Politics: Where we struggle to kneel in the muck.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by sgtclub
Again, you want to equate the to, but I don't think you can. A woman suffers a burden if she is forced to have a child. A fetus loses its right to live. They are not equal.

Then why were you asking about pain at all? And if you start asking about pain, why do you care about the pain experienced by the fetus, but not by the woman?

[ltl/fb]

Originally posted by sgtclub
Again, you want to equate the to, but I don't think you can. A woman suffers a burden if she is forced to have a child. A fetus loses its right to live. They are not equal.

The woman may lose her life, in childbirth. And don't "exception for danger to woman's health" me -- this can happen completely unexpectedly. Everything is going great, the pregnant woman has had a great checkup within a week, and suddenly, boom, shit happens and she almost dies.

I guess you could say "tough luck, people die unexpectedly all the time" but I will refer you to SD's "tough luck" being a fetus in the wrong woman at the wrong time.

And do you know how many non-adopted kids are out there? You make women who would rather have an abortion have kids, some of them think they are so cute that they keep them when they're born. During these kids' childhoods, a decent proportion are going to be given up by or taken away from the mother, when they are older and far less adoptable.

Even before that, women who don't want a baby to the extent that they are willing to have an abortion are unlikely to take care of themselves during the pregnancy, meaning that the resulting children are more likely to be "imperfect" and thus less adoptable.

I mean, shit, how many 8-y-os with fetal alcohol syndrome, who weren't read to as kids and had crappy nutrition as kids and are discipline problems, have you adopted lately?

[SlaveNoMore]

Tyrone Slothrop
Then why were you asking about pain at all? And if you start asking about pain, why do you care about the pain experienced by the fetus, but not by the woman?

According to Edwards today, "When John Kerry is President, there won't be any more pain"

So I guess the question is moot.

[baltassoc]

Originally posted by Say_hello_for_me
Puhleeze, I am a serious anti-abortionist.

No, you aren't. Not if you can sit back and allow knocked up kids in Northern Virginia to stream across the state line to over here in Maryland (come on, you know we'll be one of the last to go, and Virginia one of the first) to murder their unborn children. Dead babies are dead babies, regardless of which side of the Potomac.

You, sir, are a federalist. NTTAWWT.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
According to Edwards today, "When John Kerry is President, there won't be any more pain"

So I guess the question is moot.

Fan-tastic. That seals it -- I'm voting for that Kerry fellow.

[taxwonk]

Originally posted by baltassoc
Blair deserves one - but for Northern Ireland and the Balkans, and perhaps for Afganastan, but not for Iraq (which is just too early to tell at this point. If Democracy takes hold there and peace reigns over the Tigres and the Euphrates 10 years from now, he [and W] would have my vote for the Nobel. If Iraq is the center of a shit storm, not so much.). It's easy to forget that before he was W's ally, he was Clinton's.

Bush and or Blair getting a Nobel for going to war? How Orwellian.

[Not Me]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Do you really view these people as murderers in the same way you'd view a man who walked up and shot your son?

This is a bad analogy. The proper analogy would be does he view a woman who gets an abortion in the same way he'd view his wife walking up and shooting his son.

How I view someone who has an abortion totally depends on why. Was the pregnancy a threat to her life? Did the baby have a severe birth defect and it would have been more cruel to allow the child to be born? Was she raped? Was she 12 when she got pregnant.

All of those scenarios are very different from the typical woman who has an abortion. The CDC keeps data on this. The majority of women who have abortions in the US are white, middle class women in their 20's who are not having them for health reasons or because the child has a birth defect. The majority of abortions in this country are of healthy babies by women who have the means to support them. Go check out the CDC stats on this.

[SlaveNoMore]

Tyrone Slothrop
Fan-tastic. That seals it -- I'm voting for that Kerry fellow.

But how many times?

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
But how many times?

The man who said, "vote early and often," was the mayor of Boston, I'll have you know.

[Not Me]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Fear of women, my man. Its all about fear of women. You'll never see a man totally comfortable with women as his equal out there picketing a clinic. Is that a generalization? Yep. And I'll bet my first kid its spot on.

There are plenty of women who are pro-life.

[sgtclub]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Maybe what you mean is not what you're saying -- that you don't consider the woman's interests -- but that the fetus' demise outweighs almost any possible interest the woman could have. If so, you'd get more sympathy if you acknowledged the woman's interests instead of suggesting that she gets whatever she's got coming if she chooses to have sex.

Yes, this is what I mean. I do not believe a woman has something coming to her, that's ridiculous.

Although I still don't understand how any of this changes if the fetus is the product of rape, which is where we started. As someone else said, the harm to it is no less in those circumstances.

Logically, you are right. But still, there seems to be something intuitively different about a woman's rights in this scenario.

[Say_hello_for_me]

Originally posted by ltl/fb

And do you know how many non-adopted kids are out there? You make women who would rather have an abortion have kids, some of them think they are so cute that they keep them when they're born. During these kids' childhoods, a decent proportion are going to be given up by or taken away from the mother, when they are older and far less adoptable.

I appreciate the point you are making about unwanted kids. And, I appreciate DTB's point about the racial disparity in unwanted kids. These are both huge problems, though my understanding is that adopting the neediest kids is like adopting an angry martian shark. I know one nice girl who's family has fostered 100s of these kids for Chicago's DCFS, and I know a lot of people in Chicago who deal with the kids before they are taken out of their homes and put up in foster homes. Strangely, the girl I know is from a farm town about 50 miles South of Chicago. They do whatever they can to take these kids out of the zooey neighborhoods. And then there is the DCFS system itself, where kids are constantly raping each other etc. etc. etc. Thank God for some of these foster parents, though not necessarily all.

That said, its been kind of interesting watching the abortion, and teenage pregnancy rates fall together ever since that nice Bill Clinton forced his Contract With America on y'all and ended welfare. In the big picture, we roll back the Great Society bullshit to somewhere around 1927-levels, I doubt there is anything left for us to argue about on a societal level.

ET clarify that they didn't foster hundreds of kids "at a time"

[Not Me]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Call me callous, but I see a pharmaceutical solution to the "what about the pain the fetus might feel?" argument.

Interesting that you bring that up. When the so called partial-birth abortions are done on third trimester feti, they don't use anesthesia for the baby, although they could. What kind of fucking monster would do something like that? These docs who will crush a child's skull with a forceps and hack it to death should be required to euthanize the child first with KCL or at least anesthetize the kid. Monsters.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Thanks for trying to help, but that really doesn't alleviate my jurisdictional nonplussedness (hi dtb!).

You are having trouble here because you've been thinking too much about how our government acts without regard to due process and other rights abroad.

Think of tax burdens - you get to pay US taxes whereever you go in the world. Think of the foreign corrupt practices act - you can't bribe anyone no matter where you go. But, whatever you do, don't think of Gitmo.

[ltl/fb]

Originally posted by sgtclub
Logically, you are right. But still, there seems to be something intuitively different about a woman's rights in [the case of rape (and presumably incest)].

Oh good god. (a) your "intuitive" thing is kinda crap and (b) how would the woman access the exception for rape? Would there have to be a conviction? A trial? Charges filed? Visible violence to the woman?