Willravel

I am become threadjack, destroyer of conversations.

pig

Re: the abortion bit of this thread:

All I can think as I read this is the following:

"Prove it."

Until such time, we're arguing values. As such, it always comes down to value of the (as far as the scientific community can agree) hypothetical potential "human" life ascribed to a fetus, vs. the value to the woman who doesn't want to be a mother, for whatever reasons she doesn't want to carry the fetus to term. It can be shown that a fetus is a living thing, just like cauliflower and organs and many other things...what can't be shown is that it s a separate human life form. If you can prove this, beyond a shadow of doubt, please share because you will change my view on the matter.

Assuming you can't prove this, we're left in a situation where we're arguing over possession of a living entity which at the very least has the potential for human life after birth. The question then becomes, via will's thread OP...who does that potential life form belong to? Man, or woman? In my opinion, it's not perfect, but the preponderance of the evidence would suggest the woman has most at risk in the pregnancy and birth process, so she gets to make the decision. It's not perfect. Maybe "Dad" bought a cute little outfit for his new little treasure to wear. All I can say is "tough shit." I wouldn't like it if I were in that situation, but there are a ton of things I wouldn't like if my wishes didn't line up with those of my girlfriend / wife-to-be / wife. I'm not convinced that a fetus has a soul, and that seems to be crux of the matter, ergo foolthemall's stalemate. Everything after this is pure semantics and personal ethics. When ethics clash in personal relationships...fundamental ethics....look out for squalls.

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You don't love me, you just love my piggy style

filtherton

Well, the problem with examining the underlying assumptions that inform our perspectives is that they rarely exist completely within the scope of the subject at hand. Threadjacks are inevitable and can be important and useful.

FoolThemAll

But it's not a bacterial infection.

There's gotta be some elaboration here you left out. I don't think you meant to construct an argument that could be demolished with nothing but the above six words.

The problem here is not science. The problem here is language.

I can easily show you that it's a separate human life form. Watch: it's an organism with human DNA and the embedded, self-contained potentiality of each of the necessary vital organs associated with human beings. And it requires no additional blueprint - only additional sustenance - to reach that point.

Thus, it's obviously a separate human life form. It fits the definition.

"No, it's obviously NOT a separate human life form. Your definition's all wrong."

Oh? And what objective, empirical process did you use to arrive at the correct definition?

...yep. The science is on my side. And it's on your side as well. Because the real quibble is not over facts, but over moral interpretations of those facts. The real question is this: why should/shouldn't we value that clump of cells?

And no laboratory experiment is going to give either side the answer. It isn't a matter of science. It isn't a matter of demonstration. You can't show value. You can only allude to it and stubbornly fight for it without the benefit of being able to 'show' it. Which is what we all do.

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I wonder if we're stuck in Rome.

Plan9

You're absolutely correct. You can't debate the science but everybody argues the morality / legality. OH NOES. Men always lose in this debate.

Science isn't something that tells us that people walking around who work 9-to-5 are more important than a clump of cells hanging out on a uterus wall.

We are not "beautiful and unique snowflakes." A fetus is even less than that because it hasn't even started yet. The only value it has is MAYBE to its creators.

...

What is all this old and holy "sanctity of life stuff" and how do I wrap my head around it?

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Whatever you can carry.

"You should not drink... and bake."

FoolThemAll

Legality's a dumb little logical circle to argue. Alas, there's way too many "the difference is that rape is illegal, duh" arguments that really ought to be aborted.

Men only 'always lose' this debate in the minds of those who willfully ignore the very point of the pro-life position.

And if an evil nazi tells me I have to choose between the life of a Safeway employee and the life of a future Safeway employee, I'll surely choose the bigger clump of cells.

But we're not talking about life versus life, or who gets to get into that all-exclusive club. We're talking about life versus nine months of imperfect health, significant discomfort, and lessened mobility. The relevance of that human life ceases to be relevant in such a lopsided choice. Life, obviously, for the win.

And yet I don't have free reign to kill orphaned reclusive homeless. You need not give a human life value for it to deserve protection from your deadly indifference.

Plus, the analogy only works if snowflakes 'start' nine months after their formation.

Ignore, for a moment, your thoughts on abortion and focus on your less charitable thoughts toward other types of murder. Like, for instance, the murder of a woman following a rape. Note your revulsion: that's the sanctity of life stuff in you.

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I wonder if we're stuck in Rome.

Plan9

I've seen the human byproducts of murder. Sweet baby Jeebus in Jersey don't suggest that offing a clump of cells in some woman's penis-receptacle is murder to me. Murder is a body stuffed full of explosives turned into a roadside bomb. Murder is a rifle bullet bouncing off a femur and ripping a man's chest in half. Murder is how brains smell when they're painting the inside of a truck cab after an ambush. Murder is strictly bipedal and insane-red and stinks like shit and makes damn sure you don't forget the taste.

...

Abortion isn't murder. It's excising a fucking tumor. It's hitting the RESET button on her crotch. No way a man will ever be in charge of that option.

Unless, of course, we decide that we need every last fetus to survive. That's how men really stick it to women. By leaving them only ONE option.

...

Meh, politics is something I should stay away from.

Honestly, I'm not smart enough for the topic.

I don't belong in this thread, anyway.

Sorry, Will.

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Whatever you can carry.

"You should not drink... and bake."

FoolThemAll

I didn't suggest. I said it outright.

Murder isn't always exceptionally vicious or exceptionally gory. Murder isn't always a deep emotional imprint on your mind.

While pro-life/anti-choice ideology surely has some misogynists among its ranks, misogyny is not by any stretch a prerequisite.

I don't see anything wrong with your posts in this thread. They have that Crompsin charm that I can't even dream of replicating. Understand, your opinion is wrong , but you're expressing it just fine.

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I wonder if we're stuck in Rome.

host

Cancer cells do, malignant tumors are comprised of them.

Willravel

Cancer cells and tumors aren't parasites.

Parasites are alive, btw.

filtherton

Lettuce is alive too.

Willravel

And if lettuce were a person, you couldn't kill it. It's alive, it's homo sapien. Where is the confusion? Or are we saying it's not alive and thus it's not a parasite.

TOUCHDOWN!

abaya

Ah, just what we needed... another thread debating the ethics of abortion.

Why is this necessary? What happened to the OP?

__________________
And think not you can direct the course of Love;
for Love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
--Khalil Gibran

pig

will, abaya, fta crompsin et al: that's the exact question. prove it. otherwise, we're just swirling shit around. ustwo was exactly correct 4 pages ago. this whole argument is a secondary argument to the ultimate question of the ethics of abortion in general. only after that has been decided, in regards to the status of the fetus, can this argument be anything other than posturing and putting together a personal ethics that has embedded within it the way a particular person feels about the fetus. the rest of this is nice, but it can't be proven one way or the other.

so you want a potential daddy's rights? well, i think he has the right to decide who he sleeps with, and to live with her choices. for instance, i'm pro-choice, my girlfriend is pro-life. hypothetically, if she were to get pregnant by me, i'd be a father more than likely. that's the way it is. i wouldn't try to force her to get an abortion. if she wanted an abortion, i would support her. i am unconvinced that fetuses have a 'soul,' nor do i truly know what the fuck a 'soul' is...do you? can you prove it?

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You don't love me, you just love my piggy style

abaya

That's what I was trying to say in my 2nd-to-last post. Them's the breaks, when you're the one with the semen squirting out of you into an always-potentially-fertile receptacle. No two ways around it.

__________________
And think not you can direct the course of Love;
for Love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
--Khalil Gibran

filtherton

If lettuce were a person it would be perfectly acceptable to remove it from life support i.e. terry schiavo. Or did you disagree with that too?

You can use whatever words you want to make whatever distinctions you want. Whether the fetus is human or not doesn't matter to me. Whether abortion is murder or not doesn't matter to me. In either case even if the unborn were alive and human they would still be parasites. They become not parasites the moment they're born (but they're still kind of parasites). It doesn't even really matter to me that they're parasites, though it provides useful context.

I'm not playing games with words here. What this really comes down to is that you've decided that abortion is unacceptable and you're readily willing to rationalize this decision while i have decided that it doesn't matter and am readily willing to rationalize this decision.

FoolThemAll

Post #164.

When is ethics ever not personal? When has any ethics ever been proven?

Who said anything about souls?

Da hell? What are you two talking about?

Fwiw, if snakes had hands it'd be perfectly acceptable for them to wear sweaters.

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I wonder if we're stuck in Rome.

Willravel

So a fetus should be aborted because it's not smart enough. Got it.

filtherton

What food group is lettuce in?

Nope, you don't got it. A fetus should be aborted because the person tasked with carrying it for 40 weeks and possibly caring for it for the rest of their life isn't up to the task.

Willravel

Who can say whether someone is "up to the task" or not? Do you have a potential machine, capable of telling someone's potential?

filtherton

What does me determining whether someone is up to the task of carrying and raising a child have to do with anything? I don't tell women to get abortions. That's for the potential aborter to decide.

Willravel

You said "up to the task" as if it's some sort of provable ability. It's not. One cannot say with any reasonable certainty that a woman is or isn't up to being a mother.

filtherton

No, i said "up to the task" as in "I can't make it to work today, i'm not up to the task" or "I can't get a degree in physiology, i'm not up to the task" or "I can't carry this fucking thing in my body for 40 weeks and push it out my hey-nonny-nonny, i'm not up to the task." Whether it's provable is irrelevant.

Ever heard of "Where there's the will there's the way?" Besides being something you should put on your business cards, its converse, "where there is no will there is no way" is often also true.

I believe in the ability of the average person to effectively evaluate their own capabilities.

FoolThemAll

I KNOW YOU ARE A PIECE OF LETTUCE I'M NOT UP TO THE TASK OF ENCLOSING IN A ZIPLOCK BAG AND STORING IN THE PRODUCE SECTION OF MY FRIDGE BUT WHAT AM I?

Erm, sorry.

"Up to the task" is a subjective criterion best determined by the would-be mother. But it's very relevant whether abortion is murder or not, as "Am I up to the task" would be decidedly less relevant than "Is the option I seek something that not being up to the task could even begin to justify?"

Hrmm... maybe that would've been more parseable in caps.

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I wonder if we're stuck in Rome.

Willravel

Whether it's provable is your entire case on the subject. I didn't think I could learn to play violin, but what do you know I can. Who would have thunk it? I didn't think that I could graduate early, but lo and behold, I did. I did think that I could keep this thread on track, but it turns out I can't.
That's ludicrous.

Infinite_Loser

Apparently, people.

And, as a bit of a side note, when does a fetus stop being a simple group of cells (Aimed at the pro-abortion crowd)?

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I believe in equality; Everyone is equally inferior to me.

Rekna

FYI if Terri would have been 99% likely to come out of her vegetative state in 9 months they would not have pulled the plug and no one would have allowed the plug to be pulled. She wasn't likely to come out of the coma and had already waited for many years.

Infinite_Loser

Didn't her husband profit from that whole ordeal?

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I believe in equality; Everyone is equally inferior to me.

Willravel

Please, Shiavo is too much of a threadjack. Things are off course enough already.

pig

fta: agreed. so it's a question of what your default position is, I think. The possible potential of the fetus to become a person, or the possible potential of the woman to live her life without going through the physical and emotional turmoil of pregnancy. Since science can't prove one way or the other about the 'humanity' of the fetus, I fall back on respecting the wishes of the "clump of cells" that I can talk to. You and others fall back on the potential wishes of the fetus. I can understand your position, and in fact I don't know that I'd be comfortable with an abortion in my personal life. I'm sure I'd have doubts and worries and all the stuff that most people have when contemplating/undergoing abortions. But I default to "the facts are inconclusive, so I go with what I absolutely do know." And that, for me, tends to favor the woman who would be carrying the child.

Re: the question of 'souls' or however you like to put it, that seems to me to be the crux of the question...how do you define a person vs. an automated lump of meat?

As I said, my position on "father's rights" is completed predicated on these issues, as they seem to fall out of the derivation of one's position on abortion in a general sense. I don't think you can have a conversation about father's rights, without deciding the morality of abortion. Ergo, the reason that a discussion of "father's rights" will, I think, always be reduced to a discussion on abortion.

Now, this might change when/if we get cheap and easy test-tube facilities. If you could extract the fertilized egg from the woman in a relatively non-threatening/arduous procedure, push it through "pregnancy" on the bench-top, and then release it to the father, my position might change again. But at present, I default to letting the woman decide.

For all questions of "it looks like a duck, it walks like a duck, it quacks like a duck," I defer to jinn's earlier post. Looking like a human, or possessing cells that will eventually become "organs" and other specialized human features, does not inform my position in the least. We're talking about the potential for humanity, I think, and whether that potential is seen on a seizmograph or postulated from mathematical models, it doesn't matter to me if you're talking about semen on a bedsheet or a fetus at 6 months...potential to be a fully-realized human doesn't equate to being a human in my eyes. At least not scientifically, although I think it's highly suggestive.

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You don't love me, you just love my piggy style

filtherton

Well, if you're talking about murder as a legal construct, then no, it is definitely not murder. On the other hand, if what you mean by murder is that someone or thing has killed someone or thing else in a way you find displeasing, well, then fur is murder too. The only reason the word murder comes up is because it carries a certain emotional weight- whether it actually is murder or not is irrelevant.

So? I thought you were a scientist. The fact that you can do things is piss poor evidence that other people can do them.

What is? That i came up with a better idea for your catch phrase than you did, or that i trust people to be able to determine what is best for themselves- at least inasmuch as i don't really expect anyone else, on average, to be able to do it as well?

Help me understand the nature of the ludicrosity.

Jenny_Lyte

I support abortion from a legal and constitutional stand point and not a moral personal one. What I mean by that is, while I personally could never have an abortion, I do not support the idea that the government should have any say so in whether or not I do decide to have a baby or not.

But, for sake of argument, let's say I'm expecting. It takes two to make a baby and it should take two to raise one, so I think the father should have a say so in the process. This is interesting. Something like this happened to some kids I went to high school with. A girl got pregnant and wanted an abortion right away. The guy who got her pregnant said absolutely not. He said that if she didn't want the baby, then he would find a way to pay for her care and then take the baby and raise it himself. Our school was ripped down the middle. People on both sides argued the law and a woman's right to her own body, but no one brought up the moral and personal choices of both involved.

I had so much sympathy for this guy. He was going to do the right thing and stick by his unborn child. In the end, they did reach some kind of agreement. However, legally speaking, she could have had an abortion and there would have been nothing he could do about it. Like I said, it takes two to make a baby, so it's only fair that both parties involved get a say so.

Abstinence is wonderful.

Willravel

The legal definition of murder doesn't include abortion today, but it has before and it may in the future. Murder is separated from manslaughter by "intention to cause grievous injury and death resulted" or "conduct with a "depraved heart" showing lack of care for human life". Abortions are carried out with clear intent to end the function of the body of a fetus (I'll avoid using the word "kill" here in the interest of middle ground), and this does represent a lack of care for the fetus. I would say that even from the perspective of one who for whatever reason does not believe the fetus to be alive this is close to murder.
So you can tell me that everything you ever thought you could do you've done and everything you believe you cannot do you've not done? "Piss poor", indeed. All the evidence I need is one person who is incorrect about his or her potential. It's a guess, and as such there is always a chance it is wrong.

Besides all of that, you made the determination that if someone believes that they are not "up to the task" then they are correct. You didn't support this idea with anything, despite having the burden of proof. I demonstrated that I am an exception to your supposed rule, and then you say that "you can do things" but that everyone else can't, AGAIN, with no evidence or even a theory as to how or why this is so. I have provided proof that some people can be incorrect about their potential using myself as an example. Can you demonstrate how I am an exception to the rule using evidence and logic?

Seaver

<=== Waits with his Welcome Wagon in the background

Welcome to the Grand Old Par.... er, too soon?

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"Smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge, and fountains of unstinted wealth will gush forth." - Ashbel Smith as he laid the first cornerstone of the University of Texas

Ustwo

In time, in time........

Something like six years.

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Agents of the enemies who hold office in our own government, who attempt to eliminate our "freedoms" and our "right to know" are posting among us, I fear.....on this very forum. - host

Obama - Know a Man by the friends he keeps.

filtherton

So it's not murder, or even manslaughter?

You'd make a good guidance counselor.

It isn't as simple as potential. Or evidence. Self fullfilling prophecies are what they are.

I don't try to do things that i don't think i can do, because as someone who doesn't have a lot of breathing room when it comes to the doing of things it's generally a waste of my time. The other side of that is that if i have to do something, then i do it- it does not benefit me to think about whether i can or can't. Usually i can rise to the occasion and if i can't, well, i tried.

That's me. I don't expect other people to do the same, even though many of them will. Furthermore, i don't think that it's my place to tell someone what they can and can't accomplish, especially when it comes to something with such a large potential for disaster as carrying a child to term and raising it. You don't think you can stop drinking while you're pregnant? Fair enough, spare us all the child you will fuck up in the womb and most likely out of the womb too. You're too self absorbed to make the kind of sacrifices required to raise a kid? Fine, kill it before it gets lungs, we might all be better off if you don't raise a child in your current state of mind. Shit, it doesn't feel right? Fuck it, go with your intuition.

This is not to say that good people can't come from bad situations, just that they have things stacked against them. If that set of parents at my friend's daughter's school who aren't able to get their kid to not try to stab other kids with pencils had had an abortion we might all be better off, including them and maybe even their kid. Then again, maybe their kid will get his shit figured out, or maybe he'll become a serial killer.

I never said it was a rule, or that it was absolute. I said "where there is no will there is no way" is often a true statement. The fact that you can surprise yourself by doing things does in no way refute what i said. And i'm not going to provide evidence, because it doesn't matter and works just as well as an axiom; it is difficult for a person to accomplish a task if from the outset they don't think they can, this especially being the case if there is no one around to encourage them.

Being a parent requires commitment, patience, guile, compassion and a whole slew of other things that aren't prerequisites to sexual maturity. If you can't even commit to your unborn child for 40 weeks then you fail, and perhaps we're all better of if you wait on the whole "being responsible for the well being of another human being" thing for a while.


Actually, i don't think will believes in killing at all, not even brown people from the other side of the world, so the wagon will probably have to wait.

Seaver

And I thought we were busy inventing new kinds of Aids and Crack, man they move too fast for me to keep up.

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"Smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge, and fountains of unstinted wealth will gush forth." - Ashbel Smith as he laid the first cornerstone of the University of Texas

Willravel

Correct.

filtherton

Crack and aids aside, how many of the republican presidential candidates want to invade iran?

Seaver

Can you name one Democratic President in the last 100 years who did not lead military actions in their presidency?

__________________
"Smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge, and fountains of unstinted wealth will gush forth." - Ashbel Smith as he laid the first cornerstone of the University of Texas