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Originally Posted by filtherton
You missed the point of what I said. I don't think anyone for a minute forgot that sperm is necessary for the conception of a child. The point I was making was that men can't carry a pregnancy to term, and that because of this biological fact, there can fundamentally be no "equality" or "fairness" to be found on the subject of male input into a woman's decision to carry a child to term.
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It seems to me that even though you said you
hadn't forgotten that sperm is necessary for the conception of a child, you did just that. You argue, "Sorry men. Even though you contribute half of the genetic material towards the creation of a child, it's not your body, so you get no say-so regarding its well-being nor do you get a say-so regarding your parental contribution towards the welfare of that future child", instead of "Sorry women. Even though it's your body, you only contribute half of the genetic material towards the creation of a child, therefore you only get half of the say-so regarding its well-being and only your half in the say-so regarding parental contributions towards towards the welfare of that future child".
Please tell me, which of these two situations is more "equatable":
1.) You contribute half of what's required to create to new individual, yet based on your gender you either get unilateral decision making power of which the other gender is legally bound by or you get absolutely no decision making power at all and are forced to go along with whatever the other gender decides. Or
2.) Either you give each gender the ability to make the other forcibly operate against his or her will-- The same way a woman can force a man into fatherhood and taking care of a child he might not want, a man should be able to force a woman into motherhood or taking care of a child she might not want--
Or you make it so that neither gender can forcibly make the other operate against his or her will-- The same way a man can't force a woman into motherhood nor parental responsibilites, a woman can't force a man into fatherhood or parental responsibilities.
THAT would be equatable, and far more equatable then the situation you advocate.
And, no, that's not an oversimplification. That's what it is.
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It's not that simple, but I could see why you'd like it to be. "Fetal defects" don't necessarily affect the mother's physical health, so I'm not sure why you'd include those in your definition of "purely elective", since, you know, you're an expert on the medical definition of the term "elective".
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Because, as I said the first time, a therapeutic abortion is an abortion performed for a medical reason, which include risks to the mother's health and fetal defects, whereas an elective abortion are those abortions performed simply because the mother wants them, to put it mildly.
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Post partum depression can have ridiculously severe effects on a woman's mental and physical health. Does that mean that the prospect of PPD is sufficient to nudge that abortion into the nonelective category?
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Therapeutic. And "abortions to save the mental health" of the mother are rather dubious distinctions within themselves. Very dubious.
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I'm sure the words "purely elective" mean something, but in the context of what you said, they don't amount to much more than an attempt to sound more authoritative. And in any case, I doubt you'd find a medical professional who used the term with the casual certainty you displayed. I bet more than a couple lawyers have made a pretty penny arguing different sides of the definition of "elective."
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It means exactly what I said it means: Abortions performed for medical risks, either to the mother or the fetus, are deemd therapeutic abortions. Abortions for any other reason are deemed elective abortions. It's rather simple, really. There's no need for you to try to overcomplicate things for whatever reason.
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Calm down. You didn't directly reference birth control. What you did do is attempt to tie instances of repeat abortion to some sort of nebulously defined notion of "irresponsibility." I'm not sure why, given the fact that you clearly think that all abortions are irresponsible.
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The notion of responsibility, no matter how much you try to argue otherwise, isn't all that "nebulous".
If I buy a goldfish and later decide that I don't want to take care of it, I doubt there is anyone alive who would call me flushing it down the toilet to be the "responsible" choice. If I buy a cat or a dog, and later decide that I don't want to take care of it, I doubt there is anyone alive who would call me leaving them on the side of the road to be the "responsible" choice. Hell, if I have a kid, and after a month I decide I don't want to take care of it, I doubt there is anyone alive who would call me running out on it to be the "responsible" choice. See where I'm going with this? Abortion rids the person of the object of which-- Under normal circumstances-- They would have a duty to provide for by killing it. That action is fundamentally
no different than any of the aforementioned actions and, unless you're going to label them all as "responsible" choices, then the basis upon which you claim abortion to be the "responsible" choice is deeply, deeply, deeply flawed.
But I'd
love to see how you're going to construe that as being "responsible". I really would. Go ahead. Amuseth me.
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I think that you got so caught up in trying to dress your emotional and completely subjective opinion on the irresponsible nature of all abortions in pretty numbers and technical lingo that you forgot that your perspective exists completely independently of anything other than emotionally charged, pedantic notions of human biology.
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There's no "emotional, subjective, technical or pedantic" lingo here.
No matter what way you try to dress it up, the fact of the matter is that you're calling the deliberate killing of another human-- Most often times because the woman doesn't
want to take care of it-- To be a "responsible" choice, given the nature of sex. Stop and think about that one for a moment.
...And now that you've stopped to think about that one, rationalize it for me, please.
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Your notions of irresponsibility have nothing to do with how many times a person gets an abortion. Clearly, the vast majority, if not all, abortions are irresponsible as far as you're concerned. In light of this fact, I understand how you thought I was straw-manning you.
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Clearly, all abortions can't be irresponsible since not all abortions are elective abortions; only the vast majority of them. But, moving on, you will notice that nowhere did I say that the irresponsibility of abortion was tied to how many abortions a woman has, but rather that having an abortion once because it's to her convenience to have one to be irresponsible, and having multiple abortions because it conveniences her to be grossly irresponsible. There's a big difference between that and what you're claiming I wrote out. A very big difference.
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I guess I was confused by the fact that in your previous post you seemed to try to base this position on statistical data. I responded as if your perspective was based on something other than a completely self-serving, trivial interpretation of the data. Your reference to repeat abortions threw me off, since the only statistic you were actually concerned with was the one confirming that the abortion rate is greater than zero. Mea culpa.
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There was no possible way to be confused and my posts since they were, quite honestly, cut and dry. Even though you'd like to believe so, they were neither "self-serving" nor "trivial"-- Only the most hardened of PC'ers would believe so. It represents, as I said in an earlier post which you ignored, a complete breakdown of the whole "safe, legal and rare" rhetoric, as they are anything but rare (And abortions in the U.S. have been safe for decades pre-RvW, but that's off-topic), being the most common procedure in the United States. There is
nothing responsible about killing the product of sex because it conveniences you, nor anything about doing it repeatedly because it conveniences you. Applied anywhere else to anything else, someone continuously doing something of which they're not willing to accept the consequences of would be deemed as irresponsible, and with good reason. It's amazing how many PC'ers try to treat abortion as an exception to the rule, rather than following the rules as everything else.
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If you really do hate straw men, I suggest that you quit attempting to frame your ideas in disingenuous ways. In doing so, you will make it easier for people to respond to what you actually think.
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I believe I said this before, but there's nothing "disingenuous" about the way I "frame my ideas".
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I agree. I also think that choosing to remove a loved one from life support obviously can't be that hard a decision to make either, since that occurs with such incredible frequency... Why, I know people who have had to do it twice!!! I bet they laughed the whole time.
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Because removing someone from life support = Having an abortion, right? RIGHT??? Now this is most definitely a straw man.