Drowning = Pregnancy???

[Cybrweez]

Murrin, I have no idea. I don't know what I read from your post. I think I thought you were saying people were preventing access to contraception.

However, I see no reason to make a handful of unborn children suffer simply to keep some woman able to live her life irresponsibly.

Right, but those unborn children can suffer if we can't determine whether she can live her life responsibly. Uh-huh. Oh the tangled webs...

[Orlion]

Murrin, I have no idea. I don't know what I read from your post. I think I thought you were saying people were preventing access to contraception.

However, I see no reason to make a handful of unborn children suffer simply to keep some woman able to live her life irresponsibly.

Right, but those unborn children can suffer if we can't determine whether she can live her life responsibly. Uh-huh. Oh the tangled webs...

...that we weave

[Orlion]

sterilize them after the 2nd.

We should just sterilize all men, since they are the ones that impregnate women. Solve the abortion and overpopulation problem

Though ideally, the process could be reversed if children were wanted... after a long, paperwork-filled, time. Then, once the child or two is had, sterilization again!

[Hashi Lebwohl]

We should just sterilize all men, since they are the ones that impregnate women. Solve the abortion and overpopulation problem

A vasectomy is considerably less invasive than a tubal ligation, especially if the simple "snip and stitch" procedure is used. The procedure is also relatively low-cost and takes very little time.

Perhaps we should start educating young men at the age of, oh, 15 about reversible vasectomy and how this can dramatically reduce the risk of accidental pregnancy. They can have the reversal later on when the desire for children arises, as you note.

I like this idea.

[Orlion]

We should just sterilize all men, since they are the ones that impregnate women. Solve the abortion and overpopulation problem

A vasectomy is considerably less invasive than a tubal ligation, especially if the simple "snip and stitch" procedure is used. The procedure is also relatively low-cost and takes very little time.

Perhaps we should start educating young men at the age of, oh, 15 about reversible vasectomy and how this can dramatically reduce the risk of accidental pregnancy. They can have the reversal later on when the desire for children arises, as you note.

I like this idea.

Thank you. It does take two to tango after all, and for every 'irresponsible young lady' there's an equally 'irresponsible young man'.

[High Lord Tolkien]

Omfg! Not again

[wayfriend]

So while clever, it's bull. Just sayin'.

Interesting. I don't see anyone here claiming pregancy and drowning are the same.

What I see is someone demonstrating how rediculous is the "you are not allowed to mitigate risk" approach to risk management, by applying it in another, familiar situation. Sometimes taking the A away from the B so that you only see the A helps make things clear.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

Thank you. It does take two to tango after all, and for every 'irresponsible young lady' there's an equally 'irresponsible young man'.

Not only that, but sometimes it is is irresponsible young man who encourages the young lady to act irresponsibly in the first place.

[Rawedge Rim]

So while clever, it's bull. Just sayin'.

Interesting. I don't see anyone here claiming pregancy and drowning are the same.

What I see is someone demonstrating how rediculous is the "you are not allowed to mitigate risk" approach to risk management, by applying it in another, familiar situation. Sometimes taking the A away from the B so that you only see the A helps make things clear.

And yet it is still crap.

Sex is biologically built into most living beings to ensure that the species continues, usually through the production of young.

Water is not biologically built to drown us.

The life preserver metaphor would possibly be birth control that prevents the formation of a fertilized egg, thereby mitigating the adverse effects of risky behavior. An abortion however basically is taking the life jacket off someone else so you can float, and they can drown.

[[Syl]]

You can go your whole life without sex (so they say). Try going a day without water. You can have sex, even unprotected, without having kids, but you can't breathe in water and not drown. When it comes to biology, I think water wins.

[Avatar]

Syl doesn't dance.

Cybr, I'm not sure what you mean. I support animal rights, to an extent (namely, to the end of my fork, much to my vegetarian better half's chagrin). I'm "pro-choice," but I think I have a rather positive view of life.

Hahaha. I don't dance...my better half is a vegetarian (I am most emphatically not), and of course I'm pro-choice with a positive view of life IMO.

Wow--I thought I was the only one who argued for sterilization after a third non-medically-necessary abortion. It is good to know I am not the only one who arrived at that conclusion.[/color]

Yea, I think you and I are the only ones I've ever seen introduce it into a debate...

I've always been a proponent of mandatory reversible sterilisation at puberty. Want kids? Pass a test to get your sterilisation reversed.

--A

[deer of the dawn]

Erm.

Drowning results in death. Pregnancy results in life. etc.

Stillbirth? Death in childbirth? Also, as someone who survived drowning as a child, I am here to testify that it doesn't always kill you.

See, this is the problem with generalizations...

But it burns within me that lives are torn apart and thrown into the trash as an everyday occurrence.

What burns *me* is that pro-lifers have put "the pre-born child" on a pedestal, thereby making its rights more important than at least half of the existing population -- and at the same time, not caring about the child's post-birth quality of life at all.

So it's much better to kill them because they might not have a good life. That argument never worked for me.

Why is "pre-born child" in quotes? Is it actually something else?

There is no "pedestal", the rights of the child to live are, in fact, equal to the mother's right to live. (And definitely supersede the mother's (and her boyfriend's) right to convenience.)

"It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish."

Pregnancy results in maternal death 0.000151% of the time in the US; stillbirths are at 0.00433; but abortion results in death to the fetus 99.999999% of the time (yes there are those few botched abortions where the child survives). It is nearly impossible to know how many women die from abortion due to many reasons (medical coders refuse to assign it as a COD), but a top OB/GYN journal says abortion maternal deaths are 3 times higher than women who carry to term. Aliantha, your concerns are misplaced. Pregnancy is not generally dangerous; probably less dangerous than swimming.

[deer of the dawn]

By the way, I have not jumped on the "mandatory sterilization" bandwagon-- though I'm giving it some thought. Actually, castration would solve the rape problem at the same time...

[Cail]

But it burns within me that lives are torn apart and thrown into the trash as an everyday occurrence.

What burns *me* is that pro-lifers have put "the pre-born child" on a pedestal, thereby making its rights more important than at least half of the existing population -- and at the same time, not caring about the child's post-birth quality of life at all.

So it's much better to kill them because they might not have a good life. That argument never worked for me.

Ali's argument is similar to the Progressive reasoning for eugenics, though the Progressives were less concerned about the child and more concerned about society as a whole.

But, of course, the faulty logic is the same. If Ali truly believed her argument, she'd be crusading to have mandatory abortions for everyone below the poverty line, and retroactive abortions for children of the poor. Hell, a competent lawyer could probably use the Buck v. Bell ruling (a landmark SCOTUS decision for the Progressive movement) to justify those abortions.

Just think of all the undesirables we could get rid of!

Edited to add - I'm not saying that Ali is pro-eugenics (I have no idea where she stands on it, but I'd guess she'd say she's against it). But there's not a lot of difference between the quality of life argument for abortion, and the quality of life argument for eugenics.

[Cybrweez]

Yea, you always wind up w/that faulty logic when supporting abortion. Even hashi, who's never wrong, is inconsistent in his view, and that's saying something. Except maybe Av, I think he's ok w/killing born children, so he's a bit more consistent.

RR, nice job, luv your take on the analogy. Put it in big letters and maybe you can get it going viral too.

[[Syl]]

If it really was that simple, you'd think abortion would be outlawed in the U.S. and the rest of the world.

See, that's what I don't get about this. As much as I detest abortion clinic bombers and the like, I have to respect them. If I thought people were murdering innocent children—babies—in an almost factory-like manner, especially within my own country, I'd be strapping on a couple ammo belts and waging war on some MFers. It'd be like living in Nazi Germany next to a concentration camp and shrugging your shoulders as you see the trains roll in. By offering little more than lukewarm protest, aren't you putting your own welfare and convenience over the lives of these unborn? Sure, you can say it's not your child, not your responsibility, but that's what they say, if for different reasons. If the responsibility doesn't lie on the shoulders of those with the conscience to acknowledge the wrong, what good is conscience?

Face it. That's just the way of humanity. When the masks drop from the overhead, we put it on ourselves first. Before abortion, the answer was exposure (and still is in the rare prom or alley baby story). Romans left unwanted children at the crossroads, either to be picked up by someone who wanted a kid (usually for slavery) or left to die. Legally. Spartans (and many, many other cultures) left the sickly or, often, female babies in the wild. Throughout history, people have done what they need to do, and it's not like people just started liking their children recently. We admire the people who save the kids from a burning building or sinking car at the cost of their own life, but most of us are just happy consoling the grieving parents who couldn't.

No, where contraception fails, either through the known percentages or in practice, I think abortion is a better answer. Less time for this being to accrete awareness, personality, and entanglement with the lives of others that we generally understand to signify and give significance to life (and without these things we generally do not grieve).

As I've said before, when the society is in place to nurture and deliver these unwanted children, much less put them into loving homes, we can reevaluate. When more protesters carry signs saying "I will love and support that which you do not want" rather than righteously proclaiming the superiority of their viewpoint, maybe we can reassess that being human or alive, even when we agree that these bars have been met, is worth jack shit.[/rant]

And that's all I have to say about that.

[Orlion]

Yea, you always wind up w/that faulty logic when supporting abortion. Even hashi, who's never wrong, is inconsistent in his view, and that's saying something. Except maybe Av, I think he's ok w/killing born children, so he's a bit more consistent.

RR, nice job, luv your take on the analogy. Put it in big letters and maybe you can get it going viral too.

Not at all. Just because you reject the principle postulate that arguments supporting abortion accept does not make it faulty logic. It would be like me saying arguments against abortion always wind up with faulty logic because clearly that group of cells is not a living autonomous being and lacks hopes, dreams, desires, and personality. I could then continue to say that personifying the fetus is just plain silly. Might as well personify the good a tree could have done if only you did not chop it down. It could have cured cancer!

Both sides start from a point of speculation, neither one of which has any more solid backing than the other. To say that the other side has 'faulty logic' simply because you do not share that same initial speculation is just silly.

Incidently, this has nothing else to do with the 'better to have never existed then to have existed in the Projects' argument. It's one I would not now make, which makes me believe that my initial speculation and ali's may be different.

[wayfriend]

Abortion rights are about the rights of a woman to decide what happens to her body, and whether those rights are more important than other rights.

As soon as you let people frame the argument as whether or not it's okay to kill babies, you are now having a different and irrelevant argument. Winning that argument means nothing.

Since this is a topic about counter-examples: we Americans have a right to free speech, but not when it creates a danger to the public. Imagine two people arguing about whether or not public safety is more important than free speech. If you let someone take the public safety out of the argument, and turn it into an argument about whether free speech is good or bad, what are you accomplishing? You can conclude free speech is good -- but you haven't answered the question.

Similarly, if you take the women's right to privacy and her own body out of the argument, and you take the first trimester out of the argument, what argument are you really having? Not one that bears on abortion rights. Abortion rights are about if a woman's right to privacy and her right to her own body exceed the right to life of a baby in the first trimester. You can say killing babies is wrong ... but that's not the question.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

Even hashi, who's never wrong, is inconsistent in his view, and that's saying something.

Part of my apparent inconsistency is that I am trying to balance the rights of the adult females to choose to have an abortion versus my suspicion that some will use it as "birth control of last resort" merely to keep their life convenient and uncluttered with responsibility. Of course, that whole "manadatory sterilization" idea is completely the opposite of my usual Libertarian views--it is probably the most draconian opinion I have.

Perhaps I should quit trying to balance my views. If I choose that path, then I would support mandatory but reversible sterilization of all males at the age of 16; when a couple wants to have a child later on then he can get the reversal. This should remove the question of abortion almost completely...but it might make the instances of rape increase--some men might be more likely to rape when they know that no child will occur as a result. It will defeinitely result in more promiscuous behavior and thus the instances of STDs will increase. Still...STDs are preferrable to abortion.

The other reason for my apparent inconsistency is that personally I dislike abortion even though I support it because I believe in personal freedom. I also believe in personal responsibility--if both the male and the female take appropriate precautions beforehand, the likelihood of pregnancy is reduced to the point where it is statistically improbable.

In short, if you choose to ruin your own life then that is your choice and I support you in it. If a woman gets pregnant, though, then she shouldn't be allowed to ruin someone else's life for the sake of convenience. Rape and incest, although rare, and different--we should not subject the woman to the emotional scars every time she looks at the child that resulted.

It is definitely complex. This is leading me to support the idea of "snip at 16" for males--it is the most practical solution to the problem and, as noted, removes the question of abortion almost altogether.

[wayfriend]

Part of my apparent inconsistency is that I am trying to balance the rights of the adult females to choose to have an abortion versus my suspicion that some will use it as "birth control of last resort" merely to keep their life convenient and uncluttered with responsibility.

A familiar argument. It's like wondering if free speech is okay because you think someone will use it to say hateful things, or if the right to own firearms is okay because you think people might kill people with guns, etc. Should rights be based on whether you think people will use them in ways you don't agree with?