the average cost in the US to have a baby at a hospital was $30,000. $50,000 if a C-section. It has probably increased since then.

Some more relevant numbers:
Number of adoptions in the US per year: 135,000
Number of abortions in the US per year: over 600,000 although it's been declining since 1990 when it was 1.4 million.
Cost of raising a child to age 17: $233,000 (in most cases the costs don't end at age 17, however).

So there's at least about 135,000 people each year willing to adopt a child. Would there be another 600,000 every year if abortion were illegal?

 

[Lurch]

I'd love to pose this question to those of the 25 white, male Alabamians having daughters and who voted "yes" to this abortion Bill. And get a truly honest answer.

What would you want for your daughter if she were raped and impregnated by a black man?

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Perhaps the districts were gerrymandered (or not), but the bill had bipartisan support.

Even if the split was just 55%/45% as the poll suggests, that's still a bigger majority than the one that is taking the UK out of the EU and that 45% are not making an impression on the manifesto of either party.



Such a tactic wouldn't work if there wasn't a huge number of people who agree with the underlying premise. IMO the error is in thinking that the GOP and religious right are somehow the cause of all of this. IMO they are merely a symptom of a set of belief systems which a majority of people in a large number of states have. Remember there are polls out there which show that a majority of US voters are creationists, no wonder they have other beliefs which may look odd to others.

Bipartisan support or not, the "vast majority" of the population is not behind these religious fanatics.

 

[The Don]

Bipartisan support or not, the "vast majority" of the population is not behind these religious fanatics.

...and yet the vast majority of people elected support the views of those so-called religious fanatics. Gerrymandering would only be a factor if the parties had differing policies in the state w.r.t. abortion.

 

[Travis]

Thanks. Travis didn't respond. Perhaps he doesn't read my posts, which, of course, is fine. There are many regulars here I don't read.

To be honest, he seems to view this thread as an opportunity to broadcast, not to discuss. I don't recall him responding much here. Instead, he pops in to make another dire prediction. But that may be prejudice on my part.

I missed your post. I apologize. But it seems Zooterkin was on the ball.

 

[ponderingturtle]

Because if the state is paying "X" amount before the new law to aide families with dependent children it's reasonable to project that the amount of aide will increase due to the births of children that otherwise would be aborted.

Like everything else, if the state outlaws abortion only folks w/o the financial means to travel out-of-state to seek treatment will be affected by the new law. If someone can't float the cost of a round trip bus ticket it's a pretty good bet they may end up on state assistance.

Of course it isn't just the buss ticket, are the states they can get to ones that impose a waiting period so you need a hotel room and multiple days off work that will cost you your job?

 

[ponderingturtle]

Or has Alabama not thought this all through yet?

They thought it through plenty, you just mistake that they actually care about pregnancies or children.

 

[ponderingturtle]

A woman (or any other person for that matter) does not lose her rights to choose what to do with her own healthcare.

Her right to bodily autonomy does not grant her the right to kill another human being without just cause.

Yea of course that is only another being when in a woman no one wants to trying to think life starts at conception for IVF situations that is just silly.

Alabama State Senator Clyde Chambliss: “The egg in the lab doesn't apply. It's not in a woman. She's not pregnant.”.


Of course it is about women and the people writing the laws know nothing about medicine, see the made up idea of moving an ectopic pregnancy that is in these proposed laws. Madness and stupidity.

 

[ponderingturtle]

This. Babies have a right to be wanted.

That is crazy talk, children are a punishment for improper behavior. No one wants them.

 

[Meadmaker]

I also think it's fairly common practice to implant more than one zygote in the uterus with the understanding that there will be an option to cull some embryos.

There's no option to cull once they are implanted. It is common to fertilize multiple eggs and cull in the petri dish. It is also common to implant multiple blastocysts, but that's just a probability game. Implanting two or three gives a better chance that one will survive, but with some chance that two or three will survive. That's why multiple births are common with IVF. If you see a couple that had no children until after age 35, and then had twins or, especially, triplets, there's a good chance it was IVF.

 

[The_Animus]

No I am not a vegan. Just because I don't believe in a god doesn't mean I believe that all animal species are worthy of moral consideration, or even the same moral consideration as individuals who moralize like me (a human). Call me a speciesist as you want but I firmly believe that H. Sapiens is in a category of moral consideration outside of all other species, and we must include all members of this species including those who are "developmentally challenged", be them fetuses or the mentally retarded.

Why do you group an unformed clump of cells and mentally retarded people together as though they're even remotely the same? Further why do you exclude animals? In other words what is the criteria you use to determine it's okay to kill this living thing but not this living thing?

 

[phiwum]

I don't want to speak for all pro-life people, but since this discussion frequently gets dominated by religious people against atheists I feel compelled to. I'm a gay, atheist, pro-life, man (judge me as you will).

It's not even that the "right(s) of the fetus under consideration is more significant than the right of the woman", rather that I'm judging the quality of one right to another. The right to life of one individual will always outweigh the right to convenience of another. The vast majority of abortions in the developed world are those of convenience. Those that aren't can be easily classified into those that involve biological necessity (i.e. woman's compromised health, deformity of birth, etc.), and those that involve psychological necessity ("I was raped!", "Dad is no longer in the picture!", "What will my family think!?", etc.) While I sympathize with those of the latter category, I cannot in good faith support their desire to murder their offspring.

When you speak about the right to life outweighing other rights, this is what I mean when I say the right to life is more significant than the rights of the woman under consideration (excepting the case in which her life is threatened by carrying the fetus to term). I was using "significance" to indicate the value of the right in question, i.e., which one "outweighs" the other.

So it is only a matter of different terminology to mean the same thing.

(Pointless comment about my choice of words follows. You can skip this if you're not interested.) I adopted the word "significance" because it was used in a similar (but not the same) way in an article by Goodpaster on moral considerability. He argued that all living things are morally considerable (count, morally speaking), but not equally significant (he was not committed to the claim that moral harms to a blade of grass are as important as moral harms to a normal adult human). I used it in a comparison of rights rather than the beings under consideration, but it's similar enough that it seems an appropriate term.

Discussion of which rights outweigh others is commonplace in ethics. I don't know if the use of "significance" is common or if some other term is preferred, since I don't have a broad familiarity with the literature. I just run across it as I teach a course. It's not my speciality.

 

[phiwum]

Being atheist your belief isn't religious or soul based.

Are you vegan? If not, can you explain why terminating the previously described clump of unformed cells is murder but terminating a fully formed living thing is okay?

The reasoning is not difficult. Some believe that the fact that a being will become a full-fledged person if allowed to develop naturally entails that the being deserves the rights of a person now. In fact, that's an easier position to defend than the pro-choice position, since conception is an obvious point where something big has changed.

Everyone agrees (almost everyone) that killing an infant is bad. Most agree that it is just as bad as killing a normal adult human. Almost everyone agrees that preventing a fetus from forming is not morally the same as murder (even the Catholic church, which regards contraception as wrong, does not view contraception as murder). So, at some point at or after fertilization and before birth, this lump of cells must become a thing with rights. The question is when. Conception itself is a natural choice. Other times can be selected, but it's a more difficult task to explain why it's that moment when the fetus starts to matter. (Having a heartbeat, for instance, is a pretty obviously stupid point to claim is the origin of moral considerability.)

There is the related problem that any other time is harder to pinpoint. Singer, for instance, ties moral considerability to the ability to feel pain (I'm not saying he thinks abortion is wrong once this occurs -- his position is nuanced and it's not clear to me what his views on abortion are). But it's not clear when the ability to feel pain occurs. What change occurs so that, the day before, the fetus couldn't feel pain and the day after, it can? I'm not even talking about the problem of measuring which fetuses can feel pain, since they develop at different rates, but whether there's really some specifiable time when feeling pain is suddenly a capacity or, if it develops gradually, the time at which the capacity has developed enough to matter.

So, while I don't agree with the pro-life position, I understand it fairly well and don't think it's a stupid position to take nor that pro-lifers are motivated by misogynism. (I'm sure some are, but some people are just bad people.)

 

[phiwum]

No I am not a vegan. Just because I don't believe in a god doesn't mean I believe that all animal species are worthy of moral consideration, or even the same moral consideration as individuals who moralize like me (a human). Call me a speciesist as you want but I firmly believe that H. Sapiens is in a category of moral consideration outside of all other species, and we must include all members of this species including those who are "developmentally challenged", be them fetuses or the mentally retarded.

Wow. You *are* a speciesist. That's a tough position to defend.

 

[phiwum]

Isn't there also an argument path for ensuring that each human gets the best possible world we can give them? Being born unwanted, unloved and uncared for is better than not being born at all?

Surely, every parent fails to give their child the best possible world that can be given. I am sure you overstated that point.

But those who argue that abortion is wrong would also argue that the parents have an obligation to ensure that the baby is cared for and loved, by someone else if not them. The fact that I am unwilling or incapable of fulfilling a later moral duty doesn't excuse me from avoiding that later duty by killing the fetus now.

Obviously, the devil is in the details of the moral reasoning and I'm sure that many people would allow for exceptions when the fetus has congenital defects that promise a life of pain and suffering that is unavoidable by any means.

But many abortions do not involve the threat of a life unwanted. My wife became pregnant while still in school. Suppose she had believed that she could not dedicate herself to her studies to the extent she desired and also raise a child. Most of those who regard abortion as permissible would think that an abortion would be okay in this case. But this is not a case of choosing between abortion or life as an unloved urchin. Even if she thought a baby would present serious hardships in her studies, she has the wherewithal to know the baby is blameless and would love and care for him.

Surely, you aren't wanting to argue that abortion is permissible only in those cases where the alternative is life as an unloved child. If not, then this consideration must not be the heart of your reasoning.

 

[phiwum]

You're right though: the hyperbole is a distraction from what we should really be focusing on, which is that this law will severely restrict access to abortion if allowed to stand. Even if it only applies to doctors. The scaremongering could actually be counterproductive here for opponents of the law, of which I count myself one.

Great, no real dispute between the two of us then. I really didn't think we'd reach a common position, to be honest. I guess I'm too used to stubbornness online, a refusal to concede any ground.