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Concern for the protection of women’s lives in anti-abortion laws is not a pro-choice ploy. It’s a p

Sheldon

Veteran Member
"A person is still a person no matter how small. "

Nice straw man, but since size is irrelevant, and I didn't mention it because it's irrelevant, why bring it up at all? Try again...

This....
Nice-Blastocyst-6.jpg


is not a person...and that has nothing to do with size.
 

PureX

Veteran Member
No, because no one is advocating letting the mom die. It's a red herring.
What you aren't getting is that we don't know the mother will die. We can only guess at that likelihood. And the black and white morality of the anti-abortion crowd cannot account for the gray reality of the danger of childbirth. And because of this, a great many women are going to be at risk, and no one knows who is going to decide how to proceed in the face of that danger.

It should have been left up to the mother and her doctor. But you lot just couldn't allow that. So now a bunch of idiot politicians are going to decide, and are going to do so based on political expediency, not the well being of the mother or the child, and some number of both will die as a result.
 

Wildswanderer

Veteran Member
So you're happy to "murder" someone, by not letting them use your body? Something of a double standard.
Deliberately killing someone is the same in your world as not donating all your organs while you are still alive?
Abortion is a deliberate act that causes a death. It's not a passive action like failing to donate organs.
 

Wildswanderer

Veteran Member
Nope. That was your confused antichoice presumption. I equated the fetus to the person needing the kidney. As I said, you constantly insist that a fetus is a person, but functionally treat it as an object.
Which is again simply wrong. Surely you can see the difference between deliberately killing a person and passively failing to save someone's life.
 

ppp

Well-Known Member
Which is again simply wrong. Surely you can see the difference between deliberately killing a person and passively failing to save someone's life.
That distinction is for people who lack the courage of their convictions. But sure. I'll go with your lesser standard...
I suffer severe trauma and need blood immediately. You share my rare blood type and agree to let the paramedic hook you up to me to sustain my life until we get to the hospital. Unfortunately at the hospital they don't have our blood type and are having to get it shipped in. Can you refuse to continue supplying what I need to live? Or are you forced to use your body to sustain my life irrespective of your desires?

The answer is that you can choose to withdraw support at any time for any reason. That's the standard I use for you and for everybody else. Even....gasp...women!
 

Truth in love

Well-Known Member
In my opinion there is no compromise that will be fair to a woman under these new anti-abortion laws.

Meanwhile, many pro-life Catholic thinkers have insisted that none of these laws endanger women in any way: They argue that these laws can be written in ways that will restrict abortion while allowing exceptions to handle miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies and dangers to women’s lives in reasonable, commonsense ways.
But it is not at all obvious that this is true. Nor is it at all obvious that there is consensus about how to handle these situations in reasonable, commonsense ways, even within the church.
Take S.B. 8, the Texas law, which creates an exemption from liability for abortions “necessary due to a medical emergency.” What does that “necessary” mean? The law does not say. Is an abortion that would avert a 5 percent chance of death “necessary,” or must a doctor wait until the risk increases to a 25 percent chance? Is it enough to know that a mother will have a high chance of death tomorrow if the pregnancy continues?

Under both the Texas and Oklahoma laws, medical professionals who are fully confident in their diagnosis of a medical emergency and whose decisions would stand up to anyone’s moral scrutiny can still face legal liability. Because these laws allow plaintiffs, but not defendants, to recover legal costs, doctors and hospitals may be exposed to exorbitant costs defending their medical judgment against bad-faith lawsuits. It may even risk their freedom and livelihoods. Come September, if all goes according to the state’s plan, doctors in Oklahoma who are accused of performing an abortion that wasn’t sufficiently medically warranted might not just face a lawsuit but also a homicide charge.

How long after abortion is criminalized in Oklahoma will it take before a situation arises in which not a single doctor is available to perform a necessary, life-saving abortion for a woman who is too sick, or too poor, to travel elsewhere for it?

We cannot write laws that incentivize doctors to err on the side of allowing the woman to die and ignore the outcome that will result. If there are steep penalties for performing abortions that are later determined to have been unnecessary without strong mandates for doctors and hospitals to perform necessary abortions—which the church surely wants to avoid for religious liberty reasons—women will die. Not because of a renewed culture of life, but because of capitalism. We will have simply made it more costly to kill the child than to kill the mother.

The church’s moral teaching is that abortion should only be performed when the doctrine of double effect applies—when there is some morally neutral medical intervention that can save the mother while, unfortunately and unintentionally, resulting in the death of her child. It sounds simple in theory, much the same way that “necessary” seems like a sufficient legal descriptor in theory. But in practice, Catholic bioethicists are split on how and when to preserve the lives of mothers when their pregnancies become life-endangering.
Notably, under Texas’ law, at least one patient was told to wait until her ectopic pregnancy ruptured her fallopian tube—which would have put her at immediate risk of death from hemorrhage—because her doctor worried an abortion wouldn’t be sufficiently “necessary” under the law until that point.

It is time to create the space for an actual conversation. How we adjudicate these laws affects more than the unborn. Women’s lives are on the line.
We need to talk about ‘life of the mother’ exceptions in abortion law. | America Magazine

I think it will take time to hammer out the fine details. That said if the life of the mother exception is there I think a reasonable compromise will be found. We don’t have perfect tax laws, health care laws, educational laws etc. We should not expect perfect laws on the issue of the rights of the unborn either. We can get pretty good.
 

ppp

Well-Known Member
I think it will take time to hammer out the fine details. That said if the life of the mother exception is there I think a reasonable compromise will be found. We don’t have perfect tax laws, health care laws, educational laws etc. We should not expect perfect laws on the issue of the rights of the unborn either. We can get pretty good.
Medical decisions are often judgment calls made by medical professional.. Who gets to decide if the life of the mother is in danger? Who ultimately gets to decide after the fact if the decision was correct?
 

KWED

Scratching head, scratching knee
In my opinion there is no compromise that will be fair to a woman under these new anti-abortion laws.

Meanwhile, many pro-life Catholic thinkers have insisted that none of these laws endanger women in any way: They argue that these laws can be written in ways that will restrict abortion while allowing exceptions to handle miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies and dangers to women’s lives in reasonable, commonsense ways.
But it is not at all obvious that this is true. Nor is it at all obvious that there is consensus about how to handle these situations in reasonable, commonsense ways, even within the church.
Take S.B. 8, the Texas law, which creates an exemption from liability for abortions “necessary due to a medical emergency.” What does that “necessary” mean? The law does not say. Is an abortion that would avert a 5 percent chance of death “necessary,” or must a doctor wait until the risk increases to a 25 percent chance? Is it enough to know that a mother will have a high chance of death tomorrow if the pregnancy continues?

Under both the Texas and Oklahoma laws, medical professionals who are fully confident in their diagnosis of a medical emergency and whose decisions would stand up to anyone’s moral scrutiny can still face legal liability. Because these laws allow plaintiffs, but not defendants, to recover legal costs, doctors and hospitals may be exposed to exorbitant costs defending their medical judgment against bad-faith lawsuits. It may even risk their freedom and livelihoods. Come September, if all goes according to the state’s plan, doctors in Oklahoma who are accused of performing an abortion that wasn’t sufficiently medically warranted might not just face a lawsuit but also a homicide charge.

How long after abortion is criminalized in Oklahoma will it take before a situation arises in which not a single doctor is available to perform a necessary, life-saving abortion for a woman who is too sick, or too poor, to travel elsewhere for it?

We cannot write laws that incentivize doctors to err on the side of allowing the woman to die and ignore the outcome that will result. If there are steep penalties for performing abortions that are later determined to have been unnecessary without strong mandates for doctors and hospitals to perform necessary abortions—which the church surely wants to avoid for religious liberty reasons—women will die. Not because of a renewed culture of life, but because of capitalism. We will have simply made it more costly to kill the child than to kill the mother.

The church’s moral teaching is that abortion should only be performed when the doctrine of double effect applies—when there is some morally neutral medical intervention that can save the mother while, unfortunately and unintentionally, resulting in the death of her child. It sounds simple in theory, much the same way that “necessary” seems like a sufficient legal descriptor in theory. But in practice, Catholic bioethicists are split on how and when to preserve the lives of mothers when their pregnancies become life-endangering.
Notably, under Texas’ law, at least one patient was told to wait until her ectopic pregnancy ruptured her fallopian tube—which would have put her at immediate risk of death from hemorrhage—because her doctor worried an abortion wouldn’t be sufficiently “necessary” under the law until that point.

It is time to create the space for an actual conversation. How we adjudicate these laws affects more than the unborn. Women’s lives are on the line.
We need to talk about ‘life of the mother’ exceptions in abortion law. | America Magazine
All a woman needs to say is "If I am forced to carry this foetus to term, I will kill myself".
The abortion is then necessary due to both physical and psychological medical emergency.
 

KWED

Scratching head, scratching knee
You are worried about the one in a million exception but not the millions of aborted babies.
:rolleyes:
Why does an early-stage foetus that is unwanted by the mother need "worrying about"?
It is not sentient. It has no experiences or expectations. It is an unfeeling clump of cells. A mistake.
Why does that deserve more "worry" than the rape victim, or promising medical student or already overworked single mother who finds themselves unexpectedly pregnant after a failure of birth control.
Why does it deserve more "concern" than the unwanted child who may well be abandoned to the tender mercies of the care system - because the hypocrites who bang on about the welfare of the child don't adopt them?

You don't "care" about babies. You only care about ideological dogma and about punishing "sinful" women. You just don't have the guts to admit it.
 

KWED

Scratching head, scratching knee
I don't play stupid " what if" games. They are all humans.
You have taken an inflexible moral stance - that they are all humans of equal value. Lets see if you are consistent.

Which do you save, the one toddler or the dozen embryos? (They are at different ends of the collapsing building so you can only save one).

The reason why you won't answer is that you know you would save the toddler as you don't actually consider a fertilised egg to be "a human child" in the same way as you do a toddler.
You are aware of your own dishonesty but think that refusing to publicly acknowledge it will make it go away.
 

KWED

Scratching head, scratching knee
from 1980 to 2000 – 99.31% of abortions annually were for non-therapeutic reasons.

Abortionist Don Sloan, who has performed abortions for decades, says that a situation where the mother’s life is endangered by her pregnancy is extremely rare:

“If a woman with a serious illness- heart disease, say, or diabetes- gets pregnant, the abortion procedure may be as dangerous for her as going through pregnancy … with diseases like lupus, multiple sclerosis, even breast cancer, the chance that pregnancy will make the disease worse is no greater that the chance that the disease will either stay the same or improve. And medical technology has advanced to a point where even women with diabetes and kidney disease can be seen through a pregnancy safely by a doctor who knows what he’s doing. We’ve come a long way since my mother’s time….The idea of abortion to save the mothers’ life is something that people cling to because it sounds noble and pure- but medically speaking, it probably doesn’t exist. It’s a real stretch of our thinking.”

Don Sloan, M.D. and Paula Hartz. Choice: A Doctor’s Experience with the Abortion Dilemma. New York: International Publishers 2002 P 45-46
Unsafe abortion is a leading cause of maternal death worldwide (WHO).
If safe, accessible, legal abortion is not available, women will resort to unsafe abortion.
Therefore the provision of safe abortion is essential for women's health and safety.
QED.
 

KWED

Scratching head, scratching knee
I like Peter Singer's point of view, a mother or father should be able to terminate the life of a child up to the age of five if there's some serious disability with the child. Also, if this child is effecting the mental health of the parents.
But this would never be necessary as the millions of "pro-lifers", whose only concern is the welfare of the child, would immediately jump in and adopt them.
What's that?
Oh... :(

Kind of like how we can euthenase our grandparents now when they feel they are just a burden to us.
If you can't win an argument with reason, just make **** up! :rolleyes:
 

KWED

Scratching head, scratching knee
Another way to look at abortion is with a parallel to slavery, but not from the POV of the slave, but from the POV of the slave owner. The USA became divided in the 1860's and the Civil War was fought because of this slave owner POV that lingered in spite of a widening push for slave rights.

The slave owner saw their slaves as private property and not as a human beings. To them the slave was no different than a horse or a plow, which they legally bought at the store and thereby owned by legal means.

Because of their ownership of private property they felt had the right do as they pleased with the slaves, up and including the death penalty. They had an entitlement mentality that could not see slaves as part of humanity. This did change, after the war was lost. The Southern Democrats who lost the war vowed to rise again, but did so in a different guise of slave owner.
Indeed.
The "pro-lifers" are in some ways similar to the slave owners, insisting that they should have control over the bodily autonomy of other people, and the welfare of those people be damned.
Good analogy.
 
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