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Author Topic:   Evangelical Switch from Pro-choice to Anti-abortion
Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 278 of 441 (837704)
08-07-2018 3:01 PM
Reply to: Message 272 by LamarkNewAge
08-07-2018 1:28 PM


Re: I think the issue might have to do with allowing a premature birth.
(Ron Paul recounted something disturbing he - by chance - saw during medical school, by telling about how he accidently wandered into a room where he encountered a baby that had just been removed in a surgical abortion and it was crying, but he was told to let it alone as it was just aborted and it would die, and he quickly left the room he wandered into to get to his proper destination)
I hope this is unusual but I'm afraid to find out it is probably not. This is out and out absolutely unequivocally murder it seems to me.

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Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 285 of 441 (837714)
08-07-2018 4:15 PM
Reply to: Message 279 by Stile
08-07-2018 3:33 PM


Re: If abortion is understood to be ending a human life, THEN we can talk alternatives
Can you dig up one example even? - Where a woman had an abortion and her reason was that the baby was "simply an inconvenience?"
Someone I know personally, married to one man for forty years, told me she'd had four abortions because children would interfere with their lifestyle. I had the impression it was more her husband's desire than her own but that wasn't stated. No idea how representative they may be.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 279 by Stile, posted 08-07-2018 3:33 PM Stile has replied

Replies to this message:
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Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 324 of 441 (837799)
08-09-2018 12:36 PM
Reply to: Message 295 by Stile
08-08-2018 10:01 AM


Re: If abortion is understood to be ending a human life, THEN we can talk alternatives
Stile writes:
Faith writes:
Someone I know personally, married to one man for forty years, told me she'd had four abortions because children would interfere with their lifestyle. I had the impression it was more her husband's desire than her own but that wasn't stated. No idea how representative they may be.
How does any of this show that this person considered the children an inconvenience?
It seems to me she's dealing with reality.
She seems to understand that having a child is a 20+ year, life-changing commitment.
She can have more time to spend with her husband, her friends, her social life, her hobbies.
Or she can have much less time and money for those things and spend most of her time taking care of a child or the next 20+ years.
Yeah, you can say the baby is "inconvenient" in the sense that being jailed for a crime you didn't commit is also "inconvenient."
But as usual we have the problem of whether abortion is ending a human life or not. Are you saying that even if it IS ending a human life it is fine to abort it for the reasons you give, more time for husband, friends, social life, hobbies and so on? Or does your valuing those things over having children depend on being convinced that abortion is NOT ending a human life?
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 295 by Stile, posted 08-08-2018 10:01 AM Stile has seen this message but not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 325 by jar, posted 08-09-2018 2:28 PM Faith has replied

  
Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 326 of 441 (837808)
08-09-2018 2:41 PM
Reply to: Message 325 by jar
08-09-2018 2:28 PM


Re: If abortion is understood to be ending a human life, THEN we can talk alternatives
Oh right, what can I be thinking? Murder has always been an elective procedure in civilized nations.
(This is based on "medical staff" not really being medically motivated but more like pro abortion activists.)
But that's YOUR opinion, I haven't heard Stile say anything that ridiculous yet.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 325 by jar, posted 08-09-2018 2:28 PM jar has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 327 by ringo, posted 08-09-2018 2:48 PM Faith has replied
 Message 331 by jar, posted 08-09-2018 3:39 PM Faith has not replied

  
Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 328 of 441 (837812)
08-09-2018 2:49 PM
Reply to: Message 327 by ringo
08-09-2018 2:48 PM


Re: If abortion is understood to be ending a human life, THEN we can talk alternatives
Sometimes it is murder and needs to be called murder to wake some people up.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 327 by ringo, posted 08-09-2018 2:48 PM ringo has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 329 by ringo, posted 08-09-2018 2:56 PM Faith has replied

  
Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 330 of 441 (837815)
08-09-2018 3:21 PM
Reply to: Message 329 by ringo
08-09-2018 2:56 PM


Re: If abortion is understood to be ending a human life, THEN we can talk alternatives
Not interested in the semantics of the issue.

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 Message 329 by ringo, posted 08-09-2018 2:56 PM ringo has replied

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Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 341 of 441 (837859)
08-10-2018 7:00 AM
Reply to: Message 340 by jar
08-10-2018 6:44 AM


Re: If abortion is understood to be ending a human life, THEN we can talk alternatives
Wow, a new low yet.

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 Message 340 by jar, posted 08-10-2018 6:44 AM jar has not replied

  
Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 346 of 441 (837897)
08-10-2018 5:48 PM


How satisfying it is to see someone else made the target of the sophistry for a change, the multiplication of irrelevancies, the semantic hairsplitting, the evasive tactics, the accusations, the misinterpretations, the general mind-gemushening weirdness. Good luck getting an acknowledgement of the obvious, Tangle.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

  
Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 351 of 441 (837931)
08-11-2018 2:21 AM
Reply to: Message 350 by kjsimons
08-10-2018 9:47 PM


Re: If abortion is understood to be ending a human life, THEN we can talk alternatives
The thing that sticks in my craw is all the attention to the "unborn" and no attention to the already born and the pregnant mothers. If we are serious about reducing abortions than we need to get serious about supporting birth control initiatives, pregnant woman and their post born children! Republicans don't seem to want to do either.
I don't know about "Republicans" but Christian churches have been doing a lot to support pregnant women for many decades and I've been suggesting this is the direction we need to go in as we make it clear that abortion really is the killing of a human life. That's the bottom line: killing a human life simply cannot be a mere "right." But since that is denied that is why we have all the focus on the unborn. This thread is testimony to how hard people work to deny that we're talking about a living human being in the making. Yes, promote birth control, promote social services that give relief to pregnant women, provide adoption services too for those who don't want to keep the child and so on. But first let is face the fact that we ARE talking about a human being in formation in the womb, that at all stages under normal circumstances would inevitably continue to full human personhood if we don't kill it.
If you want to define the point at which it becomes alive and human enough before which you would support abortion but after which you wouldn't, I do wish someone would do that. I can't because I see it as inevitably a human being from conception, but I'm not going to fight with those who come up with a later date -- well, within some limits: if it can live outside the womb with modern care I couldn't support aborting it. That might be where I would draw such a line though to my mind even that is arbitrary. I'm still feeling nauseated at the thought of letting a crying baby die that LNA reported on a while back. Anything that would end the wholesale destruction of unborn babies and sharply reduce abortion would probably get my support.

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 Message 350 by kjsimons, posted 08-10-2018 9:47 PM kjsimons has not replied

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Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 365 of 441 (837994)
08-11-2018 7:43 PM
Reply to: Message 364 by Percy
08-11-2018 6:17 PM


Re: If abortion is understood to be ending a human life, THEN we can talk alternatives
Tangle writes:
NN writes:
As I said, my conclusion about what "We" should do lines up with Percy and Jar and not you.
That will be proved true if Percy will agree with this statement of yours I personally am of the opinion, that there is, in fact, some point before birth during which we are talking about a human life
I don't suppose you will agree but there's the question again. So far you've refused to take a position, human life/not human life at any point before birth.

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 Message 364 by Percy, posted 08-11-2018 6:17 PM Percy has replied

Replies to this message:
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Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 366 of 441 (837996)
08-11-2018 7:51 PM
Reply to: Message 355 by NoNukes
08-11-2018 3:47 PM


Re: If abortion is understood to be ending a human life, THEN we can talk alternatives
NN to Tangle writes:
...so where does the moral authority for your own positions come from?
It used to be that there was enough agreement that killing human life is morally wrong that such a question couldn't even come up. I suppose this is just another measure of the death of the former Christian character of the west that you would deny such a shared sense of moral authority.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 355 by NoNukes, posted 08-11-2018 3:47 PM NoNukes has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 368 by NoNukes, posted 08-11-2018 10:37 PM Faith has replied

  
Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 369 of 441 (838007)
08-12-2018 3:48 AM
Reply to: Message 368 by NoNukes
08-11-2018 10:37 PM


Re: If abortion is understood to be ending a human life, THEN we can talk alternatives
I'm not focused on what evangelicals thought.
Here's Wikipedia on Abortion in the United States.
Rise of anti-abortion legislation[edit]
When the United States first became independent, most states applied English common law to abortion. This meant it was not permitted after quickening, or the start of fetal movements, usually felt 15—20 weeks after conception.[7]
Abortions became illegal by statute in Britain in 1803, and various anti-abortion statutes began to appear in the United States in the 1820s that codified or expanded common law. In 1821, a Connecticut law targeted apothecaries who sold "poisons" to women for purposes of inducing an abortion, and New York made post-quickening abortions a felony and pre-quickening abortions a misdemeanor in 1829. Some argue that the early American abortion laws were motivated not by ethical concerns about abortion but by concern about the procedure's safety. However, some legal theorists point out that this theory is inconsistent with the fact that abortion was punishable regardless of whether any harm befell the pregnant woman and the fact that many of the early laws punished not only the doctor or abortionist, but also the woman who hired them.[8]
A number of other factors likely played a role in the rise of anti-abortion laws in the United States. Physicians, who were the leading advocates of abortion criminalization laws, appear to have been motivated at least in part by advances in medical knowledge. Science had discovered that conception inaugurated a more or less continuous process of development, which would produce a new human being if uninterrupted. Moreover, quickening was found to be neither more nor less crucial in the process of gestation than any other step. Many physicians concluded that if society considered it unjustifiable to terminate pregnancy after the fetus had quickened, and if quickening was a relatively unimportant step in the gestation process, then it was just as wrong to terminate a pregnancy before quickening as after quickening.[9] Ideologically, the Hippocratic Oath and the medical mentality of that age to defend the value of human life as an absolute also played a significant role in molding opinions about abortion.[9]
The article reflects to some (small) extent the disagreements on this thread but overall shows that historically abortion was made illegal as the taking of a human life.
Also it makes it clear that my thoughts are in line with science's recognition that there is a continuous process of growth and development from conception on, so that distinguishing any stage where it is not a human being is really impossible. The last paragraph I quote above pretty much lays out the argument I've been putting forward here.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

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 Message 368 by NoNukes, posted 08-11-2018 10:37 PM NoNukes has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 372 by NoNukes, posted 08-12-2018 1:35 PM Faith has replied

  
Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 374 of 441 (838019)
08-12-2018 2:12 PM
Reply to: Message 372 by NoNukes
08-12-2018 1:35 PM


Re: If abortion is understood to be ending a human life, THEN we can talk alternatives
Also it makes it clear that my thoughts are in line with science's recognition that there is a continuous process of growth and development from conception on, so that distinguishing any stage where it is not a human being is really impossible.
Wrong.
No, it is indeed clear as I said that what I've been arguing is in line with what is said in that article as quoted, in that it argues and I argue that because there is a continuous process of development there is no point at which we can declare it not human. The article describes that view and I share that view. That view has apparently been superseded in the medical profession although on what basis is not at all clear.
So now you want to argue with that view, fine, but what I said is nevertheless true.
The fact that there is a continuum does not make distinguishing some stages impossible. There are some stages where the fact that we are not dealing with a human being is completely clear,
No it is not "completely clear" to me or to those with whom I am in agreement as described in the article. There are many stages of development, but there are not stages of humanness since all the genetic stuff of humanness is present from conception.
You are applying a different standard, which you are free to do, but nevertheless my standard and that described in that paragraph do indeed argue that we are dealing with a human being at all stages. Again, you may argue for your standard but mine is perfectly reasonable and does have support from physicians according to that article.
You are apparently arguing from the appearance of the developing fetus, which doesn't look like a human being in the earliest stages.
just as in a spectrum of visible light, some portions are clearly not red, while other portions are clearly not blue.
Light does not grow through stages of development.
It is completely clear that conception is not the point, nor is any point before the fertilized egg becomes attached.
It is not at all "completely clear," as evidenced by the fact that science as described in the article disagrees with you.
Nevertheless it's an argument you are welcome to make.
For reference here is that part of the article again:
Wikipedia writes:
Science had discovered that conception inaugurated a more or less continuous process of development, which would produce a new human being if uninterrupted. Moreover, quickening was found to be neither more nor less crucial in the process of gestation than any other step. Many physicians concluded that if society considered it unjustifiable to terminate pregnancy after the fetus had quickened, and if quickening was a relatively unimportant step in the gestation process, then it was just as wrong to terminate a pregnancy before quickening as after quickening.[9] Ideologically, the Hippocratic Oath and the medical mentality of that age to defend the value of human life as an absolute also played a significant role in molding opinions about abortion.[9]
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 372 by NoNukes, posted 08-12-2018 1:35 PM NoNukes has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 379 by NoNukes, posted 08-12-2018 9:28 PM Faith has replied

  
Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 380 of 441 (838050)
08-13-2018 3:42 AM
Reply to: Message 379 by NoNukes
08-12-2018 9:28 PM


Re: If abortion is understood to be ending a human life, THEN we can talk alternatives
It is not at all "completely clear," as evidenced by the fact that science as described in the article disagrees with you.
Quote me some science from the article that says that a fertilized egg is a human life prior to attachment in the uterus.
I quoted all that there is in the article on the subject which says only that conception inaugurates the continuous process toward full humanness.
Wikipedia writes:
Science had discovered that conception inaugurated a more or less continuous process of development, which would produce a new human being if uninterrupted.
Implantation is part of the normal process "if uninterrupted" so that too is not a stage that differentiates between human and nonhuman. If the fertilized egg fails to implant that is a spontaneous abortion, but spontaneous abortion can also occur any time after that as well. So again, there is no meaningful dividing line at attachment or any other point along the way from conception to birth, it is a continuous biological process as stated in the article.
ABE:
I think I set the standard too high. Instead, quote me some science from that article that casts doubt on the idea a fertilized egg is not a human being prior to attachment in the uterus. Here is a hint: quickening is not an indication of being a human life.
In the article "quickening" is identified as the point beyond which the medical profession, before we had knowledge of what happens at conception, considered it wrong to abort it, which is the same as calling it a human life at that point. When we had that knowledge of the biology of conception, quickening was understood to be a meaningless indicator. This is all quite clear in what I quoted.
So for those who still want to determine a point along the developmental line before which abortion is justifiable but not afterward, it has to be on some other basis than biology/genetics which shows that humanness begins at conception.
Perhaps a point at which particular functions are acquired.
Perhaps a point where the fetus appears human according to some clear definition.
Perhaps something to do with the legal status of the fetus.
Perhaps the point of viability as identified in the Roe v Wade decision. I mentioned in a recent post that viability as made possible by all available medical helps would be my most liberal cutting-off point. I'd still have a problem well before that, however, since the twelve weeks' fetus is so clearly human in form and activity.
'
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 379 by NoNukes, posted 08-12-2018 9:28 PM NoNukes has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 382 by NoNukes, posted 08-13-2018 10:41 AM Faith has replied

  
Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 383 of 441 (838091)
08-13-2018 8:45 PM
Reply to: Message 382 by NoNukes
08-13-2018 10:41 AM


Re: If abortion is understood to be ending a human life, THEN we can talk alternatives
You simply cannot read, and you are indulging in the usual hairsplitting sophistry. Biologically/genetically we have a human being from conception to birth. And the article says very simply that when this was recognized by the medical profession they had to give up the previous definition of human life beginning at quickening. Period.
You may distinguish stages all you like, but none of them contradict the overall humanness from conception to birth. If you want to distinguish stages from each other it has to be on some other basis than biological humanness.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 382 by NoNukes, posted 08-13-2018 10:41 AM NoNukes has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 384 by NoNukes, posted 08-13-2018 8:49 PM Faith has replied

  
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