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[MrRoboto75]

I for one am in favor of doing whatever is convenient.
Babies are expensive and exhausting to support, and they can't really complain or fight back, so un-living them is just the most practical option.

Is this not a consequence of how the nuclear family unit fails to provide the level of support the extended family does, while the increasing costs of living and decreasing wages in spite of increased productivity and work time leads people to conclude that "un-living" their babies is preferable to rearing them? Using abortion as a tool for a whole generation to quietly disintegrate itself because the whole system is fucked seems to compound the fuckery rathern than resolve it

My baby can't make shareholders richer.

[Loud Whispers]

My baby can't make shareholders richer.

It can take on debt & incur expenses so it's making a lot of people wealthier

[McTraveller]

Indeed.

It's a symptom of something far deeper, and it's nefarious that it's couched in something positive.  I dunno, maybe I'm just growing even more outwardly cynical...

[MrRoboto75]

My baby can't make shareholders richer.

It can take on debt & incur expenses so it's making a lot of people wealthier

It can also default on those deb- oh wait you can't on some of those and the gov will just bail out those rich losers anyway.

[Teneb]

Has no one mentioned that their solution to what they perceive as killing human beings... is to kill human beings?

Bay12, I am disappoint.

[RedKing]

This bill is a SCTOUS barometer test, IMHO. They know it *typically* would be slapped down hard. But this is a different SCOTUS with Justice "I drink beer. I like beer, okay? We drank beer."

If it reaches the SCOTUS (if it even makes it past Kasich's veto), then it's a test of just how conservative the new SCOTUS is. If, God forbid, it were to stand then you'd see a flurry of crazy-ass Evangelical wet-dream legislation entering state houses across the Red Belt.

Legal hunting season on pagans
Criminalizing homosexuality
Making female adultery punishable by stoning while male adultery gets you a gift card for Buffalo Wild'N'Wings
Making saying anything other than "Merry Christmas" punishable by stoning with stale fruitcakes

[Doomblade187]

Indeed.

It's a symptom of something far deeper, and it's nefarious that it's couched in something positive.  I dunno, maybe I'm just growing even more outwardly cynical...

My mother in law has had at least one abortion. She is not well off. Had she been able to raise the child, I suspect she would have. But she had neither the means nor the support to do so.

There are two things that will make the abortion rate go down, though not the only ones:
Increased access to affordable contraceptives
Increased social support in the form of childcare, education, and healthcare

Of these two, contraceptive access is easier and cheaper, and we really should get on that shit.

[Kagus]

One thing that's worth mentioning, I feel, is that the process of abortion is by no means comfortable or easy for the woman going through with it... It's not some "get out of jail free" card.

Abortion is a decision you have to live with for the rest of your life...  Carrying to term is a decision you have to live with for the rest of your life and theirs.


I don't consider human life, or any life really, as being innately valuable. So the unthinking mass of partially-divided cells that gets scrambled during an abortion holds little meaning to me personally, I'd rather that potential children actually enter into life with a loving family that truly wants them and welcomes them.

I've seen the good side of a "forced birth"... I have a friend who got pregnant at a very early age (while on the pill, in case you needed a horror story today) and, due to living in North Carolina, found proper medical options to be either difficult to locate or so protected by communal contempt that they were unviable. By the time she even got the option to abort, the doc said it was too far along to be legal.

She was seventeen. Luckily, things seem to have turned out alright... her beau married her and miraculously stopped being quite as massive of a flake as he tended to be, she herself settled into the role of mom fairly well, and the kid's adorable.

Did things work out alright? Yeah, I'd say they did. Should she have had other options available to her? I firmly believe that she should have.

[scriver]

preedit: superninja'd, but I'm still posting!

Sigh.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

It is sad when people think their own rights or personal comfort are important enough to kill anyone, let alone unborn children.

I mean. You are posting this in the context of a law suggestion which would literally mean a possible death penalty for people who perform abortions.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I think people in general aren't really "for abortion", they are really "for women's rights" - and somehow we got stuck on abortion as being an issue of women's rights rather than as the killing of children.

Why can't we promote and maintain women's rights and support a culture of not aborting children?

Because people require a certain amount of control of their bodies, beings, and lives in order to be able to actualise their rights. In fact, many would hold that being able to be sovereign of one's own body is a fundamental human right.

I personally would prefer if abortions were never trivially performed. I would prefer a culture where abortions, despite being available to all, were only ever performed when really necessary. However, we know how thing was like before abortions were legalised. A lot of women suffered, a lot of women hurt themselves, a lot of women died. I am not a particular proponent of abortions, and I can still see how much better society with it available than without.

And besides, looking at the example of a culture in your post, such a culture would have to exist and be firmly in place before a possible law would follow up. Such a culture do not exist now. Such a culture did not exist before abortions were legalised - then women performed black market surgery, or worse self-surgery to accomplish it. It did not exist before that either - even further back women would poison or beat themselves to abort their pregnancy, or just straight up murder their of child after birth in desperation. Simply putting a ban on top of your society would not do away with abortion. It would just force rich people to go abroad, and poor people to go back to back-street "doctors" and coat hangers, like they did before.

See, as I said above, abortions are nothing new or modern. The only modern thing about them is the ability to be able to do it under controlled, clinical, and medical conditions. The only thing modern about abortions is the right to be able to perform it with a lower risk of death, permanent injury, or future infertility for the woman. That is why I am 100% in favour of freely(-until-health-risk-outweighs-other-factors) available abortion. This is what Sweden provides today, as far as I know, and I think it is also what the US supreme court decision mandates. To me, the health and risks to the life of the living, fully formed person outweighs the potential of the unborn, still not fully formed human, the seed-of-a-person.

Discarded strands of hair, trimmed fingernails, saliva and urine are all uniquely "human", and yet have less claim to personhood than moths. If the question is at what point a fetus becomes human, the answer is "since before it was created". I don't think that's a very good question to ask for that reason.

I consider, for lack of a better definition, a person to be a thing with the mental properties of an adult human. By that definition, many of the things I like to eat are closer to a person than even a newborn baby human.

I don't feel the comparison at all works. Discarded hairs, nails or liquids are all parts of a body, just like a fetus is, but they are not the same as a fetus. A fetus is, after all, the entirety of a body, a person-in-an-egg-shell. Hair and nails human as a leaf is to a tree, and the fetus is akin to the seed and nut that grows into the tree. One cannot diminish them into being the same as you do. Their form and function are much to different, and the promise of what they may develop into far too important to be ignored.

Has no one mentioned that their solution to what they perceive as killing human beings... is to kill human beings?

Bay12, I am disappoint.

I tried to, but I was to slow. Or rather you were to quick to assume! Teneb, I am disappoint.

One thing that's worth mentioning, I feel, is that the process of abortion is by no means comfortable or easy for the woman going through with it... It's not some "get out of jail free" card.

Abortion is a decision you have to live with for the rest of your life...  Carrying to term is a decision you have to live with for the rest of your life and theirs.

_{technically still true in both situations tho}

[Kagus]

To clarify what I mean by "product of abortion," I mean that my grandmother had one of those "either kid or you" pregnancies, and she (and her husband) chose her. My father was the child that came after that one. Should she not had the choice, then he (and I) would not exist.

This explains it a lot more. For a moment I thought you might be a botchling or something and I'd have to break out the good silver.

[Loud Whispers]

To clarify what I mean by "product of abortion," I mean that my grandmother had one of those "either kid or you" pregnancies, and she (and her husband) chose her. My father was the child that came after that one. Should she not had the choice, then he (and I) would not exist.

This explains it a lot more. For a moment I thought you might be a botchling or something and I'd have to break out the good silver.

Sour about that post-birth abortion

[nenjin]

Indeed.

It's a symptom of something far deeper, and it's nefarious that it's couched in something positive.  I dunno, maybe I'm just growing even more outwardly cynical...

People having sex with no concept of the consequences is beloved by religious folks because their hot ‘n fresh answer is: get married, in a Christian church, and raise your kids as Christians. It’s not about the sanctity of life, as anyone with two brain cells to rub together can clearly see. It’s about propagating the faith.

[McTraveller]

Response about culture

Well yes, I agree.  I've posted earlier in this thread that although I don't like abortion I think it should be legal.  Because of all the reasons you mentioned, plus a few others.

Regarding the death penalty for violation - I foresee the odd rationale that it's a one-versus-many life trade-off so it's "reasonable" or some nonsense.

Taking lives for any reason is never "good" although I suppose in some situations it may be acceptable as the "least bad" (like in cases requiring violent defense) or perhaps "necessary" such as we have to eat, which necessarily consumes life (even if we have "test tube" meat, at some point those cells were still alive).

People having sex with no concept of the consequences is beloved by religious folks because their hot ‘n fresh answer is: get married, in a Christian church, and raise your kids as Christians. It’s not about the sanctity of life, as anyone with two brain cells to rub together can clearly see. It’s about propagating the faith.

I believe there is sanctity of life and I believe there is misappropriation of sanctity of life to propagate the faith.  Don't throw out the concept of sanctity of life (if you think it's a thing) just because people abuse the concept.

[Dunamisdeos]

Can confirm that I have never heard the rationale of "If you were a Christian you wouldn't have this problem" actually spoken in any church I've been to. This is likely because I don't frequent places with those kinds of fundamentalist views.

BUT. There are plenty who believe that all human life is sacred by reasoning that it will become a functioning human being if you don't end it, and follow that logic ("logic") to conclude that the only reason you would ever consider ending it is because you are deliberately ignoring the right to life that a human baby has because you care more about your own comfort than you do about the life of a child. These are invariably people who have never had to consider the possibility of an abortion in their own life and are unwilling to accept the reality that it is sometimes necessary (by their own definition of human life) to end a life to save one. When they say "baby murderer" they mean it literally, in the first-degree sense.

But again, I am 110% certain that there are whackadoodle fundamentalists (and too many of them at that) that deliberately abuse this concept to control and abuse their congregation/followers/family. Humanity is still humanity, after all.

[nenjin]

I believe there is sanctity of life and I believe there is misappropriation of sanctity of life to propagate the faith.  Don't throw out the concept of sanctity of life (if you think it's a thing) just because people abuse the concept.

If life were truly sacred to the faithful, they'd be out in droves protesting a) the way we treat the poor b) the amount of wars we wage and the civilian casualties they generate c) extrajudicial killings by police, etc and so forth.

But they don't, by and large. They mobilize around the one issue: unborn children who are as yet unbaptized. The sanctity of life is really the sanctity of your soul, which is a lot easier to address with a baptism and some prostelyzation than fighting to make sure the life they live here on Earth (which the Church often says matters less than what you're going to do in the afterlife) is a life worth having.

So yeah. When someone starts talking about the sanctity of life, I ask them about how important life is other circumstances in someone's existence, and how they do or don't show their support for those things. And by large I get some crappy justification that is just masking the fact it's not about life for them, it's about souls. Some amorphous thing that takes far less effort, money and shits given than their actual life.

While I want to believe in the sanctity of life....modern realities force me to believe otherwise. It's an all or nothing thing to me. And I'm forced to value the lives of those who are born, conscious beings over the unborn. If someone is trying to take my life, then I can't simply not defend myself and avoid taking their's. Life is sacred is a great concept. But it's not practiced in the world the way it's preached. Life is sacred, to me, is like...one animal killing another for survival. That is a sacred act.