(Note to Compendium readers: My original post in this GameFAQs thread referenced a link, now lost, to a news story about a teenage woman in Texas who got pregnant. She got scared, and since Texas law makes it very hard for someone like her to get an anonymous abortion, she panicked and asked her boyfriend to kick her in the stomach so that she would miscarry. He did, the baby died, and based on Texas anti-abortion laws the guy was sentenced to 40 years in prison. I took the opportunity to call for the execution of anyone in the Texas government who had supported that law, and also called out the forces of Christianity for the evildoers that they are. In the following excerpts from that thread, you will see my outline in fits and starts pretty much my entire point of view on abortion. The good stuff is in the last nine pages or so, but read the whole thing for the more organic, natural understanding of my position. Or don't. I'm not the boss of you.)
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Cloud19 wrote:You're a bit confused here. First of all, only Catholics are against contraceptives. Most Christians in the U.S. are Protestant.Thank you, I am aware that most are Protestant. As it happens, the most provocative part of my earlier post was based upon (and a few lines lifted directly from) an article about a new vaccine developed by some big pharmaceutical companies that has been shown to prevent human papilloma virus, which is a major cause of gynecological cancer. This could eventually lead to the eradication of HPV and the elimination of the majority of all gynecological cancer cases on the planet.
And yet the vaccine is being opposed by the religious establishment!http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/05/19/opinion/main696613.shtmlIt is an editorial, not a news article, so it comes with a bias. But the underlying facts are not in dispute. The vaccine works, and the religious establishment doesn’t want women to have it. They’d rather these women
die than have premarital sex. Can you begin to understand my frustration?
Christians aren't against sex education, just against sex education as taught in schools, since these tend to focus on how to have safe sex, with little regard to abstinence.The problem with abstinence education is that it doesn’t work well enough to stand on its own. Kids are still going to be curious, and they are still going to have sex. When kids are taught nothing about sex other than what the abstinence platform offers, sex becomes a forbidden fruit, because everyone possesses the biological urge to have sex. And when kids who only know abstinence do have sex, they are not going to know how to do it safely when they decide to go through with it. I am not going to say that abstinence education has no place in the classroom, but the teaching of proper sexual precautions is far more important and effective in preventing teen pregnancies and the transmission of STDs. Religious folks usually brush these corroborative studies aside, but I am here to tell you that you don’t teach a kid how drive a car by sending them to their room.
Personally, I have no problem with contraceptives or sex education in school, but I do feel that sex is something to be experienced between two loving adults, not children.This is a legitimate area of debate. Children become sexually functional usually around ten or twelve years of age, and yet society illegalizes sex up through ages sixteen to eighteen, and, furthermore, discourages sex before marriage—even though the average marriage age is in the mid-twenties! So, when do we draw the line between “children” (who supposedly should not have sex) and “adults” (who supposedly have the knowledge for an informed consent)? If our society were more mature, we’d be able to teach kids about sex well enough that they could become safely sexually active as soon as puberty kicks in. But I recognize that our society is far from that, and so I support a higher age of consent in the meantime. Is eighteen too high? Probably. Sixteen seems reasonable, because most kids who aren’t on their way to becoming responsible adults by then…are not likely to go down that road in the remainder of their childhood.
As for the stipulation that consenting adults be “loving,” I don’t see the point in that. (Stay tuned for my following post!)
Cloud19 also wrote:[Sex] should not be something that is viewed as a casual, fun activity. Yes, sex is pleasurable, but we are not animals. Animals base their decisions around self-gratification and instinct. Human beings are capable of restraining their instinctual urges and basing decisions upon logic and reason, with full consideration of the potential consequences.I don’t believe that sex is sacred, and so naturally I wouldn’t seek to impose such onerous regulations on it. Sex is nice. Not holy. But we don’t need to have that argument, because we’re not likely to change each other’s minds. So, I’ll not press you on that point further.
However, I do want to point out that human beings
are animals. We are animals who happen to posses the cognitive faculties imbued us by being sentient. There is no point trying to drive a wedge between the human mind and all the rest of nature. The former belongs in the category of the latter. Now, I am not trying to imply that humans are exempt from being responsible on grounds of being carnal. Rather, I am prodding you with the suggestion that it is not a legitimate excuse to discourage humans from having sex on the grounds that we can
choose to abstain. You speak of logic and reason, and words like that speak to me very strongly indeed, so I say to you: Any such
choice must indeed
have a good reason. But that gets us back into the question of whether sex is only for the “loving,” and so here I conclude my tangent.
Sex is physically pleasurable, but it is also a form of emotional bonding that two loving adults can experience.This could be interesting, if you would care to develop the idea into a framework for the prohibiting of sex outside “loving” relationships.
Promiscuous sex debases sex to its most animal form and is, in fact, a prime example of human degression to a state of pure animal lust. This is unacceptable if humans are to continue evolving further from animals.Again, it is a mistake to draw this kind of a line between the human mind and the rest of nature. Humanity is the
epitome of nature, not the adversary of it. Without an external reason that demonstrates that abstaining from sex is better than the alternative— “
better” according to productive calculations that represent a comprehensive understanding of human potential—choosing to have sex casually is no more degrading to the human condition than choosing to drink water casually. The act in itself means nothing. We like it, we do it. Now, sometimes these actions prove to be detrimental. I’ll bet if lemmings knew that their mass migrations would lead to their being drowned in large numbers, they would try to reform their behaviors. Can you show that casual sex is more detrimental to society than the abstention from casual sex? I say that this religious-based taboo on sex, which in effect denies us the deepest part of our nature, is at the center of a profound neurosis in human civilization. The problems that result from sex veritably
pale in comparison to the problems that result from abstinence. (Or is the sum of human history not something with which you are familiar?)
Cloud 19 also wrote:While birth control should be certainly available, if you make it too available, the impression that is portrayed is, again, the encouragement of promiscuous sex. Birth control, especially the condom, has a strong association in people's minds with "casual" sex…Your implication is that increased contraceptive availability increases sexual promiscuity. But this is probably not true, as evidenced by many studies on the subject, including one on the controversial
morning-after pill. The study showed that this drug’s increased availability did
not correspond to an increase in sexual promiscuity.
Furthermore, the underlying assumption to which you must subscribe is none other than the main point of the discussion at hand: Is sexual promiscuity a bad thing at all? Your reasoning is circular when you invoke the very thing you are trying to prove.
However, putting these legitimate concerns aside and addressing your point directly, this statistic must be weighed against the number of people who, having received an abstinence-only education, will then go on to have unsafe sex, and become pregnant or diseased because of it. Your solution of restricting contraceptive availability may well cause more problems than it solves. Look at some of the more sexually liberal countries, like the Netherlands, where sex itself is common but pregnancies and STDs are low. So ask yourself: Is it pregnancies and STDs that you want to do away with...or sex itself? I encourage you to read some of the primary literature on this subject; you will find your position to be incomplete at best, and flat-out wrong at worst.
ShadowGldtr wrote:…most denominations are against contraceptives since they are "denying life" that god gave us to create.From the horse’s mouth, this is what I have been saying all along. This is the sort of sentiment that ruffles my feathers so badly, because it implies that women should suffer and sometimes die rather than enjoy safe contraception. Abstaining from sex is not an attainable ideal; it isn’t an ideal at all. (Or, rather, the claim that abstinence outside marriage is virtuous, remains unproven.) When we evolve beyond gender entirely, then sex will go the way of the dodo. But for the time being, sex is a major part of our biology, our psychology, and our heritage as a species. Restricting it as harshly as many religious folks would is simply a terrible solution that has already helped perpetuate thousands of years of suffering on humankind, and women in particular.
TheFourGuardians wrote: Actually, I have absolutely nothing against women(feminists yes, but women's rights, no.)I have learned this lesson the hard way, that the causes that champion personal liberties for those who are oppressed are often much less savory than the liberties themselves. “Feminism” may leave a sour taste in your mouth, but women are never going to get the rights they deserve without it. For many years I failed to realize that, but then I tied it together with the historical context. Abolitionists also violated public decorum, frustrated many people, made a lot of enemies in their time…but look what they accomplished!
You
must accept feminism if you truly believe in women’s rights. Your only recourse, then, is to attempt to influence feminism toward a form that suits you more. But will you find that, should you succeed in this, the cause for women’s rights gets set back? This is a question without an easy answer…because it is about
who we are, and that sort of thinking is often left to the realm of the philosophers. It’s hard.
However, I also like the idea of an innocent(maybe that's the thing. In fact, it is!) life being spared.This is an old argument with a deeply-drawn line between it. I say that a clump of cells no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence isn’t a human life; you say that it is. I suppose there’s no point in arguing about it. But for those who face the decision whether or not to destroy this tiny life, it is not our place to make that decision for them. It is our place to see to it that they have the
liberty to decide for themselves. To put it simply, the woman’s life is more important than that of the unborn proto-human inside her. I will get into that in much greater detail later on.
HyproTheII wrote:If you cannot change the environment, change yourself. Do not whine about the government or any policy. Remember: Under ANY policy, ANY politics, ANY tyranny, there are successful ppl living comfortably. If you have the problem, it is your own fault . Or how can other ppl get used to it while you cannot?You do not realize the ramifications of what you are saying. You are saying that the majority is always right, and that those who suffer by majority rule are wrong to seek to change majority opinion. This sort of thinking justified slavery, justified the Holocaust, justified the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II, justified the forced labor of Chinese immigrants on American railroads…it justified a long list of horrors committed in the name of an ignorant people too blinded by their own culture to recognize their folly from the greater perspective of history!
No, I would encourage you most sincerely to reformulate your argument…because you’d have to be a pretty terrible person to deride someone who balks at being oppressed.
Texas has anti-abortion law, so it applies to everyone live in Texas. It is not it applies to certain people only. If it pisses you off while the majority has no problem with it, it is your own fault for being a slut, end of story.This is the sort of sexist opinion to which I can offer no reasonable reply. If you feel that way, then you’re one of the people who “cannot be helped” that I mentioned at the beginning of this topic. Your opinions are yours to keep, but your wish to enact them upon the land is rightly nullified by the rule of law and our love of justice.
Every time students complain about their instructors, I always ask them the same question" Are there ppl making A and B in your class? If there are, then it is your own fault not to be successful in class. Everyone uses the same text books, everyone listens to the same teacher, so you are the only one having the problem."What you have been trying to say all the while, I believe came out differently than how you meant it. I think what you are trying to say is that people cannot blame society for their own failings. This much is true. But where does personal failing end and genuine suffering begin? If the instructor was unjust toward the female students only, would these students be wrong to complain about that? No. Injustice is still injustice, whether targeted at an entire society or the tiniest, most invisible people in it. Your argument is too simplistic to apply to this discussion rationally.
BigDan wrote: This is where you start your long string of bull**** generalizations. I, myself, am a Christian. I was raised in a Christian home. I'm against abortion in all cases except for those that the mothers life is at risk. I'm also for birth control. I have no problems with condoms, diaphragms, birth control pills, morning after pills, etc. My father, who is one of the more religious men I know, feels the same way. So if your going to label all religious conservatives one way, at least bring some credible proof with you before you even get started.I mentioned earlier in this thread that I am not speaking for every Christian. Instead I am speaking for the
overall character of Christianity in the United States. Telling me about yourself does little to address that. The prevailing Christian opinion is against most of the things you mentioned, as evidenced by individuals who have posted in this thread, by the sermons and events held by churches across the nation, by the Christian propaganda machine, and by the mainstream media (itself another type of propaganda machine). Folks like Mr. Dobson, leader of the group “Focus on the Family” regularly denounce contraceptives, and that is only the beginning of their terrible crimes. So…you want me to give credible proof? Don’t sensationalize the truth. The extent to which you choose to deny what many of your fellow Christians and Christian institutions strongly believe is more an insult to
them than it is to me. If you want to know what led me to create this topic in the first place, then just click on the link I provided in my very first post. Texas has established anti-abortion laws and fetal murder laws that have led to the scandal which I mentioned. These laws are evidence of the prevailing Christian attitudes. You might also click on the link I provided to Cloud in a recent post, about the vaccine developed to prevent HPV and the cancer that it causes—a lifesaving vaccine
opposed by the religious right on the grounds that it will lead to premarital sex.
BigDan also wrote:Also, there is nothing wrong with sex for pleasure. I'm all for it, although I believe it should be shared between two consenting adults. If you're not married, go for it, if you're h0mosexual, go for it. But use some mother ****ing protection.You see, Dan, this is good news! I’m glad you feel this way. I wish more Christians did. I wouldn’t have nearly the problem that I do with Christianity if it weren’t a
proselytizing religion. Christianity forces itself on people wherever it can. I have yet to find a Christian who can explain to me how gay marriage has ruined their own marriage. And yet anti-gay sentiments are rampant—and not just sentiments, but an active effort to deny this group of people their human rights. Gay rights is obviously a very convenient, clear-cut example for me to use, but there are many more if you would prefer I choose another.
Anyhow, your personal views do not vindicate Christianity as a whole. You’ll need more power and influence first…you’ll need to make a difference, and for the better. When I say “Christianity does so-and-so…” individuals such as yourself may feel as though I’m talking about them in particular, as though I were getting into the living rooms of every Christian in America. That’s balderdash. I’m not so stupid as to speak for individuals, because trying to do that is impossible. We can only speak for ourselves. But
groups of people often project very clear, simplistic messages. Likewise, group messages represent a range of views commonly held by some, and so I can speak to “those who agree with the message X” without encompassing all people simultaneously. Now, when you personally admit to something that I take issue with,
then I am in a position to point out an individual flaw in you and tie it into your own interpretation of the Christian faith. Fortunately, many people—including yourself—have done so in this topic. Going one by one, I can build a case against Christianity at the individual level. But I would never attempt to speak for all Christian individuals at once, and to the extent you have interpreted otherwise, I can only regret the confusion I have caused. I make my living by
respecting individuals. I don’t try to change people by lobbing insults at them. I try to reason with them.
I have nothing against emergency contraceptives. If they are going to be given to a minor though, I believe the parent/guardian should be made aware of it.Why should the parent or guardian be made aware of it? Be honest with yourself: In how many instances would mandatory parental notification prove superior in the long run? Parental notification discourages responsibility on the part of the child by validating her choice for contraception with parental consent. Parental notification sets up an antagonism between the child and her parents, especially when the parents are religious conservatives who would be deeply offended or hurt by their daughter’s expression of sexuality. Parental notification in many cases leads to a stigma on the child, emotional abuse, and even physical harm. If a kid wants emergency contraception and doesn’t want her parents to know…then I support her right to maintain her privacy. Offer her a psychological consultation prior to the administration of the medication; but don’t force her to bring her parents into it.
A child’s parents are great pillars of order in her or his world, yet parents often subscribe to the same foolish notions I’m arguing against in this topic. Ironically, if children had more open-minded parents, they would be much more able to confide in them without facing a religious confrontation that could crack the family forever, potentially causing irreversible harm to the kid’s personality. If she wants to pursue contraception without her parents, I say let her.
ShadowGldtr wrote:When the sperm hits the egg, weee there is life (Catholic perspective)You own statement contradicts its own legitimacy. The “Catholic perspective” as you call it has yet to establish itself as a correct one. The problem with most religions is that they ask for faith, faith in that which cannot be proven. They do this because older generations of religions were struck down for being empirically false. Newer religions such as Christianity don’t make this mistake; they place the proof for their claims in an Authority that can never be questioned. Well…I just don’t buy it. The language of human understanding is physical truth.
My position, for which there is a great deal of factual evidence, is that a tiny clump of cells does not constitute a human life. Yes, if nurtured under the proper conditions it will likely
become a human life, and so then the argument becomes where the cutoff should be. You say life begins at conception. I say it should begin at birth. I’d be willing to compromise, but only on scientifically verifiable grounds—and that’s harder than you might think, because it has to take into account not only the circumstances of the fetus, but the circumstances of the mother.
Yea, basically. [it’s legal only for a doctor to abort a baby]Since BigDan has established that he does not respect people who make claims without proof, I’d like to take a page from his book and ask you to provide yours. I am not disagreeing with your claim, but neither will I believe it until I see the applicable Texas or federal laws.
Well if it was on "accident" no one could prove it, but if she did it on perpuse, then ya, it is illegal Shadow, if you had read the link I provided in my original post in this topic, you would have realized that the woman herself cannot be held accountable for the death of her fetus. This is the law—and one of Texas’ more sensible laws, I might add—and so in this case you are directly wrong.
Perfect psyco wrote:You know a reasonable person would have gone to a different state and got the murder over with. This is one of the reasons why the whole scandal (see original post) is so egregious. This girl was a naive teenager who didn’t have the worldly experience—or the physical resources—to hightail it to another state and have an abortion in a calm manner. Think about what you are saying. We can’t expect kids to behave like adults. Do we punish them for this, or do we help them? The anti-abortion law punishes them. Kids are going to have sex. Let’s face it: That’s the truth of the human condition. Sex happens. By making it almost impossible for teenagers like this one to get a safe, anonymous, easy abortion, we drive them to the circumstances where they will commit foolish acts. Instead of imprisoning the girl’s boyfriend for forty years, we should imprison the people who passed the law that drove these two people to come up with their own solution where society deliberately failed them.
oldphart wrote: buddy do you review before you hit "post"? That's pretty hippy-pitiful talk there. The pothead calling ma and pa kettle black.Calling names without a basis for so doing does little to establish your credibility. For the record, I am something of a square. I’ve never been drunk, never consumed illegal drugs, never abused legal ones for the purpose of getting a rush or whatever, and have never even smoked so much as a cigarette. So if your aim was to imply that I am too intoxicated for my points to be valid, then you have missed the mark. You’ll have to try something that holds water.
The rest of your post sounds more like the resentment of an ex toward his previous partner, so I will leave that in your private domain rather than pressing you on any of it. (Not that I will expect you to appreciate me for it, but that’s honor for you. It’s not about the recognition.)
Cloud19 wrote: I thought I'd take the time to answer each and every one of these questions for you. So, have fun! =PIn the time it has taken me to move ahead with a full day of my life, I have gotten so far behind in this topic that now I have the chance to reply to you yet again. But so be it! Because you seem like one of the good guys…
To me, it is because I believe that every human deserves the opportunity to prove they can be a productive citizen of their respective nation, and thus earn the priveledge (not right) to life.I agree with you almost exactly here. The only difference is that I do believe people have a “right” to life. I word my own ideology differently: People’s lives have no
meaning until they
prove otherwise. This places the value of human life not in life itself but in our accomplishments based upon our potential and our circumstances.
However, I do not see a fetus as a human life until it reaches the third trimester. At this point, as you should know, the child can be born through induced labor, or cut out through Caesarian, and the child has a good chance to survive. This is because most development is complete. The children are still underdeveloped, but are undoubtedly human. To deny this is to deny that premature babies are human until they reach the time when they were supposed to be born.I anticipated that someone would make this point. To me there are only two good cutoffs for an abortion. One is at birth itself. The other is at the inception of cognition. To be honest with you, if it were only the baby we were talking about, and to the extent that our medical knowledge can bring premature babies into this world with a very good chance at living a normal life, I would say that abortion should be restricted at the inception of cognition.
However, it’s not just the unborn child we’re talking about. It’s the mother too. Yes, we could rip a woman open against her will and remove the thing that she herself has gestated up to this point, but that would be a gross violation of her individual rights. If she
chooses for that to happen, then by all means. But most women would not like to be ripped open against their will. Neither do many of them want to deal with a pregnancy. In some cases, it would cause them extreme hardship psychologically, socially, or physically, and on rarer occasions it could even result in injury or death.
Women must bear the onus of pregnancy alone. It is their solemn right to choose whether or not this is a burden they wish to accept. Their life experiences, their highly-developed identity, their
will trumps that of even a highly developed fetus who has had no experiences, developed no identity, and does not possess much of a will at all. Sentience itself doesn’t come into being until newborns have lived outside the womb for many months and begun to interact with their environments and develop their brains. Yes, I accept that it is the destruction of life to commit an abortion. But
human life? The only way to define human life is in what it
means to be human, and I have already said that people’s lives mean nothing until they have proven otherwise. So here we are, full circle.
Cloud19 also wrote:Sometimes, Lord, war is necessary to protect the interests of your nation. I am not speaking of a particular war, and of course some wars have been unjust.Yes, I accept just wars. I was making rhetorical waves. However,
unjust wars are an atrocity, and that is the substantive idea beneath the rhetoric. Neoconservatives have led us to Iraq on the grounds that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction—he didn’t—and that the Iraqi people would be better off—tens of thousands of them are now dead, and many more living in worse shape than they were before the war. The neocons who planned the war have done a terrible job with the postwar occupation, and now our military is mired in Iraq and our military is beginning to suffer in morale and recruitment. Yet these same people, who so easily send our troops to war to kill and be killed in the name of a democracy that seems too premature for the Iraqi culture, start to foam at the mouth when women here at home try to control their bodies. It’s hypocritical, and criminal. That was my point here.
Or slaughter plants for food, eh Mr. Vegan? =PI draw two lines here. When it comes to deciding which life is fit to slaughter for food and which is not, I draw the first line at the point of a brain developed enough to suffer extensively. Plants do not have a central nervous system for them to feel pain as we know it. Most food animals do. No brain…no pain. That’s where I draw the first line.
The second line is more ambiguous. If food animals can be raised humanely and slaughtered immediately, without causing them to suffer, then I can support that too.
As I have already explained, when it comes to abortion I draw the line at birth, having taken into account both the fetus’ rights and the mother’s. Once a child is born, a sufficiently humane society can absorb it, and it becomes no further burden to the woman. (Laws like this are prevalent in liberal states, where women can safely and anonymously abandon their children to authorized authorities without facing a penalty. This helps encourage women to decide against abortion, and it helps discourage them from abandoning their newborns to die in a dumpster somewhere, which is much more common in conservative areas of the nation where the law is less kind toward new mothers and the prevailing culture scorns and punishes women who have born children outside of marriage.
Because the aim of a government is to care for its own citizens. We have no jurisdiction in the affairs of other nations, and it is not their people our leaders have sworn to protect.Rubbish. This is the imperialist in me talking, but we have a responsibility to the entire human species, and to all other sentient or proto-sentient life on this world. When this responsibility contradicts itself, as it does with the issue of mother’s rights versus fetal rights,
then we can take into account such things as nationality and what have you. Likewise, by recognizing that mothers are more human than unborn fetuses who have yet to develop most of their conscious faculties, their identity, and most importantly their sentience, we ethically are obligated to side with the mothers.
Cloud19 also wrote:Because, as of now, we have no other means of which to power our vehicles, lights, or computers. Our means of generating electricity and power all pollutes the environment in some way.As someone who has studied environmental issues in great detail, I would like to share something interesting with you. I am not anti-technology. In fact I am pro-technology. Any rational mind would see that technology is the only way to move forward. But technology can take many forms, and some of those forms can be destructive.
I will support this with as much factual citation as you like, but for the interest of saving space, I will tell you a simple truth: Technology could be
far cleaner than it is. This is true in every sector of the economy. The reason technology is so polluting is that it is cheaper, and until recently the economy as a whole has not realized the true cost of being cheap.
These business interests do not realize the harm they have caused and will continue to cause. Yet ignorance of a fact does not obviate that fact. Businesses that resist cleanup efforts in their own operation promote death and suffering—the very thing they seek to prevent by opposing abortion rights. In this case not only are they hypocritical by virtue of ignorance, but they are wrong on
both counts. They should be anti-pollution and pro-abortion. Ah, the inanities of life! =)
We don't [punish those who lack wealth]. Where'd you get this idea? Considering how thoughtful you are, I assume that I did not get my point across clearly. We certainly do punish those who lack wealth. For example, by converting healthcare to the private sector we price the poor right out of the market, even though these people often perform the most hazardous labor and are in the least position to pay for health expenses on their own. For another example, we prevent the poor from attending college by forcing them to pay tuition rather than guaranteeing them an education that is sustained by a national tax. And speaking of taxes, the sales tax disparages against the poor, who spend a greater proportion of their income on goods that carry a sales tax. Many of these are classic liberal arguments; I would temper that by saying that I’m no socialist, and that I respect the private sector for its ability to innovate and to generally be more cost-efficient. However, innovation and cost-efficiency are sometimes less important than universal availability and standards of quality, and inasmuch as services like healthcare are left primarily to the private sector, this is one instance where we disparage against the poor.
More locally, we tend to
shun those who are not well-to-do, especially if they look like they’re on hard times. In the past couple of decades, society has taken on a much more classless appearance, which is a good thing, but even today there are times when being poor is enough to be spurned by one’s neighbors—and certainly in the recent past this was much more flagrant.
Conservatives tout “the sanctity of life” when they oppose abortion, and yet look at how both they and our social institutions mistreat the least among us in society.
Cloud19 also wrote: Because when you murder an innocent citizen, you have forfeited your priveledge to life (in my view), and thus deserve to be destroyed. For others, it is punishment. However, even you should be capable of recognizing the difference between an innocent and a convicted murderer.I will exempt you, but for those who believe that life is
innately precious—and people of that opinion far outnumber us—believing in the death penalty is contradictory to opposing abortion. This is why most of the civilized world has outlawed the practice.
I agree that we should cease eating such unhealthy foods, but people deserve the freedom to indulge in unhealthy and/or dangerous activities as long as it is not a harm to others. This is what it means to be free.Much as you have said, women who pursue an abortion pose no harm to others.
And now, finally, I have finished!
Cloud19 wrote: I am not suggesting we only teach abstinence, or that we shouldn't teach sex education, or about contraceptives. My only point is that we teach how to have [safe] sex, not necessarily if we should. It seems to me that most of public education has given up on abstinence entirely, resigning, as you have put it, that children will have sex. This is unacceptable.I will grant that I haven’t been inside a middle school classroom in many years, but I recall no slant in the sex education I received that would have been geared toward condoning sex. The attitude from the course material was that “you kids are going to have sex, we acknowledge it, and here’s what you need to do to make it as safe as possible.” There was no bias in favor of having sex other than that the material itself assumed that sex was going to happen—a true assumption.
In any case, it seems that we are in relative agreement on this point. I favor sex education, and apparently so do you, and furthermore I would not be averse in principle to a nonreligious discussion of the prudence of having sex in terms of the personal disruption it can cause to people’s lives. We differ on when sex is “prudent,” but that is beyond the realm of sex education, so I guess we are at an understanding on this point!
I could make the same argument about crime. There will still be murderers, so why outlaw it? There will still be theft, so why outlaw it? Or here's one that might strike closer to home: There will always be poverty, so why work to eliminate it?These supporting examples are all logical fallacies which incorrectly reason that, because sex happens and is not outlawed, therefore crime and all those other things that happen and
are outlawed lead to a contradiction in principle. This is not so; rather, the point of contention between us is the appropriateness of sex. If sex is more appropriate than crime, then your comparisons are not valid because the outlawing of something less appropriate has no relevance to the legality of something more appropriate, other than possibly the magnitude of appropriateness, which, as I said, is the central dispute between us.
Cloud19 also wrote:Not true. The very religious discourage sex before marriage. Society in no way encourages that. If so, how does it? In our education system? Nope. In our music? Nope. In television programs? Nope. Where have you gotten this idea?You underestimate the power of the Dark Side—er, of the religious establishment in this country. What you call the “very religious,” I call a significant minority of all Americans, and a controlling influence on our entire society. Again we come back to James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and their ilk. Society’s concept of sex as demonstrated by the media, and in literature, game, and film is more than a bit skewed.
Have you ever been talking with someone to whom you were extremely attracted, and found yourself flirting so heavily that you embarrassed yourself by behaving out of character? This is how America feels about sex in general. As long as that bikini is still there, men want to see it get smaller and smaller, exposing every last inch of bare female skin other than the genitals themselves. And yet, one slip of the nipple on Super Bowl Sunday and America starts foaming at the mouth. “The media has gone
too far this time!” they rant. The FCC bunkers down and starts fining stations for lewd displays. Opinion polls regularly establish that Americans are desensitized to extreme magnitudes of fictional violence but react uncomfortably to full nude sex scenes and the actual depiction of human carnality.
It’s painfully obvious that we as a society want sex very badly, and are so embarrassed by how close to sex we’ll actually go, that we recoil violently against the core premise of sex itself. It’s like Homer’s forbidden doughnut…you want to eat the whole thing, but you resist the last morsel of it because 99 percent of a doughnut is not “a doughnut.” It is the concept of the whole that people crave, and therefore the concept of the whole that they discriminate against. Meanwhile, they continue to consume the vast majority of the proverbial sex doughnut, on the grounds that the sum of the parts are less than the whole. America’s sexual attitudes are contradictory, sophomoric, reactionary, discriminatory, and inhibitive.
I strongly disagree [with sex at the onset of puberty], and here's why: Development of the brain is not yet complete when puberty kicks in. Sex is something to be considered carefully, especially in today's age of prevalent STDs. I will always suggest you wait until your mental faculties reach their full development before engaging in sexual activity.The incomplete development you cite does not have the restrictive impact on children’s capacity for judgment that you imply. The cognitive ability to make judgments is established at a much younger age; the environmental aspect of it—the
wisdom of one’s judgments—is what can take a lifetime to mature. There are scant biological grounds for restricting sex once the body becomes sexually capable. Any and all restrictions would have to be based on a higher-order “–ology.” The body itself is ready when it says it is ready.
Cloud19 also wrote: Secondly, I can drive a wedge between the human mind and all the rest of nature. And here it is: All the rest of nature is driven by instinct, but humans possess the capacity to act in opposition to instinct, and consider each of their actions with logic and reason.As one of the most supreme advocates you will ever find of reason trumping emotional urges and primitive instinct, you might be surprised to find that I acknowledge your delimitation entirely, and yet disagree with your interpretation of it. Reason is not separate from the rest of nature, because it is driven by and based upon the same underlying material forces. The faculties of cognitive reasoning are a new phenomenon in nature, agreed, and they allow for new behavioral norms to emerge, also agreed, but inasmuch as this basic condition establishes grounds for the invalidity of certain types of sexual interaction in particular, I see no case for your argument. You are pulling a judgment out of somewhere, and it isn’t from the cognitive aspect of the equation.
If the entire reason for your decision [to have sex] is "pleasure" then that is simply not logical, and you are no better than an animal.This is false reasoning. The pursuit of pleasure is not inherently contrary to logical thinking. Quite the contrary! Most forms of logical reasoning
rely upon some underlying shift from a less pleasurable to more pleasurable state, where “pleasure” is defined extremely loosely.
Indeed, if you take
everything else out of the taboo surrounding sex, leaving behind only the fact that it is physically pleasurable, then this is a reason for society to promote having
more sex, not less. It is a basic utilitarian principle, and while I am not a utilitarian myself, I’d be daft to say that anything inherently physically pleasurable is inappropriate specifically because it causes pleasure. That’s the sort of Christian mischief that has brought us to where we are today, still struggling with all these pointless sexual taboos.
And where does this leave love and hate? These two are the purest forms of emotion…It’s not on-topic, but I can’t help myself from disagreeing. Both love and hate have more of a reputation than they deserve. =P
Cloud19 also wrote: I agree, but then why use the word "right" if [life] is something to be earned? I feel "priveledge" fits better. However, as I suggested earlier, language is limiting.Language is not limited. We are simply not at an understanding yet. The context in which I used “right” was sociological. Once a human being is born into the world, it is incumbent upon (human) society to nurture that life toward its full potential. This is for the betterment of society itself as much as for the sake of the individual.
However, since you raised the point, I also believe that human potential itself has an
absolute, innate right to be nurtured—defined not by the universe, but by humanity itself without contradiction by the universe—which, from my agnostic point of view, is in the position to neither affirm nor condemn any declarations of meaning sentient creatures wish to assign to the underlying physical realities of existence. In this case, the purpose of assigning human beings the inherent right to develop their potential is based upon the self-affirming value of knowledge, which the sentient mind is able to attain and exploit like no other entity known to exist.
And, before you bring it up, the reason why this position does not contradict my pro-abortion stance again returns to the rights of the mother over those of the unborn fetus. Her potential is worth more, and her wishes therefore are weighted more highly. It is fallacious to consider individual rights on an individual basis in the fashion that would lead to the conclusion that abortion is wrong, because deciding individual rights at the individual level will invariably impose hardships upon wide segments of society. This is why individual rights must be established at the societal level. Or, in other words, my right to kill you for dinner is trumped by your right to live to see another day. And so it goes for abortion: The woman’s rights outrank the unborn’s. Why?
Because of what it means to be human. This is the key point forever lost on those who define humanity in terms of a soul they claim cannot be measured by mortal means.
Hold on a second. Do you know anything about Caesarians? They are actually perfectly safe, first of all. The risk is no more than dental surgery! Secondly, at that point we are no longer talking about one life, we are talking about two very definite lives. How can you honestly weigh the potential inconvenience and incredibly slight risk to the mother against the definite death of the infant?You are not only underestimating the risk, but you are missing my point. It doesn’t matter how risky or how safe something is, because if it’s wrong, then it’s wrong. Abrogating a woman’s rights is not only wrong—due to the hardships and potential hardships it imposes upon her—but it carries the
additional wrongness of imposing a physical health risk upon her in the process of depriving her of these rights! That’s more vile than a bowl of Seven-Wrong Stew!
I know you might think I am sidestepping the issue of “inconveniencing the mother” versus “killing the unborn fetus,” but what I’ve been trying to say for a while now is that killing the fetus is much less regrettable a loss than forcing an unwilling mother to complete a pregnancy or to be cut open to deliver prematurely. Women who are
willing to abstain from abortion are welcome to do so, and so much the better. But no one should have the right to force women who are
unwilling to abstain because they face legitimate risks of hardship, to undergo a full pregnancy against their will. Women will never achieve equality under the law before this right to self-determination is enshrined in our culture
and on our law books.
Cloud19 also wrote: But the problem here is that this means that, by your definition, children are to be sacrificed to save adults, and the elderly are to be sparred above all younger.Potential is not a linear function that increases with age. Unborn embryos and fetuses are a special case because these proto-humans have yet to develop most of that which can be used to classify them as humans. By the time they start walking and talking, they are worth as much as anyone else in the world. Some people accomplish their legacy at age twenty; others at age eighty…it doesn’t jive to say that human value is a function of age. Age increases experience, and therefore increases wisdom, but experience and wisdom are not where I choose to place the definition of humanity.
What is at issue here is that the unborn are a special case. Each unborn child is directly, physically,
via an umbilical cord, connected to another living being—a being whose existence outranks its own. The status of the unborn is unique among all age groups, because their fate is in direct, one-to-one conflict with the fate of those upon whom they depend, and from whose lives they may certainly detract in the most deleterious ways.
Again, we are NOT comparing the woman's life to the infant's life. We are comparing a moment of discomfort for women (the Caesarian) and a definite life ending event for the infant. There's a big difference there, bub.Maybe
you are not making this comparison, but for me it is the motivation for my entire argument. Pregnancy isn’t like getting a flu shot, which might take up a few hours of your day, hurt for a couple of seconds during the injection, and maybe give you a rash. No, pregnancy consumes many months of a woman’s life, and the postnatal period of recovery extends that even further. We’re not talking about two hours lost. We’re talking about a major physiological stress on the woman’s body for nearly an entire year, as well as almost a year of being excluded from the human community—“pregnant women should not do this; pregnant women should not do that; pregnant women should go live in a bubble.” But that’s not even the nub of my gist! At the very core of it all is the fact that, for almost a year, a pregnant woman must abandon a great deal of her ambitions, inasmuch as they might conflict with the effort of gestating a healthy baby. In this essential way, being pregnant against one’s will is like living in a very comfortable jail. Only by
choosing to go through with it are the bars removed.
So yes, I am very much making the comparison between the rights of an undeveloped scrap of flesh versus a grown woman with a distinct character. Until you understand that, I don’t think you are going to be able to comprehend my point of view.
Let me say this, here at the end: Abortion is not about privacy. It is not about convenience. It is not about sexual pleasure. It is about women’s rights. It is about
human rights extended in the most equitable fashion possible, and anyone who says that women’s rights are beneath men’s is a liar. So long as hapless men continue to argue on message boards that women must abstain from sex until they are beholden to a single man, and that, once pregnant, they must complete their pregnancy under all but the most extenuating circumstances,
society condemns women as inferior. Sexism is the worst crime humanity has ever conceived. The plight of the unborn, who possess nothing more than the rudiments of that which will eventually develop a human identity, is chicken feed compared with the fundamental right of half the human population to live on par with the other half.
I tell you again: Forcing a woman to complete an pregnancy
against her will is nothing more than locking her away in a comfortable prison. Opposing abortion is to advocate for controlling the bodies of every woman alive, all at once. Because of that, it is more evil than rape.
Sex…sex for pleasure. If only women would abstain, we wouldn’t have to argue about abortion, right? Wrong. That sort of illogical religious thinking has the blood of the ages on its hands. We are inherently sexual beings. Consenting individuals
must be free to have sex at their discretion, throughout the whole realm of their private lives. And those who would say that sex is solely for the purpose of procreation, do not understand what sets human beings apart from other animals. Our biology and instincts ensure that sex continues to be something we both crave and enjoy, but gone is the underlying motivation for sex as the means of procreation. We evolved to desire sex
itself, because sex leads to children, and now that we are a sentient race in touch more or less with the basic tenets of rational behavior, we can draw a logical line between our physical urge for sex with the completely different, biologically abstract desire for having children. And because our technology—absent the efforts of blockheaded religious conservatives—empowers us to ensure that procreation can be completely extracted from sex in physical terms as well, we are free to indulge the insatiable desire for sex without consigning ourselves to the existence of lesser animals, whose entire adult lives are consumed by the union of sexual behavior and procreation. We have dissolved that union. In the human species, procreation and sex for pleasure are two different subjects. Because our inner animal continues to yearn for sex, we cannot abstain from sex without perverting the entire human race—as can be seen by looking at every society on Earth today. Yet when, against all intentions, sex leads to pregnancy, it is because we are more than mere animals, it is because we are
human beings, that we are self-entitled to the bottomless justice known as
inalienable human rights. Pregnant women have the right to control their own bodies, especially because of the hardships to which pregnancy exposes them. It is an obfuscating oversimplification to say that consensual sexual promiscuity—which mustn’t be restricted, for the sake of human mental and cultural health—constitutes upon a woman the waiving of her rights to control her body and terminate an unwanted pregnancy—which must be her right alone, for the sake of justice and civil liberties.
That’s what we have here: The cultural wellbeing of humanity, and the civil rights of human beings. The former leads to difficulties in the latter, but this is the way it is, this is the way our biology has evolved, and, so long as we remain the creatures that we are now, today, at this chapter in our evolution as a species and as a people, we must contend with the challenges posed by acknowledging our sexuality, and this includes giving women the right to an abortion at the expense of the unborn.
The real world is lean on easy answers. Don’t pretend. God doesn’t do your thinking for you in black and white terms so simple and clear-cut that even an ancient Roman olive farmer could understand. Open your eyes. See the world for what it really us. Tackle the fascinating conundrums of human nature. Wake up and live.
Cloud19 also wrote: The only objective stance is that, no matter what we choose, life will be ended to sustain our own lives. It is enough for me to show, in other words, that it is not hypocritical to slaughter animals but still value life (though the way I value life is not all-encompassing, even human life).There is still the element of cruelty, in that it would be
cruel to force an unwilling woman to complete a pregnancy. Where livestock is concerned, the cruelty is eliminated by adopting humane growing conditions and making slaughter quick and painless. In the case of abortion, however, the only way to eliminate the cruelty of forced gestation is for the woman to decide she wants to do it. Nor is it a suitable technique to simply harass her with attempts at persuasion until she changes her mind. A frank discussion with her doctor prior to an abortion, and perhaps another round of discussions with the biological father or others who are important to the woman—but with no one whom she desires
not to confer with—is all she should have to undertake before being permitted to proceed with contraception, or an abortion. If she is not convinced by these discussions, then any attempt to force her to continue the pregnancy is cruelty.
Yes, there is the element of cruelty against the unborn. But this dilemma cannot be beneficially avoided, as it would be worse to continue on in our barbaric sexual taboos championed by the religious forces of the Earth, and, so long as the dilemma must be confronted, it has been my argument up to this point, and in full, now here completed, that the rights of the woman, based upon the
humanity of the woman, versus that of the unborn thing inside her, trump those of the latter.
And there I believe we have it. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk about this.
~ Josh
~~~
Lordaeron86 wrote:Who the **** thinks a fetus isn't human? An argument can be made about whether or not they are people and have rights, but wtf is this not human crap? What the hell do you define human as? Give me a link to a medical dictionary that defines humans as a baby+. If fetuses aren't part of their respective species, then are they their own species? Do they have their own classification?You are right. In the animal sense of the word
human, unborn humans are human too. But anti-abortionists never use "human" in the animal sense. In fact they go to great lengths to allege that humanity has nothing to do with animals, didn't evolve from no damn dirty ape, and all that other religious rubbish that we all know and expect from them. Nay, instead, anti-abortionists use the word "human" in the sense that a human "
being" is something sacred and inviolable. Human beings have an
identity as it were, that the anti-abortionists say makes us special and worthy of life where other animals deserve nothing but to end up on our dinner tables. They say it isn't our bodies but our
souls that make us human.
Well, fine. But if they want to use that kind of a definition, they've got to substantiate it. And so far as I can tell, the only thing that separates us from the animals is the nature of our identity: namely, the degree of our sentience, the depth of our cognitive and psychological faculties, and our memories. We therefore have an identity predicated upon our experiences and our sentient will. And yet unborn humans have
neither! They have no experiences and no sentience. Oh, they do have limited cognition and operational nervous systems, but the sentience isn't there yet. So the anti-abortionists are defeated on their own turf...unborn humans are "proto-"human in the sense that they have yet to possess the "soul" they allege makes a human special.
What the anti-abortionists want us to believe is that humanity exists supernaturally--that is, non-physically--which is rubbish, dreck, malarky, codswallop, poppycock, balderdash, blatherskite, hooey, dross and cobblers, and nonsense too.
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