abortion classic or dud?

Its impossible to really speak sensibly about the matter as each position is a radical denial of the other's fundamental premises.

sorta feel this is true, hence it's an intractable issue.

well, but lots of things are intractable issues - evolution vs. creationism, for example. so we set a societal baseline, and that's science over spiritual conviction. people on the "spiritual conviction" side of the q are welcome to live their lives as they see fit, but should be told, firmly and repeatedly, that they have no right whatsoever to legislate according to their beliefs.

Okay I've gotta disagree with this somewhat: "I think its reasonable to put the legality of earlier trimester abortions off-limits, while also allowing the religious to have a say in whether their tax dollars contribute to what they consider murder. I have the same say in voting against out war mongers that I consider murderers. So I don't have a problem with the Stupak amendment."

The right to bodily autonomy is a pretty basic human right. Asking to have a say in what happens with somebody else's uterus is a pretty big infringement upon that right, in addition to the fact that women have a specific constitutional right to legal abortion. In other areas of life, we don't consider it acceptable to curtail people's access to their constitutional rights just because somebody else doesn't want to pay for it. The gov't spends money (on police, security, etc.) every time some group wants to have a protest march or rally; they do that even if it's a Nazi skinhead rally or something, because citizens have freedom of speech & freedom of assembly. Do I get to decide I don't want to pay for those things, because I think the U.S. version of free speech is too lax? Hell, no! The same goes for other stuff like defending yourself in court: If we cut off gov't spending on it because some people don't like paying for criminals to have public defenders, we'd be in a fine mess.

I also think the fact that some people have "religious objections" to abortion is sort of a red herring. #1, these views don't deserve special consideration because they are religious in character. They're no more untouchable than whatever philosophical or ethical objections someone might have. And some Americans might have equally strong religious objections to birth control, prenatal care for unmarried women, viagra, keeping comatose people alive on respirators, or lots of other things. It would be absurd for insurance stop covering them for that reason. A person's medical decisions should be between them & their doctor; they're not up for a vote.

but there are ethical (if not typically explicitly or implicitly religious) underpinnings of all of our laws. and i don't think opposition to abortion is always essentially religious; often it is more broadly ethical in character. and i don't think it's as clear-cut as evolution vs. creation. there is no evidence for creation. issues with the personhood (or lack thereof) of a fetus at various stages of development are more contested and complicated.

we're gonna get into the same damn centrist vs. progressive argument we always do here but giving up that ideological ground, as john says a lot, is really dangerous and should not be on the table. really agree with gudrun brangwen's post

Gudrun is so completely OTM! On ILX it's easy to get annoyed with male posters having a huge abortion rights argument with very limited input from anyone who'd actually need one, but I care very little for anyone who trots out their ideology to attempt to deny me equal rights and I hate it even more when *women* do it.

Interesting conversation today: gay friend had to deal with some battyboy-type catcalling from black teens in his neighbourhood and challenged them with 'has being in a minority taught you NOTHING?' Pointed out to him that I could never say that to those kids if they were being rude to me, would probably have to go with 'being oppressed' instead.

My opinion on abortion is that I don't have the right to tell a woman what she does with a foetus in her own body any more than she has the right to tell me what to do with my internal organs.

the only reason this even turned into a debate is because one can't just (cleanly) self-terminate pregnancies and have to seek out a specialist. well that and xtianity but that horse has been beaten to death.

and on the third day, it rose again

i have an eerie feeling that we may be 2-3 posts away from a post involving necrophilia....

equine christ necrophilia

the album-title coil had to shelve

ahahahahahahahha

I think Obama & his entire party have demonstrated that their only interested in this issue is as a bargaining chip, so don't look for "positive changes" imo

eh maybe so, & i'm maybe putting too much faith in campaigning, senatorial obama's stated belief in repro rights, but the guy's in charge of every piecemeal bill that'll constitute a tide just like the erosive one of the bush years. the weird dynamic at the moment is that it's hard - or was hard prior to reading the pollitt article - to see any situations in which he's gonna be forced to stand up and address and defend, rather than avoid, abortion. there are tiny things like waiting until the day after the anniversary of roe to sign the (iirc) mexico city law, so as not to further inflame the opposition, that seem like attempts to manage/circumvent the ideological conflict.

sorta feel this is true, hence it's an intractable issue.

sure, but not everyone's drawn to one of the diametrically opposed positions; there's a huge middle ground which over the past however many years has drifted towards a more conservative anti choice stance - whether it's because of apathetic younger voters or different constituency makeup or whatever. i just don't think the incompatibility of the arguments have to impede on policy so much, because there are laws underneath and - like with gudrun's oppositions to whichever other policy areas - opposition can exist marginally. i'm sure there are things that can happen that liberate it from the separatist ghetto of medicine its currently seen as occupying so that it's perceived as a personal medical procedure, by most.

On ILX it's easy to get annoyed with male posters having a huge abortion rights argument with very limited input from anyone who'd actually need one, but I care very little for anyone who trots out their ideology to attempt to deny me equal rights and I hate it even more when *women* do it.

hesitate slightly to go here but i kinda disagree with this, & w/barbara kruger:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_LOouiLW1P4M/SjBqudcZ1iI/AAAAAAAAA-4/z2F0x01ypDk/s400/screen-capture-18.png

obviously this is true, and an indictment of the makeup of government, etc, but in any other situation i'm pretty okay relying on basic human understanding and empathy furnishing individuals with the skills to make a decision, irrespective of gender. i also don't think it's useful to totally distance guys from having some perspective on abortion - i'm not pushing for them to be considered as some equal partner in the equation, nor being part of the choice necessarily, but it just doesn't seem positive to present this as an issue from which they are immutably separate. a lot of things, like age, dictate how views change regarding repro rights, and i have no more time for the women in uk government who oppose abortion than i do the guys in the states. this is a very in a perfect world argument and i realise that we don't have the representatives who can process and empathise with the choice at hand, but it still bugs me a little.

like:

My opinion on abortion is that I don't have the right to tell a woman what she does with a foetus in her own body any more than she has the right to tell me what to do with my internal organs.

OTM, but i don't think gender is the variable here: it's that you don't have the right to tell anyone what to do with their body. it implies that being anatomically similar would equip you with the authority to pass judgement on the myriad circumstances that lead to making a choice about abortion.

I'm on the side of Kruger and I cannot fathom what's swimming around in the brains of men who make anti-choice legislation their raison d'etre/a career thing. I think that's all the piece she made is asking us to consider here.

his ENTIRE party!?

i actually agree with schlump, i don't really use the "it's not my place to say one way or the other, i'm just a guy" argument (while it's empirically vaild) becuase it to me is a matter of medicine and public health, and as a future health care professional interested in pubilc health it's an issue i feel strongly about and want to contribute to

people on the "spiritual conviction" side of the q are welcome to live their lives as they see fit, but should be told, firmly and repeatedly, that they have no right whatsoever to legislate according to their beliefs

kinda sums up this and just about every similar issue for me, but better than i'd have put it.

So a local doctor recently decided he was going to put a note on his door telling Obama-supporters they could find another doctor. He explained (probably to cover himself legally) that he wasn't turning them away, but if they saw the note and went elsewhere, so be it. (Seems a stupid business strategy in this day and age, no?).

Someone I know posts this on facebook and I reply critically, and a female who I don't know (but was on the other dude's friends list) smugly replies "Oh, but it's ok for a doctor to perform abortion?".

Why is abortion used so often in arguments where it doesn't even apply? For all I know that doctor doesn't even perform them.

I'm also real tired of people making us Pro-Choicers out to be goat blood drinking, baby murdering masses who hold monthly televised Abortion Parties.

Report this doctor to the licensing board. It'll take you fifteen minutes to find out their number & make the call. Health care professionals have no business pulling this kinda shit imo.

Abortion is essentially a reductio-ad-Hitlerum - once the conversation is successfully moved into a highly emotional place, the burden of defending one's arguments with reason/science is lifted and you can just yell at people.

The outspoken Grayson described Cassell’s sign as "ridiculous."

"I’m disgusted," he said. "Maybe he thinks the Hippocratic Oath says, ’Do no good.’ If this is the face of the right wing in America, it’s the face of cruelty. ... Why don’t they change the name of the Republican Party to the Sore Loser Party?"

I love this blabbermouth.

I'm always surprised how much religion has a part to play in arguments about abortion - I'll be honest and say I have difficulties knowing 100% how I feel about it and religion (and politics) doesn't come into it - and I agree with the point above that 'beliefs' shouldn't be untouchable because they're religious in nature.

I would have thought the main point of disagreement boils down to whether a foetus of any size is a 'person' and hence it's wrong to kill them whether or not they're in someone else's body. Not "religiously" wrong, just wrong in the same way that killing anyone is wrong. I guess for pro-life (hate that phrase) ppl there is less harm done all round by continuing with the pregnancy than resorting to killing what they see as a person. These aren't my beliefs at all, but for a pro-lifer would abortion be any different from say, killing your conjoined twin who shared 'your' body?

I'm *really* not trying to start a clusterfuck but I can kind of see the logic *if* you are of the belief that conception immediately = person. How this squares with the right not to tell someone what to do with their body I don't know, but then if the foetus = a person they should have the same rights? Feel free to put me straight about any glaring wholes in this train of thought.....

IMO you don't have rights until you are born

yep. there's no "conception certificate"

^^^^

if you're in the ground or inside another person, you don't belong to the body politic

what about zombies

zombies = "enemy combatants"

xposts Ah I guess that's what the pro-lifers would like to change then.. ? although i'm guessing it would cause a whole chain of legal contradictions and the universe would implode.

the problem w/fetus = person is that you get into an almost necessarily metaphysical discussion about when life ~happens~ to an embryo. which basically means that we ARE discussing religion again, however vaguely.

if you believe that the moment a sperm augurs into an egg is the moment at which personhood is established, then zero kinds of abortion are tolerable. if you believe---as i'd wager most of your fence-sitting voters do---that a fetus goes from "weird growing thing in a lady's uterus" to "someone who will eventually have a SSN" at some, poorly delineated time between conception and delivery, then you've automatically opened the door to abortions, in general, if not to every variety.

if we lived in a fantasy world where some scientific test existed to say that "at 16 weeks the embryo does BLANK and is ~sentient~" then we'd probably all feel a lot better about drawing some hard and fast rules about the timing of abortions. since we don't, though, the only hard and fast rules we can draw are "abortions: y/n". if you believe that a woman's right to control her body is sacrosanct (and, similarly, that ANY person's right to medical privacy is inviolable), then you circle "y" and off we go. if you believe that every sperm is sacred and that the baby jesus appears to an embryo at the moment of conception, and that ending the growth of even a 8-celled organism is tantamount to murdering a real person with a name and friends and favorite foods, then circle "no" and buy all the women in yr life longer, less revealing dresses.

many xps

h I guess that's what the pro-lifers would like to change then.. ? although i'm guessing it would cause a whole chain of legal contradictions and the universe would implode.

― Not the real Village People, Friday, April 2, 2010 1:43 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

fwiw they've succeeded in changing this in several states already, and it HAS caused no end of legal headaches. ironically, some of the ppl with the most headaches have been pregnant mothers (many of them pro-life!): some ladies want to go through with vaginal birth after caesarean (VBAC), which is often medically contraindicated. so even though OBs be shakin they damn heads, it is (like abortion) the right of these women to do as they wish with their bodies/fetuses. however, in states where laws have protected the rights of unborn children (murder a pregnant lady and get two counts of homicide), some women going against medical advice (AMA) and having VBsAC at home have been charged with negligence after their children died in child birth. similarly, some women have been charged with negligence/endangerment after, say, testing positive for substance use while pregnant. that these women are almost uniformly poor minorities doesn't really seem to bother anyone.

I love how everything in medicine is an acronym

ha, i was realizing that as i wrote that post

it was mentioned on some other thread that the anti-abortion position is essentially an outgrowth of old-school anti-pleasure Xtian theology - one that holds that all sexual pleasure is wrong and a sin, and that the only time sex is okay is for reproduction. Ergo, "every sperm is sacred", fetuses are the same as people, sex is only between married people for the purpose of having babies, etc. Which is, to my mind, rooted in a fundamental misreading of humanity and results in an unhealthy proscription that is basically impossible to enforce.

xp

i love the word "contraindicated"

Pro-lifers with genuine moral stances w/r/t right-to-life trumping other rights would naturally curve towards leftish positions on most everything else and it would be great if they could alienate and divide the rest of the movement, like I dunno, send everyone on their mailing lists advocacy literature on global warming, gun control, turn clinic protests into internal shouting matches on universal health care, that kind of thing.

smc - agreed, basically once you sign on for "sex before marriage is ok!" then you've kinda bought a ticket for the abortion party. which is why i'm actually pretty confident about the fact that it will be less and less of an issue once all the old people start dying.

mrque: yeah, it's a good one! useful in casual conversation, too, it just sounds so much more convincing than "would be a bad idea"

like, it's no mystery why a small, persecuted religious group would develop a strident philosophy about the essential importance of procreation for the survival of their sect, but once you've become one of the biggest religions in the world and your species has attained uncontested dominance and security, it's kinda no longer necessary so can we jettison the archaic moralizing k thx bye

xp

Pro-lifers with genuine moral stances w/r/t right-to-life trumping other rights would naturally curve towards leftish positions on most everything else and it would be great if they could alienate and divide the rest of the movement, like I dunno, send everyone on their mailing lists advocacy literature on global warming, gun control, turn clinic protests into internal shouting matches on universal health care, that kind of thing.

― Philip Nunez, Friday, April 2, 2010 1:58 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

yr talking about that unicorn of american politics, the vegan hardline ecoxtian. they all live in vt and NoCal, dude, and are among the most marginal voting blocs in the country. srsly doubt that pamphleteering from smiling weirdos in painted schoolbuses would do much to divide anyone on the pro-life side of things

xp to Philip Nunez
^^ yeah this is why I'm kind of baffled that it's lumped in with all other conservative beliefs, like you have to buy into a certain 'basket' of beliefs rather than picking them individually.

I wonder if Norm Macdonald would show up at an abortion rally with a Free Mumia sign.

pro-death penalty pro-lifers are a wonder to behold

oh man don't even get me started

and i'm sure that they think that their inverse, pro-choice anti-death penalty ppl (ie - me), are just as amazing, but they're wrong >:(

I'm kind of pro death penalty

Like, not in practice but in theory, by which I mean I feel that there are crimes heinous enough to call for execution, but I also believe our legal system, much like any/every legal system implemented on Earth, is too flawed to allow it.

this has been another installment in "HI DERE posts for the sake of posting"

"unicorn of american politics, the vegan hardline ecoxtian."

ha this makes me picture actual vegan xian unicorns!

speaking of unicorns -- any conservatives post to ilx?

in local news, about the nice new PP center opened up just a little south of my neighborhood.

I think the new Planned Parenthood center on NE MLK Ave has a pretty good sense of humor.

The website notes that since the grand opening, nearly 300 anti-Planned Parenthood protesters have shown up on about 75 percent of the days the reproductive health center is open.

Rather than getting its knickers in a twist, Planned Parenthood is asking its supports to Pledge a Picket: you can donate 25 cents for every anti-abortion rights protester who shows up, or you can donate $1 for every day the right-to-life crew turns out. It's like a jogathon. But for abortion rights.

The website says Planned Parenthood has raised over $1,000 from supporters pledging a picket since the protests began.

http://www.portlandmercury.com/images/blogimages/2010/04/01/1270166779-pledge-a-picket_01.jpg

pro-death penalty pro-lifers are a wonder to behold

― Kaleidoscope Funk Network (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, April 2, 2010 3:05 PM (2 hours ago)

i disagree with each position but it's not that hard to understand their synergy, imo - basically there are the desirables (innocent babbies) and undesirables (poor/minority felons). some people "deserve to die"

also gbx is seriously the best poster on ilx imo. agree on the awesomeness of "contraindicated" too - i see it every day and it's still a dope word to me