It's not very good flamebait.

Well, someone like me won't ever be able to bait someone as cool-headed as you, Rob. But I have to do my best, you know?

That's true for anyone who knows that the unborn are people, and not things.

Anyway.



And most of us will never be convinced that the unborn aren't persons, any more than most of you will never be convinced they are.

But it's not. That's just one facet of both that could arguably be related. I'm not saying that the issue of unborn babies are humans; slaves are humans; thus treat them humanely isn't a major issue. There, however are far too many fundemental differences between them to say that a person with a set of principles that puts him or her against slavery would be able to apply those identical principles to abortion and have the same logical thought flow.

Examples of differences:
Slavery involves manual labor and has economic implications. Abortions do not.
A baby cannot escape from its mother's womb. Slaves could attempt to escape or be set free.
Killing slaves would be counter-productive to slavery. Killing the unborn is productive for abortions.
A baby cannot communicate with its mother or anybody else. Slaves could communicate with their masters and others.


Edit: in any case, my point was mainly about the WAY that the author attempted to convey his relatively more faulty argument. Although I do maintain (per this post) that that relatively more faulty argument is, in fact, more faulty.

Pommy I'm tired of you constantly posting these controversial and inflammatory threads :/

Constantly.:psylon:

IM SORRY

Slavery = abortion?

My main issues:

a) Abortion opinions of a candidate matter to me only if that person is running for a legislative position. A President can only sign or veto the law, and appoint judges. Important powers, but I still don't think it's that much. In particular, I never got when people complain about a mayor's position on the matter.

b) Laws that force people to violate principles bother me. ie: laws that require Catholic adoption agencies to place children with gay couples. I don't really care about gay adoption, (part of me doubts it could screw up any kid who wouldn't have wound up screwed up anyway) but things like that make it illegal to act according to principle. Federal subsidization of abortion in that sense does bother me.

On the other hand a tremendous amount of tax dollars support the arms industry, which has lead pacifists to refuse to pay taxes (ie: Ammon Hennacy), but I suspect most to just have to live with it.

Overall though, I'm inclined to believe Obama's record is being skewed in the artical here.

Considering the legislatures no longer have the authority to outlaw abortion, I'd say the power to appoint judges is pretty damned important no matter which side of the issue you're on.

I don't see Roe v. Wade going anywhere, so the Judge thing doesn't seem to matter to me. If it were overturned, it'd just become a legislative matter anyway (most likely at the State level).

Indeed mine was, lol.

Anyone taking it seriously will be butthurt.

Then instead of a pointless one liner, how about you explain it to me?

So basically the author didn't advance the discussion at all, as he didn't address the stalemate issue. He's wrong in that you can be personally against it but think it should be a personal decision. He doesn't take into account that not everyone who is personally against it is against it because they see it as murder. As for his relating it to slavery, he needs to pick up a textbook. If he read just a little about the Constitution and its framing, he'd know that slavery was the most hotly contested issue at the Constitutional Convention and that the southern delegates almost walked out of the Convention because of it. But because they knew that if they didn't stay united foreign powers would eat them alive, the northern and southern states came to a compromise involving counting 3/5 of the slaves for tax(?) and representation purposes but also putting a sunset on slaves being imported. The anti-slave movement than just crossed their fingers and prayed slavery would die on its own. There was absolutely no way to resolve this issue and it was a ticking time bomb that gave us the bloodiest war we have ever had. The slave issue didn't turn out the way it did because people thought "I don't like slavery but it shouldn't be banned". It turned out the way it did because there was no other choice. What makes this truly sad he's a fricken professor and should know this.

I don't even see him mention human dignity until the very end and even then he doesn't draw a dignity link between slavery and abortion, which would have been a far stronger argument. What a clod.

Your morals are your morals. Have all the sex you want, but if you get pregnant or knock someone up, I think you should now have that responsibility to deal with. So, yeah...

I've seen this analogy before. The argument could be made that a child is a parasite for all their life. But seriously, the zygote that is created upon conception is a separate entity, with it's own unique DNA. Women try to claim that they can do what they want with their bodies, yet the child that is forming within them is a completely different person. I believe that because abortion is legal and available, it gives both men and women the ability to forfeit the consequences of their actions.

This is one of the biggest reasons I don't agree with abstinence-only education. Kids are going to have sex. They might as well know how to properly protect themselves from disease and impregnation.

That's not the point. I may be misreading him, too.



It doesn't matter why people are against it. Yes, some people are against abortion because it's bad for the woman's well-being (it's an emotionally devastating decision). However, those people still support the legality of it which would mean that they believe that abortion does not constitute an injustice of some kind (assuming that law needs to prevent injustice whenever it can prevent justice).

I don't think this position is absurd at all.




This is irrelevant to the author's argument. The point is that some people were against slavery but did not support banning slavery. It does not matter why they were against banning slavery. The point is that they could have supported the banning of slavery but they did not. Let E be emancipation of slaves. There was a group A that supported emancipation by law. There was a group B that thought slavery was wrong but was against emancipation because of economic concerns, but they personally did not benefit from slavery. And then there was a group C that owned slaves and opposed emancipation. The point is that the members of group B could have been members of group A, but they supported an injustice. So even though they didn't participate in the action, it's not really meaningful to call them anti-slavery. The context of pro/anti-slavery is whether or not the law should ban or legalize slavery.

The point is that the author is making clear that the argument here is between whether or not abortion should be legal. Why does it matter that slavery was a complicated issue that could not be easily resolved? Same with abortion, but people can still choose to be against the legalization of abortion...




Maybe this is proof that he's not actually comparing the act of abortion to the act of slavery? I might have read too much into that in my explanation to Pommy. Reading it again, I honestly take a much more conservative interpretation of his argument.

I can't believe this article is being attacked on these grounds instead of the actual political message. There are much more extreme and ridiculous arguments against abortion in the literature... this article is *nothing* compared to articles that say that abortion is world war III.

oh my god this argument is so stupid shut up

NO U

Not until I've won. Hold on, it could take a while.

Actually in many cases it is, especially with cigarettes and alcohol. If that isn't true legalizing it could only increase the number of users of a given substance.



I don't think you can really call one of the fundamental biological objectives of our existence a parasite. Besides the analogy could be seamlessly extended to cover children as well.

Regardless, a fetus is a distinct organism, and any criteria you apply to its humanity is arbitrary, and reduces to a red herring. In a society, no one person can have authority over anther's life. Only the society as a whole has that authority. That is the definition of society.

Now, I admit I'm not a big fan of the author of the posted article's reasoning, but I haven't yet heard any convincing counters to my argument.

Why such high regard for human life, though? you elevate humanity to the top of your care-o-meter and couldn't care less about other organisms. Yeah, a fetus is an organism. That happens to have the usefulness of the sorts of organisms you trample underfoot every day.

I don't mean to further an argument which is clearly stupid, but:

Death is bad. Why is death bad? When a person dies, they can no longer feel any pain or suffering. Does that mean that death is only bad to the loved ones affected by the death? No. We all probably have some intuitive sense that death is bad for a person because that person will not have the opportunity to experience life any more. So, clearly, it's important that a person have the capacity to enjoy the experience of living life in a certain way.

Here's the thing, I'm not arguing that only human beings have this ability. Some other sentient creatures may also have certain mental faculties that guarantee some respect for their life. However, most of the things you step on do not qualify.

What about the fetus? The difference is that the fetus has the potential to experience life in this way. Now, you could say that an ant as the potential to experience life in such a way because we could invent a machine to give them this power or something. However, I don't mean "potential" as any semblance of possibility, but I mean potential in the sense that it is an inevitability. It is inevitable that a fetus will have a chance to experience life in the qualified way that intuitively seems important. In so far as this is the case, we can say that it is a bad thing for a fetus to die because that death is bad for the fetus in the same way that it is bad for an adult.

Before you jump on me, I am not saying that the death of a fetus is as bad as the death of a an adult person. The death of an adult person will affect more people, and that adult person fears death unlike a fetus because the adult has had the chance to appreciate the qualified type of life that a human person (and potentially some non-human persons) can live.

60 and 80 percent of all naturally conceived embryos are simply flushed out in women's normal menstrual flows unnoticed

"If the embryo loss that accompanies natural procreation were the moral equivalent of infant death, then pregnancy would have to be regarded as a public health crisis of epidemic proportions: Alleviating natural embryo loss would be a more urgent moral cause than abortion, in vitro fertilization, and stem-cell research combined"

How can pro-lifers possibly claim to believe that the unborn are persons when they don't give a crap about THE GREATEST THREAT to the unborn? Has anyone EVER heard a pro-life leader address natural embryo loss? Where are the charities dedicated to desperately searching for a cure?

I don't understand how potential is a better moral metric than anything else, like the mom's financial situation, world population, the uselessness of small children, the fact that you just don't want the extra responsibility. None of that is any better or worse than assuming everything's potential must be allowed to mature.

That is often true for teenagers, but rarely adults.


What? The definition of society is taking away individual rights? Are you high?

I was mostly talking about France actually, but okay.



I'm talking percentages of course. It has nothing to do with population size.



We get our fair share of immigrants here. I know Germany has many immigrants, but it's not like the Netherlands don't have them. In fact we're almost in a situation where half of the population in the big cities are immigrants.

While I will admit that socio-economical aspects factor into drug use, a major reason for the differences is in fact our drug policy.

First off, we distinguish between soft drugs (Marijuana) and hard drugs (everything else). Marijuana is considered a soft drug because it can not kill you, nor is it physically addictive. (Let's not talk mental addiction because you can get mentally addicted to almost anything, including massassi.)

Now, by distinguishing between soft and hard drugs we have a major advantage. We say: okay, let's legalize retail of the stuff that's not harmful. This way we separate the two markets: softdrugs and harddrugs. The big difference with other countries is now that people can buy their weed legally in a public place, where they're not offered the harder stuff. (Another benefit of this is that the quality of weed has improved by simple commercial competition.)

In other countries you buy your weed in the park, or at the metro station or with some house dealer, and if there's no weed, he'll sell you some cheap coke or speed or what have you. In the Netherlands, the majority of 'users' just go the coffeeshop and are content to smoke some weed. Most people don't want the harder stuff, and it's not as easily accessible because most people have no idea where to get it. They just go to the coffeeshop for some weed.

All of this translates into the numbers. The percentage of hard drug addicts (cocaine, heroin, etc.) is far lower than in other countries. (France being a good example) While soft drug (Marijuana) use is up to par with other countries. (While most people would expect this to be more in the Netherlands because weed is so easy to come by).

I have. And, know what? Natural loss like that is terribly. But know what else? What you said is like saying it's okay to exterminate the jews because some of them die 'naturally' anyway.

I'm not sure I follow you here. Potential is not a moral metric. Potential is not inherently valuable. Fulfilling potential is not inherently valuable. The fact that a human embryo has the potential to be a fully rational, sentient being is morally significant insofar as we were trying to figure out why a human embryo might take moral precedence over, say, a cockroach.

Godwined.

I'm not saying that at all. What I am saying is that if you believe the unborn are persons from day 1, but don't do anything about natural embryo loss, then you are turning a blind eye to the greatest medical and moral crisis in the history of the world.

If someone believes that the unborn are persons from day 1, then that someone SHOULD NEVER PROCREATE. To have any sex at all would be to essentially play Russian Roulette with lives of innocent babies.

I mean, I understand why the pro-life movement completely ignores the single greatest threat to innocent human life. To honestly be pro-life, you'd have to believe that every mother should be charged with manslaughter, or at least child endangerment, since she exposed her children to a 60 to 80 percent chance of horrible death. You'd have to believe that the desire to start a family is selfish and cruel.

Also, if you have any links, JM, I'd be interested in reading about pro-life leaders addressing what needs to be done to stop the greatest moral crisis of our lifetime.

No, he's just being a little unclear in articulating the legal principles involved in justifying killing (whether in self-defense, manslaughter, murder vs. capital punishment), etc... but because of the ARGUMENT ABOUT WHETHER FETUSES ARE HUMANS those laws are currently irrelevant to abortion, legally. So the point is moot anyways.

It doesn't have anything to do with taking away individual rights because it's not an individual right to be able to kill someone else anyways. Unless you apply it to abortion. Which it currently isn't being.

Jedi Legend just pwned me. Hard.

I still think he did a piss poor job describing the slavery issue though.

To distill down my new understanding of the article: "If you're for banning abortion, you're pro-life. If you're for keeping it legal and don't see anything wrong with it, you're pro-choice. If you're for keeping it legal but have personal issues with it, you're still pro-choice. You don't get to carry both flags."

Counter-Godwin. I said Jews - Hitler wasn't the only one who tried to exterminate them.

And it's NOT a moral crisis. It's just how nature works. It's sad. Oh well.

Your mistake is in trying to justify one bad thing using another bad thing. It just doesn't work.

Let me put it to you bluntly : If we find a way to stop natural embryo death, hurrah. In the mean time, we shouldn't be killing even more of them.

This thread is retarded.

You've got the one guy arguing about how he know what is better for you because he lives in Holland or some ****.

Then you have the other three or four guys trying to argue to each other when a fetus is a person and not a mass of cells.

Thankfully, I do not equate 'wrong' with 'shouldn't do it'. Therefor, I can know that murder is wrong, and still think Rob should be aborted.

I would have snapped that coat hanger in half and stabbed you in the eye.

I wouldn't have used a coat hanger.

Pain killers didn't work either!

SO THERE.

The only painkillers I use come in 9mm.

But that wouldn't be zen! And it for sure doesn't go with an indoor mold culture I mean lawn.

I'm not zen. I'm taoist. Enjoy some failsauce.

This reminds me of what a joke (and a personal embarrassment) the Religion Forum was.