Unbelievable? Abortion: A woman’s choice or a baby’s life?
^ the above is a year old clip but still a great discussion.
[quote]pushharder wrote:
Smh?
[/quote]
The argument I laid out earlier would appear to render abortion illegal upon the inception of a heartbeat. A sharp observer of the logic will note that because it hinges on when a fetus can suffer the medical death of a person, and because the medical death of a person is generally a disjunctive proposition, we don’t need both a heart and a brain. The technical details regarding measurement are not for me to decide.
Whether all this accords with my moral intuition is another matter, and one that I don’t have time to get into.
[quote]kneedragger79 wrote:
How does birth control function? In other words, what are the mechanisms that stop pregnancy from occurring smh?
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
Some forms of birth control (i.e., the ones that are insulated from user error) have a very strong reductive effect on abortion:
Which brings us back around to the enormous stupidity of kneedragger, an anti-abortion crusader if ever there was one, hawking one of the riskiest possible birth control methods. If you don’t want people to terminate pregnancies, what kind of fatuous contortionism pits you against birth control methods with near-zero failure rates? Ah, that’s right.[/quote]
[/quote]
In various ways, as you surely know.
Let us begin with the simple, because later I’m sure we’ll have to deal with junk science. So, the simple: condoms. You don’t need me to explain how they work. With typical use, they are more effective than fertility awareness. In conjunction with fertility awareness, they are highly effective. As a logically necessary corollary, in a country in which abortion is legal and some portion of unintended pregnancies is aborted, advocacy for FA works toward an ideal result with a higher abortion rate than advocacy for FA + condoms.
You said that we will get into junk science. Alright let us avoid the whole portion of that discussion. We will boil it down even simpler. What are the unborn?
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]kneedragger79 wrote:
How does birth control function? In other words, what are the mechanisms that stop pregnancy from occurring smh?
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
Some forms of birth control (i.e., the ones that are insulated from user error) have a very strong reductive effect on abortion:
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1400506#t=articleResults
Which brings us back around to the enormous stupidity of kneedragger, an anti-abortion crusader if ever there was one, hawking one of the riskiest possible birth control methods. If you don’t want people to terminate pregnancies, what kind of fatuous contortionism pits you against birth control methods with near-zero failure rates? Ah, that’s right.[/quote]
[/quote]
In various ways, as you surely know.
Let us begin with the simple, because later I’m sure we’ll have to deal with junk science. So, the simple: condoms. You don’t need me to explain how they work. With typical use, they are more effective than fertility awareness. In conjunction with fertility awareness, they are highly effective. As a logically necessary corollary, in a country in which abortion is legal and some portion of unintended pregnancies is aborted, advocacy for FA works toward an ideal result with a higher abortion rate than advocacy for FA + condoms.[/quote]
[quote]pushharder wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]pushharder wrote:
Smh?
[/quote]
The argument I laid out earlier would appear to render abortion illegal upon the inception of a heartbeat. A sharp observer of the logic will note that because it hinges on when a fetus can suffer the medical death of a person, and because the medical death of a person is generally a disjunctive proposition, we don’t need both a heart and a brain. The technical details regarding measurement are not for me to decide.
Whether all this accords with my moral intuition is another matter, and one that I don’t have time to get into.[/quote]
Sorry, that aint’ gonna cut the mustard. If we’re talking the life and death of a clearly innocent human being, a “person,” I want some damn precision in your answer.
Be precise. Be bold. No pussyfootin’ around. The technical details ARE for you to decide within the scope of this discussion.
I’ll bet you’d easily be precise if we were talking the execution or pardon of an innocent prisoner on death row. You’d wax eloquent til the cows came home if that’s what was on the table.[/quote]
Why do you feel it’s necessary to shoehorn biological development into chronological progression? Can’t the degree of development, itself, be the litmus test rather a generalized marker for it?
[quote]pushharder wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]pushharder wrote:
Smh?
[/quote]
The argument I laid out earlier would appear to render abortion illegal upon the inception of a heartbeat. A sharp observer of the logic will note that because it hinges on when a fetus can suffer the medical death of a person, and because the medical death of a person is generally a disjunctive proposition, we don’t need both a heart and a brain. The technical details regarding measurement are not for me to decide.
Whether all this accords with my moral intuition is another matter, and one that I don’t have time to get into.[/quote]
Sorry, that aint’ gonna cut the mustard. If we’re talking the life and death of a clearly innocent human being, a “person,”[/quote]
Before heart/brain activity, and per medical fact, we are not talking the death of a person – a position no one has refuted.
[quote]
I want some damn precision in your answer.
Be precise. Be bold. No pussyfootin’ around. The technical details ARE for you to decide within the scope of this discussion.
I’ll bet you’d easily be precise if we were talking the execution or pardon of an innocent prisoner on death row. You’d wax eloquent til the cows came home if that’s what was on the table.[/quote]
The answer was exact: at the measurement of heartbeat. A model statute would prescribe the best technology/procedure in standard practice so that the law would keep pace with technological development. That is a literally precise answer.
[quote]kneedragger79 wrote:
You said that we will get into junk science. Alright let us avoid the whole portion of that discussion. We will boil it down even simpler. What are the unborn?
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]kneedragger79 wrote:
How does birth control function? In other words, what are the mechanisms that stop pregnancy from occurring smh?
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
Some forms of birth control (i.e., the ones that are insulated from user error) have a very strong reductive effect on abortion:
Which brings us back around to the enormous stupidity of kneedragger, an anti-abortion crusader if ever there was one, hawking one of the riskiest possible birth control methods. If you don’t want people to terminate pregnancies, what kind of fatuous contortionism pits you against birth control methods with near-zero failure rates? Ah, that’s right.[/quote]
[/quote]
In various ways, as you surely know.
Let us begin with the simple, because later I’m sure we’ll have to deal with junk science. So, the simple: condoms. You don’t need me to explain how they work. With typical use, they are more effective than fertility awareness. In conjunction with fertility awareness, they are highly effective. As a logically necessary corollary, in a country in which abortion is legal and some portion of unintended pregnancies is aborted, advocacy for FA works toward an ideal result with a higher abortion rate than advocacy for FA + condoms.[/quote]
[/quote]
No, I don’t do the Socratic method of argument.
If you have a claim to make, you’re free to make it. We’re talking about contraception and the ludicrous spectacle of someone vehemently opposed to abortion advocating for one of the least effective standalone birth control methods…in a country in which abortion is legal and some (too-high, we all agree) portion of unintended pregnancies is terminated.
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
Before heart/brain activity, and per medical fact, we are not talking the death of a person – a position no one has refuted. [/quote]
What is it the death of if not a person? Something clearly human dies.
I get your point in the above statement. What I don’t understand is why you have put such stock in legal / medical definitions and jargon? If memory serves science once thought the universe revolved around the earth, that was scientific fact. Once upon a time medicine treated all sorts of conditions, like homosexuality, with electro shock therapy. At one time the Supreme Court upheld the notion that a black person, whether free or owned, could not be a U.S. citizen via Dredd Scott vs. Sanford.
My point is not to draw a parallel between these situations and abortion; although, I think Dredd Scott vs. Sanford is a decent parallel, but to point out how these institutions are continuously evolving because they are wrong, often and a lot.
So my question is, why should we accept the death of millions of the unborn every single year based on definitions these institutions have created? Shouldn’t our laws, in a civilized country such as ours, remain on the side of caution when life, a founding principle of this nation, is at stake?
[quote]usmccds423 wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
Before heart/brain activity, and per medical fact, we are not talking the death of a person – a position no one has refuted. [/quote]
What is it the death of if not a person? Something clearly human dies.
I get your point in the above statement. What I don’t understand is why you have put such stock in legal / medical definitions and jargon? If memory serves science once thought the universe revolved around the earth, that was scientific fact. Once upon a time medicine treated all sorts of conditions, like homosexuality, with electro shock therapy. At one time the Supreme Court upheld the notion that a black person, whether free or owned, could not be a U.S. citizen via Dredd Scott vs. Sanford.
My point is not to draw a parallel between these situations and abortion; although, I think Dredd Scott vs. Sanford is a decent parallel, but to point out how these institutions are continuously evolving because they are wrong, often and a lot.
So my question is, why should we accept the death of millions of the unborn every single year based on definitions these institutions have created? Shouldn’t our laws, in a civilized country such as ours, remain on the side of caution when life, a founding principle of this nation, is at stake?
[/quote]
Isn’t freedom also a founding principle? Why doesn’t that get priority if your taking the side of caution? If life is more important then we need more government regulation everywhere.
[quote]usmccds423 wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
Before heart/brain activity, and per medical fact, we are not talking the death of a person – a position no one has refuted. [/quote]
What is it the death of if not a person? Something clearly human dies.
I get your point in the above statement. What I don’t understand is why you have put such stock in legal / medical definitions and jargon?[/quote]
There are no legal definitions in my argument – I don’t care about legal definitions; they can change easily and only because we decide we want them to.
As for the medical and scientific, it cannot be dismissed as simple “jargon.” It isn’t jargon, anyway – it’s a fundamental determination with total bearing on this discussion. You would correctly laugh away anyone who dismissed as “medical jargon” the pro-life invocation of the scientifically unambiguous determination of an embryo as human. You cannot treat other medical facts differently.
If something is wrong, you’ve got to show it to be wrong.
The medical and the scientific are central to this discussion. They can’t simply be set aside because people used to not know how astronomical bodies operated*. If something much change, then that’s fine – but the case has to be made, scientifically. The heart and brain must be set aside as the engines of a living person, and some other discontinuity in states – the change from alive to dead, being a change, requires this direct discontinuity – must be set up as the measurements of death. Furthermore, what’s set up must have implications that are not nonsensical (to take just one of many examples, they must not call “alive” a body 3 weeks after decapitation in which there persist some deep, squirming stem cells).
- Otherwise, anyone can set aside all of it: “You want to call an embryo human, but science used to say that the sun revolved around the earth, so the institution that describes and designates “humanness” is invalid. I therefore don’t accept that it’s human.” This is what I mean when I say that we cannot rely on special pleading.
[quote]sufiandy wrote:
[quote]usmccds423 wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
Before heart/brain activity, and per medical fact, we are not talking the death of a person – a position no one has refuted. [/quote]
What is it the death of if not a person? Something clearly human dies.
I get your point in the above statement. What I don’t understand is why you have put such stock in legal / medical definitions and jargon? If memory serves science once thought the universe revolved around the earth, that was scientific fact. Once upon a time medicine treated all sorts of conditions, like homosexuality, with electro shock therapy. At one time the Supreme Court upheld the notion that a black person, whether free or owned, could not be a U.S. citizen via Dredd Scott vs. Sanford.
My point is not to draw a parallel between these situations and abortion; although, I think Dredd Scott vs. Sanford is a decent parallel, but to point out how these institutions are continuously evolving because they are wrong, often and a lot.
So my question is, why should we accept the death of millions of the unborn every single year based on definitions these institutions have created? Shouldn’t our laws, in a civilized country such as ours, remain on the side of caution when life, a founding principle of this nation, is at stake?
[/quote]
Isn’t freedom also a founding principle? Why doesn’t that get priority if your taking the side of caution? If life is more important then we need more government regulation everywhere.[/quote]
Because you can’t have freedom without life…
The vast majority of the time a man and woman are exercising their freedom when creating another life. All I’ve ever asked is that that life receive the same consideration.
Edit:
“We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness; …”
I believe the law should protect the preservation of life when liberty has not been infringed upon, ie, when a mutually agreed upon sexual encounter occurs and a life is created the law should be in favor of protecting that life. Otherwise you are encroaching upon the life and liberty of the unborn.
I don’t understand why anyone would be against that.
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]usmccds423 wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
Before heart/brain activity, and per medical fact, we are not talking the death of a person – a position no one has refuted. [/quote]
What is it the death of if not a person? Something clearly human dies.
I get your point in the above statement. What I don’t understand is why you have put such stock in legal / medical definitions and jargon?[/quote]
There are no legal definitions in my argument – I don’t care about legal definitions; they can change easily and only because we decide we want them to.
As for the medical and scientific, it cannot be dismissed as simple “jargon.” It isn’t jargon, anyway – it’s a fundamental determination with total bearing on this discussion. You would correctly laugh away anyone who dismissed as “medical jargon” the pro-life invocation of the scientifically unambiguous determination of an embryo as human. You cannot treat other medical facts differently.
If something is wrong, you’ve got to show it to be wrong.
The medical and the scientific are central to this discussion. They can’t simply be set aside because people used to not know how astronomical bodies operated*. If something much change, then that’s fine – but the case has to be made, scientifically. The heart and brain must be set aside as the engines of a living person, and some other discontinuity in states – the change from alive to dead, being a change, requires this direct discontinuity – must be set up as the measurements of death. Furthermore, what’s set up must have implications that are not nonsensical (to take just one of many examples, they must not call “alive” a body 3 weeks after decapitation in which there persist some deep, squirming stem cells).
- Otherwise, anyone can set aside all of it: “You want to call an embryo human, but science used to say that the sun revolved around the earth, so the institution that describes and designates “humanness” is invalid. I therefore don’t accept that it’s human.” This is what I mean when I say that we cannot rely on special pleading.[/quote]
Okay, but medicine has proven a unique human life is created at conception. So aren’t you setting aside that medical fact, central to this discussion, in favor of heart/brain activity? Again, What is it the death of if not a person? Something clearly human dies.