I detest abortion. At best it’s a waste of human life. At worst, it’s murder. But I detest government tyranny, too. I don’t like the idea of government dictating what women should or shouldn’t do with their reproductive system. Honestly? I don’t know what to think. Whether or when it’s OK to terminate a pregnancy, and whether or when it isn’t. But I do know that a government that protects a “woman’s right to choose” . . .
is talking out of both sides of its mouth when it seeks to inhibit an Americans’ right to keep and bear arms. How can you protect unborn life at the same time that you deny adult life the right to defend itself by any means necessary?
The cartoon above puts that hypocrisy into high relief. I don’t know what to do about the issue on the right, but I sure as hell know what to do about the issue on the left. You?
If you think a fertilized egg is the same thing as a human life you need to get your ass back in to a high school science class.
If you think all that is being talked about is a fertilized egg, you need to wake your ass up.
Not only did I get an A in high school biology, I got A’s in college biology, two genetics classes, and a a class in reproductive physiology. Then I spent five years working for a genetics company.
It’s generally accepted knowledge that fertilization is when a new organism, complete with its own unique set of genes, is created. At that point, the single-celled zygote could be DNA tested to determine that it’s human (or not).
If you don’t understand that, then remedial biology might be the route for you.
^*drops mic*
beat me too it. lol
^ *runs up and punts mic across the room
Curtis in IL,
But but but, the fertilized egg only has two, no make that four, darn it now it is eight, blasted 16 … I can’t keep count because it is reproducing and growing so fast.
To all of you naysayers, how many cells does a person have to have in order to be a person? What is the threshold? If you tell me some number like 50 million cells, does that mean I can chop 50 million cells off of you because less than 50 million cells is not a human and not relevant?
Here is where I am going with this. People that ascribe “personhood” to characteristics like self-awareness, autonomy, developmental level (whether physical or mental), etc. are opening Pandora’s box for arguments to terminate human life. If you say it is okay to terminate an unborn child because they are not aware of their life, then it must also be okay to terminate a born child (or even adult) as long as they are not aware of their life. Sleeping soundly? Unconscious from an injury? In a coma? A person is not aware of their life in all three situations. Can we therefore righteously terminate their lives?
When an individual dies is the purview of our Creator … or nature if you don’t like the idea of a Creator. It certainly is NOT up to the whims of another person.
I personally don’t know what is the key cut-off to be considered a human, with all the legal protections that entails. However, by almost any reasonable criterion of which I’m aware a third trimester fetus IS a human being. I’d say let’s start there.
Now, that doesn’t need to mean that a third trimester fetus can never be aborted. There is another person involved (the mother) whose autonomy must be considered, especially if going to full term puts her at a clear risk of serious injury or death. So, there another legal framework with which we are all at least passingly familiar that deals with situations in which one human puts another at risk of serious injury or death: Self defense law. Self defense law is quite well developed, and, while it isn’t a perfect parallel, could serve as an excellent starting point.
The “clump of cells” argument is void because nobody can provide morphologic and physiologic parameters to “clump of cells” that corresponds to a zygote/embryo at any stage of gestation.
Old Ben:
By ***week 8***, all major organ systems or their framework are in place, the gross morphology is clearly and undeniably anthropomorphic, and there is a heartbeat.
Dr. Vino:
Yeah, a strong argument could be made for it being a human being during the first trimester. For a start I think we would be more likely as a political matter to be able to deal with late-term abortion. Damn, I guess that makes my suggested approach on this issue much like the incremental approach of a gun grabber (though, on an emotional level rather than an intellectual one, third trimester abortion disgusts me much more than first trimester abortion).
Very well stated.
“how many cells does a person have to have in order to be a person?”
The answer to your question is one (this does not apply to sperm or egg cells which have only one set of chromosomes).
Old Ben
There is a branch of medical science which aims to provide extra-uterine support for a fetus which cannot be carried to viability/term for whatever reason – and there are medical reasons why some women cannot do that.
At some point, we will see the “viability” benchmark pushed back earlier and earlier than the current 25 week standard.
So, hypothetically, in 5 years it could be 20 weeks and in 10 years it could be 15.
How do you design responsible and ethical public policy and legislation in that context?
AND, if we get to a point where this technology allows for survival of 15 to 20 week gestations (and our current standard is 25 weeks) what will we do with that dichotomy? How will we deal – intellectually, ethically and legally with the abortions that had taken place before the 25th week PRIOR to the arrival of that technology that saves 15 to 20 week gestations?
Uncommon, I agree with you. I say as soon as the egg and sperm come together.
Uncommon (…and Curtis), you guys are missing the real question. It’s beyond doubt that it is a human life. The real question is when does it become a person? Just leave it at a “human life” and, well, it’s no different than a lion in Africa.
But once you apply the dignity of being a person, a whole higher level of ethics come into play. One that pro-choice people will go to great lengths to avoid facing. We’ve seen throughout history (ours and world) the result how easy it is to kill when you strip away legal personhood.
Not true. Corporations have personhood. A human is much different than a lion in Africa.
Hence the term humanity, not personality. Personal treatment need not be humane, etc..
The personhood argument is a red herring.
Hillary says life begins when it leaves the hospital.
Life begins when the last kid is out of college and the dog dies.
DAAAAAAAYYYYYYYUUUUMMMMMMMMM!!!!!!!
But yes, that’s it in a nutshell. It’s alive (it’s undergoing cellular reproduction), it’s human (genetically, it can be nothing else), and it has a different genetic code than it’s mother (ergo, while attached, not part of the woman’s body). To suggest otherwise is to deny science. Why do they hate science so?
Exactly…
Im hardly am anti on this as I dont care one way or the other. Im a firm believer in letting people make their own decisions so should it be anyone but the mothers choice? What gives someone else the right to determine if the mother can or cannot make this decision on their own?
I suggest if you have that big of an issue with this subject, maybe you should just not worry about it. Spend more time worrying about yourself. Its no different than any other right, including gun rights, which are so heavily championed on this website.
The argument that “it doesn’t directly affect you so you should keep quiet about it” doesn’t really hold water.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the government were to pass a law stating that it was legal for people with green eyes to kill people with red hair. Would that mean that those of us who have neither green eyes nor red hair should have any say whatsoever? Now suppose that anyone with red hair was considered not to be a person, legally. Would that mean that only people with green eyes (and no red hair) could speak about the law, and everyone else should just shut up?
In this example, we would say, “Of course not! The rights of all people should be protected, and if they are unable to protect their own, someone else should champion their cause!” Therefore, I contend that the FUNDAMENTAL question, upon which ALL other arguments depend is this: is the unborn child a person, or merely a potential person? If the child is a person, how can we possibly say that his/her life can be ended simply for the convenience of another?
I agree . Just a lump of cells , couldn’t live on it’s own so it isn’t viable .
That’s my mom , she has Alzheimer’s and is unable to take care of herself , she lives in MY bedroom and uses up MY resources that I could be using in a much more productive way . NO ONE wants her and I have to put my educational opportunities on hold while I tend to her . It’s ridiculous and I should have a right to terminate her , she is mine after all . I’m going to cut her up into pieces and sell them to my local university so they can study Alzheimers . This is the only logical thing to do . RIGHT ?
It fits every definition, according to science.
If you think “being wanted by your mother” is the determining factor of what is or is not “human life”, then you are seriously deluded, and really fail to comprehend both biology and ethics.
When a criminal murders a pregnant woman, they are regularly charged with two deaths (the mother and the child). That is because everyone knows that a fetus is a human. He is just a very small human in the earliest stage of life, but without a doubt, he is a human.
It is just like anything else. A germinated corn seedling is a “corn plant”, even before it emerges from the soil. It is just a very tiny corn plant, in the earliest stage of its life. Even a corn seed is actually a corn plant, whose development has been temporarily suspended.
There is nothing magical about emerging from the soil, or from your mother’s womb, that radically transforms the fundamental essence of the organism.
People suppress obvious, but unpleasant truth, so that inconvenient people can be eliminated. That is the way it has all too frequently worked throughout human history. People dehumanized the Native American, and stole his land. They dehumanized the black man, and enslaved him. They dehumanized Japanese people and interned them.
Dehumanize the helpless little person in the fetal stage of life, and get rid of him. Then make up whatever nonsense you can think of to salve your guilty conscience.
Yep. If the mother leaves the baby at the moment of birth out in the cold and lt dies from hypothermia, it’s murder; cut the baby into pieces in the mothers womb at some arbitrary point a few months earlier; it’s a “Choice”.
You may REALLY want to review your embryology. And pregnancy physiology. REALLY.
This comment is so foolish it hardly bears responding, but others have, so I will too.
The point at which if you take no active steps to stop the events the fertilized egg will grow into a complete human being is the point at which the new life begins. Then that IS a human being and anything done to stop its growth and birth is the intentional murder of that human being. Simple.
It’s asking the wrong question, anyway. A human being is anything with a human DNA, but natural rights are not possessed by virtue of DNA – they are possessed by virtue of personhood. A non-human being that is a person would just as much have a natural right to life (and other natural rights). A human being that is not and cannot be a person doesn’t have such a natural right, not any more so than an animal.
I don’t have a ready answer for you wrt when an embryo becomes a person, but it’s pretty clear that the lack of a developed brain would disqualify one right away. So no, personhood doesn’t begin at conception, and neither should legal protection for life.
That is not clear at all. Especially when it is obvious the brain is developing and will be fully developed in a matter of months. OK, not fully developed, but developed as far as any newborn’s.
>> That is not clear at all. Especially when it is obvious the brain is developing and will be fully developed in a matter of months. OK, not fully developed, but developed as far as any newborn’s.
It’s fairly obvious insofar as the lack of brain implies the lack of conscience and self-awareness, which is necessary for personhood. It certainly shoots down the notion that life begins at conception right away. Beyond that, we could argue.
As for “will be developed eventually”, that means that the fetus will be a person eventually (possibly), but doesn’t say anything about whether one is here and now, which is the only thing that matters, really. If we were dealing with distant possibilities, then oral sex should be a crime on account of wasting perfectly good sperm that could have developed into a fetus which would eventually become a person.
You keep trying to create your own definitions. You are not qualified for that.
And your definition, where does it come from? Did the angel bring it down from heaven, etched on a stone tablet?
You and your mixed metaphors, you poor miserable person Where does the law define killing a human as legal, but a person off-limits? What of corporate “persons”?
Nobody needs angels from heaven to see the straws you are trying g to prop up.
In case you haven’t been paying attention, we’re debating what the law should say, not what the law actually says (if we were to go with the latter, then abortion is legal, end of discussion).
As for “corporate personhood”, it’s a legal fiction, for one thing, and bears no relation to real personhood other than the word itself. It’s also a travesty, precisely because it is designed to confer natural rights associated with being a person onto an entity which is not and cannot be a person.
Corporate persons are quite real according to the law. See, I am not writing my own definitions, like some unsavory people here. Or like on wiki.
You’re again talking about things that are irrelevant in context, but fine. According to the law as it stands in the USA, abortion is not a murder, nor a crime in general, for at least 21 weeks since conception (and in 22 states, at any moment before birth). Period. End of discussion?
Nope. See, the problem in our discussion was your playing semantics since you had no cogent argument.
Then you turn to the junk science of vaccine created herd immunity.
Maybe you are overdue for your gullibility booster shot.
Biology, by the way
Biology clearly defines what is and is not a person? You should go tell all these cognitive science researches that they’ve been wasting their time for decades now trying to come up with some objective definition – obviously, they’re all so blind that they overlooked the obvious.
Keep trying. If you redefine enough things you will only end up confusing yourself. Looks like you have succeeded. Human life is sacred, corporate persons are destroyed with regularity.
int19h,
“… the lack of conscience and self-awareness, which is necessary for personhood.”
I enthusiastically reject that idea on the grounds that it enables someone to execute a person who is sleeping, unconscious (from injury or anesthesia), or in a coma … because no one in any of those states has consciousness or any sense of self-awareness. I hope you would agree that it would be a crime to execute a person who was unconscious. Why is an unborn baby different?
We must never define whether or not someone is a human being and therefore whether or not someone has rights based on their current state of being, which includes so-called qualifiers like environment, autonomy, consciousness, developmental level, etc. To do so means that we actually have no rights at all because everything is “qualified” on something or other. No. Our rights are inherently ours. Period.
>> I enthusiastically reject that idea on the grounds that it enables someone to execute a person who is sleeping, unconscious (from injury or anesthesia), or in a coma … because no one in any of those states has consciousness or any sense of self-awareness. I hope you would agree that it would be a crime to execute a person who was unconscious. Why is an unborn baby different?
It’s an interesting question, but I posit that the difference is that for someone who is unconscious, they are in a temporary transition between their normal (conscious) state. In other words, the consciousness (and hence personhood) was there already, and is temporarily “away”, so to speak. If you were to kill them at that moment, you aren’t destroying the hypothetical future person, you’re destroying something that already existed.
In contrast, a fetus does not start in the conscious stage. It will develop into one eventually, but until that moment, there is and there never was a person there. There might be in the future, but I’m not fond of the notion of “precrime”, which seems a very accurate analogy in this case.
Note that the corollary of my position is that if a person is born into a coma and never leave it, then they’re also not a person (because they never were one to begin with). Also, if a person enters a coma or vegetative state without any possibility to leave it (e.g. if the brain has been irreversibly damaged to the point where it cannot sustain consciousness), then they’re not a person anymore, because their state is not temporary nor transitive in nature. Thus, neither of those possess full rights that would be accorded to the person. I’m comfortable with that conclusion (you can guess what my take on Terri Schiavo was)
In any case, I’m not aware of any definition that is strictly better than mine. If we assume that human DNA is what defines rights, then what about other sentient beings, and what about our future species as it mutates? At which point is the DNA “human enough”? And furthermore, why then do we deny the same rights to other species? If personhood is not the defining trait, then why shouldn’t an ape or a dolphin have the natural and inviolable right to life that we should enforce? Ironically, when people discuss animal rights in this context, they usually do bring the “they’re not self-aware enough” argument to the table, which is basically about personhood…
I’m also generally uneasy with this approach as it is similar to the historical definitions of “human possessing rights” via ancestry, that often excluded people based on their race, ethnicity etc. It feels like extending it to our entire species is just one more incremental step on that scale without really addressing the problems inherent with it.
Some early Fathers held that the soul enters the body at quickening, making it a human being — quickening is when the unborn first begins moving in the womb.
We know now that not too long after quickening, the unborn has fully human brain wave patterns. I see no way to deny that once the brain is that active, the unborn is definitely a person. So I’ll take my stand with those early Fathers and go with quickening,to err on the side of safety (since measuring those brain waves is neither simple nor cheap).
Scientifically an embryo is a human life. This fact is not in dispute among reasonable people. The question is a philosophical one: at what point does a human become a person, with the rights of a person including ownership of their own life? There is no scientific answer for that, and there will not be one. There is no clear delineation, it’s a matter of opinion. The determination is up to philosophical and ideological reasoning.
Slow gun news day.
We are talking about a gun , sort of . The one that shoots out life . The single barrel master blaster . The human creation tool that works in conjunction with the miracle known as a womb . The reason it works here on TTAG is because when the miracle gun and it’s miracle bullets meet another miracle gun we call ovaries and these bullets attach themselves to each other in the miracle womb correctly they Create gun owners like us and when you kill one of us it’s called MURDER , this is a no no . Thou shalt not kill . See how simple it really is .
How do you think you started out, genius?
From a medical, scientific, ethical and libertarian perspective, I cannot find any basis to justify abortion.
At the same time, in a very small percentage of pregnancies there is little alternative to termination.
But who decides?
In Denmark they have set a goal of killing 100% of children with down syndrome before they are born.
In the UK the goal is ‘merely’ 97%.
You can be pretty sure that if the prenatal blood test ever gets approved, HHS will force a mandate for prenatal screening of all babies. Think Gattica after that.
Many women face a choice of delaying chemo and reduce chances of survival if they choose a near 100% chance for life for the baby. Most women choose life for the baby. And I person knew a woman who died 6 month after her child was born because she chose the baby’s life. But she also knew that she have a less than 50% of lasting a year if she had chosen herself.
Yes. Setting parameters for when we do and don’t have personhood are problematic because technological advances are and will continue to set viability back earlier and earlier in gestation.
There are cases where the fetus suffers malformations that are incompatible with life. Other cases, regardless of fetal genetic status, the life of the mother is imperilled. If she is of reproductive age, then she may be able to reproduce again (no matter if this is her first pregnancy or tenth kid) if she terminates the pregnancy.
Of course, true dire medical circumstances represent the reason why only a small percentage of abortions performed. The rest are for what’s termed “social” reasons (wrong guy, wrong time, not enough money, too many other kids).
Try Gattaca instead of Gattica.
The problem is that uninvolved people want to dictate how everyone else should live – and that’s usually based on superficial input from even more uninformed people who have no standing in the argument and are simply getting on the emotional bandwagon.
BTW, I don’t like abortion either, but I refuse to even consider dictating to anyone what they can or cannot do. Society doesn’t have a history of being sympathetic to unwed mothers and hasn’t given them much in the way of alternatives that they can live with. If the pro-lifers wanted to end abortion then they should have a solution rather than just forbidding it. Like support for unwed mothers so they can take care of the fetus to term and raise the child – oh wait, that’s what welfare does. Or they could bear the child and give it up for adoption – oh wait, that’s what childless yuppies, hipsters and gay couples do when they finance a surrogate mother. Well crap, aside from medical necessity, I’ve come up with a pretty good pro-life position. Except it is never that simple.
So I think we as a society need to put these uninvolved dictators in their place by pointing out that fascism is alive and well in the hearts of these people and that we don’t need them to tell us what is right & wrong. It need not be about the baby – it is about choice – and it works for guns as well as for fetuses. Either we have the right to choose or we don’t.
Which kind of society would you prefer – regardless of subject matter – to have the right to choose or not to choose?
This should be reframed to the proper context of freedom or fascism. I don’t see any resolution in trying to accommodate both in our society.
If you understand that this is not just about “personal choice” but what kind of society we have, then nobody is uninvolved.
The difference being that the right to carry a weapon to defend you or another’s life versus the right to end another innocent life.
If any of those aborted babies had been allowed to live, which 95 out of a hundred would have survived to at least adult hood, how many of those now conscious and aware adults would have agreed with moms decision to murder them?
How many of those that have survived the possibility of being aborted would now say that mom should have had the right to never bring them into the world?
Who speaks for those that have no voice?
@Mark Lee
“BTW, I don’t like abortion either, but I refuse to even consider dictating to anyone what they can or cannot do”
You are saying that people have the right to walk up to one another and ghost them, because they felt that killing another human was a readily accepted choice to make.
“So I think we as a society need to put these uninvolved dictators in their place by pointing out that fascism is alive and well in the hearts of these people and that we don’t need them to tell us what is right & wrong.”
Killing innocent people should be against any societies norms and values, because it is the wrong choice to morally make.
” It need not be about the baby – it is about choice – and it works for guns as well as for fetuses. Either we have the right to choose or we don’t.”
Disgusting comparison of murder to my right to protect innocent life with a firearm. The Second Amendment is specifically intended to be used when the government gets into the business of murdering innocents. You have made the choice to condone the murder of innocents out of self convenience, and I have made the choice to carry a gun in defense from people with that exact wanton mentality.
“Which kind of society would you prefer – regardless of subject matter – to have the right to choose or not to choose?”
My choice is negated by my tax monies being used for the murder of innocents. I am an accomplice to murder simply because of a woman not closing her legs and swallowing or a man not pulling out. Responsibility is not limited to firearms ownership.
“If you understand that this is not just about “personal choice” but what kind of society we have, then nobody is uninvolved.”
Here comes the “we” again……. And, as always, short for “me deciding, you complying.”
“We” only means a lick, morally and ethically, if what we are talking about is limited to voluntary inclusion. Otherwise, it’s nothing but a convenient progressive sleight of hand for justifying tyranny.
Dr. Vino,
If something goes wrong during a woman’s pregnancy and she faces death or great bodily harm directly because of the pregnancy, I support the mother’s choice to deliver the baby (either naturally or via Cesarean Section). At that point medical science can do everything practical to save the mother and the baby.
I see no point in having both mother and her unborn baby die. Better to save one life than to lose both.
OK. What percentage of pregnancies present an imminent risk to life of mother?
And I have acknowledged that there are legitimate reasons to choose the mother of the fetus in that case.
However, when exploring those reasons one ventures deep into the brier patch.
Threat of imminent death of the mother and absolute incompatibility with life on the part of the fetus are more black and white. But what about genetic disorders that are NOT incompatible with life but will require life-long care for the child? And what about an overpopulated country with a one-child-only policy PLUS a societal preference for male offspring?
Murkier and murkier.
From a pragmatic standpoint I would have to respond that EVERY pregnancy poses a risk of death to the mother. The question is not if, but how great is the risk.
Further, I would suggest that if the woman is not prepared to accept that risk, she should make every effort not to get pregnant in the first instance, not to strike out against the unborn child she created who is now presenting the risk.
Kind of like handing a person you know is irresponsible a firearm and then justifying shooting them because they now represented a threat to your safety.
This is a strong argument for providing free or cheap birth control to Liberals. Abortion is not birth control it’s damage control.
I agree with you on both counts. About 2% of pregnancies are ectopic, and life threatening for the mom.
>> From a medical, scientific, ethical and libertarian perspective, I cannot find any basis to justify abortion.
From a crystal pure libertarian perspective, the fetus doesn’t have the positive right to his mother’s body as a support machine for its own bodily functions. Thus, it should be perfectly legal to serve it a vacation notice, and should it not comply, to remove it by force, for trespassing. If it dies as part of the removal process, or shortly after as it no longer has support, then that’s its own problem.
The mother was pivotal in placing the unborn in the position it occupies. Since that situation is easily remedied in less than a year, barring any complications which place her life at risk, the mother should be expected to not murder her choice.
Even the most reliable contraception methods can fail, and any birth, no matter how smooth, bears health risks.
So? That is exactly the point. People know the risks, even with contraception. They assume the risk. There is one way to not have to assume that risk, short of sterilization. If you play, you may find yourself creative a life. Accept it or don’t play.
int19h, just keep in mind that with social cons, it always boils down to sex.
You’re intending to sound like a retarded troll?
No, I’m merely paraphrasing Murray Rothbard, whom I consider an ideologically near-perfect libertarian. If it sounds like a retarded troll to you, you should take it up with Rothbard.
From a libertarian perspective it’s first necessary to know if we’re dealing with a person. A person is distinguished from a non-person by mental activity, which can be measured by brain waves. So until there are complex brain waves indicative of an active human brain (including sleep patterns and dream states), we can’t verify that the unborn is a person. But once those brain waves are present, there is no doubt that the unborn is a person, and fully deserving all the protections due any other persons.
That is quite the arbitrary definition. Also, since when is personhood more important than being human? We call ourselves humanity, not personality.
RF…oy vey you had to do it. I’ll get out the popcorn and watch the show.
The thing is, when a big guv program kills orders of magnitude more children than it was supposed to save, not a peep can be heard from the media or the pols that pushed it.
For instance, CAFE. Even the governments own studies prove that every time the CAFE standard is raised, highway and single vehicle crash fatalities increase. So much so that that know how lives each 100 pounds of weight reduction in the cars will cost and they know how many addition lives have been lost since the inception of CAFE.
Same thing with the short lived push for a Gardasil mandate. Turns out more children died from the vaccine than would have died from cancer it supposedly would prevent.
Welfare has destroyed many times more lives than it helped. But the call to grow dependency never ends.
ANti-gunner ignore the lives lost from disarming the law abiding. They will only ever quote “gun crime” stats and ignore all other violent crime that rises as the law abiding are disarmed.
This anti-vax garbage really needs to die. I’m sure, like most people on the internet, you’re gonna hate to hear this, but you are *COMPLETELY* wrong about Gardasil. The BS statistic you pulled came from raw, self-reported vaccine side-effect numbers to the CDC. The data wasn’t curated and is as useful to any real researcher as someone yelling in a foreign language to a room full of death people. Gardasil is a completely safe vaccine for most women and time will show it has and will continue to save countless lives.
I swear to god I don’t understand how some tin-foilers can be so completely obtuse.
And, you know what?
How about not obstructing individuals in making the choice to participate in your “vaxxing”, thus violating their civil and natural rights?
This is one of the REAL reasons to keep and bear arms.
Unfortunately, vaccination cannot be an individual choice if it is to be effective. It’s strength in numbers, a pure statistical approach to defeating disease. We need to have a certain percentage of the populace vaccinated, or else it’s not worth the bother. So your right to not vaccinate directly infringes on the right of others to life.
Here immunity, proof of the well-publicized statistical lie. But a lie nevertheless.
And your evidence that it is a lie is? Are you an immunologist and/or statistician?
I have offered as much evidence as you have. The internet has plenty of information available to read. I am not going to read it for you and explain the gift words.
>> The internet has plenty of information available to read.
Indeed! And all information that it has from reliable sources (i.e. actual doctors and other health professionals, as opposed to crackpots who peddle homeopathy and other altmed) indicates that you’re wrong.
So, in asserting that plenty of information is available, I am wrong? Compared to your total lack of providing any? You are inane.
Here immunity is thoroughly debunked so often it is laughable.
>> So, in asserting that plenty of information is available, I am wrong?
No, you’re not. You’re wrong in asserting that it supports your point of view.
>> Compared to your total lack of providing any?
You haven’t provided any, either. Just said that it’s out there.
I can provide it, I just assume that in this day and age an average person can open Wikipedia and type two words into the search box. But if that’s too hard, here you go:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity
>> Here immunity is thoroughly debunked so often it is laughable.
It might have helped your argument if you have at least learned to spell the term right – it’s “herd immunity”, not “here immunity”, as you have spelled it incorrectly twice already. I can’t help but wonder if that’s also why you’re unable to find any sane articles on the subject. ~
Wow, claiming victory based on wiki and autocorrect? You definitely have shown your superior intellect!
I can’t copy links on this tablet, but certainly would not have gone with wiki. Sesame Street for the internet, except that even Sesame Street gets things right
You’re welcome to present better sources that actually support the point you’re trying to make. So far, you haven’t referenced any, so there really isn’t anything meaningful to discuss aside from your autocorrect woes.
Google “herd immunity debunked” or “herd immunity myths” and read all the articles, pro and con. Then realize how your wiki-fu exposed your lack of knowledge on the subject.
I wouldn’t be speaking on this subject if I didn’t do such a thing a long, long time ago. Of course, unlike you, I also went ahead and checked the references that those online articles use for their claims, and the credentials of the people who wrote them. Which leads me to the assertion that I’ve made earlier: no verifiable and credible source supports your claims. Only the nutters with zero credibility in this (or, usually, any other) field who have an ax to grind.
Says the guy who uses wiki? You are a laugh riot!
Paul G ….. v …… int19h
DUELING …. High noon on Saturday, August 15th in the court yard of the of the Cherry Blossom Baptist church at the intersection of Smith and Broad streets . Bring your picnic baskets and own refreshments .
There will be a 250 pound hog roast , donated by Jaspers funeral home and Hardware goods .
The Gentleman’s pistols will be donated by Sir Jeffrey Franklin .
The winner will receive a mention in the annual ” Abortion Debates Forum ” 2015-2016 .
Pistols? Pshaw. True gentlemen do it with smallswords. I’m also okay with katanas, cutlasses and spears (anything else I’d have to buy special…).
Sir Jeffrey Franklin is providing the dueling pistols .
Knives are not in the least gentlemanly .
I suggest you take one of the pistols or the Sunday Gazette may read like this ;
….Paul G already won the duel , ….Int19h must have brought a knife to a gun duel . We all had ice cold water , smoked pork and Miss Daisy’s potato salad . Everyone had a great time and all went well . Mr. Jaspers would like to thank everyone for coming out and invites all attendees to drop by the funeral home Monday between 4:00 PM and 4:15 PM to pay their respects to Int19h .
It’s all good , all opinions are considered .
I recognize that some vaccinations save lives when they’re applied to the entire population, but what I’m seeing is that we tend to mandate vaccinations before we’ve actually considered the risk versus benefit, out of a misguided desire to improve general public health. Recently in Texas, the HPV vaccination was mandated, which is, essentially, legislation for the lowest common denominator: the risk of the disease is statistically insignificant, amongst males in particular, unless you make certain lifestyle choices. Something like that should remain the choice of the patient, not the gov’t.
If liberals are eager to abort themselves into extinction, I am not going to discourage them at all.
I see what you’re getting at, but the unborn don’t have political views yet.
Fetuses aren’t people. They don’t have rights. Not to mention there’s 7 billion plus of us already. Don’t like abortion? Don’t have one. As far as I’m concerned, it’s none of the .Govs (or anyone else’s frankly) business what people do with their own body. Either you’re a libertarian or you’re not. I chose to get a vasectomy rather than being saddled with some squalling brat, but believe me, if I was a woman I’d kill that thing so fast your head would spin.
You mean you would let a person decide what to do with their own body? The horror. I suppose you think it is all right for somebody to commit suicide if they want as well…you you you libertarian you, the shame.
As I understand it, it isn’t the mother’s organs that are being harvested and sold by PP. And it damn sure wasn’t the mother’s feet being pickled in jars in Dr. Gosnell’s clinic. In other words, there is more than one person’s body involved.
Not to forget that in the extreme majority of cases, that new life exists in that womb because of a choice the owner of that womb exercised.
Don’t want a baby in your womb, don’t partake of the activities that fertilize your eggs. That is the choice.
WOW!!! Thankfully someone loved you enough to give birth to you and let you be a squalling brat.
Damn, son. Angry much?
You do realize that the fetus is NOT the woman’s body? Right? Her choices put it there. (In the overwhelming majority of cases.) You don’t get to call a do over at the expense of a human life.
“I chose to get a vasectomy rather than being saddled with some squalling brat,…”
Thank you.
I have to agree. In the orthodox Jewish tradition, a baby was not a human until it drew its first breath. So most Jewish physicians have no qualms about performing abortions because, by their religion, the fetus is not a human being.
Under Roman law, a father had the legal right to slay his children prior to age seven, and deformed infants did not survive. Infanticide is practiced in India and China, particularly of female children.
Medical science has pushed back the survival of premature infants (though most very premature babies are saddled with a lifetime of medical problems, particularly with pulmonary function and eye sight), a fetus is not a human until it can survive outside the womb. Embryos need not apply. And of course, tax payers pay for the hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical care paid to try to keep premature infants alive, to treat their pulmonary dysfunction, functional blindness, cerebral palsy and heart disease. And then millions more in welfare payments.Yet the Republican right complains about welfare? Who wants to talk about hypocrisy? Who is going to feed these unwanted infants? With what money? A fifteen minute procedure can avoid billions in unnecessary and mostly futile medical care in a world where the true value of human life is measured by how much you have to pay someone to take it.
There’s a simple answer to both “debates.” Article I of the U.S. Constitution does not grant Congress the authority to ban abortions *or* guns. There: gun control debate and abortion debate, solved on the Federal level forever. You’re welcome, America.
Guess you missed that whole 14th amendment ratification thing, huh? O’m sure it was in a couple of papers.
This issue always comes down to a determination of when life begins. We each pick an arbitrary stage and stick with that. At that point, and not a trace before, id when we eztend all the rights of personhood.
Sure, stronger and weaker arguments can be made in support if one person’s opinion as to where to draw that line. However, it’s still just an opinion, not a fact.
Dressing up opinions as facts, or willfully ignoring that this fundamentally is a matter of opinion, not fact, is unhelpful and uninteresting.
I’m reading the 14th Amendment, looking for the part about abortion; try as I might, I can’t seem to find it. Do you mind pointing me to the relevant clause?
If a fetus is a human being that it deserves the same protections under the law as any other human being, per the 14th amendment.
The problem with the “equal protection of the laws” argument is that minors do not receive equal protection of the laws. We have already carved out being a minor as a separate class with separate rights. Calling unborn people yet another, distinct class, is logically consistent. In addition, at the time the 14th Amendment was written, children were basically considered chattel. I don’t believe minors count as “people” w/r/t the Constitution.
So why draw the line at birth? As I asked elsewhere. Do you support the arbitrary murder of any child under the age of majority? Either everyone has a right to life, or no one does.
how ’bout we tell you what’s interesting?
i’ll discuss this over at “the truth about the rythym method and alternative orifices.”
let’s talk guns.
It is a state issue and states can ban it or regulate it.
This is why I feel Nationwide CCW is unconstitutional.
^This!
And the tenth amendment:
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people”
Except that the 14th then kinda took away most of the purpose of the 10th by essentially saying that the Constitution and BoR’s MUST apply to the states as well as federally (an oversimplification I know).
>> Except that the 14th then kinda took away most of the purpose of the 10th by essentially saying that the Constitution and BoR’s MUST apply to the states as well as federally
It didn’t really take away most of the 10th. Remember what the 10th says:
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
It took away the right of the States to infringe on certain rights of the People, so it merely readjusted the balance on state level, not so much the state/federal balance. It did bring SCOTUS into the picture for disputes between the states and their citizens, but none of the other branches of federal power.
And I would argue that having another yet fallback for the sole purpose of blocking harmful legislation is a good thing all around. The more roadblocks to new laws on all levels, the harder it is to pass bad laws, and most laws are bad (or at least poorly written) laws.
I disagree, Jay. I don’t think the 14th overrode the 10th; it was the Supreme Court that did that. If one takes the position that SCOTUS does, in that the 14th Amendment incorporates the Bill of Rights to the States, then the 14th Amendment is downright nonsensical. For example: the 1st Amendment reads “Congress shall make no law…” Now, let’s say we want to apply the 1st Amendment to the state of Texas. Did Congress make a law abridging the freedom of speech in Texas? No? Then it’s a state issue. Consult the Texas constitution for further information.
Second, the 14th Amendment codifies a principle that had been understood since the Articles of Confederation: people are citizens both of their state *and* the United States. Dual citizenship. So when the law says that the States cannot abridge the privileges and immunities of “citizens of the United States,” that does not apply to privileges and immunities within the state. In other words, the state cannot interfere with your Federally-granted privileges. For example, Texas cannot prevent someone from voting in a Federal election (unless otherwise granted that authority). To get even more nonsensical, if you want to think of Free Speech as a Federally-sourced privilege and incorporate (apply) it to the state of Texas, as SCOTUS insists on doing, then you end up with the following result: Texas cannot prevent an individual from exercising their Free Speech in order to criticize the Federal government. It’s gobbledygook.
If anyone’s still reading, they’ll point out that SCOTUS based the incorporation doctrine on the *intent* of the BoR; they’ll say that the 1st Amendment is *intended* to protect freedom of speech, and that’s how the Feds can prevent the states from abridging it. They’ll say that the “Congress shall make no law…” is taking the “letter of the law” too literally. But if we take the same position of SCOTUS on this matter, then the 14th Amendment subverts the basic tenets of the Constitution itself. Federalism goes right out the window. State sovereignty? Gone. Is it any wonder why the Federal government just gets more and more powerful? Is it any wonder why 90% of your taxes fund the Feds, while the states and cities go bankrupt, starving on the scraps of the remaining 10%?
The fact is, the incorporation doctrine is wrong and untenable. Moreover, it is destroying the fabric of the Constitution and aiding in the ruination of this country. The way I see it, the 14th Amendment, while laudable, is so poorly written as to rival the ACA.
The supremacy clause makes clear that the Constitution and BoR applied to the states already, no incorporation required.
In your example of the first amendment, there was good reason to stipulate the restriction was on Congress, leaving the states free to regulate. State religions. They were quite legal, and technically, as you pointed out, still are. No matter how you try and incorporate it, the words tie the feds hands and allow the states to regulate.
int19h, don’t forget the 5th clause of the Amendment: “The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.” It most certainly does grant more power to the Federal government. By SCOTUS’ interpretation, it makes the Feds the referee for civil rights issues between a citizen and the state government.
Good point. Still, it’s better than having no referee at all, and it clearly limits the scope of what the feds can actually do.
The referee was supposed to be the people. Hence, the 2nd Amendment.
It doesn’t really work when a significant majority dominates and dictates its will to the rest, as evidenced by most of American history itself. Besides which, this method of settling a dispute is rather messy and bloody and involves a significant loss of life no matter the outcome. Having some more civil means of resolution that can be used before resorting to an armed uprising helps avoid that.
The specific arrangement involving non-elected SCOTUS with their life terms is troublesome in some respects, though.
The supremacy clause actually stipulated that prior to even having a BoR.
That’s why I think the 14th Amendment is a misguided abomination. I have a long reply to Jay being moderated that explains much better, but the 14th Amendment, as interpreted, clearly doesn’t understand the concept behind the Consitution. You wrote that “It doesn’t really work when a significant majority dominates and dictates its will to the rest…” That is the entire point of the Constitution: to prevent the “tyranny of the majority.” And then you wrote, “Having some more civil means of resolution that can be used before resorting to an armed uprising helps avoid that.” The Framers saw the legislative process and petitions for redress as that civil means. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t disagree with anything you wrote. I just think that the 14th Amendment completely misses the mark.
That’s why I think the 14th Amendment is a misguided abomination. I have a long reply to Jay being moderated that explains much better, but the 14th Amendment, as interpreted, clearly doesn’t understand the concept behind the Constitution. You wrote that “It doesn’t really work when a significant majority dominates and dictates its will to the rest…” That is the entire point of the Constitution: to prevent the “tyranny of the majority.” And then you wrote, “Having some more civil means of resolution that can be used before resorting to an armed uprising helps avoid that.” The Framers saw the legislative process and petitions for redress as that civil means. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t disagree with anything you wrote. I just think that the 14th Amendment completely misses the mark.
That’s why I think the 14th Amendment is a misguided abomination. I have a long reply to Jay I think is being moderated that explains much better, but the 14th Amendment, as interpreted, clearly doesn’t understand the concept behind the Constitution. You wrote that “It doesn’t really work when a significant majority dominates and dictates its will to the rest…” That is the entire point of the Constitution: to prevent the “tyranny of the majority.” And then you wrote, “Having some more civil means of resolution that can be used before resorting to an armed uprising helps avoid that.” The Framers saw the legislative process and petitions for redress as that civil means. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t disagree with anything you wrote. I just think that the 14th Amendment completely misses the mark.
The legislative process cannot be used as a safety hatch against tyranny of the majority, because, by definition, it relies on majority rule. The only thing that does provide a real check is the Constitution. From here follows that the more the Constitution limits the ability of the government to enact laws (on both federal and state level… tyranny of the majority can just as well operate within a single state; just look at post-Reconstruction South!), the better.
I’ll grant you that 14th is far from perfect, with too much fuzzy and unclear language. Still, I’d rather have it than not. Perhaps when time comes for the Constitutional Convention, they will come up with something better, clearer and more explicit. Until then, it remains a useful tool for the individual to use against the state.
^ This!
Very much this!
What firearms you choose to own and carry are a decision best left up to you. When or if to have an abortion is a decision best left up to you. The Government need not be involved in either decision.
Or marriage, for that matter.
It surprised a friend of mine a few years ago when, as a ‘conservative,’ I did not support an Amendment defining marriage.
My reply was that to me marriage comes from, and is defined by, a higher power than .gov…so, it’s not really .gov’s place to tell me (or anyone else) anything about it.
Similar idea…the BIGGEST problem we ALL face is this (mis-)notion that all this crap is for government to decide in the first place. If we reject that idea outright, so much becomes much simpler.
It’s not wonder, then, why .gov teaches (via government run schools) that government IS the arbiter of everything in life. They have to perpetuate the myth.
The difference between abortion and gun ownership is that abortion harms a human being. The fetus. It’s no more a personal choice than murder is. Or do you think that we should allow legal guardians to arbitrarily murder anyone under the age of majority?
IF YOUR TALKING ABOUT REMOVING A PIMPLE , CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT !
IF YOUR TALKING ABOUT REMOVING A CHILD , MURDER !
CASE CLOSED !
That is the single stupidest thing I have ever read. For your information, Congress doesn’t have the authority to criminalize murder either.
A poet everybody , the lad fancies himself a poet , new car caviar four star daydream think I’ll buy myself a football team .
Stupid is as stupid does .
God bless .
Forget the whole pro/anti-abortion argument. What about all the drone strikes overseas that kill children? Statists don’t care about those children because they aren’t Americans.
What is the alternative?
I’m pro-abortion. If the “mother” doesn’t want her own child to be born, neither do I. But please, that “right to choose” marketing slogan needs to be sh1tcanned and not repeated by people who should know better. Unless there was rape, incest or contraception failure, the demanding mom exercised her right to choose when she chose to have unprotected sex.
“If the mother-”
What, we just gonna say fuck the father while we’re at it? Although a woman does carry that child, she is not the only person responsible for it. I hate it when people claim that it’s a woman’s body, a woman’s choice because it’s the product of two individuals. The father played just as much of a role in creating that child as the mother does.
Life isn’t fair. There are many benefits to being male. Getting to choose what happens to your sperm after you deposit it into a woman isn’t one of them.
If pro-lifers were truly “pro-life”, they’d be all for easy access to birth control (and I mean EASY access). You want to prevent abortions? That’s the easiest, cheapest and most humane way possible. Unless there’s something more to it…
Believe me, I support people’s individual choices to use rubbers, pills, hell I’ll even allow plan B. But when people are calling for “easy access,” that usually implies “free” birth control. If people want to have sex, go for it, but don’t expect the taxpayer to foot the bill. If you cannot afford a condom then you shouldn’t risk having kids in the first place.
I agree completely w/r/t “the right to choose.” The woman has already made the choice.
Agreed, but I also believe financial abortion should exist for men
What is financial abortion?
It’s where the man states, before birth, that he has no interest in it. He loses his parental rights, but is also not obligated to support the child in any way, shape or form. Right now (ethics of the abortion act aside for the moment) the system is fundamentally unfair because the woman can, merely by deciding on her own with no input from him, to obligate him to support the child, even if he doesn’t want a child…yet he cannot force her to bear it if HE wants a child and she does not.
I’ve been saying that for years. The father should be able to sign away his responsibility along with any claims to the baby. At that moment, he is no longer legally the father. Ideally, I would like to see both biological parents have to sign off on the abortion. If the woman aborts the baby against the father’s wishes, she must compensate him for the loss of life. If the woman births the baby against the father’s wishes, he cannot be held legally as the father until he “opts-in.” Wishful thinking. The “War on Women” types don’t give a crap about the father.
At least you admit what most won’t: the anti abortion movement is all about punishing women for doing something they don’t approve of.
Nah, plenty just come right out with the sex-shaming. Of course, it’s not like a condom ever broke for them, or had a dud pill, etc etc.
You’re right. We most certainly believe in punishing things we don’t approve of. Like murder. We don’t approve of murder.
You can lead a Swarf to the truth but you can’t make it understand it .
The truth is ;
…………. A fertilized egg is life ( innocent life ) and taking an innocent life is MURDER .
And we have finally come to the post that might cause me to unsubscribe from TTAG.
This issue comes up WAY too much in gun forums and in the comments here as well.
Is there a reason we want to take one polarizing issue and cross it with LITERALLY the OTHER polarizing issue so that we can all spend a day arguing our beliefs on this issue that has nothing to do with guns?
WTF?
Agreed. The hysterical clickbait articles are getting on my nerves as well. Still, nice to see all those secret statists showing what hypocrites they are.
Throw in something about gays and “persecution of Christian” and I’m sure TTAG’s sh!tty comment system will finally collapse.
An abortion/gun rights article is click-bait? Come on now, we all know why Q2 was slow. Nick said it is because everyone is out doing stuff, not that the lame content as of late could be at fault. 😉
“But I do know that a government that protects a “woman’s right to choose” . . .
is talking out of both sides of its mouth when it seeks to inhibit an Americans’ right to keep and bear arms. How can you protect unborn life at the same time that you deny adult life the right to defend itself by any means necessary?”
I’m not sure that I follow what you’re saying here. Is it not consistent to not protect unborn life (i.e. support abortion) and to not protect the adult’s right to self defense?
CONSIDER the same matter using the weighted and defined terms of equality and value in the full and complete framing of the argument. [sic] While a person may be prevented from acting on the choice, such person is still always able to decide for him/her self. Therefore: IF the Author, by the imposition of the Author’s will, in seeking to enforce the Author’s believed shared notion of Societal Agreement, in forcing a woman to keep her child, as the woman’s initially chosen pro-creation of herself, in [intended or not] affirmation of the idea of Tomorrow, and [as] the most intimate part of herself that also happens to be someone-else as well, until that part of herself has appropriately concluded the time that the woman is, at minimum, supposed to carry such person (as an undeniable part of the undeniable process as previously stated); if that makes the Author an imperious Fascist, wrecker and thief of the woman’s meaningful personal freedom, in the Author’s request to have the woman not kill her baby; AND if the Author’s demand is akin (Equal) to the Author’s demand that the woman risk her life by attempting to accomplish the opposite (i.e., the killing of her child) by sub-standard and secretive means, unaided by persons skilled, by repetition, in the manner of ending the life of other similar such persons in similar such circumstances, and removing this intimate part of the woman from her body in a manner that is only less likely to also cause the woman’s death; THEN demanding, from the Author, in abandonment of Societal Agreement, that a Woman, devoid of the consequences of the severe and absolute violation of Societal Agreement, be allowed to accomplish the same, makes the woman, and those who aid and otherwise promote such activity, regardless of statutory directives in the affirmative of the position, Monsters. Human history has already so decided.
Worse – carried further, AND WE MUST, the Author’s continued tolerance of any known such activity is also a violation of Societal Agreement and moves us all closer to the culmination of such activity as shared violence in armed conflict. [paraphrased: TERMS, J.M. Thomas R., 2012, Pg. 70]
Abortion should be legal, but incredibly rare (how many women really get pregnant after rape or incest?). And the government should never be involved in it. As it stands now, abortion is just another form of birth control that has lead to millions of deaths. As a fellow libertarian, the population control argument doesn’t hold water. By the same logic, why don’t we just start bumping random people off every year? Abortion is a crime, with a victim.
There are only 2 sides to this issue. You either believe *ALL* human life is sacred or you don’t. You have to walk the path yourself from that point. How you do expresses how consistent or how hypocritical you are.
As fallen humans, we are all hypocritical to some extent, unable to live our ideals but still wanting to do so. Plus, it is easier on our egos to look at our failings from the side of the telescope that makes them all look tiny and far away, when turning it around towards others, magnifying theirs.
This is why you get statements to the effect of, “I’m pro-life, but also pro-death penalty” which is the essence of judgmental hypocritical thought.
It’s pretty easy to be consistently pro-life, but makes little sense to be partially pro, ‘depending on the circumstances’, ‘depending on their actions’, etc.
Does that include capitol punishment?
Yes, I am anti-death penalty. It doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes understand the want for a “need’s killin'” law- I do believe sovereign nations have the God-given *authority* to carry out capital punishment (cf. Romans 13), but I disagree with the practice entirely. There are other punishments besides torture and death and solitary confinement we could use.
To interject my Christian faith, we are ALL under condemnation for our own sinful behavior until we give that to Christ. All have sinned, the wages of sin is death. We are not qualified to judge others to condemnation, being under that same judgement ourselves.
Kudos to you for at least being consistent. That’s pretty rare.
YES .
Capitol crime , Capitol punishment .
It would be better to have a mill stone tied about their neck and they be cast into the sea .
I guess it’s a bummer for some women to have the ‘ works ‘ it takes to carry another life and all the terrible woes that accompany these ‘ works ‘ . what a shame , and so unfair .
Not so much. We consider INNOCENT life sacred. A person who makes an evil choice can wave the right to life. There is nothing inconsistent about it. Only dogmatic idiots don’t see the difference between a newborn child and a career criminal. Killing one is not morally equivalent to killing the other.
There are no innocent lives. Any judgment you pronounce based on your concept of guilt/innocence falls WAY short of God’s standard of perfection. You are either in agreement with *all* or you are not, but don’t stop half way and make yourself judge. That’s more responsibility than you or any fallen human can handle.
Well, as someone said, we are imperfect. God’s law is one thing, but man’s law generally frowns upon the murder of the innocent. The not so innocent… Not so much. But then again, God has never been against a bit of good old fashioned stoning.
The Bible does not admo ish us from judging. It admonishes against judging hypocritically.
To equate the unborn with those guilty of heinous crimes is poor judgement at best.
All human life is NOT sacred. Ask any General.
>> You either believe *ALL* human life is sacred or you don’t.
Define “human life”.
Human life – Swarf , int19h , mark s. . That which is now contemplating these great questions is the same as that which once was a clump of cells .
I like the connection, rights grated to terminate a life vs. the right of lawful self defense. I’m all for a woman’s right to terminate a life as long as the truth is told and if it’s justifiable.
Truth is PP started out with a high idea of young women recovering from a mistake and morphed into a Corporate selling of body parts. Leave it Corporate leadership to maximize a monetary return on death. Then there’s Corporations purchasing unborn baby body parts and flipping them for profit. If the DOJ doesn’t bring the full weight of the law upon both entities THERE IS NO JUSTICE.
There is no Plan or Parent in Plan Parenthood. It’s a systematic culling, primarily in black neighborhoods, of future generations. Any elected representative that continues to support abortion clinics must be voted out of office. Likewise any representative that denies lawful self protection.
Actually, Planned Parenthood started out as eugenics program to prevent the “undesirables” (blacks, mixed race, mentally challenged, etc.) from polluting the gene pool. Read up on Margaret Sanger sometime.
>> Read up on Margaret Sanger sometime.
Yes, please do (rather than taking these words at their face value). While Sanger was accused of being pro-eugenics, and there is some substance to those accusations, the bulk of her work speaks for itself. But don’t take my word for it either, go and read about her.
Margaret Sanger loved all those who were deficient in her point of view and man ol man she loved black people . She actually cared for everyone …………. and another piece of history that needs cleared up , Hitler actually loved the Jew and Muslims actually really love the nation of Israel .
People just need to read more .
Speaking of hypocritical, until there are zero children available for adoption, anti choice zealots haven’t got a leg to stand on.
Until there are zero qualified couples wanting to adopt and waiting for a child, pro-abortion advocates don’t have a leg to stand on.
So what you’re saying is that because we have too many unwanted children already, let’s just mass murder all of their successors. Anti choice zealots? Euphemistic hyperbole much? The typical liberal weapon of choice, change language. Is life precious or not? To many of us it is. And therefor it is worth protecting, even more so when it cannot protect itself.
Adoption is both insanely expensive and incredibly difficult. A true bureaucrats wet dream.
Have you seen the paperwork involved in an adoption lately? Most families take YEARS to get through the system. My friend just went through the process to adopt a relative’s kids and they took almost a full year. The reason adoptions are so slow is not because people don’t want to adopt, it’s because the government makes the process impossible to navigate before the child grows up.
The politically connected get get an adoption fast. In fact, more than one. I know several plugged-in lawyers and politicians who have been able to do exactly that, while “regular” couples wait and wait and wait.
Swarf , I think YOU are the single greatest argument for abortion . RECALCULATING >
IMHO either human life is precious and worth protecting or it is not, period. All of this talk about women’s choice is nothing but rationalizing the killing of an innocent life. We are all outraged when we hear about cases of child abuse or leaving a child in a hot car. Government steps in and protects the innocent life. But our government has no problem with killing unborn life. All in the name of convenience. It sickens me.
And here is where the lefties start their social argument. The right is for less government, less social programs. They don’t want to fund those innocent lives. Damn right (pun intended) we don’t. What we expect is personal responsibility with no get out of jail free cards. But it seems to me the lefties are the ones who don’t give a damn about innocent lives after they are born. Thousands of people are killed in their utopic gun control cities every year. Gang violence, fueled by failed liberal social engineering is rampant and yet, they seem not to care and continue with the same old policies and seemly are never held accountable by the very victims they create.
If we want the lesbian feminist women’s health collective to stay out of our gun cabinets, then we as males need to stay out of their doctors’ offices. And the government should stay out of both. Just common sense.
Consistency, of a sort.
Don’t want an abortion/firearm? Don’t have one.
Don’t like abortion/firearms? Don’t impose your willingness to ban on your fellow citizens.
You want an abortion/firearm? Minimal (if any) procedures/hurdles standing in your way to get one.
So, does something like Downs become a “pre-existing condition” under Obammie Care?
Also, speaking of hypocrisy, there sure are a lot of folks who are completely against abortion for other people, but when JoeBob knocks up their snowflake, it’s across the state line in the dead of night they go.
You can find a hypocrite for just about any situation/issue/whatever. So what?
This is not the place for discussion on abortion lol, even if it is comparing it relevantly to the gun control movement. I really hope TTAG continue to stray into other areas and maintains the site to solely discuss gun reviews, gun laws, gun stories and specifically gun related topics. Just my two cents.
Congrats on another 100+ comment thread, Robert. Commentbait is easy.
But, I’ll bite.
I’m pro-choice. Pro right to choose full auto, .50 BMG, and what to do with your body. Drugs, abortion, whatever. As long as you’re not running me over while messed up or forcing me to undergo unwanted medical procedures, IDGAF what you do. It’s really equal to or less than zero of my OR the government’s business.
I disagree with you on this issue, grindstone–but I think I agree with you on the utility of this thread. I also want to say to you that some folks do not oppose abortion because they don’t think a person “has a right to do what they want to with their own body”; but because they believe that there is another human being’s body involved, which as it happens is the one that stands to be dismembered. Maybe they (OK, we) are wrong about that. But it is nevertheless a whole different concept than wanting the government to have control over everyone’s personal life or wanting to “punish” women.
Adopt any Black babies lately, GMan? If not, then STFU. Adopt any pre-born “babies” who are anencephalic? If not, then STFU. Adopt any baby born with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and its attendant brain damage? Didn’t think so.
You don’t like abortion, then don’t have one!!!! Oh, you’re a MAN (sic), so that’s biologically impossible, and since that’s the case, then STFU.
Swarf, and Kyle V, you all have summed it up about as “on-point” as the issue can be.
Anthony – I was adopted. My sister was adopted. Have I adopted, no. My wife and I were blessed with 5 children of our own. Our second was born 2 months premature and we nearly lost him, and mom for that matter. My oldest was killed 10 years ago in a car crash which has left my youngest son, the only survivor, with permanent traumatic brain injury. So I’m sure I really needed your vile vitriolic personal attack. Thanks. I’m leaving now so I find a quiet place to cry.
Yeah, well, 40 years ago my wife and I chose to have a child born w/ a terminal illness that would kill him long before he had the opportunity to live out a full life. Indeed, no parent should ever have to bury a child – it just screws up the order of things. We chose to have our child because we loved him, wanted him, had the wherewithal to support him, money, family support, etc. Yet, that was our decision, made within the context of OUR lives, and with major assistance i.e., the beneficence of surgical team who donated their skills in 12 hours of surgery at birth and a hospital who waived the costs over and above what my meager, graduate student insurance policy would pay. So, while I can never know your pain, I can say that I know mine. You have come down on the side of pro-life, given yours. Good on you. I have come down on the side of choice, good on me. In the end, I am I and you are you, neither of us is in this life to live up to the expectations of the other. And so far as I’m concerned, I come down on the side of personal liberty.
The choice you are defending has enriched baby butchers who are selling baby pieces for profit. The butchers of auschwitz also rationalized there choice to kill for the lure of profit.
How about the choice of the baby? Does he or she get a vote??
I am sorry for your loss and other attendant pain.
Your words of compassion seem empty to me for some reason , I think it may be your other callous statements .
I am sorry if I have you all wrong , my heart aches for you .
First it’s ok to kill unborn children, then it’s ok to kill old people, next it’s ok to kill the terminally ill, then the disabled, and before you know it (and without really knowing how you got there), it’s ok to kill you. Or anyone the government classifies as undesirable.
yep. If a person can justify the murder of the most helpless and defenseless among us, an unborn baby, then they can justify the murder of any that have survived the womb.
More importantly Thomas , it is our acceptance of such deplorable behavior as a society that is so horrific . If we accept abortion and reason away it’s horror then we will also accept the atrocities of all the other things you described and more . How can we then expect God to go easy on us .
Easy, no fuss…All part of the plan, when everyone is finished killing everyone else, backfill’em with illegal immigrants voting Democrat…cycle repeat.
I’m against rudabakers
It’s interesting to me how most everyone has skirted the CURRENT issue and is debating the issue in the classic, all or nothing sense. I know quite a few people who support what Roe legalized, but not selling baby body parts, or killing a baby born alive outside the womb. This has gone well beyond 1st trimester choice, folks. Where do those of you who are pro-choice draw the line? If abortion should always be legal, then do you agree with noted leftist gun grabber Barbara Boxer who infamously said, in support of partial-birth abortion, that a baby could be killed just legal, fine and dandy in her opinion, up until “you take your baby home” from the hospital? At what point should “crushing above and below” to preserve the organs for sale be considered murder, instead of choice? Based upon what do you conclude that your line in the sand should be that point?
To all those pro-life advocates. What do you think in case of rape or incest. If all life is precious, then why is the baby to blame for the actions of the father? Would you be willing to force your spouse or daughter carry the child of a rapist? If not, then you can’t really think a fetus has rights, since those are independent of others’ actions. If that is the case, then abortion of one fetus or another makes no great difference. The fact of the matter is that unless you think rape victims must carry their rapist’s child to term, you are simply using the pro-life stance as a mask for your true intention of punishing people with parenthood for choosing to have sex.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I believe it is NATURE that decides to punish people with parenthood for having sex. Unless I’ve forgotten my sex-ed lesson, the whole purpose of sex was to make parents (babies). We as a society seem to have gotten the misconception (terrible pun) just because relatively reliable birth control is almost universally available that sex is just for fun and babies are a mistake. That is just ninety degrees away from what nature intended.
So at what point in the life of that baby/mistake can you decide to abort? If it’s just a mistake or a birth control failure, when does your right to correct that mistake end? One minute? One month? Eight months? Eight years?
It’s a person or it’s dead, that’s the choice. When is not the issue.
Hah, an argument from nature is silly. We overcome nature all the time. If we go into that, then rape is natural, and so is murder. You still didn’t answer the question. Do fetuses have rights? And if so, then are you okay with your wife or daughter being forced to give birth to a child conceived of rape?
Well, you asked, so what the heck. I’ve always believed the only relevant question is when it’s a “person,” and once it is, “it” becomes a he or she with all the same rights as anyone else. People can debate on where that line is, but it has to come somewhere, and once it’s crossed, it has nothing to do with rape or incest, so speaking only for myself, I don’t make any exception for rape or incest.
However, I would point out, JAlan, that the flip side of the leftist “punishing people for having sex” argument is the conservative point that it’s the same as taking responsibility for your own actions and inactions in anything else. Actions have consequences, and why should a baby be treated as some sort of alien invader who crawled up in a woman’s uterus who should be killed for attacking her? Is the position of the liberal left that there’s just no way for someone to have sex without pregnancy? When you can get contraceptives free, at taxpayer expense, at the local health dept? And without parental consent, if you’re a minor?
That argument would play a lot better if abstinence was the only way to avoid a pregnancy. Of if, in the interests of intellectual honesty, which you seem to be advocating, you only supported the right to choose in situations in which the person had not been given any opportunity to use birth control. To the contrary, I think a substantial number of people (not necessarily you) who claim to be conservative go all leftist on abortion, not because of any other reason, but because they’re annoyed by Christians vocally expressing their sense of morality in general, and Christians are usually vehemently pro-life, so the “free thinking agnostic/atheist” bunch just wants to oppose anything and everything that appears to be an extension of “don’t do this, because it’s sinful.” “Oh, yeah, well eff-you telling me what I can and can’t do! You’re pro-life? Well, I’ll just be pro-choice and you can shove it, Bible-clinger!”
Indeed, actions do have consequences, but thanks to medical science, we can lessen that burden. At least you are logically consistent, but you mentioned a line. At what line, then, should abortion not be legal even in case of rape or incest? Because, true, there should be a line, but we already have one. Why then are we still having the debate?
An analogy I’ve not seen touched on yet…
Making guns illegal will not keep people from having them, it only makes them a criminal when they do.
Making abortions illegal will not keep people from having them, it only makes them a criminal when they do.
That to me is the biggest issue when it comes to abortion. Being a gun blog, I would analogize it to private sales. You can criminalize them, but you can’t stop them. You cannot stop a woman from locking herself in a bathroom with a clothes hanger. You can criminalize it, and throw her into prison if the police find out about it. But you *cannot* prevent it. Period.
Just once I want to see a pro-lifer advocate the imprisonment of these mothers.
You’re only analogizing sayings, not facts. -G, what evidence that abortion rates would stay the same if outlawed do you have? To the contrary, we have empirical evidence out the ying-yang that guns being outlawed do nothing to reduce crime, and in fact, have the opposite effect, and ultimately costs innocent lives.
While we’re at it, the pro-life side could say this: A gun is a tool which may be used to protect innocent life from murder. An abortion is an act by which an innocent life is murdered.
Guns/Abortions is apples/oranges in my book. If you are pro-choice and just believe it’s a mass of cells, fine, but once you do believe it’s a person, how can you not want that person protected, just like you’d want to protect the clerk at the convenience store with a law against his murder, presumably enforced by the government? And RF and others, while most of us here are extremely anti-government on most issues, I’ll bet almost all of us would say murder should be illegal.
So back to the question: At what point is abortion the murder of a person to you?
The only fact I attempted to correlate was that people were having abortions before they were legal and people will still have firearms if they were to be made illegal. Although I have no proof of either however.
I said nothing of the impact on either abortion rates or gun ownership. Would there be one? I suspect yes.
I’m guessing, however, any attempt to determine how many people illegally possessing firearms would be as successful as determining how many people have illegal abortions.
I do find it interesting the similarities of emotional hyperbole I see on the right-to-life side of abortion as I do on the gun-control side of the second amendment.
William B,
In my personal opinion abortion in murder in ALL cases, no exceptions.
>> what evidence that abortion rates would stay the same if outlawed do you have?
We don’t know that it’ll stay the same. We do know, however, that known abortion rates have fell since Roe v. Wade (and they keep falling every year), after a very brief increase. We don’t know if this is causal or just a correlation, but it would seem indicate, at the very least, that a more liberal abortion policy does not encourage abortions.
The problem with all this data, of course, is that when abortion is illegal, you won’t have accurate statistics on the number of abortions performed, because admitting to performing one is confessing a crime.
Okay, I’ll join the hordes of those who’ve decided to bite into the bait.
Gun rights and abortion rights are two completely separate issues and there’s no reason to link them. Sure, in USA there’s likely a correlation between a person’s views on guns and that person’s views on abortion. However, that correlation is not that strong and definitely doesn’t equate to causation.
And I have to admit that in this matter I’m happy that I don’t live in the USA. Being pushed into choosing D and risking losing the gun rights, choosing R and risking losing the abortion rights, or choosing neither and wasting my vote… Not a good situation.
That said, I’m pro-choice, as they say. The scientist in me tells me that a two weeks old embryo has little brain to speak of. A large percentage of embryos are naturaly aborted, often without the woman even knowing she’s pregnant, and you never see anyone calling for diagnosing these miscarriages so the embryos could have a proper burial. So there’s definitely a point where the emerging life is still too undeveloped to count as an independent human by most standards, and the fate of many on these embyos gets almost completely ignored even by those with a predisposition towards rejecting abortion. On the other hand, there’s definitely a point where the fetus is developed enough to count as a human being.
So the question for me is not whether we should be pro-choice. Yes, we should. The right to (regulated) abortion is both scientifically sound and morally justified. The only question is how to set limits on when it is too late for the abortion to be morally acceptable.
My dividing line is the point at which the fetus is capable of living outside the mother. I don’t know the general medical consensus – but I’m sure the medical community can come to some consensus on number of weeks to viability.
Before that point it’s not a “person” with all the rights thereof. After that point, it’s the mother’s responsibility to care for the fetus as if it is a newborn baby.
There should always be an exception for the health and safety of the mother. I would agree to a late-term abortion to save the mother. A dead mother is no good to anyone.
This is the only acceptable compromise I’ve been able to workout in my head.
Untermenschen – sub-human.
I repeat my statement from above – The point at which if you take no ACTIVE role in stopping its development the fetus will grow into and be born as a human being is the point at which it is a human being.
Just as every child born will grow into an adult unless some outside force stops his life, so does the fetus grow into a child unless some outside force stops it.
“Spontaneous abortions” – miscarriages, do not occur do to any intentional act and are entirely natural, as are all other form of natural death people are subject to in life. Comparing that with an intentional abortion is ridiculous.
The point about miscarriages is that if abortion were illegal, then anytime a women has a miscarriage, there would need to be an investigation to make sure it wasn’t murder. It’s the logical extension of the argument.
Conservatives like myself call abortion murder. The court system says it’s legal. I still call it murder.
Kicking someone is considered a minor assault crime. If you kick a woman and knock her over to steal her purse, and she won’t let go as many women do, so you kick this 8 month pregnant woman in the stomach until she let’s go of her purse. If her pregnancy is terminated has the purse snacher committed a murder of just a simple minor theft? What say you libertarians?
If the thug shoots the woman in the stomach and then steals the purse has the theft committed murder if the pregnancy is terminated? I think it is murder. What say you libertarians?
Simply shooting someone and they live will get you maybe 2 years or less in some jurisdictions.
A Purse snacher might get a week in jail or maybe a couple of months depending on the jurisdiction. When my wife was pushed and nearly knocked to the ground and her purse stolen I thought about this at the time.
Having abortion legal it a separate issue from funding it with tax payer money. Why do libertarians say it’s ok to fund abortions with tax payer money?
Libertarians say they want the government out of the sex lives of people. I think libertarians are liars.
If you want free love , free sex then why am I paying for it?
If I’m wrong educate me. Send me your libertarian links.
It seems progressive libertarians want government in the bed room using welfare to subsidize a sex life style for single women.
Margaret Sanger wanted to reduce the number of black children being born. Her clinics were nearly all located in segregated neighborhoods. Do libertarians agree with Margaret Sanger?
I think if the government got out of the bedroom and allowed men and women to form they relationships without the Uncle Sam welfare money, then we would have fewer bastards committing crimes. Jim crow was bad. But Jim crow did not break up the inner city family with welfare. Welfare was a northern progressive idea.
I know the Nazis use to harvest the teeth of gas chamber victims to get the gold and sell it. Is planned parenthood doing the same thing selling other valuable human body parts? I think they are.
If I’m wrong then send me your libertarian links. Educate me.
If you really want to git to the “Nit & the Grit”, and discuss non gun matters, we should not be talking about whether abortion is right or wrong, but what to do about preventing the the thing that leads to it.
The BIG problem is how to get most folks to use means to prevent unwanted pregnancies in the first place!
India, China, and other countries population is out of control! The worlds population is close to seven billion, and growing. China’s industrial machine is ruining the climate!
All this, because of too many people!
Bama Baby now says we need to find better energy sources. That’s like setting your house on fire to kill a few termites. Does anybody think that’s gonna work when we eventually have one person for every square yard on earth?
Use a condom, not a knife!
Republicans act like abortion is the first form of birth control. In fact, they don’t even support birth control, only abstinence.
Republicans are terrible to pregnant mothers. Shame them for having sex outside marriage, shame them for getting pregnant, shame them for wanting to abort the child, shame them for going on welfare to support their child, shame their child for causing trouble, then backing the police when they eventually shoot the shamed child.
The irony of conservatives who despise abortion but is completely fine with government murder in wars or by the police. Oh, they also support 2A to defend against government tyranny. LOL.
The irony of leftists who treat all life the same and draw no distinction between the guilty and the innocent. And in fact want to save the guilty and murder the innocent.
Ah. So all the Vietnamese, Iraqi and Afghan civilians slaughtered by the US government were all “guilty”. Of something.
Only American stem cells are worth protecting. Check.
Why do democrats support Barry Obamas 8 years of war? Why are domocrats at war in Syria? Why did democrats kill thousands of people in Serbia under Bill Clinton when he ordered the bombing of country that did not attack America?
Does it depend on who’s Ox is being gored as to who you are willing to have killed? I doubt you will be putting on a uniform and get shot at.
Good question. Why do Republicans suddenly oppose war when Obama is in office? Oh right, that’s because both parties are full of hypocritical partisan hacks who would gladly murder a million people for a few more votes.
“I doubt you will be putting on a uniform and get shot at.”
You’re right, that’s for stupid people.
Murder is murder regardless who is doing it, war is hell and innocent people die on all sides and there seams to be no way to avoid that. As to Police actions it’s the same way but if you are trying to suggest that resent news events where people resisting arrest died in custody then you need to establish that it was murder, you will need motive/intent etc.
“motive/intent”
That’s easy, today’s cops have an expectation of immediate, total submission and obeisance from the people they are supposed to protect, but instead extort and kidnap. The penalty for disobedience is death. Unsurprisingly, robed government lawyers have decided that government goons are allowed to kill anyone at the slightest sign of resistance, under the guise of “officer safety”.
Summary: the intent is to beat “respect” into the peasants, the motive is massive butthurt at being “disrespected”.
“motive/intent”
That’s easy, today’s cops have an expectation of immediate, total submission and obeisance from the people they are supposed to protect, but instead extort and kidnap. The penalty for disobedience is death. Unsurprisingly, robed government lawyers have decided that government goons are allowed to kill anyone at the slightest sign of resistance, under the guise of “officer safety”.
Summary: the intent is to beat “respect” into the peasants, the motive is massive butthurt at being “disrespected”. It’s not murder because the government said it is legal for government employees to kill people.
I don’t visit this site to get into this kind of discussion. The cartoon is right on but lets talk about guns.
+1 Right on brother, someone at TTAG needs to reel it in and keep topics in line with what this site was founded on
Thirty seven years ago I shot my wife with a single barrel gun , blasted her good . She wanted shot .
Thirty five years ago I shot my wife again with the same gun . Fired a single round .
Thirty three years ago I shot my wife a third time with the same gun , she chose to be shot .
Three beautiful children later I can say I am happy I shot her all three times .
My children are all happy to be alive .
GUN / BARREL / SHOOT / SHOT / BLASTED / FIRED / ROUND .
I’m no big fan of abortion by any stretch, but I detest government intervention in the lives of it’s citizenry even more. If it isn’t my child being aborted, then while I may not agree with your decision, I absolutely think you should have the right to make that decision. I’m no scientist, nor a pious man, so I won’t go on about when life actually starts. I just believe everyone should be able to make their choices on their own, without every Watts, Clinton, and Bloomberg telling them they’re wrong for it.
If hitler, Goebbels, and Mengele were still alive and in prison, they would be demanding release on the grounds that not even they killed as many people or did things as horrific and dehumanizing.
You wanna know where the most dangerous place in the world is? It’s not somalia, mexico, or a gun free zone, its the wombs of American mothers, where a million are killed every year with impunity by their own parents and doktors of death.
Meh…not going to debate baby murder and selling body parts at PP. Eugenics brought to you by M. Sanger and fabians, greatly expanded by herr hitler-and perfected by the souless among us. Woe to you if you are an “undesirable”…clickbait duty done TTAG.
I’m pro-choice and pro-2A. I don’t like the idea of the government getting heavy-handed in the choices that women make in their private lives, or the idea of the government trying to deny people’s rights to self-defense.
Limiting or banning abortion has little to do with protecting life, and more to do with controlling women, just as gun control has little to do with protecting life and more to do with controlling people.
We don’t have any of these university women in Perry County, but I’ll tell you what we do up here when one of our women starts poking around in something she doesn’t know anything about. We get her an extra cow. If that don’t work, we give her a little more garden to tend. And if that’s not enough, we get her pregnant and keep her barefoot. – Arkansas State Senator Paul Van Dalsem, 1963
You know what would curtail abortion? Making birth control available OTC and in the process driving the price down to about the same cost as a bottle of aspirin.
It’s nothing more than a political football. First it was the right screaming moral outrage for expanded access for birth control, but now the sides have switched and it’s the left screaming less access due to no insurance coverage for OTC drugs. It’s unbelievable, but you just can’t make this stuff up.
In reality both sides of the aisle don’t give a rat’s ass about women. They only care about what’s politically convenient.
Who says defunding Planned Parenthood is Government intervention. Its the funding of Planned Parenthood that is government intervention. In addition not permitting adults to sell their spare kidney but then permitting planned parenthood to auction off baby hearts, brains, livers, and other organs to pad the bottom line is a double standard at least. For something that was supposed to rare, and only the most necessary cases turned into a common practice that takes 21% (excluding miscarriages) of all pregnancies. They are as common as a miscarriage now. Planned Parenthood doesn’t even keep enough staff and professionals on hand to handled followups and complications. They just dump any complications on the local ER who staff OBGYNs. This is why Texas was so effective in passing a law that closed clinics. Planned Parenthood once again was using a double standard, or exemption to get around the costs of a healthy procedure that a hospital by law and liability must undertake.
In a 1941the German “Acktion T4″ progrram: to eliminate life unworthy of life was exposed by the Catholic Church. The outcry among the German people was so strong that Adolf Hitlwr, you know the guY comitied to genocide” caved in and terminated the program.
Now, some 70 years after the end of Nazism we are debating whether selling fetal body parts to laboratories for “medical research” is ok? I say Hitler and the Nazis have won the day.
FYI: There are over 70 cures available from adult and placental stem cells. You know how many treatments are available from fetal stem cells? Zero, nada, ziltch, the null set. That’s right, none.
I thing we all deserve a hearty Sieg Hiel.
The Democratic Socialists are Nationalistic Socialists. Where do you think they get their gun control program models and government models in general? I still have problems telling the difference between Hitler’s and FDR’s programs. Maybe in degree, but the general core was the same.
So where are the FDR ovens?
Luckily , FDR died before he could have them built and luckily the war with Japan ended with a couple big bangs , You do know that FDR did build internment camps , right ? He did uproot thousands of Japanese Americans and lock them behind barbed wire , right ? My guess is the ovens weren’t far behind .
So the government funds Planned Parenthood, So what? The government also gives tax breaks to all the Catholic churches, that would shut them down!
So stop the funding to PP, and then do away with all the tax breaks for the churches!
See who does most of the hollering then!
There are many Church’s that have 501 tax exempt status and if the government cut that off you would see the true Church emerge in America. You would find that people that give to their Church do it to further the Gospel of Christ and give regardless of wether they get to clam it on their taxes and would continue to give. You are right in the respect as to who would whine the loudest that would happen but they would not be the true Church.
Here’s my analysis (with hat tip to the late, great Robert Nozick):
On abortion: I have very little basis for raising a legal objection to a woman having an abortion a day after she gets pregnant, or two days, or three days, or three weeks…
… I would have a very serious problem with a woman aborting the day before she will give birth, or two days before, or two weeks before…
Where exactly the “cut-off” is, I am not sure. It’s somewhere in the course of the pregnancy, but when? We can’t just shrug it off to majority rule, because fundamental rights are involved — the woman’s and the unborn both. So the courts and the constitution are implicated in the political/legal decision. Is Roe the worst possible resolution of this question?
On the 2nd Amendment: I have no problem with individual Americans owning revolvers, or pistols, or ARs, or AKs, or Barrett .50 cal. …
I do have a concern with individual Americans owning fuel-air explosives, or VX cannisters, or MANPAD missiles …
Where exactly the “cut-off” is, I am not sure. It’s somewhere in the spectrum of destructive weaponry, but where exactly? We can’t just shrug it off to majority rule, because fundamental rights are involved — the Second Amendment and the guarantee of a “republican” form of government. So the courts and the constitution are implicated in the political/legal decision. How defensible is the current post-Heller/McDonald “kludgeocracy” in this light?
All those saying the Gov’t should stay out of regulating the abortion business and comparing it to gun control is ridiculous…get real, guys. The right to bear arms is a constitutional right. Killing people (whether in a womb or not) is inhumane and flat out murder, no matter when it occurs. Murder is not a protected right. No one can say the Gov’t should just stop regulating murder – it is the most devastating crime on the planet. The RIGHT TO LIFE is the most basic right for mankind. Any life in the womb is just that – human life. It doesn’t all of a sudden become human in the 8th month. It was a human from the beginning, as soon as that egg became fertilized. And by the way, it is not the “woman’s body”. The entire baby is separate from the woman it grows inside. Skeleton, organs, etc. It gets nutrients and protection from the mother’s womb.
And someone else brought up a good point – nearly everywhere if a pregnant woman is murdered, the perp is charged with murder of two humans. Why is abortion any different?
I read through a lot of passionate words, but found nothing that had anything to do with “the truth about guns.” What has this website degenerated into?
WTF does abortion have to do with guns? Just click-bait I guess.
On point–stupid is as stupid does. Stupid people smoke crack, bang meth, and create more stupid people. I am not responsible for their actions–even if I find them despicable. Gov’t control is NEVER the answer to our problems–neither is religion.
For some strange reason, abortion and guns have been “twinned” together is U.S. politics. They are mentioned together so frequently that a person unfamiliar with U.S. politics might think they have a tight functional connection. They have no functional connection, but they are signifiers of ideological commitment and, when taken together, the assumption of an “orthodox” left or right position on both at once signifies that you are capable of the “cognitive dissonance” needed to be a reliable partisan ideologue.
GOP: “background checks can never prevent disqualified purchasers from obtaining guns. They’ll just go to the black market” but “surely we can stop women from getting abortions just by making it illegal; what could possibly go wrong with generic RU-486 pills being trafficked?”
DEMS: vice-versa.
Religion is never an answer to anything . You are correct .
A personal belief in and relationship with God however is the answer to ALL our problems and the falling away from a personal belief in and relationship with God is the reason for ALL our troubles .
On gun control:
“If there’s a step we can take to save even one child, we should take that step”
The problem dear president is to save the one child, you are depriving thousands from self defense, and there will probably be much more death among those folks, than the one life you are saving!
New presidential strategy:
Save one, kill ten!
Speaking of hypocrisy and cartoons, and regardless of which side you are in the abortion debate, you should at least know what Planned Parenthood is and what they do before you judge them based on headlines in Fox News. Specifically:
1. Planned Parenthood does not recommend or suggest abortion as a family planning method or a way to deal with unintended pregnancies.
2. Out of all services performed by Planned Parenthood, abortion accounts for 3% (in fact, not all PP service centers even perform abortions). The vast majority of the rest is contraception, followed by various counseling services, and healthcare procedures such as breast & ovary cancer screening or STD tests.
3. None of the abortions that are performed by Planned Parenthood are funded by yours, or anyone else’s, taxes, or other public money. The ban on federal public funding of abortions is still in effect, and PP is not exempt from it.
(And so, defunding PP means defunding all those other services, not abortion.)
4. By some estimates, PP contraception, counseling and sex ed prevent on the order of 500,000 pregnancies per year. Note that these are not abortions, but rather pregnancies that could have happened but never did. A large chunk of those would have been abortions otherwise.
(And so, defunding PP almost certainly translates to a net increase in abortions.)
So when you are writing your representative about this, bear these points in mind, especially if you are pro-life – the propaganda that you’re being fed may cause you to act against your interests in practice.
+1
Most accurate comment I’ve read.
But he forgot to mention that Planned Parenthood is the largest abortion provider in the country. They do at least 1/4 of the abortions in the US, over a third of them African-American. The money they make from providing abortion is way more than 3% of their income, as well. Knowing the truth about why Sanger started PP, and the numbers that were left unsaid, is quite revealing.
There are those on the far left who would argue a women should be able to abort a perfectly healthy fetus at 39 (or even 40+) weeks if she feels like it
There are those on the far right who think taking the morning after pill is the same as murdering a toddler.
Both positions are ludicrous.
In between is a mess.
I always reckoned it would be nice, if those on the left in the gun control debate, were more diligent about practicing abortion all the the way up until the occurrence of death from old age……. If nothing else, the risk of the rest of us suffering under tyranny, would certainly be reduced, if they were all ripped to pieces and unceremoniously tossed in trashcans.
Your wish is largely the reality – California has higher abortion rate than Texas, for example.
But the reverse is true for teen pregnancies – way higher in the South than anywhere else. So those are your options. Though I suppose if what you want is voters, teen pregnancies are a-ok.
Isn’t “pregnant at 16, mother at 17”, still the statistic “optimum” for least risky pregnancy, for both mother and child, all else being equal? It sure ain’t far off, and to the extent it is, it is likely erring on the high side. Back in the civilized era, when the likes of Jefferson trumped the likes of Clinton, teen pregnancies were the norm. So, they can’t be all that bad.
In reality, it is out of wedlock pregnancies that is “the problem.” But that doesn’t fit the progressive narrative nearly as well.
>> Back in the civilized era, when the likes of Jefferson trumped the likes of Clinton, teen pregnancies were the norm … In reality, it is out of wedlock pregnancies that is “the problem.”
“… in Massachusetts records dating from 1652 to 1800 demonstrate that the mean age of first marriage for ladies was between 19.5 and 22.5 years, and records for other colonies reflect similar ages. In fact, the average age of first marriage for all of the colonies studied was 19.8 before 1700, 21.2 during the early 18th century, and 22.7 during the late 18th century.”
So either teen pregnancies weren’t the norm, or most of them were out of wedlock. Hmm…
(Of course, most current teen pregnancies that I was referring to are also out of wedlock. And this is fairly unlikely to change… though if you want to suggest to conservative politicians who run those red states that they should encourage teen marriages, I’ll ask you to hold on for a minute while I go fetch some popcorn.)
>> So, they can’t be all that bad.
Slavery was also the norm in Jefferson’s “civilized era”. As was the notion that husband basically owns his wife and children. So, they can’t be all that bad, surely?
I think all Soviet Socialists should get scientific abortions, even retroactively. Gotta stop Global Warming and overcrowding somehow.
Abortion is wonderful and all the pregnant women who have one should get more abortions and be sterilized. Same goes for the sperm dispensers. If enough of these people with the maternal instincts of a brick get abortions and sterilized then we will have achieved evolution in action and we will not have to worry about the whole issue anymore. Same for the druggies, alcoholics, chain smokers, and the homosexuals which is more evolution in action. Elimination of the unfit.
Clump of cells – DNA shows human. Living outside the mother – leave a 2 year old alone and see how long he/she lives. At point of fertilization, it’s a human being, period, no quarter given.
Does a woman have the right to do with her body as she sees fit? Sure, that’s why forcible rape (as opposed to next morning regrets turned into rape charges) should be a capital offense. But, bringing another person into it – the unborn baby – now makes the rights of that person something to consider. And, the right to life is a basic one, one we all have been granted, only to be taken away by our trying to take another person’s life away (self-defense), war, or so judged by your peers for having taken something significant from another person, such as murder or rape.
When it’s a triage moment – baby’s life or mother’s life, that is the point where medical staff need to make everyone aware of the facts involved and then let the parents decide what is the right way to go. A horrible situation, but a triage one, not a moral, ethical, or, God forbid, a legal one.
>> And, the right to life is a basic one, one we all have been granted, only to be taken away by our trying to take another person’s life away (self-defense), war, or so judged by your peers for having taken something significant from another person, such as murder or rape.
“Right to life” is an overloaded term – it can denote a negative right, which is to say, the right to not have your life taken away from you by someone else (this is the sense in which it is referenced in the Declaration of Independence, for example). Or it can denote a positive right, which imposes an obligation on other people to sustain your life – to feed you, shelter you, heal you etc.
If you believe in the latter, then right to life is applicable in this case. If you only believe in the former, then the mother doesn’t have the obligation to provide her body for the sake of sustaining the life of the fetus, and removing it from the mother’s body requires only her consent and nothing else.
How many cancer cures , treatments for Alzheimer’s , cures for leukemia , answers to so many riddles have been destroyed since Roe v Wade ? How many incredibly new firearm designs have we squandered .
My only wish is that every Swarf out there would have had a mommy that felt the same way and then acted upon it when they first got the insight .
God the creator of all that lives is watching and he will hold EVERY ONE accountable for their actions and words .
Thank you mom for my existence !
I am not going to argue the right or wrong of abortion, but the public should in NO way be funding it !
I went with the .45 because the 9mm will just piss the bad guy off and I don’t trust any caliber that doesn’t start with .4… Oh wait, we’re still discussing abortion.
/thread
I went with a full bore 12 gauge single barrel . Barrel length is arguable .
We should be killing baby lions, two birds with one stone…and kill those birds also…and forget the stones, where’s my AR.
Obviously not everyone that passes a background check should own a gun. Is it any wonder why anti-gunners are concerned about the mentality of certain gun owners?
I think we can settle this whole “Abortion” argument by just changing the label “Abortion” to “Tissue Harvesting”.
No more “Abortion Clinics”, now they are just “Tissue Harvesting Clinics”.
That was /sarc.
It wouldn’t matter Al , we would have the same arguments and same apologies and same reasoning and the same disdain and the same result . If one does not live under the umbrella of a moral and just God then one cannot and will not understand the difficulty in arguing for abortion .
Every aborted fetus is one less Democrat going to the polls. Since I value my guns, up with abortion!
This argument has and will go on forever. What is the point ? Nobody’s mind will be changed. Seems like a waste of space, time and computer memory. Back to guns.
If we are going to give a lump of cells the same rights as a fully formed human being maybe it is time to give animals the same rights as humans as well?
How many animals are genetically human? How many are created through the act of human sexual reproduction?
How many animals will at some point in their life become human beings?
There are permanent repercussions no matter what you do, keep it, put it up for adoption or abort it.
Not your decision. Not your business.
There are permanent repercussions no matter what you do, keep it, put it up for adoption or abort it.
I disagree with abortion, but I’m not in that situation.
It’s pretty simple though.
Not your decision. Not your business.
Astounding…..the number of males who comment on what a woman should or shouldn’t do with her body and her pregnancy, truly astounding. Here’s what baffles me even more…..I have seen quite a few people on this site referring to undocumented immigrants as “parasites” and “trash”…..yet those same individuals go on a tirade about “respecting human life”. Interesting. Another question: Why is it that the Right is so pro-life, but then has no interest in the kind of government funding that assists women who cannot afford to take care of their children, nor do they support funding the social programs that assist children in the foster care system. When a child is unwanted, there is no guarantee that child will be adopted by a loving, financially stable family. And we all know the plight of a child who ends up in the foster care system. This is hypocrisy at it’s finest. Stick to discussions about guns TTAG.
I guess you missed sex ed, where you learn it takes 2 to make a baby.
A child has done nothing to earn the disdain of others.
Lumping numerous unrelated issues together only proves you cannot comprehend any of them.
WTF are you talking about Paul G? Of course it takes 2 to make a baby, but that doesn’t mean “two” are going to be responsible for that baby. Or are you unfamiliar with the overburdened foster care system and the number of single mothers who rely on government funded programs to provide food and shelter for their children? And the issues are very related. How can a pro-lifer call a zygote a “human life” [which I agree with BTW] and then in the same breath, refer to an undocumented immigrant as a “parasite”. Respect for life means respect for ALL life.
They are only related in your whacked out mind. People exist, therefore government should feed and clothe everyone as well, right? Or as an alternative, allow people to start killing undesirables?
Also, an unborn child has broken no laws, illegals have. Disdain is earned.
You obviously have very poor comprehension skills when it comes to reading. The point is that people who are pro-life are hypocrites if they don’t also support funding the welfare system that will feed and shelter all those children who were NOT aborted but who are also not being provided for by their parents….that goes for supporting the funding required to keep all those children who are waiting to be adopted in the foster care system as well. If you want to have disdain for anyone, have disdain for the corporations that allow illegal immigrants to work for them. If there wasn’t money to be made in the U.S., they wouldn’t be here. Things are not as black and white as you would like them to be.
Apparently reasoning ability is not part of your skill set. Understanding that abortion is murder has zero correlation to funds for children born in poor circumstances.
You are trying to force a relation in order to rationalize murder of the unborn.
Sorry, not gonna happen. It is not any less murder because people don’t like funding other people’s irresponsibility.
The only hypocrite is you in this case
Don’t you get it? Most people get abortions because they do not have the financial means to support a child or they simply do not want the child. If a child is born to a financially unstable mother or a mother who gives that baby up for adoption, who should pay for keeping that “life” alive once he or she is born? The government? Isn’t what the right wing is against? And I’m the hypocrite?
Murder is murder. Trying to justify it because someone is irresponsible, or for convenience, or because other people should pay for your mistakes doesn’t work.
Life is inconvenient. People are expected to take responsibilities for their actions. There are not enough scapegoats in the world for all of your progressive whinings.
So abortions are the fault of the responsible people, who have a decent income…because they won’t finance others’ poor choices? Um, no.
I’m not justifying murder. I am asking those who are against abortion, WHO WILL PAY FOR THIS POOR AND/OR UNWANTED CHILD that you insist come into the world? Sounds like you want to assure that all fetuses are born into the world and then not give a damn whether or not they are fed once they get here? What kind of respect for life is that? It is the conservatives who “whine” about having to foot the bill for people’s food stamps or worse yet…18 years of expenses when those unwanted children go into the foster care system and never get adopted. Use your critical thinking skills Paul. I’m done with you.
Denial? We have to have abortion cuz other people won’t pay for my poor judgement!
Always the victim.
Are you too ignorant to see what you are claiming?
In the case of rape or incest I would be willing to adopt or help provide assistance to the child , In the case of a female willingly having intercourse and then conceiving a child , I would MAKE the mother take financial care of the child and if she knows who the father is , MAKE him take partial financial responsibility for the child , even if it required a chain gang .
That’s the problem with liberals , always crying about conservatives not wanting to step up to the plate when the truth is , if it wasn’t for hard working conservative people there wouldn’t even be a plate for a liberal to step up to . It is the mealy mouth liberals that don’t want to contribute , that’s why we have abortions .
Trying to pawn off murder as OK on the (false) premise that nobody would take care of
them is idiocy.
The welfare state is quite alive and well. Adoptions of children domestically and from abroad are increasing every year. A 2 yr wait to adopt domestically is considered a short wait. Plenty of demand for children. Your rationale is not just irrelevant, it is blatantly false.
The fact is that the majority of abortions are performed for convenience.
You’d think humanity with it’s supposed continuing technological, social, and intellectual/philosophical advances would have got over baby killing a long time ago… one of the strongest traits I respect of Christianity and its adherents is their fight against human sacrifice; you can argue all you like, but that’s what it is.
Gods first commandment to man .
Be fruitful and multiply .
Gods sixth commandment to man .
Thou shall not murder .
And in our law as it has evolved to today, man also means woman.
Paul G wins the DUEL . I bow to his reasoning and comments . Mark s. out .
Hypocrisy, like the dead horse I beat here about people understanding individual liberty enough to support the 2nd amendment yet supporting the massive government and corporate propaganda campaign by supporting forced medical procedures on the public, this is textbook hypocrisy.
I know that I am dense and have difficulty understanding things and I am having difficulty following your comment and I am truly interested in understanding your point .
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