I think people that have fear that, ‘Oh if I have a kid I won’t be able to do this and I won’t be able to do that.’ It’s kind of the opposite. It really gives you energy. It makes people better.”
~ Red Hot Chili Peppers band member Anthony Kiedis, as quoted by People, August 30
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Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
What an AWESOME picture!
What an awesome quote.
Doug and I have been carrying on a conversation over here:
https://www.jillstanek.com/2011/08/new-pro-life-documentary-featuring-the-culture-of-life-in-the-philipines/#comments
Anthony’s quote is relevant — he’s claiming that people are capable of delusion about how a child can affect their happiness. In fact, he’s claiming that the reverse of their intuition is true. Of course, he is not likely right in all instances — but he’s clearly discovered something. He sounds like a convert from the point of view he now finds shallow and lacking understanding.
In short, he’s a parent. ;-)
It should be said that there are many people who regret becoming parents. One such person writes at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2010483/Am-I-monster-wishing-Id-children-The-confession-fills-mother-shame.html
There are always two sides to anything and parenthood comes with many costs — as well as benefits. For some people, the costs outweigh the benefits. However, I know people who believe being a parent is the best thing in their lives.
You know, the Chilis are guys who have been there and pretty much done EVERYTHING. So the fact that they have found unconditional love with their children, to me, speaks pretty loudly that people who regret parenthood need some psychiatric help. The world is full of narcissism, and that used to be looked at as something out of the norm – not anymore. I for one am thrilled to see Anthony Kiedis publicly say something like this.
Do you guys realize that the Red Hot Chili Peppers played in the Rock for Choice concerts?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_for_Choice
Tiffany – do you realize that the Quote of the Day section isn’t just reserved for quotes by pro-life individuals?
And yet, amazingly, Kiedis’ quote is extremely pro-child. Maybe one day he’ll realize that killing his son before he was born would not have been an acceptable choice.
Pro Child and Pro Choice. That’s me and Mr. Kiedis.
No. You’re Pro-Some-Children. We’re Pro-Child, Pro-life, because we’re Pro-ALL-THE-CHILDREN
Hall – you probably meant Pro-Choice and Pro (dead) Child (when you want it that way). that is more accurate. If a child is a ‘thing’ then we can treat it like a thing. But a child is human, and we need to treat all humans humanely.
I agree with Kel and xalisae – we are Pro-all-the-children, not some-of-the-children,
I remember reading many years ago an article about people who regretted having children. They fell into 3 basic categories: parents of babies or young children who were dismayed by the amount of work they were; parents of teenagers having extremely high conflict; parents of grown children from whom they were alienated. In the last category, the absence of any continuing closeness made them feel they had wasted their lives raising kids who turned into adults with whom they lacked a strong emotional bond.
I just love the picture!! Soooooo sweet!!
Pro Child and Pro Choice. That’s me and Mr. Kiedis.
Anyone who supports legalized abortion is not pro-child. Period.
Of course, he is not likely right in all instances — but he’s clearly discovered something…..
In short, he’s a parent. ;-)
Rasqual, if everybody knew themselves enough to make their best decision – and if that was to be a parent, then all fine and good in my book.
Denise: Anyone who supports legalized abortion is not pro-child. Period.
Maybe they want kids to be loved and wanted, not just born because “they have to be.”
It’s the tattoos.
Maybe they want kids to be loved and wanted, not just born because “they have to be.”
Parents should not determine a child’s worth and whether that child lives or dies. If a parent is so ill-equipped to raise a child then adoption is a wonderful alternative. Newborns are very adoptable and even if they were not then it still would be no excuse to deny them the right to life.
And do you “pro-choicers” ever realize how many people throughout the ages have been born in less than ideal circumstances? Let me just name a few: Jack Nicholson (born to a teenage mother), Loretta Lynn (born dirt poor), Steve Jobs (born to a college student who gave him up for adoption), Judy Garland (her parents tried to abort her because they could not afford another child), and the list goes on and on. In fact, most people could recount some hardship growing up like having an abusive or alcoholic parent or not having enough money or whatever. What does not kill us makes us stronger! This is what humanity is. None of us are perfect and trying to eliminate people in the quest for perfection is both evil and dangerous.
If a parent is so ill-equipped to raise a child then adoption is a wonderful alternative.
Perhaps, if the pregnant woman is willing to continue the pregnancy.
Perhaps, if the pregnant woman is willing to continue the pregnancy.
Gestating the child is only a temporary condition for the mother. Once the child is born the mother may or may not opt for the very ”moral” choice of adoption.
When a woman is pregnant it means that a life (or lives) are growing inside of her. If there is a medical emergency issue then it may be justifiable to end a pregnancy and potentially end the life of the unborn child (However, the child should NEVER be deliberately killed; If the point of viability has been reached then all measures should be taken to save the child). Otherwise, abortion is 100% immoral and should be illegal.
Erika Bochiochi put it well when she wrote,
“Even if “failure to rescue” were an accurate approximation to abortion, special affirmative duties arise, both morally and legally, when the drowning individual is not a stranger, but is one’s own dependent child. One does not play the “good Samaritan” but the responsible and law-abiding parent when she rescues her drowning child from a pool of water. In pregnancy, the dependency and vulnerability of the nascent, developing child are even more evident, and the parent’s affirmative duty of care is arguably more obvious. For not only is the unborn child dependent and vulnerable, but her mere existence (as a dependent and vulnerable developing child) is due, at least biologically, to the life-giving act in which her parents engaged.
The argument, based in centuries-old common law, maintains that when an individual puts another individual in a position of vulnerability (“in harm’s way”) and has the ability to offer help and assistance, the law requires that individual to do so.” (Lifenews,August25, 2011)
Hopefully, women and men will soon recognize and accept their responsibility to the children that they create. Quit pretending that you are doing your children a favor by killing them – they don’t see it that way. And if you see it that way, the surviving ones may return the favor when you become inconvenient and burdensome.
I can think of few slogans more hypocritical that “Pro-Child, Pro-Choice”
Quit pretending that you are doing your children a favor by killing them
It is downright scary to know that many (if not most) pro-aborts think this way. :(
Doug, are you saying killing solves or will solve the problem of unloved, unwanted kids?
Kel, saying that “wonderful” may apply to adoption, but if the pregnant woman doesn’t want to be pregnant, doesn’t want to continue the pregnancy, then it’s probably not going to be “wonderful” for her.
I don’t see any “solving” of the problem of unwanted kids, unloved kids, or “under-loved” and insufficiently cared-for kids. There are always going to be many sad stories, around the world, IMO. I’m not saying “kill ’em all,” either.
Barb: Quit pretending that you are doing your children a favor by killing them – they don’t see it that way.
The unborn don’t see it any which way, and while you can engage in all manner of straw man arguments, it’s really not the issue.
All I can say is that there are at least two of the Red Hot Chili Peppers who shouldn’t be seen with their shirts off. :)
I don’t believe I said anything about “wonderful” adoptions…?
You stated you believed people supporting abortion may simply want kids to be loved and wanted, not born because they have to be. Do you believe then that pro-abortion people have selfless motives for killing innocent human beings?
I know you wouldn’t say the same about born children who are unloved or unwanted – that it’s acceptable to kill them – and it’s because of that magical event called “birth.” If birth is the factor that removes the right of a mother to kill her child, then the state of being unloved/unwanted doesn’t mean a thing.
You don’t advocate killing them all, but why not? If your argument is based in any way on “wantedness” then surely the right to kill an unwanted child extends beyond the birth canal, right?
Abortions will occur even if they are made illegal. Case in point:
http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/idaho-woman-brings-first-challenge-in-country-against-unborn-pain-act
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/31/idaho-abortion-lawsuit_n_944351.html?ref=fb&src=sp#sb=1943503,b=facebook
Many young people whose birth mothers can’t care for them go into the foster care system. They also often age out of the foster care system and straight into homelessness.
This problem could be addressed through a guaranteed annual income.
Hi Tiffany,
Yes those that wish to kill will find ways to accomplish that regardless of the law.
“Abortions will occur even if they are made illegal.”
True. How does it follow that abortion does not take the life of an innocent human being?
Carla says:
September 1, 2011 at 7:45 am
Hi Tiffany,
Yes those that wish to kill will find ways to accomplish that regardless of the law.
(Denise) Do women who are overjoyed at being pregnant seek abortions?
Hi Denise,
You seem to be a tad hung up on “happiness.”
Bobby Bambino says:
September 1, 2011 at 8:05 am
“Abortions will occur even if they are made illegal.”
True. How does it follow that abortion does not take the life of an innocent human being?
(Denise) The problem is that pregnancy imposes extraordinary costs on the female who is pregnant. These costs are calmly accepted in the case of wanted pregnancies. They are sometimes also accepted in other pregnancies.
It is also true that the pregnant female continues to live if she aborts but the unborn cannot live without the carrier. Thus, if the female commits suicide or dies in an illegal abortion, there are 2 deaths. If she safely aborts, only one.
Abortions might still occur if they are illegal. They will become extremely rare after all pregnancies become planned.
So Denise, is the idea that if you are going to kill someone and you might hurt yourself while trying to kill someone, then the law should make it as easy as possible for you to kill that person without hurting yourself? I also do not see how financial considerations justify killing someone.
Bobby Bambino says:
September 1, 2011 at 8:31 am
So Denise, is the idea that if you are going to kill someone and you might hurt yourself while trying to kill someone, then the law should make it as easy as possible for you to kill that person without hurting yourself? I also do not see how financial considerations justify killing someone.
(Denise) Pregnancy is a special case because of the extraordinary burdens placed on the female by this condition. I’ve written before about how this debate would change if it were feasible to transplant an embryo or fetus without killing it.
The specialness of pregnancy has been recognized by anti-abortion laws which didn’t prosecute anyone for murder but specifically for the crime that was abortion.
Re: Carla: I’m not “hung-up on happiness.” I’m pointing out that the surest way to drastically reduce the number of abortions is ensuring only those who want to get pregnant actually get pregnant.
I myself am horrified by abortion and have never had one.
The unborn don’t see it any which way
Doug- If you ask a sleeping person if it’s ok to kill them, and they don’t say anything, does that mean it’s acceptable for you to go right on ahead and do so? 9_9
“Pregnancy is a special case because of the extraordinary burdens placed on the female by this condition. I’ve written before about how this debate would change if it were feasible to transplant an embryo or fetus without killing it.”
Yes exactly. I agree. In other words, the issue is not at all about whether or not the woman will still abort if abortion is illegal or not, but that a woman has bodily ownership or whatever. So the original point I was making is that the original argument given by Tiffany is question begging- that is, it assumed either that the unborn isn’t human or it assumed that women have this bodily right to kill their unborn in order to not be pregnant anymore. Thus, it seems that you and I both agree that the argument that “abortion should be legal because women will do it anyway” is a complete failure and the right to an abortion cannot at all based on this fact.
The problem is that pregnancy imposes extraordinary costs on the female who is pregnant.
You’ve never had an abortion, but have you ever been pregnant at all? Wanting to eat jello and cottage cheese or rice crispy treats and beef jerky or having a burning desire for fried dill pickles really isn’t THAT extraordinary. Beside, waddling is cute. Look at penguins.
MMmm deep fried pickles… soooo good.. I can’t wait to go back to the south…
Bobby Bambino says:
September 1, 2011 at 9:02 am
“Pregnancy is a special case because of the extraordinary burdens placed on the female by this condition. I’ve written before about how this debate would change if it were feasible to transplant an embryo or fetus without killing it.”
Yes exactly. I agree. In other words, the issue is not at all about whether or not the woman will still abort if abortion is illegal or not, but that a woman has bodily ownership or whatever. So the original point I was making is that the original argument given by Tiffany is question begging- that is, it assumed either that the unborn isn’t human or it assumed that women have this bodily right to kill their unborn in order to not be pregnant anymore. Thus, it seems that you and I both agree that the argument that “abortion should be legal because women will do it anyway” is a complete failure and the right to an abortion cannot at all based on this fact.
(Denise) There is a cost-benefit analysis here. Some regard the females who will commit suicide or be killed or maimed if abortion is illegal as simply too high of a price to pay. Others see them as a kind of collateral damage, justified if abortion is reduced by its illegality.
I don’t believe I said anything about “wonderful” adoptions…?
Kel, I believe Doug is referring to me when I wrote that adoption is a wonderful alternative. Doug obviously disagrees. :(
xalisae says:
September 1, 2011 at 9:05 am
The problem is that pregnancy imposes extraordinary costs on the female who is pregnant. You’ve never had an abortion, but have you ever been pregnant at all? Wanting to eat jello and cottage cheese or rice crispy treats and beef jerky or having a burning desire for fried dill pickles really isn’t THAT extraordinary. Beside, waddling is cute. Look at penguins.
(Denise) I have never been pregnant. My situation makes me completely unsuited to be an adequate mother and I’m horrified by abortion so I avoided the particular sex act that can lead to pregnancy until my tubal ligation at age 24.
A married pregnant woman who planned to give the baby up for adoption told me, “The last few months have been sheer hell.” It is obvious that pregnancy can impose extraordinary costs and that is why when abortion is illegal, it’s not prosecuted as murder but as its own special category of abortion.
There is a cost-benefit analysis here. Some regard the females who will commit suicide or be killed or maimed if abortion is illegal as simply too high of a price to pay. Others see them as a kind of collateral damage, justified if abortion is reduced by its illegality.
We don’t make murder legal to ensure that murderers don’t take out their aggression on themselves.
So you have no frame of reference other than second-hand information from someone full of hormones at the peak of a tough situation…YOUR OPINION SEEMS LEGIT. 9_9
Denise Noe says:
There is a cost-benefit analysis here. Some regard the females who will commit suicide or be killed or maimed if abortion is illegal as simply too high of a price to pay. Others see them as a kind of collateral damage, justified if abortion is reduced by its illegality.
“Collateral damage”? Nope. I’ve never heard a pro-lifer or read about any pro-life organization arguing that opposition to abortion is in any way, shape, or form about cost-benefit. Every life is infinitely valuable, that includes the unborn baby and the suicidal pregnant woman.
I think you’re confused. The “collateral damage” are the unborn, justified because abortion supporters believe that a woman’s “bodily autonomy” is the most important thing.
The argument that legalization does not increase the abortion rate is just absurd. In the immediate years following Roe, conceptions rose by nearly 30 percent, but births actually fell by 6 percent. Not surprisingly, legalized abortion also made adoption rare with something like 1 in 5 women giving up their baby for adoption before Roe and 1 in 30 after Roe.
“There is a cost-benefit analysis here. Some regard the females who will commit suicide or be killed or maimed if abortion is illegal as simply too high of a price to pay.”
So you WOULD defend the argument that if someone will hurt themselves attempting to kill someone else, then it should be made legal to kill that someone else in order to prevent the person from hurting themselves.
Unless, of course, the one making this argument doesn’t think the unborn is human or a person. Again, it simply begs the question. No one would argue that rape should be legal because sometimes women fight back and hurt the rapist. “But the rapist is violating the woman’s autonomy, just like the fetus does.” Ah, so that is the real question- does the fetus violate the woman’s autonomy or not? If so, then why do we need this “cost-benefit” argument? “But the woman is a person and the fetus is not.” Ah, so that is the real question- is teh fetus a person or not? If so, then why do we need this “cost-benefit” argument?
The cost-benefit argument is a bad argument because when pressed, we see that it begs the question by assuming precisely the opposite of what pro-lifers claim without any kind of justification.
Wanting to eat jello and cottage cheese or rice crispy treats and beef jerky or having a burning desire for fried dill pickles really isn’t THAT extraordinary. Beside, waddling is cute. Look at penguins.
To be fair, this minimizes the experiences of a lot of women, for whom the physical and emotional “costs” of pregnancy are far more serious and debilitating than some cravings and a bit of waddling. Feel free to ask me or anyone else who’s got experience with hyperemesis. I would have killed (literally?) to experience some adorably wacky cravings rather than to be repulsed by EVERYTHING (except, oddly, Corona – I had a shot glass of beer once a week or so and the hour afterwards was the only time I felt well enough to eat) and puke every fifteen minutes, day and night, for weeks on end. I wasn’t even pregnant for very long and yet the costs were fairly long-lasting – I couldn’t work so I had to quit my job; I missed a lot of classes in a very short period of time so I failed one of them, which has made it difficult to transfer and go back to school all these years later.
The actual point is that the costs of pregnancy to the woman, short of death, are less than the costs of abortion to the child. Saying that pregnancy isn’t THAT BAD, JUST SUCK IT UP AND DEAL WITH THE CRAVINGS just implies that there is some level of badness of pregnancy effects that might make abortion justified. Few things made me feel as solidly pro-choice as once hearing a pro-lifer express disgust at women who “can’t deal” with being pregnant; she described pregnancy as “something a common housecat can do.” You know what? Abortion isn’t wrong just because pregnancy is “not that hard.” It doesn’t matter if pregnancy is easy or hard, and as someone with extremely difficult experiences with pregnancy, I see a lot of dismissiveness of that fact in the pro-life movement. I get why. I don’t like the cultural trend towards medicalizing everything, especially pregnancy and birth; I think pregnancy is a natural and normal thing, and if I am ever pregnant again I will probably not have a hospital birth, assuming no complications etc. I think our current attitude “others” the entire pregnancy cycle and I disagree for a variety of reasons. But I know that if I ever get pregnant again, it probably won’t be easy. I will be miserable and ill and entirely dependent on my partner; my partner in turn will suffer bouts of frustration and feelings of inadequacy because there will be nothing he can do to really help. It will be nearly a year of our lives spent feeling miserable and feeling like we’re letting each other down. And then we’ll have a newborn, and the sleepless nights will pick up in full. That can seem daunting, when literally getting through the next five minutes seems insurmountable. It doesn’t take anything away from the pro-life message to acknowledge that.
When I was pregnant, the first person to acknowledge and validate how HARD everything had been for me was the doctor at the abortion clinic. I was so very grateful.
My cousin and his wife are looking to adopt domestically. Someone wants that unplanned baby even if the pregnant mom doesn’t!
Adoption is a better option because in most cases the child will be well cared for and loved. I’ve never heard anyone say they regret adoption, but I know there are women AND men who regret abortions (and lost fatherhood).
Those are the rare minority, Alexandra. When you can show me that the majority of abortions are carried out under such conditions, I might be willing to reconsider my statement.
Also, it’s not as though my first pregnancy was a walk in the park, granted it was for different reasons than physical (although I was driving the porcelain bus every morning at work and evening after I’d come home into the start of my second trimester), but that doesn’t change when comparing what a woman undergoes during pregnancy to what a child undergoes in abortion, women are hard-pressed to be put through .0000000000000009ths what the child loses.
But why does the difficulty of the pregnancy need to come into play? It’s an extraneous statement that has no purpose except to dismiss the experiences of that minority of women. I don’t think that your opinion SHOULD change based on whether the majority of aborting women experience extreme complications (although I believe a disproportionate percentage of women with hyperemesis choose abortion; if you go through any support forums for women with HG you come across a surprisingly high number of women with some abortions and some completed pregnancies) because the difficulty of the pregnancy has no bearing whatsoever on whether abortion is justified.
that doesn’t change when comparing what a woman undergoes during pregnancy to what a child undergoes in abortion, women are hard-pressed to be put through .0000000000000009ths what the child loses.
That was exactly my point and I said as much, almost verbatim. Why bother laughing at someone’s statement that the costs of pregnancy are high for some women, when the costs of pregnancy are basically never high enough to warrant abortion anyway? It’s a logical dead-end argument that does nothing except invalidate those women for whom the costs ARE high. If someone says, “Pregnancy is difficult,” I see no reason to say, “No it’s not!” It doesn’t matter if it is or isn’t, for the purposes of the justification of abortion; but it matters a lot to the woman you’re talking to that you apparently don’t understand or respect her individual experience enough to acknowledge that it’s even TRUE.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with Ashli McCall, but she aborted her first pregnancy due to HG, and I believe went on to have three other successful pregnancies – all with HG. She also wrote a book to support women who struggle with this. If you read any of her old blog postings you’ll see that even after being completely devastated by her abortion, she found herself thumbing through abortion listings in despair with subsequent pregnancies. It is an isolating, alienating, miserable thing to go through and I can tell you right now, it doesn’t matter how rare it is when it’s YOU going through it.
Sure, women like her – and me – are in the minority. Women with severe complications of any kind are in the minority. But what is gained by telling us that our experiences are too inconsequential to be respected at the expense of a joke? If someone uses hyperemesis to justify abortion, you don’t point out that hyperemesis is rare – you point out that hyperemesis is not a license to kill. Unless, of course, you think that hyperemesis is not a license to kill only BECAUSE it is rare.
Barb: Quit pretending that you are doing your children a favor by killing them – they don’t see it that way. Doug: The unborn don’t see it any which way, and while you can engage in all manner of straw man arguments, it’s really not the issue.
Barb to Doug: You don’t have any knowledge of how the unborn perceive threats to their bodily integrity. Anyone who has actually watched an abortion can see that the unborn does not “go gently into the good night”. They twist and turn to avoid the intrusive device. Try cutting a worm in half and see how it perceive torture.
My premise, which I adopted from Erika Bochiochi, was that people who cause the risk of harm to an innocent human being, as a man and a woman do, when they conceive an unplanned pregnancy, should have the decency to reduce the risk of harm to the child that they have created. And society should expect that care from them. I don’t see how that is a “straw man argument” because it is a rebuttal to the claim that the mother’s “bodily autonomy” trumps the child in the womb’s right to live.
It’s hard to comprehend abortion advocates – your claims of compassion and love of children is very hollow.
Here is the link to Ashli McCall’s website.
http://beyondmorningsickness.com/
She is a friend of mine. :)
I apologize, Alexandra. You’re right, it is irrelevant. I just wish people would stop bringing it up as though 100% of the time pregnancy is a fate worse than death for most women. It’s frustrating, but it’s also not your fault it’s frustrating.
DUHHHHHg:
Still waiting on a response to my comment from earlier from you:
The unborn don’t see it any which way
Doug- If you ask a sleeping person if it’s ok to kill them, and they don’t say anything, does that mean it’s acceptable for you to go right on ahead and do so? 9_9
I’ll answer for Doug,
“Doug- If you ask a sleeping person if it’s ok to kill them, and they don’t say anything, does that mean it’s acceptable for you to go right on ahead and do so? 9_9”
Is that sleeping person INSIDE you, depending on you to sustain it for 9 months?
I’m sorry, but does where your child is in relation to you-their location-now determine whether or not you can legally kill them?
I’m sorry, but does how dependent upon you your child is for survival now determine how acceptable it is for you as a parent to kill them? Is it MORE ok to kill a newborn infant than a toddler? Is it less ok to kill a teenager than a 9 year old?
Do these hold true in all instances, or are they special circumstances that have been established for abortion?
See? I can answer questions with questions, too. And my questions are better than yours.
“I’m sorry, but does where your child-their location-now determine whether or not you can legally kill them?”
Your English teachers should be proud.
The US Supreme Court says it’s LEGAL to have an abortion if the “child”, your language, not mine, is INSIDE you.
I think carrying a toddler or 9-year-old in your uterus would be incredibly painful. Can you imagine being pregnant for YEARS? And you would definitely need a c-section to deliver.
The US Supreme Court says it’s LEGAL to have an abortion if the “child”, your language, not mine, is INSIDE you.
So the twin that you aborted wasn’t your “child?” Not your biological offspring, but your son who survived was and is?
What would your position be if the all-knowing US Supreme Court changed its position on abortion like it did on slavery? OH, wait, that’s RIGHT, they didn’t change their position. If the Supreme Court had its way, African Americans still wouldn’t be citizens! Awesome.
Because the unborn child is inside you, do you view “it” as your property to dispose of as you see fit, or simply as an impediment to your own freedom and independence?
Either way, it is not moral to kill another human whom you view as “property,” nor is it moral to kill another human whom you deem to be a temporary inconvenience.
*please note my updated/corrected statement. I did so before you immaturely decided to make a federal case out of my omitted word. I don’t have much time to type during the day, so you’ll notice far more mistakes from me during the daylight hours than I exhibit in posts which are submitted after I am at home. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, perhaps we can converse about the matter at hand, like big girls do?
The US Supreme Court says it’s LEGAL to have an abortion if the “child”, your language, not mine, is INSIDE you.
Well then, I guess location DOES determine whether or not you can legally kill your child. From the makers of the 3/5ths Compromise, ladies and gentlemen. And you support this. YOU should be proud, madam. 9_9
I think carrying a toddler or 9-year-old in your uterus would be incredibly painful.
Great. Me too. Fortunately enough for us, that’s biologically impossible, and we’re talking about our children while they are still at a phase in their life cycles in which they are designed to be inside of our uterus.
I just wish people would stop bringing it up as though 100% of the time pregnancy is a fate worse than death for most women.
I agree. It’s getting ridiculous.
Anyone who has gone through a pregnancy deals with the stuff that comes with the territory, and some with more than the usual. But as Alexandra pointed out, that shouldn’t be a license to kill.
Lrning says:
September 1, 2011 at 12:06 pm
Denise Noe says: There is a cost-benefit analysis here. Some regard the females who will commit suicide or be killed or maimed if abortion is illegal as simply too high of a price to pay. Others see them as a kind of collateral damage, justified if abortion is reduced by its illegality. “Collateral damage”? Nope. I’ve never heard a pro-lifer or read about any pro-life organization arguing that opposition to abortion is in any way, shape, or form about cost-benefit. Every life is infinitely valuable, that includes the unborn baby and the suicidal pregnant woman. I think you’re confused. The “collateral damage” are the unborn, justified because abortion supporters believe that a woman’s “bodily autonomy” is the most important thing.
(Denise) No, I meant that the females who die because of suicide or the specific conditions when abortion is illegal are not a wanted damage but a collateral damage by those who belief their deaths are worth the benefits of having it illegal. In many cases, the embryo or fetus is simply doomed: the pregnant female is psychologically unwilling or unable to carry to term no matter what. If she dies because abortion is illegal, that is collateral damage in service of the greater good. People who support outlawing abortion believe that many females who would abort if it is legal and safe will be scared off by the conditions of illegality as conceived in rape Rebecca Kiessling’s mother was but won’t commit suicide. There is a belief that, in general, an unplanned pregnancy will be — by most females — simply accepted if abortion is illegal. The female will carry to term and give birth. Regardless of whether she wanted to be pregnant or not, having to carry to term will automatically affect her feelings and she will come to deeply love the child she has carried to term and borne. In the minority of cases in which she carries to term and gives birth but doesn’t want to raise the baby, she will give it up for adoption.
Again there is a cost-benefit analysis. Some pregnancies are just not going to be carried to term. The embryos and fetuses of those pregnancies can’t be saved regardless of the law. The girls and women are likely to survive if abortion is legal and the people who want it legal do so to save their lives. People who want it illegal believe that many more pregnancies will be aborted if it is legal and having more pregnancies carried to term is worth the inevitable deaths of females in back-alleys or as suicides.
if the “child”, your language, not mine,
That’s not just my language. It’s a provable biological fact. A DNA test would “share my language”. XD
The girls and women are likely to survive if abortion is legal and the people who want it legal do so to save their lives. People who want it illegal believe that many more pregnancies will be aborted if it is legal and having more pregnancies carried to term is worth the inevitable deaths of females in back-alleys or as suicides.
Except that you and they are ignoring that deaths due to illegal abortion had all but ceased to be in the US before abortion was legalized due to medical advancements and improvement of the level of care of women. Medical care is even better now.
As a matter of fact, take a look at the death rate as it stands now from LEGAL abortion. I daresay that the deathrate of women whether abortion is legal or illegal will stay essentially the same. The “backalley” is now the front alley, and women are still dying. They’ll stop dying when they learn to give their children the consideration every human being deserves.
Except that you and they are ignoring that deaths due to illegal abortion had all but ceased to be in the US before abortion was legalized due to medical advancements and improvement of the level of care of women. Medical care is even better now.
This reminds me of something I read earlier today on the decline in maternal mortality rates in the Philippines, where abortion is illegal. The first paragraph reads:
The Philippines are winning the battle against maternal deaths even without any reproductive health law. Recent studies released by the government and major research institutes show a marked decline in maternal deaths, contradicting old data used by birth control supporters.
I just wanted to address the argument that abortion should be legal because if it’s illegal women may hurt themselves,
Before you consider what happens to the mother if she cannot commit abortion, you have to consider what the act is. Abortion kills an innocent child, that should be what matters most. For one thing, the child cannot control what happens to them and they are treated like collateral damage while the mother has the choice not to have sex, she can avoid getting pregnant.
Secondly, with abortion we shouldnt put the needs of the one committing the act over the needs of the victim, that seems counter-intuitive. If abortion were illegal no one would be forcing the woman to get an abortion, that would be her choice. Why would the child’s life have to be compromised for the woman’s desires, it’s not their fault she’s pregnant?
and I’m not apathetic to women going through pregnancies, I understand that it can be very difficult but the solution to this had to be one that does not hurt an innocent person, in this case, the unborn child.
The unborn don’t see it any which way
Xalisae: Doug- If you ask a sleeping person if it’s ok to kill them, and they don’t say anything, does that mean it’s acceptable for you to go right on ahead and do so?
No. However, if you have a living “human being” – kept alive by having oxygenated blood pumped through its vessels – even though the brain has been removed, then there too I’d say there is no “seeing it any which way.”
I don’t believe I said anything about “wonderful” adoptions…?
Denise: Kel, I believe Doug is referring to me when I wrote that adoption is a wonderful alternative. Doug obviously disagrees.”
Denise, you’re right that that’s what I was referring to. I had made two posts before Kel replied, though, and I think she was replying to the other one – my mistake.
Kel: You stated you believed people supporting abortion may simply want kids to be loved and wanted, not born because they have to be. Do you believe then that pro-abortion people have selfless motives for killing innocent human beings?
I don’t think there is any “selfless” going on, here. It’s what people want. It’s what they value the most, or that for which they have the least distaste for. Going back to what I said – I think that being “pro-child” need not be just for having the maximum number of kids born, but rather for wanting a good life for the individual, not too much suffering, etc.
At this point, if I were you, I’d ask, “Is it better to be killed than to have a life of suffering?” Personally, in some cases I think so. Not saying that I or anybody else can predict that ahead of time, either. Yet I’d rather see X number of babies born, versus X plus some additional – where the additional ones had lives of such suffering that they’re truly “horror stories” as we see sometimes, around the world.
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I know you wouldn’t say the same about born children who are unloved or unwanted – that it’s acceptable to kill them – and it’s because of that magical event called “birth.” If birth is the factor that removes the right of a mother to kill her child, then the state of being unloved/unwanted doesn’t mean a thing.
Birth is not “magical,” but it does make a big difference, i.e. there’s no significant debate about born babies. And really, late enough in gestation and I’m not for elective abortion anyway. I do see “somebody” there once mental awareness, sentience, emotion, personality, etc., are there – and they are there in most late-term fetuses. As for “after birth,” then what is the argument? There’s nothing nearly as compelling as the woman’s bodily autonomy, IMO.
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You don’t advocate killing them all, but why not? If your argument is based in any way on “wantedness” then surely the right to kill an unwanted child extends beyond the birth canal, right?
Of course not. I’m not even saying that I’d have it past viability. My point is that the bodily autonomy of the woman, the freedom that women currently have, is important. This is without even saying it is *the* most important thing – and I realize that you don’t think it is. But it’s a “real deal” argument, where such does not exist for born babies.
X: You’ve never had an abortion, but have you ever been pregnant at all? Wanting to eat jello and cottage cheese or rice crispy treats and beef jerky or having a burning desire for fried dill pickles really isn’t THAT extraordinary. Beside, waddling is cute. Look at penguins.
Every time I go to the zoo, I smuggle out a penguin. I’m making an army.
Barb: You don’t have any knowledge of how the unborn perceive threats to their bodily integrity. Anyone who has actually watched an abortion can see that the unborn does not “go gently into the good night”. They twist and turn to avoid the intrusive device. Try cutting a worm in half and see how it perceive torture.
Barb, if you’re coming from some place like where you watched ‘The Silent Scream’ (now well-discredited) then I’ll just say you’re wrong. If you mean late enough in gestation where there is conscious awareness of sensation, emotion, etc., then okay – and I’m not for elective abortion that late anyway.
There is reflexive movement fairly early on in gestation, as with the embryo, even, but this is not any conscious action. Abortions like you describe are a very tiny percentage of all abortions, to start with, and I’m saying I’m not for those in the first place as they come later in gestation.
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My premise, which I adopted from Erika Bochiochi, was that people who cause the risk of harm to an innocent human being, as a man and a woman do, when they conceive an unplanned pregnancy, should have the decency to reduce the risk of harm to the child that they have created. And society should expect that care from them. I don’t see how that is a “straw man argument” because it is a rebuttal to the claim that the mother’s “bodily autonomy” trumps the child in the womb’s right to live.
Where I saw a straw man argument on your part was where you said something to the effect of “stop pretending you are doing your children a favor…” Come on – do you really see women saying they “are doing the baby a favor”? Not wanting to be pregnant, not wanting to continue a pregnancy, is not the same thing as saying “doing the baby a favor.”
As to you feeling that the life of the unborn trumps the woman being legally free to have an abortion – okay – I’m not saying you “should not” feel that way.
Xalisae: “Doug- If you ask a sleeping person if it’s ok to kill them, and they don’t say anything, does that mean it’s acceptable for you to go right on ahead and do so?
Tiffany Campbell: Is that sleeping person INSIDE you, depending on you to sustain it for 9 months?
True – it’s not only the characteristics of the baby we are concerned with, it’s also the other argument, the reason the abortion is desired. “Is there a good enough reason or not?” Once born, whether you are pro-life or pro-choice, it’s a different deal – is there any significant amount of sentiment for born babies being killed?
If we have the hypothetical “living human being” with the brain scooped out, the body being kept alive, then I’m saying there is not “anybody” there. There’s no mental awareness, sentience, emotion, personality, etc. The person they were is long gone. Likewise, prior to a point in gestation, while we can say “living human being,” that’s not the same as being “somebody” in the sense of mental awareness.
Had my mom had an abortion, there never would have been a “me” to know or care about anything. And that’s what the abortion debate is – different people caring about different things. Do we say the life of the unborn is what we care about the most? Or do we say it’s the pregnant woman or girl, and the freedom they now have, and what they desire?
Doug: Another issue seems to divide many pro-life and pro-choice people, which is the question of whether what kind of people we are is as important as what kind of humans the unborn are. Whether the unborn are “anybody” is one question; what kind of person I am is quite another.
My take? Being a kind of person who stands in judgment of what kind of human another human is, is little different than being a slaveholder judging the value of his holdings. That’s what kind of person I would then seem to be.
Are we the killing kind of people who salve conscience by counting rationalizations for killing our weaker brothers and sisters while they’re entirely vulnerable and dependent — dependent on a very different sort of people than we’re turning out to be? (you might say pro-choicers are undependable)
Or are we a life-giving people — nay, a people who confess no power to give life (but for conception), but reject the power to destroy it? Are we the kind of people the most defenseless can depend on?
Whether a pregnant woman values unborn life may be something we should care about. The fun part? Through persuasion and advice we may be able to help her value defenseless humanity and enter the adult world where we embrace responsibility for the helpless among us — and we can do so without in the least violating any pro-choice ethic whatsoever.
It’s no respect of slaveholders to leave them in the delusion that their putative chattel has no significant human value.
“I think that being ‘pro-child’ [also means] wanting a good life for the individual, not too much suffering, etc.”
Do you think the bona vita consists in settling for the death of others as a means to one’s own satisfaction? What’s bona about the morte of others?
I don’t think there is any “selfless” going on, here. It’s what people want. It’s what they value the most, or that for which they have the least distaste for. Going back to what I said – I think that being “pro-child” need not be just for having the maximum number of kids born, but rather for wanting a good life for the individual, not too much suffering, etc.
Being pro-child should most likely be anti-killing the child. But then, when you believe killing is a solution to the problem of suffering as you do, Doug, well… anything goes, and anything is possible. Anything.
At this point, if I were you, I’d ask, “Is it better to be killed than to have a life of suffering?” Personally, in some cases I think so. Not saying that I or anybody else can predict that ahead of time, either. Yet I’d rather see X number of babies born, versus X plus some additional – where the additional ones had lives of such suffering that they’re truly “horror stories” as we see sometimes, around the world.
So you view certain humans as merely “additional” or “extras” that are unnecessary? Yes, there is suffering. But I have to question whether killing is a good solution. Obviously, I do not believe killing is the solution. I don’t look at the orphans displaced in Sudan and think “Gosh, they really would be better off dead; maybe we should just let them die rather than help alleviate their suffering in some way.” I just do not understand that line of reasoning whatsoever. And if you’re willing to kill a child in utero BEFORE it “has to suffer,” then to me, that’s murderous.
You’re not seeking to eliminate suffering but instead eliminate the sufferers.
Birth is not “magical,” but it does make a big difference, i.e. there’s no significant debate about born babies. And really, late enough in gestation and I’m not for elective abortion anyway.
And yet, you’ve never been able to really explain your reasoning for this. If there is “nothing as compelling as the woman’s bodily autonomy” (for the temporary condition of 9 months of pregnancy, I might add), then why look at the fetus at all, Doug?
Of course not. I’m not even saying that I’d have it past viability. My point is that the bodily autonomy of the woman, the freedom that women currently have, is important. This is without even saying it is *the* most important thing – and I realize that you don’t think it is. But it’s a “real deal” argument, where such does not exist for born babies.
Women are still free beings, even while pregnant. But the life of the preborn child must be considered. You even consider it past the arbitrary point of viability – as do many pro-choicers. Let’s face it, Doug – no one has full bodily autonomy. We restrict the rights of others in order to protect the lives of the vulnerable in society. Restricting a pregnant woman from killing another human – her own offspring – during gestation and thereafter isn’t unreasonable.
Let me state it again: You’re not seeking to eliminate suffering but instead eliminate the sufferers.
Likewise, prior to a point in gestation, while we can say “living human being,” that’s not the same as being “somebody” in the sense of mental awareness.
Then let’s stop splitting hairs about “somebody” and just go all-out and protect every living human being, without discrimination! What a great idea, Doug! You should be proud of yourself for thinking of it!
True – it’s not only the characteristics of the baby we are concerned with, it’s also the other argument, the reason the abortion is desired.
Then why all the hand wringing about “somebody”?
“Is there a good enough reason or not?” Once born, whether you are pro-life or pro-choice, it’s a different deal
Why? I’ve not been able to have any lengthy conversations with newborns that would indicate for me there is a “somebody” there by your definition.
– is there any significant amount of sentiment for born babies being killed?
Ummm…yes. It makes me want to vomit every time I hear such stories on the news. But my stomach sinks just as much when I hear about someone who aborted. Both are defenseless human beings who were betrayed by those who were supposed to protect, care for, and nurture them, and the idea is horrific to me on its face.
Had my mom had an abortion, there never would have been a “me” to know or care about anything.
You’re putting the cart before the horse. We’re all not just brains floating about in jars, Doug. That fetus that was in your mom when you were gestating was indeed YOU, you simply refuse to recognize it and lose yourself in philosophical navel-gazing to spare yourself any discomfort. You are you. You are the same you that’s been in that same body since you were conceived. The only differences are growth and development. Your thoughts and ideas are irrelevant to the physical reality of what you are. No, Doug, reality isn’t actually just someone else’s dream, and we’re all not just imaginary people on the back of a giant turtle swimming through space. We have things like rationality coupled with science now, so we no longer have to depend solely on the flawed minds of men to determine what is actuality.
And aside from that, do you not enjoy knowing or caring about things now, so much so that you’re ambivalent to the thought of your mother having aborted you? Do you not think that this is a grand chance you’ve been given to experience the world, and that everyone should be as lucky as you simply to be alive on the same planet to exist?
If you can feel that you appreciate your life and NOT be Pro-Life, you are the epitome of self-centered.
Or do we say it’s the pregnant woman or girl, and the freedom they now have, and what they desire?
Of course we don’t, Doug. Very few instances in the world do we say that someone else’s freedom and desire is paramount to another human being’s life. Abortion is the only one that comes to my mind.
Kel: “And yet, you’ve never been able to really explain your reasoning for this. ”
Doug and I’ve been going down with this ship into the archival abyss, and it’s been an interesting conversation. He’s insisted that his position — which I’ve probed in near futility — is merely an opinion not pretending to objectivity.
That’s fine as well as it goes, but he also says he doesn’t find pro-life reasons compelling. In other words, a gratuitous opinion — a default position, I guess — needs some force to act against it to move. A thing is where it is, regardless of what put it there. (as an aside, I suspect this is why Doug is easygoing in these parts; he’s as unconcerned that pro-lifers have good reasons as he is that perhaps he ought, as well — “ought” isn’t an issue for warrant for him, perhaps. He’s following the golden rule and applying a categorical imperative, and this consistency translates into civility)
Doug is a veritable anti-Luther: “”Here I stand; I can do no other — so help me God.” But Luther said this because reason took him there. In Doug’s case, he says something similar because reason isn’t taking him anywhere other than where he finds himself.
I don’t think the Empire’s clones in Star Wars were any more rationally complicit in the Emperor’s evil designs than Doug is consciously being; they simply had no reason to do anything else. I have to admit, under Lucas’ direction they did look a bit as if their interest in accuracy and successful combat didn’t get much past a “default” effort.
Xalisae: “Very few instances in the world do we say that someone else’s freedom and desire is paramount to another human being’s life. Abortion is the only one that comes to my mind.”
It’s one of the most interesting things in the world, that when something becomes politicized, people set aside how they apply principles uniformly in life and make exceptions for the issue in which they have a stake. If power corrupts, this shows how it corrupts the mind itself. It’s a trap for us all, alas, and it’s an insidious one.
Denise Noe says:
“…who belief their deaths are worth the benefits of having it illegal.
People who want it illegal believe that many more pregnancies will be aborted if it is legal and having more pregnancies carried to term is worth the inevitable deaths of females in back-alleys or as suicides.”
I want abortion to be illegal and I don’t believe the above. I don’t know any pro-lifers that believe the above. And I don’t know any pro-life organizations that would agree with you.
Lrning: Doesn’t much matter. All we need is voters to make it happen. Resistance is futile. Pro-choicers can’t win in the long run. They’re regressive troglodytes who want to take us back to back alley abortions.
Yeah, for anyone doing a double-take, that’s what I said.
Rasqual, you said “it’s a trap for all of us” was that a Star Wars pun? Haha
Another issue seems to divide many pro-life and pro-choice people, which is the question of whether what kind of people we are is as important as what kind of humans the unborn are. Whether the unborn are “anybody” is one question; what kind of person I am is quite another.
Rasqual – sure, same as are we the type of people that respect the woman’s liberty?
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My take? Being a kind of person who stands in judgment of what kind of human another human is, is little different than being a slaveholder judging the value of his holdings. That’s what kind of person I would then seem to be.
Are we the killing kind of people who salve conscience by counting rationalizations for killing our weaker brothers and sisters while they’re entirely vulnerable and dependent — dependent on a very different sort of people than we’re turning out to be? (you might say pro-choicers are undependable)
You can say the same thing for pro-lifers. Are we the kind of people who favor taking away the woman’s freedom in this case? Are we the kind of people who favor taking away the freedom of the slaves, in the case of slavery?
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Whether a pregnant woman values unborn life may be something we should care about. The fun part? Through persuasion and advice we may be able to help her value defenseless humanity and enter the adult world where we embrace responsibility for the helpless among us — and we can do so without in the least violating any pro-choice ethic whatsoever.
It’s no respect of slaveholders to leave them in the delusion that their putative chattel has no significant human value.
I’m not for letting the opinion of slaveholders dictate law, nor am I for letting the opinions of pro-lifers dictate law. It’s not necessarily “adult” to want to take away somebody else’s freedom.
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“I think that being ‘pro-child’ [also means] wanting a good life for the individual, not too much suffering, etc.”
Do you think the bona vita consists in settling for the death of others as a means to one’s own satisfaction? What’s bona about the morte of others?
No, Rasqual, I’m not saying there would be any satisfaction for me personally, were one pregnancy to be ended. I cannot predict what will happen, nor what would happen if the pregnancy were continued. That said, there is still the question of what extent the unborn are “others,” and just how we define “others.” There is no question that the pregnant woman is another. What’s “bona” about her losing the freedom she now has? It’s an argument.
That said, there is still the question of what extent the unborn are “others,”
Why should that even matter? Why can’t we just protect every living human being because they’re alive and a member of our species? Why should higher brain function have anything to do with which human beings we protect under the law at all?
and just how we define “others.”
Ummm…Do you not have dictionaries in your state, Doug?
OTHERS:
pronoun 9.
Usually, others. other persons or things: others in the medical profession.
PERSON:
[pur-suhn] Show IPA
noun
1.
a human being, whether man, woman, or child: The table seats four persons.
HUMAN BEING:
noun
1.
any individual of the genus Homo, especially a member of the species Homo sapiens.
Seriously.You’re being ignorant, Doug. Now let’s determine if you’re being willfully ignorant on purpose, or if you’re actually this dense.
Doug-People lose freedoms all the time if their freedom is impeding someone else’s life or health. “Freedom” is not the be-all, end-all. LIFE is, because you can’t have the former without the latter. Therefore, sometimes priorities have to be set for those unable to rationally set them themselves (Pro-Legal-Abortionists and those who would abort). Involuntary incarceration or mental committal are just two of the many ways and instances citizens often have their personal freedoms restricted in order to protect others and the public in general.
Rasqual: he also says he doesn’t find pro-life reasons compelling. In other words, a gratuitous opinion — a default position, I guess — needs some force to act against it to move. A thing is where it is, regardless of what put it there. (as an aside, I suspect this is why Doug is easygoing in these parts; he’s as unconcerned that pro-lifers have good reasons as he is that perhaps he ought, as well — “ought” isn’t an issue for warrant for him, perhaps. He’s following the golden rule and applying a categorical imperative, and this consistency translates into civility)
Doug is a veritable anti-Luther: “”Here I stand; I can do no other — so help me God.” But Luther said this because reason took him there. In Doug’s case, he says something similar because reason isn’t taking him anywhere other than where he finds himself.
It’s not “gratuitous” – it’s how I feel, same as for everybody else here, regardless of what they may attribute their opinions to. “Ought” is definitely in play – “society ought to maintain the liberty that pregnant women now have,” or “society ought to say that the life of the unborn trumps all other concerns.” There is no “reason,” necessarily, that means my position is correct in any external way, no, but that is true for all of us. It all comes down to what we value the most.
Kel: Being pro-child should most likely be anti-killing the child. But then, when you believe killing is a solution to the problem of suffering as you do, Doug, well… anything goes, and anything is possible. Anything.
Kel, not everybody sees the unborn as “children,” in the first place. I also did not say that killing, directly, is a solution. I don’t pretend to be able to forecast how good or bad a life will be. But there are some situations in the world where I might well feel, “Wow, that kid would have been better off never being born,” or, for that matter, “better off never having been conceived.” Some people feel that their lives are not worth it, and they choose to suicide. Some women feel that it’s not the right time to have a baby, and I’m for letting them make that decision.
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“At this point, if I were you, I’d ask, “Is it better to be killed than to have a life of suffering?” Personally, in some cases I think so. Not saying that I or anybody else can predict that ahead of time, either. Yet I’d rather see X number of babies born, versus X plus some additional – where the additional ones had lives of such suffering that they’re truly “horror stories” as we see sometimes, around the world.”
So you view certain humans as merely “additional” or “extras” that are unnecessary? Yes, there is suffering. But I have to question whether killing is a good solution. Obviously, I do not believe killing is the solution. I don’t look at the orphans displaced in Sudan and think “Gosh, they really would be better off dead; maybe we should just let them die rather than help alleviate their suffering in some way.” I just do not understand that line of reasoning whatsoever. And if you’re willing to kill a child in utero BEFORE it “has to suffer,” then to me, that’s murderous.
I don’t say “unnecessary.” Heck, we’re all “unnecessary” in some respects, from many a standpoint. I agree with you – alleviating suffering is preferable to killing, per se, but so much is not alleviated. Again, personally, I’m not going to say that “this pregnancy should be ended because the baby will suffer too much.” I’m certainly not going to say, “kill this born kid because he is suffering too much.” But some kids’ lives in the Sudan, etc., feature more suffering than may be the case in 10,000 abortions.
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You’re not seeking to eliminate suffering but instead eliminate the sufferers.
There is a difference between somebody that’s already suffering and an unborn embryo or fetus that has yet to become “somebody that can suffer.” I’m saying that the pregnant woman can have a good enough reason to end the pregnancy, and it may include suffering.
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“Birth is not “magical,” but it does make a big difference, i.e. there’s no significant debate about born babies. And really, late enough in gestation and I’m not for elective abortion anyway.”
And yet, you’ve never been able to really explain your reasoning for this. If there is “nothing as compelling as the woman’s bodily autonomy” (for the temporary condition of 9 months of pregnancy, I might add), then why look at the fetus at all, Doug?
Because prior to a point in gestation, the fetus cannot suffer, has no mental awareness at all, no emotions, no personality – there’s a “human organism” that is there alive, but I don’t see “somebody” there yet.
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“Of course not. I’m not even saying that I’d have it past viability. My point is that the bodily autonomy of the woman, the freedom that women currently have, is important. This is without even saying it is *the* most important thing – and I realize that you don’t think it is. But it’s a “real deal” argument, where such does not exist for born babies.”
Women are still free beings, even while pregnant. But the life of the preborn child must be considered. You even consider it past the arbitrary point of viability – as do many pro-choicers. Let’s face it, Doug – no one has full bodily autonomy. We restrict the rights of others in order to protect the lives of the vulnerable in society. Restricting a pregnant woman from killing another human – her own offspring – during gestation and thereafter isn’t unreasonable.
We restrict the rights of others when we feel there is a good enough reason. In the vast majority of abortions, the unborn do not suffer. The real argument is between the “suffering” of those who think abortion is wrong and the suffering of the pregnant woman, and I’m going with what the pregnant woman wants.
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Let me state it again: You’re not seeking to eliminate suffering but instead eliminate the sufferers.
Not directly, and not by my decision. If anything, I’d rather the suffering never happen. But, for example, for a woman in the Sudan to say, “this is no time to be bringing a baby into the world…” I fully understand that.
“Likewise, prior to a point in gestation, while we can say “living human being,” that’s not the same as being “somebody” in the sense of mental awareness.”
Xalisae: Then let’s stop splitting hairs about “somebody” and just go all-out and protect every living human being, without discrimination! What a great idea, Doug! You should be proud of yourself for thinking of it!
No, there are situations where not everybody agrees with you, X. Wartime, self-defense, abortion, etc. Your desire for “every living human being to be protected” is sometimes against the desire of the pregnant woman herself, and those who favor the woman deciding, herself.
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“True – it’s not only the characteristics of the baby we are concerned with, it’s also the other argument, the reason the abortion is desired.”
Then why all the hand wringing about “somebody”?
Because the pregnant woman is undeniably somebody in that respect, somebody with desires and emotions, just like you, just like me. When it comes to whose opinion to let hold sway, I’m for having it be that of the pregnant woman herself.
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“Is there a good enough reason or not?” Once born, whether you are pro-life or pro-choice, it’s a different deal.”
Why? I’ve not been able to have any lengthy conversations with newborns that would indicate for me there is a “somebody” there by your definition.
That they have emotions, are sensate, have some mental awareness, etc., is not in doubt, however. I didn’t mean that the newly-born could weigh in on the abortion debate anyway, rather than once the baby is outside the womb, there is nothing like the abortion debate that is then present.
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“– is there any significant amount of sentiment for born babies being killed?”
Ummm…yes. It makes me want to vomit every time I hear such stories on the news. But my stomach sinks just as much when I hear about someone who aborted. Both are defenseless human beings who were betrayed by those who were supposed to protect, care for, and nurture them, and the idea is horrific to me on its face.
I disagree, X. I certainly don’t see a significant amount of sentiment for it being legal to kill babies, after birth.
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“Had my mom had an abortion, there never would have been a “me” to know or care about anything.”
You’re putting the cart before the horse. We’re all not just brains floating about in jars, Doug. That fetus that was in your mom when you were gestating was indeed YOU, you simply refuse to recognize it and lose yourself in philosophical navel-gazing to spare yourself any discomfort. You are you. You are the same you that’s been in that same body since you were conceived. The only differences are growth and development. Your thoughts and ideas are irrelevant to the physical reality of what you are.
That’s not contradicting what I said. Granted that there was a living human organism there. But it was not mentally aware, it did not have emotions, personality, etc., prior to a point in gestation, and as far as me ever having those attributes, if my mom had had an abortion prior to a certain point, then what I said is true – there never would have been a “me” to know or care about anything.
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No, Doug, reality isn’t actually just someone else’s dream, and we’re all not just imaginary people on the back of a giant turtle swimming through space. We have things like rationality coupled with science now, so we no longer have to depend solely on the flawed minds of men to determine what is actuality.
Okay, and the fact is that either certain mental and emotional attributes are there, or not.
____
And aside from that, do you not enjoy knowing or caring about things now, so much so that you’re ambivalent to the thought of your mother having aborted you? Do you not think that this is a grand chance you’ve been given to experience the world, and that everyone should be as lucky as you simply to be alive on the same planet to exist? If you can feel that you appreciate your life and NOT be Pro-Life, you are the epitome of self-centered.
I’m not ambivalent, but that really does not matter. If a given person wants to end their life, would you then say that abortion is a good thing? The point stands – (regardless of what I think now) had my mom had an abortion prior to a point, there never would have been a “me” to know or care about anything. This is why I don’t see miscarriages as really a “sad thing” for the unborn. The sadness is in the born people who want the baby to live. A “grand chance”? No, not really – most pregnancies are willingly continued, so it’s not like it’s “rare” to be born. If there is a “self-centered” here, it’s on the part of people who would have their own desires trumping that of the woman who is the one pregnant.
____
“Or do we say it’s the pregnant woman or girl, and the freedom they now have, and what they desire?”
Of course we don’t, Doug. Very few instances in the world do we say that someone else’s freedom and desire is paramount to another human being’s life. Abortion is the only one that comes to my mind.
Well, many of us do, same as for killings in self-defense, etc.
“That said, there is still the question of what extent the unborn are “others,”
Xalisae: Why should that even matter? Why can’t we just protect every living human being because they’re alive and a member of our species? Why should higher brain function have anything to do with which human beings we protect under the law at all?
Because it’s not just all about the “raw numbers” for all of us, X. I’ve said this before – there can be more suffering in one child’s life (or, for that matter, in one adult’s life) than there may be in 10,000 abortions. When it comes down to your opinion about “every living human being” versus the opinion of the woman who is actually the one pregnant, many of us do not see the need to overrule what the pregnant woman wants, many of us don’t see the need for society to enforce your desire in the matter, over hers.
___
and just how we define “others.”
Ummm…Do you not have dictionaries in your state, Doug?
OTHERS:
pronoun 9.
Usually, others. other persons or things: others in the medical profession.
Sure, and you know darn well that we all don’t agree on “person.” In fact, it’s due to personhood not being attributed to the unborn that has you dissatisfied with the current situation.
___
PERSON:
[pur-suhn] Show IPA
noun
1.
a human being, whether man, woman, or child: The table seats four persons.
And of course there is the sense of “child” that means from birth to adulthood. Your wish for “child” to apply to the unborn is subjective, at the most. In the real world, the unborn are not considered full legal human beings, and not considered as having full personhood. If these were not true, the abortion argument as we have it now would not exist.
____
HUMAN BEING:
noun
1.
any individual of the genus Homo, especially a member of the species Homo sapiens.
Seriously.You’re being ignorant, Doug. Now let’s determine if you’re being willfully ignorant on purpose, or if you’re actually this dense.
Baloney – I’ve said hundreds of times that “human being” per se, cannot be ruled out post-conception. That is not saying they have mental awareness, emotions, rights attributed, the status of persons, etc.
____
Doug-People lose freedoms all the time if their freedom is impeding someone else’s life or health. “Freedom” is not the be-all, end-all. LIFE is, because you can’t have the former without the latter. Therefore, sometimes priorities have to be set for those unable to rationally set them themselves (Pro-Legal-Abortionists and those who would abort). Involuntary incarceration or mental committal are just two of the many ways and instances citizens often have their personal freedoms restricted in order to protect others and the public in general.
Yes, if society says there is a good enough reason to take away their freedom, then it’s taken away. With legal, elective abortion society is currently saying the opposite of what you want to be the case. Society is saying there is not a good enough reason to take away the liberty that women currently have in the matter, and I agree with that.
No, there are situations where not everybody agrees with you, X.
And who gives a flip about consensus? Majority rule has excused some pretty heinous activities in the past.
Wartime, self-defense, abortion, etc.
One of these things is not like the others. One of these things just doesn’t belong…You’re comparing apples an oranges. Elective abortion does not involve a woman losing her life (unless the abortion is flubbed, of course, and she loses her life while trying to kill her child). If you really wanted to include abortion in an analogous situation, you should say something like a parent suffocating their child because they’ve determined they could afford to go back to college or a trip to the bahamas if they didn’t have to feed, clothe, and house that child. There is no comparative loss suffered by the party paying for the death of the gestating human in regards to the other situations you’ve listed. They are not analogous. Trying to say that they are shows the disingenuousness of your premise.
it’s not only the characteristics of the baby we are concerned with, it’s also the other argument, the reason the abortion is desired…Because the pregnant woman is undeniably somebody in that respect
Ok. So, we’re not concerned with whether or not we are dealing with a “somebody” here…unless that “somebody” happens to be the pregnant woman. Then and only then do we give a flip. SEEMS LEGIT. 9_9
How do you think you’re going to win an argument when you’re saying “That doesn’t matter.” “That matters because the pregnant woman fits my criteria.” “Even if the gestating human being DID fit my criteria, it wouldn’t matter, because the woman takes precedence, to me.”
I never was good at playing games in which other people make up the rules arbitrarily and change them on a whim as they deem necessary. I’m done see-sawing with you on this subject. *hops off the see-saw without warning you*
I disagree, X. I certainly don’t see a significant amount of sentiment for it being legal to kill babies, after birth.
See: China.
Granted that there was a living human organism there. But it was not mentally aware, it did not have emotions, personality
Speaking of your own self as an anonymous non-being: “it”…makes you sound absolutely like a raving insane person. Just so you know. Mental gymnastics…mental gymnastics…so amusing to watch the card castle crumble. That “it” was you, Doug. Does it make you uncomfortable to think of yourself in that way? So vulnerable, and with the worldview you espouse, at the mercy of your mother as to whether or not you get to live this life you’ve been given? Pretty harsh, huh. Let’s re-write this, sans lunacy:
“Granted I was a living organism then and there. But I was not mentally aware. I did not have emotions or personality.”
-and your chance to have them would’ve been taken away from you forever and always, had you been aborted. The life you have now would’ve been stolen from you against any wishes you might now have. Think about it. ^_^
there never would have been a “me” to know or care about anything.
And once again, I am not defined by my mental capacity or cognition. If I suffered massive head trauma today, and was utterly and irrevocably changed forever, I would still exist. I would be me. I’m still the same person I was when I was 7, even though I enjoy different books and shows and think differently about just about everything now than I did then.
Incapacitation =/= death or not existing, Doug, no matter how much you would like it to be so. Protest all you like, but when it comes down to it, if you strangled another human being to death in your backyard who was comatose and without the capacity for emotion, cognition, sensation, etc., and you were caught, the police wouldn’t give a rat’s a$$ about the mental capacity of said dead person, nor would a judge or jury. And I guess Jeffrey Dahmer got a bum rap, since he incapacitated and labotomized his victims before he terminated life functions present within their bodies, I suppose the most he could’ve been charged with was assault. 9_9
Okay, and the fact is that either certain mental and emotional attributes are there, or not.
No, it’s not. That criteria is squishy and subjective. Until we have some sort of screen that we can sit a human being behind which will then definitively show all the thoughts or emotions or sensations or what other arbitrary nonsense YOU happen to decide constitutes “alive”, the only concrete thing we can determine is biological function which is indicative of real, actual, scientific “alive”, for which gestating humans meet the criteria.
I’m not ambivalent, but that really does not matter.
Why not, and why shouldn’t it? Seems to me that since you don’t think it matters, you’re ambivalent by default, regardless of what you say. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain…”
If a given person wants to end their life, would you then say that abortion is a good thing?
If someone is born then grows to adulthood and decides that his/her life is horrible enough to justify ending it, I would say that qualifies as them aborting themselves, and that really is THEIR “choice”. Granted, I’d recommend they get counseling first and try to get some psychiatric help for themselves. But I’d be more inclined to support THAT “abortion” than what we are talking about today.
If you are talking about a pregnant woman, she’d just have to wait, because she’s not the only person in that boat, and she really needs to consider her bunk-mate(s). If she still wants to do so after they’ve jumped ship, then more power to her. Otherwise, she really shouldn’t be authorized to make that decision for someone else.
I am not going to dignify with a response what you wrote about those who die in the womb. It’s disrespectful, to say the least. I will only say that we mourned my brother because he was a member of our family, not because of any sort of self-centered gratification that he could’ve given us that we felt was lost. Your idea of people existing merely for the benefit of others you showcase with this statement I find more than disturbing, but I should know better than to expect anything more from those who support legal abortion at this point.
A “grand chance”? No, not really – most pregnancies are willingly continued, so it’s not like it’s “rare” to be born.
I never tire of telling pro-legal-abortionists how wrong they are. According to the March of Dimes, as many as 50% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage — most often before a woman misses a menstrual period or even knows she is pregnant. We are all lucky to be here, and it’s more rare to be born than you will let yourself believe. This only compounds how sad it is that a parent will elect to end that “lucky” child’s life prematurely.
If there is a “self-centered” here, it’s on the part of people who would have their own desires trumping that of the woman who is the one pregnant.
It also rather pisses me off when you blather on about “oh, that poor wittoo pregnant woman and her freedom and wishes and desires!!!” when 9 years ago I was that pregnant woman, Doug, and my desire was to not be suffering through a crisis pregnancy, but to also realize that freedom also has responsibility, and it WAS NOT my “right” to end my daughter’s life just because if I’d had my druthers, I’d rather not have been pregnant right then under those circumstances. You act like you care so much about us, Doug, when we’re right here telling you that if you really respected us or gave a flying f about us that you’d want us to be decent human beings who wouldn’t kill the helpless, vulnerable children in our wombs depending upon us. That you’d see us less as frightened animals who would eat their own kits to make it through the winter but as HUMAN BEINGS, like you and I with respect, dignity, and the strength to persevere without resulting to what can only be described as the most macabre fiscal and emotional cannibalism one can imagine. And that you’d care enough about us to look at our children we let live and give them dignity enough to see them as the human beings they’ve always been, even when they were just floating along in our wombs because they are the same organism they are now that they were then, and they were NEVER just an “it”.
So don’t lecture me on “self-centered”.
I’ve said this before – there can be more suffering in one child’s life (or, for that matter, in one adult’s life) than there may be in 10,000 abortions.
So when the misery index gets above a certain number, kill your kids and shoot yourself in the head. SOUNDS LIKE A BRILLIANT PLAN! And what if that one aborted kid would’ve ended up winning the lottery and having the best life ever? Our bad! Oh well, at least it wasn’t us on the chopping block, amirite? (all this eye-rolling is giving me a headache. You owe me 2 excedrin and a glass of water)
versus the opinion of the woman who is actually the one pregnant
Once again, been there, done that, got the 9 year old. HER opinion is the one that really matters. Hopefully you’ll see that one day. My desire means nothing, neither does that of the pregnant woman. This isn’t about desires, freedoms, and wishes. This is about the actual real lives of other human beings.
Sure, and you know darn well that we all don’t agree on “person.” In fact, it’s due to personhood not being attributed to the unborn that has you dissatisfied with the current situation.
Yeah. And 9 out of 10 inhabitants of an insane asylum don’t agree that they aren’t Abraham Lincoln. What’s your point?
And of course there is the sense of “child” that means from birth to adulthood. Your wish for “child” to apply to the unborn is subjective, at the most. In the real world, the unborn are not considered full legal human beings, and not considered as having full personhood. If these were not true, the abortion argument as we have it now would not exist.
Show me someone who disagrees that a gestating human being is someone’s child, and I’ll show you a DNA test that agrees with me. I bet the test will be more accurate, concise, and fraught with philosophical b.s. than my scientifically accurate documentation.
Baloney – I’ve said hundreds of times that “human being” per se, cannot be ruled out post-conception. That is not saying they have mental awareness, emotions, rights attributed, the status of persons, etc.
And if it takes half a chicken half a day to lay half an egg, how long does it take a one-legged monkey to kick the seeds out of a dill pickle? Emotions/mental awareness/etc. is all just the new discrimination that’s become socially acceptable. And after working with the handicapped, it’s every bit as infuriating for me as it was for abolitionists back in the day.
With legal, elective abortion society is currently saying the opposite of what you want to be the case. Society is saying there is not a good enough reason to take away the liberty that women currently have in the matter, and I agree with that.
And a long time ago, society said it was in the black man’s best interest to work the fields for whites. Society said it would be good to take Native Americans off the land of their ancestors, put then on a reservation, and “civilize” them. Society has been wrong, A LOT. But I’m glad to know where your place would’ve been in history, Doug. Personally, I’m gonna have to opt for doing the right thing rather than siding with “society”.
Pregnancy is a normal natural condition. It is common and usual. It is in no way extraordinary. Billions of people (and animals) fill the world because pregnancy is entirely ordinary, and necessary for each to exist. Gestation is the female’s defining characteristic. It is the opposite of extraordinary. The sterile or childless female is extraordinary.
Xalisae,
Just reading through the exchange…….
My glass of water is raised to you, fair lady for hanging in there with Doug!! I shall take these 2 Exedrin in your honor!
One day maybe all of these conversations with have some effect on Doug’s beliefs and he will err on the side of life.
If a human being exists in the womb, should pregnant women be able to receive the same welfare payments mothers of newborns are eligible to receive?
Denise:
Programs like WIC and Food Stamps already recognize the gestating human being by increasing allotments while a woman is pregnant.
Carla:
Thanks. ^_~
Correction:
Show me someone who disagrees that a gestating human being is someone’s child, and I’ll show you a DNA test that agrees with me. I bet the test will be more accurate, concise, and fraught with philosophical b.s. than my scientifically accurate documentation.
Should read:
Show me someone who disagrees that a gestating human being is someone’s child, and I’ll show you a DNA test that agrees with me. I bet the test will be more accurate, concise, and fraught with less philosophical b.s. than some rationalizing wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Isn’t the best way to address this problem to try to ensure that the females who get pregnant are the ones who WANT to get pregnant?
Sure. But how does that change that once a woman IS pregnant, there’s another human being to consider? Making sure that every woman who gets pregnant wants to be pregnant is great, but that’s not the only thing we need to do. There are many circumstances in which someone might intentionally get pregnant (or get someone else pregnant) only to reconsider or have second thoughts later and turn to abortion. What about THOSE children?
xalisae says:
September 4, 2011 at 4:21 pm
Sure. But how does that change that once a woman IS pregnant, there’s another human being to consider? Making sure that every woman who gets pregnant wants to be pregnant is great, but that’s not the only thing we need to do. There are many circumstances in which someone might intentionally get pregnant (or get someone else pregnant) only to reconsider or have second thoughts later and turn to abortion. What about THOSE children?
(Denise) Aren’t most abortions of unplanned pregnancies?
Aren’t most babies placed for adoption also of unplanned pregnancies?
It seems we would do a tremendous service if we minimized unplanned pregnancies — even if we can’t completely eliminate them.
I support research into transplanting embryos and fetuses into other wombs and/or artificial wombs but that is quite awhile off. It might not be possible to prevent all abortions but we can do a lot to prevent abortions by preventing unplanned pregnancies.
xalisae says:
September 4, 2011 at 4:21 pm
Sure. But how does that change that once a woman IS pregnant, there’s another human being to consider?
(Denise) I have a friend who had an abortion when it was illegal. She says, “Nothing and I mean nothing was going to stop me.” She has also said, “I just wasn’t going to complete the pregnancy.” She believes there is a chemical problem and that if certain brain chemicals don’t activate, the pregnancy itself is completely unacceptable.
What xalisae said. Each and every time. :)
I have a friend who had an abortion when it was illegal. She says, “Nothing and I mean nothing was going to stop me.” She has also said, “I just wasn’t going to complete the pregnancy.” She believes there is a chemical problem and that if certain brain chemicals don’t activate, the pregnancy itself is completely unacceptable.
Sounds like mental illness. Even that your friend seems to want to blame her abortion on a biological process rather than her own will seems like mental illness. She should get some help.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1284384/IVF-babies-aborted-women-change-minds.html
And yes. Women do intentionally get pregnant and then change their mind. Not every abortion is because of a crisis pregnancy.
xalisae says:
September 4, 2011 at 4:21 pm
Sure. But how does that change that once a woman IS pregnant, there’s another human being to consider? Making sure that every woman who gets pregnant wants to be pregnant is great, but that’s not the only thing we need to do. There are many circumstances in which someone might intentionally get pregnant (or get someone else pregnant) only to reconsider or have second thoughts later and turn to abortion. What about THOSE children?
(Denise) Part of any sex education program must be information about embryonic and fetal development. Kids should see what the unborn look like at different stages. That might make many unlikely to abort.
xalisae says:
September 4, 2011 at 6:06 pm
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1284384/IVF-babies-aborted-women-change-minds.html And yes. Women do intentionally get pregnant and then change their mind. Not every abortion is because of a crisis pregnancy.
(Denise) It is also possible that some women get pregnant with the INTENTION of aborting the pregnancy: http://www.truecrimefanatic.com/DeniseNoeHorrorAbortion.html
It’s not necessarily “adult” to want to take away somebody else’s freedom.
Having the legal right to kill your unborn child or support the killing of your unborn child will never make one free, Doug.
the fetus cannot suffer, has no mental awareness at all, no emotions, no personality – there’s a “human organism” that is there alive, but I don’t see “somebody” there yet.
I could say the same things about a few proaborts.
It might not be possible to prevent all abortions but we can do a lot to prevent abortions by preventing unplanned pregnancies.
Denise, this is what Planned Parenthood promised. Huge fail. PP needs to go.
X, great comments! Any proabort who spends hour after hour reading and debating abortion and still refuses to see where abortion is taking our world, is lacking in the compassion department.
The road that sex-selection abortion alone is taking women and girls down, is absolutely horrifying. Freedom my rear.
Doug: “If there is a “self-centered” here, it’s on the part of people who would have their own desires trumping that of the woman who is the one pregnant.”
Yeah, just like those damn abolitionists getting in the way of property rights.
“No, no, because fetuses are in her body!” Well, so? Slaves are on the owner’s plantation. Same diff. At least the slaveowner gets some work out of his property. It’s a shame pro-choicers can’t figure out a way to put the fetus to work for ’em — maybe generating some kind of therapeutic hormones for a few months to improve the mother’s health, before aborting ’em once they’ve been useful, the parasitic little scamps…
xalisae says:
September 4, 2011 at 6:04 pm
I have a friend who had an abortion when it was illegal. She says, “Nothing and I mean nothing was going to stop me.” She has also said, “I just wasn’t going to complete the pregnancy.” She believes there is a chemical problem and that if certain brain chemicals don’t activate, the pregnancy itself is completely unacceptable. Sounds like mental illness. Even that your friend seems to want to blame her abortion on a biological process rather than her own will seems like mental illness. She should get some help.
(Denise) She had that abortion decades ago. She was 17 but says she didn’t face any kind of parental disapproval or stigmatization. Indeed, when she DID tell her mother she was pregnant, there was no “You’ve been such a disappointment” or scene like that. My friend didn’t let herself recognize she was pregnant until beginning her 4th month of pregnancy. She didn’t sit down and write out the pros and cons of “choosing” whether or not to continue the pregnancy. Instead, she immediately set out to abort. She went to a doctor who sexually molested her but ended up saying he wouldn’t do the abortion. She went to a second doctor in which the same thing happened. She was losing money and getting molested but she did not “even for one minute” consider completing the pregnancy. She insists that it was “the pregnancy itself” that she had to stop, the “swell and swell and swell and days spent in agony writhing and screaming and bleeding and tearing.” When she finally did tell her mother, Mom immediately borrowed money for an abortion and went to a doctor who did it. She says she had a few hours of cramps that were so mild they didn’t prevent her from falling asleep. After the saline killed the fetus, the doctor went in and took it out. Again, she faced to stigmatization or disapproval. It was the process of the pregnancy itself that she says she automatically rejected. She just wasn’t going to go through it.
Her explanation makes sense of some abortions that are otherwise hard to account for. Example: a doctor remembered a woman who came in and died from terrible complications from an illegal abortion. She was married to a wealthy man. As a married woman, she faced no stigma. As a wealthy woman, if she had had the baby, she could have turned its raising over to paid caregivers. Why would she risk her life to abort? The only reasonable explanation is that she couldn’t stand the condition of pregnancy itself.
Denise Noe says:
She insists that it was “the pregnancy itself” that she had to stop, the “swell and swell and swell and days spent in agony writhing and screaming and bleeding and tearing.”
Sounds like she was afraid of the birthing process and with her aversion to “swelling” perhaps she had body image issues or an eating disorder. You bring up this friend’s story quite often. What do you think it proves? Every woman that has had an abortion has her own story of why.
Doug says:
It all comes down to what we value the most.
So true. That’s the whole abortion debate summed up in one sentence. Some people value a woman’s bodily autonomy the most and some people value life most.
Lrning says:
September 5, 2011 at 10:06 am
Denise Noe says:She insists that it was “the pregnancy itself” that she had to stop, the “swell and swell and swell and days spent in agony writhing and screaming and bleeding and tearing.” Sounds like she was afraid of the birthing process and with her aversion to “swelling” perhaps she had body image issues or an eating disorder. You bring up this friend’s story quite often. What do you think it proves? Every woman that has had an abortion has her own story of why.
(Denise) Because the “why” in this case had nothing to do with the usual reasons for abortion. It had nothing to do with what might happen with a baby if she had birthed one. It also shows that adoption isn’t always an alternative. It obviously is not if the process of pregnancy itself is what the female is trying to stop.
The story is also relevant to the debate because there are other cases like the one of the wealthy married woman I cited that don’t fit into the usual paradigms. That married woman faced no stigma. She could have turned the raising of her child over to paid caregivers. Yet she lost her life in a terrible way in an illegal abortion. What could have been the reason — unless it was the pregnancy itself that she somehow found intolerable?
What could have been the reason — unless it was the pregnancy itself that she somehow found intolerable?
All you know about the poor woman is that she was married and wealthy. Why would you assume the only reason she would illegally abort the child is because she found pregnancy itself intolerable?
Perhaps her unborn baby was less than “perfect”.
Perhaps the father was not her husband and she thought she might get caught in an affair.
Perhaps she was deathly afraid of losing her perfect, girlish figure.
Perhaps her husband was abusive and she didn’t want him to have the satisfaction of having an heir.
Perhaps she was planning a long overseas trip and didn’t want to give birth in a foreign country.
Perhaps she believed the violent ruler of planet Zurloog was going to take over the earth and she didn’t want to bring a child into such horror and suffering.
The list of possible reasons could go on and on. But how does any of this justify the destruction of an innocent life?
Lrning says:
September 6, 2011 at 12:12 am
What could have been the reason — unless it was the pregnancy itself that she somehow found intolerable? All you know about the poor woman is that she was married and wealthy. Why would you assume the only reason she would illegally abort the child is because she found pregnancy itself intolerable?
Perhaps her unborn baby was less than “perfect”.Perhaps the father was not her husband and she thought she might get caught in an affair.Perhaps she was deathly afraid of losing her perfect, girlish figure.Perhaps her husband was abusive and she didn’t want him to have the satisfaction of having an heir.Perhaps she was planning a long overseas trip and didn’t want to give birth in a foreign country.Perhaps she believed the violent ruler of planet Zurloog was going to take over the earth and she didn’t want to bring a child into such horror and suffering. The list of possible reasons could go on and on. But how does any of this justify the destruction of an innocent life?
(Denise) The married, wealthy woman died a horrible, painful death. One of the physicians who attended her said it made him physically ill to watch as bruises appeared on her body as if she were being punched over and over from the inside.
Abortion was illegal. Its illegality didn’t save the woman’s fetus. It didn’t save my friend’s fetus. The only thing that could have meant the fetus being brought to term was the willingness of the pregnant female to CARRY it to term. Doesn’t that show that ensuring pregnancies are wanted must be the priority of anyone concerned about abortion?
How many abortions would be stopped if every female seeking one was required to look at a photograph of an embryo or fetus at her stage of pregnancy? Or, if blind, required to hear a description of what it looked like?
I support this mandatory disclosure.
Doesn’t that show that ensuring pregnancies are wanted must be the priority of anyone concerned about abortion?
This is why supporting women facing unplanned/unwanted pregnancies is so critical. With proper support, an unplanned pregnancy can turn into a wanted pregnancy. I’ve seen it happen. Women that are moments away from an abortion are shown the support that exists and they joyfully decide to choose life. This is why supporting the work of sidewalk counselors and CPC’s is so important.
Something about your use of the word “ensure” doesn’t sit right with me though. It’s not possible for us to “ensure” that all pregnancies are wanted. “Wanting” a pregnancy is an emotion. Emotions are not something that can be “ensured”.
Lrning says:
September 6, 2011 at 9:51 am
Doesn’t that show that ensuring pregnancies are wanted must be the priority of anyone concerned about abortion? This is why supporting women facing unplanned/unwanted pregnancies is so critical. With proper support, an unplanned pregnancy can turn into a wanted pregnancy. I’ve seen it happen. Women that are moments away from an abortion are shown the support that exists and they joyfully decide to choose life. This is why supporting the work of sidewalk counselors and CPC’s is so important. Something about your use of the word “ensure” doesn’t sit right with me though. It’s not possible for us to “ensure” that all pregnancies are wanted. “Wanting” a pregnancy is an emotion. Emotions are not something that can be “ensured”.
(Denise) Aren’t many unplanned pregnancies the result of the sexual exploitation of the female? If so, can’t we do much to prevent that?
All pregnancies are the result of a particular type of sex act. Can’t we influence females who don’t desire pregnancy to limit sexual expression to other types of — often more satisfying for the female — acts?
Can’t we encourage research into more effective contraceptives with fewer side effects?
I believe all of the above would diminish the number of abortions. It’s work that badly needs to be done.
“No, there are situations where not everybody agrees with you, X.”
Xalisae: And who gives a flip about consensus? Majority rule has excused some pretty heinous activities in the past.
Here is what was said:
Doug: “Likewise, prior to a point in gestation, while we can say “living human being,” that’s not the same as being “somebody” in the sense of mental awareness.”
Xalisae: Then let’s stop splitting hairs about “somebody” and just go all-out and protect every living human being, without discrimination! What a great idea, Doug! You should be proud of yourself for thinking of it!
“No, there are situations where not everybody agrees with you, X. Wartime, self-defense, abortion, etc. Your desire for “every living human being to be protected” is sometimes against the desire of the pregnant woman herself, and those who favor the woman deciding, herself.”
We were not talking about “every living human being.” We were talking about being mentally aware or not. It’s not “splitting hairs” any more than is noting the difference between being inside the body of the pregnant woman, or outside her body. This is not to say that those “have” to make a difference to you. The point is that they *do* make a lot of difference to a lot of people. Agreed that a consensus or majority “vote” won’t necessarily mean that you or I agree with it on a given issue. Just saying that viability/sentience/personhood/bodily autonomy, etc., are real issues here, with meaningful amounts of sentiment behind them.
____
“Wartime, self-defense, abortion, etc.”
X: One of these things is not like the others. One of these things just doesn’t belong…You’re comparing apples an oranges.
Not when we realize that they are all situations where the question of “is there a good enough reason for it” can come up. I realize that you don’t think that a woman’s bodily autonomy and/or her wishes make for a good enough reason for abortion to be legal, but vast numbers of people do, i.e. it’s a real issue – again, with meaningful amounts of sentiment on both sides.
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“True – it’s not only the characteristics of the baby we are concerned with, it’s also the other argument, the reason the abortion is desired.”
X: Then why all the hand wringing about “somebody”?
“Because the pregnant woman is undeniably somebody in that respect, somebody with desires and emotions, just like you, just like me. When it comes to whose opinion to let hold sway, I’m for having it be that of the pregnant woman herself.”
X: Ok. So, we’re not concerned with whether or not we are dealing with a “somebody” here…unless that “somebody” happens to be the pregnant woman. Then and only then do we give a flip. SEEMS LEGIT. 9_9
Wrong – we are indeed concerned with whether there’s a “somebody” there, and in the case of the pregnant woman, there is no doubt, there’s nobody even contesting it.
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X: I never was good at playing games in which other people make up the rules arbitrarily and change them on a whim as they deem necessary. I’m done see-sawing with you on this subject. *hops off the see-saw without warning you*
I’ve been consistent. I have not pretended that my feelings and opinions are somehow “external” or “absolute” in ways that cannot be proven. I haven’t said that certain things “have” to matter to you, but rather just noted that they *do* matter to many other people, which is true. As far as “changing things,” I’ve copied what was said, above, in an effort to stay on track, whereas you were the one making changes.
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“Granted that there was a living human organism there. But it was not mentally aware, it did not have emotions, personality, etc., prior to a point in gestation, and as far as me ever having those attributes, if my mom had had an abortion prior to a certain point, then what I said is true – there never would have been a “me” to know or care about anything.”
X: Speaking of your own self as an anonymous non-being: “it”…makes you sound absolutely like a raving insane person. Just so you know. Mental gymnastics…mental gymnastics…so amusing to watch the card castle crumble. That “it” was you, Doug. Does it make you uncomfortable to think of yourself in that way? So vulnerable, and with the worldview you espouse, at the mercy of your mother as to whether or not you get to live this life you’ve been given? Pretty harsh, huh.
No, not “harsh,” just true. Yes, there is a point in gestation prior to which the unborn don’t have mental awareness, etc. It’s not “mental gymnastics” to see that. Sure, the “living human organism” was what became “me,” or if we’re just going with that most-inclusive “human being” sense, then yes, it was me, but that does not mean that sentience, personality, etc., were there. It doesn’t make me uncomfortable to think of it – it’s just the truth.
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X: If I suffered massive head trauma today, and was utterly and irrevocably changed forever, I would still exist. I would be me.
Depends on what that trauma was. If you’re “brain dead,” after that, then we just plain disagree. Your body could be kept alive, but without your brain, without your personality, etc. – if there was just a “human being” being kept alive by having oxygenated blood pumped through the vessels, then I say that the person you were is no longer there. “Living human organism” still applies, but if the brain is gone, or even just the conscious parts of your brain were gone – then I say the person you were is long gone.
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X: “And aside from that, do you not enjoy knowing or caring about things now, so much so that you’re ambivalent to the thought of your mother having aborted you? Do you not think that this is a grand chance you’ve been given to experience the world, and that everyone should be as lucky as you simply to be alive on the same planet to exist? If you can feel that you appreciate your life and NOT be Pro-Life, you are the epitome of self-centered.”
“I’m not ambivalent, but that really does not matter. If a given person wants to end their life, would you then say that abortion is a good thing? The point stands – (regardless of what I think now) had my mom had an abortion prior to a point, there never would have been a “me” to know or care about anything. This is why I don’t see miscarriages as really a “sad thing” for the unborn. The sadness is in the born people who want the baby to live. A “grand chance”? No, not really – most pregnancies are willingly continued, so it’s not like it’s “rare” to be born. If there is a “self-centered” here, it’s on the part of people who would have their own desires trumping that of the woman who is the one pregnant.”
X: Why not, and why shouldn’t it? Seems to me that since you don’t think it matters, you’re ambivalent by default, regardless of what you say. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain…”
In the here and now, in my case I’m not ambivalent – on balance (despite all the ups and downs of life) I do want to live. I’m not “neutral” on living, thus I say I’m not ambivalent. I do enjoy knowing about things now, but my point is that had my mom had an abortion, I would have never had emotions, period. There never would have been a “me” like that. Why I said “that really does not matter” is because it’s true, regardless of how I feel now. You were asking me about my take on life, pursuant to the idea that abortion is a bad thing. Thus my question concerning somebody with a negative take on life – would that somehow make abortion a good thing?
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X: 9 years ago I was that pregnant woman, Doug, and my desire was to not be suffering through a crisis pregnancy, but to also realize that freedom also has responsibility, and it WAS NOT my “right” to end my daughter’s life just because if I’d had my druthers, I’d rather not have been pregnant right then under those circumstances. You act like you care so much about us, Doug, when we’re right here telling you that if you really respected us or gave a flying f about us that you’d want us to be decent human beings who wouldn’t kill the helpless, vulnerable children in our wombs depending upon us.
Okay, so you made your choice – you more wanted to continue the pregnancy than you wanted to end it, “crisis pregnancy” or not. That is fine with Pro-Choice and it’s fine with me. Your feelings don’t constitute somebody else’s “responsibility,” necessarily, but I would not advise you to do anything differently. There is also not one monolithic “you” as far as pregnant women, and within the group are many women who diagree with you – they’d say the did the best thing, that they’re glad they had an abortion in that situation, and that they’d do the same thing again in similar circumstances.
“That said, there is still the question of what extent the unborn are “others,”
Xalisae: Why should that even matter? Why can’t we just protect every living human being because they’re alive and a member of our species? Why should higher brain function have anything to do with which human beings we protect under the law at all?
“Because it’s not just all about the “raw numbers” for all of us, X. I’ve said this before – there can be more suffering in one child’s life (or, for that matter, in one adult’s life) than there may be in 10,000 abortions. When it comes down to your opinion about “every living human being” versus the opinion of the woman who is actually the one pregnant, many of us do not see the need to overrule what the pregnant woman wants, many of us don’t see the need for society to enforce your desire in the matter, over hers.”
X: So when the misery index gets above a certain number, kill your kids and shoot yourself in the head. SOUNDS LIKE A BRILLIANT PLAN! And what if that one aborted kid would’ve ended up winning the lottery and having the best life ever? Our bad! Oh well, at least it wasn’t us on the chopping block, amirite? (all this eye-rolling is giving me a headache. You owe me 2 excedrin and a glass of water)
I’ve already said that we cannot predict what will happen, exactly. There is still the question of empathy or not for the unborn prior to when they have emotions, mental awareness, etc. The idea of morals and ethics stems from us having a certain consciousness, in the first place. On “shooting yourself in the head,” if a given person’s suffering is enough, to the point where living for them is a net negative, then they’ll want to die. When the only consciousnesses involved are the pregnant woman and somebody else giving their opinion – regardless of what they are telling her, then since the woman is the one pregnant I give the nod to her.
Take it easy on those eyes. ;)
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OTHERS: pronoun 9.
Usually, others. other persons or things: others in the medical profession.
“Sure, and you know darn well that we all don’t agree on “person.” In fact, it’s due to personhood not being attributed to the unborn that has you dissatisfied with the current situation.”
X: Yeah. And 9 out of 10 inhabitants of an insane asylum don’t agree that they aren’t Abraham Lincoln. What’s your point?
Who fixed Abe’s Lincoln? To be serious – that the dictionary cannot be used to prove that the unborn are necessarily “persons” or “children.” At the very least there are senses of the words – just as valid as any other sense – that apply from birth to a later time.
Carla: One day maybe all of these conversations with have some effect on Doug’s beliefs and he will err on the side of life.
Who knows, Carla? :) Hope things are going well for you.
“It’s not necessarily “adult” to want to take away somebody else’s freedom.”
Praxedes: Having the legal right to kill your unborn child or support the killing of your unborn child will never make one free, Doug.
Well, P, it gets philosophical, there, including the meaning of “child.” To some extent, believe it or not, I agree with you – because there too we get into meanings of “free,” and with legal abortion then the original freedom I mentioned is already there – so (whether you think it should be there or not) going from that point forward there isn’t any “making one free” unless we delve into other meanings of the word.
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“the fetus cannot suffer, has no mental awareness at all, no emotions, no personality – there’s a “human organism” that is there alive, but I don’t see “somebody” there yet.”
I could say the same things about a few proaborts.
Yeah, you could, or you could say that about those who would be slaves, etc., and in both cases you’d be incorrect. To a point in gestation, what I said remains true.
Doug: “If there is a “self-centered” here, it’s on the part of people who would have their own desires trumping that of the woman who is the one pregnant.”
Rasqual: Yeah, just like those damn abolitionists getting in the way of property rights.
The slaves were sentient, mentally aware, had emotions, personality, etc.
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“No, no, because fetuses are in her body!” Well, so? Slaves are on the owner’s plantation. Same diff.
No, not the “same diff.” Bodily autonomy and liberty are not the same argument that was made for the slaveowners. Heck, if anything – they are the argument made for the slaves.
“It all comes down to what we value the most.”
Lrning: So true. That’s the whole abortion debate summed up in one sentence. Some people value a woman’s bodily autonomy the most and some people value life most.
Thanks, Lrning. My one disagreement is that it’s not just “value life,” but rather differing perceptions of the value of lives.
.
We were not talking about “every living human being.” We were talking about being mentally aware or not.
No, I am talking about “every living human being”. You and your ilk are a bunch of navel-gazing philosophers sitting around trying to legitimize the inexcusable, and set new criteria for “worthless feeders” and “the fit”, and I don’t play that game, Doug. Either you’re a living human organism-a living member of the human race-or you are not. If you are, and you’ve not had your due process and/or you are not an imminent threat to another living human organism’s life, no one has a right to kill you, and you deserve to have protection under the law, regardless of how your brain happens to be functioning at the moment, because face it, Doug, there is A SH-T TON of variation in cognition, and choosing that as your be-all/end-all criteria for what constitutes a human being who is “worthy” of legal recognition and protection is just freaking stupid. If you want to sit in your house and act like you’re better than some other humans because you have the f-ing superpower of full cognition, then great for you. You and your wife can sit there giving each other a$$ pats about how great and awesome you two are because you can ponder “Yes, but what does it mean?” all day, but that is not some awe-inspiring ability in my book. We should protect those of lesser ability than us simply by virtue of them being human beings such as we are. They shouldn’t have to legitimize their existence to us to keep us from killing them. We’re not savages, Dr. Manhattan.
This is the internet. This portion in this text block is MY internet. I do not allow discrimination in MY INTERNET. So you’re going to have to do better than “I can reckon, n’them thar yungin’s cain’t reckon nothin’ nohow, sos I say we can kill ’em!” only dressed up in philosophical jargon, euphemisms, and elegant prose. The message is no less stomach-turning and barbaric, regardless of the suit it wears or how you might try to paint it.
any more than is noting the difference between being inside the body of the pregnant woman, or outside her body.
Funny you should mention that, because it’s just as irrelevant. I don’t care if I lovingly craft my child into a jaunty chapeau and wear them about on my head-if I do something to that child that places them in danger or harms them, I should be held accountable by the government, whose job it is to protect those members of its society who are unable to protect themselves. This is not a difficult concept to grasp: “1.) Parents have an obligation to care for and provide for their children as long as they retain default custody. 2.) The gestating human being is a living human being. 3.) The gestating human being is a living human being which any DNA test will prove to you is the child of his/her parents, one of whom is (almost always) the pregnant woman.” put it all together, and you get Pro-Life, because we’re not a bunch of delusional hippies too worried about harshing some chick’s mellow to stand up for the child she’s about to kill.
The point is that they *do* make a lot of difference to a lot of people.
Well whoopty-freaking-doo for “a lot of people”. Did you miss the portion in history where “a lot of people” were slaveholders? Where “a lot of people” were Nazis? Where “a lot of people” helped homestead Indian lands and kill them wholesale? A lot of people thought the Earth was the flat center of the universe…Need I continue?
“OH, GOSH AND GEE-GOLLY, DOUG! I DIDN’T REALIZE THAT A LOT OF PEOPLE OPPOSE SCIENCE AND FACT! I’D BETTER IMMEDIATELY SUCCUMB TO BANDWAGON PROPAGANDA, CHUCK MY BRAIN AND EVERY BIT OF BIOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE I’VE AMASSED IN MY LIFETIME OUT THE WINDOW, AND BLINDLY FOLLOW EVERYONE WHO FEELS CERTAIN THINGS ARE ACCEPTABLE JUST BECAUSE SOMEONE SAID ‘FREEDOM’. I’D HATE TO NOT BE ONE OF THE HERD!!!!”
I suppose if “a lot of people” told you that jumping off the Eiffel Tower without a chute was the most awesome, and greatest kind of freedom a young pregnant woman could have, and that she wouldn’t be harmed, and no human being would lose their life in the process, then we should just look the other way. Why? Because…her freedom….desire…and stuff. Right? Yeah.
Agreed that a consensus or majority “vote” won’t necessarily mean that you or I agree with it on a given issue.
“consensus or majority ‘vote'” is a sh—y substitute for rational thought and morals, Doug. I feel sorry for you with your handicap. XD
but vast numbers of people do
Once again the appeal to the bandwagon. You realize that stopped working on me when I took Oral Communications in jr. high, right? Knowledge is power, Doug. You should really educate yourself. Then maybe what other people desire and mass appeal might lose some sway over you, and you can actually give this issue some real rational thought and scientific inquiry instead of just differing to the memory of that one chick who yelled “MY BODY, MY CHOICE!” at you that one time in the quad when they had that rally on campus which apparently scarred you for life.
(the bandwagon won’t save you from me, Doug. THEY CAN’T. *cackle*)
I realize that you don’t think that a woman’s bodily autonomy and/or her wishes make for a good enough reason for abortion to be legal, but vast numbers of people do, i.e. it’s a real issue
Oh, but upon closer inspection, there appears to be a typo here. Let me fix this for you:
“I realize that you don’t think that a woman’s bodily autonomy *has a single thing to do with wtf we’ve been talking about because you’ve been pregnant twice and know for a fact that women still have every bit as much control and say over their bodies and the same rights pre-and post pregnancy.” -fixed for ya.
“Because the pregnant woman is undeniably somebody in that respect, somebody with desires and emotions, just like you, just like me. When it comes to whose opinion to let hold sway, I’m for having it be that of the pregnant woman herself.”
X: Ok. So, we’re not concerned with whether or not we are dealing with a “somebody” here…unless that “somebody” happens to be the pregnant woman. Then and only then do we give a flip. SEEMS LEGIT. 9_9
Wrong – we are indeed concerned with whether there’s a “somebody” there, and in the case of the pregnant woman, there is no doubt, there’s nobody even contesting it.
Ok. So the intangible idea of “somebody” Doug and Pro-Choice relativistic eggheads have divined is the ultimate epitome of what it means to be a human being matters more than the physically provable properties and easily definable biological characteristics of what constitutes a human being in every science text I’ve ever read, because they said so. Why? Because it’s what pregnant ladies crave (bonus points if you can get the reference).
Oh, well, you should’ve said so sooner, because I will totally just roll over and accept that-o, wait-no I won’t, and the idea seems asinine.
By the way, “Horton Hears A Who”, as told by Doug, would be a really crappy book.
I have not pretended that my feelings and opinions are somehow “external” or “absolute” in ways that cannot be proven.
Yeah. There’s a reason for that. It’s because “it’s right because it feels right to them, man!” has all the substantiality of smoke rings, and although I’m sure it goes over well when the “many other people” consist of nothing but those wearing hemp sandals and tie-dyed shirts, but “feelings”, “opinions”, “desires”, and “emotions” go about as far with me as my car will travel on unicorn tears and fairy farts.
I am not making changes, because my position is based on solid, provable values rather than flighty ideas of intangible, quicksand notions of things like “viability” and “sentience” (our guidelines and theories about which are ever-changing as medical technology advances). My position is by far the most concrete, and you can say you’re not moving the goalpost all you please, but when the original position was signified by a balloon in the wind that you weren’t holding that you chose merely because you enjoyed the color…I’m not surprised you would make such a claim. lol
No, not “harsh,” just true. Yes, there is a point in gestation prior to which the unborn don’t have mental awareness, etc. It’s not “mental gymnastics” to see that. Sure, the “living human organism” was what became “me,” or if we’re just going with that most-inclusive “human being” sense, then yes, it was me, but that does not mean that sentience, personality, etc., were there. It doesn’t make me uncomfortable to think of it – it’s just the truth.
Then why was trying to get you to come out and say it like pulling teeth? :/
But no, Doug, it IS harsh. It is. Lucidity is fleeting, but death is forever, buddy, and saying “Sorry, Bill’s not here right now, but since he’s not feel free to destroy his belongings, kill his pets, and burn his house down. He’ll be back in about 9 months.”=HARSH.
By the by, “Sure, the “living human organism” was what became “me,” or if we’re just going with that most-inclusive “human being” sense, then…” =see all those twists and turns? That’s some mental gymnastical loop-de-loops! Wheeee! Nothing “became” you, Doug. “It” became Doug like I “become” Linda after having a cup of coffee in the morning. I am me. Sometimes I’m witchy, sometimes I’m giggly, and I’m always a wise a$$. There are not several Lindas that reside in my body which change out intermittently. I was an embryo, I was a fetus, I was an infant, I was a child, I was a teenager, and now I am an adult. When I was going through any of those stages in which I was capable of verbally expressing myself, I would’ve told you, “I’m Linda.” not “I am the immature human shell which is the physiology which will one day house the mature mental presence that is Linda on September 7, 2011.” Seriously, Doug. Carrying out your fanciful notions as far as they can go makes you sound like a nutcase. Really.
In the here and now, in my case I’m not ambivalent – on balance (despite all the ups and downs of life) I do want to live. I’m not “neutral” on living, thus I say I’m not ambivalent. I do enjoy knowing about things now-let’s finish this thought-“and f- everyone else, cuz I made it out safe.”
In the here and now, in my case I’m not ambivalent – on balance (despite all the ups and downs of life) I do want to live. I’m not “neutral” on living, thus I say I’m not ambivalent. I do enjoy knowing about things now, but my point is that had my mom had an abortion, I would have never had emotions, period.
And my point, that you won’t let yourself recognize, is (and since you’re not allowing yourself to be objective we’ll have to work in hypotheticals) that if you were that one brilliant man who invented a time machine, you went back in time to visit your mother who was pregnant with you and show her what an awesome dude she was pregnant with, and you found that she was scheduling an abortion, would you not try your damnedest to keep her from doing so? I’m not letting you wriggle out of this by saying “IRRELEVANT! NAH NAH NAH, I CAN’T HEAR YOU! IRRELEVANT!”
You were asking me about my take on life, pursuant to the idea that abortion is a bad thing. Thus my question concerning somebody with a negative take on life – would that somehow make abortion a good thing?
No. My point there was just that, you can’t really tell how anyone’s life is going to turn out, so please don’t kill them at a very early point in it. /shrug
Okay, so you made your choice – you more wanted to continue the pregnancy than you wanted to end it, “crisis pregnancy” or not.
Oh yay! It’s my favorite part of the Pro-legal-abortionist show!! I love this part! It’s the part where I’m told that no matter what I say, I actually secretly wanted to be pregnant with my daughter as evidenced by the fact that I did not kill her. It’s the part of the show that exemplifies how Pro-Legal-Abortionists cannot even FATHOM doing the right thing by one of your own children simply for their sake rather than worrying about your own well-being/wishes/desires/etc. I always enjoy this part of the show, because I think it is quite telling just how absolutely morally BANKRUPT it proves them to be since they can’t even comprehend not doing something that benefits you and doing something that benefits someone else with no ulterior motive whatsoever.
It’s not so bad though. I’ve known plenty of people who were morally bankrupt. I went to college, and most of them were my friends. I’m pretty fond of my lawyer as well. :P
There is still the question of empathy or not for the unborn prior to when they have emotions, mental awareness, etc. The idea of morals and ethics stems from us having a certain consciousness, in the first place. On “shooting yourself in the head,” if a given person’s suffering is enough, to the point where living for them is a net negative, then they’ll want to die. When the only consciousnesses involved are the pregnant woman and somebody else giving their opinion – regardless of what they are telling her, then since the woman is the one pregnant I give the nod to her.
Ok. And having been the pregnant one thinking “OMG MY LIEEFFFFFFFFFF IS OVAR!!!!” and then seeing my child born, I’m siding with her and every kid like her, because I know that pregnant women can get the f- over it and be fine, and I know that abortion would’ve killed HER (not some abstract floating sock puppet I imagined as her, but HER).
Take it easy on those eyes. ;)
You break ’em, you buy ’em, and I have to warn you, I’ve had them appraised by my fiance. ;P
Who fixed Abe’s Lincoln? To be serious – that the dictionary cannot be used to prove that the unborn are necessarily “persons” or “children.” At the very least there are senses of the words – just as valid as any other sense – that apply from birth to a later time.
Holy crap, “lift” can be a noun or a verb!
C’mon, Doug. Meanings of words are not mutually exclusive.
Doug! Doug! Stay down, man! It’s a knockout! If you try for more, I’m afraid you’re the one who won’t be sentient anymore!
Xalisae, as the mother of a daughter, how do you anticipate dealing with her sexuality when she reaches puberty? I’ve mentioned that I have a friend who is asexual and whose body “Just Said No” to the sexual feelings of puberty by arresting her at a hormonally pre-puberty level. Her condition is rare. It is likely you will have to someday deal with a female child who does have those feelings. In addition, the female adolescent — and young adult — is vulnerable to sexual exploitation due to a desire to be liked, cared for, appreciated and simply to have company.
Much of preventing problem pregnancies is about helping females avoid pregnancy without thwarting, repressing or warping them sexually but at the same time persuading them to express it in ways that are not harmful to themselves and others. This is not an easy thing to do by any means. We also need to address the inevitable desire of the adolescent girl and young adult woman to simply have a partner and to bond. We need to help them enjoy solitude and engage their alone time constructively.
Of course, your daughter might get pregnant — even as young as 13 or 12. How will you ensure that she will not be reluctant to tell you she is pregnant? How will you ensure she will not be reluctant to carry the pregnancy to term and give birth?
Would you be able to deal with it if your daughter became pregnant and told you she was not going to carry to term?
“We were not talking about “every living human being.” We were talking about being mentally aware or not.”
Xalisae: No, I am talking about “every living human being”.
Okay, but that is a different deal.
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You and your ilk are a bunch of navel-gazing philosophers sitting around trying to legitimize the inexcusable, and set new criteria for “worthless feeders” and “the fit”, and I don’t play that game, Doug.
It’s still the same argument, X. That’s like saying it’s inexcusable not to recognize the woman’s bodily autonomy and that she should be free to legally choose, either way.
Somebody could say that “you and your ilk sit around trying to enslave women…” When people resort to ad-hominem arguments, it’s usually a sign of a weak or unsupportable position.
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Either you’re a living human organism-a living member of the human race-or you are not. If you are, and you’ve not had your due process and/or you are not an imminent threat to another living human organism’s life, no one has a right to kill you, and you deserve to have protection under the law, regardless of how your brain happens to be functioning at the moment, because face it, Doug, there is A SH-T TON of variation in cognition, and choosing that as your be-all/end-all criteria for what constitutes a human being who is “worthy” of legal recognition and protection is just freaking stupid. If you want to sit in your house and act like you’re better than some other humans because you have the f-ing superpower of full cognition, then great for you. You and your wife can sit there giving each other a$$ pats about how great and awesome you two are because you can ponder “Yes, but what does it mean?” all day, but that is not some awe-inspiring ability in my book. We should protect those of lesser ability than us simply by virtue of them being human beings such as we are. They shouldn’t have to legitimize their existence to us to keep us from killing them. We’re not savages, Dr. Manhattan.
I’m not choosing it as the “be-all or end-all.” It’s one thing to be weighed, along with all you say, all of what pro-lifers say, all of what pro-choicers say, and all the pregnant woman says. “You and your wife can sit there giving each other a$$ pats..” :) Ha! That is great and you continue to give fired-up posts, X. No, we’re not “savages,” and that brings us not only to the contemplation of life, but also of freedom.
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This is the internet. This portion in this text block is MY internet. I do not allow discrimination in MY INTERNET. So you’re going to have to do better than “I can reckon, n’them thar yungin’s cain’t reckon nothin’ nohow, sos I say we can kill ‘em!” only dressed up in philosophical jargon, euphemisms, and elegant prose. The message is no less stomach-turning and barbaric, regardless of the suit it wears or how you might try to paint it.
I think you’re the one trying to “paint” things a certain way. What is here is really a straightforward comparison in how much we value the life of the unborn, or a given unborn baby, versus the liberty of the pregnant woman. Do we, as a society, really need to make it illegal for women to have abortions?
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“any more than is noting the difference between being inside the body of the pregnant woman, or outside her body.”
Funny you should mention that, because it’s just as irrelevant.
The point was that it wasn’t “splitting hairs.” It’s a real, meaningful argument.
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I don’t care if I lovingly craft my child into a jaunty chapeau and wear them about on my head-if I do something to that child that places them in danger or harms them, I should be held accountable by the government, whose job it is to protect those members of its society who are unable to protect themselves. This is not a difficult concept to grasp: “1.) Parents have an obligation to care for and provide for their children as long as they retain default custody. 2.) The gestating human being is a living human being. 3.) The gestating human being is a living human being which any DNA test will prove to you is the child of his/her parents, one of whom is (almost always) the pregnant woman.” put it all together, and you get Pro-Life, because we’re not a bunch of delusional hippies too worried about harshing some chick’s mellow to stand up for the child she’s about to kill.
That’s bypassing the question of personhood, etc. I’m not saying you are “delusional,” but that’s essentially you just stomping your feet and pretending that things “have to be” your way. They don’t.
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“The point is that they *do* make a lot of difference to a lot of people.”
Well whoopty-freaking-doo for “a lot of people”. Did you miss the portion in history where “a lot of people” were slaveholders? Where “a lot of people” were Nazis? Where “a lot of people” helped homestead Indian lands and kill them wholesale? A lot of people thought the Earth was the flat center of the universe…Need I continue?
How is that an argument? Lots of people used to be for abortion being illegal, too.
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“OH, GOSH AND GEE-GOLLY, DOUG! I DIDN’T REALIZE THAT A LOT OF PEOPLE OPPOSE SCIENCE AND FACT! I’D BETTER IMMEDIATELY SUCCUMB TO BANDWAGON PROPAGANDA, CHUCK MY BRAIN AND EVERY BIT OF BIOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE I’VE AMASSED IN MY LIFETIME OUT THE WINDOW, AND BLINDLY FOLLOW EVERYONE WHO FEELS CERTAIN THINGS ARE ACCEPTABLE JUST BECAUSE SOMEONE SAID ‘FREEDOM’. I’D HATE TO NOT BE ONE OF THE HERD!!!!”
Again, how is this an argument, X? It is not “science” or “fact” that is the debate, it’s that people disagree on what is best to do. Biology, science, etc., do not pronounce upon morality. The facts really are not at issue. There is the biological reality we are talking about, and then there are all our “shoulds” and “should nots.” The main fact that has you unhappy is that personhood is not attributed to the unborn. Looking back through history, sure – there has been slavery, off and on, good stuff, bad stuff, flat-earth theories, etc. Abortion has been both legal and illegal. But personhood for the unborn is a different deal – it’s never been the case. Not that it’s impossible that it will be, but it’s different in that the unborn are inside the body of a person.
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I suppose if “a lot of people” told you that jumping off the Eiffel Tower without a chute was the most awesome, and greatest kind of freedom a young pregnant woman could have, and that she wouldn’t be harmed, and no human being would lose their life in the process, then we should just look the other way. Why? Because…her freedom….desire…and stuff. Right? Yeah.
You can bring up any number of meaningless hypotheticals. Your approach, were you to think that was a good thing, would be to “stomp your feet” and maintain that everybody who thought differently was stupid.
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(the bandwagon won’t save you from me, Doug. THEY CAN’T. *cackle*) :) :)
Once again the appeal to the bandwagon. You realize that stopped working on me when I took Oral Communications in jr. high, right? Knowledge is power, Doug. You should really educate yourself. Then maybe what other people desire and mass appeal might lose some sway over you, and you can actually give this issue some real rational thought and scientific inquiry instead of just differing to the memory of that one chick who yelled “MY BODY, MY CHOICE!” at you that one time in the quad when they had that rally on campus which apparently scarred you for life.
No, I wasn’t appealing to the bandwagon. I’ve never said *my opinion* carries weight because a certain number of people agree with it. You’re putting words in my mouth and mischaracterizing what I’ve said. My point was that it’s not “apples and oranges,” that it’s a legitimate question and concern – and those remain true.
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“Because the pregnant woman is undeniably somebody in that respect, somebody with desires and emotions, just like you, just like me. When it comes to whose opinion to let hold sway, I’m for having it be that of the pregnant woman herself.”
X: “Ok. So, we’re not concerned with whether or not we are dealing with a “somebody” here…unless that “somebody” happens to be the pregnant woman. Then and only then do we give a flip. SEEMS LEGIT. 9_9”
“Wrong – we are indeed concerned with whether there’s a “somebody” there, and in the case of the pregnant woman, there is no doubt, there’s nobody even contesting it.”
Ok. So the intangible idea of “somebody” Doug and Pro-Choice relativistic eggheads have divined is the ultimate epitome of what it means to be a human being matters more than the physically provable properties and easily definable biological characteristics of what constitutes a human being in every science text I’ve ever read, because they said so. Why? Because it’s what pregnant ladies crave (bonus points if you can get the reference). Oh, well, you should’ve said so sooner, because I will totally just roll over and accept that-o, wait-no I won’t, and the idea seems asinine.
No – “ultimate epitome” wasn’t said or implied, and it’s not the issue, anyway. The physical reality of the unborn is not being argued. The issue is our perceptions of the good/bad/right/wrong in the moral realm, and what is best for us to do, as a society. Not saying you should “roll over,” etc. Not saying you or pro-lifers in general are stupid, illogical, uneducated, etc. If there is one thing I object to in your arguments, it’s that you pretend that pro-choicers are lacking, in that way. I’m not saying my opinion *has* to be reflected in law, nor that you have to agree or even that you necessarily should agree, given your beliefs and feelings. That would be unsupportable. You, however, do engage in some of that pretense.
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By the way, “Horton Hears A Who”, as told by Doug, would be a really crappy book.
So who are you, X? The Sour Kangaroo? ;) Come on – the residents of Whoville were sentient, mentally aware, had emotions, personality, etc.
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“I have not pretended that my feelings and opinions are somehow “external” or “absolute” in ways that cannot be proven.”
Yeah. There’s a reason for that. It’s because “it’s right because it feels right to them, man!” has all the substantiality of smoke rings, and although I’m sure it goes over well when the “many other people” consist of nothing but those wearing hemp sandals and tie-dyed shirts, but “feelings”, “opinions”, “desires”, and “emotions” go about as far with me as my car will travel on unicorn tears and fairy farts.
Nope – you’re going with your feelings, opinions, desires and emotions just as the rest of us are. However, you *are* proceeding as if your feelings are somehow “externally true,” and that is not correct.
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I am not making changes, because my position is based on solid, provable values rather than flighty ideas of intangible, quicksand notions of things like “viability” and “sentience” (our guidelines and theories about which are ever-changing as medical technology advances). My position is by far the most concrete, and you can say you’re not moving the goalpost all you please, but when the original position was signified by a balloon in the wind that you weren’t holding that you chose merely because you enjoyed the color…I’m not surprised you would make such a claim. lol
You’ve shifted the conversation around, at times, and that’s fine. I’ve never said your position on the issues has changed. Your position is no more concrete than mine, though. It’s still the same question of what we value the most.
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“No, not “harsh,” just true. Yes, there is a point in gestation prior to which the unborn don’t have mental awareness, etc. It’s not “mental gymnastics” to see that. Sure, the “living human organism” was what became “me,” or if we’re just going with that most-inclusive “human being” sense, then yes, it was me, but that does not mean that sentience, personality, etc., were there. It doesn’t make me uncomfortable to think of it – it’s just the truth.”
X: “Then why was trying to get you to come out and say it like pulling teeth? :/”
I’ve never disputed that nor failed to agree with it – the same biological organism is there all along, from conception. I’ve stated it many times. Three days ago, in this same thread, I said, “Granted that there was a living human organism there.”
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But no, Doug, it IS harsh. It is. Lucidity is fleeting, but death is forever, buddy, and saying “Sorry, Bill’s not here right now, but since he’s not feel free to destroy his belongings, kill his pets, and burn his house down. He’ll be back in about 9 months.”=HARSH.
It’s harsh to take away somebody’s liberty. How harsh is it to have a living organism die, before it ever gets to the point of wanting belongings, pets, a house, etc., versus not letting a woman with an unwanted pregnancy have a legal abortion? It’s a question.
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By the by, “Sure, the “living human organism” was what became “me,” or if we’re just going with that most-inclusive “human being” sense, then…” =see all those twists and turns? That’s some mental gymnastical loop-de-loops!
Not at all. There was a zygote, blastocyst, embryo, etc… At some later point there was a “me” as far as being sentient, mentally aware, having emotions, personality, etc. You and me right now – take out the conscious parts of the brain, while the bodies live (or are kept alive by medical means). There are still two “human beings,” there, sure, but as far as the people we were, the “Xalisae” and “Doug,” they would be long gone. My opinion.
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“In the here and now, in my case I’m not ambivalent – on balance (despite all the ups and downs of life) I do want to live. I’m not “neutral” on living, thus I say I’m not ambivalent. I do enjoy knowing about things now, but my point is that had my mom had an abortion, I would have never had emotions, period.”
And my point, that you won’t let yourself recognize, is (and since you’re not allowing yourself to be objective we’ll have to work in hypotheticals) that if you were that one brilliant man who invented a time machine, you went back in time to visit your mother who was pregnant with you and show her what an awesome dude she was pregnant with, and you found that she was scheduling an abortion, would you not try your damnedest to keep her from doing so? I’m not letting you wriggle out of this by saying “IRRELEVANT! NAH NAH NAH, I CAN’T HEAR YOU! IRRELEVANT!”
Yet again – how is that an argument? This is two different things. You’re now talking about my present desire to live, which I grant you is there. Yet if my mom had had an abortion, there would never have been a “me” with any desires, period. If my mom had an abortion in the past, then there would be no “me” to go back in time, obviously. Even aside from that – it would still bring up the obvious counter-question, that if I didn’t want to live, would that have made it a good thing that my mom had an abortion? I don’t think you’d say it did. So what would it matter how I now feel, even casting aside the fact that it’s a meaningless hypothetical?
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You were asking me about my take on life, pursuant to the idea that abortion is a bad thing. Thus my question concerning somebody with a negative take on life – would that somehow make abortion a good thing?
No. My point there was just that, you can’t really tell how anyone’s life is going to turn out, so please don’t kill them at a very early point in it. /shrug
Same as above, I guess. I realize we don’t know how a given “somebody” would turn out. But prior to there being a sentient “somebody” there as far as the unborn baby, what we have is your opinion versus that of a woman with an unwanted pregnancy.
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Okay, so you made your choice – you more wanted to continue the pregnancy than you wanted to end it, “crisis pregnancy” or not. That is fine with Pro-Choice and it’s fine with me. Your feelings don’t constitute somebody else’s “responsibility,” necessarily, but I would not advise you to do anything differently. There is also not one monolithic “you” as far as pregnant women, and within the group are many women who diagree with you – they’d say the did the best thing, that they’re glad they had an abortion in that situation, and that they’d do the same thing again in similar circumstances.
Oh yay! It’s my favorite part of the Pro-legal-abortionist show!! I love this part! It’s the part where I’m told that no matter what I say, I actually secretly wanted to be pregnant with my daughter as evidenced by the fact that I did not kill her. It’s the part of the show that exemplifies how Pro-Legal-Abortionists cannot even FATHOM doing the right thing by one of your own children simply for their sake rather than worrying about your own well-being/wishes/desires/etc. I always enjoy this part of the show, because I think it is quite telling just how absolutely morally BANKRUPT it proves them to be since they can’t even comprehend not doing something that benefits you and doing something that benefits someone else with no ulterior motive whatsoever.
Your opinion in no way is necessarily “the right thing.” I’m not saying that “secretly wanted” had to play any part. I will say that on balance you wanted to continue the pregnancy. You wanted to continue it more than you wanted to end it. It’s no more “morally bankrupt” to advocate the pro-choice side than it is to advocate the pro-life side.
“To be serious – that the dictionary cannot be used to prove that the unborn are necessarily “persons” or “children.” At the very least there are senses of the words – just as valid as any other sense – that apply from birth to a later time.”
Holy crap, “lift” can be a noun or a verb!
C’mon, Doug. Meanings of words are not mutually exclusive.
X, that’s not true as stated. Many, many definitions are descriptive, rather than being truly prescriptive. “Baby” can be applied to the unborn, but it can also mean newborn or recently born. Same for “child” – there is definitely the sense that means “between birth and full growth,” etc., as opposed to it applying before birth. Often, there indeed is mutual exclusion going on.
“It’s still the same question of what we value the most.”
Right. A year in prison is more valuable than being executed.
Seven months of knowing you are pregnant is more valuable than having your own child shredded like so much sushi.
Life is even more valuable than liberty.
That is a value that more than justifies xalisae “stomping her feet” about. And while she does that little dance around you, I for one will raise her hand. And you, my friend, are still lying flat on the canvas.
? for Xalisae: You believe the government should hold females “accountable” if they abort. What sort of punishment should be imposed? I believe that many might reply that the illegality of the abortion constitutes a punishment in itself. A representative of an abortion criminalization group was asked, “If abortion is illegal, who do you think should be prosecuted?”
“The abortionist,” he replied. He didn’t want the female punished because she is “also a victim.”
Do you believe that girls and women should face criminal penalties such as jail time?
Or do you think the illegality itself is holding the girl or woman “accountable”?
Denise:
as for your first question, I’d probably consult my youngest sister, as my parents did the best job with her. She’s staunchly pro-life, has been out of school for a long time, married, even, and has not had a pregnancy scare. So I’d ask her how to go about instructing my daughter in matters like that, as well as doing things I already know how to do, like encouraging her to set goals for herself and work hard towards them.
As for your second question, I’d suggest penalties identical to what one would expect to be given to a parent who hires or attempts to hire a hitman to kill their child, since that’s what abortion is, essentially.
I remember one time I was in the courtesy car from my dealership, riding to pick up my car after some work was done on it. We got into a discussion with a doctoral science student and the driver about embryonic stem cell research and pro-life items.
The doctoral student was very adamant that if the human life was not conscious, no problem using that ‘life’ because it was not aware. It wasn’t really human life then…
Since he had no idea about my background, I asked: ‘is awareness the best measure for value or life? If my husband wanted to kill me in my sleep, would that be ok?’ ‘uh – that’s not what I meant,’ he stammered. ‘I mean with doctors and science…’ he continued.
“ok – I just had my tonsils out, during my operation I was medically unconscious…. Was I human before the surgery, not human during, and human when I came out of anesthesia?’
‘Uh – that’s not what I meant,’ he said. “an embryo is small,’ he decided to continue – ‘nothing really human or valued at all.’
‘ok – so pretend I’m small – then is it ok for someone bigger, stronger to decide that I have no worth? Is it ok for a big human to pick on or hurt a little human? so if I was a parent, can I hurt a child?’
‘No – that’s not what I meant’ he said. I replied: ‘But that is what you stated logically. A person’s worth is not dependent on where he is, his consciousness or his size. If he is human, he has worth.’
Switching subjects, he stated: ‘I bet you hate illegal immigration and the poor. You must love the Bush-administration policies!’ I said ‘no – I love all humans – whether they are immigrants, poor or anything. And I don’t like the Bush policies.’
He was stumped.
For him, this made no sense – if you championed the unborn, then you must be racist; if you championed rights for all humans, then you must be cruel to the poor.
‘What kind of Republican are you?’, he stated. I told him ‘I was a serious practicing Catholic, that we valued all human life, have a duty to those less fortunate, and had a Christian outlook – not a Republican or Democratic one.’
I challenged him to value all humans, not just some, and that we should not use humans in any way that denied their innate dignity.
Needless to say, he left the car, (probably happily), and the driver said he agreed with me – and that young man had a lot of learning to do. I agreed.
We need to help women who feel that abortion is the way to solve their problems. If it’s housing, we should help with housing, education – help with education, relationship – get counseling or other support – but we should not help them kill their children.
Ending the life of a pre-born human via abortion doesn’t help those problems.
And human life is more than awareness, location, size, dependency or convenience. We are all worth much more than that. All of us, born and unborn.
xalisae says:
September 7, 2011 at 8:34 pm
Denise:as for your first question, I’d probably consult my youngest sister, as my parents did the best job with her. She’s staunchly pro-life, has been out of school for a long time, married, even, and has not had a pregnancy scare. So I’d ask her how to go about instructing my daughter in matters like that, as well as doing things I already know how to do, like encouraging her to set goals for herself and work hard towards them. As for your second question, I’d suggest penalties identical to what one would expect to be given to a parent who hires or attempts to hire a hitman to kill their child, since that’s what abortion is, essentially.
(Denise) Thank you for answering.
“It’s still the same question of what we value the most.”
Hans: Right. A year in prison is more valuable than being executed.
Probably, for most of us, yes. And that’s still the feeling of a sentient person. A sentient person that is not inside the body of another person, so right there are two big differences. If those differences were not present, we wouldn’t even be having the debate.
joyfromillinois says:
We need to help women who feel that abortion is the way to solve their problems. If it’s housing, we should help with housing, education – help with education, relationship – get counseling or other support – but we should not help them kill their children.
Ending the life of a pre-born human via abortion doesn’t help those problems.
And human life is more than awareness, location, size, dependency or convenience. We are all worth much more than that. All of us, born and unborn.
Amen. Beautifully stated.
xalisae says:
September 7, 2011 at 8:34 pm
Denise:As for your second question, I’d suggest penalties identical to what one would expect to be given to a parent who hires or attempts to hire a hitman to kill their child, since that’s what abortion is, essentially.
(Denise) It is remarkable that you would support penalties that would send girls and women who abort to prison for much of their lives. I don’t believe that’s ever been done in any modern Western society. The fact that pregnancy is considered a very special case is shown by the fact that when abortion is illegal, it is in fact usually the abortionist only who is prosecuted.
Prosecuting girls and women who abort and sending them to prison for long terms would also have to entail the building of many more female prisons than we now have. Indeed, were such laws rigorously enforced, a very large number of women would be imprisoned.
I don’t agree. I can’t remember where I first saw the study, but the last number I found said something like 80% of women going in for abortions when questioned said that if abortion were made illegal, they wouldn’t seek or attempt to obtain one.
If fetal humans ARE real, actual, living human being like you or I are, which they are, then they should be treated like it under the law, as well.
Abortionists can be prosecuted just like hitmen are prosecuted when they’re brought to justice.
Doug,
Sentient, schmentient.
Wikipedia: “the ability to feel, perceive, or be conscious, or to have subjetive expeeriences”…”the concept is central to the philosophy of animal rights, because sentience is necessary for the ability to suffer”.
Merriam-Webster:: 1. responsive to or conscious of sense impressions
2. aware.
I put it to you that little word “ability” should cover the entire lifespan of the creature in question. The more you allow him or her to grow, the more “sentient” he or she becomes. Any of us are “able” to win the lottery next year. If hit by a bus, we are not.
Go ahead and marginalize our relatives as “subhuman” or only “potential” sentient beings. The fact is that like any lifeform, they are able to react and feel from the earliest age. Just how “aware” they are is hard to measure even after birth.
But, unlike a rock or tree, just give them a little time and they’ll be currently as sentient as you’d like.
You’re just hiding behind this word, like the word “viable”, which – when you’re honeset about it, just means “harder to kill”.