…and…
Wouldn’t it mean that they had also stabbed the woman?
I do not understand the relevance of your strawman. That was not at all what I was asserting in responding to Strollen. My point is that if you rely on fetal homicide laws as your justification for regulating abortion you are doing exactly what the anti-abortion folks who wrote those laws want you to do. From the wikepedia entry on the Unborn Victims of Violence Act.
I think if you look at the historic approach that Dems have taken to their Senatorial duties and appointments to the Court, you would have to conclude that they would not have done to Obama and Garland what Republicans did, had they been presented with a similar opportunity, and that they would have reluctantly concluded that it was too close to an election to offer a nominee now.
As I have pointed out before, Thomas & Roberts & Alito are all on the court with the blessing of Democrats. Scalia was as well. Kennedy was as well.
Trump appointed her to the bench for the first time barely three years ago.
It’s not a strawman. It’s an intellectual exercise, that forces us to think about underlying issues.
So what is your answer? It’s not some sort of trick.
Of course it’s a strawman. It has nothing to do with anything I was discussing. This is the Internet, not Philosophy 101, so moar cat pictures please.
But, in the interest of moving the thread along: In both cases you’ve stabbed a person. Either one of those acts could be considered particularly heinous and we have laws that add extra penalties for such acts depending on the jurisdiction.
But if I stabbed the child after it was born, and killed it, then i would be prosecuted for murder.
Should i be prosecuted for murder if i stabbed the chid a minute earlier, before it had been delivered?
You should be prosecuted for stupidity. Just sayin’.
The other factor here is also that one of dependence. A lot of the embryo/fetus => personhood argument is dependent on an opinion, sometimes based in a religious view, but should that religious view become the law of the land? should those religious beliefs be forced upon those who do not share them? Are all embryo/fetuses equal?
Also, this debate is completely ignoring any rights of the carrier. Should the mother be forced to carry any and all pregnancies to term? What if carrying the pregnancy imposes an undue burden on the mother?
Ultimately, both of those arguments hinge on the mother. IMHO, even above the State, the Mother is the one who needs to judge the value of the embryo/fetus, through her religion, the father and what her body/mind/spirit/doctors are telling her (especially if the burden includes the mother’s possible (probable in some cases) death.
Forcing a belief on someone who has more experience than you through the legal power of the Government is an awful thing to do. The appropriate thing is persuasion, not imposition, especially on the citizen who has (for the most part) reached the age of citizenship.
My final concern is not RvW - related, but what next? The power represented by the religious anti-abortion movement will not be allowed to just go away, but move on. I figure LGBTQ protections will be next, probably with some criminalization allowed, and then moving on to other groups to discriminate against using the power of the Government.
I don’t think it should ignore the mothers rights at all.
But in certain situations, i believe that her rights are not the only rights at play.
At conception, for instance, i believe that the mother’s rights are in fact the only ones at play. So she should be given full control.
But the other extreme would be immediately prior to birth. In that situation, i feel that the fetus is a person, as much as a newborn is, given that it is structurally identical. It’s the exact same entity, and this should be granted the same protections. My view here is not based on religion at all, but rather on the logical view that if a newborn child is deserving of certain rights, then that exact cold is still deserving of those rights even if you translated its location in space a foot to the side.
So in that latter case, you are forced to consider the rights and well-being of both entities. Not just the child, nor the mother. They are both worthy of consideration at that point.
No, not really because it just circles the drain not unlike this thread being hijacked by it, meawhile a whole host of what I consider more important issues get the air sucked out of the room by it (oh the heresy).
But if we were to waste more time on it I’d prefer hearing why men want to tell women what to do on this.
I’m no internet fool and know when to bow out of a thread, if it ever comes back on topic I’ll circle back and if that never happens no great loss, I’ve got an Ottoman empire to run into the ground.
Both worthy of consideration, sure - to a degree I’m arguing that they are both worthy of consideration from knowledge of conception at least. However, who or what should have the right to say one or the other is more worthy?
At what point would we argue that you or I have a Government forced obligation to run into a burning building to save another person’s life? Or a baby’s life? Does it make a difference if it’s a baby? Why/Why not? Should that be your choice, or should the Government force you to do that?
I’ll even throw in an SF wrinkle - let’s say that gender surgery gets better enough to allow the father to carry an embryo/fetus to term and give birth (could reasonably happen in the next 20 years, certainly in the next 50, or about as long as RvW has been a Constitutional Right). Should the State be able to force a father to undergo gender surgery and carry the embryo/fetus to birth?
Perhaps to make it easier you can list all the topics that men are not allowed to have opinions on.
I mean I hope you realize that we’re not lawmakers debating what bills we’re going to introduce into the Senate this afternoon. This is a message board.
You talk about whatever you like Menzo, I certainly won’t stop you.
And if you feel entitled to tell women what to do with their bodies in this forum, knock yourself out man.
I don’t feel entitled to tell women what to do with their bodies when I’m sleeping with them, so you don’t have much to worry about on a message board.
We’re having a discussion. Nobody is telling anyone what they can or can’t do.
But we do that all the time. We, as a society, have already decided that people have rights. And in court, we routinely decide what is the best outcome in situations where you have actors with competing interests, based largely on some notion of maximizing wellbeing.
I don’t believe that in that case you would be obligated to endanger yourself to save another person.
Likewise, in cases where a pregnancy endangers the life of the mother, even if you were to consider the fetus a person, legal consistency would suggest an abortion would be ok.
However, in the (extremely unlikely) case where a woman has already carried a child into the 9th month, where the child is essentially structurally identical to a newborn, and thus a person, but then wanted to get an abortion for non medical reasons, i would tend to think that should not be allowed, because it’s essentially sacrificing ALL of the rights of the child, in exchange for some fairly arbitrary abstract notion of liberty. The mother isn’t actually benefiting in a way that counterbalances the loss of all rights by the child.
Now, in practice, that extreme case would likely never come up, the abortion would actually be endangering the mother, and is already illegal in most of the country.
We. Have. A. Thread. For. This.
It’s not like the main topic of this thread is some one of sacrosanct discussion.
It’s normally just dunking on GOP assholes.
I’m interested in “dunking on GOP assholes”. I’m not interested in another god damned abortion debate. I’m expressing my opinion. The end. You guys can just ignore a random opinion like mine like usual about thread “drift” or whatever all you want but don’t pretend like this is a good thread to bring that debate over to.
Thread cop, out! :)
Eh, that’s cool. I find a discussion about which and morality more interesting than the GOP assholes, since their endless assholishness has fatigued me, but if someone wants to move it over there, that’s cool.
Yeah, we can do that.
I do think that the discussion of what happens to the Right to Life Religious wing of the GOP (where so much of the moral corruption is - see Falwell, et al), if they do get their way is important to the topic however.