abortion classic or dud?

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."

contradancing

CONTRA, iran

Laws to protect human beings are manmade. Likewise, definitions of "life" and what constitutes a "human being" are manmade. We'll never come to a point where there's a consensus on this, I don't think.

I had a friend who spouted off nonsense about science 'proving' the child was alive and could feel pain. And then when I asked if he'd even think abortions were allowable if the mother's life was threatened, he said no - his opinion was that the mother had already been alive for a decent period of time, and it was time to let the child have a chance. Ya know, ignoring the fact that well the child might die too.

I hate the smugness of some of the pro-lifers. Another friend used to smugly state to me "It's not a choice". Um...yes, actually, it is.

smugness is a bad attribute from anyone

agreed. there are those on our side that can be too....it's unfortunately a point that gets argued quite loudly and abrasively on both sides.

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"

― k3vin k., Friday, April 2, 2010 9:50 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

exactly, this is also why the torture debate doesn't really have any traction outside of liberal circles.

so outside of liberal circles, Americans are basically pro-torture then?

yes

I see I never weighed in on the original question in the thread title. Surely someone else must have said it already, but here goes anyway:

abortion == dud
abortion rights == classic

For all of the obvious reasons. No one likes abortions. No one says, "Yippee! Good times!" at the thought of going through with one. But in a bad situation, it can still be the best solution, and removing the possibility of abortion can certainly lead to a worse outcome - much worse for everyone involved.

x-post

most people are stupid, ignorant and pretty awful imo

(i live in one of the reddest of red states so that might be coloring my cynicism right now so feel free to ignore)

No one says, "Yippee! Good times!" at the thought of going through with one.

oh, c'mon, there's gotta be someone out there who does

probably the type of person who writes Dead Ringers fan fiction

http://www.theonion.com/articles/im-totally-psyched-about-this-abortion,10931/

lol

as always, the onion was there first

I see I never weighed in on the original question in the thread title. Surely someone else must have said it already, but here goes anyway:

abortion == dud
abortion rights == classic

For all of the obvious reasons. No one likes abortions. No one says, "Yippee! Good times!" at the thought of going through with one. But in a bad situation, it can still be the best solution, and removing the possibility of abortion can certainly lead to a worse outcome - much worse for everyone involved.

― Aimless, Saturday, April 3, 2010 2:45 PM (36 minutes ago)

i...understand what you're saying but this is kind of a touchy position to take. this basically describes my mom, who is pro-choice but doesn't think abortions should be publicly funded or at least doesn't have a problem with it not being tax-payer funded.

his opinion was that the mother had already been alive for a decent period of time, and it was time to let the child have a chance. Ya know, ignoring the fact that well the child might die too.

Yeah it strikes me that this is what underlies a lot of this pro-life mindset. Kind of why I'm trying to boil down to what the actual pro-life argument is as it seems clouded by all this sort of crap.

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.

tbh yeah I find this ... odd. Maybe because it's a 'hidden' kind of process due to it being in another body? If it was born way premature and you had to 'put it down' could you still do it? Bit of a non-starter I guess as it would depend what the "determination" of person-status actually was. Dunno, I'm just thinking of a friend of a friend who had a seriously premature baby (didn't know she was pregnant thru most of it) and the baby has serious problems but it seems to me that just by being out of the mother's body there was no question of euthanising her or whatever. The same questions about quality of life etc were potentially there and I get the impression they would have considered abortion had there been time.

^^ I mean hypothetically re the 'euthanising', the NHS hasn't stooped quite that low. My post seems stupid now, please ignore it.

i'm confused

this basically describes my mom, who is pro-choice but doesn't think abortions should be publicly funded

When I say "removing the possibility of abortion" is dud, that includes the fact that, for a poor person, not having the money for one removes the possibility of having one. So, the funding ought to be there, too, for those who require it. That shouldn't be a touchy problem for anyone who believes abortion is morally acceptable.

As for abortion itself being a dud experience, so is getting wisdom teeth pulled, or a colonoscopy. People do it anyway, for reasons far removed from the dudness of going through the experience.

Many socially conservative people believe abortions should be legal, but the woman should have to pay the bill. I often wonder why they don't just call it Slut Tax? It certainly seems like the manifestation of a particular mindset, and it's a prevalent attitude lurking under the surface of women who don't much like other women.

Suzy, the attitude is "that would never happen to ME". It's a self-esteem trip, it doesn't belong in real politics. I can see adopting that position if you are a strict fiscal conservative, but too many people inject their personal hang-ups into their political positions.

Yes but it's 'that would never happen to me, because I'm not a SLUT.' There is a punishment angle there, too, that men are not presented with for their participation in an unplanned pregnancy.

Also my spies tell me Mpls/St. Paul is crawling with anti-abortion creeps this weekend, hope the equivalents of 16-year-old me go to where they are and give them Hell.

No one says, "Yippee! Good times!" at the thought of going through with one.

lol at my school some girl performed like 5-10 "abortions" over the course of a year for her "art" "project"

lol i remember reading about that on nutty pro-life blogs!

That's a pretty expensive "statement," unless by "performed," you mean "pantomimed" or something.

wait "what"?

she just collected menstrual blood and said it was fetal tissue i think

she collected a bunch of semen from her friends and then stuck it in herself and then took a bunch of herbal abortifacients, then she collected the blood and videotaped herself doing it and then smeared all the blood over a big plastic sheet or something and then projected the video onto the sheet

basically it was just like the art scenes in ghost world except with menstrual blood

it was pretty dumb and she had clearly not thought it through but hey that's art for ya I guess

I was kind of hoping she got knocked up & shilled out the $1000s to have that many really for real terminations. I would be impressed by anyone who managed to successfully get pregnant that many times in a year.

Which herbs was she taking? A lot of traditional abortifacients-tansy and pennyroyal, for example-are actually poisons that make the body so sick that it miscarries to save resources for itself. Rue and juniper are the safest, IIRC, but they are a little chancy.

i don't think she really took anything, and this says she didn't even use real blood http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_student_abortion_art_controversy

yeah but I'm pretty sure those statements were made under pressure by the academy - IRL she seemed like the kind of person daft enough to actually carry it out (NB I have only met her like, once or twice)

Herbs as dangerous as henbane have been used in the past for, ah, "stoppages" or "promoting menustration."

it really hits the endowment & giving rates pretty hard when one of your students is getting national news coverage for making herself bleed a lot

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.

This is pretty much how I view it and it is why I am 100% pro-choice at any point during the pregnancy and for any reason.

That art student girl was a fucking idiot. smdh.

thought the art student project was kind of ballsy and hilarious frankly

me too kinda