Republicans succeed in ploy to increase unsafe abortions

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VMSmith wrote:


If you can’t feed ‘em don’t breed ‘em.
Call it an incentive to rise out of poverty like so many others have...



Call it what you want.



Did I stutter the first time?
And I don’t even want to know WTF a “ciswomans” or “transmans” is. It even sounds like the kind of things I’d be passionately against if I did know.



As a taxpaying citizen in a democracy I have a say in what happens via my vote. So, yeah, I do have a say in what actually happens.



Coming from you that’s a compliment; thank you.



And they can when it’s their dime and not that of the public.

Yours truly,
The misogynist.

Could be. It's not a subject I tend to read on very often.

The NT doesn't go about the business of making a lot of "requirements." Pacifism is a preference, not a requirement--as in, it is PREFERRED, not required. War is sometimes necessary for nations to protect themselves. While Christians are called upon to "turn the other cheek," Jesus' teachings about "going the extra mile" were in response to the Hebraic practice of demanding justice automatically rather than considering forgiveness and mercy as options. As I said, I'm not entirely opposed to abortion in special circumstances. But a woman who, in my view, SHOULD be given the choice of abortion or her own death can just as well choose to save the life of her baby.


Sure. If you want to be consistently pacifistic, then you have to be pro-life.


But how do you define sentience? How do you know that so-called zefs aren't sentient? If consciousness is required for sentience, or some other ability, then people at some point in their lives will lose this attribute and hence their humanity. There is then no distinction between abortion and euthanasia. And ironically it's when a person still has the will and ability to act that they can even choose "assisted suicide" or euthanasia. This is never a choice made for them. Why make that choice FOR the unborn when it is known that the unborn will gain those attributes, something that cannot be said for the terminally ill or the elderly? This seems backwards to me.


In that world, yes. The evidence that we live in that world is lacking in sufficiency.


"Where most people agree," sure. But you also have the problem of religious exercise. Agree with religion or not, it is not up to the government to dictate how people should practice their religion. By allocating tax money towards something a religious group finds morally objectionable is infringing on those rights.

Christianity/theism does happen to be a majority view, but let's suppose it's in the minority. Judicial doctrine in the US has always been that minorities enjoy some degree of protection even though decisions have to favor the majority. Religious groups would be a protected class and their rights to not have their tax money go to funding objectionable practices would still have to be respected.


There is. No tax money for abortions. Abortion proponents can set up charities expressly for that purpose if marginalized women feel compelled to have abortions but have no way to afford one.


I've thought something similar, to be honest. And this kinda exists already, such as with old order Amish. I know some Mennonites that minimize contact with outsiders such that basically they work for them, babysit their kids, clean their houses, build portable buildings, and bake cookies, etc., but I can't seem to engage anyone on discussing their beliefs. You're either born into it, you walk into church uninvited determined to join already, or you just flat-out miss the boat. That's my impression of them, anyway. Honestly, they're nice people. The thing I don't like is that Christianity is something a Christian has to come to on his or her own terms, not "just because I said so" or "that's just what we do." My line of work just happens to keep me in the church every time the doors are open and sometimes it's just more convenient for me to spend most of my day there. My kids, of course, have to go, too. I think religious education is important for religious parents. But not at the expense of children not knowing that there really is a world out there. Christianity is worthless if it isn't a free choice, and I make it a point to encourage even my students (not just my own children) to think for themselves every chance they get. I think that the decision to accept Christ as the most important logical decision a person can make.

I gotta hand it to the Mennonites on one thing though--they ALMOST got church discipline right. So close... My biggest beef with organized Christianity is that it epically fails at discipline. They either look the other way when it comes to behavior of congregants or they completely banish you. My own experience at the wrong end of it is rather than address the issue and see to it that members get the justice they deserve (rather than calling cops on or suing other church members) the pastoral staff simply swept the issue under the rug. We were disappointed when this happened to us, but there was no point in blowing what happened out of proportion. The willful unrepentant need to be put out of church, but people who "unfriend" their congregants miss the whole point that being a believer involves a change in that person's life and, consequently, lifestyle. Any action taken by a church should be towards guiding miscreants in that direction, not permanently disfellowshipping them.

The problem of Vaticanizing a society is you end up with the FLDS "lost boys," people abandoning undesirables in their community. In America, this isn't as bad as it could be since there are concerned people who can and do offer help. Your refugee camp idea might work, but you also have the problem of how to deal with things in such a way that they don't become an overwhelming burden on society. Quite honestly, religious societies are more dangerous the more insular they become. If they are free from the national laws under which they live, they can quickly implode left in isolation. But if they implode, there is the risk that they implode at the cost of human life depending on just how dangerous they are. With your typical mainstream and evangelical Christianity, there is a sort of missionary mentality that is concerned about the ultimate destiny of all humanity. Living as an isolated community is actually counter-productive to fulfilling the Great Commission. The real Vatican is really just Catholic HQ. The role of church in any community is really to just function as the local HQ but often fails since congregants don't always reach out to the community themselves, bring friends to church, engage non-believers, engage people of other faiths, etc. You seem to mean well, but effectively what you're suggesting amounts to little more than a ghetto or concentration camp.

No. You are not paying any cent for it. State-funded abortions actually reduce overall government investment, so in fact you are making money from it. You are now free to shut up.

If it's state funded then, yes, it IS costing. We shouldn't be paying for these litters of illegitimate children either.
I can assure you if they knew they weren't going to get a check they'd learn to practice abstinence.

Really?
Prior to contraceptives being legal and available, and before there was anything like welfare, poor people had children, just like anyone else.
And your use of "litters" of children dehumanizes poor people. How would you like someone speaking in terms of you as less than a human being?

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

added to that why would you practice unsafe sex and get pregnant if you knew you could get an abortion for free? in what way does it benifit you? having an abortion means taking time off work, travelling far, paying for board, facing stigma from society, having someone you dont know reach up your privates and fiddle with stuff. STDs are still a danger. how is a check a go ahead for unsafe sex? it is inhuman to force people to deprive themselves of sex just because there is a risk of pregnancy. sex is for fun not just procreation. also poor people pay taxes too. everyone pays GST at least. and those illegitimate children are part of society. if the state ever does what it keeps saying it is doing(representing the people, protecting their interests, etc because it never does that because it contradicts its own interests) then it should include those kids and women. in other words you are not the only one out there. taxes are not just there to benifit you.

He's a conservative on the internet, he already knows what dehumanization feels like.

That's an excuse?
And conservatives might be treated better if they displayed a little heart for their fellow human beings.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

No, but if you want conservatives to behave better, you can't go around calling them tea baggers and the like, which you do at every opportunity. You're over in the other thread objecting to my generalizations about liberals and firearms, while simultaneously spreading much nastier generalizations about conservatives here, which you again do at every opportunity. You can't simultaneously demand that other people behave civilly while acting uncivil yourself, I've called you on this sort of thing before, yet you still seem to think it's different when you do it; it's not.

Also, you're committing the common error of ascribing motivations to the actions of others based on your own morality and worldview, which is not universal. Someone who wants to cut government social programs, for example, may be motivated by the same desire to help the less fortunate that you possess, but simply has a different idea on how to go about doing it. While you may place more value on providing unconditional support, that other person may be more concerned with fostering dependance and prefer a job skills and placement type program. When you universally condemn that person as uncaring and evil rather than trying to engage them about the issue, you destroy any possibility of discourse and sow the seeds of greater discord instead.

Raptor has internalized some of the more hyperbolic comments directed at him over the years and crafted a sort of Nemesis persona in the forum, a reaction I can understand even if I don't always agree with his take on things. I mean if people are going to call you evil anyways, might as well reap the benefits... In my case, simply being mistaken for a conservative has led to verbal abuse and disparagement, just the kind of thing that could give someone a persecution complex.

I disagree. Some people can work harder than anyone else and never rise beyond their circumstances. If nothing else, they should have children so that at least they can pass along their own experiences and help steer the direction of their children's education so that they have better opportunities.

Now, as far as reality goes, there are a lot of poor families in which the parents are fairly uninvolved in their children's lives and fail to exercise enough control over their children to make that happen. As a former classroom teacher, I've seen firsthand what looks to me like a cycle of ignorance perpetuated by the welfare state: 1. You can only get food and health care if you are marginalized, 2. If you work, your job won't pay enough to keep your head above water, 3. If you work, you lose your benefits, 4. You receive more benefits if you have more children, 5. You only receive benefits if you are single, unmarried, and the father isn't in the picture. Repeat the cycle for children born to you. When my wife and I fell on hard times, sure we were lucky enough to get WIC. But we also tried to get assistance for daycare expenses. Being self-employed, there was no way I could conjure up the paperwork they demanded, and a lady at that office told my wife if she were to walk out of the office, take off her wedding ring, and lie about being married then she'd qualify (there's nothing in the rules that said you had to be unmarried, single parent). We concluded the only difference between us and the people who were basically earning more money than us and still getting assistance was the color of our skin. We managed to "fire our bank," pay off all our credit cards, and manage our other debts without having to file bankruptcy and only paying in cash for things we need. We ended up back on top, but just barely. My wife found out how to cut through all the red tape at Medic-aid so we won't have any problems with childbirth or any complications up to a year afterward. But we lost pretty much everything we had when things got awful, and we think someone was being really generous when a $30,000 hospital bill mysteriously vanished from the credit report.

The uninterested poor are the ones who really benefit. The real losers are the lower middle class. It is unjust. And in spite of it all, I say keep having babies because as long as babies are born there's at least a chance that a lightbulb will go off in someone's head that they can be better than what they were born into.

If you want to define sentience as consciousness, fine. I'm fine with euthanasia too. You can't then say, 'does that mean you'd kill my granny with Alzheimers?' No, I wouldn't. Limited consciousness isn't the same as no consciousness (which is what the zef has until the third trimester).




There's no evidence for the Christian world existing, either. The burden of proof rests on the person making the extraordinary claim. That is, that we have souls zapped into our cells at conception. Until that's proven, I'm going to go off the basis of no souls and sentience being the criteria.




I live in the UK. Even if most people are theists in my country, they support abortion. It's up to the government job to do what its people want it to do and if that includes providing reproductive health services, then so be it. Tax money is allocated to things I find morally objectionable all the time because I live in a supposedly democratic country.



That might work. However, I view the provision of reproductive health services so important, that I want a comprehensiveness of coverage that only government funding can provide. This is why I like having socialised medicine. I don't trust charity to provide something I see as a so fundamental to society's wellbeing.

Perhaps that's so. And perhaps it's equally true that I and others have been bombarded with abuse from conservatives that it's a knee jerk reaction on my part to shoot first.
And while conservatives may care about the underprivileged in their own way, many others simply don't care about them at all, and only regard them as an impediment to the rest of the country.
Only Raptor can tell us which one applies to him.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Well, I still have moral objections to abortion. However, given the legal status of abortion a.k.a. "reproductive health services," we're discussing something that lies squarely within the realm of medical procedures. That's why we have things called "standards"--basically, even if you ARE getting a cut rate from a charity or government, you will still lose your license if you botch the procedure. Charity is only going to go as far as the people who are committed to it, and you really have to maintain a committed core to keep the clinics open and running. I just don't see why abortion services are such a dire necessity to the functioning of society, which is why I think it should be mandated as strictly an emergency procedure when the death of the mother is otherwise imminent and only elective in a few rare and highly restricted cases. Anything else I might add here would be a virtual copy/paste of what I've already mentioned.

OK, but we still have no evidence that the zef lacks even limited consciousness. A "clump of cells" still acts with purpose and somehow knows what it's supposed to do. So if you're saying that there is absolutely no consciousness after implantation, then that to me is an extraordinary claim.


No, the burden of proof rests on the person making any claim. Evangelical Christians typically won't take issue with personhood beginning at conception. The claim that it doesn't would carry with it the onus of proof, whether extraordinary or not. Besides, that particular Christian might view the denial of personhood at conception as itself an extraordinary claim, ergo the person who denies it would still carry the burden of proof.


Well, sure, we'll just send you all of our baby-killers then! (j/k) In all seriousness, I don't live in the UK, so I don't feel it's my place to tell you what to do. I feel it is wrong, and there's not much more I can do in the way of telling you how to run your country than merely expressing my opinion and letting that be the end of it.

LOL good one!
However, I refused to allow myself to be dehumanized on the internet or anywhere else because I am what I am and that cannot be taken away from me.
Let the left writhe under the whip of their own self-doubt....