Texas bans abortion.

[Stacyhs]

When you said non-sentient being, you were obviously referring to the embryo. I believe in determining its rights, the fact that it is turning into a sentient being matters and is part of the equation



Sorry, but in terms of talking about what rights the fetus/zygote/embryo should have, I am not going to ignore the fact that it is turning into sentient being. You may think that doesn't matter, I think does.

Thing thing is, Warbler, that what you think SHOULD be considered sans any scientific support, or even contrary to science, is fine...for you. But thousands of women every year face this dilemma and they can make that decision for themselves following their own consciences according to Roe v Wade...unless some second or third party totally disconnected from them decides they believe they know best.

You can use whatever fancy argument you want. I am not going to believe that mother and child are the same being/lifeform until birth.

That wasn't a 'fancy' argument; it was a logical one based on what 'separate' means. Yours is based on emotion and what you 'want' to believe.

Sorry, I accidentally left out the word "don't" that should have read " but I don't know that that is how we should measure whether they are same lifeform or separate lifeforms."

I wasn't conferring "personhood" on the embryo, I was simply saying that in deciding what rights and value it is has and/or doesn't not have, the fact that it is developing into a sentient being should be part of the equation.

That's exactly what you're doing. By saying that we should take into account that it will eventually develop into a sentient being, you want us to think of it as that future sentient being and not what is actually is.

Originally Posted by Stacyhs View Post
Do you feel it's "murder" to remove a person from life support who cannot feel or think because there might be a 'miracle' and they may suddenly come out of a 20 year vegetative coma?

It might be murder if the person had a living will with clear instructions that they should not being removed from life support and want to take the chance that there might be a 'miracle' cure. If they have a living will that says the opposite, it would not be murder. I also do not think it would be murder if there was no living will and the doctor says there is no hope and the next of kin decided to pull the plug.

So it's OK to take a non-sentient, non-viable, separate lifeform-person off life support by disconnecting their breathing tube and/or feeding tube but it's not OK to disconnect a non-sentient, non-viable, (in your opinion) separate embryo lifeform from its breathing/feeding tube aka placenta. Gotcha.

We basically had to do that 5 years will my father. He had hit his head, hard. Because he was on a blood thinner, he bled alot and into the brain. He suffered some brain damage. He was recovering somewhat when he went into cardiac arrest, they tried to restart his heart, they tried the paddles and got a faint heart beat and he went into cardiac arrest again and they got a faint heart beat again and had him hooked to life support. There was nothing that could be done. He wasn't going to get any better than a faint heartbeat and would need to be hooked up to life support to keep on living. No chance of having any quality of life beyond just laying there connected to life support. He did not have a living will but we all knew he would not want to live like that. Mom made the decision with the rest of the family's approval. He went very quickly after life support was removed.

I'm sorry to hear that. I also had to make that decision for my beloved Mother-in-law who was more of a friend than MIL. She had an unexpected cardiac embolism during a minor surgery and never regained consciousness. She was on life support for three days and she had left instructions that it was my decision what to do in such a situation. After conferring with several of her doctors, I said to disconnect her. She died within a couple minutes. The weird thing was that she had a premonition she was not going to survive this day surgery procedure that she'd already had twice before.

 

[Warp12]

So it's OK to take a non-sentient, non-viable, separate lifeform-person off life support by disconnecting their breathing tube and/or feeding tube but it's not OK to disconnect a non-sentient, non-viable, (in your opinion) separate embryo lifeform from its breathing/feeding tube aka placenta. Gotcha.

Well, if it is a pretty much agreed upon fact that they will fully recover, we generally don't even discuss taking them off of life support. Nonsensical comparison. Really bad.

 

[Stacyhs]

What a peach she was.

How a woman who advocated for the selective breeding of her fellow citizens came to be memorialized with those who built a country is hard to understand.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opin...-sanger-deserves-no-honors-column/5480192002/

Of course, there are plenty of apologists out there who love her. It's not so different from the dynamic we see in this thread, tbh. Sometimes it's hard to tell if I am at the ISF, or a Third Reich debate club meeting.

Oh, dear. I see you've fallen for the distortions and cherry picking, out of context lies and misinformation that the anti-choice supporters have put out Let's take a look at some of the claims in that opinion piece of yours:

1."For those identifying historical figures with racist roots who should be removed from public view because of their evil histories, Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, must join that list."

Nope. In fact, Sanger was certainly less racist than many people of her time. She believed, and fought for, the advancement of medical care for "Negroes" and for more "Negro doctors" because she felt Black people would be more willing to trust a Black doctor. She wrote in 1939:

It seems to me from my experience . . . in North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Texas, that while the colored Negroes have great respect for white doctors, they can get closer to their own members and more or less lay their cards on the table. . . . They do not do this with the white people, and if we can train the Negro doctor at the clinic, he can go among them with enthusiasm and with knowledge, which, I believe, will have far-reaching results. . . . His work, in my opinion, should be entirely with the Negro profession and the nurses, hospital, social workers, as well as the County's white doctors. His success will depend upon his personality and his training by us.

The minister's work is also important, and also he should be trained, perhaps by the Federation, as to our ideals and the goal that we hope to reach. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs. (Sanger, 1939, December).

Sanger never advocated forced sterilization or abortions on Black women. She wanted to provide them with birth control exactly like she did for white women but she was afraid her efforts could be misconstrued by a justifiably suspicious Black community. Does the Tuskegee Experiment ring a bell?

In her lifetime, Sanger won the respect of international figures of all races, including the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.; Mahatma Gandhi; Shidzue Kato, the foremost family planning advocate in Japan; and Lady Dhanvanthi Rama Rau of India — all of whom were sensitive to issues of race.

And this is certainly 'racist':

Harlem — 1930
In 1930, Sanger opened a family planning clinic in Harlem that sought to enlist support for contraceptive use and to bring the benefits of family planning to women who were denied access to their city's health and social services. Staffed by a black physician and black social worker, the clinic was endorsed by The Amsterdam News (the powerful local newspaper), the Abyssinian Baptist Church, the Urban League, and the black community's elder statesman, W.E.B. DuBois (Chesler, 1992).

2. "In promoting birth control, she advanced a controversial "Negro Project,"

Yes, she did start the "Negro Project"...which was designed help the Black Community and was support by several Black leaders, including W.E.B. DuBois:

Negro Project — 1939–1942
Beginning in 1939, DuBois served on the advisory council for Sanger's "Negro Project," which was designed to serve African Americans in the rural South. The advisory council called it a "unique experiment in race-building and humanitarian service to a race subjected to discrimination, hardship, and segregation (Chesler, 1992).”

In a letter to philanthropist Albert Lasker, from whom she hoped to raise funds for the project, Sanger wrote that she wanted to help a group notoriously underprivileged and handicapped to a large measure by a ‘caste’ system that operates as an added weight upon their efforts to get a fair share of the better things.

Oh, golly gee...there's that horrible racism of hers rearing its awful head by wanting to help Blacks in the rural South. How controversial!

3. "...wrote in her autobiography about speaking to a Ku Klux Klan group"

Yep, she spoke to a women's group about birth control one time.

Sanger spoke at one event for the women’s affiliate of the KKK, but it was to educate those women on birth control. And this was the only event she spoke at that any sources or documents pointed to.

Sanger wrote of the event in her diary:

“I accepted an invitation to talk to the women’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan at Silver Lake, New Jersey, one of the weirdest experiences I had in lecturing.”

Anti-choice advocates even put out that same claim and doctored a photo of Sanger to make it look like she was attending a KKK rally.



4. "... and advocated for a eugenics approach to breeding for “the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extinction, of defective stocks — those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization.”

Your sad attempt to bring in Nazi Germany is way off the mark here. Sanger did support eugenics, but not in the way the Nazis did or in the way your article strongly and misleadingly implies.
In context, Sanger was talking about contraception helping to wipe out not passing on genetic disorders for which there was little or no treatment in 1923. This is what Sanger actually wrote:

The closest quotation to the one cited in the meme we could turn up came from an 8 April 1923 New York Times article attributed to Sanger in which she used the word “weeds” in a somewhat similar manner, but didn’t attach it to any particular race or ethnicity:
"...Meanwhile “Birth Control” became the slogan of the idea and not only spread through the American press from coast to coast, but immediately gained currency in Great Britain. Succinctly and with telling brevity and precision “Birth Control” summed up our whole philosophy. Birth Control is not contraception indiscriminately and thoughtlessly practiced. It means the release and cultivation of the better racial elements in our society, and the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extirpation of defective stocks — those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization."
In his 1992 book American Extremists: Militias, Supremacists, Klansmen, Communists & Others, author John George writes that this quote was “evidently concocted in the late 1980s for the purpose of trying to make the early birth control advocate seem a racist and anti-Semite” and that “this fabrication has been kept in circulation by antiabortion and anti-birth control groups.”

Sanger and Eugenics

Eugenics is a theory of improving hereditary qualities by socially controlling human reproduction. Eugenicists, including the Nazis, were opposed to
the use of contraception or abortion by healthy and “fit” women (Grossmann, 1995). In fact, Sanger’s books were among the very first burned by the Nazis in their campaign against family planning (“Sanger on Exhibit,” 1999/2000). (Sanger helped several Jewish women and men and others escape the Nazi regime in Germany (“Margaret Sanger and the
‘Refugee Department’,” 1993).)

Sanger, however, clearly identified with the broader issues of health and fitness that concerned the early 20th-century eugenics movement, which was enormously popular and well-respected during the 1920s and '30s — decades in which treatments for many hereditary and disabling conditions were unknown. But Sanger always believed that reproductive decisions should be made on an individual and not a social or cultural basis, and she consistently and firmly repudiated any racial application of eugenics principles. For example, Sanger vocally opposed the racial stereotyping that effected passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, on the grounds that intelligence and other inherited traits vary by individual and not by group (Chesler, 1992).

All quotes from above are from the link below unless otherwise noted. https://www.plannedparenthood.org/files/8013/9611/6937/Opposition_Claims_About_Margaret_Sanger.pdf I suggest you do a bit more research before swallowing whatever the anti-choice people are shoveling.

 

[Warp12]

<if only word count made things true>

Unsurprising response. Laughable, especially considering your cited source.

Hitler was a pretty good guy, according to the American Nazi Party.

 

[smartcooky]

Oh, dear. I see you've fallen for the distortions and cherry picking, out of context lies and misinformation that the anti-choice supporters have put out Let's take a look at some of the claims in that opinion piece of yours:

1."For those identifying historical figures with racist roots who should be removed from public view because of their evil histories, Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, must join that list."

Nope. In fact, Sanger was certainly less racist than many people of her time. She believed, and fought for, the advancement of medical care for "Negroes" and for more "Negro doctors" because she felt Black people would be more willing to trust a Black doctor. She wrote in 1939:



Sanger never advocated forced sterilization or abortions on Black women. She wanted to provide them with birth control exactly like she did for white women but she was afraid her efforts could be misconstrued by a justifiably suspicious Black community. Does the Tuskegee Experiment ring a bell?



And this is certainly 'racist':





2. "In promoting birth control, she advanced a controversial "Negro Project,"

Yes, she did start the "Negro Project"...which was designed help the Black Community and was support by several Black leaders, including W.E.B. DuBois:


Oh, golly gee...there's that horrible racism of hers rearing its awful head by wanting to help Blacks in the rural South. How controversial!

3. "...wrote in her autobiography about speaking to a Ku Klux Klan group"

Yep, she spoke to a women's group about birth control one time.



Sanger wrote of the event in her diary:



Anti-choice advocates even put out that same claim and doctored a photo of Sanger to make it look like she was attending a KKK rally.



4. "... and advocated for a eugenics approach to breeding for “the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extinction, of defective stocks — those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization.”

Your sad attempt to bring in Nazi Germany is way off the mark here. Sanger did support eugenics, but not in the way the Nazis did or in the way your article strongly and misleadingly implies.
In context, Sanger was talking about contraception helping to wipe out not passing on genetic disorders for which there was little or no treatment in 1923. This is what Sanger actually wrote:






All quotes from above are from the link below unless otherwise noted.
https://www.plannedparenthood.org/files/8013/9611/6937/Opposition_Claims_About_Margaret_Sanger.pdf

I suggest you do a bit more research before swallowing whatever the anti-choice people are shoveling.

An excellent, step-by-step, systematic take-down by the numbers of Warp12's BS

Expect the response to be something like the usual dodging, or perhaps the "I'm moving on, there's nothing to discuss here" hand-wave.

 

[Susheel]

An excellent, step-by-step, systematic take-down by the numbers of Warp12's BS

Expect the response to be something like the usual dodging, or perhaps the "I'm moving on, there's nothing to discuss here" hand-wave.

Nope...it was the verbal equivalent of the "finger in ear...la..la...la...la"

 

[Stacyhs]

Well, if it is a pretty much agreed upon fact that they will fully recover, we generally don't even discuss taking them off of life support. Nonsensical comparison. Really bad.

Once again you miss the point. For someone who thinks aborting a non-viable, non-sentient embryo is murder, why is it OK to 'kill' a non-viable, non-sentient human being when the doctors could be wrong? In the anti-choice commonly used justification: Only God has the right take a life.

 

[Warp12]

So it's OK to take a non-sentient, non-viable, separate lifeform-person off life support by disconnecting their breathing tube and/or feeding tube but it's not OK to disconnect a non-sentient, non-viable, (in your opinion) separate embryo lifeform from its breathing/feeding tube aka placenta. Gotcha.

Well, if it is a pretty much agreed upon fact that they will fully recover, we generally don't even discuss taking them off of life support. Nonsensical comparison. Really bad.

Once again you miss the point. For someone who thinks aborting a non-viable, non-sentient embryo is murder, why is it OK to 'kill' a non-viable, non-sentient human being when the doctors could be wrong? In the anti-choice commonly used justification: Only God has the right take a life.

This is doubling-down on a very, very bad argument.

 

[Stacyhs]

Unsurprising response. Laughable, especially considering your cited source.

Hitler was a pretty good guy, according to the American Nazi Party.

LOL! I KNEW IT! I was just going to reply to Smartcooky that you'd either not read it at all or attack the sources!

Wassamatta? You think Planned Parenthood made up all those quotes, all those easily verifiable facts? What about Politico, Snopes, and The Columbian Missourian? Are they 'laughable' too? But your source, Kristan Hawkins, is totally unbiased and credible, right?

Kristan Hawkins is president of Students for Life of America. Follow her on Twitter: @KristanHawkins, or subscribe to her podcast, Explicitly Pro-Life.

 

[smartcooky]

This is doubling-down on a very, very bad argument.

That's rich, coming from the King of doubling down on bad arguments

 

[Stacyhs]

This is doubling-down on a very, very bad argument.

Whatever, Warp. We both know you routinely criticize anything I ever post and why. Toodles!

 

[Warp12]

LOL! I KNEW IT! I was just going to reply to Smartcooky that you'd either not read it at all or attack the sources!

You attributed all quotes to Planned Parenthood, unless otherwise noted. Could anything be more laughable biased? You act as though only one source has lobbed criticism at Sanger. You know better.

But, here you go:

Planned Parenthood in N.Y. Disavows Margaret Sanger Over Eugenics

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/21/nyregion/planned-parenthood-margaret-sanger-eugenics.html

I guess even the biased figure it out, on occasion.

 

[smartcooky]

You attributed all quotes to Planned Parenthood, unless otherwise noted. Could anything be more laughable biased? You act as though only one source has lobbed criticism at Sanger. You know better.

But, here you go:

Planned Parenthood in N.Y. Disavows Margaret Sanger Over Eugenics

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/21/nyregion/planned-parenthood-margaret-sanger-eugenics.html

I guess even the biased figure it out, on occasion.

Its a pretty sure sign that your rebuttals are tanking when you have to go back over 80 years to justify them

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."
L.P. Hartley

 

[Warp12]

Its a pretty sure sign that your rebuttals are tanking when you have to go back over 80 years to justify them

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."
L.P. Hartley

Huh? The article is from July of 2020. This is current news. I am not the one who brought up Sanger.

From the NY Times article:

Ms. Sanger, a feminist icon and reproductive-rights pioneer, supported a discredited belief in improving the human race through selective breeding.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/21/nyregion/planned-parenthood-margaret-sanger-eugenics.html

But, hey, support that ideology if you wish. The Aryan Nations organization agrees.

 

[smartcooky]

Huh? The article is from July of 2020. This is current news.

Pretend to not understand what I have said all you like. Everyone else here knows what I meant.

 

[abaddon]

Dogs and cats don't develop into human babies, either. Of course, not everyone feels that aspect adds any value, obviously.

Dogs and cats are not human and cannot develop into humans no matter how much you wilfully and intententionally misundertstand the Theory of Evolution. It is nobodies fault that anyone lacks the wit to work it out. We call those idiots. Are you one of those or not?

 

[Stacyhs]

Warp isn't being honest or just doesn't bother to read.

Planned Parenthood in New York only, not Planned Parenthood. Looks to me like they've fallen for the same Sanger "Nazi-style" eugenics nonsense that the anti-choice have put out there. They are putting today's morals on the eugenics movement of a hundred years ago which was not race based and misrepresenting what Sanger's position on eugenics was. This is a classic example of overreacting to be politically correct but factually wrong.

Ben Carson:

"Maybe I am not objective when it comes to Planned Parenthood, but, you know, I know who Margaret Sanger is, and I know that she believed in eugenics, and that she was not particularly enamored with black people.

"And one of the reasons you find most of their clinics in black neighborhoods is so that you can find a way to control that population. I think people should go back and read about Margaret Sanger who founded this place — a woman Hillary Clinton by the way says that she admires. Look and see what many people in Nazi Germany thought about her."

Not much, Ben, as they burned her books.

Did Margaret Sanger believe in eugenics?

Yes, but not in the way Carson implied.

Eugenics was a discipline, championed by prominent scientists but now widely debunked, that promoted "good" breeding and aimed to prevent "poor" breeding. The idea was that the human race could be bettered through encouraging people with traits like intelligence, hard work, cleanliness (thought to be genetic) to reproduce. Eugenics was taken to its horrifying extreme during the Holocaust, through forced sterilizations and breeding experiments.

In the United States, eugenics intersected with the birth control movement in the 1920s, and Sanger reportedly spoke at eugenics conferences. She also talked about birth control being used to facilitate "the process of weeding out the unfit [and] of preventing the birth of defectives."

Birth control...not sterilizations, not abortions...to help eliminate inherited disorders that there was no way to predict like we can today. Now, prospective parents can test for genetic disorders in the womb or even before and can choose not to use in vitro zygotes that carry the genes for Tay-Sachs, Down Syndrome, Sickle Cell Anemia, and Cystic Fibrosis to name but a few. This is a form of eugenics today.

Sanger advocated parents who had a child/children with inheritable conditions like these or those for whom these ran in the family to use birth control to help eliminate the birth of more children with these medical conditions. Remember that, in those day, these children were often sent to live in asylums from babyhood as they were seen as "faulty" and people were often ashamed of them.

Historians seem to disagree on just how involved in the eugenics movement she was. Some contend her involvement was for political reasons — to win support for birth control.

In reading her papers, it is clear Sanger had bought into the movement. She once wrote that "consequences of breeding from stock lacking human vitality always will give us social problems and perpetuate institutions of charity and crime."

"That Sanger was enamored and supported some eugenicists' ideas is certainly true," said Susan Reverby, a health care historian and professor at Wellesley College. But, Reverby added, Sanger's main argument was not eugenics — it was that "Sanger thought people should have the children they wanted."

It was a radical idea for the time.

Sanger wrote about this mission herself in 1921: "The almost universal demand for practical education in Birth Control is one of the most hopeful signs that the masses themselves today possess the divine spark of regeneration."

In 1946, Sanger wrote about the importance of giving "Negro" parents a choice in how many children they would have.

"The Negro race has reached a place in its history when every possible effort should be made to have every Negro child count as a valuable contribution to the future of America," she wrote. "Negro parents, like all parents, must create the next generation from strength, not from weakness; from health, not from despair."
Her attitude toward African-Americans can certainly be viewed as paternalistic, but there is no evidence she subscribed to the more racist ideas of the time or that she coerced black women into using birth control. In fact, for her time, as the Washington Post noted, "she would likely be considered to have advanced views on race relations."

https://www.npr.org/sections/itsall...thood-started-to-control-the-black-population

If you want to talk about eugenics Nazi-style, look no farther than the good old US of A that allowed forced sterilizations of people thought by the state to be unfit to procreate up until the 1970's.

 

[Warp12]

Warp isn't being honest or just doesn't bother to read.

Read this (again?). Sorry if my response isn't bloviated enough to meet your standards.

But, here you go:

Planned Parenthood in N.Y. Disavows Margaret Sanger Over Eugenics

Ms. Sanger, a feminist icon and reproductive-rights pioneer, supported a discredited belief in improving the human race through selective breeding.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/21/nyregion/planned-parenthood-margaret-sanger-eugenics.html

I guess even the biased figure it out, on occasion.

Then again maybe the NYT has it all wrong, along with those crazy NY Planned Parenthood folks.

 

[Warp12]

I'm sorry to hear that. I also had to make that decision for my beloved Mother-in-law who was more of a friend than MIL. She had an unexpected cardiac embolism during a minor surgery and never regained consciousness. She was on life support for three days and she had left instructions that it was my decision what to do in such a situation. After conferring with several of her doctors, I said to disconnect her. She died within a couple minutes. The weird thing was that she had a premonition she was not going to survive this day surgery procedure that she'd already had twice before.

This is a terrifying story, for a variety of reasons. May she rest in peace.

 

[Planigale]

Its a pretty sure sign that your rebuttals are tanking when you have to go back over 80 years to justify them

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."
L.P. Hartley

I have to agree with smartcooky (unless I have misunderstood?)

Eugenicism is now assumed to be a 'Nazi' phenomenon, but pre WW2 it was a widely held belief both amongst those on the left (e.g. HG Wells) and the right. Many conditions were thought of as being inherited we would no longer consider as such. Even progressive liberal people used language that would be regarded as uncomfortably racist now.

I am uncomfortable about the racist connotations of negro doctors for negro patients, but movements like this and developing negro universities were seen as progessive at the time. Clearly she involved community leaders in her actions which is still advocated.

The concern about people thinking she was promoting a race based sterilisation program is interesting, it is something still raised e.g. with the covid vaccines, that they are intended to render Africans infertile. So ensuring community leaders can address these concerns is still something that would be done.

Sadly it is still true that the areas with the greatest poverty are those with the greatest need for birth control. Options then were of course limited. For a poor working class woman with multiple pregnancies, several children probably in a state of chronic malnutrition abortion may have been life saving for her and her current children.

I am sure that somewhere there are what we would view as offensive statements and racist terminology, e.g. her use of the word negro, but that does not mean she was a proto-Nazi or pro slavery.