PUNK’D’s Dax Shepard and The Masterpiece that is…‘‘Idiocracy’’.
‘‘Welcome to Costco, I love you’’.
[quote]jjackkrash wrote:
On an emotional level and maybe its also on a biological or evolutionary level I just don’t get that worked up over, for example, the morning after pill.
[/quote]
For the record, there is a growing body of evidence that says emergency contraception, or at least Plan B, is not an abortifacient and works only by preventing the release of the egg for fertilization. So, assuming that this is the case, I don’t think anyone should be worked up over Plan B. In fact, people should be grateful for it, because its only real connection with abortion is that it can preclude the temptation to have one.
[quote]angry chicken wrote:
The decision to have that child RUINED the lives of both the mother and the child. [/quote]
Really? I would of thought sucking the girl out of her mothers womb would of ruined her life pretty quickly too.
At least she had an OPPORTUNITY to make something of her life. Whether she did or not is on her.
[quote]Aragorn wrote:
I think, regardless of your stance, you would do well to read his writings. Here’s a brief chapter: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/content/BPL_Images/Content_store/Sample_chapter/1405115475/Cohen_sample%20chapter_Contemporary%20debates%20in%20applied%20ethics.pdf
[/quote]
Couldn’t agree more with this.
[quote]angry chicken wrote:
If my friend had an abortion when she was 16, her life would have been completely different. [/quote]
Sure. However we don’t have any idea if it would have been better or worse. One could assume if they wished, but I’m not going to.
As was mentioned, both of these women were given the opportunity to over come hardship. They apparently didn’t based on your description. That is a sad outcome, but those type outcomes come from planned children born of responsible adults as well. Life is neither easy nor fair as you well know. However, not being given the opportunity to make something of yourself, irrelevant of the situation you are born into isn’t fair or easy either.
The daughter’s life has thus far ended in tragedy. It isn’t over yet however, she still has time. If she were prevented from being born, that wouldn’t even be possible. Not to mention one has no idea how or if the abortion would have changed the mother’s life or path in life either.
I’d much rather err on the side of giving people a chance to be a star, to change the world, then to assume they cannot and end any opportunity they have…
I have more faith in human sprit I guess. And I’ll take 10 burdens, shit 1000 burdens, for the chance of one great one.
People have been saying this for 1000’s of years. We haven’t hit the tipping point yet.
I’m not advocating forcing anyone to do anything. Like was said in this thread or another, more laws won’t change the situation. We need a cultural change.
But I do however think it is silly you assume people would be “condemned” by having a child, at any age. I can give you an anecdotal story that is quite the opposite outcome as yours, except this 16 year old had a boy. Both are remarkable people who make solid contributions to society on a daily basis.
I’ll never again support abortion, the murdering of a human being. I was young and stupid once and advocated it, but now I regret, with a whole heart, that previous belief. I was wrong. It is wrong. I don’t judge those that have them, nor the doctors that perform them. They live in a time, in a world where it is accepted and seen as a positive by many. I wish the world was different, but it isn’t, nor likely to be anytime soon. I’m not looking to force anyone to do anything, but I’m not about to pretend the action is anything other than it is…
^My mother had my oldest brother (who is 10 years older) when she was 16 (pregnant at 15), he is a productive member of society, with 3 biological kids himself whom he raises (2 he has only partial custody of due to divorce). Instead of accepting her situation, my mother, worked hard to support her son (without a father in the picture mind you until my father entered the picture 5 or so years later) and better their lives.
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
I’ll just leave this here. [/quote]
Through the 2013 filter this seems crazy, odd and horrid.
Through the filter of human history however, this isn’t even a blip on the “omg” radar.
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
I’ll just leave this here. [/quote]
Ahahahahahaaaa…so true.
I’m with Farnsworth on many levels lol.
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]jjackkrash wrote:
On an emotional level and maybe its also on a biological or evolutionary level I just don’t get that worked up over, for example, the morning after pill.
[/quote]
For the record, there is a growing body of evidence that says emergency contraception, or at least Plan B, is not an abortifacient and works only by preventing the release of the egg for fertilization. So, assuming that this is the case, I don’t think anyone should be worked up over Plan B. In fact, people should be grateful for it, because its only real connection with abortion is that it can preclude the temptation to have one.[/quote]
Mind sharing sources? I haven’t heard this news yet
[quote]jjackkrash wrote:
[quote]Aragorn wrote:
[quote]jjackkrash wrote:
Aragorn, that was a pretty good read. Thanks. [/quote]
Glad to help! That man is a very, very sharp mind. Doesn’t mean you need to agree with the position, but the dude has legitimate resume and chops–he should be read (on many issues, not just this one) because I think people need to hear well argued points regardless of opinion. I know if I am around somebody who says “he’s an idiot” by way of repsonse to disagreement with George that I need never again concern myself with paying attention to what they think :P.
Incidentally, this guy is a REAL “Constitutional scholar”…our commander in chief would probably have done well to take his classes. Ok, got my dig in I’m disappearing again lol[/quote]
For the record I’m not trying to bait and I am conflicted, although this isn’t one of my big issues so I’m not very well read on the subject. So I appreciate the link.
I was googling around for a rebuttal and came across this link.
I feel like it kind of sums up my feelings. On an emotional level and maybe its also on a biological or evolutionary level I just don’t get that worked up over, for example, the morning after pill. But as the baby develops and starts to look like a person I really start to have a problem. Maybe that’s not logically consistent but its how I feel so, again, thanks for the link.
[/quote]
I can understand the visceral take you have. I believe it is more important to be rationally consistent regardless of one’s feelings or the issue at hand, however.
[quote]pittbulll wrote:
[quote]pat wrote:
What in the ruddy hell is an ‘incomplete human being’? I have never heard that before, please elaborate.[/quote]
a ruddy colored baby that can not breath or digest food .
[/quote]
So if a born baby is on a ventilator and iv nutrition, it’s not complete? What if somebody is missing a leg, wouldn’t that count as incomplete?
[quote]countingbeans wrote:
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
I’ll just leave this here. [/quote]
Through the 2013 filter this seems crazy, odd and horrid.
Through the filter of human history however, this isn’t even a blip on the “omg” radar.
[/quote]
Through the filter of history, today’s teenagers are ignorant, frivolous and utterly ill-equipped for the responsibilities of adulthood, let alone parenthood.
In past times, you were expected to grow up by the time you were thirteen. Today thirty is the new thirteen, particularly in this country.
Alexander founded a colony at sixteen and commanded a kingdom at twenty. Genghis killed a man at fourteen and consolidated an empire before his twentieth birthday. David Farragut captured a British warship at age twelve. Jeanne d’Arc led an army before leaving her teens.
A child raised in our frivolous, neotenous, schizophrenic American pop culture of instant gratification and deferred responsibility, physical comfort, easy credit and grade inflation, which celebrates mediocrity and cultural and historical myopia, rewards conformity, simultaneously glorifies and abhors sex and violence, idolizes thugs, whores and jackasses, while obsessing over safety and risk avoidance, cannot be expect to think or act like anything a child well into his thirties or forties.
The picture I posted, of two generations of people (who don’t appear to be the sharpest tacks on the board) fathering and bearing children in their mid-teens is not so much a blip on the OMG radar as a solid patch of red on the WTF sensor.
Drop what you’re doing and go watch Idiocracy. It is our future, gentlemen and ladies. And it sucks donkey balls.
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
[quote]countingbeans wrote:
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
I’ll just leave this here. [/quote]
Through the 2013 filter this seems crazy, odd and horrid.
Through the filter of human history however, this isn’t even a blip on the “omg” radar.
[/quote]
Through the filter of history, today’s teenagers are ignorant, frivolous and utterly ill-equipped for the responsibilities of adulthood, let alone parenthood.
In past times, you were expected to grow up by the time you were thirteen. Today thirty is the new thirteen, particularly in this country.
Alexander founded a colony at sixteen and commanded a kingdom at twenty. Genghis killed a man at fourteen and consolidated an empire before his twentieth birthday. David Farragut captured a British warship at age twelve. Jeanne d’Arc led an army before leaving her teens.
A child raised in our frivolous, neotenous, schizophrenic American pop culture of instant gratification and deferred responsibility, physical comfort, easy credit and grade inflation, which celebrates mediocrity and cultural and historical myopia, rewards conformity, simultaneously glorifies and abhors sex and violence, idolizes thugs, whores and jackasses, while obsessing over safety and risk avoidance, cannot be expect to think or act like anything a child well into his thirties or forties.
The picture I posted, of two generations of people (who don’t appear to be the sharpest tacks on the board) fathering and bearing children in their mid-teens is not so much a blip on the OMG radar as a solid patch of red on the WTF sensor.
Drop what you’re doing and go watch Idiocracy. It is our future, gentlemen and ladies. And it sucks donkey balls. [/quote]
BOOM!
Laying the truth down like a lead pipe.
[quote]Aragorn wrote:
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
[quote]countingbeans wrote:
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
I’ll just leave this here. [/quote]
Through the 2013 filter this seems crazy, odd and horrid.
Through the filter of human history however, this isn’t even a blip on the “omg” radar.
[/quote]
Through the filter of history, today’s teenagers are ignorant, frivolous and utterly ill-equipped for the responsibilities of adulthood, let alone parenthood.
In past times, you were expected to grow up by the time you were thirteen. Today thirty is the new thirteen, particularly in this country.
Alexander founded a colony at sixteen and commanded a kingdom at twenty. Genghis killed a man at fourteen and consolidated an empire before his twentieth birthday. David Farragut captured a British warship at age twelve. Jeanne d’Arc led an army before leaving her teens.
A child raised in our frivolous, neotenous, schizophrenic American pop culture of instant gratification and deferred responsibility, physical comfort, easy credit and grade inflation, which celebrates mediocrity and cultural and historical myopia, rewards conformity, simultaneously glorifies and abhors sex and violence, idolizes thugs, whores and jackasses, while obsessing over safety and risk avoidance, cannot be expect to think or act like anything a child well into his thirties or forties.
The picture I posted, of two generations of people (who don’t appear to be the sharpest tacks on the board) fathering and bearing children in their mid-teens is not so much a blip on the OMG radar as a solid patch of red on the WTF sensor.
Drop what you’re doing and go watch Idiocracy. It is our future, gentlemen and ladies. And it sucks donkey balls. [/quote]
BOOM!
Laying the truth down like a lead pipe.[/quote]
It’s what I do. 
[quote]angry chicken wrote:
[quote]countingbeans wrote:
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
Offspring do provide benefit for their parents, but for the first several years (or decades in the case of humans) that benefit is largely immaterial (emotional and spiritual benefits more than contributing to the survival of the family), aside from the obvious (and appropriate to your profession) tax advantages. [/quote]
I take exception to the emotional and spiritual benefits being termed immaterial here. I’ve just seen too much positive come from babies entering into people’s lives to call something that profound and life changing “immaterial”.
I’d also argue that a family with a pregnant female or infant/toddler will likely take more care in ensure its survival than a family of just a coupling of adults… As in the desire to see the child grow up healthily and happy will lead the parents to make choices and partake in activities that positively effect their survival and well being. Mommy might sell her street bike and by a safer care, daddy might not volunteer for the underwater welding job on the oil rig and take the safer job in the factory down the street, etc…
I think you discount the less obvious and less physical benefits children bring to their parents erroneously to favor simple observations like “mom breast feeds the child, so it is a parasite.”
[/quote]
I’ve also seen it work the exact opposite. I have a very good female friend who got pregnant when we were both 16 (not by me!). Her mother was very religious and insisted that she keep the child. She had to drop out of school. She was completely dependant upon her mother, who at this point was conducting what amounted to full blown psychological warfafe on her, using guilt, shame, religion and everything she could to make my friend feel like a piece of shit for getting knocked up.
When the child was born I was there in the room. A healthy baby girl. My friend got on WIC and public assistance. She bounced from one unstable home to another. From one unstable relationship to another. The daughter was sexually molested. Later she was raped. Both of them were incapable of processing their emotions very well - it’s was the classic case of children raising children. They never evolved or amounted to shit. My friend ended up getting strung out on crack for a few years and losing custody of the daughter, who was given to the grandmother. She got raped again.
The child is now 22 and just called me the other day asking for money. She’s a slut living in South Baltimore, doesn’t have a car or a job and is on public assistance. She has NO marketable skills and will most likely be a burden to the state for the rest of her shallow life. I find it to be a small miracle that she hasn’t gotten knocked up yet, although I suspect she has and has chosen to get abortions and not tell anyone. At least she got that right.
The mother is 39 now, past her prime and is on public assistance as well because she hurt her back a few years ago. Although I suspect she just “hurt her back” to get a disability check.
The decision to have that child RUINED the lives of both the mother and the child. Neither are happy. Neither contribute anything except sucking up our taxpayer resources and making stupid posts on facebook with their smart phones that they somehow can afford, even though they cant afford food.
If my friend had an abortion when she was 16, her life would have been completely different.
This isn’t some “fictional story”, it is an actual situation of someone I know very well. I will always be in favor of abortion when the person having the child is unable to adequately care for it. It creates TWO fucked up lives that eventually become a burden to the state and the planet.
With the population explosion we have experienced in the last 300 years, we don’t have the luxury of things like “morality”. We are on an unsustainable path that will ultimately lead to the destruction of the human race.
As I said before, I would NEVER allow MY offspring to be aborted. But I would also not in good concience condemn someone to the life of my friend because of MY beliefs. In my opinion THAT is immoral. [/quote]
What does that have to do with anything? I suppose you are arguing that if she had an abortion life would be just peachy.
To say that people should have abortions because their live would be better without the child says nothing about whether or not abortion is murder.
It is the taking of a human life. It doesn’t much matter if that human life turns out to be a crack whore or not. Still a life and if you kill a crack whore, you’re going to prison for murder.
It’s also a huge copout to say “I wouldn’t have an abortion, but I can’t tell others what to do.”
Abortion is either the willful intentional taking of a human life or it is not. If it is not, then I don’t care what you do. All evidence, scientific and otherwise indicates strongly that the child in utero is a human being. To take that life is to take a human life.
Human existence is filled with tragic stories, that doesn’t mean that humans should kill each other to prevent them from having a ‘bad life’.
[quote]jjackkrash wrote:
[quote]Aragorn wrote:
[quote]jjackkrash wrote:
[quote]countingbeans wrote:
[quote]pittbulll wrote:
[quote]countingbeans wrote:
But if you value all life, how can you condone the ending of human life in the certain particular instances you do?]
[/quote]
because it is not the life of the child until viability . It’s life is at the will of the mother and not my decision
[/quote]
Please post a doctor or any sort of scientist paper that backs up this nonsense. So until week 20 is it magic fairy dust that causes the growth of the fetus if not life?
wtf?[/quote]
I’m curious, what makes a “life” valuable to you? I doubt the response is “all life is equally valuable” because your toenails and hair are technically alive and part of you and I’m assuming you don’t have a problem “killing” or “ending” life that is non-essential to the whole.
Does being sentient play a role with valuing life? If a baby is alive and will be born alive but brain-wave dead and non sentient is this “life” worth the same as a baby that would be born sentient and functional? Is it ok to terminate the life of a brain-dead baby? Is it morally ok to view one of these live beings as worth less than the other? I think it is, but I’d like to hear your thoughts.
How about, hypothetically, you are a fire-fighter going into a hospital that is burning and there is a person who is brain dead and on life support in the same room as a person who’s brain is functioning but is disabled. You can only save one of them. Which one do you pick? Is it morally acceptable to make a choice by valuing one of these lives more than the another? Is there any circumstance under which you save the brain-dead patient and feel like you made the right choice? I say no, you pick the non-brain-dead person every single time and feel like you made the right choice.
Pat raised the point that how you “feel” about something doesn’t change what it is and the fact of “what it is” is important. At what point does a fetus become sentient (and I truly don’t know the answer to this)?. Before it becomes sentient–i.e. when it only has the potential to become sentient–it isn’t sentient. Is this an important distinction? I think it is.
I personally agree that a first-trimester or earlier baby is “alive,” but I am not convinced it is “sentient” and similarly situated to a sentient being even if it has the potential to become sentient in the future. [/quote]
This is not quite true: one of the current criteria for the scientific definition of “alive” is to be an organism–a contiguous living system which directs its own processes (note this is independent of whether it retains nutrients from another life form or not). A second is the ability (genetically) to reproduce, whether or not that is possible due to mutation, maiming, or sexual immaturity (age).
By all these criteria a fetus is alive. I would suggest that beans is probably using shorthand for “human organismic life” when he says “all life”. But then I suspect you knew he was doing that as well.[/quote]
I think this is an interesting post and, for the record, I wasn’t trying to be disingenuous. I’ll also spot you that a zygote is a “human organismic life.”
Two implicit propositions get tossed around alot in this debate: (1) all human life has the same value and life is the paramount value; and (2) “i’m not basing my argument on religious grounds.” I’m trying to explore these propositions–maybe as much for myself as anybody else because I’ll admit this issue has me conflicted–because I don’t think it is self evident that terminating a zygote is morally the same as terminating a sentient person or that a zygote should be entitled to be treated like a full fledged sentient person. Maybe it does, but I’m not sold.
In my mind, few on here would suggest that preventing a sperm from fertilizing an egg is a problem. Maybe I am wrong. But in any event, I don’t see that much difference from terminating the fertilized egg seconds after it gets fertilized as substantially different from just preventing the egg from being fertilized. Other than its an easy bright line to draw or for religious reasons, what is it that makes a two-cell zygote so special that it is deserves the rights of a full-fledged citizen?[/quote]
A ‘zyote’ is a stage of human development. The organism in question is still a human organism, just like you are. I am an adult, that’s the stage of human development I am in.
[quote]jjackkrash wrote:
[quote]kamui wrote:
[quote]jjackkrash wrote:
[quote]kamui wrote:
[quote]Pat raised the point that how you “feel” about something doesn’t change what it is and the fact of “what it is” is important. At what point does a fetus become sentient (and I truly don’t know the answer to this)?. Before it becomes sentient–i.e. when it only has the potential to become sentient–it isn’t sentient. Is this an important distinction? I think it is.
I personally agree that a first-trimester or earlier baby is “alive,” but I am not convinced it is “sentient” and similarly situated to a sentient being even if it has the potential to become sentient in the future.[/quote]
Sentience can’t be a criterium here.
Or, more accurately, if it was a criterium, we should legalize the homicide of comatose and unconscious people too.
And maybe the homicide of sleeping people, depending on your definition of sentience.
It seems that each time we try to find a criterium to justify abortion, we end up with something that could justify other homicides.
Which should tell us something.[/quote]
I am not convinced that pulling the plug on a permanently brain-wave-flat-lined person should be considered murder in all circumstances, or that it is morally or should be legally treated the same as gunning down your wife because you think she is cheating on you.
[/quote]
Maybe.
But a fetus is not comparable to a permanently brain-wave-flat-lined person.
A fetus is more like a brain-wave-flat-lined person who will recover in a few weeks.
Except his/her brain-wave aren’t actually flat.
[/quote]
If you know, when does a fetus get brain waives at all? I seem to recall its at about 7 to 8 weeks.
[/quote]
It doesn’t matter.
[quote]pat wrote:
I am an adult, that’s the stage of human development I am in.[/quote]
You must feel lonely here.