abortion classic or dud?

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

cant remember if im supposed to kneejerk hate art students or kneejerk defend them tho

HAMMER4U MAX

http://www.bengreenfieldfitness.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/reflex-hammer.jpg

eh I thought that abortion arts thing had potential, but the girl was pretty stupid - really hate it when you justify doing outrageous things by saying "well I just wanted to start a discourse about aborton", artists should never talk about their own work

also caving in to the corporation means you're just not really into it

lol art-school chicks are always up to that sort of thing, chick obv didn't ACTUALLY do all that, it was a performance

if i hated shit made by ppl who were inarticulate abt their own art i dont think i would like any art at all

and if i hated artists who backed down when push came to shove i dont think i would like any art at all

I don't know. I just sorta find that kind of shock value performance art more annoying than anything else.

stando-art school bullshit shouldnt really be taken that srsly tbh, only reason there isnt a story like this every week is because they are boring, not bc they're not happening and instigating 3rd level local "controversy"

well it's probably different for you guys cause you're on the outside looking in. she just kinda gave off the vibe of a space cadet and it was kinda like really, the national media are getting their rocks off over her?

and I realize where you're coming from max but to me it was just evidence that she wasn't really committed to the idea or her art - it was kind of like, even she knew it was a half-assed idea that she pulled out of her ass cause she needed to do a senior project, and she caved immediately once they threatened to prevent her from graduating. if you really think your art is worthwhile then stand your ground imo.

also the medium of presentation was such obfuscating bullshit too, project it from a VHS tape onto four plastic sheets hung in the shape of a cube?? did you happen to take polaroids or 8mm film too?? are you going to paste the negatives onto the plastic sheets?

but yeah if I knew bernard sumner I probably wouldn't like new order so

i wish i could say this was the worst ive heard

im not really invested in defending this "as art"--just think its easy to be dismissive & jaded abt art students & "manufactured controversy"

yah Im dismissive & jaded abt nearly everything so

~would that my eyes could see again~

im dismissive and jaded abt dismissive jadedness

classic!

― as a dude (goole), Tuesday, December 2, 2008 1:44 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Suggest

haha

all im saying is that a controversy like this just needs the right moment to go viral, there's a confluence of reasons why that story got blown up, but really it was not because it was that sensational, just because it got picked up at the right moment and carried. Sounds like a bad art project that was being lol controversial, and saying that they are ten-a-penny in art school (an atmosphere where paul mccarthy, marina abramovich etc are like old masters at this stage) is not so much jaded as taxonomic tbh. her story got picked up, was easily used to illustrate a partic. point conserves had about the insane primitivism of liberal values wrt the life of the unborn, and so it seemed obvious that once it entered into an area of discourse ie conservative blogs/news shows/chat radio etc that are not usually keeping up to date with the local art scene, that due to its novelty and, due to perspective, novel shock value, the story grew legs.

Sure the girl went back on whether or not it was real. She was just some girl with a not so great idea that got caught in a larger media whirlwind than she bargained on from the bubble of her artschool/scene and when faced with that I mean, she probably just didn't want to have to explain to her parents why the money spent ontuition was now wasted. A lot of people do just go to art school w/o any long term goals of being artists, or realise that their commitment was not what they thought it was when they were 18. Holding some girl accountable for her artistic integrity under those circumstances just seems ridic naive imo.

yeah i dont think we disagree i think u are just being meaner about it than i am

i have a lot more *baggage* in this are than u tho

booming post IKR

to clarify though, I don't really care that she went back on her stance or tried to have it both ways, it just annoyed me when people held her up as a serious or good or interesting artist or w/e given her waffling - I'm not hatin the playa I'm hatin the game

ah yeah i guess i only basically read negative cov'g of her, like either she was some kind of godless babykiller or she was a dumb art student, and i felt bad, she was just some kid who wanted 2 make art~~

anyway apparently she's getting a ph.d in performance studies @ nyu so good on her, have a nice life~

just a girl with a dream~~2 make art~~and abort her fetus