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[Max™]

I'm sorry... did I see someone say "moderate republicans" a little ways up the page?

What the hell does that even mean?

They only favor permanently disenfranchising blacks but they're just "eh" on other groups?
They aren't totally on board with endorsing legislation requiring women be placed in stalls to crap out kids and watch Fox?
They can't really justify getting rid of all health care which poor people might use because some companies still make money off said poor people?

Romney voted to convict the orange dumbfuck the first time, he was joined by a handful of other R senators AFTER THE CAPITOL BUILDING WHERE THEY WERE DOING BUSINESS WAS ATTACKED BY A MOB INCITED BY THE ORANGE DUMBFUCK, so I think they only get like half-credit for not being utterly spineless when their lives were actually at risk, yanno?

If you're comfortable sitting down at a table with 10 nazis, that means there are 11 nazis at the table.
Republicans are STILL openly supporting the nonsense Q Cucks Klown bullshit and they're still scared of the orange dumbfuck while racing to disenfranchise everybody except their core constituency: old racist white people, plus as many young racist white people they can get their hands on. Accepting the lies of an ex-leader because his followers are too invested in the way he said "it's totally cool to be open about how shitty you really are" while refusing any self-examination (what happened with that bipartisan jan 6 investigation?) and repeatedly spewing obvious falsehoods to preserve the image of your orange dumbfuck as some capable strongman are all things fascist movements do. I was saying this years and years and years ago, I cited Umberto Eco as an expert on it fairly recently, pretending these people can be reasoned with or convinced to stop being fashy cuntboys is how we got where we are today.

A moderate republican isn't a republican, the whole party has been sprinting rightward faster than ever, which is impressive because ever since the Southern Strategy solidified it as the party of white supremacists and godbotherers, the idea of there being room to go further right sounds absurd.

Yet here we are, a party scared to exercise power and represent the majority who voted for it, and a party devoted to enshrining the minority who voted for it as the only minority that matters through any means necessary.


As for the pregnancy discussion, every single unwanted pregnancy--literally 100% of them with absolutely zero room for argument otherwise--is the fault of a dude getting off carelessly.

It stands to reason that a guy should probably be required to prove they are both able and willing to care for a baby before they can just run around shooting them into people, and perhaps something like a program where young guys get an xbox or something and have to get a reversible vasectomy which can only be undone after said capability/culpability checks are performed might be a solution if the goal is preventing abortions?

I mean, I know one party who obviously wouldn't be up for it, which just proves they don't give two fucking shits about "tha unborn!!!" and merely want to exert control over women/punish them/make shit more difficult for poor women especially those who aren't lily-white like the pieces of shit passing these laws.

[MrRoboto75]

Moderate Repubs = They don't like Trump as a figurehead even though they ultimately agree with his views/motives.

[Rolan7]

About pregnancy:  I have to push back on it being, uh, *completely* the... fault... of men.  For one thing they do get taken advantage of too.

I totally agree with the point that most anti-abortion measures, which focus almost exclusively on the mother, are based in controlling women via their body parts.  People can reasonably care about fetuses/unborn but should hold the guy responsible as well - and I don't mean financially.  If we're to force a woman to donate her blood/mobility/torso/privacy/diet and finally suffer life-threatening and excruciating delivery over making a single mistake (or having safeguards randomly fail), then at *least* we could require the male to donate blood, community service, and be temporarily rendered impotent over the same interim.  I know it's disgusting, and yet it's a much lighter violation of bodily autonomy while directly benefiting the community.

(My point is that we cannot force any of that on either party, unless we're *punishing immorality*.  And even our justice system rarely goes so far in denying people their bodily autonomy.)

So yeah, it's not always the guy's fault.  Let's not let that distract from the fact that we only talk about punishing/forcing the gal, and in ways that guys would never suggest for themselves.

(I used gendered terms when talking about sex, here, for brevity.  Obviously guys can get pregnant, but those guys probably weren't the ones historically denying abortion access to females)

[Loud Whispers]

If you're comfortable sitting down at a table with 10 nazis, that means there are 11 nazis at the table.

[weeps in Chamberlain]

[McTraveller]

If we're to force a woman to donate her blood/mobility/torso/privacy/diet and finally suffer life-threatening and excruciating delivery

What is it with this new worldview that being pregnant is a horrifying, dangerous, awful thing? The entire biological purpose of a female is to generate offspring.  To head off any heated response: I explicitly want to state that biological purpose is unique from social purpose. I do not believe for a single moment the social "purpose" of women is to generate offspring; that is demeaning to humanity as a whole and women in particular.

I can see that some (all?) cultures have taken nefarious advantage of the biological aspects of reality, but I think it's a stretch to say that society "forces" women to "donate their bodies" and suffer a "life threatening" process to continue the species.  Yeah statistically there is a health risk, but c'mon, calling pregnancy "dangerous" is clearly provocative language conveying a bias. Yes it's technically correct, but we don't say eating is dangerous, when clearly there is a choking hazard, food poisoning hazard, allergy hazard, etc. I could even cite actuarial tables that, even though females have this "dangerous" attribute of childbirth, their life expectancy is still higher than males...

A problem I see with "reproductive rights" is, at least in western cultures, is that bearing children is no longer valued or seen as a privilege or great responsibility - it's seen more as an annoyance and hazard, getting in the way of personal lifestyle, career path, and the like.  Since we treat it as a hazard, we get all kinds of messed up stuff.  If instead we as a culture treated pregnancy with reverence and value, I think we'd care for women much more.

Now - hopefully you see that my view isn't "enslave women to be breeders", but it's that women need more respect.  Yes give them access to abortions, sure, but I would much much rather build a society that values the unique capability of women to give birth, and not in the "valued in the capitalist sense of let's exploit it because it has value" sense.

[MrRoboto75]

If we're to force a woman to donate her blood/mobility/torso/privacy/diet and finally suffer life-threatening and excruciating delivery

What is it with this new worldview that being pregnant is a horrifying, dangerous, awful thing? The entire biological purpose of a female is to generate offspring.  To head off any heated response: I explicitly want to state that biological purpose is unique from social purpose. I do not believe for a single moment the social "purpose" of women is to generate offspring; that is demeaning to humanity as a whole and women in particular.

In spite of biology, humans are really bad at giving birth.  Consider for most of history giving birth was often fatal for the mother even if the baby survived.

[Frumple]

What is it with this new worldview that being pregnant is a horrifying, dangerous, awful thing?

It's called (slowly, too goddamn slowly) treating the medical issues of women with more of the concern they deserve, as opposed to the shit to be ignored they've generally been treated as. Pregnancy is thoroughly fucking unpleasant for many, literally life threatening (significantly moreso than eating, if you really want to use that jackass comparison), fairly likely to cause permanent or long term physical damage, and is overall just a really shitty thing to live through, most of the time. Birth itself is literally one of the absolutely most painful things a person can live through, even with women generally being more pain tolerant than men.

The kid's usually nice when miscarriage or stillbirth doesn't happen and human bodies jack themselves up on hormones to attach to them, but everything else about it is generally pretty fucking miserable. Human biology does not lend itself to easy birth. You can respect someone for going through that shit, but part of giving that respect is not fucking downplaying the difficulties they go through in the process.

This wasn't different in the past -- it was actually more dangerous and more miserable, with a lot more dead children and dead mothers as a results. Most societies just treated women like shit and didn't give a damn it was dangerous and miserable.

E: I mean, the eating comparison is particularly fucked up, really. Imagine for a moment somewhere between one in five and one in ten of the times you ate, you just threw it right back up. That would be eating on the probably undercounting miscarriage rates (nevermind everything else that can go wrong), with likely less unpleasant results, and I don't think bloody anyone would consider it that pleasant of a thing or what you'd call a "privilege".

[None]

You, uh, you also can't choose not to eat, or satisfy your hunger by pantomiming the action of eating. Shit, I wish it was that easy. Also, we're better at educating people how to stop choking than how to stop becoming pregnant.

More respect for the capability to rear children isn't going to stop the economy from expecting all available parents to work for the wage to put child in daycare to be able to work for the wage to keep a roof. This is not to say that they're being exploited to fund the daycare industry, but that it's simply expected that you have two incomes to pay the bills in a household now. We'd need sweeping labor and wage changes to begin to fix that and we couldn't even manage a minimum wage of $15.

Edit: better yet, let's let women decide- I think they've decided that being pregnant is a horrifying, dangerous, awful thing, so let's give them the resources to manage that, yes?

[McTraveller]

I'm looking to be educated here, not cause trouble.  So I looked at some numbers and was actually surprised:

Some sources say that choking killed about 5200 people in the US in 2019, mostly the elderly.

Also The CDC says there are only about 700 pregnancy-related deaths per year in the US.  (To be fair, I thought it would be higher than this!)  This includes before, during, and up to a year after birth.  This is apparently roughly 10 deaths per 100000 live births, so fewer than that per pregnancy, since there are more pregnancies than live births.  The little I was able to find says that about 15% of "known pregnancies" result in miscarriage, but there are probably many more "undetected miscarriages" (basically when the woman didn't even know she was pregnant in the first place, and it was so early that no miscarriage was detected) - as high as 50% of all fertilizations.

So just based on deaths, eating does in fact kill more people than being pregnant.  As for "danger":  5.2k deaths by choking out of 330,000k people is naively a 1.6 in 10^5 chance of dying per year if you eat.  The pregnancy related death rate is naively 10 per 100k, or 1 per 10^5.

So there you go, eating is about twice as likely to kill you than being pregnant.

Short story: humans are really bad at estimating probability/risk.

[hector13]

Has that factored in people generally needing to eat multiple times per day, versus pregnancy being limited to roughly half the population and occurring not nearly as frequently?

Edit: like, just spitballing it, 330m people eating 3 meals a day is pretty much 1 billion eats a day, so 365 billion eats a year, and you’ll be shoveling food in your mouth more times than that ‘cause we are not Pennywise the clown.

5200 deaths from probably over a trillion possible choking events is pretty much nothing.

[Rolan7]

A problem I see with "reproductive rights" is, at least in western cultures, is that bearing children is no longer valued or seen as a privilege or great responsibility - it's seen more as an annoyance and hazard, getting in the way of personal lifestyle, career path, and the like.  Since we treat it as a hazard, we get all kinds of messed up stuff.  If instead we as a culture treated pregnancy with reverence and value, I think we'd care for women much more.

I guess I understand this viewpoint.  People get a lot of crap for not starting a traditional family, but less so than we used to.  And there is, I guess, an increasing acceptance and perhaps even expectation that everyone have a career.

In my opinion the solution is to recognize childcare, including by a parent, as an actual job that deserves actual respect.  I have mixed feelings and baggage about pregnancy but being a parent-or-guardian is something I deeply respect and feel strongly about.

And it's not like I dislike people for making children, I just feel burned by expectations that I participate in it, or that adoption isn't real parenthood.  In other words: I agree that motherhood is exceptionally deserving of respect - largely because it *is* such a momentous project.

Now - hopefully you see that my view isn't "enslave women to be breeders", but it's that women need more respect.  Yes give them access to abortions, sure, but I would much much rather build a society that values the unique capability of women to give birth, and not in the "valued in the capitalist sense of let's exploit it because it has value" sense.

Absolutely.  I tend to come at this from the perspective of the state, since many governments seem concerned about decreasing rates of childbirth.  Like I think None was getting at, there are economic reasons for this (not just allowing women access to education and some reproductive freedom).  The state can subsidize childrearing, particularly if we start treating it like the real work that it is, and more people will naturally choose to take on the burdens of pregnancy.

Edit:  Not to be-labor to the point, but "choose" is operative there, of course.

[MrRoboto75]

So there you go, eating is about twice as likely to kill you than being pregnant.

Eating is infinitely more likely to kill me, as I lack a uterus.

In my opinion the solution is to recognize childcare, including by a parent, as an actual job that deserves actual respect.

I don't think the problem is raising kids isn't respected, it's that more often than not a family cannot sustain itself on a single income anymore.  People aren't choosing to work to avoid their kids, they work so their family has food water and shelter.

[Criptfeind]

This seems like just such a weird and pointless tangent. Eating? Guess what? People need to eat. Eating is dangerous but the reason we don't say it's so is in the context of the fact that it's necessary. So the NET DANGER of eating is negative (and greatly greatly so). People don't need to get pregnant, certainly not at least personally.

If people had no need to eat, but we made laws forcing them to do so, you'd better fucking believe that people would decry those laws for a lot of different reasons, including it being a danger to them, and be totally right to do so.

[wierd]

I will just throw another statistic out there--- LACK OF SLEEP.  Specifically, from trying to work multiple jobs, due to the lack of quality gainful employment.


It has been linked with a 30% increase in the risk factors for alzhiemers disease, and several studies have shown that even A SINGLE DAY of poor sleep, causes accumulation of the plaque forming protein in human brains.


This science is not really all that new either.  It's been building for a long time.

OH-- And the statistic is that the disease manifestation rate is increasing.



Why aren't people up in arms over the shenanigans of corporate america? 

Compare and contrast with the "Eating" argument, and the pregnancy argument.

Remember, Alzheimers is NOT normal aging, and is a pathogenic process, that science is linking more and more to poor sleep hygiene.

[McTraveller]

I don't think the problem is raising kids isn't respected, it's that more often than not a family cannot sustain itself on a single income anymore.  People aren't choosing to work to avoid their kids, they work so their family has food water and shelter.

That is a good example of systemic embodiment of "raising kids isn't respected."  It's sort of chicken-and-egg perhaps: women started working, pushing up cost of housing and stuff because "everyone is a two-worker household", which then makes it difficult to sustain on a single income, so there is undue economic burden, etc. etc.  The system itself doesn't "respect", as in doesn't make as economically attractive, childbearing.  It values making money and a career over childbearing.

I mean even tax forms have "occupation of spouse" on it, and do you write "mother" or "housewife" there?

It's all a side effect of "if someone doesn't pay you for it, it's not worthwhile" kind of thinking, which is very sad.  Funny thing is, I think environmentalism has actually become more "respectable" than raising kids!  You don't see news articles about raising kids, spending time with your kids, etc. - not nearly to the extent you see stuff about the climate or entertainment figures.

Preview-inspired edit:

If people had no need to eat, but we made laws forcing them to do so...

That's false equivalence. Anti abortion laws don't "force" you to procreate; the procreative act has already occurred.

Note also society has an interest in procreation - you can't have society without it after all.  In the best case I'd be for society saying "you are pregnant, on average it's better for society and for you to bring it to term than terminate, and we'll help you do that."  This is different from abusive forms of the stance like "you got pregnant, you're on your own, deal with it!" or even forced procreative acts themselves, but I think that's a different conversation.

I do mean that - on average carrying a pregnancy to term is just not that risky compared to other everyday activities.  Procreation is, in fact, an "everyday activity" of humans, even if it's not done literally every day.