3778

yugogirl.gif

3779

No, it doesn’t.

3780

I really haven’t had any experiences that suggest otherwise!

3781

Including the President, of course, his cynical bargain with the religious right notwithstanding.

3782

Trump pretty much transcends political parties. He was essentially a NYC liberal at some point in his past.

The reality is, I don’t think he ever had any kind of real principled view on any issue beyond, “Whatever is good for me, personally, right now, is good.”

3783

Aiding and abetting the Republican party makes one a traitor. Fuck them.

3784

I really, really wish people here, particularly my liberal allies, would stop and think about the implications of this.

The GOP has been the purported champion of people opposed to abortion for several decades. As a result, hundreds of millions of votes have been cast for Republican candidates. This, despite the fact that over and over, when push came to shove, Republican and their appointments have stepped in to save abortion rights.

You would almost think the whole thing was a gigantic con game.

So how could it work, that millions of anti-abortion voters still vote GOP, despite all the times that Lucy pulled the football out from under them? Could it possibly be that anti-abortion voters who might have otherwise turned against the GOP (or at least burned out on thinking the GOP would deliver on this issue) are repeated re-motivated by the blizzard of liberals who call them the ugliest of names?

The anti-abortion crowd is, indeed, pretty thick headed to keep falling for this con, but you know, liberals are being just as taken in by the same con. They just keep on playing their part, not just insisting on abortion rights, but going far beyond to tell these people – who are almost 100% have-nots, and thus potential Democrats – that we despise them and would not welcome them into our tent.

(And, as an aside, I am reasonably certain that at the upper levels, one of the main reasons Republican leadership does not like Trump is that he is too stupid to understand the con. He would actually end abortion rights, just for the adulation of that base. And if that ever happened, it would be a long term electoral disaster for the Republicans. Abortion is probably the best turn-out-the-vote card of this entire era, but FAR more so for whichever party is not currently getting its way.)

3785

Disapproval forced them to embrace Nazism, part the 35th.

3786

I’ve been reading some old RPG PDFs, and I think I have a way to resolve the abortion issue. Namely Earthdawn’s framework of Namegivers. (https://earthdawn.fandom.com/wiki/Namegivers) Once the fetus has been named, then it’s considered a human and can’t be aborted. Until then, abort away. This framework is easy to understand, it’s consistent, it makes far more sense than then the ludicrous life at conception idea, and it places a bright line along the otherwise murky path of fetal development.

3787

Cue Republican politicians promising to enact laws that will automatically name any unnamed fetuses present in wombs or test tubes three times a day, each day, according to a pre-selected list of Biblical names, and still winning all the votes in Flyover Shithole America.

3788

I actually respect the internal logic of anti-abortion folks more than some here do, I think. I disagree with the idea that a zygote is a person, but the idea that a third-trimester fetus is a person is rather persuasive to me, though I believe there are other considerations from the mother’s point of view. Like many people I think a lot happens in those nine months and teasing out the emergence of “personhood” is a deep challenge for science and ethics. But if one believes all 9 months constitute personhood, then it follows that legal abortion (or any abortion) has been a holocaust to rank alongside even the Nazis. And if that is so, then even voting for Trump actually makes a kind of sense. Oddly, improbably, of all the bargains Trump has broken, he – he of the multiple wives and tawdry affairs and likely rapes and who-knows-how-many abortions paid for – has actually kept the one he made with the evangelicals.

I respect that more, anyway, than Trump voters who bought his BS lines about coal or how brown people were taking way their jobs, and who were completely ignorant of (or approving of!) the clear and present danger he presented to constitutional democracy. That I call stupidity and malice mingled, and called it so in 2016, and will continue to call it so.

Now, as for said anti-abortion voters’ belief that the universe was created by the entity known as Yahweh and that there was an avatar of said entity walking around in Judea ~2000 years ago, well… that I consider to be absurd. But a lot of my political allies and friends believe the same thing, so I try not to bring it up too often.

3789

The problem with this concession is that there is ample evidence to the contrary. E.g. this law, which applies to fertilized eggs inside women but not to multiple fertilized eggs created to be implanted in women.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-29/why-alabama-s-abortion-law-includes-an-exemption-for-infertility

They can’t really believe the fertilized eggs are people if they are happy to kill the ones who don’t get selected for implantation. Or, maybe they do believe that, but it is not a belief we should take seriously.

3790

I for one am glad that we’ve finally accepted that liberals are the real racists intolerant assholes.

3791

It also follows that since something like half of all fertilized embryos miscarry, that miscarriage is the greatest killer of humans in history and we should be devoted all of our health research funding to solving it.

3792

This doesn’t really follow. Miscarriage is a tragedy regardless of whether you believe a fetus is a person. And we don’t allocate research funds proportionally according to the number of people killed, a much bigger factor is the likelihood that a given research project will be productive.

3793

(Edit: sniped by Matt_W)

I would add another critique to that one, that:

  • If you accept zygotes are full human beings,
  • and half of all zygotes fail to actually implant (https://www.ucsfhealth.org/education/conception_how_it_works/)
  • then this failure to implant has literally killed half of all human being that have ever existed. Like a 10 Billion+ death toll from this, enough to completely dwarf any other cause of death like war, cancer, heart disease, starvation, etc. etc. etc.
  • therefore life-begins-at-conception people should be clamoring for enormous resources to be devoted to defeating this scourge that has killed 10 Billion people, and kills another ~400,000 people each and every day.

But of course they are not clamoring to cure this terrible tragedy. Which points to a couple of things, like a) people don’t really spend much time thinking about this, ~45 minutes of thought is plenty for this one issue that they base their morality and politics around and B) that’s cause they already got the answer they want. If you take this one weird interpretation of when life begins, and then you immediately stop thinking about its implications, then you never have to be the bad guy ever again and you are always the good guy.

3794

All the babies killed by miscarriage are killed by the will of God, because they were all baby hitlers.

3795
  1. If that research is right, more than half of miscarriages occur completely undiagnosed and unknown by the mother.
  2. A miscarriage may or may not be a tragedy to the mother/couple involved. Kind of depends on whether the pregnancy was wanted. But even in cases where the pregnancy was wanted, the loss is (I speak from experience) of a potential or imagined child, not an actual child. Because an early-term fetus is not a child and would never be mistaken for one.
  3. Miscarriage carries none of the social weight, even to rabid pro-lifers, that stillbirth does. We don’t typically bury early-term miscarriages or hold funerals for them. Couples do grieve, yes, but it’s a muted private grief, and it doesn’t seem in character or quantity anything like the grief of losing a child. I know losing either of my kids would tear my heart out and leave me permanently broken. Miscarriage was sadness for a few days.
3796

When in power, anti-abortion zealots do not behave as if they believe life begins at fertilization and that all life is precious and must be protected. They simply don’t. Therefore, they do not actually believe that.

3797

So God must be arrested and prosecuted.