The Effect of "Abortion Rights" on the Political Landscape

[GodFearinGunTotin]

Yes they do lose their rights as they lose their facilities.

They never lose their right to life. You can’t just kill them for any reason you can come up with.

 

[AndreusMaximus]

Yes they do lose their rights as they lose their facilities.

Okay, I should have phrased that more precisely. I'm only talking about inalienable human rights, most particularly in this case, the right to life.

There are a lot of things that we have come to call "rights" nowadays, like the right to vote, the right to work, the right to healthcare, etc, etc, that are not really innate human rights, either because they are a service provided by someone else (like healthcare) or are something that only people who have citizenship and are of a certain age have a right to (like the right to vote.)

Yes, when someone starts to lose it mentally, they lose their ability to make certain decisions for themselves, and thus they can lose their "rights" to live wherever they want, conduct their own financial affairs, drive, etc.

But when it comes to inalienable rights, like the right to life, we don't diminish that right based on a person's age or mental abilities. Except, it seems, for when they are in the womb.

If I show you a picture of a newborn baby, or of an elderly woman, or a disabled veteran, and ask you, "Is this a person with a right to life?" I'm betting I'll get an unequivocal "yes" without hesitation.

But when a human being is inside the womb, suddenly it's a list of questions about "Can they feel pain yet?", "Can they contemplate their own existence?", "Do they have any medical conditions?", "How old is the mother?", "Is the father a rapist?", and on and on.

That's why, even though we're much further apart in our conclusions, I find @LeftyGunner's position more logically consistent than @jamil's. Jamil claims that you can't ascribe "personhood", nor the inalienable right to life that comes with it, to an unborn child until they start to meet certain criteria, like feeling pain. He says that in order to believe absolutely that every human being has the same moral value, and the same right to life, you have to have religious beliefs in a soul. But apparently the moment the human being makes it outside the uterus, all that flies out the window, and now they are unquestionably a human person, with an inalienable right to life, same as everyone else, with no consideration at all for any mental/physical defects, how mentally developed they are, etc? This is the inconsistency that I don't understand.

 

[KLB]

They never lose their right to life. You can’t just kill them for any reason you can come up with.

There is a point a person can lose that right as well. People are taken off of life support and allowed to die all the time.

 

[AndreusMaximus]

There is a point a person can lose that right as well. People are taken off of life support and allowed to die all the time.

That is not the same as losing the right to life. Get back to me when it is allowed to stab/poison/dismember someone who is being taken off life support.

Making a decision about whether or not to continue extraordinary medical intervention in order to prolong someone's life is certainly a moral question, but it is in no way equivalent to outright killing someone.

 

[GodFearinGunTotin]

There is a point a person can lose that right as well. People are taken off of life support and allowed to die all the time.

Allowing a life to end on its own is a far, far different thing than purposefully and forcibly ending it. Removing life support isn't necessarily killing a person.

 

[KLB]

But when it comes to inalienable rights, like the right to life, we don't diminish that right based on a person's age or mental abilities. Except, it seems, for when they are in the womb.

As I just replied to GFGT, there is a point where a person can lose that right as well, generally due to injury.

 

[AndreusMaximus]

There is a point a person can lose that right as well. People are taken off of life support and allowed to die all the time.

I will also add this. If someone knows with near-certainty that someone on life support will recover within 9 months and return to perfect health, but chooses to take them off life support anyways, then you may have a point. If not outright murder, that scenario would certainly be very close to murder.

 

[KLB]

That is not the same as losing the right to life. Get back to me when it is allowed to stab/poison/dismember someone who is being taken off life support.

Making a decision about whether or not to continue extraordinary medical intervention in order to prolong someone's life is certainly a moral question, but it is in no way equivalent to outright killing someone.

I'd say it is closer than you make it out to be.

This is another area where the two sides will never agree.

 

[GodFearinGunTotin]

I'd say it is closer than you make it out to be.

This is another area where the two sides will never agree.

People being able to rationalize why or when another ought to live or be killed is the first crime recorded in the Bible. Because they can justify it does not mean it’s justifiable.

 

[AndreusMaximus]

I'd say it is closer than you make it out to be.

This is another area where the two sides will never agree.

Is it really that close?

Would you ever be comfortable with someone who is on life support being given a lethal injection instead of merely having life support removed? If no, then I think you understand the vast difference between discontinuing care vs. outright murder.

You can try to brush it off with platitudes like "the two sides will never agree" but the fact is, I'm sorry to say, you're just being plain illogical here. To somehow suggest that because we don't necessarily continue extraordinary care up to the last possible second for someone who is guaranteed to die anyways, that means they've lost their right to life, how does that make any sense? It's like saying that if I don't donate every spare penny I have to feed starving people in Africa, that's morally equivalent to me taking a plane over to Africa and going on a shooting rampage to kill as many starving people as possible.

Or to flip it around, I'll ask again, would you be okay with removing life support from someone who is virtually guaranteed to make a full recovery within months, if care is continued? That's at least closer to being a correct analogy for abortion, but even then it's still not quite the same as outright killing someone.

 

[KLB]

Would you ever be comfortable with someone who is on life support being given a lethal injection instead of merely having life support removed? If no, then I think you understand the vast difference between discontinuing care vs. outright murder.

Yes actually. I think it is more humane to do that. Letting someone die of suffocation, starvation, or organ failure is no better. I wouldn't let an animal suffer like that.

You can try to brush it off with platitudes like "the two sides will never agree" but the fact is, I'm sorry to say, you're just being plain illogical here. To somehow suggest that because we don't necessarily continue extraordinary care up to the last possible second for someone who is guaranteed to die anyways, that means they've lost their right to life, how does that make any sense? It's like saying that if I don't donate every spare penny I have to feed starving people in Africa, that's morally equivalent to me taking a plane over to Africa and going on a shooting rampage to kill as many starving people as possible.

Or to flip it around, I'll ask again, would you be okay with removing life support from someone who is virtually guaranteed to make a full recovery within months, if care is continued? That's at least closer to being a correct analogy for abortion, but even then it's still not quite the same as outright killing someone.

My personal feelings have little to do with what I am discussing. Thankfully I have not had to make a decision about anyone's life to date. Making it for an animal was heartbreaking enough.

 

[LeftyGunner]

Allowing a life to end on its own is a far, far different thing than purposefully and forcibly ending it. Removing life support isn't necessarily killing a person.

Even in the best-case scenario a woman can only offer her unborn a chance at a live birth. No woman can guarantee her unborn a live birth…to argue that she is legally bound to provide one flies in the face of not only biology, but also logic and empathy.

A medical abortion is nothing more than a voluntary miscarriage...a misoprostol-only medical abortion does not kill the unborn directly, it triggers the natural biological process of stripping and emptying the uterus of its lining and contents, exactly as a miscarriage does.

Any right to life an unborn child has is entirely contingent on the cooperation of the mother’s body...If the body doesn’t consent, the pregnancy is miscarried.

I don‘t see why the mind has any less right to remove consent to pregnancy that the body itself does.

From my perspective the truth is self-evident: Involuntary miscarriage is not homicide, and voluntary miscarriage is not murder.

 

[jamil]

This is the part of your worldview that I'm trying to understand: Do you or do you not believe in equal rights for every human person? Because it seems to me that the point you keep driving at is that, without the concept of a soul, human rights have to exist on a spectrum, and human slowly gain rights as they develop more of their human traits.

What I don't understand is why you only apply this concept to babies in the womb? Do human persons also start to lose some of their rights as they lose their mental faculties? Or their ability to perceive pain? Like, what if I replace your two pictures and say:


How would you answer that?

Why compare the old coot to the yuppie?

Someone on life support would make a better point. But even by that point, does the person on life support have a right to have their life supported by other people’s machines? Indefinitely?

You don’t have a right to life exactly. Wouldn’t that imply you have a right to make others sustain you? You have a right to pursue life within your means. That means some people have more resources than others, unfortunate as that may be. Even for the old coot who looks like he’s ready to cuss out nurse Crachet. If he’s broke. Them’s the breaks.. except we have a spot of socialism to spread out the access to life saving care.

And why does the zygote have the same right to life? The right to make the mother carry it to term? I think rather, the parents have a moral responsibility to care for the unborn life that they participated in creating. Just like the children have a moral responsibility to care for their parents in their later life.

 

[LeftyGunner]

I will also add this. If someone knows with near-certainty that someone on life support will recover within 9 months and return to perfect health, but chooses to take them off life support anyways, then you may have a point. If not outright murder, that scenario would certainly be very close to murder.

On an average day in the US 2-3 women will die in childbirth.

You are considering the odds over the stakes, I think that is the pregnant woman’s decision alone to make.

 

[jamil]

People being able to rationalize why or when another ought to live or be killed is the first crime recorded in the Bible. Because they can justify it does not mean it’s justifiable.

People rationalize all kinds of stuff.

 

[Creedmoor]

That is not the same as losing the right to life. Get back to me when it is allowed to stab/poison/dismember someone who is being taken off life support.

Making a decision about whether or not to continue extraordinary medical intervention in order to prolong someone's life is certainly a moral question, but it is in no way equivalent to outright killing someone.

I'm gonna say that you've never been involved with Hospice with an elder family member then. Nothing more than poisoning / overdosing with morphine, oxycodone and or fentanyl.
Its a rhetorical answer.

 

[Twangbanger]

I don't have any illusions. I don't believe for a moment that my position has any widespread political support.

What's your point, though? I'm not going to back down from these beliefs for political reasons. It's not happening.

If you want to say that I need to recognize that "Life at Conception no matter what" is politically non-viable right now, and that I may need to be willing to vote for candidates who are the best possible option right now, even when they don't 100% align with my beliefs, then, yes, I readily admit that.

But if you ask me about my true beliefs regarding this unfortunate situation, I'm not going to lie about it.

Let me ask you this: Why is it that if someone wants to cut the baby out of a 10-year-old's body, but they're sure to dismember or poison the baby first to make sure its dead, that's the compassionate and merciful thing to do; but if I suggest that maybe we cut the baby out in such a way that lets both the baby and the mother live, suddenly it's the most horrible, evil thing ever?

I don't expect you to alter your beliefs. What I'm hoping to accomplish with this line of conversation, is to establish what an outlier you are, and how foolish the GOP was to ever get so involved with people like you. Because this was intended to be a political thread, and you don't even really believe in exceptions for the life of the mother. You want the State to forcibly strap that life-endangered woman to a table, and cut that life out of them, for the possible future benefit of some other couple. In your suggested solution, the 10 year-old girl was raped once, and now she's going to be surgically raped again, in a figurative sense, for the imputed future benefit of a fetus and a hypothetical adoptive family. She is not going to just "snap back," physically or mentally, from that act adjudicated upon her by the State.

What you're also forgetting is that the presumed adoptive family likely won't even exist, because the bio-mom (and/or family) gets a vote in whether the child is put up for adoption. America today isn't the sort of idealized redistributor of infants that you seem to imagine. Ever since Lyndon Johnson turned babies into paychecks from the State, through the magic of Food Stamps/SNAP/WIC/AFDC, these tots don't get swept away by Julie Andrews to go live in a mountaintop orphanage where singing nuns raise them to be responsible citizens. Once she's forced to bear this child, the "family" (?) is at least equally likely in modern America to keep it and raise it in substandard conditions, at public expense, to eventually become a social burden on the rest of us (and quite possibly a criminal one).

 

[jamil]

"What I'm hoping to accomplish with this line of conversation, is to establish what an outlier you are, and how foolish the GOP was to ever get so involved with people like you."

How to win friends and influence enemies
Written By Twangbanger

 

[BugI02]

Was just thinking about the divide and how there's really no common ground to be had. You pretty much either think abortion is literally murder or you don't. The nation can't really come together at all on this, but we do have a mechanism to handle this, but I'm not sure either side can agree to it completely. It's nothing new. We all know about it. Federalism.

You mean like the 23 states within which abortion was in some form legal at the time Roe v Wade was decided and the penumbra of the shadow was discovered?

It wasn't enough for the 'all abortion all the time' wing of American politics then, what makes you think it will be now. Now they want a federal law enabling abortion, and after watching Johnson sell us out on Ukraine I'm not so sure that is out of reach

 

[jamil]

I don't have any illusions. I don't believe for a moment that my position has any widespread political support.

What's your point, though? I'm not going to back down from these beliefs for political reasons. It's not happening.

If you want to say that I need to recognize that "Life at Conception no matter what" is politically non-viable right now, and that I may need to be willing to vote for candidates who are the best possible option right now, even when they don't 100% align with my beliefs, then, yes, I readily admit that.

But if you ask me about my true beliefs regarding this unfortunate situation, I'm not going to lie about it.

Well, I'm not asking you to back down from your beliefs. Just consider political consequences of insisting that policy must be your way or the highway. It should tell you that it's not time for such a policy. It's far outside Overton's Window and the people just won't tolerate such a law. Try to change hearts and minds before trying to push very unpopular legislation.

It will likely cost Republicans 2024 elections. And then you guys will be complaining that the election was rigged, without considering that maybe voters thought about how those mean Republicans made that little girl travel to Indiana to get an abortion.

Let me ask you this: Why is it that if someone wants to cut the baby out of a 10-year-old's body, but they're sure to dismember or poison the baby first to make sure its dead, that's the compassionate and merciful thing to do; but if I suggest that maybe we cut the baby out in such a way that lets both the baby and the mother live, suddenly it's the most horrible, evil thing ever?

Pretty much. That's 10 year old's story is the textbook case against banning abortion. And it was timed perfectly.