LOL... Virginia Governor Northam had a Train Wreck Week

[anthony]

 

 

 

3 minutes ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

 

You may want to play God with a mother's unborn.

I don't. 

That's her business between her and her God (or conscience).

You want to rule over the pregnant mother and force her to do as you will.

I don't.

The government of others should only enter after the mother no longer is the physical environment and domain of her unborn.

Michael

Now this is when I should leave the debate. Instead of looking for common ground between the arguments, and there is some, you are playing both sides as you wish, to make a put-down argument. This is not good faith, Michael. 

I want "to rule over he pregnant mother..." Bosh. I have made several arguments in favor of abortion, in favor of the mother's life not being sacrificed - the actual to the potential. The mother has several months to make up her mind, and anyway the large majority of abortions are carried out (in the USA) before the third trimester. Sensibly and fairly rationally, it seems, the huge number of women are not even in need of a viability restriction. Late/full term abortion just becomes a football for cynical politicians to kick around and get votes, while pissing off the conservatives. Which is even more reason, not less, to establish once and for all, what is objective life.

You thought it wrong of Rand to call the "pro-life" sacrifice of mothers to unwanted motherhood, "vicious", but also morally oppose the abortion of "a clump of cells" while claiming individual rights to abortion anytime, above the viable, living fetus. Very contradictory.

Let me say one more way: The govt. must only protect life and rights. Individual rights protect one's freedom of action, but they do not guarantee one's rationally- moral behavior, nor is it the govt's business - simply - you may follow whatever ethical system you want, so long as others' rights are untouched, etc. Individual rights are not a moral code to guide your life by. 

IF it can be proven that a third-term fetus has achieved life-status, and this looks a slam-dunk going by all the vital signs scientists have learned of, - then, objective law must protect the fetus. If not, not.

 

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

1 hour ago, anthony said:

I want "to rule over he pregnant mother..."

 

1 hour ago, anthony said:

The mother has several months to make up her mind,

Tony,

Or what if she goes beyond those several months?

The government will step in and make her obey what it wants her to do? And if she refuses, force her to or punish her?

How do you reconcile this?

Why does she not have 9 months to make up her mind?

Why does she not own her body?

Because you want the government to rule over her while she is pregnant. Obviously.

And why do you want this? Because you determine there is some magic point when the human she is carrying becomes alive. And don't forget Rand's qualifier: "at least in the human sense of the term."

Noticing this is not bad faith.

It's being precise based on what you say, not what I say.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

1 hour ago, anthony said:

IF it can be proven that a third-term fetus has achieved life-status...

Tony,

It achieved that at conception.

Who pray tell is supposed to grant such status?

A human?

Yup. Those humans who want to rule over pregnant women, obviously.

I prefer to stay with my formulation, take the government out of it, and go with biology. Pregnancy as a social construct so the government can sanction killing does not align with my understanding of life or freedom.

Abortion is not a right the government owns so it can grant it to others.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

1 hour ago, anthony said:

I have made several arguments in favor of abortion...

Tony,

And I have only made arguments against abortion. I loathe it. (At best, it's a tragedy.)

Yet I want freedom and individual sovereignty for the mothers regarding their unborn and you want them obedient to the government at some point on pain of force and punishment.

So who is really advocating for sacrifice?

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

The context is individual rights.

Let a woman's right to abortion be protected through the first trimester or thereabouts at the federal level and let the states do what they can and will for the latter part of the pregnancy and the rights' issue be considered by their residents. Or not.

Work it out.

--Brant 

[Brant Gaede]

Rights are a human invention congruent with human nature which is why they are natural. Government protects rights, it does not grant them. Any granted right is ipsofacto bogus, never mind who grants it.

One gets the impression abortion is a subject Rand really didn't want to deal with. Personally I'm much more concerned with people who encourage a woman to have an abortion than those who discourage. There can be a lifetime of regret and psychological damage. That said, the damage can flow in either direction.

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

8 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

The context is individual rights.

Brant,

The underlying context of that context is what is an individual human being?

Rand basically said individual human beings in the beginning of their individual lives are nothing but protoplasm that have no human life. Look at her quote. That's exactly the meaning of what she said. Then at some arbitrary moment (which has kept changing in O-Land ever since her formulation), that nonhuman protoplasm somehow magically transforms into a human. Tony agrees with her.

So long as people are willing to call humans not human, they will continue to sanction the mass extermination of their targets.

It's heady stuff to have that kind of power. Once acquired, even Rand didn't want to give it up. (I believe in her case, it was guilt at root for her own abortion. I speculate, but the signs are there. I was present at a Q&A when she was asked if she ever wanted to have children. The nastiness of her tone and demeanor when she let fly, "It's none of your damn business," was not warranted by the question, which was asked in an adoring fan kind of way.)

But look at the context you mentioned (individual rights) in light of the underlying context I mentioned (what is an individual human being), and that in light of sanctioned mass extermination of human individuals in their embryonic ("nonhuman protoplasmic" according to the exterminators) stage of existence.

What individual rights does an exterminated human being have? Or exterminated protoplasm, for that matter?

None. That's what.

With extermination, killing and death are what replace rights.

The exterminators know this, too. The only way to make them feel better about themselves for harboring such a contradiction and sanctioning the killing of innocent individuals is to say the humans they want exterminated are not really human.

And when this is shown to them is such clear terms they can't slip out of it with rhetoric, they get pissed, say you are acting in bad faith and so on. The one thing they will not do is question their premise without filtering it through a mantra taken as an axiom, mostly Rand quotes these days. Such quotes replace their eyes, so questioning their premise to make sure it's right is impossible to them. There's too much at stake.

Imagine waking up one day and realizing you have been preaching the very thing you have been preaching against, the killing of innocents--and there are piles of dead humans out in reality as the logical result of people who think like you do.

I know what that's like because I had that realization. It's painful. 

That's what led me to my formulation. If some women are going to kill the human life inside them regardless of anything, why not lay the entire moral burden of such act at their feet along with that power and get the government out of the business of ruling over personal morality and the inside of people's bodies?

I want no part of sanctioning abortion. And I want no part of sanctioning the government to enslave innocent women, even if only during the last months of pregnancy. In other words, I want neither the power to kill innocent individual humans by right, nor the power to enslave innocent women by right, not even through the proxy of the government I live under.

Let each woman govern her own body and what it bears within. And let her--and no one else--bear the moral responsibility of her choices and actions in so governing.

But for God's sake, if we want to identify correctly, we have to stop saying the thing she bears in her womb, the thing that makes her pregnant, is nonhuman life. That just doesn't make any sense. Humans procreate humans. Humans procreate nothing else.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

There has to be a legal context, if only for practical reasons. If a woman has the right to abort the fetus the government's job is to protect that right, at least early in the pregnancy.

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

2 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

There has to be a legal context...

Brant,

And that is my suggestion.

Let a woman have sovereignty over her body much like Indians have sovereignty over Indian Territory.

This is the legal precedent.

A seeming rub with my suggestion is the legal status of doctors who perform abortions, but that is resolved by the fact that, in my suggestion, the unborn are not subject to protection as citizens or even humans under US Law except as extensions of the mother. Since she would be sovereign over anything produced by her body and growing within it, a doctor would not be committing a US crime by engaging in work for hire by her to remove something (even an individual human life form) from her body.

Also, part of my suggestion is to make it illegal for the US government to fund abortions.

Ever.

This way the silly concept of "right to abortion" goes away. There can be no right to kill innocent humans, nor can I conceive of one in a government that protects individual rights.

That's why it's so important for abortion proponents to advocate calling the unborn "not human," even if only for a few months or weeks or whatever of their growth cycle (take your pick, the times vary all over the place). If they recognize--and get the government to recognize--that a fertilized human egg is a unique human life, such an individual human life, under the current US system of government, will automatically get its right to life protected. So, to get around that, we get the logical and observational abomination of calling human life "inhuman."

It's all about power and the so-called "right" to exterminate humans. And I don't buy it as good logic or correct thinking. (Hell, I even disagree--totally--with Rand on this one.)

My suggestion is to remove the domain of the government's power from inside the body of women and acknowledge their rule over that territory (their body), including their power to kill or nurture anything growing within them as they see fit, including human life that is individual, but also a biological extension of their lives. Something like the power of Indians to dispose of plants and animals that grow on Indian reservations as a biological extension of the land. (Notice that once such plants and animals go off the reservation, they automatically fall under US law.)

Voila.

Everything becomes nice and legal and no one's rights get infringed. Then, influencing the abortion issue becomes persuasion on a one-on-one basis, not criminality to prohibit everyone or making up weird legal constructs to permit everyone. It doesn't get more legally protective of a woman's individual choice than that.

And people who are against abortion have their best shot at convincing women to not abort. After all, persuasion is free speech. Hospitals, for example, will be able to insist that women look at pictures, etc., before providing them with an abortion, depending on the policies of each hospital. If a hospital thinks it can prosper by promoting abortions on demand as something good like contraception, let it rise or fall on the free market without government money and see how far it gets.

I trust this process for abortion, letting people persuade each other by free speech, a lot more than any friggin' law, especially one that is shot through and through with rationalized and unreasonable grounds to make it work.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

Michael, you are advocating a cultural shift in the debate that's simply not going to happen. The waring factions love the war too much. I'm not saying I agree or disagree with you in whole or part. 

--Brant

[Peter]

Anthony wrote: The objective law here must override the mother's wishes. 

“Call The Midwife!” You certainly “take it to the limit” in one sentence. Well said. I find myself mixing up “what should be legal or illegal” and “what is moral,” but you sort through the spider web of choices. There are many potential consequences to “forcing” a potential mother to carry the child to viability, or full term birth. The legal and support systems need to be on alert.

This moral and legal problem can be extended to include other dilemmas like overloaded life rafts, concert shootings, and getting off a crashed plane . . .  in a moral and legal manner, when it would be so easy to just panic like those scenes when the T-Rex gets loose in Jurassic Park.  Peter

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

1 hour ago, Brant Gaede said:

Michael, you are advocating a cultural shift in the debate that's simply not going to happen.

Brant,

Actually, an idea like this starts in places like OL where it is discussed and hashed out.

Once someone prominent gets wind of it, it grows. If it is framed in a form that hits the cultural zeitgeist correctly, it starts becoming a real thing. After that, it's just a matter of fighting it through the legal structure.

Think of this. Even one year ago, would you have imagined that entire states would outlaw abortion--signed into law? The idea to do that started somewhere. That somewhere was small places like churches, forums and so on.

I have no illusions my formulation will happen just because I say so. I have a big head, but not that big.  But working out the idea is productive. Once it is honed, it can be shopped around to people with large audiences.

In the age of the Internet,  all it needs is one such person to get things rolling.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

 The "Leave the Woman Alone" movement?

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

9 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

 The "Leave the Woman Alone" movement?

--Brant

Brant,

A "Boss Babe" movement?

"Power to the Preggers"?

"Sovereign Spawners?"

I'll have to think on it. Maybe work on it a little...

 

Michael

[Peter]

Boobs are for babies?

[william.scherk]

President Trump has boosted OANN at least once. Here the network's main anchor addresses abortion and the fools who do not understand this administration.  Bill Mitchell ...

 

[Jules Troy]

Keepyurdickinyurpantz movement?

[anthony]

https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2019/02/26/new-poll-big-majorities-democrats-and-young-people-reject-late-term

[william.scherk]

2 hours ago, anthony said:

https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2019/02/26/new-poll-big-majorities-democrats-and-young-people-reject-late-term

The Jesuit site did not  offer a link to the actual polling ...

https://www.kofc.org/un/en/resources/communications/american-attitudes-abortion-knights-of-columbus-marist-poll-slides.pdf

[Peter]

Those identifiers create a false dichotomy. I am pro life and pro choice.

[BaalChatzaf]

10 hours ago, Peter said:

Those identifiers create a false dichotomy. I am pro life and pro choice.

I assume that means you would prefer to see fewer abortion  and more use of birth control techniques and technology. 

 

Ba'al Chatzaf

 

[Peter]

If aliens contact us, I hereby appoint Bob "official translator."

[ThatGuy]

1 hour ago, Peter said:

If aliens contact us, I hereby appoint Bob "official translator."

"Shaka, when the walls fell."

[anthony]

11 hours ago, BaalChatzaf said:

I assume that means you would prefer to see fewer abortion  and more use of birth control techniques and technology. 

 

Ba'al Chatzaf

 

I think Peter means pro-life and pro-choice are both right and moral, in their contexts. Not in conflict but a combination of, then. 

[Peter]

1 hour ago, ThatGuy said:

"Shaka, when the walls fell."

That episode was infuriating, but Ashley Judd was invigorating. She is, and was, beautiful.

"Darmok" is the 102nd episode of the American science fiction television series Star Trek: The Next Generation, the second episode of the fifth season. The episode features Paul Winfield, who previously played Captain Terrell in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and Ashley Judd in her debut acting performance. It describes an incident in which the crew of the Enterprise is unable to establish meaningful communication with the crew of an alien vessel, which is resolved by the struggle of the ships . . . .