ABOOOORTION

By the time of birth, it certainly has more sensation and brainpower than most animals moral vegetarians want to protect. Somehow, though, because the unborn human is a fetus–meaning it is inside a belly and strapped to a cord–it has less rights than a pig. At least animal rights laws protect the pig from being cut up by a pair of scissors while still conscious.

I thought that getting an abortion was only legal for a certain amount of time before the fetus is too developed.

I’m pretty sure that’s correct GSG. I don’t understand why the development matters though. Would it be okay to kill a 2 month old baby who is just as helpless as a fetus but not an 18 year old?

Edit: And StarStorm I was trying to make a like… parallel example or something. I don’t know what you’d call it

Well it is simple, do you remember being a fetus? Also, go look up pictures of them.

Do you remember being a 1 year old? Is it okay to abort 1 year olds?

I think I have a few scattered memories. And yea it is okay to abort a 1-year-old, it’s called adoption.

Sorry for trying to be serious

It differs by state. Abortion is always legal pre-viability–before the baby could live independently–but states are allowed to regulate later-term abortions. Here in New York, until recently, partial-birth abortion was legal. If the baby’s legs had emerged, the doctor could still reach in with scissors and stab the baby’s head to kill it, or cut it up and vacuum it out in pieces.

It may still be legal. There’s now a federal law banning partial-birth abortion, but only where it “affects interstate commerce.” Without getting into details, if partial-birth abortion (like failure to buy health insurance) is not an economic activity, it may be technically legal for a New York resident to get a partial-birth abortion.

Another circumstance would be to save the mother.

What would you do if you accidentally knocked someone up? What if it was someone you didn’t know very well, or someone you don’t want to be involved with long term? Having a kid and being legally and financially responsible for it for the next 18 years is pretty much the most life-changing event possible. It also significantly impacts your ability to find another partner. And you also have to deal with the other parent for pretty much the rest of your life.

If you have custody, who watches the kid when you work? If you don’t have custody, you’re probably looking at a minimum of $750 in child support each month that will be garnished out of your wages wherever you work. If you’re not working, your unemployment gets hit.

What if the kid is going to be disabled or have down syndrome? You’ll need to find a baby-sitter the rest of your life, anytime you want to do anything.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are millions of reasons why you wouldn’t want to keep it. As far as the point when the fetus matures enough to have rights and “becomes human”, that’s a subjective topic. Legally the fetus cannot be aborted after 24 weeks in the US, but there are exceptions.

From Wikipedia - why women decide to have abortions:

* 25.5% Want to postpone childbearing
* 21.3% Cannot afford a baby
* 14.1% Has relationship problem or partner does not want pregnancy
* 12.2% Too young; parent(s) or other(s) object to pregnancy
* 10.8% Having a child will disrupt education or job
* 7.9% Want no (more) children
* 3.3% Risk to fetal health
* 2.8% Risk to maternal health
* 2.1% Other

Those are the main disputes that people have with abortion. I waffle on the issue precisely because of those “reasons” to have an abortion. If you didn’t want to accidentally knock someone up, use condoms, birth control pills, sponges (unless he’s not sponge-worthy, naturally), etc. Sure they have a failure rate, albeit one that is quite low. If you don’t want to risk that, don’t have sex. The whole issue boils down to personal responsibility and what should be the rights of what is ultimately a human. Ignoring the religious elements, the whole dispute is over whether abortion should be just another common birth control method.

And now, I can’t help but think of it as being analogous to Goldwater saying nuclear weapons should be considered a part of conventional warfare or whatever that comment was.

As an FYI, adoption is an alternative to abortion. I have no idea how that process works though. I only know one person who put her kid up for adoption after a teenage pregnancy, and it’s not something she really cares to discuss.

That’s not the most asinine thing I have ever heard in my life. It certainly ranks up there, though. One is a proto-human, still almost completely undeveloped and absolutely reliant on the mother’s body. The other is, you know, a fucking human that can be cared for by anyone.

Wait wait wait, Ramza just got beaten. Sorry, kid, but you’re gonna have to try harder. Or better yet, don’t.

Xwing, repeat after me: “I do not have any say in what a woman does with her body.” Because, as icky as you think that abortion is, as super-duper preshus you think baybeez are, it’s not your decision and you have no business in it. When you go on like that, what you are saying is that “an unborn human has less rights than a pig”, but what you are inferring is “a fetus has more rights than the woman developing it”.

Again, repeat after me: “I do not have any say in what a woman does with her body.”

In many jurisdictions, yes, but by that time the mother has almost always chosen to keep the child and is now being forced to abort it because something has gone seriously, seriously wrong. Pregnancy isn’t a walk in the park, people, it takes a lot of work and a lot can go wrong with it.

AND

No, because if the mother does not want to take care of a living child, the child can be passed on to someone who wants to raise the child with minimal issues. A fetus, not so much. Also, you can’t “abort” a one-year old, as there is no pregnancy to abort. Seriously, “abortion” is not a euphemism for “murder”.

Also, if you really feel the need to throw drugs into the argument, I will say that you also have no right to dictate what a person can put into their own body. Although, while one disagrees with the War on (some people who use) Drugs, the argument can be made that irresponsibility with drugs can endanger other people: aka driving drunk.

This hurts my brain. Don’t do that. Adoption is not abortion.

Like I said, the reason I don’t waffle is because I don’t have any right to say what happens with a woman’s body. Full stop. The end. It doesn’t matter how icky I consider the means, it doesn’t matter how well developed the fetus is, I do not have that right or privilege. And assuming that a magical DVD comes along and turns me into a woman, I ONLY have that right and privilege as pertains to myself. I still do not get to say if a woman can or cannot carry a child or terminate a pregnancy.

Going further, one would argue that an abortion is taking personal responsibility of the situation, as an admission that one is not able to or has no desire to go through pregnancy (much less take care of a child) and then take the steps to remedy that.

As I’ve said before: sometimes contraception fails. Sometimes she is not taught enough to use it properly (common in the US considering attitudes towards sex and contraception). Sometimes she does not have the option to use it (if you honestly believe that a rapist or an abusive partner is going to give her the option to use contraception, I have a bridge to sell you). Sometimes, it is sabotaged (re: abusive partner). She has the right to any means necessary to refuse a pregnancy. And no, it is not a fucking “nuclear option”.

Also: while “not having sex” is an option (usually), noone has a right to dictate if another person gets to have sex or not, barring their own right to NOT have sex with the other person.

No. No it is not. To put a child up for adoption, a woman has to carry the child until birth, which still entails a lot of work, a lot of changes in the woman’s body, and is still completely fucking dangerous. Yes, I know that maternal mortality in the US is far lower than developing countries (1:4800), but we still not exactly among the best in that area (Ireland, with 1:47600), and even if we were, it would still be dangerous and still entails all of the above.

(Statistics above drawn from: “Maternal Mortality in 2005” by the World Health Organization. Seriously, that kind of surprised me, I saw Sweden and figured that would be the best. My own bias, I guess.)

Besides, one also points out that those who tend to go after abortion are almost always after contraception too, and are pretty much always more interested in “slut-shaming” than in actual babies. Seriously, I don’t see “pro-life” (HAH) help with taking care of the “saved” children (despite the fact that raising children is one of the most resource intensive activities one can engage in). When they do deign to throw something in, it’s not much more than a pack of diapers and formula. Fat lot of help, that.

welp. Spaz doesn’t care to have any sort of conversation about it. It’s just “her body, I don’t have a say, full stop” mantra. Given that the whole issue centers around whether that’s the proper attitude or not, you can’t just declare it as some universal premise and say it ends there.

But anyway, way to misrepresent what I said. I never said abortion was a nuclear option. I said I see parallels in using abortion as a standard form of birth control as Goldwater stating that he thinks nuclear weapons should not necessarily be ruled out as a part of conventional warfare. It’s taking away the mystique of the nuclear option and instead saying “here’s the most potent form of what we have, be it birth control or bombs, and making it a part of how we regularly perform it.”

I also never said I have a right to dictate when someone should or shouldn’t have sex. I was saying that in response to Locke, suggesting that abstinence IS technically a choice when it comes to dealing with the effects of pregnancy. If you don’t pee in her butt, she won’t crap out a kid. Unless you get a blowjob and she then steals your sperm and artificially inseminates herself with that, but oops. If she did that, I doubt she’d be looking to have an abortion either, so we’ll just ignore that scenario for now.

As or whether abortion is taking personal responsibility or not, that’s once again up for debate. Some see it as taking an “easy” road out (although given some of the medical side effects of abortion such as increased risk of miscarriages, it’s really not wholly easy). It strikes me more as “I’m going to have sex, I’m not going to be safe about it, and I’ll just have an abortion if I get knocked up.” That’s not personal responsibility. Personal responsibility is living with consequences of the actions you took or choosing to have never taken those actions in the first place.

As for rape, it should be fairly obvious I was talking about consensual sex given that, once again, I was responding to Locke’s scenarios which plainly came from consensual sex. Don’t even try to throw up the strawman of “RAPISTS WON’T LET YOU USE CONTRACEPTIVES.”

Ah. Okay.

I do apologize for misrepresenting what you said.

That said, as for as birth control goes, abortion is far, far less than an ideal form of it: it tends to be invasive, has considerable cost attached to it, and of course, there is the chance of permanent harm that goes with most medical procedures.

If you seriously want to go into personal responsibility (or lack of), one would state that a lack of responsibility would be having the child and then fobbing it off onto, say, a parent and otherwise ignoring it. Abortion is taking responsibility: it requires one to face the situation at hand (being an unwanted pregnancy) and then resolve that situation to the best of their ability (that is, by undergoing an abortion). Whether one considers it “easy” or “hard” does not come into it, and even if it did, “the easy road” does not necessarily mean shirking responsibility.

Seriously, just because something seems like it is “easy” doesn’t mean it’s not a valid way to resolve the situation.

(As an aside: “consequences”. Every time I hear that word I hear “babies are the consequences of opening your legs, slut”. But that’s me. Regardless, children should not be “consequences”. They should be welcome additions to the parents’ life. Children who are seen as “consequences” tend not to have the happy lives that they deserve.)

Even ignoring rape and other such scenarios, she still has the right to resolve the situation by any means she deems fit. If contraception fails, abortion is an option and should remain so.

All that said, that is one of the wierdest things I’ve ever heard, and it is oddly funny.

My biggest issue with the attack on Planned Parenthood is that it’s not just an assault on pro-choice, it’s an assault on family planning in general. A large number of people utilize Planned Parenthood to acquire (or learn about) contraceptives, which reduces unwanted pregnancies, which in turn reduces the number of abortions that would be happening.

So let’s talk about adoption as an alternative to abortion for a minute. Is it really even a possibility in all cases? What if the mother can’t afford to pay for the necessary medical care/diet/etc that she would require during the pregnancy to make sure the child is born healthy? What happens if she can’t afford to eat if she’s not working and has to take unpaid leave? What if she can’t find adoptive parents during the pregnancy (who in a lot of cases would pay the aforementioned cost) and the child ends up straight in an orphanage? Is the mother even capable of adjusting her habits? Does she want to?

As a note, one of the current reasons for the push to defund PP is that Breitbart and his “investigative journalists” tried to pull what they did on ACORN on Planned Parenthood. I’m sure he would have had his Great White Pimp O’Keefe in on it if the little moron didn’t fuck up with his “loveboat”.

I see StarStorm is just as angry and polemical now as I vaguely recall her being 6-7 years ago. Some things never change.

Xwing, repeat after me: “I do not have any say in what a woman does with her body.”
I do, actually. For example, if a woman swings her fist at my face, I am well within my rights to block her fist. One person’s rights end where another’s begin. And the key issue here is whether an unborn baby should be treated as a person with rights.

Despite your furious slew of accusations about what I believe, I actually only (1) gave an accurate depiction of partial-birth abortion, and (2) stated the fact that pigs have certain legal protections that unborn babies do not. Your violent wrath in response to my statement of pure facts suggests that, deep down, you are not as comfortable with those facts as you make out–or at least, you are worried that these facts will be convincing to others.

what you are saying is that “an unborn human has less rights than a pig”, but what you are inferring is “a fetus has more rights than the woman developing it”
The word is “implying,” not “inferring.”

Please, let me decide what I am implying. In my view, the mother should have more rights than the fetus, not less. I believe a mother whose life is endangered by pregnancy should be able to get an abortion. I also believe abortion should be available where the baby has a genetic defect or where the mother was raped. I don’t yet have a strong opinion on whether pre-viability abortions are okay–up to about the fourth or fifth month. On balance, this means the mother has more rights than the unborn child, who never has the right to say, “Save me, not her,” or, “What about my right to privacy?”

Of course, you can repeat your mantra that a child is part of a woman’s body, but that’s far too conclusory to be taken seriously. Doesn’t it matter that the baby has different DNA? A different heartbeat? That, one minute after it is born, it is a full human under law with equal rights to all other citizens? To just reply that it’s part of the woman’s body is not an argument, but a bare assertion of your unjustified belief. No one is obligated to care what you believe, despite how many times you repeat it:

Again, repeat after me: “I do not have any say in what a woman does with her body.”

When most people have abortions its before the 12th week of pregnancy, which is usually the cutoff for them, and at that point its not even a fetus yet. Well, its a fetus at week 11 so its right at that cutoff.

What if you use condoms and birth control and still become pregnant? Should you have to put your body through pregnancy? Your body is never the same and there are health risks to anyone from pregnancy, even if you aren’t a particularly high-risk patient. And if you have a baby with someone they are never really out of your life, even if you want them to be.

There will always be abortion. There has always been abortion. As long as there has been civilization, there have been women trying herbs or other things to get rid of unwanted pregnancies. What the question America is really trying to answer is this- Should women be able to have safe abortions?

I think that a woman has a right to control her own body. As long as the fetus is too young to be viable, I agree with a woman’s right to choose. Personally, I have not and I do not think I would have an abortion. But I don’t think that means I can tell another woman what to do with her uterus. I actually take that back. If I dd become pregnant after taking precautions at this point I might have an abortion. Pregnancy is not something I need.

I’d like to point out that there is a surplus population in the world, and also that there are many more kids that there are adoptive parents. If you have a kid and want to get rid of it right away (and you’re white, especially) you have a better chance to find parents for your baby. But if you think that every kid given up for adoption finds a mommy and a daddy, you should realize that there are many foster homes filled with kids that can’t find parents.

It’s like if you’ve ever read The Cider House Rules, which is entirely about abortion, you see that the people don’t particularly like doing them, but its something that just needs to be done.

I don’t believe in God, a higher power, or anything else that many so-called pro-life people use as reasons for taking away abortion rights. But I do believe in being realistic, and abortions are a 'necessary evil".

Also, these changes to Planned Parenthood could do more damage that just taking away abortions. Low-income women will have a harder time getting birth control, which will only lead to more pregnancies, which they won’t be able to abort. Unless you think people are just going to stop having sex, this could do a lot of damage.

Finally, laws that prevent life saving abortion are just foolish. If the woman dies the fetus will anyway, so what’s the point? Abortion or not the fetus is dead. Its about the rights of a woman to live. If the fetus was viable they would just delivr it and send it to the NICU. Its not like they’re killing 8-month old fetuses to save women, those babies would be delivered.

I come from a town where over 40% of the high school girls in the graduating class were mothers or pregnant. Planned parenting would be a welcome addition to the school curriculum. Unfortunately the only sex education is from a place called Carenet, a “Pregnancy Crisis Center” which takes in people to scare them away from abortion, and which comes into the high school health class every year and tells teens not to bother with condoms because they don’t work, and to wait until marriage. They also use a piece of tape as a metaphor for the vagina, showing that the more it is used on different thigns (people) the less it sticks until it is useless and no one would want it. So there’s lots of girls with low self esteem who learned not to use condoms!
What you say is true- PP teaches people about how to avoid pregnancy and STDs, its not all about abortion.

I didn’t even think about the leave thing. We do live in a country where there is no real leave for women. You can take up to 3 months off, but who can afford to take that time off when you have a new baby? I know a lot of women who went back to work literally within a week or two of giving birth, exhausted but determined to keep their apartments, which means working.

There are lots of reasons to have an abortion, but lots of these unplanned pregnancies can be prevented by good education. The best way to prevent another one is contraception, but schools don’t really teach this well enough when they do at all, and people come out stupid about sex partly due to the United States’ (and Canada to a certain extent) weird attitude about sex.