Talk Elections

What is your opinion on this commonly used statement in favor of abortions?

Safe? Yeah, although admittedly can cause emotional harm to women having one.

Legal? Not universally yet, but it should be considered a right for all women.

Rare? I'm not sure about this one.

I don't really care if it's rare or not.   But yes, it should be safe and legal of course.

You want abortions to be more common? 

If it means that one day 16 and Pregnant can be cancelled due to lack of material.

These three are fine to me. Add "free", though.

The idea that they need to be rare is a concession to the reactionary forces, really people should be able to have abortions as often as they want to. Emotional harm only comes from stigmatization of abortions, which of course is foolish- remove that and all shall be fine. People should think of abortions as a normal procedure akin to putting on a condom. They can and should be having them left and right, which will be glorious.

Antonio V/Objectif 289 (do we go by the little names or the big ones?) alas, I do not think they should be free- condoms are not, no?

Little.

Very good as far as these political slogans go.

Safe- Abortions will not be if they are made illegal.
Legal- See above.
Rare- Yes, but for the convenience of the women.  Obviously, no one likes abortion or unwanted pregnancy.

I don't get this debate about there being "too many abortions". It's the choice of the individual.

I'm happy someone gets it. I think there need to be more, but really the idea of rarity being a good thing... is again an imposition.

I'm all for free condoms as well, but I guess they are cheap enough for the price not to be a problem.

And yes, it's Antonio. :) Usernames (the "little" ones) are those to which most people are refered to as.

Yes, I suppose you are right. How much would an abortion cost, anyways?

No idea, but I guess it might be a very serious burden for lower-income women. Here in France, abortions are reimbursed like a medical act by the country's public health care.

Assuming a single-payer system, then state-funded abortions would be obvious, I would think. But what are the chances we in the US would get single-payer any time soon?

()

...unfortunately.

Safe, legal, and rare

Rare in this context is subtle pandering to the forced-birthers. What should be rare is unwanted pregnancies.

I like this TheReporter guy. We need more posters like him.

Fixed.

Of course abortion should be rare. Even if you're 'pro-choice' you can hardly consider it a morally neutral act. It's death (and death for no reason is...)

See, that's why English needs gendered nouns. Then she could call her herself "TheReportress" and all would be well.

I'm not going to even comment on the rest of you. Anyway, it's a nice little slogan that tries to forge a nice little compromise ground for wishy-washy, indecisive politicians who want to be everything to anyone. Hell, if I wasn't quite the ideologue on this issue, I might fall for it. However, it's stupid.If you have a moral problem with abortion (as I do) and believe it's killing (as I do), then why the Hell don't you want it to be illegal? And if you're pro-choice and saying it, do you view abortion like video game playing, "It's not wrong, but we shouldn't have too much of it?" But, there's already enough bashing of it from the pro-choice side, so I'll leave it at that.

...Except there are people out there who don't view it as killing.

I'm glad someone feels the same as me.  In regards to the bolded part, especially.

It's inaccurate hackery. It's as bad as any spin the Republicans have ever come up with.

And they're wrong.

It's about as killing as killing a spider or something.

Of course it's killing; nobody has ever seriously disputed whether it's killing (just like killing a gnat is still killing, killing a bacteria is still killing, etc.). The dispute is over whether it's murder (I happen to believe it is not, up to a point).

Nah, spiders are more alive than this thing:

()

You do realize that was you (and all of us) at one point, don't you? 

Sure. I was also a bunch of atoms in space at some point. Doesn't mean I have any fondness for random asteroids or stars.

So the thought of your parents considering the option of having you aborted doesn't bother you in the least? 

TheReportress sounds like some odd BSDM character. But I'm kind of into that....

Anyway, thank you, but of course as Lief said, we were all that at one point. Try talking to it, try touching it... note you can't do that.

Wouldn't have been able to feel it, so why would I care?

It's like asking what you would think about yourself before you came to exist, in heaven.

we are nothing but a bunch of atoms in space, as far as i know.

...no? I don't see how that could have been inferred from what I said.

I wasn't aborted, so I don't really care.  And I can't say I'd give a fock if I was aborted.  I'm pretty sure I wasn't meant to exist anyways.

Maybe I'd feel empathy for fetuses if I believed that they're people.  The "herp what if you were aborted derp" argument loses it's meaning when you're an amoral douchebag like me.

If I were aborted, I wouldn't have an opinion on being aborted because I would have never existed. Simple as that. A lot of things could have happened that would have prevented me from being born; as a person who currently exists and enjoys existing, I'm happy that the millions of things necessary for me to exist occurred, but I'm not going to be upset for the literally billions of other potential people who could have existed if other decisions had been made.

I find the thought of teenaged or young adult women who, because of a mistake or an episode of poor judgment, are forced to cut short their dreams and goals to raise a child that will always be on at least some level unwanted much more upsetting than the thought of my parents hypothetically aborting me.

As a person who was likely an accident, I can say that it sucks.  Particularly when it's two random people who hate eachother who are forced by their silly morals to stay with eachother.

I see fewer unwanted kids as a good thing.  But even then we'll have the problem of insanely idiotic 14 year old girls who want to keep their fetus.

I should think it would be obvious that for a conservative pro-choicer, then saying that you want abortion to be rare means that you want the situations that would lead a woman to the decision of having an abortion to be rare.  Ideally, no woman should have an abortion because she feels she can't afford to bring the child to term. (Whether it be to keep the baby or give em up for adoption.)  Also, ideally people would abstain from intercourse unless they are prepared to deal with the possible pregnancy.  While some in the pro-life movement overstate the effect, terminating a (potential) human life is not an easy act to contemplate for most people, nor should it be.

Abortions will be rarer if more people use contraception. Which not only removes the moral gray areas (unless you are the pope) but is far less uncomfortable for the women involved.

I don't give a damn about fetuses either. And yeah, that "what if you were aborted" argument is utter bullsh*t. Our existence is the consequence of an infinite succession of random events which could easily have never happened, and our mother not aborting is only one of those events.

If I want abortions to be rare, it's only because I acknowledge that they almost always represent an emotional trauma for the woman. In an ideal world, appropriate contraception would prevent unwanted pregnancies from the beginning and allow women not to face the dilemma of whether or not to abort.

I think the implication is that there are fewer unwanted pregnancies in the first place.

there's an obvious joke here but all i'm going to say is get help.. no seriously.

Can't think of a convincing criterium for personhood that would deny personhood to an unborn fetus and at the same time extend it to a heavily dementing old man.

The death penalty should be safe, legal, and rare. It's used far too often.

Safe: it depends on the situation, because back-alley abortions are not at all safe, but maybe they are if performed in a clinic or hospital.
Legal: I oppose abortion except to save the life of the mother.  There are other options available (birth control and adoption, for example) that, while by no means foolproof, are still much better alternatives and I feel should be legal.  As for rape and incest, I feel that it is an exploitation of women to allow abortion in cases of rape because it suggests that men can sexually abuse women without consequence.  Incest can be voluntary or involuntary, so the same guidelines, in my opinion, would apply to it as well.
Rare: If we change the law to reflect this, abortion will be rare.

Should be added to "talking points that piss you off".


WTF?!

Well, unfortunately, I am not surprised....

What alarms me is that most people here seem to be worse than the Democratic Party (or at least, the official position of the Democratic Party).

I was going to reply to Scott about how his opinion (about no one liking abortion) is incorrect. It turns out that that isn't even needed.

Seriously, is that the only single reaction you can come up with every time someone expresses a view you disagree with ?

Few views I disagree with are as egregious as what you just said.

That's surprising, considering how half of your posts sound exactly like this one.

Yeah, as I thought.

They might not end up staying quite as dumb if they can still go to school.

The ideal is that they don't get pregnant in the first place. Abortion is just cutting the weed; education is pulling it out by the roots.

I find the phrase largely unhelpful. Under the doctrine of Casey v Planned Parenthood which largely supplanted Roe v Wade the question should be when does the state's interest in the fetus exceed the woman's right to privacy. There is a great deal of law pertaining to the definition of the state's interest at the end of life. Under Casey, we have failed to recognize that one can apply a parallel standard to the onset of life for the question of law.