Abortion

[migrendel]

Also, what aspect can't you understand? I think they're fairly understandable.

[migrendel]

I never thought about it that way Gustaf, so I guess I'll drop it. And the increase of standards in living has nothing to do with population. They are merely correllating facts. Think of how much better it would be if all this great technology could be applied to a population not spiraling out of control. Such a view that you have about Malthus fails to take into account its perfect accuracy when he wrote it, and obviously circumstances have changed. Also, Malthusian-type situations are seen in many countries in Asia and Africa, where the only things tempering the shockingly high fertility rate are conflict, disease, poverty, and famine. For its limited appeal in the developed world, Malthus is still very applicable to many countries still in existence.

[migrendel]

Also, Nym, as someone I plan to vote for, I'd be interested in knowing the Constitutional basis for your view on late-term abortion, and what other factors you considered.

[migrendel]

Your argument as to the limited applicability of abortion rights is most amusing. People cannot help if their gender, age, sexual orientation, or persuasion about the desirability of sexual intercourse prevents them from getting pregnant. Such a position shows a blind indifference to human variability, and reflects more of a tendency to clutch at straws than at a deep and reflective understanding of universalism.

Now, I must address your legal views coupled with your biological premises. I will not deny that skin cells are not pluriopotent, but since post-conception cell matter is, that is a more compelling reason to not define life as beginning at conception. If those cells can conceivably develop into anything with certain limits, why are they so unique as to merit protection? Also, hypothetically, if women conceived by parthenogenesis, then how would you define the beginning of life? I know that sounds ridiculous, and of course it is, but it shows just how untenable it is to define a point for the beginning of life before birth.

Your legal analysis is really the weakest of all however, because it shows an aloofness to the very nature of an enduring law for all. If medicine can push back the point at which a right to an abortion ends and a right to life begins, women will live in a constant grey area, where they will be left to eternally wonder whether an overzealous physician will further restrict their rights. That is why it is critical to define the Constitution as an absolute and stationary law, which will regard the right to an abortion in an identical sense fifty years from the current day.

You also overlooked key precedent. The reason why unmarried women may seek to end a pregnancy, despite the fact that Griswold v. Connecticut explicitly referred to right to privacy within the context of marriage, is because of a 1972 decision called Eisenstadt v. Baird which extended those rights to unmarried people as well.

I also think your passionate analysis of Intrauterine Cranial Decompression lacks an intellectual perspective. Rather than looking at this in a detached legal fashion, you chose to view it as an emotional issue. And let's face it, you primarily think this way because of a moral bias. Morals are not rooted in a careful calculus of various relationships between science and law, they are children of the heart. Please, please, just look at in a pragmatic light. I'm sure you'll see things you've never seen before.

[migrendel]

I think that the only way that issues of this volatility can be assessed objectively is through detached intellectual analysis.

[migrendel]

Well, April still is awhile off. I would love to attend, but I might not be able to. I'll try my hardest to attend, because if someone like me can't find the time to make it, how can we expect those teetering in the undecided column to take up the cause?

[migrendel]

To FLGOP:
The abortion issue is in so many ways intertwined with the social understanding of the class structure. It is undeniable that poor women seek abortion more often than women of means, but viewpoints leave their coalescence there.

I am of the old school of thought. I believe the government has a duty to protect the vulnerable who cannot protect themselves. I also believe the spirit of the law neither knows nor tolerates classes amongst its citizens, be they based upon race, gender, economic status, or any other characteristic with primacy to the individual's definition of self.

The women who have abortions are often forced to do so because of financial hardships that leave them in extremis. It would be unwise, and costly, for the government to step in, deus ex machina style, and tell women "You shouldn't have had sex." Well, they had sex, and you can't change the past. You can only shape the future.

It is also undeniable that women bear the fiscal brunt of childbearing. The act of criminalizing a form of healthcare would have grossly disproportionate consequences on the genders, and would be a classical violation of gender equality.

One must also wonder how women can maintain their dignity and self determination if their circumstances are involuntarily straightened by an unwanted child. Perhaps the economic barriers to abortion erected by the Hyde Amendment, Department of Health and Human Services, et alia, have something to do with the epidemic of unwanted children being abused.

The next time you try to argue abortion from an economic vantage point, at least realize that it's more cost effective to allow it.

I can also foresee society rising to reject such sloppy thinking. The simple rule of "Thou Shalt Not Kill" was apposite for a society of a truly black and white nature, but as choices acquire more complexity and import, such simple thought is deeply unequipped to cover the most important decisions of a woman's life.

[migrendel]

I can't decide what I should to address first. Perhaps I'll do it a la carte.

I will start with your views on poverty. I will agree that contraception is more cost effective than abortion. However, it is significantly less effective than abortion. If you use natural contraception, the rate of failure can be 30%. So, if a woman is pregnant, it is cheaper for the government to pay for an abortion than a lifetime of welfare entitlements and pre and post natal care.

Also, a society's standards of poverty are of course defined by one's surroundings. One who might be wealthy in Mozambique could constitute a member of the underclass here. If the levels of affluence and poverty are of comparable variance, the significantly more secure person in America can suffer equal psychological trauma based upon class resentment.

To say abortion shouldn't be funded by taxpayer money is silly. I oppose most of our defense spending. Does that entitle me to insist that we cut off funding for national security and in addition allow me to refuse to pay my taxes?

Your attempt to link Dred Scott with the disregard for common law precedent is factually incorrect. While not overturned by the Supreme Court, the decision was invalidated by the Thirteenth Amendment. Yet, the Eisenstadt decision is still alive and well as binding precedent. It is frequently cited by the Supreme Court in privacy disputes.

Finally, I cannot see your gender equality argument's premise. What I think it says is that men and women can use their abilities equally to fend off conception. But this has nothing to do with actual gender equality theory. It can be best described as the distant edge of the parabola of the plane of standard egalitarian thought.

And one correction, nclib. The petitioner in Roe v. Wade did not raise her child. Her mother did, at a considerable hardship for an aged woman.

[migrendel]

Tell us that, Brambilla, when you're the victim of rape and are forced by an activist federal government to bring a child into the world. Can you imagine the moral horror of a woman with an unwanted fetus, feeding off every sinew of her body, growing larger by the day, beneath her heart? I can't. The sad fact is that your morality cares little for the desperation faced by many women, the bondage that their reproductive capacity shackles them into without their consent. Perhaps when you exult a fetus, you malign and show no mercy for the lives of women.

[migrendel]

We do show the depths of our compassion when we support reproductive rights. Perhaps the type of compassion we show isn't readily apparent to you.

When we tell women that they may procure an abortion, we grant them an enormous responsibility. That responsibility is to determine whether, considering the range of circumstances that make up the fabric of their lives, they shall be mothers.

It is not a simple choice. I can say so from personal experience, having devoted much time to helping family planning agencies do their good work. Many women agonize for long periods of time, because they consider it the biggest decision of their life. Often, it is not whether they want a child or not, but simply that they can't afford to feed it. Many women make that choice, and have misgivings about it for quite sometime afterward.

Then, there are women who find out that the fetus growing inside them doesn't have a brain. It shall die within days or weeks after birth. But to deliver it alive, the uterus must be cut open so much that is damaged, often so much so that any chance of future child bearing is nil. A woman can also have the same late-term procedure that was banned, without a health exception, and her fertility will be uncompromised. She may then have the chance to bring a healthy baby into the world. Of course, as a fetus advances in gestation, the choice as to whether to continue such grows more difficult, but that is precisely why it should be left to the individual.

I believe that the pro-life people oversimplify the decision. They portray it as something that women do arbitrarily rather than as a product of long and painful deliberation. They portray late-term abortion as a matter of convenience, rather than as a matter of a fruitful life in the future. To respond, we show our compassion by seeing more than the ultimate decision, but the lives affected by all that may come of it.

[migrendel]

I would suggest you read up on anencephaly and hydrocephalus, two obstetric conditions in which a fetus is conceived without a full brain, is born alive, and they are both dangerous to maternal health.

In addition, it is rather hasty of you to describe dilation and extraction as barbaric. What is barbaric, under most modern ethical standards, is to force women to bear unwanted children under the most unsafe of conditions.

I also could not help to note that you oppose abortion because you feel that a fetus can feel pain. A fetus cannot feel pain until it develops a cerebral cortex. Would you support abortion rights prior to that point?

P.S. The correct locution isn't aren't I, it is am I not.

[migrendel]

The fact that she was able to make that choice without people such as yourself preventing her from doing so shows that liberty is alive and well in this country. History has always been on the side of liberty, from winning independence to freeing the slaves and ever onward. We have granted women the preliminaries of freedom by giving them a vote, let us confirm our determination by allowing freedom and not biology to be the ultimate law of this nation.

If a majority of women choose abortion for personal reasons, what is the shame? Would you prefer those children to go into miserable homes? Would you prefer women to suffer under a cloud of misery until the end of their days? I am aware that people like you invoke the argument that people shouldn't have sex, but it happens. We must not make non sequitur decisions because of a flawed concept of reality exulting the tenability of abstinence. I am happy to hear that you have a new baby that is loved. But should your wife have decided otherwise, and none of us, I think, can understand the depths of desperation women sometimes face, it is not for you, or me, or the federal government to say differently. When our progeny are loved, wanted, and provided for, that is when we have a humane society.

[migrendel]

I would like to respond to something said earlier by StatesRights.

If supporting progressive and humane values that favor fair and equal treatment for all citizens is snobbish, than I call myself a snob with no shame. We do not do what is right just so we can be considered in touch with mainstream America, a land of Wal-Marts, gun owners, and Calvinism. I do not believe that is mainstream America. I believe that mainstream America falls somewhere in between those who favor same-sex marriage and those who favor banning homosexuals from the county, those who favor abortion on demand and those who favor denying rape victims a chance to right the wrong perpetrated against them. I make no claim to be part of mainstream America. I only wish you could acknowledge the fact that neither do you.

[migrendel]

Mary Magdalene was never called a prostitute in the Bible. This is often repeated hearsay. The confusion can be for one of two reasons: a) Mary was from Magdala, a town with a rather seedy reputation, and people made a mistake based upon her origin, or b) this is part of an attempt to discredit a leading and devoted disciple of Jesus, probably because she was a woman.

[migrendel]

You were coerced, CTGuy, by a state government which refused to abide the Constitution which governs it. You were wronged, and let us hope that the wrong is righted by our Supreme Court this year.

[migrendel]

An aspect overlooked in this clash of absolutes is one of balance. When thinking of this as a moral question, perhaps one should weigh the disadvantages of criminalizing pregnancy termination.

If we did this, we would violate the true birthright of the child, to be born into a world that accepts and nurtures them. The alternative is child abuse, neglect, or years of one's life in the foster care system. We can tell women what to do with their fertility, but we must accept that we have destabilized the very foundation of their civil rights, and have denied them fair treatment under the law. We can take this choice away from poor women, but we then allow for child starvation and an intense wanting for the basic needs of life. We will also see the butchery of illegal abortion once again.

The reason why I have never been convinced by the pro-life people is because I am far too aware of the consequences of making abortion a crime.

[migrendel]

Under conventional conditions, stealing is illegal. But because of mens rea, and a situational understanding of the law, those women surely cannot be punished. That is just a consideration of mitigating circumstances. The law should not be blind to the point of visiting injustice upon those who have least.

[migrendel]

I, too, am a little confused about the tendency of some among us to reduce homosexuality to an entirely biological state. I believe that human behavior is a product of genetics and a complex relationship with one's environment. To reduce any type of behavior to a chemical imperative denies its complexity.

I do however feel it is only a difference. People can accept the fact that others vary from them, as they would accept a person with blue eyes or left-handedness. It only becomes an issue when some among us make it one.

[migrendel]

I believe that society necessitates the lack of culpability of poor women in crime under certain circumstances. If poverty is eliminated, this exception shall no longer need be.

I also believe that society necessitates the right of women to make their own reproductive decisions. Since the relationship between physical autonomy and liberty shall never change, this will always be.

[migrendel]

I see no reason why small business owners should be treated as the victims of manifest economic injustice.

I also do not see why we should return to a past of legal error.

[migrendel]

If the receptive party in the theft is impoverished, and the crime is rationally related to the maintenance of general well-being, I do not believe prosecution is legitimate.

[migrendel]

The theft of small goods is clearly a malum prohibitum crime, and if justified by exigent circumstances, it is celarly pointless to prosecute a minor regulatory infraction.