Human Rights

All these comparisons are going to be faulty on one level. But you need to be addressing the situation, not how you think it's different. You say that a pregnancy is not like an injury but clearly, an unwanted pregnancy is exactly like an unwanted injury or infection. Think of it like a sexually transmitted disease. Why? She knew the risks. Why shouldn't she "accept responsibility" and help herself? Why should she have the right of driving car + getting medical treatment? Where is that written? Why wouldn't it be a right? I asked you that before but you never told me. You simply said you didn't see how it was, but you didn't explain why. And you're not the one who determines what rights are, so I don't see how your bare assertion on the matter is anything even worth considering.

Who on Earth made that premise? Riverrat I think you've been given a lot more than you're capable of responding to, already. You don't have the time here to invent strawmen to knock down.

Maybe you've heard of clinics where they specialize in that. As a matter of fact, she has exactly the same right to treatment for her infertility as she does for any other injury, disease, or disorder.From what basis do you assert no right for women to become pregnant if they wish?

Because you didn't make a comparison; you misrepresented the arguments of your opponents. Nobody's argued in favor of pulling the plug on the neonatal wing; in fact, in response to that very question, I've repeatedly laid out the reasons why opposing forced birth has nothing to do with euthanizing infants on life-support. By my line of reasoning? No. Only by your line of reasoning, where an adult woman is nothing more than a life-support machine for embryos, does that follow. Your continued disdain for the rights and independance of women becomes more and more obvious, even as you deny it. You'd like to conceal it, but the more you compare women to machines, the more obvious it becomes that women are nothing but objects to you. Well, certainly the court in recent rulings has striken down any attempt to legislate or adjudicate a couple's right to reproduce, if they so choose. That's why we don't have population control measures, for instance.So, since when? Look, RR, you're not the one who decides what rights women have and don't have. If you don't believe they have a certain right, you need to explain why. Under our constitutional system, people have all the rights that there's no reason for them not to have. You seem to be drawing a distinction between the rights people have under the law and the rights they have under... something else, though you refuse to say what that might be.Nobody knows what the fuck you're talking about, and your mode of argument seems to be limited to "I say they don't have such-and-such a right, so they don't. Prove me wrong."You'll pardon me if I don't find that very compelling, since you're not the arbiter of rights. Your opinion on rights is essentially meaningless, especially since you've already said you don't plan on taking any measures to oppose abortion. You're free to hold your own opinion, as I am mine, but if you expect it to be taken seriously you need to be taking an effort to defend it, not simply demanding that we convince you otherwise. We've laid out how we justify our positions, and you haven't addressed any of that. You've just repeated yours.Ok, we get it. You think women who have sex are supposed to be baby machines. You've consistently compared them to life-support machines and a host of other objects and situations that communicate loud and clear your belief that women are not people, but uteruses (uteri?) on legs. Well, gotcha. If you're intent on dehumanizing women, no argument of ours is going to convince you otherwise.Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

No, I didn't. Why are you intent on misrepresenting my argument? Then fetuses who would normally be aborted should be put up for adoption, instead. Surgeon, heal thyself. Your disdain for women couldn't possibly be any clearer. (Let me let you in on something that should be completely obvious. Just because you like to have sex with women doesn't make you pro-woman. It simply makes you heterosexual. Being pro-woman, being feminist, means seeing women as equal people and not just as fuckholes of varying degrees of attractiveness.)Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

I imagine that contraceptive technologies will increase, so, no, I don't think there will be 40 million adoptions. Maybe they'll be orphans or something. Who knows? It's your hypothetical, what do you think will happen? And how is this on-topic again, exactly? I couldn't have described your views any better myself. There's no insult, just an accurate description of your position. With every post you prove me right.

What makes you think I don't understand where RR is standing? Just because I don't agree with him?

Except that that's not his position at all. If you get burned, RR thinks you should be treated for burns. If you're in a car accident, you deserve to be patched up to the extent of your insurance coverage, etc.Only when a woman has sex for pleasure does the hammer suddenly come down, and she's not allowed to take steps to rectify a situation that clearly occured by accident (birth control failure.)I understand completely where Riverrat is coming from - he knocked a girl up once and then pressured her into an abortion. And now he feels bad about it. He thinks that, because he did something wrong by pressuring a woman into an abortion, the answer is to make sure that it's impossible to pressure a woman into an abortion. He thinks that the way to do that is to control what kind of choices women can make, but that's the exact same mistake he made in the first place. But it's impossible for him to see his error because he doesn't see women as equal people capable of making decisions.The proof is the dripping disdain for women that flavors every one of his posts. The proof is that when I told him that women should be considered equal adults, he told me I was "mistaken." (It happened.)Riverrat wants to control women because he's certain that he knows better than they do. I completely understand his opinion, which is why I stopped responding after he made that clear. I mean did it even occur to you to look at the thread before you made sweeping pronouncements about what I did and didn't understand? Apparently not, since otherwise you would have seen that my last post was several pages ago.

Well, shit, Gasby, if you're not prepared to aquaint yourself with what's going on in the thread, maybe you don't exactly have a really great position from which to be talking about who understands what? Well, I've already asked you - exactly in what sense am I still "trying to change" anything at all?

No, I'm not; the subject was whether or not I understood where you were coming from. And I do. The proof of it is your posts and the amazing disdain for women and their choices that peppers every single one of them. Wtf what? Have you just forgotten what you've posted, or what? Look, I quoted you doing exactly this, and you had absolutely no reply, confirming that my interpretation of your remarks was correct. Message 123: I get it, already. You're convinced you know better than women how they should live their lives and use their uteruses. You say you're not, but why is it that every single post that you write is chock-a-block with your desire to control women's uteruses? And if that's completely unrelated to your personal history of having a woman get an abortion, why did you bring it up in the first place?I mean it's not like I looked in your medical records or something. Everything I've said about your personal history has been stuff you felt necessary to introduce into the conversation. Look, RR, if you didn't want to talk about that stuff, you shouldn't have brought it up. You have no one to blame but yourself. So he actually doesn't have the same responsibilities. Gotcha. The man has no role in all of this, because we're talking about women. Men don't get abortions.

The context only makes it clearer that I was right, RR. You weren't taken out of context, just edited for brevity. Women who agree with you that women are not equal to men? Yes, those women are not pro-woman. The fact that some women agree with you is irrelevant. Even the KKK had black members. Then what the hell are we talking about, RR? First you say women shouldn't be allowed to have abortions, now you're adamant that they can choose for themselves?Why did you open a thread to attack the right to chose and advocate for forced birth if you don't believe any of those things? I'm sure you'd like to believe that it was.

Does your mechanic own your car just because you had him work on the transmission? The doctor isn't doing the abortion willy-nilly; he's doing it because he was contracted to perform the abortion on behalf of the owner of the uterus. Well, who is giving her cramps, chief? The magic menstural fairies? You're simply equivocating on the word "control." Bingo. That's the principle we call "freedom".

Why should a rape victim recieve privileges that others don't have? Why is that fair?Also - how do we know who's a rape victim?Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

How does that make abortion a privilege? A privilege is something that you have. How can you coherently assert that women have the priviledge of having abortions, but they can't have abortions?You've stopped making any kind of sense, and that's largely RR's fault for refusing to address the debate in the obvious way - should women who consented to sex be allowed to have abortions, or not? He largely refuses to address the question. Fair enough, but it seems like an obvious and important question. Can you be a rape victim without your rapist having been convicted of rape?

That's exactly what he said: Women don't control their uteruses because if they did, they wouldn't need a doctor to perform the abortion. You mean, is liberty the heart of the liberal attitude? That people should be free to do those things that we don't have a really good reason to prevent them from doing?Yeah, that's exactly it. It's called "freedom". It means that you don't have to justify the things you want to do; rather, the people that want to prevent you from doing them need to justify their position. It's why the Bill of Rights is not a document outlining what you're allowed to do, it's a document outlining what the government can't prevent you from doing.Freedom. Yeah, I can see how it would be a scary thing to you, Riverrat, but I'm not about to apologize or defend my view that people should be basically free. Maybe you'd care to explain how it is that you're able to know better than everybody else what they should be allowed to do?