Abortion Rights On the Chopping Block

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Ok, but all of that is completely superfluous and irrelevant. You don’t go killing teenagers or the elderly by labeling them a “medical condition.” Elderly people eventually die on their own, teenagers eventually grow up and leave you alone, and pregnancies end themselves when the baby leaves the room. Murdering a baby is unnecessary when the body will normally expel the child on its own WITHOUT causing lasting harm to either.

Most pregnancies end that way. So if it’s unnecessary to end a pregnancy early by killing a baby, what are we really talking about? What’s so important about killing babies?

Conversely, organ transplants aren’t even the same thing. Apples to oranges. A kidney is an organ. A baby is a human being. Kidneys are donated by people who care about other people in treating a permanent condition. Pregnancies are temporary and end with a baby independent of its mother—and she never has to see her baby again if she doesn’t want to. And while you cannot be called upon to save a life that doesn’t matter to you, neither can you call on another person to approve and support infant murder.

Demonstrate that killing a baby is self-defense and I’ll at least understand why you’d want legal abortion. A baby simply growing in a womb does not constitute an attack. An ectopic pregnancy, however, is potentially a death sentence for both mother and baby. Justifiable homicide is not murder.

Legal abortion implies the consent of the public. Back alley abortions and wire hangers arguably result in greater mortality. However, it doesn’t come with the burden of voters giving their nod of approval. If it happens that way, then it really is the mother’s fault for doing something she knew not to do. Or it is the action of criminals acting in secret and could result in prosecution if they are caught. Either way, it doesn’t force the public to go along with something they believe is destructive. Now…if it is a medically necessary, emergency, life-saving procedure performed in a hospital O.R., the public can sleep at night since women have at least the option of choosing themselves if at least one of them is going to die, anyway. Given the choice, better to only lose one life than two.

The thing is, rape can happen to anybody at any time, no matter how much a part of your child's life you believe you are. I think it's immoral for the government to force someone to continue a condition that was violently forced upon them just for the sake of bringing another baby into the world, but we may have to agree to disagree on that.

TBH, I think expecting a 12-year old to carry a baby to term and raise that child is unreasonable and expecting too much. I have a different opinion on this. I see nothing wrong with Plan B birth control, not to mention I believe pregnancy starts with the implantation of the fertilized egg. Life technically, but ONLY technically, begins with fertilization. But I also know that chemical pregnancies happen, the embryo doesn’t always make it, and I’ve even had to emotionally process the loss of a baby. So I can’t allow myself to get so emotionally bound up in so many billions of aborted embryos that most women never know they had. That’s a perfectly natural phenomenon. So there are reasonable steps one can take in ending a pregnancy before it can even start. I would prefer my own daughters begin birth control precisely because rape can happen. Regular b.c. wouldn’t be a carte blanc for promiscuity, but rather protection against those who don’t take no for an answer (although it has been argued that the pill actually INCREASES the likelihood of rape since rapists don’t have to deal with the consequences of impregnating a girl).

It seems most legislators recognize this as a potential problem and allow early abortions in the case of rape. The ban on abortions is not without exceptions, and the attitude that there are never exceptions is just hysteria on the part of those who want more dead babies. It is true that there are those who expect a full, complete ban. I’m not one of those guys. But I do believe that MOST cases of abortion are unnecessary.

Well, it doesn't really bother me that gay marriage is the result of a court case. That's what the courts are there for, after all, to protect people's civil rights. There would be no interracial marriage, freedom to access birth control, or desegregation without court cases, either.

Regarding the cake thing, I believe that if you own a business that's open to the public, then you have a responsibility to serve the public. That includes baking wedding cakes for gay couples as well as straight couples. It's not a matter of forcing anybody's beliefs on you, it's a matter of not wanting to be discriminated against, which does harm society.

Oh, but it SHOULD bother you. I have no dog in that fight, no skin in that game. I tend to give most people the benefit of the doubt. Could ANYONE be a threat to society? Sure, and that includes religious people, gay people, atheists, musicians, babies…nobody gets a free pass. So I ask what do ______ people do that cause governments to pass laws banning _______? And if any group of people are known to cause problems and constitute a threat to individuals, then they SHOULD be criminalized. It is the proper role of government to protect its citizens and guarantee their life and freedom. It is NOT the proper role to regulate the lives of ordinary citizens by restricting their rights beyond what is necessary to preserve life and freedom. You have the right to free speech when you are in the public marketplace. You do NOT have freedom of speech once you cross over onto my property. You do NOT have the right to free speech anywhere on my property, especially not inside my house. I am not even obligated to give you a public platform and a microphone if I do not wish to. But the government cannot stop you from creating your own platform and reaching out to others. Likewise, it is not the proper role of government to regulate what you create and who you do business with. You should have the right to know what your product is going to be used for and the right to decline service to anyone for any reason. If you sell guns and suspect someone is going to shoot up a school, then you should have the right to not sell guns to that person. If you have a religious or other objection to baking certain products for certain purposes, you have the right to decline your own participation in such an act. Or you should, same as how you might decline to sell ammonium nitrate to someone you suspect might have non-agricultural intentions. No, I’m not comparing gay weddings to terrorism. But it’s the same principle. Individuals have the right to discriminate. But not all individuals share the same values. For every one individual who doesn’t want to be associated with gay marriage, there might be a hundred who just want your money. Maybe a thousand. So picking on the one Christian who disagrees with gay marriage is really just pathetic.

Being open to the public does not imply a responsibility to the public. At all. The only responsibility any individual has is to himself. Being open to the public means being open to people with shared values. If individuals are responsible to the public, that means that when I go to Office Depot, I have the right to sue them for refusing to sell me groceries. I just wanted a freakin’ apple, and they wouldn’t sell me one. They must be racist. Absurd, right? Because Office Depot isn’t in the business of selling groceries. And that’s what shared values are. You need office supplies, you go to Office Depot. You want groceries, you go to Kroger. And if you want a cake for a gay wedding, you find a baker who does that kind of thing. The proper role of government is to protect the rights of individuals to do business as they think is best and to punish individuals who cause harm to others, not to force Office Depot to sell fruit.

If you have to depend on government to “allow” gay people to get married, or allow mixed race marriage, or force integration (twist of irony, black people calling for segregation in recent years), then you are placing government in a position to take away those rights at any time for any reason—or no reason at all. That ultimately does individuals more harm than good. And I think with regard to abortion if you take away the right of individuals to agree as to whether unrestricted access to abortion all the way up to birth is harmful to individuals or not or whether there can be a justification for doing harm. I believe in non-aggression—the principle that the individual should never initiate force. People with similar attitudes to mine often support women’s right to abortion since restrictions on it constitute restrictions on the individual. However, it is also the destruction of a human being and poses greater restriction on human rights than NOT having abortion. If left up to individuals, a nation can come to a consensus as to how it sees the issue and can include it as a right to be protected in itself. The nation can be guided by reason. Same applies for race and LGBT matters. Court cases helped minorities assert the rights they were already guaranteed. Court cases did NOT help in getting society as a whole to accept minorities. Any time a small group of people imposes control over the thoughts and beliefs of other individuals who disagree with them, all you are going to get is suspicion and resentment. To that end, certain segments of black society say they are better protected living apart from whites than being forced to integrate. Oh, and btw…integration in public schools happened when black kids were bussed out of district into white schools. How has that worked for the benefit of the black community in the decades since? And government enforcement of a right to murder babies is going to improve things…how?

Maybe the courts don't have the power to tell people to stop being racist, homophobic, etc., but they can order you to not discriminate against them. A wedding is a wedding, gay or straight. Saying you'll provide wedding cakes to straight couples but not to gay couples is textbook discrimination. But I also believe that focusing on wedding cakes is petty and obscures the egregious discrimination that LGBT people continue to face.

I think a better solution is to allow people the freedom to discriminate. People do it all the time. It’s a matter of self-preservation and self-interest. What music you listen to. Where you live. Which church you attend. Which school you attend. Which jobs you apply for. Who you date. Gays are among the most exclusionist victim classes out there, but as a victim class (not all gays prefer to be victims) expect to be completely accepted and protected without regard for whether people WANT to accept them or think they deserve protection. If discrimination is so bad, why not just ask gays to be straight? Because by expressing a preference for only other gay men one severely narrows the pool of potential mates. Who’s to say the perfect mate for any given gay man doesn’t happen to be a straight woman?

But if you DON’T discriminate, then you open yourself to unacceptable, potentially deadly risks. Not discriminating your sexual partners likely will lead to diseases, some incurable, and unwanted pregnancy and murdering babies. So there’s discrimination we accept and discrimination we don’t. And thus by discrimination we keep ourselves safe as well as others by extension. When you let just anybody fly planes, they fly them into skyscrapers and kill thousands of people. Or when someone gets pissed off by heavy-handed government intervention that results in the deaths of religious people, it might be a good idea to hold off on sales of fertilizer. Or when a proud dad walks into a pawn shop with a disaffected teenager, it miiiiight be a bad day to sell guns.

If you discriminate on race…well, ok, that’s just stupid, because you’re denying goods and services to a COLOR rather than a human being who has the same value you have. But that’s the beauty of the world we live in. If one person denies someone a thing based on skin color, then his competitor gets the guy’s money and prospers. Black civil rights came about as the result of blacks being LEGALLY denied their rights. IOW, it was government action that disenfranchised them. The correct course of action would have simply have for governments to enforce laws that afforded blacks equal opportunity. Instead, what happened was a stream of legislation and constitutional amendments that dealt with the rights of a specific race and allowing the formation of special, protected, victim classes after which other victims would crawl out of the woodwork to get their piece of the pie. I can’t make this any simpler: You cannot solve a problem that the government causes with a government solution. You only succeed in causing more problems. All you can do is try to talk people out of being douchebags. And if their policies are unreasonably discriminatory (emphasis on “unreasonably”), then you just respond in kind. Christian guy won’t bake a cake? No problem. Open up a business that caters to baking cakes and steal business away from the Christian guy.

I do agree with you that the baking cakes thing is petty. I typically will refer to baking cakes as a metaphor for someone being coerced into an action that violates his principles. It’s been years since I noticed anything remotely similar in the news, so hopefully we’re over this in the United States. Mississippi and other states passed laws prohibiting lawsuits such as the famous case in Colorado. Personally…yeah, I’d raise religious objections, too. But there are other ways to handle this. What I might do if it were me is I would just bake the cake and not ask what it was for. It’s not a wedding cake. It’s a cake that just happened to end up at a reception for a recently married gay couple. It wouldn’t be necessary to attach my name to anything to do with the event. That way we all get what we want. It becomes a problem when the buyer demands validation for something the producer doesn’t agree with or doesn’t want to be associated with, and that’s precisely what has happened. When businesses are forced to shut down over things, it becomes a matter of civil rights because it means you do NOT actually have freedom of religion or the right to property.

The relevant takeaway, though, is the mistake in assuming that government involvement in a thing magically makes everything ok. If you have to depend on government to make abortion available in spite of public interest, it might be a good time to consider whether you should have it at all.

So, you blame the woman for dying trying to end a pregnancy in a society where it's illegal? So then you value the life of a zygote, embryo, or fetus over the life of the pregnant person?

The point is, what gives the embryo the right to use somebody's body without their consent, a right that no other human being has? It's a different scenario from teenagers or the elderly because neither are asking to occupy your body without your consent. Abortion can very well be self-defense, as pregnancy can be lethal. Not to mention the fact that it's an inconvenience to have to give up your bodily autonomy, even if only temporarily.




Well, I'm glad you at least have it in your heart to allow exceptions for 12-year-old rape victims.






First of all, are you really proposing that gay people simply marry somebody of the opposite sex if they want to avoid being discriminated against?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but did you also go on to suggest that LGBT people enjoy being separatist and discriminated against? If that's what you were saying, then you must not know very many people from the community. As a member of the LGBT community, I can assure you that my only desire out of life is to be able to live it in peace, with my partner of choice, without being discriminated against over something beyond my control.

I"m not saying people should be indiscriminate over any and everything. I'm saying that discrimination against someone over something they can't control or something that's part of their identity (race, sex, religion, sexuality, etc.) is wrong and should not be tolerated, especially if it's discrimination by the government or by a business.

I"m glad you can at least be counted on to bake the cake, though, apparently.

You are misrepresenting what I said. Straw man fallacy is a fallacy.

Again... You're focusing on when abuse DOES happen, ignoring the ACTUAL frequency of abuse. In the real world, not every uncle or grampa is a crusty old pervert. That assumption that they are trivializes sexual abuse as a crime, though I don't think that's what you intend to do. Over the last few decades people tend to be hyper-vigilant over sex crimes in ways they didn't tend to before, but over time too much rhetoric on any subject tends to desensitize the public to the seriousness of it. I find it unthinkable that we live in an age when sex trafficking is actually a problem, but here we are, and society is progressing in a direction in which what your uncle does to you is less a problem to others than what some greasy guy from Central America or Eastern Europe does. These aren't conversations we had back when I first joined WrongPlanet.

I do not assume every uncle or grandpa is a crusty old pervert, but statistics do show a lot of times it's a family member or friend of the family who is the perpetrator in cases of child molestation and rape. Even if a parent does supervise their child well, it could still happen.

... the right is focused on trans people in public restrooms.  Even the guy in the sketchy van who says "Hey, want some candy?" is more or less a thing of the past.

You want a hot body? You want a Bugatti?
You want a Maserati? You better work, b!tch
You want a Lamborghini? Sippin' martinis?
Look hot in a bikini? You better work, b!tch
You wanna live fancy? Live in a big mansion?
Party in France?
You better work, b!tch

the right is all about "either/or" - full capitalism with all its rough edges that cut the poor - or communism. they systematically deny that there are shades of gray possible such as the european "third way" that they always lump in with "socialism" when it is in reality but capitalism with a human face.

Even the guy in the sketchy van who says "Hey, want some candy?" is more or less a thing of the past.

Let's say America looses Roe. I mean I think as long as you use other forms of birth control, you should likely be fine and not worry about it, and have peace of mind there, unless I am wrong?

So if the woman is raped then, there is no exception, abortion wise? And it's true that no contraception is 100 percent effective but it's pretty close so I don't think people need to worry so much.