[quote]PRCalDude wrote:
That’s punishing somebody with death for a capital offense they haven’t yet committed because they haven’t yet left the womb. I don’t care about any yet-to-happen cycle, I care about the right of the baby to live. [/quote]
And yet when the baby is born, you’ll likely turn into the “don’t bother me, kid” type. If that kid grow up to be a degenerate because his parents weren’t ready, and he murders someone in your family, are you going to be so “pro-life” then?
[quote]PRCalDude wrote:
What does this have to do with the right of a human being who has committed no capital crime to live?[/quote]
It has EVERYTHING to do with it. The child is usually almost GUARANTEED to grow up to become a sociopath. Think I’m exaggerating? Come to NZ, go to South Auckland and take a look at the low-life scum growing there.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/category/story.cfm?c_id=30&objectid=10517189
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/category/story.cfm?c_id=30&objectid=10517031
This sort of thing is usually perpetrated by low-life fucktards from broken homes, and were born into a family that SIMPLY WASN’T READY.
Now if all you pro-lifers are willing to adopt these children and give them a stable loving environment, then that a different story. Until then, you’re a bunch of hypocrites.
[quote]Makavali wrote:
PRCalDude wrote:
What does this have to do with the right of a human being who has committed no capital crime to live?
It has EVERYTHING to do with it. The child is usually almost GUARANTEED to grow up to become a sociopath. Think I’m exaggerating? Come to NZ, go to South Auckland and take a look at the low-life scum growing there.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/category/story.cfm?c_id=30&objectid=10517189
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/category/story.cfm?c_id=30&objectid=10517031
This sort of thing is usually perpetrated by low-life fucktards from broken homes, and were born into a family that SIMPLY WASN’T READY.
Now if all you pro-lifers are willing to adopt these children and give them a stable loving environment, then that a different story. Until then, you’re a bunch of hypocrites.[/quote]
In short, “they should all be dead.”
[quote]Sifu wrote:
Sloth wrote:
Sifu wrote:
Since some of you pro-lifers care so much about “babies” I have questions for you. Because I want to know just how much you really do care about “babies”.
How many of you have adopted one or more “babies” or are in the process of adopting?
I stopped here. So because someone doesn’t adopt a baby, the baby should’ve been killed? Do you really want to make that your arguement? “You’re better off dead, you orphan! Your mother should have snuffed you out in the womb! You might grow up to be a criminal!” You guys come up with pretty gruesome ideas. Harvest human lives to extend the health and mortality of those fotunate enough to have escaped the womb. And now, kill them in the womb as a precaution against potential criminals.
My point was this. You prolifers are quite willing to force others to have babies they don’t want, because you care sooo much about the baby. But the moment the top of the baby’s head sees daylight for the first time you change your tune to “you’re on your own now kid. Don’t you ever become a problem for me!”.
[/quote]
Aha! What does that have to do with actively killing them? Your arguement is nothing less than “if you don’t adopt, they should die.”
Notice how after some arguement the point of supporting abortion comes down to doing away with “undesireables.”
Notice after some arguement the point of supporting abortion comes down to doing away with “undesireables.”
[quote]Makavali wrote:
PRCalDude wrote:
What does this have to do with the right of a human being who has committed no capital crime to live?
It has EVERYTHING to do with it. The child is usually almost GUARANTEED to grow up to become a sociopath. Think I’m exaggerating? Come to NZ, go to South Auckland and take a look at the low-life scum growing there.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/category/story.cfm?c_id=30&objectid=10517189
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/category/story.cfm?c_id=30&objectid=10517031
This sort of thing is usually perpetrated by low-life fucktards from broken homes, and were born into a family that SIMPLY WASN’T READY.
Now if all you pro-lifers are willing to adopt these children and give them a stable loving environment, then that a different story. Until then, you’re a bunch of hypocrites.[/quote]
Our hypocrisy, existent or not, has nothing to do with the rights of an unborn baby. You’re using tu-quoque.
[quote]Sloth wrote:
In short, “they should all be dead.”[/quote]
All? Hardly.
If your so concerned about a clump of cells being “murdered”, then maybe this will brighten your day.
According to a January 9, 2007 Daily Telegraph (London) article reporting on a statement by Dr. Anthony Atala of Wake Forest University, there is another “ethical” source of stem cells. The fluid surrounding the fetus has been found to contain stem cells, that, when utilized correctly, “can be differentiated towards cell types such as fat, bone, muscle, blood vessel, nerve and liver cells”, according to the article. The extraction of this fluid does not harm the fetus in any way as well. “Our hope is that these cells will provide a valuable resource for tissue repair and for engineered organs as well,” said Dr Atala.
And what about the 70,000 odd embryos from IVF that will eventually be destroyed because they aren’t being used? Surely it would make sense to put them to better use?
[quote]PRCalDude wrote:
Our hypocrisy, existent or not, has nothing to do with the rights of an unborn baby. You’re using tu-quoque.[/quote]
So I should just ignore that blatant hypocrisy in your views? I don’t think so. The right for people to live outweighs POTENTIAL life in my book.
[quote]Makavali wrote:
PRCalDude wrote:
Our hypocrisy, existent or not, has nothing to do with the rights of an unborn baby. You’re using tu-quoque.
So I should just ignore that blatant hypocrisy in your views? I don’t think so. The right for people to live outweighs POTENTIAL life in my book.[/quote]
Potential?
Anyways, shouldn’t you guys call your moms up, and complain that you should’ve been given over to science, in order to save lives? Uh oh, I can make the hypocrite charge too! Heck, maybe some of your organs now, could still save lives.
[quote]
So I should just ignore that blatant hypocrisy in your views? I don’t think so. [/quote]
Actually, I’ve admitted no hypocrisy. I was merely pointing out your use of a logical fallacy.
Mine too.
[quote]Sloth wrote:
Anyways, shouldn’t you guys call your moms up, and complain that you should’ve been given over to science, in order to save lives?[/quote]
Only if my mother wasn’t emotionally or financially ready to have me. Funny how you overlook that part of my argument.
[quote]Makavali wrote:
Sloth wrote:
Anyways, shouldn’t you guys call your moms up, and complain that you should’ve been given over to science, in order to save lives?
Only if my mother wasn’t emotionally or financially ready to have me. Funny how you overlook that part of my argument.[/quote]
So, because your mom had money, you deserved your life. Oh, ok.
[quote]PRCalDude wrote:
My point was this. You prolifers are quite willing to force others to have babies they don’t want, because you care sooo much about the baby. But the moment the top of the baby’s head sees daylight for the first time you change your tune to “you’re on your own now kid. Don’t you ever become a problem for me!”.
What does this have to do with the right of a human being who has committed no capital crime to live?
Our behavior has nothing to do with whether or not a baby has a right not to be deprived of life.
Our claims are that human life begins at conception and that that life has committed no capital offenses worthy of death.
[/quote]
Nice try at feigning ignorance of the point I am making. But I know you are much smarter than that.
Society does not have enough money put into welfare today to properly provide for all the children who are born into poverty. Yet Republicans don’t want to put up any more money. Adding thirty five million onto an already overextended program would have made the problems we are facing now even worse…
You pro-lifers would gladly create a huge problem for society. But when faced with the consequences you would be the ones pissing and moaning the loudest about the mess that you have forced on everyone else.
You have not refuted my point. Which is. Your care about the “babies” starts at the moment of conception and ends at the moment of birth. After that you really don’t give a damn.
You most certainly don’t want to be burdened by the consequences of your opinions in any way. Despite the fact that you have no problem pushing the burden of your opinions on others who don’t want it.
[quote]Sloth wrote:
Notice after some arguement the point of supporting abortion comes down to doing away with “undesireables.”[/quote]
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=did_iroe_v_wade/i_abort_crime
Did Roe v. Wade Abort Crime?
And Why Hardly Anybody Wants to Talk About It
Crime is down across America. The nation’s crime rate has been dropping for the best part of a decade now, and everyone is keen to take the credit. New York’s Mayor Rudy Giuliani claims that zero-tolerance policing is responsible; former California Governor Pete Wilson credits three-strikes-and-you’re-out laws; President Bill Clinton says gun control and federal funding for prison construction and new police officers have done their part.
Likely as not, they’re all partly right. But what if it turns out that other factors are actually having far more influence on the crime rate than these get-tough policies? Why lock up two million people–more than half of them nonviolent offenders–at a cost of tens of billions of dollars a year and the disruption of untold millions of lives, if the real explanations for the drop in crime lie elsewhere?
Last summer word began circulating, first in the academic community and then in the media, that two professors, John Donohue and Steven Levitt, had found solid evidence of exactly that: They had discovered a link much stronger, more statistically demonstrable, than the link between anticrime policies and crime rates. More shocking still, the link they found was between abortion and crime. Or to be more precise, between the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion and the much heralded fall in crime rates starting about 18 years later, in the early 1990s.
When laid out in its crudest form, the notion that crime was dropping because potential criminals were being aborted provoked a firestorm of objections from left, right, and center. What terrible policy conclusions, people demanded to know, were they supposed to draw from this information? “Racist, genocidal stupidity,” the conservative monthly American Spectator labeled the new study. On the opposite political flank, Jackie Cissell, director of the Indiana Family Institute, wrote that “African Americans [are] in shock because it could threaten the very survival of the race.”
But if the smoke ever clears, progressive critics will find that the policies this new study actually points to are not shocking at all. In fact, they’re quite traditionally liberal.
John Donohue, a professor of law at Stanford University who once ran an unsuccessful campaign as a Democratic nominee for the Connecticut state senate, and Steven Levitt, a University of Chicago economist, have long sought explanations for the falling crime rate. In a 1998 paper published by the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Donohue pointed out that the explanations people usually give just do not account for much statistically. According to his calculations, the large decline in crime during much of the 1990s was either a short-term anomaly or the result of factors that had not yet been identified. It was a hint of a fascinating new theory that he and his colleague were developing.
During the course of their research, Donohue and Levitt had almost accidentally stumbled upon the number of abortions performed in America and the fact that–in Donohue’s words–“poor, unmarried, young, low-education women tend to have more abortions. And their kids tend to have higher rates of crime.” The two researchers began crunching the numbers, and after several years they concluded, to their own surprise as much as anyone else’s, that fully half of the decrease in crime that has occurred over the past decade can be directly attributed to the fact that women in the 1970s and 1980s had ready access to abortion.
After exhaustive peer review lasting the better part of a year, their study, titled “Legalized Abortion and Crime,” is scheduled for publication in the May 2001 issue of Harvard University’s prestigious Quarterly Journal of Economics. The authors hope that a longer version, specifically addressing many of the criticisms leveled against their work, will follow in a top law review.
Looking at state-by-state and year-by-year figures, the two professors found a remarkable correlation between abortion rates and crime rates 15 to 18 years later. And that’s not all. They also determined that in the states that legalized abortion prior to the Roe v. Wade ruling, crime rates began falling earlier than in other parts of the country (see box). Moreover, while the rate of arrests did drop in other age groups, among young people (those whose mothers had the option of a legal abortion) it dropped far more. The authors factored in a host of other possible explanations, and the correlation between crime rates and abortion remained powerful. “According to our estimates,” they boldly asserted, “legalized abortion is a primary explanation, accounting for at least one-half of the overall crime reduction… . The social benefit to reduced crime as a result of abortion may be on the order of $30 billion annually.”
That such an idea, put like this, would raise the hackles of an extraordinary range of people should have surprised no one. Levitt and Donohue had stepped into the vicious ethical and political minefield of the American abortion debate–as well as the treacherous terrain of race politics, since African Americans have abortions at a higher rate than whites. But the authors, economists rather than ethicists, were unprepared for the response and initially seemed almost too stunned to prepare counterarguments. “What’s odd about our study,” Levitt now reflects as he prepares for publication of the work and, presumably, renewed assaults on its authors, “is it manages to offend just about everybody. [But] our worldview is an economic worldview–that people respond to incentives. I view it as being apolitical.”
That lack of political savvy may explain much. “I don’t think it’s controversial to say crime is higher among African Americans,” Levitt still insists. “We’re not saying there’s anything intrinsic about this. There’s also higher poverty among African Americans. The causality is not important in our argument, in the sense of why it is that African Americans are disproportionately represented in the crime statistics.”
Given recent political history, however, and given the ways in which the poor–especially the black and Latino poor–have all too often been blamed and punished for the circumstances of their poverty, causality was certainly on many other people’s minds. Were Donohue and Levitt arguing that poor people were intrinsically, perhaps even biologically, predisposed to criminal behavior, or did they believe that the environmental conditions of poverty pushed people into crime? Were they conservatives or liberals, and why had they avoided showing their political hand in their academic presentation?
Add to this confusion the fact that conspiracy theories run rife in today’s inner city–theories that AIDS is a form of biological warfare against black populations, that the war on crime and drugs is a none too subtle attempt to destroy the social fabric of the inner city through mass incarceration, and that the easy availability of abortion is a means of racist population control–and this study could hardly be anything but explosive.
At the same time, anti-abortion groups accused the study of advocating the murder of unborn children as a crime control stratagem. “Naturally, if you kill off a million and a half people a year,” the executive director of the Pro-Life Action League declared sarcastically in a news release, “a few criminals will be in that number.” Meanwhile, many on the left of the political spectrum, including some in the pro-choice movement, denounced the report as little more than a call to arms against the poor. As if it had advocated for forced abortion, sterilization, or euthanasia against select elements of the American population, the study was seen as a bloody addendum to such bibles of the New Right as Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s 1996 book The Bell Curve.
But this is not, in fact, what the two authors were arguing. In the years after Roe v. Wade, they found, the number of abortions performed each year in America grew rapidly. By 1980 the annual total had reached 1.6 million, a statistic that has remained fairly constant ever since. Before this, the authors argue, more unwanted children were being born, often after unhealthy pregnancies during which the mother failed to look after herself adequately, and often into difficult, non-nurturing, impoverished environments. Such children, Donohue and Levitt assumed, would be more likely than others to grow up to commit crimes as troubled, angry, gang-affiliated teenagers and young adults. The authors cite evidence from studies in eastern Europe and Scandinavia that “unwanted children are likely to be disproportionately involved in criminal activities.” And it’s certainly plausible that the same would be true in the United States.
Donohue and Levitt’s data bear this out. Legalized abortion, they found, didn’t just lower the absolute number of people in a given age group; it disproportionately lowered the number of children born to mothers in impoverished circumstances who hadn’t intended to become pregnant and gave birth to babies they didn’t want. The effect on subsequent teenage arrest rates suggests that these were indeed the conditions that put children “most at risk of engaging in criminal behavior.”
Joseph McNamara, a Hoover Institute fellow, sees the connection as simple common sense. “Many years ago, when I was police chief of San Jose,” McNamara remembers, “I cooperated with Planned Parenthood, and I said: ‘Your organization prevents more crime than mine does.’ Children need love and nurturing. If there’s no one there to provide that [because a child is unwanted], many are going to commit crimes and violent behavior. You don’t have to be a criminologist to see that the children growing up under these conditions are at high risk. It’s an enormous problem for society to have children born that no one wants and no one’s able to take care of.”
Levitt and Donohue think of themselves as researchers, not advocates for any position–not even McNamara’s–and they are annoyed that others see their study as promoting forced abortion. “It seems such a puerile logical step,” Donohue says. “A completely incorrect reading of the study. One wonders how presumably intelligent people could make such an incorrect logical inference.” Far from having any ax to grind about abortion and crime, Donohue, raised as a Catholic, says he resisted making this connection until the evidence he and Levitt compiled proved overwhelming.
But by presenting only their study’s results and not the social meaning they saw in it, the two researchers left both the study and themselves vulnerable. “John and I are good at taking data and understanding [it]. We have no expertise in making moral or ethical judgments,” Levitt says. “We bring this to the table to add to the debate, but certainly not to solve the debate.” They might have diffused much of the criticism leveled against them, however, if they had joined forthrightly in the policy debate from the start, presenting their study as Donohue privately acknowledges they see it–as evidence that get-tough anticrime policies have less effect on crime than most people think and that allowing women to choose when to have children has more.
[quote]Sifu wrote:
PRCalDude wrote:
My point was this. You prolifers are quite willing to force others to have babies they don’t want, because you care sooo much about the baby. But the moment the top of the baby’s head sees daylight for the first time you change your tune to “you’re on your own now kid. Don’t you ever become a problem for me!”.
What does this have to do with the right of a human being who has committed no capital crime to live?
Our behavior has nothing to do with whether or not a baby has a right not to be deprived of life.
Our claims are that human life begins at conception and that that life has committed no capital offenses worthy of death.
Nice try at feigning ignorance of the point I am making. But I know you are much smarter than that.
Society does not have enough money put into welfare today to properly provide for all the children who are born into poverty. Yet Republicans don’t want to put up any more money. Adding thirty five million onto an already overextended program would have made the problems we are facing now even worse…
You pro-lifers would gladly create a huge problem for society. But when faced with the consequences you would be the ones pissing and moaning the loudest about the mess that you have forced on everyone else.
You have not refuted my point. Which is. Your care about the “babies” starts at the moment of conception and ends at the moment of birth. After that you really don’t give a damn.
You most certainly don’t want to be burdened by the consequences of your opinions in any way. Despite the fact that you have no problem pushing the burden of your opinions on others who don’t want it.
[/quote]
I think you should read the link I posted for Makavali.
Either way, my care for babies or the availability of welfare for them are not reasons for them to be put to death since they haven’t committed any capital offenses. Depriving an innocent person of life is the very definition of “bad for society.”
[quote]Sloth wrote:
So, because your mom had money, you deserved your life. Oh, ok.[/quote]
Twist my words as much as you want, parents need to be financially and emotionally stable to raise children.
Levitt’s a dishonest hack.
[quote]Makavali wrote:
Sloth wrote:
So, because your mom had money, you deserved your life. Oh, ok.
Twist my words as much as you want, parents need to be financially and emotionally stable to raise children.[/quote]
So if parents at some point become financially or emotionally unstable, are the children then murdered? Usually, if the situation gets bad enough, the state intervenes and places them in foster care.