Is Abortion Murder?

I'm sorry, I just don't buy it. Look, was a time, maybe, when I could have trusted your point, but not this time.

We had two threads spanning sixteen months in which the contrast of rights was refused; now we have some recognition of that contrast from anti-abortion, but it is also not the slightest bit unpredictable that the point would be construed to utterly ignore a woman's human rights.

As long as anti-abortion regards women as subhuman, its advocates will continue to meet our disgust. The movement in general has had decades, and can't come up with anything but the dehumanization of women. This community in general has had a couple years, and our anti-abortion advocates can't seem to break form or defy expectations.

This determined denigration of women is nothing short of hatred. To you, maybe it's just asking a question, but in the first place, at best it's a really naïve question; to a second, it takes place in an environment and at a time in which this very sleight, the fallacious ontological redefinition of zygote, blastocyst, or fetus to equal a person is in question; and the beeblebrox here is that of course the question is formulated to disregard the human rights of women, because that's all the anti-abortion movement seems capable of.

To the other, acknowledging my entry to the thread, I do still think you're a good bellwether; I actually expect this line of politicking to be prominent in the 2016 cycle. Huckabee and Rubio would have stirred the movement by now, except Trump somehow manages to hog all the action. Still, though, misogyny is going to be an important theme on the Republican side of this electoral cycle.

And the problem with giving you genuine advice on how to push your platform isn't even a question of giving aid and comfort to hatred; rather, the practical challenge is that the advice would have to do with taking a more general approach to what seems to be a somewhat juvenile process of trying to poke small holes with pointed, loaded questions. The problem with that advice, though, is that the more general approach will demonstrate the fallacy not only of that attack vector, but the anti-abortion movement in general.

I have a joke about human frailty and conservatives: It is one thing to acknowledge the fact of human frailty, another entirely to calculate its exploitation. Put simply, there's a difference between recognizing that humans are imperfect and trying to swindle them. Conservatives don't like this point, but any tit-for-tat they get into with liberals about bad behavior still plays to the liberals' favor in diversity, frequency, magnitude, and implications. And, in the end, the difference I'm describing also describes how FOX News operates; their mission is to exploit human frailty in order to bear false witness.

It's a prominent dissonance.

The best innovation the anti-abortion movement has shown over the last four decades is to change a couple of words. They've always stooped to fallacy; that part is just more apparent for repetition in the specific discourse and more generally in the conservative politic.

One of the results is that my side of the dispute is really sick and tired of putting up with this petty rudeness, because no matter how innocent or naïve―and therefore unjustly attacked―people pretend to be, it is a calculated sleight with massive human consequences that they just don't seem to care about. And here's the thing: I dare you to respond with the obvious point about what they do care about, but without committing the same calculated sleight against women. It's a lot harder to do, and when you pull it off, the words have no punch because they're so restrained.

But the problem with the "tough questions", as one member put it, is that in this issue they are often loaded questions. And, you know, the flip side of those decades of misogynistic bullshit from conservatives is that seasoned liberals have a lot of practice with this. That is to say, when one hands over such a disproportionately weighted device, the outsize component is pretty obvious. Our allegedly sane, secular neighbor, for instance, appears to have completely missed this point.

More simpy, if the device is a Toyota Tercel with a four-banger, you'd probably notice the Kenworth drive shaft.

Translated: When you hand over a presupposition of women's inhumanity, some people will notice.

Was a time when those loaded questions worked; people would stutter and give a middling answer. But with so much repetition so often these days, it's getting a bit like jumping jacks. Or, as one high school football coach I knew would say, "I know a lazy side-straddle hop when I see one!"

And it's true, after decades of hearing the same old disrespectful excrement over and over again, I'm not certain why anyone would expect anyone else to pretend it isn't putrefied.

 

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No.

No agency, significant organization, or large fraction of the population, in our society or any other, has ever treated a 12 week fetus as a person.

Have you ever, after the past thirty years of experience with the wingnut video barrage, considered waiting until somebody with integrity had checked the facts, before buying into yet another one?

 

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The law defines "child in utero" as "a member of the species Homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unborn_Victims_of_Violence_Act

 

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An opportunity to do what?

...wait never mind. There is no dialogue possible with you, you are a horrible human being.

 

So?

 

Yes, such an unborn child can be important enough to the parents that it requires some form of legal concept. But that has nothing to do with a women's right to choose.

 

If you want the babies to be born so much, would you choose to carry them as a surrogate if you could?

And if not, why not?

 

Giggity-Giggity ¡Gack!

Ethical question: If I know what mistake our neighbor appears to be making, do I say something, or just sit back and watch what happens next?

On another note entirely, the history of fetal protection laws has involved much fighting over semantics specifically because of this question. Indeed, it's why we shouldn't be surprised, after all this time, that South Carolina's law has been used against women over three hundred times, and the only man ever charged under the law ostensibly passed to protect pregnant women from domestic, intimate, and other violence saw his conviction overturned.

The only reason we're seeing FAP asserted now is because "life at conception" finally failed. Remember the whole thing about, "Well, my sperm cells are alive, and I piss out a hundred thousand of them a shot. Here, look at these skin cells. That hurt! They're alive. Dying, but still alive. And those blood cells. Alive ... and now they're dead"? There came a point when we heard "life at conception" so much that people just got sick of it, and the superficial retort seems to have sufficed. The problem was that "life" did not specifically demand what the advocates wanted. Personhood under law at the moment of fertilization is what they've been after the whole time.

But back when we were using the phrase "life at conception" instead of "personhood", the fetal homicide laws were the alleged inroad. What we see in South Carolina, or an absurd case out of Nebraska in which prosecutors dropped a child abuse charge against a pregnant drug addict after she gained dispensation for medical exam and terminated the pregnancy, is pretty much exactly what abortion access advocates predicted. Over time, we've seen pregnant women incarcerated in hospitals for medically unsound legal judgments. We've seen hospitals violate patient confidentiality in order to have a pregnant woman arrested for falling. And it's quite easy to suggest these insanities are partly cultural insofar as a prosecutor in South Carolina or Indiana or Nebraska might go after women this way while the phenomenon is considerably less represented, say, on the continental Pacific coast, but under FAP, those insanities will become mandatory.

As such, it's worth reminding that the law our neighbor points to was passed in the form it was passed specifically because it doesn't assign personhood. Indeed, "The law defines 'child in utero' as 'a member of the species Homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb'", is about as perfect as a body like Congress might accomplish in such circumstances.

Oh. Damn. I guess I gave away the gig, anyway.

 

You keep returning to the same question.

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If I could, yeah, I probably would. But I can't. Enough with the silly question.

 

Horrible because I would choose life over death?

 

It's not silly, it's hypothetical. You do understand the concept of a hypothetical question, don't you?

 

No

But because you don't walk a mile in mother's shoes and/nor the child's shoes.

 

Hmm, better to never walk than at least walk that mile? I'm not saying misery is a good thing, yet therein many find their way.

 

Walk the mile bowser.

 

A case in point... Yeah, it seems cruel to me, but who am I to devalue their lives?

 

Horrible because you refuse to acknowledge the living person involved.

 

There's no need. Plenty of people already have and come out champions.

 

Correction> The living PEOPLE involved.

 

Walk a mile bowser. It will do you good.

The mother and the child.

 

Not in your case.

As established, you don't actually believe an early fetus is a person; and as demonstrated, you have no respect whatsoever for the woman's life. So it's not even one, for you.