I think there’s another aspect to all of this: Why is it that in 99% of commercials depicting a couple on TV today, the man is always black and the women is always white? This is clearly a psy-op. One of the (unconscious?) messages that it’s sending to men of European descent is this: Why should you care if a white woman aborts her baby if she’s being impregnated by a man of another race?
America (and the rest of the West) has become an incredibly toxic place for the white male. Fight and die for this country? Hahahaha! Hell no.
I think this is a difference between men and women, but maybe it is just me. My reaction to that story was how many woman does this apply versus the three or four million births? What are the counterbalances, trade offs and potential consequences of change?
I think on average woman are much more compassionate than men. This isn’t bad unless things get out of balance. This is true for raising kids and for society.
Being an emotion, it is easy to manipulate by children and politicians when they want something.
This is why I said in my first post that the anti abortion folks should just show the aborted baby because that works on emotion.
Currently there is no balance between emotions and logic regardless whether the emotion be compassion or fear. No facts needed. No discussion allowed. On anything.
When I say men don’t want sympathy, you say thanks for the info but why don’t they march. Marching, just like crying is asking for sympathy. It works extremely well especially for woman and on woman, but most masculine men don’t want sympathy.
The current situation in society is dangerous and I am not talking about abortion. If I am right about men, the lid will blow off and these men will lose patience and decide to respond with force. That is not a force that is surgical.
I appreciate @civilwestman, but I disagree on men thinking being mistreated is ok because woman were mistreated in the past. Remember that only a small percentage of people are high IQ I happen to believe you don’t punish the son for the sins of the father, but it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks. If the rage is unleashed it will be ugly.
I think maybe your first paragraph is the crux of it. Women think, what if this were me? Men, you indicate, do not, they think in more impersonal, broader terms. So it’s like I said initially: they take it personally but only in the abstract.
I dk the statistics on thalidomide ( you ask how many women this scenario could apply to, and you would discount it in making policy if the number isn’t…significant.) but I don’t care. I remember that period of time; lotsa women had apparently been given the drug to control morning sickness. In my view legislative policy must have an air hole or safety valve to accommodate individual situation like this.
But I reckon you’ll say: Isn’t that just like a woman!
I’m not totally unsympathetic to this idea in theory, but we’d need to be extremely clear on where we draw the line. On the issue of Thalidomide babies…I’ve known a couple (ones that survived as adults, of course) and I don’t think it moral to have aborted them…they have their struggles (as do we all), but they also have moments of joy and people who love them. The same can be said for Down’s syndrome kids. In my opinion, if we are to err, we should do it on the side of life. Look at what’s happening in Canada with MAID (Medical Assistance In Dying)…I can’t help but think that abortion played no small part in the slippery slope that is occurring there…it is HORRIFYING.
It is horrifying. And I think it’s a form of insanity, because, it seems to me there’s no way to stop someone determined to kill himself.Ten seconds alone with a box cutter…
People don’t need intervention, certainly dont need to be counseled on dying as an option,
But IMHO, there’s a huge ethical distinction when the individual dying early can be consulted, has agency. It’s like the ethics hypo where in one instance , the subject is in a position to , idk, pull some switch in which two people in one train car will die, or 5 people in another will die. All the passengers are oblivious to the danger. So all subjects save the greater number of people.
But in the hypo where there are 5 people in a medical waiting room, one with perfectly healthy organs and 4 waiting for organ transplants, the subjects usually don’t opt to sacrifice the healthy guy to save the other 4.
What’s the difference? The healthy man has agency, you can ASK him if he wants to give his life.
My few cents on Down’s Syndrome babies: I had a high-functioning double cousin with this, and, indeed, she was loved and cared for by all of us. That said, she, like AFAIK, all persons with this syndrome, had dementia by the age of forty. And they’re the lucky ones, the ones with healthy, not defective, hearts, the ones with esophagi that connect to their stomachs, the list does go on. Had I become pregnant and found that the infant I carried was positive for Down’s I would have very seriously considered abortion. It’s indeed a deep moral issue. And at least in this case, one for the parents to decide. In the absence of the father, the mother should be free to decide.
That is exactly the point I was trying to make in the OP. At the retail politics level in the US, abortion has been reduced to merely a question of political power (like everything else). The taught-to-be-thoughtless public thinks if it as merely a form of birth control with zero moral import. Alternatively, as usual on the left, they want the exception to swallow the rule. Because birth control is not 100% effective, we must have abortion on demand without any restriction, discussion or even questions. Those purporting to be defnending “Our Democracy™” insist the right must be Constitutional in nature thus beyond majority rule; it could not possibly be decided by an actual democratic process! This is just another example of the fact that on the left - there are ZERO universal principles applicable to all cases. There exist only their ideological diktats, dredged from the Leftist (=sinister in Latin) well of revealed wisdom - on a case-by-case basis - as required by (unpredictable ad hoc) ideology. That’s why the Leftist past… is so hard to predict.
Yes. I can certainly understand loving and caring for a downs syndrome baby once it’s here, in our midst. But I truly Can’t understand why anyone would feel it’s wrong to prevent more of them from being born in the first place. I was kinda wavering around before I had my chorionic villi sampling test at about 11 weeks, but my BMD said—and he was right— we wouldn’t be getting this test if we didn’t already know what we were going to do.
Yesterday I went to check out one of the local Evangelical churches. It was an intelligent, civilized bunch, with lots of kids running around. This is in contrast to the old-denomination churches (Episcopalian, Catholic) that tend to be dominated by the elderly, and follow a more formal structure. Many Evangelical churches have separate spaces for kids to run around in or for mothers to take care of them, and they even have multiple tiers of service for kids segmented by age.
Now, one of the topics they discussed was abortion. And their approach to it was the concept of ‘options’ – they want to give women with unwanted pregnancy an option - show them that there’s support and a community for them if they decide to keep the baby.
They invited folks to take a baby bottle and fill it with messages, money, whatever – and they’d give this to a pregnant woman trying to figure out what to do.
I was struck by how beautiful this was, and how terribly misleading are the MSM descriptions of evangelical attitudes towards this.
Addition: I think these same people also adopted kids who were ‘saved’ in this way.
The thing that so amuses me about this entire debate is the total infantilization of women, by both sides.
The pro-lifers act as if the mom must be a cretinous being who has been living under a rock before she finds herself pregnant. Then she’s preyed upon by unscrupulous abortion doctors and clinics. She’s desperate, alone, scared.(Although exactly why is hard to fathom, now that bearing, or being, an illegitimate child entails no stigma.) She never heard tell of adoption. (The “options” @eggspurt mentions. And—although she is the one who orders and consents to the abortion, nobody ever dreams of charging HER, the poor simpleton, with the act they consider murder. She is, the Right says, “sick”, she needs help……
And among the pro-choicers it’s no better. The woman is still desperate, alone, scared (see above) She’s evidently too stupid to have figgered out how to use birth control, and she never heard tell of those neat li’l kits you can buy at CVS: pee on a strip of paper the very day you miss your period……no, she has no “choice” before she gets a few months along, or even, horrifyingly, until she’s about to give birth!
Idk, I’d rather these sick and/or simple young women didn’t reproduce…….
I hope I didn’t misrepresent the very humane narratives that these women delivered - without any judgement or threat or condescention towards a pregnant woman.
But it’s a good reminder how even good-intentioned people can be perceived this way because of a hateful context.
Oh @eggspurt, sorry, I didn’t mean to criticize your comment. And I don’t hate evangelicals (at least that’s what they’re called now; to me, growing up, they were just the people from our church. I was evangelical when evangelicism wasn’t cool—nor reviled.)
It struck me as a tad…naive…condescending?—however, to assume that these pregnant young women wouldn’t be aware of the possibility of adoption until they got a message in a (baby) bottle. I don’t doubt the good intentions of the people you were describing.
Mulling over this observation brought back a recollection of Zhanna Friske. Indeed, women do have agency.
Ms. Friske was a Russian singer/actress, perhaps best remembered for her roles in the extravagant fantasy movies “Night Watch” and “Day Watch”. She was the lady who defied gravity by driving her sports car across the glass face of a Moscow high-rise building.
In what seems like a story taken from the pages of a Russian novel, a little more than a decade ago she finally found happiness in her personal life and moved to Miami with her husband, where she became pregnant. As a “matronly prim” in her late thirties, her medical condition was intensively supervised. This showed that her fetus was developing properly, but she herself had a previously-undiagnosed aggressive brain cancer. The cancer was treatable, but the chemotherapy would effectively abort her unborn child. However, if she delayed treatment until after the birth of her child, the cancer would be too far advanced, with fatal results.
Her own life or her unborn baby’s life? – only one could survive. She chose to carry her baby to term.
In remembrance of her noble spirit, here is Zhanna Friske in happier times, singing “On a sea of white sand” at a summer concert in Red Square.
The Muslim religious “authorities” are all over the place as you would expect from a semi decentralized and internally feuding religion. Apparently they all come down on the side of the mother’s life over the fetus. But as to how far along in gestation abortion is allowed when the mother’s life is not at issue it ranges from 0 to 120 days. It is one issue of many that gets argued over.
Most other places in Europe or the anglosphere aren’t religious enough to make for titanic fights. I know there have been notable fights in places like Ireland and Poland. eg. Ireland, in 2018, changed their constitution to remove the anti-abortion clause after a referendum (turnout was 64%, of that 66% voted to repeal). Ireland now has statute law that makes it illegal after 12 weeks (and with the usual exceptions), but only for the abortionist, not the pregnant mother.
China has abortion legal at all stages of pregnancy. It used to be encouraged to control population issues. China is officially atheist and has been for enough generations to make that stick in the minds of the people, so there doesn’t appear to be much dissent. OTOH, they now have population growth issues and are expanding child care and other supports.
The Orthodox Church claims to have always been opposed to abortion, however it does have an exception for life of the mother issues. On the other hand, a lot of the Orthodox lands were Soviet Communist atheists, which have an attitude much like the CCP. So the churches may not have a lot of influence on the laws anymore. eg. Russia has 12 weeks, 22 weeks for rape, usual exceptions.
A sidenote is that the US federal system isn’t copied much, and has an unusual division of powers. US States were intended to be able to have State Churches, and all that implies legally (criminal codes, sumptuary laws…) However, between the 14th amendment and the Progressive era, a lot of power concentrated at the federal level in an uncomfortable one-size-fits-all fashion, arguably incorrectly. That, plus the stronger than normal position religion has in US life (and it’s finer grained sect fragmentation) made for a lot of strife on the matter. I have hope that the recent SC decision to return the issue to the States will eventually smooth things out as the people lobby and vote for their positions in a normal political process.
I have to admit I laughed when it became apparent that the “pro-life” side was not ready for the widely telegraphed repeal of Roe. I didn’t think of it as them being losers, but I understand his point.
Everyone should be ecstatic about overturning Roe but instead we have to listen to idiots like Lindsay Graham clamoring for a national ban which is irresponsible because he knows it’s impossible politically. He probably does it to sabotage conservatives who want to win.
Why introduce this bill 45 days before midterm election?
or Mexico 
or Ukraine 
and Russia 