There's just as much proof that Harry Potter is real as there is for the reality of the Bible.
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A great first step to ending Abortion!
- Thread starter Wolverine
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It's a potential child. It's birth that makes it an actual child.
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You see Article 3. SCOTUS has the ultimate judicial power.
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You are obviously wrong!
You are wrong, dna transfer happens at conception, which distinguishes every trait of that child, so obviously it's life!
Yes it does, but you just won't listen to it.
I never have. But, more to the point, I support a whole range of policies that result in fewer fetal deaths, whereas most people on the right are only interested in policies that punish women.
No, not even close. The CIA World Factbook ranks 225 places in the world (mostly nations, but also some territories like Guam or Gibraltar). The US barely makes the top 25% of them. Yet, where we'd expect the US to be is right near the top of all wealthy nations, considering infant mortality rates correlate with wealth, and we're one of the very wealthiest nations (plus we're a nation that spends much more, per capita, on healthcare than any other nation). Instead, according to the CIA's World Factbook, the US is tied with Serbia and behind 55 other nations, including all the other major wealthy countries of the world. Infants die in the US at about an 81% higher rate than in France, for example, and almost three times the rate of Japan.
We know how to fix that, of course, and could do so pretty easily if the political factions that pretend to care about fetal life genuinely cared about those infants. We could bring our healthcare into line with first-world standards while doing more to support families with infants, and addressing maternal health and fitness. The policies would be easy to implement, politically, if the anti-abortion zealots could be made to care about the lives of babies. But, unfortunately, they don't care even a little. They haven't thought of a way to use infant lives as an excuse for punishing women, the way they have with fetal lives, so they have no interest in cooperating on solving the problem. Instead, they'd rather just lie and say we're in the top 5%.
I suppose that depends on how you define fetus. If you are referring to any unborn offspring, then abortion definitely isn't the number one cause. Approximately 50% of fertilized eggs are miscarried before the woman even knows she's pregnant. So, the number one thing killing those unborn is some combination of bad luck, bad timing, and issues with maternal health (e.g., an older woman having unprotected sex, or a woman having unprotected sex while ill, poorly rested, stressed, fat, or otherwise at sub-optimal reproductive health is more likely to be "killing" her unborn offspring by failing to offer them a decent hope of implanting in her uterus).
If you're talking about fetuses only in the sense of a more developed unborn offspring -- one that has implanted and developed enough that the pregnancy is known-- the rate of miscarriage is between 10 and 15%:
https://www.healthline.com/health/pregnancy/miscarriage-rates-by-week
So, for those fetuses, the rate of miscarriage is approximately the same as the rate of abortion. So, again, that would put the risks to a fetus of that stage from various known risk factors for miscarriage at about the same level as the risk of abortion.
So, why is it that the anti-abortion zealots focus pretty much exclusively on the smaller overall risk (abortion), and not the larger overall risk (miscarriage)? The answer is clear: helping women avoid unwanted miscarriage with supportive healthcare and other helpful social policies doesn't punish them. And punishing women for transgressing religious sexual taboos is the entirety of the point of the anti-abortion movement. Protecting the lives of the "unborn" is just an excuse for the punitive policies.
"Abstinence" isn't a social policy. You cannot enforce it. The issue is whether, as a policy, we should go with an abstinence-only campaign (e.g., sex-ed that focuses on promoting the chastity fetish among children), or we should instead go with policies that have proven more effective at preventing unwanted pregnancies (and disease) in practice (e.g., sex-ed that doesn't waste time trying to frighten and shame children into not having sex, but instead arms them with practical knowledge to protect themselves). I favor the approach that has proven more effective.
A taboo against extramarital sex is neither good nor bad. It would be like a taboo against having sex on Tuesdays, or having sex while wearing a hat. The taboo is silly, but not, in itself, consequential. The problem comes when the taboo is allowed to distort policy in a way that causes bad social impacts. Check out the teen birth rate by state, for example. You'll see the rates are lowest in the least religious states (MA, NH, CT, VT, NJ, RI, etc.), and highest in the Bible Belt (AR, MS, OK, LA, KY, TX, WV, AL, and TN are all in the top ten). When you focus not on creating good outcomes, but rather on promoting a particular religion's sexual taboos, results are poor.
PostmodernProphet
fully immersed in faith..
you support abortion which results in fetal death 100% of the time...
not the first time someone used this fake argument. The statistics ignore one significant difference. It rates only children which survive a week from delivery. Most EU nations count children who do not survive at least a week as stillborn. The US numbers do not.
science has already done that.......you are referring to fertilized eggs that fail to become a fetus and expire as unattached zygotes.
gfm7175
Mega MAGA
I HAVE seen it... It states (bolded added by me): "The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution...
Not over it... but under it...
SCOTUS is not an Oligarchy.
PostmodernProphet
fully immersed in faith..
nobody is trying to "enforce" abstinence......we just want to stop you from killing children.......you idiots object to "shaming" children into not having sex but don't bat an eye at encouraging them to kill.......you are disgusting......
gfm7175
Mega MAGA
Okay.
There is nothing more effective than abstinence. Nobody is shaming children into not having sex, but rather, teaching them (for starters) the responsibilities which come with it, such as child raising (by a solid nuclear family) and to wait until that solid family foundation is laid down. Sex is not something to do or take casually.
Me too. That's why I favor abstinence (until one is emotionally and fiscally ready for forming a family). It is the most effective approach one can possibly take. Also, it does not result in fetal murder...
gfm7175
Mega MAGA
Inversion Fallacy. YOU are the one rejecting science...
gfm7175
Mega MAGA
How are women being "punished"? They have the freedom to choose whether or not they want to have sex. You're just hearing people tell those women that they ought not murder the life that they FREELY CHOSE to create (since they freely chose to have sex).
Love/care/etc. cannot be forced through compulsion... It must be freely given and freely received.
Also, the "anti-abortion zealots" (as you call them) are NOT the ones who are slaughtering millions of fetuses into tiny pieces...
Not 100% of the pregnancies, which, obviously, is the relevant comparison.
That's a super popular argument among right-wingers who want to excuse US numbers. The problem is that it doesn't explain other consistent stats. You see, it's not just newborns in the US who have higher mortality. It's six-month-olds, and one-year-olds, and two-year-olds, etc. It's also mothers -- we have a terrible maternal mortality rate here, relative to other wealthy nations.
Also, you've muffed the standard right-wing argument. It's not that EU nations don't count those that die within a week as stillborn. That's simply not true. Rather, the standard right-wing argument is that some of them don't count those that are delivered before 22 weeks, at low birth weight, and then die. But, even after controlling for that, the US has a very high infant mortality rate by wealthy-nation standards:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w20525.pdf
In fact, as you can see there, "the US has similar neonatal (<1 month) mortality but higher postneonatal (1-12
months) mortality." So, it's basically the opposite of your assumption. You'd assumed that the difference was the babies dying in that first week were counting in the US and not elsewhere. But if that were the case, we'd see a big difference between the US and the other countries in the first month (when those early deaths were tallied), but not in the later months (when they no longer factored in). Instead, it's the opposite. The US does OK, by international standards, within the first few weeks, but then for the balance of the year, our babies die at a higher rate. So, now that you know that the facts are the opposite of what they'd be if your theory were right, care to revise your theory? Or is the theory too enticing to allow facts to influence it?
If that's how you want to define fetus, and you don't care about the zygotes, that's fine. Yet, even with the "attached unborn," we're still talking about the mortality impact of miscarriage being roughly the same as the mortality impact of abortion -- at least within the same order of magnitude. So, why not focus on reducing that, with at least as much fervor as the campaign to punish women for voluntarily ending pregnancies? The answer, of course, is that it's not really about the fetuses. It's about the trill of punishing women.
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The evidence suggests you can't even promote it, much less enforce it. Abstinence-only education fails to result in abstinence, but what it does result in is more people being unprepared when they have sex, and thus higher unwanted pregnancy rates. Why not work with the liberals to address that? After all, a large share of those unwanted fetuses will end up dying, one way or the other, so if preventing fetal deaths is the goal (rather than just punishing women), preventing those unwanted pregnancies will do that.
Again, the issue isn't abstinence versus non-abstinence. We can agree that if it were possible to wave a magic wand and make it so nobody has sex, there'd be no pregnancies. But there are no magic wands to wave with policy. The choice being discussed is abstinence-only education versus more pragmatic education. It turns out the latter is much more effective at preventing unwanted pregnancies.
Incorrect. If you're unfamiliar with the propaganda used in abstinence-only education programs, read up on it and get back to me.
It's like driving: you don't want to do it recklessly, and you should take reasonable precautions. The problem with abstinence-only education is that it's the equivalent of a driver's ed program that harps endlessly on the idea that the only way to be absolutely sure you won't be in a car accident is to never get in a car (and in focusing exhaustively on that message, fails to spend appropriate time on defensive driving, etc.) The message is technically correct, but an utterly idiotic way to design a driver's ed program.
As for "fetal murder" -- there's no such thing. You might as well refer to bacon as being the result of "pig murder" -- or liposuction being "fat cell murder." Killing something isn't murder unless the thing has a right to life. Fetuses don't.
Clearly not. Reread.