If there is one issue I am sick to death of arguing about, it is abortion. Thus, listening to all the noise about the Stupak Amendment has me rather turned off on blogging and reading blogs today. Apparently, even though it is not listed on his official biography and he has no apparent medical training, Stupak thinks of himself as a doctor and feels comfortable inserting himself in between millions of women and their physicians. Not since Dr. Frist’s remote diagnosis of Terri Schiavo have we seen such arrogance.
And while I am sick and tired of the debate about abortion, I’m even sicker of the C-Street panty-sniffers like Stupak. Why is it always helmet-haired old white guys who are such busybodies when it comes to a piece of anatomy they don’t have?
calipygian
Jealousy? Curiosity? Disgust?
El Cid
Because it’s a big part of authoritarian culture to keep women ashamed of their own voluntary sexuality. Abortion is about punishing women for having sex. It’s not about babies or souls or anything else. It’s about shame, pain, disgust, and most of all, control.
Cain
Because if he has one more hole, he’d get anatomy bingo.
cain
ruemara
Because they don’t have it, so they want to control it.
SATSQ
Comrade Dread
Because many people disagree with you regarding the line that’s been politically drawn to define a human life and the rights that come with it.
EchoesBunniesRemoteFromWork
Fear the vagina!
Genine
‘Cause they’re douchebags.
GReynoldsCT00
@El Cid:
yeah but women sure better put out for powerful politician assholes like him… just don’t get pregnant, right? hypocrites.
Alan
What was there to gain by including the amendment? They got one GOP vote that the Dems probably would’ve gotten anyway. I have a feeling this whole health insurance boondoggle will go down in the Senate anyway. So I guess it probably doesn’t matter. Single payor is what should have been done anyway. Until that’s done, if you get diagnosed with a fatal disease go blow yourself up on ‘K’ Street, ‘C’ Street or Wall Street and make a real difference for the rest of us.
Heh.
TheHatOnMyCat
Because they can.
And because Dems were naive to think that they could get healthcare reform passed without facing the abortion boogieman.
I would say “facing it head-on” but that would sound crude, and as you know, I hate that.
FlipYrWhig
John Aravosis, Jane Hamsher, Dan Savage, and DailyKos (collectively, it seems) are apparently urging a boycott of DNC over Stupak — or, to use his hip-hop name, S2Pac.
General Winfield Stuck
By the look of it, makes me wonder if the Godbotherers should worship Uterus Sunday instead of Easter Sunday.
Hawes
They supported the Stupak Amendment to protect their sagging, wrinkled gray asses. “Look at me! I’m not Teh Librul!”
I bet not a few cynically figured that the worst of it would be torn out in conference.
So we’ve been reduced to counting on the political courage of Harry Weak Reid.
J.W. Hamner
As I believe Ezra Klein pointed out, not only is it a vagina, but it’s a poor woman’s vagina. So if that’s two birds with one stone that is.
FlipYrWhig
Didn’t it secure the votes of at least a few Democrats who might have wavered, making it possible for them to maintain some kind of Catholic cred?
Linkmeister
@Alan:
It wasn’t there to get Republicans. It was inserted to get Blue Dog and Catholic Democrats.
What was really really startling was the number of jerk Democrats who voted for Stupak and against the bill anyway.
Cerberus
@El Cid:
This.
Also because they don’t view women as entirely human.
As a biologist, the whole abortion “debate” is professionally infuriating. As a woman and a friend of women, it is personally infuriating.
I fucking hate the Catholic Church. Criminal, evil, molesters.
Incertus
@Comrade Dread:
Great. Nobody’s making them get an abortion. Now they can shut the fuck up and let women who feel they need them get them without having to walk through a goddamn gauntlet.
The Grand Panjandrum
We would probably have more lesbians in the world if Stupak and the rest of the helmet-haired numbnuts were the only alternative for women to choose as partners.
GReynoldsCT00
@The Grand Panjandrum:
LOL! true, that
andrea
Because they have to pay for it?
Cerberus
@Comrade Dread:
Well they are free to draw that line for themselves, same as a christian scientist who decides to forego cancer treatment to save their lives, but until they magically both undo the medical consensus to the answer to the question as well as the personhood of the woman held hostage to another organism in slavery, they can stfu.
Oh wait, it’s the same group that doesn’t believe in evolution, refuses to read biology textbooks on principle, and stands against sex education. And yet, they still expect not only medical science to take a back seat to their uninformed ramblings, but to receive the benefits of the same medical science when it comes to their illnesses and …oh right, unwanted pregnancies.
Hypocritical, evil, ignorant, god fuckers.
Ash
@The Grand Panjandrum: God, if men could get pregnant we’d all get years of paid maternity leave and free childcare.
We already pay for their ED pills, of which I have no doubt 75% of Congress uses.
Alan
@Linkmeister:
It’s getting to the point that a vote is decided –not– by who you’re for, but by who you hate the least. It seems almost pointless.
jl
“Why is it always helmet-haired old white guys who are such busybodies when it comes to a piece of anatomy they don’t have?”
I come back to insurance coverate for b o n e r p * l l s.
Perhaps the coverage needs an adjustment. Lower co-pays (to get consumption up, as it were) to reduce frustration. Or, higher co-pays, to keep it out of reach and calm them down.
There needs to be study. Or maybe they are worried about competition for reimbursement monies for very important man-type benefits as opposed to not important benefits for mere women, which they naturally assume should have top priority.
They are an odd bunch. I believe that until the 1840’s when the modern wave of US protestant ‘happy male sinner’ brand fundamentalism in the US began, pregnancy was considered the woman’s business until ‘quickening’.
Violet
@El Cid:
Exactly. It’s all about control. People like Stupak are pathetic.
gopher2b
Fetuses are such jerks.
jl
I meant to type”
“which they naturally assume should have NOT have top priority.”
They are a very odd hypocritical bunch.
When can we expect the Stupak fertility clinic amendment. Or will all those snowflakes be adopted, someday or other. That is certainly firm ground for a fundamentalist to justify churning out unused blastocysts.
smiley
@Alan:
I disagree with that, but whatever. What’s more important is that without the Stupak amendment, or something like, the bill wouldn’t have passed. The problem is with the democratic party, sadly.
El Cid
I think Digby’s onto something in contextualizing the Stupak amendment as a way of trying to crap up something which otherwise would make liberals think they had, sort of, won something for once — and no matter how us grunts might disagree with that view that ‘liberals’ had won this, from the ever-vigilant-against-any-real-liberalism Establishment, it could always be seen as close enough to disgust and frighten them.
Mr Furious
So, are all male sexual-related procedures and medicines also forbidden to use any federal funds?
Mr Furious
So, are all male sexual-related procedures and medicines also forbidden to use any federal funds?
Mr Furious
Oh, fuck this WordPress bullshit.
Alan
@smiley:
It’s obvious by your response and two others I wasn’t paying enough attention to what went on. Anyway, the amendment it fuct up.
El Cid
@Mr Furious: All male sexual related procedures and medicines are required to use federal funds, and I think we should go above and beyond and federally fund all those commercials for herbal drugs which magically make your thing better, because we are a conservative center-right nation.
cmorenc
Because, to put it crudely, they aren’t getting much access to that “piece of anatomy” anymore, at least not from any premenopausal women who aren’t from escort services. And therefore they have some bitters perhaps to go with their self-righteousness.
The Grand Panjandrum
@El Cid: They could call it the Limbaugh Amendment.
Midnight Marauder
Well, for the sake of everyone, at least Obama had the good sense to come out and say something like this:
Obama: ‘This is a Health Care Bill, Not an Abortion Bill’
And in a surprising bit of news, apparently, many Senate Republicans are “cool” on the Stupak Amendment:
Senyordave
Why is it always helmet-haired old white guys who are such busybodies when it comes to a piece of anatomy they don’t have?
Cause shitbags like Stupak (substitute any GOP white male, including Sen. Diapers) truly could care less about the women invovled. I truly believe they see one of the main roles of women to be baby factories.
If there is karma, they will come back in the next life as a pregnant, poor teen with limited options.
WereBear
At some point women could just have the tiny blastocyst taken out and frozen… that doesn’t bother the Highly Visible Godly.
Laura W
@gopher2b:
And super selfish!
Senyordave
We would probably have more lesbians in the world if Stupak and the rest of the helmet-haired numbnuts were the only alternative for women to choose as partners.
And probably zero gay men if Supak and his kind were the only available men.
Midnight Marauder
The question now, of course, is how the crazy kids at FDL will spin Obama’s words into somehow meaning “Fuck those slutty bitches and their bastard children. I’ll stick the coathanger in myself.”
bemused
If women legislators even suggested restricting men’s access to their proctologists or male enhancers…….
@J.W. Hamner:
It’s ironic that making it harder or almost impossible to get an abortion most affects the people who are least able to financially support a baby. At the same time, rightwingers become apoplectic about the unwed mother down the street getting any social aid. They hate poor people yet fight tooth and nail to add a lot more of the people they have such contempt for to welfare programs.
JHF
Hear, hear, John. I thought we were well past all this bullshit.
Talk about the good ol’ days, Jesus.
Ash
@Senyordave:
Unfortunately, Stupidak (yes, I am 12 years old) is a Dem.
Zifnab
The insurance companies can add a rider to their coverage that offers abortion. If they make the fee nominal, there’s no reason lots of sensible non-raving-bible-thumpers won’t pick it up. Given that an abortion procedure is significantly less expensive than the cost of childbirth, insurance companies have every reason to encourage their clients to take it and use it.
The net result of the Stupak Amendment might not be as bad as we’re afraid of. That said, it’s an excellent opportunity for anti-women politicians to stake their claims and fluff up their asshole credentials.
Just add it to the long list of right-wing hypocrisies next time you hear a wingnut hero bemoan the horror of government regulation on private enterprise. I just wish this vote had happened in the Senate, so we could line up all the pro-rape and anti-choice folks and see who matched.
Gwangung
@Senyordave: These two statements FTW.
ds
Now that the health care bill includes a provision that will actually reduce access to abortion, is the National Right to Life committee going to endorse it?
Hahahahahahaha.
As far as I can see it, the pro-life movement stopped caring about abortion years ago. It’s all about promoting Republicans.
JHF
I just read Allan at #9. BRILLIANT! ABSOFUCKINGBRILLIANT!
And don’t think it won’t catch on, either.
geg6
I said this much more eloquently in the previous thread (okay, more profanely) but FUCK THE CATHOLIC CHURCH, those evil perverted criminals in designer dresses. I hate those mother fuckers as only someone brought up Catholic can. They hate women and they are afraid and jealous of us, as are all fundies and the vast majority of men of all races and colors (present company excluded). They don’t want us to enjoy sex and any woman who does must be punished. And that’s what this is about. It’s what it’s always been about. I am officially against HCR at this point because of this amendment. I hope that not a single progressive female Dem votes for it. Not one. I want this bill to die now unless this goes away. Health care reform is not worth this egregious violation of women’s rights and the insertion of the Vatican Criminal Syndicate into our government.
Joel
unfortunately, stupak et al. represent a political reality for america.
without the hyde poison pill – and let’s be honest, this stems from the hyde bill – hcr doesn’t pass the house.
Morbo
HA! I had the exact same thought reading this dreadful comic strip (Warning: it’s Day by Day) on Instaputz. He clearly wants to titillate, but he’s still too much of a prude to actually draw a certain anatomical feature.
Joel
commenter shinkers from 538.com explains it best
Joel
blockquote fail!
Ash
@Morbo: Hmm, did that comic strip lady have her nipples removed when she went in for her boob job?
Neutron Flux
I don’t know why they do this John Cole.
I really do not know.
I suspect it is because they think they are hitting the center. I suspect is has something to do with who is giving them money.
Logically, it is insane for old men to dictate to women what to do about an intensely private decision.
They keep getting rewarded for doing this tho, so do not expect it to stop.
I really would not mind if they all DIAF.
kay
@bemused:
Poor women don’t have abortion coverage now.
” More than 16 million women receive their basic health and long-term coverage through Medicaid. In 2003, Medicaid covered one in ten women and one in five low-income women. In 2003, 11.5% of women of reproductive age were covered by Medicaid.
Currently, all state Medicaid programs must cover pregnant women who meet the federal income requirements. Many states have elected to cover women with incomes that are higher than the federal requirements. However, this coverage is not without limits, and abortion services are among the provisions that are most stringently regulated. “
kay
State Funding for Abortion under Medicaid
Funding under Hyde Amendment Only: Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming.
Hyde Amendment and Additional Health Circumstances: Indiana (physical health), Iowa (fetal abnormality), Mississippi (fetal abnormality), Utah (physical health and fetal abnormality), Virginia (fetal abnormality), and Wisconsin (physical health).
All or Most Health Circumstances: Alaska, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, Washington, and West Virginia.
Noncompliant with the Hyde Amendment: South Dakota (life endangerment only).
Corner Stone
@Joel:
Only 1 Republican voted for the bill, right? Just Cao from LA?
So what more could the R’s have done to stop this bill beside vote No?
Were there procedural tactics the minority party could’ve pulled?
geg6
Zifnab: You are wrong from what I’ve read (and not at hysterical sites like FDL). From what I understand, the language of the amendment makes providing any abortion coverage, even in a private plan or rider, will deny that insurance provider from participating in the exchange. So which insurer do YOU think will be opting out of the exchange so they can keep covering abortions for their private clients?
Alan
@JHF:
I was only kidding.
J. Michael Neal
The complete and utter cluelessness of comments like this are why, despite being pro-choice, the people I agree with offend my intellectual honesty almost as much as those I disagree with. The line defining who is and is not human absolutely can not, and should not, be decided by only one portion of a society. We don’t let only a subset of society decide whether or not Jews are human beings. We don’t let only a subset of society decide whether women are human beings. The idea that only pregnant women should get to decide whether a fetus is a human being is both intellectual cowardice and moral abomination.
The same holds true for all of you who seem to think that a hatred of women is the only thing that motivates those who oppose abortion rights. This is EXACTLY the same sort of pathetic narrow mindedness that dominates the teabaggers and their insistence that the only reason we can be in favor of government intervention in the health care system is because we’re Hitler inspired communists. It’s wrong, both on the facts and on the basic decency.
For god’s sake, have the courage to admit that your opponents might, just might, be arguing from a deeply held belief on the terms that they are arguing. They might not be motivated by a hidden and evil agenda. If you don’t have sufficient courage to admit that there might be valid reasons why you are wrong, then go sit in a corner until you can be a grownup. It depresses me that so much of the BJ commentariat turns out to be so scared that they can’t treat those they disagree with with any amount of maturity.
Well, except Fuckhead. I expect it of him.
ds
Every time health care reform fails, liberals claim “we should have gone for a more liberal bill! That’s why it failed! We’ll be able to come back next year with single payer, and it’ll pass, right?”
If this “boondoggle” goes down in the Senate, that means health care reform is off the table for probably two decades or more.
And it’s far from clear that single payer will be in any way politically viable then. In fact, the bill in two decades is likely to be even more conservative than this one.
Clinton’s health care bill was similar to what Nixon proposed and liberals opposed because they thought it was a terrible deal. Obama’s health care bill is similar to what some moderate Republicans offered as a counter-proposal to Clinton’s bill.
Sorry. I don’t want to be in 2029 with 100 million Americans uninsured, and the solution on the table being similar to some shit Sarah Palin babbled about in her Katie Couric interview.
This is the best chance to reform health care into a decent, reasonable system that we’ll probably ever have.
These are the stakes. Let’s not fuck it up.
J. Michael Neal
Yes, there were. Did you bother to read the rest of the post you pulled the quote from?
Annie
Conservatives argue loudly that health should be between a patient and his/her doctor, without government involvement, UNTIL it is an issue of reproductive rights.
Then, they argue the government should be involved ancond should restrict not only access but treatment and choice.
Small government when it suits them; big government dictating health response when it suits them…
I love what I read today that we should restrict conservative men from even masturbating, as it amounts to sperm not headed for procreation purposes! Tell that to the “C” Street crowd….
Also, conservatives should come out against birth control and see how many people they get at a health care rally.
Neutron Flux
@J. Michael Neal: Well look.
I do believe that they are acting from deeply held beliefs.
But they should examine those beliefs.
In order to make this shorter:
They have no skin in this game. Get the fuck out of the way.
WereBear
@J. Michael Neal: Don’t think so.
Because if they were, they wouldn’t (as they so often do, and as the Stupak-Pitts amendment does) allow for “exceptions” for rape, incest, and the life of the mother.
Because if you think it’s murder… you wouldn’t make those exceptions.
kay
Here’s the S-CHIP restriction. S-CHIP can cover girls up to age 19.
“Separately, the statute allows federal payment for abortion services under state-designed CHIP programs only in cases of life endangerment, rape or incest, although states may cover abortion in other circumstances with their own funds. A similar restriction applies to coverage of abortion under Medicaid and therefore to Medicaid-based CHIP efforts.”
John Cole
Which is why I am content to let the women contemplating an abortion make the decision for themselves. Under my plan, you are free to never have an abortion.
bemused
@kay:
It’s a horror. What a stupid country.
It just kills me. No sign of the anti-choicers after the baby arrives. They disappear. Just a lot of snarling about lazy women with no morals & why should they pay for their problems.
Ash
@J. Michael Neal:
Well, good for them. But having “deeply held beliefs” doesn’t exempt someone from needing to shut the fuck up and mind their own.
KDP
Because how can a man maintain his perceived place in the world, holding dominion, sanctified by God, over all living things, when his counterpart, woman, insists on continuing to participate in such blatantly animal acts as menstruation and childbirth?
geg6
J. Michael Neal: Screw you. These assholes, the Catholic Church especially, certainly do have a fervently and sincerely held belief. That belief is that women must be controlled, especially when it comes to sex, and those who cannot be controlled must be punished. All the rest of their beliefs about abortion, marriage, and sex stem from that. They fear us and it is so ingrained into the theology and ideology that it can even sound reasonable to open-minded people. But if this wasn’t about their fear and hate for women and is really about their devout Christian beliefs, then why do they not follow those beliefs in all other areas of life and why are they so determined to keep women down in economic and political terms?
Samnell
I believe that is the proper province of biologists. After all, they’re the ones qualified. The opinions of the rest of us are by definition less informed and therefore less valuable. Having biologists available to consult renders any opinions the rest of us have worse than worthless, but actually a needless distraction to the entire enterprise. It’s like asking your garbage man to come help out the neurosurgeon working on your brain.
The idea that species membership is the sole variable by which one should assign membership in the moral community is both intellectual cowardice and a moral abomination. Corpses and skin cells are every bit as human as you and I.
kay
@bemused:
Yeah. S-CHIP doesn’t cover abortion either, and it’s available to girls up to age 19.
I’m pro-choice, and pro-choicers (IMO) have a strong privacy argument. I really wrestled with it, but at the end of the day I ended up where the Roe court ended up.
This isn’t about poor women, though, and we shouldn’t pretend it is, because poor women qualify for Medicaid, and Medicaid has severe restrictions on abortion funding.
So, we’ll have to leave them out of it :)
Cerberus
@J. Michael Neal:
And you are ignorant to the field of biology, the rule of autonomy where no being is allowed to use a human without their permission, and basic human decency.
A fetus, is medically nonequivalent to a person in about a zillion different ways. But thanks to this country’s illiteracy of basic biology, we get to “debate” the “serious issue” that men don’t have any skin in.
Fuck. their. rock. ignorant. asses.
KDP
@KDP: In case it’s not clear, my comment was purely snark!
jl
@ds: “The idea that only pregnant women should get to decide whether a fetus is a human being is both intellectual cowardice and moral abomination.”
Very few would defend the idea that a pregnant woman can decide, alone, that a fetus in the eighth month of pregnancy can be aborted.
Society has decided, legally speaking, that a woman can decide during the first trimester, and society has a growing interest after that, until a woman has very little control over deciding after the fetus is viable outside the womb. A pregnant women has very little control in the third trimester.
The problem is vocal minority imposing its will on a certain class of women over period during which society has decided that she does have control during the first trimester. The goal is to define life as beginning at the moment of conception, which is an extreme view historically, and in contradiction to what this society has decided.
It seems to me that the amendment also inteferes with the social control (through a doctor) that society has decided is needed for decisions after the first trimester.
The amendment is a very bad idea. So, I think your comment is very wrong.
J. Michael Neal
No, John. That is exactly the sort of intellectual dishonesty I’m talking about. That is ceding the decision of who is a human being to a minority. In this case, a minority of one. If a fetus is a human being, then the abortion is murder, and whether it is a justifiable murder needs to be decided by society at large, just as in the case of every other instance of it.
Cerberus
Also, I am really really tired of “deeply held beliefs”. It seems that these only come up when a minority group is about to be fucked. Religion shouldn’t trump reality and yet we have to bow and scrape for “deeply held beliefs”.
Fuck their “deeply held beliefs”.
P.S. Why do we never seem to notice or care about the deeply held beliefs of the non-religious right? The deeply held belief that war is wrong always seems to be pissed away, but we get verklempt about gays getting married, women having a legal medically necessary procedure, or blacks not being property (oh wait wasn’t supposed to put “deeply held beliefs” in their historical context). Fuck them sideways.
J. Michael Neal
@WereBear:
Maybe they don’t believe in letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. You are assuming that, because they are working to limit only some abortions, that they can’t be serious about the reasons they say they are against them. This is a stupid position. Reducing the number of people they think are being killed, even if they can’t eliminate it entirely, is a perfectly valid moral and intellectual position.
bemused
The countries that have safe & legal abortions have lower rates of abortion. That those countries have better access to birth control & aren’t hysterical about unmarried people & young people having s-e-x probably makes a big difference too.
Rightwingers don’t want to hear those statistics though.
J. Michael Neal
@geg6:
This is a ridiculously broad statement, and deeply insulting with regards to a number of Catholics that I know and am friends with. Many of them are liberal women. Your argument that they must hate and fear women is cowardly. Face the fact that some of your opponents are honest and moral people who simply disagree with you on a question of when a human life begins, and whether the fetus’ right to life is more important than a woman’s right not to carry it.
Neutron Flux
@J. Michael Neal: All righty then. Let’s vote.
How come we never get to vote?
Cause you would LOSE.
Cat G
@J. Michael Neal: I take your observations in good faith, and believe that there are many people who have struggled with these issues and come down in a different place than I do. But I also KNOW that there are many who stridently oppose abortion and who also oppose birth control and actively attempt to institute obstacles. I have also personally heard activists say that if a woman doesn’t want to be pregnant, she shouldn’t have sex. IMHO if someone is a good faith opponent of abortion, they should also be an active proponent of sex education and easy accessibility to birth control. Name 2 prominent anti-abortion activists who support sex education and birth control. Let them prove their good faith.
Laura W
@Cerberus: I like you.
Ash
Yeah……no. This little thing called biology has already decided this matter for everyone. Just because some feel like saying “fuck that biology crap” and turn instead to what some old book says on the subject, doesn’t mean they get to make a decision.
John Cole
@J. Michael Neal: There is nothing intellectually dishonest about it at all. Under your plan, we should hold a referendum every time anyone wants an abortion, because even if we determine a 3 month old fetus is not a “person,” some people will disagree.
My position is neither intellectually dishonest nor ambiguous- you don’t want an abortion, don’t have one.
The idea that you should be able to determine what other people do with their body is authoritarian tyranny to cater to your moral convictions and as far as I am concerned, ridiculous.
And I’m not arguing about this anymore. Don’t want an abortion, don’t have one. I’m out of here before we descend to the “every sperm is sacred” level of idiocy.
Cerberus
@J. Michael Neal:
The field of medicine reveals quite clearly and succinctly that a fetus is not medically, biologically equivalent to a living person.
Furthermore, our enemies do not truly believe that life begins at conception like they claim. When pressed for how much jail time a woman seeking abortion should do for their murder, they cannot answer, when asked to save embryos, they will not, when asked to contemplate the staggering number of natural miscarriages before implantation and afterwards, they deny reality and they support policies across the board which make no sense if one is opposed to abortions, but make perfect sense if they were opposed to female sexuality (such as birth control).
But chief of importance, is that it is medically obscene to consider a fetus a person, it is even more obscene to consider the blastocytes and the like of the period most women obtain an abortion a person.
And that’s all before getting to the point, the simple fact that even if they were right, no being, no singular being on the planet has the right to someone’s body without their consent, even if they require that body for survival. A fetus would not be considered equal to a person if we were to outlaw abortion, they would have more rights than any other being on the planet, the right to the nonconsensual, constant, violation of a living breathing human’s bodily autonomy.
They’d be worth more than a person.
But oh wait, some people had “deeply held beliefs” about lady bits.
kay
@J. Michael Neal:
But abortion isn’t murder, J. Michael Neal. We had the debate. We made a societal decision, and an opinion was written, and it stands.
It isn’t arbitrary at all. It isn’t a “majority of one”. If it were a majority of one it would be a criminal act. It isn’t.
If there are a group of people who decide that Florida’s self-defense law is, in fact, murder, are all the homeowners relying on that (radical) statute a “majority of one”?
Corner Stone
@J. Michael Neal:
Yes asshole, I did. I was unclear on how the minority party could force the vote to go and become more onerous.
That’s why I asked the fucking question. Did you notice that Cavuto mark at the end of my post? I was asking for more clarification from someone who thought that quote they posted was useful.
But since I see you’re busy riding your hobby highhorse back and forth I won’t expect a response.
Xenos
Do you know how hard it is to find decent help these days?
Without a steady supply of orphans and foundlings who are desperate for a meal, a family, medical care, and the occasional crumb of paternalistic kindness, where are we to find the next generation of maids, butlers, teenage prostitutes, cabin boys, rent boys, quaint hawkers of newspapers on street corners, and so on? We can even sodomize them while exhorting them with middle class values – good times, that. Why let the priests have all the fun?
There is no fun or profit in exploiting while uplifting these lost souls if we can’t force poor and oppressed women into generating them by the millions.
Neutron Flux
@kay: I like this.
Joel
@Corner Stone: i think the passage would have been blocked by more moderate democrats.
from the politico story linked earlier — about nancy pelosi’s arm-twisting to get this shit passed — it seems like there was a possibility that the repbulicans thought they could scuttle the vote altogether by voting “present” on the stupak bill to block its passage.
apparently the catholic church leaned on the gop to advocate its passage.
the strange and twisting world of politics…
Cerberus
Really tired of all the religion trying to fuck the field of biology and medicine.
I’m sorry theocrats, I really am that the theory of evolution makes your origin myths look even more like bronze age storytelling. I’m sorry that we debunked the myth of the homunculus and that your sperm grows fully formed into a baby with hardly any investment from the woman. I’m sorry that we noticed that God is the biggest abortionist considering the incredibly high number of pregnancies that end in miscarriage.
I’m sorry that the imperfect nature of the human reproductive system allows horrors to occur that challenge your faith in sperm magic, that fetuses can be born inside the brains of their twin brother, that fetuses can grow up without a brain, or a head, or without skin. I’m sorry that birth isn’t a happy neutral event that instead of occurring after an agonizing 9 month toil on the mother’s body happens in seven seconds and leaves the mother orgasmic.
I’m sorry the inside of people’s bodies are gross and icky. I’m sorry that people are born with sexualities of a vast and wondrous spread of variety, that male and female isn’t as simple as penis and vagina, that we keep debunking so much of your holy book when we look into the workings of the real human animal.
But it’s your issue, not ours, now stop sticking your dick in our business. Biology is. Deal with it.
Joel
@J. Michael Neal: this pro-choicer is in your corner.
just for the record.
J. Michael Neal
No. You are attacking a ridiculous strawman. Under my plan, we, as a society, decide whether a fetus is legally a human being, and build the general rules for abortion from that decision. I have no idea where you get this idea.
Well, yes. I agree actually. This is the really thorny problem. If we, as a society, decide that a fetus is a human being, then we have to decide which right is more important: that of the fetus to life, or that of the mother not to carry it.
Now, to me, *if* I were to assume that a fetus is legally and morally a human being, I would have to come down on the side of saying that its right to life is more important. That does mean that I would advocate an authoritarian tyranny preventing a woman from doing what she wants with her own body. In my mind, that is less of a harm than advocating an authoritarian tyranny that allows the killing of a human being.
Note the conditionals in all of that. I *don’t* believe that a fetus is legally or morally a human being, a least prior to a certain, very hard to determine, point in the pregnancy. Therefore, the only authoritarian tyranny I see *in* *practice* is that enforced upon the woman. Therefore, up until a point in the pregnancy that is clearly short of the point where the fetus becomes a human being, I’m entirely in favor of her being allowed to have an abortion. After that, not so much. I kind of like to fall safely on the side of not just killing people; I sleep better at night.
What I am not going to do is pretend that everyone who disagrees with me on the ultimate decision do so because they have an evil agenda to control women. Many of them reach a different conclusion from me along those various steps through an honest process. I take those people seriously. They really do think that allowing abortion is murder. Given that, they would be moral monsters not to think that a fetus has a right to life.
I do agree that there are some abortion opponents out there who really are motivated by misogyny. Their goal really is to control women and their sexuality. The two cautions I would give are that I generally find it better to assume that any particular individual, like, say, Bart Stupak, do not fall into this camp unless I have some evidence that they do. The other is that there are some misogynists who want to control women and their sexuality who are also motivated to oppose abortion because they came to an honest conclusion that it is murder. Exactly how one wants to deal with these folks is complicated. I’m not sure that they don’t deserve to be just lumped into the pool of the dishonest ones, but I’m also not sure that that’s the most productive way to go about it.
Cerberus
Shoot moderation.
I should add that I do think that even with this abomination, the health care bill is (barely) a positive step, but I’m tired of the constant annoying bullshit of minority groups being given a round of fuck you for anything positive to occur. We got the racist, but a brown person might get helped crap early on. We’ve got the sexist, but my money might fund something I hate and god knows that only can apply to right-wingers and the taxes paid by left-wingers who want abortion rights must be ignored so they’re money can go to funding bombs and religious groups that want to kill them now. I imagine in the senate, we’ll get a nice dose of pissing on the atheists and the queers and we’ll have a lot of waggling of hatred for the DFHs.
It’s…unfortunate.
Joel
@John Cole: i think what j. michael neal is saying is essentially this:
we live in a society where people hold a plurality of beliefs. one of the beliefs in which our society has the greatest divergence of beliefs is abortion.
we – the ideologically liberal faction of society – can coalesce around a given set of beliefs but that doesn’t mean everyone else will. and in order to operate a functioning democracy we have to respect those differences.
now we can argue that some of those are arguing the pro-life stance do so in bad faith, and i will completely agree. but many are not. i have this debate with my wife all the time. she thinks that many of the pro-lifers are simply hypocrites; it only takes an unwanted pregnancy of a close family member and the stakes chance. and again, for some, that may be true, but for many its not.
just my meager 0.02
kay
@Neutron Flux:
You run right into “person”, first off. You need a definition.
Then people run screaming from the room, tearing their hair out, and-leave-everything-the-way-it-is.
Its not a joke, either. Defining a fetus as a “person” from conception would have HUGE ramifications.
The Dangerman
These “deeply held beliefs” have a biblical answer if one is willing to look. Life for Adam didn’t begin until God breathed the breath of life into him. It didn’t start with his conception (or however God put the First Dude together).
Sorry, but simple separation of Church and State means “beliefs” have to be suppressed occasionally. Don’t like abortion? Don’t have one. But don’t apply your beliefs to others in the legislative process.
Anne Laurie
Depressing, yes; startling, no. These are the brand of ‘Blue Dog Democrats’ who are actually Republicans, and they insist on shitting in the punchbowl because they need to prove just how right-wing they really are, to their donors more than their constituents in most cases. Also, they’re for the most part bloviating morans with room-temperature IQs, because the 27 Percenters deserve to be represented, too.
Of course the anti-choicers are arguing from “a deeply held belief” — they believe that a woman doesn’t deserve to control her own body, an agenda that is not at all “hidden” but is by rational standards “evil”. The vast majority of those holding the “deeply held” anti-choice position (including, I bet, every single arsehole who voted for the Stupak amendment and against the bill) also have a “a deeply held belief” that gay people are somehow unnatural and should be forbidden to marry their partners, or even to do things with their bodies that the legislators don’t approve. There are plenty of deeply held beliefs that simply don’t deserve our respect, much less to be legislated.
cay
that was the only post all day that made me feel better.
TheHatOnMyCat
@J. Michael Neal:
Yeah, fuck the deeply held belief. Nobody else’s belief is any more deeply held than mine. We all have deeply held beliefs. Big fucking deal.
Abortion is not murder, murder is murder. And the Constitution grants citizenship at birth, not at conception.
All that said, I am okay with a range of views on this subject, within limits. But I am not okay with a view that anyone has the right to tell a woman in the third month of gestation that she is carrying a full fledged human being around and has no rights in that context. If someone else wants to think that, fine, but that doesn’t carry with it the right to impose the view on someone else.
All THAT said, I don’t think that excluding public funds for other peoples’ abortions is all that unfair, and I can’t get worked up about. If that is the cost of healthcare reform then so be it. On balance, a lot more lives are affected by healthcare reform than are by fighting over public funds for abortions. It’s an issue that belongs to the dividers. Fuck the dividers, I am sick of them.
Cerberus
@J. Michael Neal:
Nngh!
Ok, you keep riding this hobby horse in blissful ignorance of reality.
It wasn’t some legislative majority, some shadowy “they” that decided a fetus wasn’t a person.
It was MEDICINE. BIOLOGY. Science.
A fetus is not medically the same as an autonomous human being. This would still be true if tomorrow the legislature passed a constitutional amendment stating that a fetus is a super person and has the right to dominate its host for 9 months.
Abortion is a medically necessary procedure, a fetus is not medically a person. It doesn’t MATTER what some god-botherer thinks. Just like it doesn’t matter that a majority of Americans don’t believe in evolution.
So, yes, you are a dishonest piece of shit.
Chuck Butcher
Oh c’mon now. Everyone of us was a fetus at a point and most of us have kids, grandkids, nieces/nephews, or potential ones. Everyone that looks at a tummy bump knows there’s something growing in there that will most likely become a human. The interest and the reasons for the interest are not solely a matter of the possession of a womb.
I won’t even argue that a lot of the asshole views assigned to the RTL bunch aren’t true of some of them, or even a lot of them. That doesn’t change the fact that it is human to be concerned about fetuses. There certainly are better basis to debate the issue on than religion and probably what best serves society in general will displease most – and that’s the bitch of it.
No, I don’t like the Stupak Amendment, but there are levels of stupidity being tossed about that are in no way useful, either. You cannot reasonably argue that because a fetus is not viable that it is not also a human in the making, that left uninterfered with it will be one. That says nothing about whether or not it should be interfered with, it does mean that society at large has a stake in the discussion. The gender imbalance in government is another issue, it does not remove a reason for society at large to be conscerned.
There is a hell of a lot of work to be done to show what outcomes are best for everyone from the individual woman to all of society – that argument has barely begun.
Joel
@kay: i would say, however, that the case is far from closed. where does human life begin? i’m a scientist and am pretty uncomfortable coming to any conclusions there.
it’s a messy issue and while i think there could be some pretty good indicators (certain forms of brain activity), i still couldn’t feel one hundred percent certain. it was only four years ago that we’ve determined fairly conclusively that an arthropod with a much simpler nervous system — the lobster — does in fact process painful stimuli (i.e. when you boil a lobster alive, it feels the agony of being boiled alive).
now, if you’re saying that society has made a decision that the act of receiving an abortion is not a crime, then i agree. and i agree that it should remain non-criminal. i also agree that the stupak ammendment is a shame (but fundamentally no different than the status quo under the hyde bill). but it’s important to keep in mind that there’s a lot of ambiguity both scientific and moral surrounding this issue.
Hookers and Cocaine
@Joel: Definitely should be a personal decision… there is no need to regulate abortion any more than Roe did, cause it definitely doesn’t give women the right to elective abortion of a viable fetus.
But I’m with you. Neal makes a very good point about how radicalized people on both sides of this issue have become. Not all pro-lifers are monsters, at least half of them are actually women… so it’s a bit silly to try and paint this as a war between sexes.
It’s a moral dilemma, and nobody can claim they know for certain where the lines should be drawn.
WereBear
I don’t understand. We, as a society, came up with some rules. And within those rules, everyone gets to make their own decisions.
I hold the deeply held belief that the worst thing you can do to a person is make them enter the world resented and and unwanted.
geg6
J. Michael Neal: Fuck you and your Catholic friends. I grew up in that cesspool and I know more Catholics than you’ll ever know, even some who wear the veil and collar in my own family. Don’t lecture me about the willing suspension of logic and reality underlying the superstitions your Catholic friends choose to live in. I know more about it than I care to. There are no more self-loathing people in the world than the members of the local parish’s Christian Mothers.
John Cole
We already did this. You want to re-litigate it.
slag
@J. Michael Neal:
Asshole. This is the point. Woman > fetus. End of story. The only good that can come from restricting abortions is more dead women. That’s unacceptable.
Also,
I feel this pain. This is a settled issue; past time to get over it. Nonetheless, I do enjoy hearing a good “baby killer” diatribe every now and again. It makes me think of Elmer Fudd, “Kill da baaaaaby! Kill da baaaaaaby!”, and I can’t help but laugh out loud.
The Dangerman
Actually, I rather like the idea of having a ban on the use of Federal Funds for things that are against my “deeply held beliefs”. Can I get a ban on spending for Iraq?
Corner Stone
@Joel: Ok, thanks. I’ve read the Politico piece but I never accept anything from that source at face value.
I took away a definitely different reading of how this bill came to be.
General Winfield Stuck
@Joel:
Well now, any swinging dick can have deeply held beliefs in this country. What we are talking about of course is inflicting those beliefs on those who don’t hold them. And using something completely lawful as the vehicle of imposition.
Now cc’rs can vote how they want, but to withhold tax moneys for something they don’t like, that is in fact legal, opens up a whole keg of similar worms, pun intended. Parsing out MY tax money from the rest for things like the Iraq war and other wingnut brain farts is where to begin this little tit for tat. And by Gawd, they went ahead and used my taxes to do it anyways, without my permission.
If this passes in it’s present form, which is to poison the community well of insurance recipients. ALL of them cause they could have received a wingnut anti choice dollar, it will be illegal and unconstitutional on it’s face. But with our jeevus beholden SCOTUS, who knows if they will make an ACTIVIST ruling. Perish the thought.
That is all.
Cerberus
@Chuck Butcher:
Okay, one small point, teeny tiny, I assure you, left alone, not interfered with in any way…
A fetus would die.
A fetus requires constant interfering, nutrients, hormones, protection, amino fluids, immune system aids, placenta, air supply, etc… to grow into a person.
And this is the problem. A bunch of men seem incapable of understanding that when a fetus is growing, that’s work. That’s constant investment from the mother to make the “magic” happen. Without the woman host, a fetus is a clump of cells, useful perhaps in their undifferentiatedness which are key for stem cell technology. But without the magic hormones and chaperones to promote recruitment, division, and growth?
It’s an inert clump of cells.
gopher2b
The arrogance and gross oversimplification of this issue by both sides is frustrating.
I am not religious. At best, I’m agnostic. But, I have serious problems with a woman being able to terminate a fetus well into a pregnancy. Nonetheless, I also hold the belief that I will never tell (or better, allow my government to tell) a woman she cannot take the morning after-pill. Somewhere in the middle I get deeply confused on the morality.
Legally speaking, Roe v. Wade was a terrible decision and most liberal leaning legal scholars will tell you the same thing (in whisper). I do think, however, that you can make a strong argument that a fetus pass the 20th week has a Constitutional right to not be terminated. I don’t base this opinion on any “jealously” of “woman parts.” It’s based on my belief that a fetus may very well be a living thing with Rights.
Regardless, identifying a fetus as just another “piece of [female] anatomy” is morally repugnant and reprehensible.
Annie
@J. Michael Neal:
I will have the courage to admit that conservatives are acting out of an honest principle, when I see any evidence that they are.
Excuse me. If they are so against abortion that why limit access to contraceptives and health care for all? They should be promoting organizations like Planned Parenthood that do try and reach out to those who cannot afford adequate health care and contraceptives. Instead of demonizing them at every term. I work with poor women, and I know how limited are their options.
Were conservatives first in line to speak against torture, or to defend the “personhood” of those held for years without judicial process?
What gets to me is that they protest against abortion without principle. If you are against abortion than make sure that women have access to what they need to prevent pregnancy. White male conservatives come out against abortion for pure power politics. They know they can’t get pregnant, so this is a “win-win” situation for them.
Give me a “f…ing” break. Principle. What principle? Fiscal responsibility? For everything that does not benefit them. I never saw “tea baggers” when the Bush administration was passing along billions of our dollars to corrupt defense contractors. “Individual responsibility?” Except when they want to have sex outside of marriage, and they want to get in-between a woman and her doctor. “Small government” Except when they want the government to restrict access to reproductive rights.
What principle??????
Anne Laurie
@Xenos:
Heck, without a continuous supply of “accidental” offspring among the working class, each of them requiring care & feeding, where will the Banana Republicans get the underpaid waiters, clerks, Walmart employees, customer service reps, and let’s not forget cannon fodder to Keep America Great(tm)? These are the people who look at the Brazillian favelas or the Egyptian fedayeen and ask themselves, ‘Why can’t our peasants be kept as needy and desperate as those foreigners? It would make things sooo much nicer for The Right People, like us!”
Samnell
@The Dangerman: Good idea. I want a ban on paying the salary of my fuckheaded Representative (Stupak himself) and every other asshole who voted for his Amendment. It goes against my “deeply held belief” that assholes shouldn’t get my money. For that matter, no travel expenses for him too.
J. Michael Neal
It relates to the way the amendment process works under the rules for a particular bill. (Establishing the rules for each bill is why the Rules Committee is so powerful.) In this case, had Pelosi blocked a vote on the Stupak amendment, it would have re-opened the matter, and the Republicans could have introduced their own amendment. That would have been extremely problematic for the Democrats to block; there are enough pro-life Dems who couldn’t be seen to oppose such an amendment that it would probably have come to a vote and might have passed. Therefore, there was a very real possibility that the realistic alternative to the Stupak amendment was not a health care bill that allowed abortion funding, but one with an abortion rider that would have made it impossible for many Democrats to vote for.
Would that have been the likely outcome? I really have no idea. It’s certainly worth considering, though.
gopher2b
@Cerberus:
I’m curious. If we developed an “artificial womb” where we could remove a fetus from a uterus and grow it to full term outside a woman’s body, would you still support “abortion.”
In other words, let’s say a woman wanted an abortion.
But instead of terminating it, we removed it from her uterus and hooked it up to a machine and it was later adopted by another couple. Would you be against preventing a woman from having a “traditional abortion” in this case?
Edward G. Talbot
I don’t see much reason to care if someone is being honest or not about it. I could list a whole litany of what most would consider heinous positions, both current and past, where you could easily make the argument that the individuals and groups taking those positions did/do so from honest beliefs. Making that list would incite flames and cries of going too far, so I won’t do it, but the my point is that simply honestly believing something is right or wrong, does inherently make it valid enough to debate. Nor does the fact that “x” percent of the population holds those beliefs – that might create the reality of having to deal with them, but not create the debate.
So with someone that wants to take away (or in this case further restrict) what I consider a basic right, there’s no room for debate, any more than there is over some of the other heinous positions I alluded to. These people’s opinion is simply wrong.
Now, I understand that it is easy – very easy – to attack what I have said here. “So you won’t even talk about it, man you must be the one who has the problem.” As I suggested, we ALL have lines beyond which we don’t consider discussion productive and we consider the opinions to be wrong, destructive and worthy of inherent condemnation in all cases. The fact that you and others consider the abortion debate to not have crossed that line does not mean the rest of us agree.
Cerberus
@gopher2b:
Bullshit, completely medically unfounded, entirely based on superstition, zero biological basis, zero regard for the host and her right not to carry nonconsensual organisms in her sex organs.
It would be so much more simple if people didn’t think reading a biology textbook would make their wangs fall off.
J. Michael Neal
I don’t want to re-litigate it, but lots of other people do. Welcome to a democracy, John. Are you sure you want to look at American history and declare that, once we have come to a conclusion about when someone deserves the full rights of being a human being, the case is closed and we should never re-open it?
slag
@Joel: I don’t give a shit when “human life begins”. That’s a nonsense argument. As @Cerberus explains:
As are skin cells that we slough off every day. I’m not holding any funerals for those. But that’s a personal decision.
kay
@Joel:
I agree completely. I stick to the legal end because that was the process I used to come to the conclusion I made, and I just suck at religion. It’s not the fault of “religion”, I’m sure. I’m not very abstract, and I’m impatient with Big Ideas regarding human rights. It isn’t a context I’ve ever found useful, and I’m better suited to grunt work. The One Human At A Time approach.
It makes sense that you would go the scientific route.
Blackmun (Roe) grappled with this. He hashed it out. He struggled with it until the day he died.
He went the “physician’s decision” route for the same reason you and I are relying on our preferred, familiar methods: because that’s what he knew. He was counsel to the Mayo Clinic, and comfortable with doctors.
J. Michael Neal
Yes, and it’s pretty tough to build a decent society if everyone is going to say, “These are my deeply held beliefs, and anyone who disagrees with me is completely illegitimate and should not be lisyened to.”
Then again, I meant to lump you in with Fuckhead.
Edward G. Talbot
@Edward G. Talbot:
in that first paragraph, it should read “my point is that simply honestly believing something is right or wrong, DOESN’T inherently make it valid enough to debate”
Joel
@General Winfield Stuck:
yet we have all sorts of laws imposed upon us by other members of society. that’s how societies and laws work.
Cerberus
@gopher2b:
As long as the original host woman is under no obligation to raise the resulting child, nope.
Odd though that you should ask such a question. Because that question was posed to pro-lifers in a giant survey a couple years ago. They nearly unanimously opposed the idea. Apparently it doesn’t count as saving the fetus as long as the woman isn’t suffering revealing that for most pro-lifers it is about women having sex.
Ash
@gopher2b:
Good thing for you then that a woman CAN’T just willy nilly terminate a pregnancy “well into” it. You should technically have no problem.
geg6
I cannot discuss this issue with men or the religious. The religious because they seem to think their superstitions should override everything. And men because they will never have a stake in it. Some of them get that and either shut up or speak the truth and decide to leave the decision to the person most affected. Some of them don’t and think they should lecture me about my reality and my life if they can’t control either one.
Joel
@gopher2b: not only does such a thing not exist, it would be hard to imagine the litany of scientific and ethical issues involved in bringing it to place. how would you develop and test such a technology? why the hell would we want such a thing?
J. Michael Neal
No. Science can not answer this question. The reason you think it has is because you approach it with a set of pre-held assumptions as to what constitutes a human being. You then use science to prove what you already believe.
The question of who is a human being is not one that can be answered by science, because science can’t tell us what criteria we should use. Having a complete set of DNA is every bit as valid a scientific answer to the question of who is a human being as are the criteria you are using.
This is the arrogance that irritates me so much. Your beliefs are not grounded in anything more provable than theirs are. Your belief that science is inerrant about philosophical questions is every bit as wrongheaded as their belief that the Bible does the same thing.
jl
Never mind everbody. Call it off.
No one seems to know exactly what the Stupak amendment would do. Reconvene when our overlords and the court scribes figure it out.
Controversial Stupak Amendment Sows Anger, Confusion On Capitol Hill
Talkingpointsmemo
Brian Beutler | November 9, 2009, 6:55PM
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/11/controversial-stupak-amendment-sows-anger-confusion-on-capitol-hill.php?ref=fpblg
Joel
@geg6: men don’t have a stake in pregnancy? that’s a pretty dim view of fatherhood.
slag
@gopher2b:
You know what I find morally repugnant and reprehensible? You sticking your big nose into a woman’s reproductive life. Why don’t you go live in your brave new world wherein women are your goddamn potting soil and leave others to make decisions for themselves. Hell, you can start your own utopian cult where you all sacrifice your own selves in honor of the fetus. No one’s stopping you.
J. Michael Neal
@geg6: All I can say is that you are hateful, tiny person.
Cerberus
@Joel:
There is zero scientific confusion on the issue. Life began at the first unicellular organism and has continued uninterrupted since. Human autonomy however and the creation of a unique human person only occurs with birth.
And it gets really obvious why with a basic knowledge of human reproduction and biology.
gopher2b
@Ash:
I suppose its a good thing I didn’t say “willy nilly” then.
If you have zingers you want to throw out there, please try to use them with someone who actually made the argument you are attacking.
Comrade Dread
And you miss the point. If you think the line between human being with rights has been crossed, you will not support allowing them to be killed without due process.
For example, if I thought the legal line for full personhood was 3 years old and advocated legal infantice by parental choice up to that point, you would probably think I was advocating something monsterous and evil.
Well, as hard as it is to consider, those people who view a fetus as an actual person with rights to consider, do not think it a simple optional choice as to whether or not the parents decide to end its life.
jl
J Michael Neal:
“Under my plan, we, as a society, decide whether a fetus is legally a human being, and build the general rules for abortion from that decision. I have no idea where you get this idea.”
We have already done that. Whether you like our cultural history or not, whether you like the changing attitudes towards early and late abortion through history or not, whether you like Roe v Wade or not, it has been legally decided.
Extreme abortion opponents do not want to abide by the decisions of society, so think they should be able to deprive other people of their legal rights.
That is the situation, like it or not.
Joel
@Cerberus: yet we have births at all different stages of devlopment. gestation periods can vary enormously. in one extreme case, children have been born almost 18 weeks premature . is that child more autonomous than one that is still gestating at 38 weeks?
there’s a whole lot of ambiguity and i think it’s fundamentally dishonest not to recognize it.
General Winfield Stuck
@Joel:
You miss my point. Sure we have laws imposed we don’t like, but this one outlaws a legal procedure when federal tax dollars from subsidies go into private companies in a nebulous fashion. Banning abortions for pure government funding of say Medicaid is one thing, and what the Hyde Amendment is about, the Stupak one is way way to broad and pretty much bans any insurance company that is in the new exchange from offering abortion services to be covered.
I expect they will work this out somehow, but as it now stands it is on shaky constitutional grounds, I think.
Annie
@J. Michael Neal:
Someone deserves the rights of full personhood. Great, let’s start charging women who loose a pre-born during pregnancy with murder. Let’s explore what they ate, where they went, when they slept, how long they worked, who they talked with, and what kind of music they played. Let’s go deeply into their mental state. Let’s march them through the town square with a scarlet letter on their foreheads….That would be principle
Chuck Butcher
@Cerberus: @Cerberus:
That is beyond stupid, to create such a situation you would have to remove it from a woman’s body. The modicum of self-preservation on a woman’s part will maintain a fetus. As a species we’d be dead if that weren’t so.
Assigning magical thinking to me on that basis is ludicrous. I stated that there is a reason for debate on the issue. A right to do with your body as you please is NOT unlimited in this society. Don’t consume too much of certain substances and drive, in fact don’t consume some substances – there are levels at which any society will demand limits to behavior. That fetus got there through an action, it didn’t just appear. Unwilling/unknowing participation in that action certainly bears on that, but don’t pretend that the presence of a fetus is magic – or buy Immaculate Conception on a regualar basis.
Joel
@Joel: excuse me, gestating is only done by mothers. a 38 week fetus gestating would be an odd thing entirely.
Cerberus
@J. Michael Neal:
Bullshit.
Sorry.
Oh and to your “complete set of DNA” crap?
Guess you’ll be forgoing that cancer treatment, yes?
Full set of DNA is in every cell of your body, all semi-autonomous.
And medical procedures require to be given over to issues of medical reality. It’s when non-scientists butt in, that shit goes wrong. I don’t go in the churches and tell them how to worship, they don’t get to come into my lab or the local clinic and tell them how to do our jobs.
If there is one thing I would think would be the purview of medicine and science, it would be a fucking surgical procedure.
J. Michael Neal
This statement assumes much, which is exactly my point. It assumes that a fetus is not a human being. That’s a perfectly valid assumption, but certainly not a necessary one. If you make the opposing assumption, then it is very clear that there is quite a bit of good that comes from restricting abortion, namely lots of fewer dead babies.
That you refuse to see that perfectly reasonable people can come to different conclusions than you do speaks to your narrowness of mind, which rivals that of your opponents.
Ruckus
@Cerberus:
Also, I am really really tired of “deeply held beliefs”. It seems that these only come up when a minority group is about to be fucked. Religion shouldn’t trump reality and yet we have to bow and scrape for “deeply held beliefs”.
This.
Aren’t beliefs in this case religious beliefs? Yes I thought so. So where in our governing are we supposed to depend on religion to make decisions? Is that crickets I hear?
It’s not reality that is being trumped, it’s society that’s being fucked for religious beliefs. I’m not at all religious and I know that a fetus can not live on it’s own and is therefore not human. Yet. Given the correct conditions it can become a human and it needs protection and nurture to get there, but it can not obtain or sustain life on it’s own. Any other view is OK as long as it is understood that it is not fact but a deeply held belief and does/can/should not apply to anyone but the holder of the belief. Just like any other deeply held belief, all of which are about religion, not of governing society.
gopher2b
@slag:
As long as you aren’t there. Sorry no one asked you to the prom.
rob!
I am so f**king sick of politicians nipping away at the edges of abortion. Look, you a-holes, ITS LEGAL, deal with it. If you want to make it illegal, take it to the god damn Supreme Court.
Cerberus
@Chuck Butcher:
…Do you even read what you posted?
…It just whooshed right over your head, didn’t it?
jl
Do relgious people who think sex should only be for procreation ban any funding for b o n e r p i l l s?
Maybe I will be come an extreme fetus rights advocate and deny any connection between federal funding for anything related to, even indirectly, fertility clinics. Since they lead to orphan snowflake children who will almost certainly ‘die’ someday.
That is where Neal’s reasoning leads.
kay
@Joel:
And, I knew this, gut-level, but am horrified that it’s now confirmed.
I went along from peer pressure, basically. Once.
stickler
Augh. The Godforsaken abortion debate. Again. Thanks, Rep. Stupak!
Look, folks, here’s the reality: lots of people (most, not all of them, men) are really concerned with female sexuality and babies (pro babies, anti sex). It’s true now and has been ever since the dawn of Time. These people have always tried to regulate and restrict and remove shoes and usher back into the kitchen, world without end, Amen.
And there’s another reality that’s been with us since forever: some human females become pregnant and don’t want to be. And there’s not a God-damned thing you can do about that, no matter how repressive you get. (Oh, you could provide birth control and full citizenship/human rights, but that’s a relatively recent experiment.)
So the reality is, there are going to be pregnancies that get terminated. There always have been, there always will be.
Until the end of the nineteenth century, most of the time childbirth was a woman’s (icky) thing, and well into the early modern period the Catholic Church reckoned “life” as beginning at “quickening,” which happened whenever the mother chose to tell somebody about it, to be frank. Plus health was terrible for most folks, so miscarriages and abortions were hard to tell apart. Don’t get me started on infant death, either.
Fast forward to November, 2009: for the last thirty years, American law has recognized that wimmen have the right to terminate a pregnancy in the first trimester, and it gets more difficult after that. Frankly, about the same kind of thing we had with “quickening.” It’s a compromise … WITH REALITY. The Stupak amendment makes a Constitutionally legal procedure more difficult for poor women. Go, USA!
People with “deeply-held beliefs” about other people’s bodies can stew about those beliefs on their own time. Making abortion more difficult won’t make it go away. It’ll just make it more hazardous for poor women.
jl
@J. Michael Neal: Society has already decided how the rights of a fetus grow, in proportion to the likelihood of its survival outside the womb of the mother.
If you do not like that decision, go and try to change it. Do not discriminate against other people’s legal rights because of your presonal beliefs through unfair and divisive discriminatory legislative provisions.
Cat G
Oh, and about Rep. Bart Stupak, a little research is in order..
http://michiganmessenger.com/23484/stupak-denies-knowledge-of-connections-to-mysterious-c-street-house
Apparently he’s been co-habitating with a bunch of right-wing, religious zealots for years. The C street group definitely deserves more attention. Other residents have included Sen John Ensign, Sen Tom Coburn (who attempted to negotiate hush money with Sen Ensign’s paramour) and that solid moral character Gov Mark Sanford.
As for Mr. Stupak’s ammendment, Congress can show some good faith non-sexism by making sure that there will be no blue pills covered or erectile disfunction benefits allowed either.
For the record, only 27 states require prescription drug benefit plans to cover contraception.
mai naem
I called Stupak’s office and just got pissed off after arguing with the staff and hung up on them . Not very mature of me but to see these scumballs pull this crap on the HCR bill makes me want to personally bitch them out at a townhall. I am willing to bet these same pigs would be lining up with pictures, Powerpoint presentations and long term savings CBO projections on anti-depressant pills, if Nancy Pelosi proposed on pulling Viagra and Celaxis off the public and private insurance drug formulary. Oh, and you J Michael Neal are probably one of those people who is so against abortion but if it was your kid or your gf and it was inconvenient you’d probably running to the closest abortion clinic to get rid of the inconvenience.
gopher2b
By the way, if none of you have read “Becoming Justice Blackmun.” You should. It’s great book and brings Roe to life. I think it was masterful law; it just was based on the Constitution.
slag
@gopher2b: So, then, what are you still doing here? Don’t forget not to write!
J. Michael Neal
@Cerberus:
The surgical procedure is, indeed, fully within the purview of medical science. That has nothing to do with the nature of the question I’m putting forth, but it is certainly true.
Other than that, your post is a nice attack at a strawman. If you want me to go into a further description of what I mean by having a full set of DNA, I could, but I’m pretty sure you know that already.
Strangely enough, so does a two year old. Left to themselves, pretty much all two year olds would die. All babies three weeks old would do so. By your argument, it should be perfectly lawful to kill them, since they can’t survive on their own.
Now, unlike you, I recognize that I’m making a strawman argument. You don’t believe that we should be allowed to kill two year olds. At least, I hope you don’t. What it does mean is that there are unspoken, but pretty obvious, additional parts to your argument, namely that you are talking about a biological entity that is dependent upon a specific human, and not just someone in general. I recognize that, and am perfectly willing to assume that you meant the obvious additions necessary to keep your argument from being stupid.
You might try to show the same courtesy.
kay
@gopher2b:
It’s (now) fashionable to say Roe is bad law, but no one had a better idea.
People forget the case that led to Roe was about contraception. Whether married couples had a right to contraception use. A Catholic majority in a state legislature went a little mental.
So, there’s that. The vehement opposition to state interference in private decisions didn’t just spring up out of nowhere.
The religious crossed a line. That gets forgotten.
gopher2b
@J. Michael Neal:
You can add the elderly, severely handicapped, burn victims, people in comas, etc, etc.
Her entire position is based on simple minded dogma. Don’t bother.
Cerberus
@stickler:
Pretty much.
A lot of it is also this simple fact. Pregnancy is all woman.
A man shoots his seed and his short contribution is over. He’s irrelevant to the process.
People are unable to grasp how much of an insult this is to men who are used to being the dominant group in society. Here is this thing that they have zero involvement in. Their sperm isn’t even magic, it doesn’t grow inside of a woman all powerful. No, they just fertilize an egg which then has to implant, not be sloughed off, have a successful triggering by the Woman’s hormone system to then be protected, be protected, fed, hormone bathed, etc.. by the Woman’s processes, require massive involvement by the Woman to keep it healthy and fed and protected and entirely at the mercy of the Woman’s consent not to seek an abortive procedure and the whims of fate that could cause any one of a thousand things to go wrong au natural.
A delicate whirlwind of biological processes, all Woman, barely a speck Man.
So, they seek to impose control externally and we get the abortion debate. Same as it ever was, because a certain class of man can’t handle the answer to the question: But what about the man in all of this? Being “He’s irrelevant.”
So they must either diminish the woman, or make the short work the sperm does the most important event (conception is the beginning of humanity, or at least as close to conception as we can get).
slag
@J. Michael Neal: Tell you what, then, we’ll just put you in charge of gestating all unwanted fetuses from now on. Just like we could do with a two-year-old. Problem solved.
Woodrow "asim" Jarvis Hill
@J. Michael Neal: This is pretty cute, this gig you got going, here.
The issue isn’t that we’ve “decided”. Government clearly hasn’t, with far too many of the Legislative and Judicial decisions hemming Roe in until it’s nearly a shadow of itself.
The issue is that you’re waving a sophistic magic wand of “redecide abortion, and all will work itself out!”
And it won’t. I’ve stated in my personal blog that I think Roe was a decision that, on purely societal grounds, was far ahead of American society at the time. People simply hadn’t heard the tales about backalley abortions for one. People had no real idea what abortion was about, and what the ban was costing women. It took a lot of reading,a nd a lot of talks with women who had dealt with that issue, for me to understand as a young college student in the late 80’s.
The endgame for banning abortions isn’t some magic fuckin’ faryland where women are honored as caretakers of the next generation. It’s not some place where children are cherished even moreso than they are today. It’s not even a place where fetal rights advance much more beyond the banning of anything that might harm them.
We just have to look back to my parent’s lifetime to know the horrors. We just have to look at every country today that bans the procedure to see the plain it causes. To see that whether you want them to or not, women WILL see this procedure, and WILL carry through on it.
We don’t keep abortion legal because it’s “cool”. We do so because we know from experience that banning it is a cost far more bloody and painful to society as a whole, and esp. to women, than having it is. Because women feel it is part and parcel of their rights as humans, and they have always been able to judge the morality of carrying a child — and that judgment should continue to be left up to them, not to the State.
If you want to raise the fetus to that position, feel free to try. But you’d best bring to the table more than just a cold and heartless morality that does nothing to comfort the victim of sexual assault, or even a uncaring lover. Otherwise, why should they listen?
Anne Laurie
@gopher2b:
Can’t answer for Cerebus, but I’ll chip in anyways: Your utopian Miracle Womb is never going to be cost-free. Even if (when) it can be done, it’ll be expensive, and the women most likely to need an abortion are usually the least likely to be able to afford an extrauterine support system. So we’d be pitchforked into a situation where developing fetuses were up for bid — good news for those would-be adoptive parents looking for a physically perfect white newborn from two healthy teenagers (the Bristol Palin bidders), but not so good for the women being “encouraged” to sell their “unwanted” offspring on the open market. Not to mention all the heartbreaking cases where women discover that the very-much-wanted fetuses they’re carrying are defective; who gets to decide whether a fetus with Downs Syndrome or Tay-Sachs “should” be miracle-wombed to term, and if so how much “should” the parents/their insurance/the rest of us be willing to pay to nurture it?
Right now, it’s medically possible for a man to have a developing fetus surgically implanted in his abdomen and artificially nutured to the point where a Caeasarian section could theoretically produce a viable infant. You’ll notice that such “miracle babies” are not being much discussed in the popular press, because, frankly, it’s cheaper to pay a surrogate for the use of her uterus (and if necessary, to pay her or another woman for her eggs). And none of the thousands of anti-choice men waving placards in front of Planned Parenthood have been willing to step forward and volunteer to serve as guinea pigs, either.
J. Michael Neal
@mai naem:
More likely, you, mai naem, are probably one of those people who doesn’t bother to read what people write, but don’t let that stop them from hurling accusations that directly contradict the explicit statements of the person you are attacking.
Ash
@Anne Laurie:
I don’t know about that. Have you asked the Governator about this?
gopher2b
@kay:
I totally agree. I was against Roe before I read it. I was torn in law school after studying it. I did believe that it the fetus was the plaintiff in that case, you would get the exact same decision. I was back in favor of it after reading the book about Blackmun. Nowadays, I just think it should be resolved at the state level and feel like Blackmun’s analysis should be the starting point.
Chuck Butcher
@Cerberus:
You ride your horse so hard your brain freezes up? Uninterfered with. The condition you propose that kills it is interferencem, ir is quite naturally coddled simply by means of continuing a woman’s own life sustaining procedures. It takes a lot, despite all your lab coated stuipidity, to sufficiently deprive a fetus to kill it within the womb. Women have tried that, starvation and other, to abort and failed most frequently. Most miscarriages are due to problems with the fetus itself, entirely unrelated to actions on the woman’s part.
Your example of it is simply a matter of removing it from its natural environment – it’s horseshit.
I didn’t say it was a human, or a person, I said that uninterfered with most will be. You don’t like that, take it up with nature, not me.
Cerberus
@J. Michael Neal:
More than you would think considering I am a year and a half into my master’s program in Biology.
Full set of DNA is not unique. Unique full set of DNA is not unique (in the way you think of it) either.
I create unique sets of DNA all the time in my work. I’m in cell biology. There is so much more than that preliminary step.
On two year olds…snort. Dude, leave a two-year old in a room full of reachable food and it will survive. It may be filthy, undernourished and prone to every disease on the planet, but it will find a way to survive a good while.
And it is important to note the distinction between a newborn, shall we say, who requires minimal assistance to reach food and the like, and a being that is literally requiring the consent of another person for basic survival, growth, and being.
Especially as we note that most abortion procedures that are elective occur in first trimester where what is removed cannot be called a human person by any standard outside the literally insane and certainly not medically.
A baby can feed itself, with low assistance, it has little to do with a fetus which requires the woman’s constant hormonal assistance entirely to become something that will at one point become potentially a person, to literally grow into or should I say be grown into something that can sustain itself (can breath on its own, pump blood on its own, regulate its homeostasis on its own, run its immune system on its own, digest food on its own, grow its remaining brain on its own (yeah, brain actually isn’t finished until after birth), etc…
That’s what is meant by autonomous. Medical personhood.
Raincitygirl
J. Michael Neal and Joel can both fuck right off.
Interesting how two people who will never, ever get pregnant have hijacked a comment thread to lecture people who CAN get pregnant about these precious deeply-held beliefs.
Call me an absolutist/extremist/feminazi/uncivil if you like, but it’s my goddamn uterus, sitting in my goddamn body. The only men who get a say in what I do with said uterus are the men I designate to have a say. Neither Joel nor J. Michael Neal is in that category. Partly because they’re sanctimonious assholes. But also because they’re total strangers having a nice devil’s advocate argument over my uterus. If they want a say so badly, they should figure out a way to grow uteri in their own bodies. Then they can get pregnant and decide for themselves what to do about it. Until then they can fuck off.
Now someone pass me a fucking Midol before I perform a hysterectomy on myself without anaesthetic out of sheer desperation. Once J. Michael and Joel have uteri of their own, they’ll know soon enough what I need Midol for.
gopher2b
@Anne Laurie:
Seriously? I hadn’t heard that. How does it work? Do they put implant a uterus. Wow. Bold new world.
To your other points: it’s my belief that if society tells a woman that she cannot abort her child, it has the obligation to assume its care. Generally speaking, I believe society owes kids a lot and we continually fail them (i.e. I’m ambivalent about “universal health care” but strongly in favor of it for kids, better schools, blah, blah)
J. Michael Neal
I’m not nearly that optimistic. It’s a contentious issue. It’s one where there is going to be an unhappy and unconvinceable set of people no matter what we do.
My point is somewhat larger, and I freely admit that I’m engaged in furious windmill tilting. However, I strongly believe that, in a pluralistic society, it is very important to work from the assumption that your ideological opponents are honest in their arguments most of the time, and until proven otherwise. It is also essential to believe that their goals are basically decent most of the time and until proven otherwise. If we don’t work from these assumptions, pluralistic society fails. There are a number of different avenues that that failure can take, but none of them are good.
One of the things that was so corrosive about the Bush administration is the way that they eroded these assumptions, both by refusing to work from those assumptions themselves, and by providing so much evidence that the rest of us couldn’t make those assumptions about them. The amount of damage this did to America is incalculable. It makes me weep.
It needs to stop. I argue against it whenever I can, which usually means that I do it with those I generally agree with on policy matters since those are the boards I spend most of my time on.
Most of the people here are just like the Crossfire clowns that Jon Stewart lit into years ago. Stop it. You’re hurting America.
kay
@gopher2b:
Well, it started at the state level, so if you’d like to go back to banning contraception, we can run this thing over again.
Again: a Catholic majority in a state legislature acted against contraception decisions between married couples.
I think you’re a little blithe and unconcerned about “at the state level” although it always sounds good.
Blackmun wasn’t that naive, and he had precedent to follow. But, remember, abortion rights people didn’t jump in and start this fight. Religious did, and they ended up with a right to privacy.
And if you think they won’t overstep again, well, I disagree. I think vigilance is prudent.
Anne Laurie
@Woodrow “asim” Jarvis Hill:
Thank you for saying this.
J. Michael Neal
Ah, yes, the You Just Can’t Understand Because You Aren’t Exactly Like Me argument. Makes one wonder how we manage to survive as a society at all.
Nicole
After every woman is guaranteed access to free birth control, state-funded pre-natal care, paid parental leaves of at least 2 years and state-funded day- and after-school care, then I will be amenable to listening to pro-lifers’ issues with abortion. As far as I am concerned, until such time as I see them in front of the Capitol, waving signs demanding the state financially support the raising of children, they’re hypocrites.
It’s amazing how fast these people start gobbling like retarded turkeys when you ask them how much more they are willing to pay in taxes to support the unwanted children about whom they profess such concern. Seriously, ask them. I have and it’s hilarious.
Kayla Rudbek
@Joel: Ever read any of Lois McMaster Bujold’s books? She calls it a “uterine replicator.”
gopher2b
@kay:
I was T minus 5 so I don’t remember much of anything but your point is taken.
Samnell
@kay: That’s pretty much the general problem with putting anything important back to the state level. Plus it throws a bone to the Slave-Whipping Fan Club of John C. Calhoun and that’s never ended up as much more than a disaster for human rights.
mai naem
I have a deep held belief that eating meat is killing animals and therefore immoral. Will Stupidak legislate that for me? And in the HCR bill no less? Y’know it’s a very deeply held belief and it has nothing to do with me wanting to have control over people’s diets or anything. It’s just that I believe it’s immoral. Also too, I think Tyson Chicken and Hormel should not be allowed to sell their chicken or spam abroad either. Furthermore, I feel my legislation is more important than Anthony Weiner’s and Raul Girjalva’s single payer legislation.
Kayla Rudbek
@Joel: And yes, there are a hell of a lot of women out there who would want a uterine replicator. Women who would like to have children but who physically can’t carry them to term, for one.
Chuck Butcher
J Michael Neal begins his thesis from the point that law derives from morality. If you buy into that, you start to buy into his arguement.
I don’t, we argued beyond anyone’s interest the other day. As for ownership of a uterus, I own my dick and there are some things I’m barred by law from doing with it. For good reasons, you say. I agree, I’m still barred. You say in the interests of society, sure and I agree.
In a social construct there are going to be limits and we need to decide what they are and show good reason tor why they are. If you don’t like that about your uterus, there is a surgical cure.
I personally, propose to interfere with it as little as possible, that does not mean there won’t be any interference. That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be an argument about it, because it will be interfered with – just like every other Right you have.
Cerberus
@Chuck Butcher:
Okay…we’re having a simple problem of terms. See biologically, whether or not it is “automatic” or “tied to the survival instinct” a woman is literally responsible for whether or not the fetus grows and survives. It is her nutrient supply, amniotic fluid, tight hormone and immune system regulation, and about a thousand involved action on the part of the woman’s body to keep it alive.
In short, it is the woman keeping the fetus alive, by her body’s direct actions, not the fetus growing on its own or some neutral process.
Pregnancy used to be well-correlated with teeth loss, malnutrition in the mother, and a host of other complications, because the fetus acts as a leech on all of her systems for basic survival and her body will divert much to sustaining the growing fetus and lower stages.
So, it’s not really automatic.
It’s also really really easy to fuck up.
What you are commending upon and using is the well-known fact that it can be difficult to fuck it up safely for the mother. But there’s about a thousand processes that can go wrong, even massive mood swings can cause hormone balances to go funny, diets can fuck up growth patterns, external trauma can cause early breaches, barriers can fail, immunosuppression can fail, etc…
And that’s before getting into the number of substances women would take for centuries to induce a miscarriage or rather, an abortion long before safe surgical abortion came onto the scene.
It’s hardly low involvement on the part of the woman. Biologically, it is the highest involvement her body will ever face short of terminal cancer and even then…
Believe me as a cell biologist, “it’s automatic” does not mean “there’s no host involvement”.
General Winfield Stuck
@Raincitygirl:
The penis thinks. But has few good ideas.
Neutron Flux
@kay: I was just saying I like your comparison to the Florida law. I do not understand the rest of your post WRT to this “person” thing.
Did you mean to respond to someone else?
General Winfield Stuck
@Raincitygirl:
The pen is thinks. But has few good ideas.
Ruckus
@Raincitygirl:
I’d say you have it right on.
I’m of their gender, but absolutely not of their belief system and I say exactly the same thing as you.
I don’t have a right to tell anyone what to do with their body except if they want to use it to harm others. Making someone grow a group of cells into a human while not having any concept or acceptance of the responsibility of what happens during and after is the height of hubris. The short answer is they should MTOFB – mind ther own fucking business.
kay
@Samnell:
I love state law. I’m a state’s rights liberal.
But religious go a little mental, historically, they have, time after time, in place after place, and they force our hand.
There’s nothing I’d like better than to stay out of religion.
They have to help me do that, and passing laws that codify one religion’s mandates is not helping me do that.
J. Michael Neal
This is absolutely true . . . provided you start from the assumptions that both you and I do. Yes, many (though not such a huge majority that I’m at all comfortable with the unqualified use of “women”) do feel that it is their right as a human being to make that judgment. At this point, their belief has won the day, though far from without qualification.
However, there are many people who do not start from those assumptions, and who think that the cost of allowing abortion is more bloody and costly to society than the alternative. My point is not that I agree with them. My point is that it is extremely damaging to our society if widely held views as to something as basic as what the basic requirements of the moral (not scientific) designation of being human are simply shouted down and assumed to be dishonest.
The comparison to the civil rights movement is interesting. By 1960, it was possible to begin shouting down the opponents of civil rights, because it was clear that they were not being honest. The most obvious evidence of this was that they avoided directly defending the basis of their position. They weren’t willing to just come out and argue that blacks weren’t really human beings and didn’t deserve the legal and moral status of such. Without that argument, their position had zero chance of surviving long term. That those opposed to gay rights are being forced to travel the same route is the surest sign that they are going to lose.
That’s not true of abortion. If anything, it’s the pro-choice side that seems to be uncomfortable debating the most fundamental underlying part of the question, namely, what constitutes a human being. That’s less true here (hi, Cerberus!) than it is in general, of course. Here, it’s the 19th Century that’s instructive. Then, the argument that blacks weren’t really full human beings did have honest arguers on both sides, and full commitment to the fundamental levels of the positions. Given that, society broke down completely, and we had to kill several hundred thousand of each other to try to resolve it.
I’m not sold on the idea that I’m actually prepared to engage in a civil war over the abortion issue. That means that we have to have some sort of commitment to actually debate the matter with some level of civility.
Xenos
Civility is highly overrated.
Cerberus
@Ruckus:
Yup.
J. Michael Neal
I doubt it, but I have no objection to you arguing that someone should. I disagree with you, but I do assume that you are honest in your arguments and not engaged in some sort of veiled attempt to oppress anyone.
Corner Stone
Shorter John Cole:
I’ve got other things going on. How about let’s you and him fight some more on an intractable non-discussion.
J. Michael Neal
Well, yes. That actually isn’t what the abortion debate is about. It’s about whether or not having an abortion is using your body to harm another.
Chuck Butcher
@Cerberus:
You put words in my mouth and treat me like I’m the ignoramous? I’ve had to (and to this day have to) deal with a miscarriage. I am quite well educated and know about the demands put on a woman’s body. In fact I know enough about cell biology to understand how it works without your help.
thanks a bunch, though.
Cat G
@J. Michael Neal: Once again, you make your case for tolerance well. Giving your opposition the benefit of the doubt IS important to a pluralistic society. But most of us aren’t arguing in the abstract. This has been a hot issue since what, 1973? I’ve watched decades of anti-abortion activists hurl the vilest invective at pro-choicers, assault women who want abortions, throw up all kinds of impediments to effectively harass women, bomb & murder people, etc. etc.
Tolerance needs to go both ways.
It’s well past time for anti-abortion activists to demonstrate some good faith by actively supporting sex education and birth control.
So, so sorry if you’re offended when someone tells you to keep your hands and laws off her body, but too effing bad. When the anti-abortion types stop yelling “baby killers” etc, THEN we can talk.
Corner Stone
@Xenos: Civility for civility’s sake is the most highly overrated of all.
Fuck Civility. Fuck it right up its stupid ass!
Emma Anne
I’m with Anne. If these people cared about life, or babies, or preventing abortion, they would immediately change their behavior dramatically. Birth control would be free for all. Prenatal care would be made available for all women, and all babies would receive free well baby care. Abstinence-only sex ed would be replaced by real sex ed. Poor mothers would be given a living stipend, so they wouldn’t choose abortion because of lack of a way to support themselves.
They are in favor of none of this. Because what they want to end is female sexual agency, not bad outcomes for babies.
Ruckus
There seems to be 2 sides to most societal issues.
1. Those that want to control everyone else as much as possible. In every way possible.
2. Those that want everyone to have a much freedom as possible without harming others.
So under this concept I have to ask what do they gain from being anti-abortion? Or anti-homosexual? Got no upside for that one. Or racist. Once again no upside. And on and on.
So the only upside is power/control. Over someone they don’t know and will never see the downside to the life they control. Damn, how many people stop maturing at 5 yrs old?
Ash Can
::skims thread::
Oh, for fuck’s sake. Not this bullshit.
OK, all of you who can’t stand abortion? Here’s your assignment. Fix this sorry-ass world of ours so that nowhere, nohow, no way does any woman feel any need to get an abortion. Fix it so that any woman, anywhere, who gets pregnant, regardless of the circumstances or situation, says, “Hey, it’s cool. It’s OK that I’m pregnant. It’s all right if I carry this pregnancy to term and have this baby. I can do this.”
Can you do that? You can? Then congratulations; you’ve just eliminated abortion. Until then, go piss up a rope.
J. Michael Neal
You continue to misrepresent my argument. I never said this. What I said is that the law derives from the moral system held by those who decide the law. That can be the moral system held by an absolute monarch, that held the rich people in an oligarchy, or by voters in a democracy. (There is a principle/agency problem when trying to simplify it in a representative republic, but let’s set that aside for the moment.)
This has nothing to do with whether or not there is any relationship at all between what the law says and what is, in fact, moral. None.
Anne Laurie
@gopher2b:
Look up ‘ectopic pregnancies’, which in rare & medically-supported cases have resulted in live births. Theoretically, a fetus doesn’t need a uterus, just a placenta that will parasitize other abdomnial organs until it’s old enough to survive. Theoretically, there’s no reason why an otherwise “healthy” placenta-&-fetus packet couldn’t be removed from the fallopian tube it’s about to kill its “mother” by outgrowing and reimplanted, either in the uterus where it failed to migrate or in a third party’s abdomnial cavity. But there’s not been much call for research trials, because frankly, it’d be hella expensive and there’s not much “profit” potential at the other end.
Joel
@Kayla Rudbek: my point is, fundamentally, that the ethical costs of developing such a thing would probably be too high.
whither the experimental failures?
Betsy
@J. Michael Neal:
Actually, the fundamental argument is (or should be) whether any human can be forced to give his or her body, and risk his or her health and life,* for another organism, rights-bearing or otherwise.
*I had a friend who almost died in childbirth, right here in the U.S. of A. Childbirth, however natural, is an enormous physical and social burden that carries a risk of death or permanent disability. This must be acknowledged in any debate about abortion, IMO.
slag
@J. Michael Neal:
Yeah. I can’t imagine why women don’t want to continue arguing how they’re no longer 1/2 of a person. Especially when their refusal to do so deprives you of your god-given right to frolic gleefully in your pseudo-intellectual playground. Crazy, I know.
You want a civil war? Keep chipping away at a woman’s right to sovereignty over her own body. You’ll get one.
J. Michael Neal
@Cat G:
Yes. Yes, it does. That doesn’t mean that I’m prepared to excuse intolerance when I see it.
No, you and I can talk right now. The behavior of those on the other side is not a sufficient excuse for anyone on our side not trying to understand.
John Cole
You apparently are one of those who want to re-litigate it. Fine.
But the current health care reform bill is being written under the current laws of the land, and abortion is legal. You and Stupak are free to re-fight this battle elsewhere, for now, this amendment is little more than panty-sniffing.
And speaking of strawmen, since you apparently think that every argument that does not agree with you is a strawman, how bout the whopper you just unloaded regarding the history ofthe US and the rights of others. You know what African-Americans and others who have had their status as citizens changed over the years in common?
They walk, talk, breathe and they aren’t IN ANOTHER PERSON’S STOMACH.
Cerberus
@J. Michael Neal:
That’s cause there’s no real debate, medicine and science has an answer and women have basic civil rights that would be violated even if a fetus was a person. The debate the pro-life people don’t want to have is not “is a fetus a person”, but “is a woman a person”. The shocking reality of our society, is that a certain number of people do not believe that a sexual woman is as much of a person as a man and deserves some form of punishment to underlie that. That’s the debate that gets lost in the shuffle. The fundamental rights of women.
And might I say as a many minority, I am sorry if I can’t always be perfectly civil in these conversations, but I’m tired of hordes of people who will never be affected by the debate having debates about what basic civil rights I am allowed.
It is worth noting your comparison to slavery, because even if the pro-life people were right on fetal personhood, a woman would be a slave. Enslaved to another person, their rights and body forfeited as long as that enslavement lasted and that fetus would have extra rights, rights given no other human, since the time of slavemasters.
And women are getting testy, because a bunch of northern whites and southern whites are having a debate on how human the darkies are and what civil rights will be extended to them. Or rather a bunch of men are having a row amongst themselves on whether women are afforded to the same control over their bodily autonomy as every man has under birth (no man has to sacrifice food, organs, be raped, or forced to grow a set of cells using their own bodies hormones, nutrients, and biological processes).
No matter the outcome, men will be unaffected, same as straights when they vote on gay rights, or whites when they vote on the rights of minorities, but the outcome has heavy consequences for those populations.
And so tetchiness occurs.
Dunno why. Personally, I love it when people vote on my basic civil rights.
J. Michael Neal
This is actually a secondary argument, not for reasons of importance, but simply because a decision that a fetus is not a human being with legal rights means that we can completely ignore this one. That means that the question of whether or not a fetus is human is the fundamental one. Even having the rest of the debate is contingent upon that answer.
Sanka
Yeah. What a jerk. Of course, the healthcare “reform” making its way through Congress puts the government between millions of Americans and their doctors, but this is Democratic-sponsored intervention, and therefore, we should all just STFU and play nice, because the Democrats won the 2008 election. Democrats are so much more virtuous in wielding their
oppressionpower than those corrupt, white Republicans…J. Michael Neal
So what? That lays out the criteria by which you decide who is human. It does not say anything about whether there should be a debate about those criteria.
I’m also going to chalk you up as someone else who can’t be bothered to read what I write before ascribing positions to me.
Joel
@Emma Anne: i think the issue is thornier than that. for example, we as a society are in virtual agreement that violent crime is wrong and that it’s a core responsibility of government to prevent it.
imagine someone who profits from violent crime — let’s use stringer bell from the “wire” as an example — arguing that it’s our responsibility as critics of his business to provide alternative opportunities to his dealers, lieutenants, etc. to dissuade them from a life of crime.
obviously not a completely apples to apples comparison, but you get my gist. we ask the government to make things happen where we feel, as individuals, that we cannot. i mean, without that, why not have government at all?
let’s flip this another way. if we find that it’s desirable to ease restrictions on abortions — let’s say, by removing the burden of the stupak amendment or, going back, the hyde bill — why don’t we actively pursuade our fellow citizens who don’t agree with us to do so?
Betsy
@J. Michael Neal:
By that logic, a decision that a person cannot be compelled to support another with their body means we can completely ignore the question of rights-bearing personhood. So it’s not secondary.
Betsy
@Betsy:
To which I’d add: I do not believe that one person can be compelled to give up their own bodily autonomy against his or her will in order to make it possible for another person to live. Therefore, I find the question of personhood totally irrelevant.
Evinfuilt
I wonder why its people who don’t want Government between us and our doctor want to have a congressman there telling me what procedures and I can have.
I know the answer, and its unsurprising, but all of them are hypocrites.
Cerberus
@Anne Laurie:
Tightly regulated placenta, with regulated hormone baths and an immunosupressive layer. There’s a couple of other things, it’d need as well, homeostatic insulation system, etc…
Very much right on it not being cost-effective or entirely guaranteed, but it’s very possible this technology will be available within 100 years.
Course, by that time, the technology will have already been perfected on techniques that don’t require the sperm at all and that will cause a whole new cascade of insecure men.
kay
I have noticed that pro-life activists spend a lot of time worrying that pro-choice activists have not grappled with the serious moral aspects of their position.
But it occurs to me that pro-life activists have not grappled at all with the most radical sector of their movement, nor have they grappled with this fact: it’s been a success.
The murder of doctors who provide abortion has been a success. They’ve been chased out of whole states, with bullet-proof vests and security details, and more than a few are out of business because they were murdered.
That fact, I think, probably has repercussions in this country, for anyone who cares about the rule of law.
Because anyone with any radical agenda has to look at the practical success of radical pro-lifers and determine that they won that doctor battle. Using violence and lawlessness. Not a good way to win.
But pro-life activists choose not to “wrestle” with that.
And in that they’re cowards.
latts
@Chuck Butcher:
Sure. Absolutely. However, being a good citizen requires individuals to pay close attention to the boundaries between their more fervent emotions and others’ privacy & autonomy. We, as a society, don’t have any real standing to stake legal claims on women’s bodies just because we luv the baybeez so much– attempting to do so is impossibly narcissistic and irrational. We really only have two avenues to claim a societal interest in pregnancy and fetuses, if you think about it: the physical & emotional health of the women in our society, and the expenditures and risks we accept when babies are actually born. Beyond those two issues, we don’t have any real reason to concern ourselves in any individual pregnancy except for a bunch of faux-existential masturbation– it’s always more comforting to ponder others’ morality instead of one’s own, I guess– and the aforementioned misogyny. Anti-choicers’ beliefs are undoubtedly “deeply held,” but that doesn’t mean they’re smart, intellectually disciplined, or in any way useful in the real world… hence the dancing goalposts that grace this debate.
Joel
@Raincitygirl: just curious as to which of the statements i’ve made that you disagree with, aside from #97 which i am wavering on right now.
General Winfield Stuck
@John Cole:
You mean THAT’s where babies come from. Stomachs? They lied then down at Ralph’s Snooker Hall.
latts
Aaaaand… this debate always reminds me that liberal men aren’t always a whole lot better than conservative ones. Privilege does tend to breed smug arrogance.
J. Michael Neal
Yes, there are, indeed, times when the fundamental rights of different people come into conflict. Welcome to the real world. If the fetus is a person, there is no resolution to this problem that does not involve one person’s fundamental rights being subordinated to those of someone else. There is no particular reason why it is the mother’s rights should be assumed to be more important.
You and I get around this by denying that a fetus is a human being, and therefore, it does not have any fundamental rights. Ergo, abortion is permitted, at least up to the point where it is a human being.
This leads me to a question for you. At what point do *you* think that a fetus becomes a human being? Is it at any point before actual birth? Unless you are prepared to argue that, you don’t manage to avoid the conflict that you are denying exists.
If, as you argue here, the mother’s rights to not have to carry the fetus *must* be held superior to the baby’s right to life, then you must be prepared to argue that abortion is, at all times, legal right up to birth. If a woman decides that she no longer wants to carry the child at any point, she can demand that it be aborted, or, at a minimum, delivered in some way. That this is extremely risky for the human being that is brought into the world prematurely, and carries enormous health risks, does not matter. It may be sad, but it’s right to life is not as important as the mother’s right not to be enslaved to it.
Is this what you believe? Or do you think that there is some point at which a fetus’ right to life is more important and the woman can be forced to carry it to term? If it is the latter, how do you reconcile this with the arguments that you are making?
liberal
@J. Michael Neal:
Wrong. The morality of abortion doesn’t hinge on whether the fetus is a human life, but whether it’s a separate human life. Which it isn’t until viability.
Ruckus
@J. Michael Neal:
Either you just don’t get the concept of harm no one, you don’t understand the concept of biology, or you’re just fucking ignorant. You have to be in one of those groups to think that this is an issue that you have any skin in.
It is none of your fucking business.
Now you may not like my tone but that’s tough shit. You are trying to control others. You have no right to do that in this case. Your belief harms other people. Your belief does not get the results that you intend. Abortion does not stop wither you like it or not. Legal or not. Murders and bombing of clinics does not stop it. The only thing that happens is woman get harmed. They will have an abortion if that is the best for their current situation. And I’ll bet they won’t like having to do it. But they will. They have for eons. They will for eons. Until men step up and act human about the reproductive process and rights of all involved this will happen.
Cerberus
@Betsy:
Yeah, it’s kind of the central debate. Even if fetuses were actually biologically human autonomous persons equally deserving of life as other persons (and let’s not forget that at the point of abortion, most fetuses are blastocytes, not much human resemblance or personhood to marvel at), they don’t have the right to a host organism.
No human has the right to enslave another and use their body against their will. No matter how “innocent”, no matter how noble the reason (need to survive, or more accurately exist at all). Period.
It doesn’t matter that they didn’t mean to. It doesn’t matter that their hosts were dirty sluts engaged in non-authorized evil slutty slut sex. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that they would cease to be without the constant support.
No human has that right. I can’t harvest Stupak’s non-essential organs to save my life. I can’t rape Brian Brown even if I would die if I did not. I can’t enslave Cheney if it would keep my family fed.
No human has that right.
So why are we giving it to unformed clumps of cells that are dependent upon their host even for determining shape and function?
The personhood debate is secondary and designed to get people to think about “aww, the poor babies” instead of remembering the very real, very alive woman at the center of things.
slag
@Cerberus: Thank you! Thank you for being a much nicer person than I am. Seriously. The patience with which you construct this argument is Peace Prize material. It’s inspiring.
John Cole
@J. Michael Neal: At the point they can survive outside the womb with reasonable medical care.
Our current law already covers that.
Edward G. Talbot
I’ve seen precious little evidence – historical or otherwise – to suggest that for a pluralistic society to function well, people need to start with a position of trust of other people’s motives as a default position. In fact, it is my personal belief that skepticism about motives is a more healthy starting point. Thus I disagree with the point that J. Michael is making ad nauseum (in between playing “devil’s advocate” on the specifics of abortion). And all the points that derive from it.
Which means unless he comes up with some other way in addition to the dozen different ways he’s said it to convince me (and I suspect many others) of this starting position, the discussion as a productive activity never really existed. Which is similar to the point I made about a hundred comments ago. Some positions need not be argued and society will still survive and even thrive.
Corner Stone
@latts:
I was dirt poor for the first 25+ years of my life but that never stopped me from being smugly arrogant.
Cerberus
@J. Michael Neal:
Medicine says birth.
And J.
My point was a bit subtle, so you might have missed it. No one. Cero persona, Nein hominid, no person or persons unnamed. Has the right to another person’s body without their consent.
None.
Sooooo…that kinda shoots out the tires of the debate, so sorry, better luck next time.
Unless you argue that slavery is a defensible institution and you are willing to resurrect it in order to continue debating the morality of abortion.
Are you?
John Cole
Because J. Michael Neal and Bart Stupak go to church and want to make damned sure we all know it.
Emma Anne
@Joel: why don’t we actively pursuade our fellow citizens who don’t agree with us to do so?
I don’t see how that happens while we all pretend that the motivations of the anti-choice side are something that they clearly are not.
Example. What if people opposed to the Iraq war claimed that most people opposed to the war were pacifists. Yet they clearly weren’t – many of them supported Afghanistan, many were in the military, etc. Does it make sense to try to convince the anti-Iraq-war people based on arguments you would use to convince pacifists? Or does it make sense to point out that the anti-Iraq-war folks are not pacifists, and try to grapple with their real objections?
The Stupak amendment did not pass because the people who voted for it love life or even want to reduce the number of abortions. We know this because they do not support the things that actually protect life and reduce abortions. They’re against those things too. So arguing on that basis is arguing with a pretend position.
Ruckus
@Cerberus:
I likey. Very much.
IOW Very well stated.
liberal
@J. Michael Neal:
Nope. The point is that the fetus is not a separate person, because it depends on her in a most particular way. For example, we might say an invalid is “dependent,” but the invalid is not dependent on any particular person.
No, the mother’s rights trump the baby’s up to the point of viability, but not after.
Joel
@Cerberus: just a minor quibble here; i haven’t followed much of the back-and-forth you’ve had with j.m.c. but i want to clarify some science. i’m not a developmental biologist so i don’t have a ton to add here, but there are some basic issues that are being mucked up here. it doesn’t really fundamentally change the nature of the argument so just bear with me.
the blastocyst stage occurs shortly after fertilization. once the embryo implants, that’s it. blastocyst stage is over.
in fact, you’re not a fetus until about the 10th week of gestation (on average).
it’s important to note the distinction. a timeline (with minimal annotation) is available on wikipedia.
Corner Stone
@Edward G. Talbot:
Others have made this point but they used phrases like “fuck their fucking deeply held beliefs”.
In any event, I agree with both you and them.
My interests do not have to coincide with yours, nor do the interests of society. And I certainly don’t have to give a shit about someone who sincerely believes that my female cousin is a witch because she can read.
They believed that shit too once upon a time. Deeply and personally believed it.
Cerberus
@John Cole:
Oh well in that case…
I’m so sorry to have butted in with my massive knowledge of cell biology and future lady bits.
kay
@liberal:
Blackmun got that right, amazingly, and he’s still essentially right.
Sandra Day O’Conner said medical science would fix this, because the “infant” would be distinguished from “fetus” at a lower and lower gestational age.
But that actually didn’t happen. It’s still right about where Blackmun put it, and Blackmun relied (partially) on the ancient “quickening” idea.
We keep more preemies alive longer, and they do better, but we didn’t move the actual needle “born alive, separate from the mother” very far from “quickening”, (20 or so weeks) which is the measure they relied on in the 1800’s.
liberal
@John Cole:
We have a winner!
Ruckus
@John Cole:
Of Course!
The nut shell. Now full.
Joel
@Emma Anne: i don’t see how productive – or accurate – it is to assume that the “other side”, maybe as much as 1/2 of the adult population of the united states, is arguing entirely in bad faith.
Chuck Butcher
Since some of this argument seems to revolve around this idea of unlimited Rights, I’m curious to know about some other examples. I know of none, but I don’t know everything.
J. Michael Neal
@Betsy: To which I’d add: I do not believe that one person can be compelled to give up their own bodily autonomy against his or her will in order to make it possible for another person to live. Therefore, I find the question of personhood totally irrelevant.
Samnell
@kay: My problem with state government in general (And I do mean all of it; I think they should be abolished.) Is the same as your problem with trusting the states on abortion:
They always go mental, mine as much as anybody else’s. And all we get in exchange for slavery, segregation, and the rest are districts we can use to test pilot programs in (which could just as easily be federally established) and medical marijuana (which again, should be a federal initiative).
I’d feel differently if the states were some kind of essential safeguard of the rights of minorities or something, but that’s not how American states behave. In fact they manage the amazing feat of both being a constant menace to the rights of minorities and a constant impediment to making gainful changes favored by the majority.
liberal
@kay:
Yeah.
The poster on USENET I read who best made the argument about viability—that the key issue isn’t when the fetus is human, but rather a separate human—admitted that this answer could change with changing circumstance (viz, progress on viability), but claimed (reasonably I suspect) that that hardly made it unique among such arguments and wasn’t a weakness.
J. Michael Neal
@John Cole: I’m more inclined to think that John Cole likes to shoot his mouth off without bothering to actually read what a person has written.
Cerberus
@Joel:
Basically, yes. I was using fetus technically inaccurately because well, shorthand small inaccuracies are often the cost when trying to simplify a concept for non-scientists.
And you are right about another key concept. Almost every single elective for choice abortion occurs in the pre-fetal stage of development, which makes the signs pro-lifers use about the “horrors of elective abortion” doubly and triply lies.
Joel
@liberal: i’ve actually got to go but i’ll sum up with this;
i absolutely agree with that position. one hundred percent. it’s the closest thing to scientific consensus that we’ve got. but i leave with the caveat that there is enough ambiguity that someone could make a completely different argument in good faith. i draw the line — as in, i won’t even entertain the argument — that anything that occurs before implantation constitutes an abortion.
J. Michael Neal
@Cerberus:
No. Feel free to shoot at whatever strawmen you like, though. That is a fundamental right.
Fair enough. That is, at least, a consistent argument. One I vehemently disagree with, but reasonable.
J. Michael Neal
@liberal:
I agree with you. However, it is not consistent with an argument that the mother’s right not to have to carry the fetus must trump any right of the fetus to life.
Corner Stone
@J. Michael Neal:
While that’s undoubtedly true, it doesn’t change the fact that your argument suffers from epic fail on several levels.
For example –
This is a massive fail of false equivalency and misdirection. It’s just specious and not even on point.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
Fix’t.
They want to control it in the case that one day they finally get their hands on it. Can’t allow a woman to have the option to decide for herself, her poor husband would lose control and that wouldn’t be acceptable.
I was over at the GOS reading about Stupak’s office having a bad day when I read a post in the diary from someone who called Stupak’s office. This person was told that since they were not a constituent that his office didn’t care to listen to them. A post responding to this said ‘he just made me a constituent of his with this amendment’. Well pols, like it or not, national issues in the information age are not solely statewide any more. The internet allows people to take an interest in issues that are near and dear to them by focusing on politicians at the national level.
Stupak or any other federal-level pol can now be held to account by people donating money from outside their state. In the past, people had to join national organizations to try to have an effect at the national level. Now people can organize on the spot and focus energy and money on specific contests/issues and like it or not, the pols are going to see this happen more and more often.
This can be used for good (gay rights, womens choice, etc) or bad efforts, it’s all in how it is applied and how effective it is. The pols like Stupak haven’t caught up or are in denial, the times have changed and national politicians can’t hide in their state any more. People outside the state can now see into it and involve themselves directly by donating to and/or working for whatever so they can either keep things as they are or try to change it.
If you are going to shape things at the national level then you are not just a representative for your state/locale, you are a representative for every single citizen in the country. When your decisions affect the nation then you are answerable to that nation for them.
Fix’t.
J. Michael Neal
It is on point to the specific question I am asking. Quite simply, *if* you believe that a woman’s right not to have to carry a fetus is absolute, as more than one poster on the thread have asserted, it is very much on point. It may not be on point to any argument that you have made, but it’s not all about you.
Cat G
@J. Michael Neal: “not trying to understand…” You talk like this is some new issue we’re trying to understand. I can do both sides of this argument…it’s not new.
It turns out that you’re really not interested in tolerance you just want to re-argue all the issues we’ve been debating for 35+years. Been there, done that.
In pre-Roe days, one of my sisters had a technically not ectopic pregnancy but high, painful & problematic. To terminate it, she had to get a lawyer, go to court AND have her husband’s permission. I also know women who had abortions in the old back alley days, who were so desperate they were willing to take substantial risks.
We should not go back to the “good old days.”
Ruckus
@Corner Stone:
This is a massive fail of false equivalency and misdirection. It’s just specious and not even on point.
Isn’t this what magicians and people with no logic to their arguments do? Misdirection.
Church Lady
I guess I just don’t quite get all the uproar. Currently, if a woman has health coverage under any type of federal plan (Medicare, Medicaid, S-Chip or private plans offered to federal employees), any coverage for abortions falls under the Hyde Amendment, which severely restricts the circumstances under which an abortion would/could be covered. Is this not correct?
If anything approaching the House plan survives conference, and the Stupak Amendment remains in, how will it make any difference? Why are so many up in arms over something that isn’t covered now anyway. It doesn’t appear that anything is being taken away, only that abortion covereage will continue to be excluded from all federal coverage, except under certain circumstances.
kay
@Samnell:
I love state law ( and I think liberals ignore it at their peril) because it’s 90% of what governs people’s everyday lives. We get so het up about federal law, and, really, you’re probably not running into it.
Criminal law, property, mundane things, but really important.
I have also noticed that state AG’s and regulators do not seem to be entirely captured by the entities they police and regulate, and if they are they’re relatively easy to remove, and I’m convinced federal regulators are captured, and they seem to stick around forever.
My big worry with health care reform isn’t state law. It’s federal (non) regulators. Let’s hope they do a better job enforcing the insurance regs they write than they’ve done policing the financial sector. Lord. We’re probably screwed.
Cerberus
@J. Michael Neal:
You disagree with medicine and then…
It’s a surgical procedure, it’s medicine, medical reality dictates that it is necessary. Reality reality dictates that unsafe abortions will be undergone and at higher rates without the medical option.
But you want to disagree with medical personhood and what? Still have a debate on the “morality” of a surgical procedure?
What exactly is served by this? Once medicine is thrown out of medicine, what then?
Many churches say AIDS is not a disease but a cure for the gay plague. Biology says it is a dangerous retrovirus. Should AIDS treatment be withheld while the churches fight this out?
Some churches such as scientology and christian science believe modern medicine to be the devil’s handiwork. Many more believe that the principle of evolution is an evil directly responsible for the Holocaust? Considering most every pill, medical procedure, and drug was developed via principles of evolution and are modern medicine, should science step back and refuse to treat anyone until we debate this out?
Faith healers claim to heal the sick, science has found zero cases of this being true and many have actually convinced people to forego actual medical treatment leading to their deaths. But the debate must continue?
Science on science, I would think would be the primary source, the alpha to all omegas. Just as if I wanted to launch a rocket into space, I’d talk to engineers, astronomists, chemists, and physicists and rely on their scientific principles, not on the half-mad ravings of the astrologers and the people who think the world is flat.
I’m sorry you think this is something to be waved aside. A little never you mind, but the position of medical biology on a principle of medical biology kinda trumps everything. It defines the reality of the debate.
But thank you for noticing and agreeing that the side of the pro-life community is foremost against reality. A better summation could never be made.
General Winfield Stuck
@Joel:
They are not arguing in bad faith, or most of them I think. And they are entitled to their arguments, bad or good faith. And they can continue to agitate for their belief to be recognized as the legal one that abortion is wrong and should be banned. But reality is that we are a nation of laws, not personal deeply held beliefs.
And currently the law is on the side of abortion up to around twenty two weeks as I understand it, when the central nervous system of a fetus becomes fully functional and the fetus is viable outside the womb. And current law also allows for aborting the fetus after that under certain conditions.
The wrongness of Stupak et al is to hold hostage vitally needed legislation to keep alive a lot of sentient persons outside the womb by insisting on the outrageous proposition that “their” tax dollars not go to funding abortions in such a broad way as to circumvent a legal procedure from being covered at all under a new health care insurance system. And in the most nebulous way imaginable as to my previous comments. This is unacceptable and well beyond their right to hold “deeply held beliefs” that would in practical effect deny others theirs, that also happen to be fully legal.
Chuck Butcher
@kay:
How is it then that you square this with the current situation? It got this way under State rights, on their watch.
Mayken
@Hawes: Yeah, and as we’ve seen to day quite the opposite has happened. As soon as this passed the House I knew the Senate would get the same amendment put into the bill. The day Obama signs HCR with this poison pill will be a day of mixed feelings for me, just as Nov 4th, 2008 was when he was elected and Prop 8 passed here in Cali!
Samnell
@J. Michael Neal: I’m not the one asked, and I’m a nobody commenting on my first thread here, but I’ll come out and answer it:
To be clear, I’m not making a statement about the law here. This is my opinion of how things should be.
No limits. If she comes in to deliver and decides she doesn’t want the thing, I approve of her being able to have it disposed of that very day. A fetus is a member of H. sapiens sapiens (a “human being”) and nobody seriously debates that. It’s basic science. It’s alive. Just like your skin cells and cancerous tumors. It even has unique DNA (kind of like cancer cells do, or human chimeras). We don’t consider cancer cells to have rights. The very notion is absurd, and so it is equally absurd to consider another dangerous growth inside a person’s body to have rights. Species membership is transparently not sufficient grounds on which to grant any kind of rights.
This of course sounds radical, but we already let woman discard the child after she’s had it as long as she signs the right papers. Nobody objects to women having adoption available to them. Why should they have to wait until after they’ve been through numerous physical strains, painful trials, and the like in order to do so?
TheHatOnMyCat
@Corner Stone:
Please enter my lifetime subscription to your newsletter.
Ruckus
@DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal):
This is one of my most bothersome problems with the current form/process/procedure of our government. People can have minority views and the majority have no election process for control over that.
I favor reasonable term limits for all national offices just for this reason.
gwangung
The difference, from what I can tell, is that there is a very real possibility that this ban would be extended to ANY plan offered by companies participating in the exchanges, whether it was offered by private companies or not and whether your worked for a public or private entity…and, of course, would extend to any possible public option.
That’s a very real difference.
John Cole
You’ve whinged this entire thread, excusing Stupak’s amendment, ignored the fact that current law allows for abortion, and also conveniently ignored all the discussions about the viability of a fetus, and instead gravely intoned about societal obligations to determine when someone is a person.
At least when I spout off at the mouth it is on target.
J. Michael Neal
@Cerberus: Science can not make the decision you claim. It just can’t. It can determine whether or not a fetus is viable, but not whether viability is required for someone to be human. It is your non-scientific belief that viability is required that leads you to your conclusions. Science can conclude that your criteria for humanity are met, but can’t set them.
Here’s another question. How do you feel about mandatory child support? Does a man have a right to autonomy, or is it all right to reject his autonomy and make him pay for the upbringing of a child?
If it is, why are his rights subordinate to that of the child? It can’t be because he chose to have sex with the mother, because that exact same decision doesn’t mean that she has given up her rights to autonomy.
Corner Stone
@J. Michael Neal:
HAHAHAHAHA!!
Self-referential massive fucking fail!
God damn dude. I remember when you were someone who couldn’t talk to a woman but at least seemed to be a decent person.
What fucking asshole factory did you crawl through? And I can ask that as I am an unabashed asshole.
Did someone you loved make a decision you weren’t ok with?
Cerberus
Also, it’s not a strawman if my point is central to the debate, which is no being has the right to another person’s body without their consent. Cero persona in los todos estados unidos, ever since the ending of slavery.
To extend that right to a fetus, an embryo, a collection of blastocytes, blastocytes, trophocytes, blastocysts, or fertilized egg would be to extend it rights enjoyed by no other person. No one has the right to another person’s body, not even if their life depends on it, even if their use of the body is non-life-threatening. I can’t harvest someone’s organs to live. I can’t demand as an invalid that a specific person spend their time hand feeding me with a spoon. I just don’t have that right.
With that, it’s immaterial that medical reality also notes that a fetus is not a person until the moment of birth.
So, pro-life doesn’t really have a leg to stand on. I’d love to have that debate on my rights as a minority if it was sane, rooted in the reality, and secular. But I must admit, I really love that debate on my rights as a woman and the rights of all the women in my lives when that’s not the case. What a rush, say I.
John Sears
Ahh, wow. I come back and there’s another one of THESE arguments.
I’ll play, though.
I believe: a fetus is not a person. A fetus is a clump of human cells. I would define essential humanity as requiring sentience, defined as something along the lines of: self-awareness, intelligence and consciousness.
Thus, a fetus, lacking all 3 throughout most of the pregnancy, and at least intelligence throughout, is not a person.
Contrary to what J. Michael Neal seems to think about me in other threads, I’ve given this standard a lot of thought. It makes me uneasy about the rights of higher mammals, many of which are far smarter and more complete individuals than human infants, let alone a blastocyst.
If, however, I was to concede that a fetus was a person, then it would be a matter of two complete persons, one of whom is dependent on the other for survival, at the complete cost of that second person’s autonomy. Ask yourselves this: if there was a man who was dying of organ failure, and there was another person who could donate the organ at a small, but non-trivial risk of death, and certain risk of lengthy, painful and invasive surgery, over the course of, say, 9 months, would you compel that person to donate the organ against their wishes?
If you can’t say you’d be willing to do so, to arrest, confine, and cut the organ out of them against their will, even as they scream and beg for their freedom, then I can’t see how you could oppose abortion rights.
Samnell
@kay:
State law is only important because it’s made important. There’s no obvious reason that the federal government couldn’t manage criminal law, property law, and all the rest. (It’s certainly not that state legislators are categorically smarter or less corrupt.) The problem of non-regulation will always be with us, sadly. That’s as true if the corporate whores are working from an office on the Potomac or from Austin, Boston, and Boise.
States exist, sure. And one can be resigned to their existing. (I’m not, but I’m not happy about much of anything in American politics and haven’t been since I started paying attention.) One should certainly be aware that the state houses shall most likely do all they can to eviscerate any kind of good that comes from Washington. I’m not suggesting they be ignored. I’m suggesting that states themselves are a terrible idea, as US history has shown more than once.
Woodrow "asim" Jarvis Hill
@J. Michael Neal: Dude. I study MLK — hell, I was just re-listening to a bunch of his speeches last weekend on the way home from a work trip. My Dad ate dinner with MLK, and knows Jesse Jackson’s family — indeed, my grandparents’ house isn’t far from his grandparents.
Your comparison with the Civil Right movement is way, WAY off. I may not agree with every aspect of the current high levels of the pro-choice movement, but civil discussion is oftentimes the bane of legitimate social change:
—From MLK’s famous “Letter From Birmingham Jail”
My point for saying that I think Roe was early is NOT so that we can have a “civil discussion”. I think it can be done…but solves shit. Even the Federalist Papers weren’t a “civil discussion”, they were propaganda, and the Founders who wrote them said as fuckin’ much.
No, I want, and need, people just like you to stop kvetching about women’s rights vs. fetal rights on a Goddamn blog, acting like a fuckin’ 101st Fighting Keyboardist for Pro-Lifers, and go Talk To Some Women. Talk, as I did, to women who’ve had abortions. Read stories about the women who’ve regretted, and the women who don’t give a damn, and the ones who struggle with the decision, and the ones certain in it’s rightness. Spend some time reading the pro-life blogs, and standing in defense of a clinic, both things I’ve done.
MLK et. al. didn’t change minds just out of honesty. They changed minds because they fuckin’ showed the horrors of being a Negro in America. They made people face that hell in the starkest way people, broadcast over their evening meals. Southern leaders played right into it, whereas holding back would have caused a different situation. Any basic analysis of the Civil Right movement knows this is why they kept pushing the status quo, to get those reactions and to look like the good guys.
That, if anything, is the parallel with the Pro-lifers. It’s easier when you’re honest…but you seem to think these fights are about high-falutin’ values. That’s bullshit. MLK was a brilliant philosopher…but he worked, as we say these days, Da Streets to make the changes. And it was there, on the streets of Memphis and Birmingham and Selma, that my people started to see a way out of no way, and others started to see the dignity we had been denied.
So yes, I reject that the solution to this involves a “civil discussion.” I reject that somehow the pro-lifers are more “moral” simply because their position makes a better sound bite, and hits more directly. I’ve explained why, and I don’t see where writing an essay to expand that point will change your mind.
So, I also reject that I have to prove a point to no one but you. Trying to “civilly” explain a position that I developed through years of work, both high-level and low, and through discussions with veterans of both civil rights and feminist/pro-choice battles, and so on, is something that would take far longer than is worth it.
For me, I’ve got an amendment to stop. And I recommend to others to focus on the same.
Chuck Butcher
@Cerberus:
Oh horseshit, I can fucking slaughter you under certain circumstances, I’ve taken complete control of you body. Nice try, that’s the problem with hobbyhorses, you don’t think it through.
kay
@Chuck Butcher:
What current situation? They did a race to the bottom on state law on credit cards, with the whole “they’ll compete across state lines!” and voided every state law usury provision in the country.
They did a race to the bottom on mortgage lending practice and regulation and completely over-rode state law consumer protections, and destroyed the integrity of county recording systems to the point where no one knows who holds title, then they dumped it all in the state’s lap, and ran away.
Federalization has been a freaking disaster for consumers as far as banks and lenders. Incredibly, and completely predictably, they lobbied and bought one Congress instead of 50, and that was easier and more efficient.
It worked better when states had some police power.
J. Michael Neal
@Samnell: No limits. If she comes in to deliver and decides she doesn’t want the thing, I approve of her being able to have it disposed of that very day.
John Cole
J. Michael Neal has still failed to point out where in Stupak’s amendment there is a debate on the viability of a fetus and when a fetus becomes a person.
Oh, wait. There isn’t one! Awesome!
Cerberus
@J. Michael Neal:
Ah, I suddenly understand exactly the type of person I am dealing with.
But just in case, monetary autonomy, social autonomy, are not bodily autonomy. We can lock a man in a 9×11 cage. We can restrict his freedom, we can take his money.
We cannot rape him. We can harvest his organs. We cannot even force him to give up his blood and nutrients without consent. We cannot enslave him.
Bodily autonomy is paramount and protected.
And sorry, but biology has a lot to say on life and personhood and believe me when I say that being in a lab or even reading the hormonal process by which a Woman’s system grows the implanted blastocyst reveals how stark it is.
A fetus, up to the moment of birth, is wholly dependent on and enveloped in the female autonomous system. It is not until the point of birth that it develops the necessary final steps to be able to survive autonomously, because those systems cannot exist until it has crossed that threshold. It is remarkably simple and has been the accepted wisdom of all the fields of mammalian biology and medicine for a good while now.
Chuck Butcher
@kay:
Are you deliberately dense or do you just know nothing about insurance? That is currently the State’s balliwick.
J. Michael Neal
@John Cole:
Uh, no. You really haven’t read what I’ve been writing.
No, John, it really isn’t. Where in this thread have I said that my views have anything to do with going to church? In fact, where in this thread have I said that I’m opposed to abortion rights?
With regards to the Stupak amendment, simply saying that abortion is legal is irrelevant. There are lots of things that are legal that the government chooses not to pay for. It’s true that government *should* be willing to pay for it, but there’s no legal reason why it has to.
Cerberus
@Chuck Butcher:
You are “allowed” to slaughter me?
My word, I had no idea murder was legal.
I’m glad to see that the idea of bodily autonomy is so threatening to you though that murder was the first thing that popped in your head.
J. Michael Neal
@John Sears:
There is a significant difference between your analogy and the abortion question. To make it equivalent, you need to add the element that the potential donee in question is 50% responsible for the person on life support needing the transplant. Except in cases of rape (including incestual statutory rape), the woman bears half of the responsibility for the fetus being dependent upon her. She made the choice that led to it. She was not enslaved involuntarily. She chose to engage in the behavior that led to it of her own will.
Cerberus
@J. Michael Neal:
Medically why not, legally, in some states, they try and restrict her ability to flush a blastocyst with a drug that inhabits implantation, so you’d never see that case. Also, there are next to zero women that decide to have an abortion for simple “I don’t want a child” reasons past first trimester. Abortions at the table don’t occur in reality, even back in the bad old days, unless the woman’s life was forfeit.
Even then, hell sometimes even today, the husband gets to choose which one gets to live. Because women, pfft, who cares?
J. Michael Neal
@John Cole:
John Cole has still failed to realize that the abortion debate is more than just this one amendment. Where in the stimulus bill did it discuss the morality of taxation? It didn’t. It assumed that those involved in the debate were familiar with that question and had already arrived at their positions. Quite properly, the Democrats told the teabaggers screaming that taxation is slavery to fuck off.
Go back to watching the game, John. You’re arguing at a level far below your usual standards.
J. Michael Neal
This is probably why I described the extreme case as a hypothetical. If you want to treat the other post-viability one as hypothetical as well, feel free. You’re probably right.
Rights, though, are theoretical constructs, and so can be examined with hypothetical cases.
Samnell
@J. Michael Neal:
The fetus should possess no rights whatsoever in my opinion. There’s no outweighing to be done because no rights are in conflict. So universally the woman deserves absolute and complete discretion.
There is no point at which the woman should be required to have the caesarian, in my book. I assumed this would be clear in context after I told you my opinion was she should have the unchallengeable right to an elective abortion on the day she’s due, but I guess not. I’m not sure how much clearer I can make it. Lethality to the fetus is acceptable at all times during gestation. If it’s what the woman wants, it’s the preferred outcome.
Chuck Butcher
murder was the first thing that popped in your head.
latts
@J. Michael Neal:
Money isn’t– or at least it traditionally wasn’t, although perhaps that’s questionable now– fully equivalent to physical presence and/or function. Money’s supposed to be a poor compensation for lost/absent people, health, etc. And in the case of child support, it’s basically meant to avoid teh evil welfare state. It’s certainly not on a par with permanent physical changes & risks, the burden of actually parenting, etc.
Or hell, maybe money is equal to mere human bodies & personal burdens. Kinda sick, but maybe that’s where we are nowadays.
General Winfield Stuck
And something else to consider. Theoretically, if the notion behind the Stupak amendment is allowed to stand, it would open the crazy door to all sorts of claims of subsidy tax dollars not only thwarting abortion, but about anything this or that minority of deeply held believers might object to.
Was the abortion clinic built with any materials that could have received some subsidy. Any of the equipment somewhere along the line, say from the manufacturer getting a tax payer subsidy for solar heating etc….. etc……/ Sounds outrageous? If so, you haven;’t been paying attention to the myriad of crazed stunts pro lifers have pulled to get their way. Up to and including murdering in cold blood abortion providers.
slag
There it is. That unapproved, dirty sexy sex. We all know that anytime a woman engages in that activity, she’s signing herself up for third-class human status. It’s written! In all the medical journals!
Cerberus
@Woodrow “asim” Jarvis Hill:
Thank you, that was very well put.
I think the most stark reminder that it isn’t babies, but women being sexual comes in being a volunteer escort for Planned Parenthood. Seeing the hateful mostly male faces of the protestors, seeing their biologically inaccurate “surgery looks gross so be against it” posters, hearing them rant about how the slut you are walking in deserves to burn in hell, lots of jeering about sluts and hell, “you should have closed your legs”, hearing the receptionists note who on the outside picket line had brought in themselves or their daughter on a previous occasion.
Or just paying attention, noting the lack of contact with medical reality, the fact that they are against every known preventer of abortion, because they involve teaching women about their sexuality.
It’s about female sexuality for the majority of protestors. Maybe there are consistent true believers on the fringes, but for the most part, it’s related to sex, pregnancy is a punishment, and trying to escape that punishment will see you burned in hell.
Considering these same bastards are the same ones lining up against gay rights, for torture, for the death penalty, for the war on drugs, for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, against health care, against a social net for the poor and needy, against anything and everything that helps someone not them…
It’s unfortunate. I’ll leave it there for fear of being “uncivil”.
General Winfield Stuck
@J. Michael Neal:
Horseshit. This post is specifically about one amendment and it’s involvement of tax money’s to further the cause of anti abortion folks. The broader debate on abortion is utterly irrelevant except as you have tried to infect this thread with it.
John Sears
@J. Michael Neal: Two things:
I would not be willing to cut the organ out of any person, no matter how responsible they were for any crime.
So, it’s not a problem for me. Thank you for allowing me to clarify. Let me return the favor: you believe that responsibility for acts, undefined but including sex that leads to pregnancy, can partially or completely justify invasive involuntary medical procedures. Could you give me a framework for that? Would you be willing to kill a murderer for their heart? A rapist for their lungs? A jaywalker for their bone marrow? And what about multiple lives. A single dead person’s organs, properly distributed, could save dozens, perhaps hundreds (you’d be amazed at how far skin can go, and skin grafts save a lot of lives).
Is it a 1-1 ratio, or would higher numbers be involved?
Two: The Stupak amendment makes no allowances for rape, incest or the life of the mother. In fact, it bans ‘abortion services’, which can be construed to cover the removal of a dead, but not yet miscarried, fetus, since there is no distinction between the procedure to do so and a ‘regular’ abortion.
The Stupak Amendment could punish women financially, not just for a fetus.
For a DEAD fetus. A dead fetus, even if it was produced by rape, and even if carrying it to term would kill the mother, say by a nasty infection.
I hadn’t considered this possibility until it was brought up in an article linked by Digby, but then, I’m not a doctor.
http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2009/11/09/will-stupak-amendment-force-women-whove-miscarried-lose-insurance-coverage-i-think-so
Cerberus
@Chuck Butcher:
Uh huh.
Do you even understand anything I argued or are you literally seeing a giant sheet of red and the words, “extremist” “liberal” “feminist” “bitch” floating in front of your eyes?
Yes, this bitch has a fancy degree and way more knowledge than you on this particular field of study. I’m sorry this threatens you. If there is any way I can make it up to you, I would, but then I’m lying out my ass this sentence.
J. Michael Neal
Only in cases where he has forfeited his rights.
I am uncomfortable with the idea that someone’s right to autonomy, bodily or otherwise, can automatically trump someone else’s right to life, when it is the first person’s actions that have made the second person dependent upon them. I would buy your argument entirely, except that I take the idea of a woman controlling her own sexuality seriously. One consequence of taking it seriously, at least for me, is a belief that she is responsible for the consequences of those actions.
To me, that means that she has willingly chosen to subordinate her rights to the resulting person. The morality, even if not the legality, of making another person completely dependent upon you and then choosing to let that person die rather than fulfilling the responsibility of keeping them alive, is abhorrent. It is, quite simply, wrong.
As I said, that is a moral belief that possibly can’t be translated into law for the reasons you cite. Bodily autonomy is different than monetary autonomy, and possibly should be respected in all cases. That doesn’t change the fact that the set of choices is morally wrong.
This is the problem with trying to answer the problem purely with science. Other mammals are not human. Now, maybe they all should have the same rights that humans have, but we have drawn a line saying that they don’t. Therefore, the question of exactly when they go from a fetus to an animal don’t have any legal force, and no moral force for most of us. Quoting all fields of mammalian biology with regards to the question of when someone becomes human is pointless. It can’t answer that question, unless you want to assert that humans and other mammals are no different under law or morality.
Emma Anne
She chose to engage in the behavior that led to it of her own will.
I *knew* we’d get to the part about she should have kept her laegs together sooner or later. All tribute to BJ and its denizens that it took so long.
J. Michael Neal
Bullshit. This is nothing but pure, unadulterated bullshit. My argument isn’t that sex is wrong, or makes anyone into any sort of lower class citizen. It’s that actions have consequences. Becoming pregnant is a very predictable consequence of having sex. Biologically speaking, in fact, becoming pregnant is the vast part of the point of having sex.
A woman is not signing herself up for any sort of third-class status. What she is signing herself up for is the possibility that she is going to become pregnant. At some point after becoming pregnant, that fetus becomes a person. The woman is going to have to take legal responsibility for that child. That point may be at birth, when the child legally becomes hers. Note that it does so even in the case of immediate adoption. She has to go through a legal process to transfer responsibility for the baby to someone else. (For procedural reasons, this may be conducted prior to the birth, but the legal process must be completed.) If she simply abandons the baby, that is a felony.
Most of us here think that abortion is okay up until the point where the fetus becomes human. Cerberus believes that it is okay past that point. Fine. For the rest of us, my statement isn’t that a woman becomes anything less because she had sex. It’s because we think that she has legal responsibilities that result from the consequences of that sex once the fetus becomes a person.
If someone believes that a fetus becomes a person at conception, it does not necessarily mean that they believe that sex is dirty and so that the woman must be punished. For many of them, it means that they simply believe that the legal responsibility attaches at an earlier stage than we do.
Unless you are arguing that legal responsibility for a baby *never* attaches to the woman, you don’t believe your own argument. At that point, who isn’t taking a woman’s sexuality seriously?
John Sears
@Emma Anne: But of course. That’s ultimately what it almost always comes down to; a deeply, deeply held belief that women who get pregnant are sluts, and deserve whatever punishment they get, for God on high has smote them for their iniquity.
Cerberus
@J. Michael Neal:
It would be on the narrow question of humanity. However, on the case of when a giraffe is a new giraffe, rather than an “expected” giraffe is of critical interest in zoology and has been well explored for that. Also, well, it’s pretty unethical to dice up humans for science experiments, so a lot of research into mammalian processes start on other animals. The process has been thoroughly examined in mice, dogs, monkeys, chickens, etc… for the mammalian process of birth and the differentiation and hormone regulation required.
This is a lot of how we know so much, some more is by artificially stimulating some of these conditions, fake fertilizing and growing an egg into later stages, some others by examining the end result of abortions.
The only reason I didn’t invoke even more sections of animalia is because the notion of placental birth is fairly unique to mammals.
The reptilehood of reptiles or the birdhood of avians is determined by their hatching, otherwise the egg was addled.
So the X-hood of a new organism is indeed a biological summation for reasons you are unable and unwilling to approach for fear of losing the metaphysical.
This stalemate is familiar to me. It happens often in the evolution debate. I’m sorry, biology just happened that way. I’m sorry it hurts, but you’ll get over it…with time.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
Shorter J. Michael Neal: She decided to have sex so it’s only right that she suffers the consequences for doing so.
Punishment? Gotcha.
If every single woman in the country withheld sex until they were given the right to control their own body, just about every single man would be screaming at their reps to pass the bill already. Since most men already have pretty good access to what they want, they don’t have to give a shit about women and their rights.
And they don’t.
Fulcanelli
Overheard outside a home in a small town deep in the conservative Heartland(TM) of Red State America…
Does it suck and make me squeamish? Yup.
Is it my body and consequently my decision to make? Nope.
Such is the price of freedom for all. This is my deeply held belief.
Cerberus
So J Michael Neal believes a woman deserves it because sex carries the risk of pregnancy, that child support is an assault on his freedom, and that bodily autonomy is a non-issue…
Intriguing.
I make no judgments or pronouncements, I favor no particular side, I just leave this here with little note or fanfare and let the conclusions settle where they may.
J. Michael Neal
@Emma Anne:
I knew that writing that sentence would generate exactly this response. I never said that she should keep her legs together. A woman should do whatever she wants with her sexuality. However, like all other behaviors that an adult, autonomous person takes, she should be prepared to live with the consequences of that action. If the result of that action is a person, she must accept that her actions have left a human being completely and totally dependent upon her, and that, if she ignores that, she will be saying that her autonomy is more important than that other person’s life.
Again, in my opinion, that moment doesn’t come until some time during the third trimester. Prior to that, she isn’t responsible for another person. However, that’s the result of my views of when a fetus becomes a person, not due to my views of female sexuality.
As for your knee jerk response, it demonstrates the blinders you are wearing. You seem to be arguing that a woman should be able to fuck whoever and whenever she wants and not have to live with the consequences of it. No one gets to live any part of their life that way.
John Sears
@J. Michael Neal: Ah, I see.
It’s not that dirty, dirty sluts are second-class citizens.
It’s that dirty, dirty *pregnant sluts* are second-class citizens. Because biology says so.
That perspective is so incredibly precious, and yet so tragic. It’s like a sad-eyed adorable puppy in the rain.
It also doesn’t hold a lot of water, considering that humans can have sex when neither partner is fertile, which in the case of the woman is the vast majority of the time, that human sexuality is part of a complex web of social interaction, or that sexual desire persists after sterility, say, menopause.
Leaving aside the entire issue of teh gay, of course.
Emma Anne
@Joel: i don’t see how productive – or accurate – it is to assume that the “other side”, maybe as much as 1/2 of the adult population of the united states, is arguing entirely in bad faith.
Then make your case. My contention is that most right-to-lifers are not motivated by what they say they are, and I have provided evidence based on how they behave. Lets see your evidence of their sincerity. Not their high-flown rhetoric, but their actual behavior in support of babies and new mothers and reducing the number of abortions. There are a few sincere people, just as there are a few pacifists. I’ve know a few. But not most of them.
Show me some proof that I am not fair or accurate. Or else stop with the civility bullshit, please.
Chuck Butcher
I want to get something across before I get lumped in the the RTL and other assorted idiots. Any rational society recognizes that there are practical limits to what it can allow, even in regards to things it calls Rights. Some folks here are making absolutist claims that don’t hold water. They certainly are not going to be made public policy, EVER.
I don’t want to argue points on something like this issue from a point of absolutism that does not exist at any point in our legal system. If you do that you immediately disqualify yourself as a part of a constructive dialogue. It is no different than just lying and calling one thing another. You will not get law that simply doesn’t exist made into being by making false assertions of absolutes.
This stuff about the sacredness of you body’s inviolability by others or the state is just that – stuff. The state and other quite justifiably do interfere and few of you would ever object to those interferences, though their is frequent disagreement as to the amount. You can get nowhere if you don’t start out on the ground you actually stand on just because this time you don’t like it happening.
You’ve got Cerebrus & J Michael both riding hobbyhorses that are factually quite immaterial, don’t advance shit, and aren’t really very entertaining.
Cerberus
I will note this though, there is an appalling number of men even on this fairly liberal site who seem incapable and even hostile to the notion of bodily autonomy.
This disturbs me, this has always disturbed me. Just as I have always been disturbed at the number of conservatives who are unable to grasp the notion of consent.
Personally I don’t believe Bodily Autonomy and Consent are terribly difficult notions, nor do I believe that anyone worth ever engaging sexually would ever be threatened by them. And yet the reality that is is one in which that viewpoint is not universally held.
That does not make me feel entirely safe, I might point out. I imagine many other women agree.
Cerberus
@John Sears:
Leaving aside the issue of the straight.
Dear me, there seems to be an entire plethora of sexual acts straight couples can get into that carry absolutely zero risk of pregnancy.
Cerberus
@Chuck Butcher:
Ah, High Broderism. Both sides are bad and extreme. When are you getting published in the Washington Post?
John Sears
@Cerberus: Well yes, of course, but I get the impression that we’d end up having to explain an awful lot of terms, and perhaps get out illustrations or that site with the little wooden dolls in various positions, for our friend J. Michael Neal here.
I mean, dear Eris. The vast part of the point of having sex?
I haven’t had a chuckle like that in a while.
Cerberus
@Emma Anne:
That’s not how it works, Emma. How it works is that one side provides ample proof of the political, social, biological, and legal reality of the situation, point out in full depth why what they are doing is fully supported by reality and how their opponents claims are not in concordance with reality. Further, they point out what their opponents claims are in concordance with, fully back up this assertion by noting the exact ways in which their reasoning is flawed one way but not in another way. Opposition then proves this in the method of their argument and the basic assumptions they carry.
And the other side then throws a giant tantrum and the reasonable middle notes how unfortunate the divide is and start railing on the first side to defend their position without ever noting how hallow and religiously oriented the second side is.
Because that’s how they do it in America, sister. Anything less would be practically communism.
Mayken
@Joel: I can think of a lot of reasons why we might want such a thing – women with pre-eclampsia or gestational diabetes for instance. I met a woman today at my sister’s ob-gyn who has blood clots due to her pregnancy. Etc. But yes, the ethical and technical issues involved in creating it – in addition to the questions about the effect of not having a living mother carry the fetus to term on its development, attachment etc. – will probably leave this in the realm of science fiction.
TEL
@Woodrow “asim” Jarvis Hill: Outstanding post! This is something I came to understand by studying the women’s suffrage movement. Not nearly as personal an experience for me (since we women got the vote long before I was born) as the Civil Rights movement was for you, so thank you.
And there isn’t anything much more personal for a woman than her own pregnancy.
Chuck Butcher
@Cerberus:
Um, lady (I had no idea nor cared) childishly absolutist would be what is floating in front of me. You really have no fucking idea whatever what I’ve said or what it means because you’re wearing blinders of the hobbyhorse sort.
I have exactly no use in my personal life for weak submissive women or in my professional life. The women who move in my circles may well be quite a bit more adequate than you. You see, most people I disagree with take the time to figure out why and what it is about. You just threw yourself on the floor. I am impressed.
J. Michael Neal
No, but thank you for misrepresenting what I’ve said. There are a huge number of conditionals in everything that I’ve written that you’ve decided to pretend I never used.
1) A woman deserves it only in the sense that she is responsible for her actions. If she has sex, pregnancy is always a potential result. At some point along the way, there is a human being that is legally dependent upon her. That moment may come at conception, and it may come at birth, but it will come. Pretending that it doesn’t happen is an abdication of the idea that we are all responsible for our actions. I reject that. On a moral level, I find it abhorrent that someone would take the action of making someone dependent upon themselves and then decide that their autonomy is more important than the survival of the person they made dependent. You avoid this question by defining personhood as occurring at the time of birth. I disagree. To me, a fetus becomes a person at the point where it has a defined cerebrum and higher brain functions. To me, that is what makes someone a person. After that point, even if it is legal for a woman to abort the fetus, I find it morally objectionable. She is responsible (or half responsible) for its existence and dependence, and she is abandoning it. That’s wrong. (As a discussion of rights, I’m setting aside the question of whether the abortion is medically necessary for the health of the mother. I’m not saying that that’s not an important question, just that it’s not very important to establishing the rights involved. Untangling those rights becomes even more complicated.)
2) Forcing a man to pay child support is an assault on his freedom, as is every other court ordered requirement that someone pay someone else. I think that it is a perfectly justified assault on his freedom (you seem to have assumed, for no particular reason except your own imagination that I don’t). He is, after all, half responsible for the child, and it is entirely fair to impose some of those costs upon him. That’s what being responsible for your actions means. I just don’t pretend that it isn’t a limitation of his freedoms, because it is. Tough noogies, big guy. Think ahead in the future if you don’t like it.
3) You are absolutely incorrect that I think bodily autonomy is a non-issue. To reach that conclusion, you have to ignore explicit statements on my part to the opposite effect. There were multiple posts that you responded to and, in fact, blockquoted, in which I made those statements. Either you have a short memory, or you decided to be dishonest about it.
My point is not that bodily autonomy is unimportant. It’s that fundamental rights such as bodily autonomy often come into conflict with other rights. When that happens, we sometimes must subordinate one person’s fundamental rights to those of someone else’s, because there is NO result that does not do so. My disagreement with you is that bodily autonomy must ALWAYS be the fundamental right that triumphs. I am prepared to accept an argument that it is legally true that it should; I have to think about it. I am not prepared to accept that it is always morally true. There are times that the only right thing to do is to accept that you caused someone to be dependent upon you, and live with the consequences of that.
John Sears
I almost laughed myself into a hernia carrying some groceries up the stairs just now.
This is very entertaining.
Cerberus
@Chuck Butcher:
Mmhmm.
Yeah, at the end of the day, I still actually know the cellular biology behind the process and you’re the one who is having a giant level spaz attack because some uppity woman knows more than you.
Again, I’m truly sorry that on this particular issue, I know more of the science behind it than you do. I’m sure there exist other issues, some other issue, in which you know more than me. Take pleasure in that, if you must, cause man, wow, issues.
J. Michael Neal
@John Sears:
I’m not sure how it’s disputable that the vast majority of the biological reasons for sex are reproductive. There are a few others, but that’s a fact. There are a vast number of *social* reasons for sex that have nothing to do with reproduction. Those are very real, but they aren’t biological in nature. (Okay, this leads to a discussion of the nature of the brain and the origins of social desires. Can we please ignore those if I concede that, depending upon the answer, my statement might need further qualification?)
Yes, social desire remains after infertility. This is more an accident rather than the actual biological purpose of sex.
Again, no, though I admire your ability to misrepresent me in insulting ways. You seem to have a natural talent.
Are you arguing that people should not be responsible for their actions? Is any attempt to say that women who willingly assert their autonomy by having sex should be willing to accept the consequences an attempt to make them a second class citizen? Can I get a list of the things that I can do that no one can make me accept the consequences of because it would make me a second class citizen?
Cerberus
Ok, I’ve now stayed up way too long. The two people I was arguing have fully collapsed into their expected stereotypes fitting the stereotype: “hostile to or indifferent to the rights of women” of the pro-life argument suite thus proving the claims made by pro-choicers up-thread. Biological knowledge and the fact that bodily autonomy actually has trumped in every legal estimation since the time of slavery and legalized rape have been presented and ignored by the expected parties. Expected parties have shown zero knowledge of what consent and bodily autonomy actually mean. Expected parties have shown hostility to female sexual autonomy which was well stated as the true reason hiding behind any pro-life argument.
I believe the point has been made as well as it’s going to get through the skulls of the expected parties.
Ladies and gentlemen, I believe it is time for a nightcap.
Cerberus
I mean seriously, the consequences argument? You were better off pleading ignorance about the purpose of sex.
John Sears
@J. Michael Neal: *snort*
Dude, seriously. Not even close to true, even assuming that you define sex as only including acts that are physically capable of transmitting sperm to eggs.
There are many, many kinds of what most people define as ‘sex’ that cannot reasonably be expected to lead to pregnancy, and most of a given month a woman is not, in fact, capable of becoming pregnant. Plus, as I mentioned, sexual desire is not contingent on fertility.
Yeeesh
Then there’s the fact that about a third of pregnancies lead to spontaneous abortion by the host body, for one reason or another.
At least use a qualifier of some kind. ‘Unprotected reproductive sex’ or something. Please. My sides are starting to hurt.
J. Michael Neal
@Cerberus:
Given that it is the narrow question of humanity that we are discussing it, this seems like a concession.
It sounds as if you are invoking quantum mechanics rather than biology. The reptile is neither dead nor alive until we can see the egg hatch. This seems really obtuse. The contents of the egg were a reptile or an avian or not viable prior to the hatching, we just don’t know which.
That’s because the question of what is morally a human being is a question of ethics and metaphysics, not biology. Biology can inform that question, but it can’t answer it. Your insistence of when personhood begins is dependent upon moral and metaphysical beliefs that you have, one of which (but not the only one) is that science should be the final answer. There is no particular reason why it should be, you just think that it’s better that way. That, itself, is not a scientific belief.
John Sears
@J. Michael Neal: Now now, be polite. I asked you for a list of situations in which you would or would not condone the involuntary application of invasive medicine upon a guilty or ‘responsible’ person, and we have seen neither hide nor hair of such a list or guideline.
Until you present such a framework, I have to conclude that this is a special case of responsibility, unique to pregnant women, who would therefore be a second-class of citizen.
J. Michael Neal
Very true! There are all sorts of ways that an autonomous woman can engage with her sexuality and receive sexual pleasure that can’t result in pregnancy. I’m willing to bet a large amount of money, at pretty steep odds, that very, very few of the autonomous women for whom abortion becomes an issue limited themselves to these options. Instead, my bet is, they bodily autonomously chose to engage in the other sexual acts that can lead to pregnancy.
Funny how pregnancy sometimes results from the decision to engage in male/female vaginal sex.
Absolutely. I’m leaving aside the issue of gay sex because, it is my belief that it very rarely results in pregnancy, and I also believe that, absent a pregnancy, abortion isn’t an issue.
If you know otherwise, you are familiar with a type of gay sex I’ve never heard of. Have fun with it.
Chuck Butcher
@Cerberus:
Dumbass, if the concept does not exist anywhere in our legal system, it is immaterial. You would not accept its existance – period – except right here right now.
I’ve been around here for awhile, typing away – you are the first to contemplate Broder as a model for me.
You assert a concept that doesn’t exist and expect to get somewhere arguing it. It is a lie. Factually inaccurate.
You cannot show me any Right that is not interfered with, not even by the “Founders.” You will, however, point at them and say, “well of course in this instance…”
You lay claim to something that does not exist – physical inviolability. It doesn’t exist and you’ll applaud its lack of existance until you hit this argument. Your application of logic is blocked by your emotions on this issue, I pointed out the problem and you don’t like it.
I personally don’t like the ability of accessing abortion being controled by lack of funds. I think abortion is a bad choice surrounded by worse ones. The very best thing is to not get pregnant if that’s not what you want, from there the alternatives go from bad to worse and worst is the legally unavailable abortion resulting in slaughter/abused children. I have no moral opinion on abortion, I see outcomes and I want them measured in a logic manner that results in the best and least intrusive results. But I’ll make no nonexistant claims in search for that.
short version – you’re being an asshole.
J. Michael Neal
I notice that you have conveniently edited a crucial word out of my claim. Is this a common practice of yours?
J. Michael Neal
Yes, lying about what someone has said is always a great time.
John Sears
@J. Michael Neal: Your belief that the question of the nature of humanity belongs to the realm of ethics and metaphysics is, itself, an unproven claim.
Perhaps someday we will discover a simple test. Maybe there is, despite all evidence to the contrary, such a thing as a soul, and we will invent… a soul detector. A gizmo, to solve this dilemma. Perhaps reality is all on a quantum computer, and there’s a tag in our quantum metadata that says ‘human = 1’.
There was a time when philosophers were the only people ‘qualified’ to tell us about the nature of physical reality too. That’s how we got things like aether, or Plato’s wacky stuff. Then some clever blokes came up with physics, and, well…
J. Michael Neal
Fine. I had assumed that it was obvious that I was talking about male/female vaginal sex. In a discussion where a necessary element of the whole thing is a pregnancy, it’s not an unreasonable assumption to make. However, if you prefer, I will modify it to the rather tautological claim that:
Any sex that results in a pregnancy had pregnancy as a reasonably predictable result, and so a woman should be willing to live with the consequences.
Does that make you happy? Can we discard all of the irrelevancies about gay sex, and people that are so careful that they can guarantee that the woman isn’t ovulating, and all of the rest? Can we reduce it to the stuff that’s relevant to the discussion?
Do you have any other pedantry you want to bring up? As a first class pedant myself, I don’t object, but I think it would be more efficient if we could just deal with it all up front.
Dr. Morpheus
@Cerberus:
Fuck you Cerberus, show us some links where biology/medicine has “scientifically” determine a fetus isn’t a human being.
Put up or shut up you piece.of.shit.pinhead.
You have absolutely no clue as to what science does. Determining when a fetus is a human being is a philosophical/moral issue. Science CANNOT determine these sorts of issue.
Oh, BTW, my girlfriend is against abortion, does that make her a woman hater who wants to control women’s bodies?
Oh, and for the record, I’m pro-choice.
John Sears
@J. Michael Neal: I’m sorry, I find the comment ‘biologically, the vast part of the point of having sex’ to be equally hilarious.
Apparently you don’t. You see some grand reproductive purpose behind all the countless millions of sex acts that could never lead to pregnancy, to people being born gay (or is that a ‘choice’), to the very high rate of spontaneous abortion, to the fact that, unlike many other animals, humans have sex when there is absolutely no possibility of conception, and on, and on, and on.
Or it’s all an accident, a flaw on the grand scheme, an imperfection. Sex without the possibility of children is incidental to human sexuality.
That’s utterly hilarious.
Chuck Butcher
@Cerberus:
Which is entirely immaterial to the issue of control of a body and that’s what you can’t see. Take the sheepskin off your face – I ain’t impressed. I made no pretense to being a biologist, I never cared for it much, anyhow.
All your issues about cells and physical demands don’t mean anything to the argument about control over your own body. Not a fucking thing. You assert an absolute inviolable right that doesn’t exist in regard to anyone’s body. It doesn’t now and it never did.
You can’t start from an imaginary point and get anywhere. You might just as well pick up an empty test tune and proclaim a cure for cancer.
stickler
One might note the interesting fact that J. Michael Neal has not yet acknowledged that all American citizens currently have the right to terminate a pregnancy in the first trimester. Legally, there is no valid debate about this point. Oh, sure, moral scolds have been waving their hands furiously for years now. As he is doing. But Roe v. Wade is (for the time being) law.
And Representative Stupak wants to make procedures involving that particular Constitutionally-protected act exempt from reimbursement under a new insurance coverage program.
That’s what this is about, not some Vatican-approved hand-waving exercise about abstract morality and personhood.
Ignore the Jesuit behind the curtain, folks.
J. Michael Neal
I didn’t see you ask that question after I mentioned the element of responsibility. Sorry.
Let’s take following situation:
Person A shoots Person B. In so doing, they completely destroy his kidneys in such a way that the *only* way that Person B’s life can be saved is through a transplant. Person A is the *only* individual who is a donor match, and thus the *only* way that Person A lives is if Person B is required to submit to losing one of his kidneys.
In that scenario, I would have no problem arguing that Person B should be required to undergo the invasive surgery involved in removing one of his kidneys.
So, yes, I believe that someone can forfeit their right to bodily autonomy in other situations. The problem in going from the hypothetical to the realistic is that it’s very hard to come up with a real life situation in which one person’s life is totally dependent upon another person responsible for their situation and no other person can save them. It’s even harder to come up with a situation that can reasonably be anticipated by legislation.
Pregnancy is close to unique in this regard.
J. Michael Neal
Yes, it is. Isn’t epistemology funny that way? As an uncertain question that can’t be proven one way or the other, the question of whether or not the nature of humanity is a metaphysical question seems to be . . . a metaphysical question.
Okay, I’m kind of abusing the word “metaphysical” there because I thought it was an amusing sentence, but it certainly isn’t a question of science.
stickler
Here, look and see:
Totally, completely irrelevant. Casuistry. Jesuitical hand-waving about moral absolutes that disregard American constitutional law and the full citizenship of female Americans. Nothing, nothing at all to do with the reality of either Roe v. Wade, or the Stupak amendment.
Very high-quality trollery, though.
J. Michael Neal
No, I don’t. You are imagining things. Of course there is no reproductive purpose to sex acts that can’t produce a pregnancy. My belief (pending that discussion of the origins of social functions, which should probably be extended to questions of psychology) is that there isn’t much of a biological purpose to these acts at all. There are a lot of personal reasons for them. There are a lot of social reasons for them. There’s nothing wrong with them. Hell, I’m rather fond of many of them myself. The thing is that human sexuality has gotten so complicated that we’ve moved beyond the biological purpose of sex in many, if not most, if not almost all, instances.
With regards to spontaneous abortions, the fact that many pregnancies fail does not bear on the biological reasons for sex, other than it means that we have to have more of it to produce the same number of kids.
It’s incidental to the biological purposes of human sexuality. It is an accident, in the grand scheme of things, that we have found so much purpose in sex beyond its original purposes. Very few other species have managed to do so, and I think that their lives are the poorer for it.
J. Michael Neal
One might note that I have done exactly that several times. It is absolutely legal. I have never argued otherwise.
Yes, he does. What’s your point?
It’s about both, actually. The belief about morality and personhood is why he doesn’t want the government to pay for it.
Why? Jesuits are permitted to have moral beliefs, too, and to want them to be enacted into law.
J. Michael Neal
I feel like I’m reading German. A verb! We need a verb!
General Winfield Stuck
A thread is a terrible thing to waste.
John Sears
@J. Michael Neal: Why should that apply to a person who committed an assault, and not to a murderer, though?
Let’s take the absolute most extreme sort of case.
Let’s say you have Person A kill Persons B, C, and D in cold blood. He laughs as they take him away.
Now, obviously, Person A can not help Persons B, C, and D. They’re dead.
Person A, though, has some very desirable organs. He, and he alone, is a match for 14 separate individuals across the country, who will die without a transplant. He is clearly guilty. He has been found guilty by a jury of his peers, and indeed, confesses his guilt loudly and frequently.
However, he does not want to die.
Would you be in favor of strapping him to a gurney, flying those 14 people into the hospital where he is restrained, and slicing him open while still alive to remove all of his organs?
I would not be. I value human autonomy more than the meat that makes up individual human beings. I have a feeling we disagree on that point.
I don’t think, however, that this situation would be so rare as to be impossible to legislate. Most people have organs that *someone* could use, and many people waiting for organs die without receiving one.
I would not be in favor of removing the single kidney from the one man, even to save his victim’s life, either.
This is by way of answering your question in turn: No, a woman is not ‘responsible’ for the life, or potential life, of the fetus she carries as a result of sex that she willingly engaged in of her own free choice with the full knowledge of potential pregnancy. While all rights must be weighed against one another, the right of a fully formed individual to their personal autonomy is an order of magnitude greater than the right of a potential person to that first person’s physical being (in my view).
Or, for that matter, another full person. This would, in my view, make a woman part of a second class of citizen, a class that, apparently in your view, is not limited to women, but also to certain violent criminals. It is not a class I believe in.
J. Michael Neal
As an aside, and in case anyone is still reading, I think an interesting tactical maneuver for pro-choice Democrats to pull in the Senate would be to call the bluff of their opponents. Introduce an amendment that would prohibit any insurance plan that is tax exempt from offering an abortion option. See who is willing to go on the line as wanting to take away the abortion rights of the well-off.
Chuck Butcher
@General Winfield Stuck:
Nah, the post held the seeds of its own destruction, then aided and abetted by those that wanted to assert non-existent rights or try to achieve some impossible philosophical/moral hair splitting judgement.
J. Michael Neal
@John Sears:
You may out an extreme case, but one that’s irrelevant to the question at hand. In your hypothetical, Person A has no responsibility for the condition of the people who would be getting his organs. There’s no causation, and no responsibility. Further, your example demands the death of Person A, which makes it unlike the case you are comparing it to. Instead, it becomes like a situation in which a late term abortion is necessary in order to save the life of the woman. You’re going to get very different answers to this hypothetical.
Really? I have no idea how you can arrive at this conclusion. The pregnancy is the direct result of an action that she freely chose. How is she not responsible for the fetus’ existence and its complete dependence upon her? Did the pregnancy occur out of nowhere? Was there some way that the fetus could have not been dependent upon her? Does putting quotes around responsibility change its meaning?
You are assuming something that was discarded earlier in the chain of posts. We are not talking about a potential person. We are talking about an actual person. This line of argument was predicated upon the idea that there is some point prior to birth at which a fetus becomes a person, and that the abortion is being contemplated after that point. Cerberus got out of the question by asserting that a fetus, by definition, does not become a person until the point of birth. So far, no one else has indicated that they share that view.
If we are discussing a fetus that is a potential person, but not yet an actual person, we have not yet run into anyone who would argue that the abortion shouldn’t be permitted. There are some of them, but it is a quite small subset of those opposed to abortion rights.
John Sears
@J. Michael Neal: There is only one vote that matters in the Senate right now, and that is Joe Lieberman.
If he votes against cloture, this whole thing goes down in a flaming wreck.
His wife is an insurance industry hack, and on balance, 87% of insurance plans offer abortion, private ones I mean. They like abortion because it’s far less expensive and risky than pregnancy.
So I’m guessing we could predict how he’d vote. The insurance industry desperately wants this bill to pass, without a useful public option, but with an individual mandate. Lieberman will do their bidding, and vote down any amendment that compromises that outcome.
He could burnish his ‘pro-choice’ credentials while doing it too.
J. Michael Neal
I go to great lengths to avoid studying SEC regulations like I should be doing.
John Sears
@J. Michael Neal: You did help clarify for me here.
You think that a person has to be directly responsible for the life of another person, not responsible for the life of A person. That’s interesting, and might lead to some interesting consequences.
For example, if you were robbing a store, and you shot someone, you might well be best off finishing the job, lest you become an involuntary organ donor some day.
But that’s a hypothetical. I can accept the standard of direct responsibility. I still find the scenario you outlined with the compulsory kidney harvesting abhorrent. If it wasn’t a kidney, though, and an organ that caused certain death to remove, would you still support a direct trade? One life for another? I suppose that’s a death penalty question and I ask merely out of curiosity.
As I said a while ago, even assuming that the fetus is a real person, I still oppose forcing the mother to carry it against her will. A world where we can be compelled into involuntary medical procedures to benefit others, or even save them, is not a world I would ever want to live in.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
Presumably it is possible for a man to not have sex even if it is offered to him, presumably women have this same capability. Since men leave a little ‘gift’ behind after sex, at that point I believe that it is up to the woman as to what to do with it. I think that once the sperm is no longer in the possession of the guy who owns it then he no longer has any say as to what is done with it.
If she gets pregnant, even if she told the guy she was on the pill or whatever, then no matter what he thinks she should be able to carry the pregnancy to full term. Likewise, she should be able to terminate the pregnancy if she so desires, despite any objections the man might have about it. If a man doesn’t want a woman to have an abortion then he has the option of not having sex with her. Problem solved.
IMO, the only people who can speak for women about issues that women face are the women themselves. This guy says let them hash this issue out amongst themselves and the men can butt out of it.
Fat chance of that though, men love control and are reluctant to give it up.
John Sears
@J. Michael Neal: I’m curious, have they put the ‘Goldman Sachs Is Always Right’ part in writing yet?
I suppose it might be more of an unofficial rule.
Wile E. Quixote
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. We need to change the terms of the debate, tell the fundies, wingnuts and other fetus lovin dipshits and fucktards that it’s not abortion, tell them that it’s “pre-natal capital punishment”. Because if there’s one thing that fundies, wingnuts and all of the fetus lovin dipshits and fucktards love as much as they hate abortion and teh gay it’s capital punishment. Hell, say capital punishment to a “pro-lifer” and they get a stiffy, start seeing starbursts and if they’re polite excuse themselves so they can go off somewhere and touch themselves (and if they’re not polite they do it right in front of you).
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
@Wile E. Quixote:
Tell them that any woman who conceives a child outside a church-sanctioned marriage must give that child up so it can be put to death to pay for her sin of sex.
That ought to get the wingers to line up and vote for it. Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if they asked for it to be made into a pay-per-view event.
John Sears
Well all, it’s been real, but I have a deadline and sleep to attend to.
Night.
reality-based
@J. Michael Neal:
ay, there’s the rub, isn’t it? The woman is pregnant – and therefore I, or Society, or Stupak, or Catholic priests – get to tell her what she can and cannot do with her own body.
After all, the slut did HAVE SEX!!!!!!
And you just revealed your own agenda here.
and that, Mr. Neal, is where all of your high-minded bullshit about societal interest in deciding personhood, or whatever, is revealed as just that – bullshit. It’s all about punishing women for having sex – for you too.
Mr. Neal, on the day when every single time YOU have sex, you are granting society the right to decide what you can and cannot do with your own damn body for the next 9 months – THEN you can argue.
and by the way – I am still waiting for you to provide links to all those anti-choice organizations that are “acting in good faith,” –
you know, the ones who believe so strongly that abortion is wrong, that they are vigorously supporting comprehensive sex education and free, easily available contraception to all comers. You know – the strategy that keeps Western Europe’s abortion rate a small fraction of ours.
Show me ONE DAMN EXAMPLE
chirp, chirp, chirp damn chirp.
There are none. They don’t want to prevent abortions, they want to punish women – just like you.
J. Michael Neal
I find it abhorrent, too. The problem is that there isn’t any outcome to it that I *don’t* find abhorrent.
Probably not, but this is an instance that I’m not sure I can answer in the hypothetical. At this point, the overlapping rights are too even for me to really decide in the abstract. I guess that means that you can construct a scenario in which I would say yes, but I’m not sure what it is.
Are there any consequences to her for creating the situation? This is an equally problematic hypothetical, since based upon our assumptions as to when humanity begins, the answer, obviously, is yes. It’s more relevant with an assumption that life begins at conception and abortion is a much simpler procedure.
J. Michael Neal
Really? Please explain to me what this agenda is that it took me almost 300 posts to reveal. My guess is that you are way off.
reality-based
@Cerberus:
true, that –
and scary, also/
stickler
SATSQ:
Troll!
The original post was about a dipshit amendment sponsored by Stupak, which would have made it harder for female American citizens to have (reimbursed) access to legal medical procedures. And you’ve just managed to squirt enough Jesuitical ink to coat the entire midfield, three hundred sixty two comments’ worth, without once dealing with the actual original post.
May Ignatius Loyola give you a great big rimjob in Hell. Tell him hello from the Elect.
Chuck Butcher
@stickler:
Nah, the seeds of destruction are right here:
I think massive amounts of silliness ensued, but…
Xenos
Oy. What wreckage. Waking up to find 364 posts and zero progress. Indeed, civility is very overrated.
Little Dreamer
@Annie:
Wait a minute, if I had an ectopic pregnancy that didn’t make it past the fallopian tube (and burst my fallopian tube taking one ovary with it, which damned near killed ME, so we can safely assume I wasn’t responsible) then can we charge God with murder and parade HIM through the streets?
Also, if God is all knowing, why does he let those who intend to get abortions if they find they are with child get pregnant in the first place? God is the guilty one!
Little Dreamer
@Chuck Butcher:
Um, pardon me, it appears you’ve never heard about the Christian savior who had no human father…
I can go to a church on any given Sunday and be forced to sit through sermons stating that Jesus was born of a virgin. Perhaps it is THEM you should be speaking to.
Little Dreamer
@J. Michael Neal:
Please be sure to chime in and notify us when your agenda was finally justified by switching a definition. You stated you were pro-choice on your very first post, I think not. Don’t think we’re not onto your tactics.
RedKitten
@J. Michael Neal:
You mean, to THEM, right? Last time I checked, women still don’t get pregnant all by their lonesomes….
Ruckus
@RedKitten:
Surely you know that J. Michael doesn’t want any responsibility for the actions of half the human race, he wants control of the other half.
Little Dreamer
@Chuck Butcher:
Uh, it’s a lot harder to get a physician to sign off on a hysterectomy than you might think. It has been my experience that some doctors are afraid to tamper with the child bearing capabilities of women who may become pregnant. After my ectopic pregnancy, I asked the doctor if he’d be willing to remove the other ovary as well, as I was finished with bearing children and didn’t want to deal with the pain and debilitation associated with periods anymore. I was told that, no, I would have to keep walking around with the one ovary I have. My chances of having another ectopic are higher, but I still have one remaining ovary, so I have to make sure I don’t get pregnant just to assure that I remain alive.
gil mann
Yeah, nobody except men.
Well, okay, I’m not doin’ so hot with the whoever/whenever part, but we’re talking about consequences here.
Two bullshit disciplines. How convenient.
El Cid
Strange. Apparently there are some people who feel it is personally important to them that other women bear (literally) the consequences of having sex.
I guess life’s just not satisfying unless you know that some woman, somewhere, is being punished for having sex without your permission or approval.
kay
Looking at the Stupak Amendment and then the Hyde alongside it, the Stupak Amendment looks more and more like a mean-spirited and completely politically calculated move.
It’s redundant, I think Hyde probably covers this whole field, which means it was staged for maximum anti-choice media play.
It reminds me of the anti-immigrant provisions Republicans add to legislation.
Cheap shot, pro-lifers. It’s a bully move.
So much for “well-intentioned”.
Xenos
Let me get this straight (I am a straight white guy, so maybe I am not sensitive to all the nuances).
A close family member of mine recently lost a pregnancy. The fetus died spontaneously in the 11th week – she went in for the ultrasound, and no heartbeat, no blood flow, for whatever reason this pregnancy just did not succeed. A couple days later she goes in to get it removed surgically in order to ensure there are no complications down the line. Under the Stupack amendment, would she have to wait for the situation to threaten her life before she would get coverage for the surgery?
I saw the bill for this procedure. It was listed as a “D & C”. It does not say ‘fetal death so there was a D&C” or “good girl D&C” or “Not such a bad girl D&C” or “She has to hold a job to feed her kids so please don’t make her go through three weeks of being sick before maybe expelling the dead fetus with a number of possible complications D&C” or anything like that. The reason for the D&C is extremely private and nobody’s damn business. The insurance company’s job is to pay for the fucking thing, not to act as some sort of moral arbiter so Stupack can get a pat on the head from his local bishop.
Just even thinking about this shit sends my blood pressure through the roof. Why NARAL not formed a paramilitary wing to start kneecapping these people is beyond me.
mandarama
@Cerberus
As a mother of two, I want to hug you for the huge laugh this gave me. Thread is full of painful Earnestness, but this made up for it.
scav
and it’s not like those pro-life people value women enough to be out in the streets agitating for rapists to charged with murder or at least up for manslaughter charges when an unsought pregnancy results in the death of the mother.
ksmiami
Wait this thread just grew and grew… I have one comment – I think Stupak (the amendment, not the rep unfortunately) will be removed in the Senate, but I think on top of this, a large provision should be made that all pregnant women are entitled to wonderful prenatal care like they have at Cedars Sinai, a luxuriating week in the hospital during and after childbirth with spa treatments and of course free follow up care including tummy tucks, free baby check ups and more. I mean if it is soooo important to these ignorant fu-heads that all babies conceived are brought to term, then they need to pay for it. Also, I don’t want MY tax dollars supporting viagra prescriptions or prostate cancer treatments.
TheHatOnMyCat
@J. Michael Neal:
Am I missing something, or is this entire troll here just an attempt to draw attention to your failed blog?
J. Michael Neal
@RedKitten:
Just Some Fuckhead
Good job, troll. You start out by gratuitously insulting me and finish by telling everyone to fuck off. Well played!
It’s pretty clear you still haven’t gotten laid.
Joel
@General Winfield Stuck: well yes, agreed. this goes back to my first comment (quoting the guy from 538), way back when this was a different thread.
gil mann
@J. Michael Neal:
Y’know, if I thought literally everyone here was misinterpreting my statements, I’d wonder if maybe I couldn’t do a better job of expressing myself.
I must lack your confidence. Along with your conviction that sexual intimacy should be approached like a game of Russian Roulette.
Original Lee
@Cat G: You go, girl (or dude – whichever fits).
LoveMonkey
@J. Michael Neal:
We are, we are, but in a secret way that only we know about.
Original Lee
@Betsy: Exactly. Too many anti-abortion activists want us to believe that pregnancy and childbirth are walks in the park. Well, sorry, they are not. I have a very close friend whose wife died in childbirth, and I have 4 more friends who nearly died in childbirth. Another 2 friends were on bed rest for almost their entire pregnancies, and one of them was in the hospital for 5 months. FWIW, all of these women were white and middle-class, so their situations did not result from poor health care or lack of access to health care. If they had been pregnant 100 years ago, they almost certainly all would have died, instead of “just” one.
Xenos
When someone’ ideal woman is a virgin mother, you can see how they have some unrealistic ideas about women’s lives and the parenting process.
Ruckus
@Xenos:
FTW
Betty_Betty
I am an American woman who, in theory, has equal rights to men under the law. I speak for myself and every single female I know when I say: I will not be going to the back of the bus again. If republicans or pseudo-republicans, the religious or misogynist try to re-legislate abortion, I will get out my motherfucking guns and fight in the street. I will fight you all until the day I die. I am not a generic vagina or uterus, I am a fully realized, sentient human being. I have rights, and I will not be going to the back of the bus again. I am an atheist and your religious superstitions and myths mean less than nothing to me. I will not be enslaved by them. I will fuck who I want, when I want, and I will be pregnant or not be pregnant according to my personal preference, not yours. I am nobody’s property, and I will not be going to the back of the bus again.
Test us, motherfuckers.
Raincitygirl
Betty, you have just won the internetz. Please contact me to discuss delivery options.