abortion classic or dud?

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

aw ty ^_^

so more on that rogue doctor. there's a poll on the website to determine whether the doc was in the right or wrong. there were three options, one was like "go get em doc", the other was like "he's wrong", and the third was "regardless of opinion this is unethical". first option got 84% of the vote. I really hope online ballot stuffing was going on :/.

^^ 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.

― Not the real Village People, Friday, April 2, 2010 2:04 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

lots of studies illustrate that people's political or social "beliefs" are mostly formed by family/social milieu. the strongest indicator of whether you will be e.g. democrat or republican is whether your family and neighbors are democrats or republicans.

hardly surprising (and it prob. applies to most of us) that most people don't have time/energy/intellect/interest in getting to the basic ethical questions behind all of their beliefs and opinions, and instead assume what amounts to a kind of received wisdom on most of them.

of course these arguments have a hard time accounting for CHANGE, but i think they are more true than most would like to acknowledge.

also gbx's long post above gets to the heart of the issue (for me anyway), the fundamental uncertainty about what "life" is and when it begins. but of course even if we sorted this out (huge "if"), it would leave lots of basic ethical questions about why human life should be sacrosanct and that of other species' not at all (or less so).

i guess i just get exhausted by demagoguery on both sides of the issue.

i suppose i should distinguish "life" from "personhood." a fetus seems unquestionably alive, whether it is a "person" is a trickier matter. i'm tempted to say that any answer to this question is necessarily contingent.

imo it's not a person until it's born but am i callous for not really caring? if we had a scientific test for determining whether something is a person (to me that doesn't make any sense because personhood is not a scientific concept but eh) and it found a fetus became a person at 16 weeks, i would still be ok with abortion afterward just because it's in another person's body.

the thing i can't explain consistent with that is why i'm against the death penalty in 100% of cases. the unfairness of it is the main problem for me but even if it was fair i can't go along with killing a *person* even if it did something much much worse than occupying someone's body for 9 months. seems like i am pretty religious about it, and possibly do care about personhood, or i'm selfish about my body, maybe. or the fact that an execution doesn't remedy the condition of having murdered someone; it isn't doing anything useful except retribution.

hmm I have never viewed the purpose of punishment as being anything more than acting as a deterrent for other people (although you're right in that people often prefer to see it as retribution)

well people try to justify it as a deterrent because it seems more rational but i do not believe them, also the dp is not a great deterrent for a lot of reasons
that's a whole other thread though :(

not particularly useful as a deterrent tbh

xp

if u guys want i could get high and write what i remember about foucault from college

yeah I'm not saying that the dp is a good deterrent but it just seems as high as you can go without legalizing torture

anyway I can't hate on the death penalty because it has given us an awesome iron maiden song YEAAAAAAh YEAAAAH YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH HALLOWED BE THY NAME

*not gonna go all penology on the thread*

take it to iltmi

huh huh huh I hope that means what I think it means

are you a penologist, harbl

"Contradistinction" is almost as good as "contraindicated."