GOP Lawmaker Explains Why All Abortions Should Be Illegal

[Brad_ATX 13,654]

14 hours ago, TitanTiger said:

Committing more violence isn't going to bring her healing.  It's not going to undo the rape.  It's going to add to the trauma.  It's not going to make her more human to kill another human for the sins of someone else.  Killing an innocent is what is dehumanizing.

What I am saying is, a life is equal to a life.  Hers is no more equal than that of the child and the child's is not more equal than the mother.  If the pregnancy was going to put the mother's life at risk, then we have an equality of circumstance.  But that's not what this is.

That's a big assumption.  I believe many women would argue that forcing her to carry a child after a rape is actually adding to the trauma by delaying her ability to get back to a normal life.  It's not her responsibility to bear the fruit of someone else's evil.  And frankly, it's unethical to ask her to do so.

[TitanTiger 20,471]

1 minute ago, Brad_ATX said:

That's a big assumption.  I believe many women would argue that forcing her to carry a child after a rape is actually adding to the trauma by delaying her ability to get back to a normal life.  It's not her responsibility to bear the fruit of someone else's evil.  And frankly, it's unethical to ask her to do so.

Killing never comes without consequence, even if it's only to one's psyche.

[maxwere 82]

I wasn't going to link this, but since @homersapien made a good geopolitics comment & since the vid mocks the gross internal inconsistency of the alt-right.  Enjoy:

Science, logic, reason has no ground to form morality on its own.  It has to borrow moral suppositions from elsewhere.  The universe is an evolved machine, a grandpa gets randomly knocked off on facebook... so what in the name of science?  How does that transgress logic?  It doesn't.

[alexava 6,973]

45 minutes ago, Brad_ATX said:

That's a big assumption.  I believe many women would argue that forcing her to carry a child after a rape is actually adding to the trauma by delaying her ability to get back to a normal life.  It's not her responsibility to bear the fruit of someone else's evil.  And frankly, it's unethical to ask her to do so.

If anything it solidifies why early term abortion absolutely should be a woman's choice. Rape or not. There is no doubt a woman should not be forced to carry and deliver and continue to live out this pure evil. If you lump it in with all pregnancies it devalues all of them. I have always been pro choice ( but favor limits on terms) but never emotional about it. In other words I would never celebrate or encourage or cheer on an abortion. I prefer birth ,adoption, but would not force it by law. This idea of forcing even rape victims to carry and deliver makes me want to march in support of choice. I find it beyond ridiculous. 

[Brad_ATX 13,654]

8 minutes ago, alexava said:

If anything it solidifies why early term abortion absolutely should be a woman's choice. Rape or not. There is no doubt a woman should not be forced to carry and deliver and continue to live out this pure evil. If you lump it in with all pregnancies it devalues all of them. I have always been pro choice ( but favor limits on terms) but never emotional about it. In other words I would never celebrate or encourage or cheer on an abortion. I prefer birth ,adoption, but would not force it by law. This idea of forcing even rape victims to carry and deliver makes me want to march in support of choice. I find it beyond ridiculous. 

This basically echoes my stance 100% on the subject.  I'm someone who is married to a woman that would likely have to get an abortion if she got pregnant.  She has several rare health conditions that would basically put her life at risk.  We take every precaution imaginable (I'm going to be sterilized soon to completely take it out of the equation).  Still, there's always a small chance that a pregnancy could happen. And if it did, we would have to terminate it.  It's not something that we would be happy about by any means and we know we would have to live with the reminder every day, but it's the logical choice to protect my wife which is what I vowed to do when we got married.

[alexava 6,973]

13 minutes ago, Brad_ATX said:

This basically echoes my stance 100% on the subject.  I'm someone who is married to a woman that would likely have to get an abortion if she got pregnant.  She has several rare health conditions that would basically put her life at risk.  We take every precaution imaginable (I'm going to be sterilized soon to completely take it out of the equation).  Still, there's always a small chance that a pregnancy could happen. And if it did, we would have to terminate it.  It's not something that we would be happy about by any means and we know we would have to live with the reminder every day, but it's the logical choice to protect my wife which is what I vowed to do when we got married.

Sorry for her condition but you are correct in putting her first and I doubt you will let anyone tell you different. I hope you get the opportunity to adopt one day... If you aspire to be parents. Because of a couple of situations I have seen lately I would like to see more non baby adoptions. Despite what some say there is a lack of willing families taking these children from grade school to 16 especially when trying to keep siblings together. I even consider it myself briefly but our life is way too busy now to take on more. 

[TitanTiger 20,471]

On 4/19/2017 at 10:42 AM, Brad_ATX said:

This basically echoes my stance 100% on the subject.  I'm someone who is married to a woman that would likely have to get an abortion if she got pregnant.  She has several rare health conditions that would basically put her life at risk.  We take every precaution imaginable (I'm going to be sterilized soon to completely take it out of the equation).  Still, there's always a small chance that a pregnancy could happen. And if it did, we would have to terminate it.  It's not something that we would be happy about by any means and we know we would have to live with the reminder every day, but it's the logical choice to protect my wife which is what I vowed to do when we got married.

I've yet to, in all my years of living and moving amongst conservative, pro-life evangelicals, met someone who believed that an abortion (or at least a too early delivery attempt) wasn't warranted in cases where the woman's life was in danger from carrying to term.  I know they exist, but they're like unicorns.  I've met women who say they would not abort even if their life was in danger, but they wouldn't go so far as to say that they'd make that the law.  Even the Catholic church teaches that you do what is medically necessary to save the mother's life but you do not do so in a way that your only intent is to kill the child.  In other words, you attempt to save both, but if the child dies in the course of that attempt, it is not considered an abortion.  That is a fundamentally different thing than purposely choosing to inject saline into the amniotic sac and chemically burn the fetus, crush it with various instruments, then rip it apart with powerful suction.

[maxwere 82]

Though I disagree, I think both @Brad_ATX and @alexava have very well reasoned arguments.  Kudos.

I would challenge you guys to defend your premise that rape is evil (immoral) and the method you determine this.  (There are currently cultures that don't see certain forms of rape this way.  How can you objectively criticize those cultural practices?)  I'm particularly interested to see if you can do it without appeal to consensus, natural rights or some other kind of subjective social decency.

[homersapien 11,354]

3 hours ago, TitanTiger said:

Actually science does make such a claim.  Life begins at conception.  It's as plain as day and utterly verifiable.  And this understanding is universal and without regard for religious or philosophical considerations:

"Development of the embryo begins at Stage 1 when a sperm fertilizes an oocyte and together they form a zygote."
[England, Marjorie A. Life Before Birth. 2nd ed. England: Mosby-Wolfe, 1996, p.31]

 

"Human development begins after the union of male and female gametes or germ cells during a process known as fertilization (conception).

"Fertilization is a sequence of events that begins with the contact of a sperm (spermatozoon) with a secondary oocyte (ovum) and ends with the fusion of their pronuclei (the haploid nuclei of the sperm and ovum) and the mingling of their chromosomes to form a new cell. This fertilized ovum, known as a zygote, is a large diploid cell that is the beginning, or primordium, of a human being."
[Moore, Keith L. Essentials of Human Embryology. Toronto: B.C. Decker Inc, 1988, p.2]

 

"Embryo: the developing organism from the time of fertilization until significant differentiation has occurred, when the organism becomes known as a fetus."
[Cloning Human Beings. Report and Recommendations of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission. Rockville, MD: GPO, 1997, Appendix-2.]

 

"Embryo: An organism in the earliest stage of development; in a man, from the time of conception to the end of the second month in the uterus."
[Dox, Ida G. et al. The Harper Collins Illustrated Medical Dictionary. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993, p. 146]

 

"Embryo: The early developing fertilized egg that is growing into another individual of the species. In man the term 'embryo' is usually restricted to the period of development from fertilization until the end of the eighth week of pregnancy."
[Walters, William and Singer, Peter (eds.). Test-Tube Babies. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1982, p. 160]

 

"The development of a human being begins with fertilization, a process by which two highly specialized cells, the spermatozoon from the male and the oocyte from the female, unite to give rise to a new organism, the zygote."
[Langman, Jan. Medical Embryology. 3rd edition. Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1975, p. 3]

 

"Embryo: The developing individual between the union of the germ cells and the completion of the organs which characterize its body when it becomes a separate organism.... At the moment the sperm cell of the human male meets the ovum of the female and the union results in a fertilized ovum (zygote), a new life has begun.... The term embryo covers the several stages of early development from conception to the ninth or tenth week of life."
[Considine, Douglas (ed.). Van Nostrand's Scientific Encyclopedia. 5th edition. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1976, p. 943]

 

"I would say that among most scientists, the word 'embryo' includes the time from after fertilization..."
[Dr. John Eppig, Senior Staff Scientist, Jackson Laboratory (Bar Harbor, Maine) and Member of the NIH Human Embryo Research Panel -- Panel Transcript, February 2, 1994, p. 31]

 

"The development of a human begins with fertilization, a process by which the spermatozoon from the male and the oocyte from the female unite to give rise to a new organism, the zygote."
[Sadler, T.W. Langman's Medical Embryology. 7th edition. Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins 1995, p. 3]

 

"The question came up of what is an embryo, when does an embryo exist, when does it occur. I think, as you know, that in development, life is a continuum.... But I think one of the useful definitions that has come out, especially from Germany, has been the stage at which these two nuclei [from sperm and egg] come together and the membranes between the two break down."
[Jonathan Van Blerkom of University of Colorado, expert witness on human embryology before the NIH Human Embryo Research Panel -- Panel Transcript, February 2, 1994, p. 63]

 

"Zygote. This cell, formed by the union of an ovum and a sperm (Gr. zyg tos, yoked together), represents the beginning of a human being. The common expression 'fertilized ovum' refers to the zygote."
[Moore, Keith L. and Persaud, T.V.N. Before We Are Born: Essentials of Embryology and Birth Defects. 4th edition. Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Company, 1993, p. 1]

 

"The chromosomes of the oocyte and sperm are...respectively enclosed within female and male pronuclei. These pronuclei fuse with each other to produce the single, diploid, 2N nucleus of the fertilized zygote. This moment of zygote formation may be taken as the beginning or zero time point of embryonic development."
[Larsen, William J. Human Embryology. 2nd edition. New York: Churchill Livingstone, 1997, p. 17]

 

"Although life is a continuous process, fertilization is a critical landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new, genetically distinct human organism is thereby formed.... The combination of 23 chromosomes present in each pronucleus results in 46 chromosomes in the zygote. Thus the diploid number is restored and the embryonic genome is formed. The embryo now exists as a genetic unity."
[O'Rahilly, Ronan and Miller, Fabiola. Human Embryology & Teratology. 2nd edition. New York: Wiley-Liss, 1996, pp. 8, 29. This textbook lists "pre-embryo" among "discarded and replaced terms" in modern embryology, describing it as "ill-defined and inaccurate" (p. 12}]

 

"Almost all higher animals start their lives from a single cell, the fertilized ovum (zygote)... The time of fertilization represents the starting point in the life history, or ontogeny, of the individual."
[Carlson, Bruce M. Patten's Foundations of Embryology. 6th edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996, p. 3]

 

"[A]nimal biologists use the term embryo to describe the single cell stage, the two-cell stage, and all subsequent stages up until a time when recognizable humanlike limbs and facial features begin to appear between six to eight weeks after fertilization....

"[A] number of specialists working in the field of human reproduction have suggested that we stop using the word embryo to describe the developing entity that exists for the first two weeks after fertilization. In its place, they proposed the term pre-embryo....

"I'll let you in on a secret. The term pre-embryo has been embraced wholeheartedly by IVF practitioners for reasons that are political, not scientific. The new term is used to provide the illusion that there is something profoundly different between what we nonmedical biologists still call a six-day-old embryo and what we and everyone else call a sixteen-day-old embryo.

"The term pre-embryo is useful in the political arena -- where decisions are made about whether to allow early embryo (now called pre-embryo) experimentation -- as well as in the confines of a doctor's office, where it can be used to allay moral concerns that might be expressed by IVF patients. 'Don't worry,' a doctor might say, 'it's only pre-embryos that we're manipulating or freezing. They won't turn into real human embryos until after we've put them back into your body.'"
[Silver, Lee M. Remaking Eden: Cloning and Beyond in a Brave New World. New York: Avon Books, 1997, p. 39]

 

The only device being employed here is an arbitrary distinction between "person" and "human life."  There's not real basis for it other than to diminish the value of one individual so as to confer the right to dispose of it like a mere thing on another.  Much like any violation of basic human rights, it almost always begins with an effort to simply define the other as a subhuman, a non-person - anything other than a human being.

Science also applies the term "life" to plants.  So is it immoral to pull a weed?

Obviously, for the sake of this argument, that's not the "life" we are referring to.  

For example, my father was brain dead when we "pulled the plug". We didn't try to prolong the living cells in his body which included his heart.  

Now tell me that making such a distinction was wrong.

If there is a scientific basis for the sort of human existence we are talking about, then it revolves around the brain and the potential for consciousness, not mere cellular development.

[homersapien 11,354]

4 hours ago, TitanTiger said:

That's funny.  I recognize human life.  It's a view based on science.  You arbitrarily choose to regard it as something else for the purposes of denying it rights, as if a personhood fairy perches itself at the edge of a woman's vagina and sprinkles pixie dust on them, magically transforming them into a person.  It doesn't get more arbitrary than saying someone is a person based on relocating 5 inches south.

If one bombs a town because one has determined more good will come of it than bad, you are making a decision regarding the lives of the innocents that are killed.  That's an arbitrary decision on.  

The hope or intention that no one is killed is simply a self-deception which is not germaine to the decision to bomb.

[TitanTiger 20,471]

13 minutes ago, homersapien said:

Science also applies the term "life" to plants.  So by these terms it is immoral to pull a weed.

No.  Because "plant life" is not the same as "human life."  This is a false equivalency.

 

Quote

Obviously, for the sake of this argument, that's not the "life" we are referring to.  For example, my father was brain dead when we "pulled the plug". We didn't try to prolong the living cells in his body which included his heart.  

Now tell me such a distinction was wrong.

If there is a scientific basis for the sort of human existence we are talking about, then it revolves around the brain and the potential for consciousness, not mere cellular development.

Death is part of the life cycle of human beings, indeed all living things.  It's one thing to allow life and death to take its natural course.  It would be a completely other thing to walk in there and shoot him dead.  

[homersapien 11,354]

4 hours ago, TitanTiger said:

Killing never comes without consequence, even if it's only to one's psyche.

But it's not your decision to make, which is large part of Alexava's point.

[TitanTiger 20,471]

Just now, homersapien said:

If one bombs a town because one has determined more good will come of it than bad, you are making a decision regarding the lives of the innocents that are killed.  That's an arbitrary decision on.  

The hope or intention that no one is killed is simply a self-deception which is not germaine to the decision to bomb.

You are willing to risk the side effect of some innocent lives lost to prevent the loss of many more innocent lives.  If you bomb the town for no reason other than revenge or convenience, then it's arbitrary and immoral.

This still isn't an analogy that's working for you.

[TitanTiger 20,471]

Just now, homersapien said:

But it's not your decision to make, which is large part of Alexeva's point.

Conversely, it's not anyone's decision to make to kill another who has done nothing to deserve it.  It's my decision to make (and by extension, society's) just as much as it's my decision to help bring about laws that say you can't beat your 3-year old to death for disobeying you.  It may not be my child, but we do have that right.

[homersapien 11,354]

1 minute ago, TitanTiger said:

No.  Because "plant life" is not the same as "human life."  This is a false equivalency.

Exactly.  

The point is that science has nothing to say about that distinction.  The "life" my father possessed was like that of a plant, not a human.   

[TitanTiger 20,471]

1 minute ago, homersapien said:

Exactly.  

The point is that science has nothing to say about that distinction.  The "life" my father possessed was like that of a plant, not a human.   

Science does make that distinction.  Whatever gave you the impression that science posits that human life and plant life are no different from one another?

[homersapien 11,354]

2 hours ago, maxwere said:

I wasn't going to link this, but since @homersapien made a good geopolitics comment & since the vid mocks the gross internal inconsistency of the alt-right.  Enjoy:

Science, logic, reason has no ground to form morality on its own.  It has to borrow moral suppositions from elsewhere.  The universe is an evolved machine, a grandpa gets randomly knocked off on facebook... so what in the name of science?  How does that transgress logic?  It doesn't.

"Planned Parenthood wants to kill anybody in the womb"?   

[homersapien 11,354]

1 minute ago, TitanTiger said:

Science does make that distinction.  Whatever gave you the impression that science posits that human life and plant life are no different from one another?

I am saying all of the scientific statements of biological fact you listed do not address human sentience.

[TitanTiger 20,471]

Just now, homersapien said:

I am saying all of the scientific statements of biological fact you listed do not address human sentience.

By what standard are you positing "sentience" as the benchmark?  How is this not arbitrary?

And what constitutes "sentience?"

[homersapien 11,354]

3 minutes ago, TitanTiger said:

By what standard are you positing "sentience" as the benchmark?  How is this not arbitrary?

And what constitutes "sentience?"

It's the same benchmark you will use if you are ever in that position, God forbid.

And I didn't claim it wasn't arbitrary.  In fact, I am claiming the opposite. All of our decisions regarding the taking of life are arbitrary. 

Look it up if you don't know what it means.   Remember Terri Schiavo?

[TitanTiger 20,471]

1 minute ago, homersapien said:

It's the same benchmark you will use if you are ever in that position, God forbid.

Look it up if you don't know what it means.   Remember Terri Schiavo?

You didn't answer the first question.

And I know what it means.  I want to know the specifics of what you will use to define it when it comes to abortion.

[homersapien 11,354]

21 minutes ago, TitanTiger said:

Science does make that distinction.  Whatever gave you the impression that science posits that human life and plant life are no different from one another?

Generally speaking, at the cellular level they aren't really different.   Science makes distinctions between all life forms but it doesn't address sentient life outside of fully developed humans.

 

[homersapien 11,354]

8 minutes ago, TitanTiger said:

You didn't answer the first question.

And I know what it means.  I want to know the specifics of what you will use to define it when it comes to abortion.

If not sentience - or at least potential sentience - then what?   What criteria would you use to determine whether or not to stop life support?  

And I don't understand what you are getting at regarding how I would "use" it regarding abortion other than pointing out a zygote or fetus is not a sentient human.

But keep in mind I am not trying to persuade you.  I am simply explaining my position regarding abortion:  The mother herself has priority over her pregnancy and the decision to carry to term is hers and hers alone.   And yes, that's arbitrary. 

I understand you believe differently, which is obviously your right. 

The real question that we aren't addressing is what should that mean from a legal standpoint.  I am assuming you would apply legal sanctions to abortion that supercede the woman's right to make her own choice.

Now while you can make an elaborate technical case for that, it ultimately depends on a "sanctity of life" concept which is more idealistic (religous) in nature than it is practical or scientific.

[TitanTiger 20,471]

Just now, homersapien said:

If not sentience - or at least potential sentience - then what?   What criteria would you use to determine whether or not to stop life support?  

You're making a false equivalency between someone whose body is dying and coming to the end of its ability to sustain life and one that is just beginning its life.  And even then, we are talking about the difference in allowing nature to take its course vs purposely murdering someone.  Those are not the same things.

Give me some basic criteria that will define sentience for a preborn individual.

[maxwere 82]

22 minutes ago, homersapien said:

"Planned Parenthood wants to kill anybody in the womb"?   

No.  If they've stayed true to Ms Sanger, just blacks, Mexicans and poor whites.