Five years ago, I had a second trimester miscarriage. Sixteen weeks into a very much wanted pregnancy, severe cramping came over me very quickly, and I started to bleed. For some reason I can no longer recall, I had a measuring cup in my bathroom, and when I called the midwife to let her know I was in trouble, she wanted to know how much blood I was losing.
8 ounces in about 30 seconds.
Hang up the phone, she said, and call 911.
By the time the ambulance arrived, I had lost over half the blood in my body, and my blood pressure had dropped to 60/40. And I had, wrapped up in a tissue, the body of my unborn son. He was not a “fetus”. He was a tiny little human being who had died before he could be born.
Perhaps owing to my Germanic blood and my experience with a late term miscarriage, my views on abortion are decidedly practical and lean perhaps towards the Machiavellian.
Abortion is killing a human being. This does not seem the slightest bit controversial to me. Calling an unborn human a “fetus” might make the killers feel better, but it doesn’t change the fact that aborting a baby is killing a human. I think of it as similar to calling the enemy a “gook”, or a “Kraut” or a “raghead”. You dehumanize your victim to make it easier to kill him.
As a society, we sanction the use of lethal force in any number of ways. I doubt there are any modern cultures that prohibit the use of lethal force against an equally lethal threat, meaning that every citizen has the right to use lethal force in the right circumstances. We have military forces and police officers and armed bank guards and the death penalty (which I don’t agree with at all). We disconnect life support machines in hospitals knowing the outcome will be death.
By that logic, the only acceptable moral justification for abortion would be when the unborn baby really does present a lethal threat to the mother. And that does happen. It happened to Savita Halapannavar in Ireland, and since abortion for any reason is prohibited in Ireland, Savita died.
http://judgybitch.com/2012/11/14/holy-shit-ireland-you-suck/
I had a very similar condition. In my case, the baby was dead, and had come out of my body, but the placenta was still inside me, and I had an emergency D&C to remove the “products of conception” as they are called. After I was put into hypothermia because there wasn’t enough time to warm the blood for the transfusion. That was fun. In Savita’s case, the baby was still alive, with no hope of surviving, and she was allowed to die of the eventual infection that set in.
When a pregnancy literally and uncontrovertibly threatens a woman’s life, abortion is morally justified.
But that isn’t why most abortions are carried out.
Aborting a baby because it suffers from some catastrophic abnormality opens up a whole can of ethically fraught worms. In that scenario, the baby is being killed not because it poses a threat to the mother’s life, but “for its own good”. Often, the abnormality is simply that the baby carries the dreaded extra chromosome that results in Down Syndrome. But if we can abort a baby because it is defective, why not euthanize newborns with undetected abnormalities who weren’t aborted but surely WOULD have been, had the parents known about the condition?
Why not allow parents to decide if the baby is “good enough”?
Obviously, that is grotesque, but not more grotesque than a late term abortion.
Most abortions are carried out in the first trimester because, for whatever reason, a woman does not want to be pregnant. Perhaps she feels too young. She is too poor to care for her child. She has other plans. She does not want to parent with the father of the child. She conceived the child as a result of rape or incest.
None of those things pose a threat to a mother’s life. They are not strictly morally justified. I am personally very much in support of women aborting children they cannot afford – the last thing the world needs is more poor people. And women who do not have the voluntary support of the fathers should also not be having children. We don’t need any more single mothers, either. Ideally, the children should be placed for adoption, but there are two giant problems with that: it’s easier to kill a baby you can’t see than it is to give away a baby that you have cradled in your arms.
Adoption is a very emotionally hard choice to make. Abortion seems easier, especially in a culture that treats unborn humans as nothing more than a gooey gob of cells. A fetus.
And most adoptive couples are white, in search of white children. There. I said it. Black babies, and brown babies are less valuable on the adoption markets. Most adoptive couples are white and they prefer white babies. Yes, that is profoundly racist. I’m not making it up. It’s true.
Just because something is really ugly doesn’t make it false.
So if we are going to allow women to abort babies because they just don’t want them, even though that is not a morally justifiable reason, but is instead the least worst choice for society as a whole, how can we then set any limits on why and when a woman can use lethal force against her own unborn child?
It’s fun to watch feminists spin their wheels when confronted with an uncomfortable dilemma: what if a woman wants to abort a baby simply because the baby is a girl?
The whole “fetus” argument gets dropped in a heartbeat when that happens. Suddenly the unborn babies are not clusters of cells at all, but “girls”.
The figure [of missing girls] is 60 million, about the population of the entire UK, which Hundal surmises is comprised by those “aborted before birth, killed once born, died of neglect because they were girls, or perhaps murdered by their husband’s family for not paying enough dowry at marriage.”
Should the genocide continue, there will be an extra 28 million men of marriageable age.
http://jezebel.com/where-are-indias-60-million-missing-girls-the-tragic-1091500375
While there is certainly a problem with neglect and murder in India, it looks like most of those girls were victims while still in the womb.
Abortion is killing girls in India.
India’s 2011 census shows a serious decline in the number of girls under the age of seven – activists fear eight million female fetuses may have been aborted in the past decade.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-13264301
It’s easy to turn up our noses at faraway cultural practices and consider ourselves to be ever so much more enlightened, but it turns out that the practice of aborting girls is one that travels.
Canada has a problem with it, and the National Post calls sex-selective abortion the “real war on women”. When your fetus is a female, it’s not a fetus any more. It’s a “woman”.
The UK has a similar problem, and a recent event there has thrust sex-selective abortions into the spotlight. Reporters from the Daily Telegraph approached abortion providers to see if they would consent to a late term abortion based only on the fact that the baby was a girl.
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/comment/columns/dominiclawson/article1310708.ece
It is illegal to abort babies based on sex in the UK, but nevertheless, the Telegraph found two doctors (out of nine questioned) willing to terminate a pregnancy simply because the baby was a girl.
Since it IS in fact illegal to abort babies based on their gender, prosecutors in the UK took an interest in what the Telegraph found. Both doctors were caught on tape agreeing to abort girls. The evidence is a slam dunk.
Prosecutors declined to press charges.
Sources familiar with the Scotland Yard investigation said that prosecutors saw the issue as “sensitive” and that it had become “political”.
Sensitive indeed.
Abortion is one of those issues that highlights the fact that feminism as a political ideology is not concerned with equality and is certainly not concerned with morality. Feminists champion untrammeled access to abortion because it is a visceral, blood-soaked proclamation of the real goal: female superiority.
Women will determine who lives and who dies.
The culture is not quite ready to accept that, so we use ideas like “fetus” to veil the real agenda. If we openly admitted that abortion is killing a human being, and then fiercely defended women’s right to take the life of any human who begins existence inside her body, we are veering dangerously near the truth of the matter.
When abortion is used to murder female humans for no reason other than the fact they are female, the veil is lifted, even if only temporarily. Fetuses become girls. Unwanted cells become women. The embryo becomes human.
And the death of enough of those humans becomes genocide.
Here is Janice Turner, desperately trying to have her cake and eat it, too.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/janiceturner/article3863067.ece
She begins by claiming that gender-based selective abortions are something only those icky brown people do anyways.
So, other than undercover hacks, who are these girl-killing British mothers? Are they trivial-minded control freaks who, having spawned one daughter, are so furious at this second female foetus that they rush to dispense with it, so they can get cracking on conceiving a boy? Have you come across one? Me neither.
The other scenario is that women settled here from countries where there is a real and acute problem with gender-based abortion, are eradicating female foetuses here.
She then goes on to claim that even if women really ARE aborting their baby girls, it’s not their fault anyways!
Yet it is unfair to blame women for gender-abortion. A third of expectant mothers surveyed in India, with its distorted male ratio of 112, said they would prefer a boy and almost none a girl, but two thirds said they didn’t mind. (Even American men have a distinct preference for boys, while women are evenly split.) The impetus for sons is not generated by mothers. Women do not expel the potential life in their bellies without good reason.
Okay, so whose fault is it then? Whom shall we blame? Who is it that generates the impetus for sons? Who has provided this “good reason” to expel life?
Janice doesn’t really answer, but based on her other columns, I think we can all take a guess at who is to be held responsible for this.
Women’s libido isn’t the problem. Men’s is.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/janiceturner/article3780119.ece
Men haven’t been keeping their side of the bargain. They’ve ditched their power tools but still won’t pick up a duster.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/janiceturner/article3675766.ece
Why do men commit almost all the crime?
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/janiceturner/article3768313.ece
It’s all part of desperate spin to retain women’s rights to determine life and death without alerting the wider society to that fact. Sex selective abortion calls into sharp focus the fact that almost all abortions are morally indefensible. The babies pose no threat to the mother’s life. They pose a threat to her accumulation of power.
And power is really what the struggle is about.
I admit 100% that I am still tripping on how I feel about abortion, especially late term abortion. It is a power than women MUST have, because it is in our best interest as a society to make sure that we limit the number of unwanted babies born into impoverished circumstances with no father present.
Those babies tend to grow up and cause mayhem and chaos.
“[C]ontrolling for income and all other factors, youths in father-absent families (mother only, mother-stepfather, and relatives/other) still had significantly higher odds of incarceration than those from mother-father families.”
But that doesn’t mean the power to terminate human life shouldn’t be tempered with strictly enforced limits.
Ideally, I would like to see all abortions prohibited once the baby has become a person, and I define that in terms of neural activity. Once there is an “I”, a person, a human being who thinks and is self-aware, no one can take the life of that person with the sole exception we apply to all humans: when it presents a lethal threat.
Abortion rights must take into account the reproductive rights of both parties involved. No man should be able to compel a woman into being a mother, but no woman should be able to compel a man into becoming a father, either. In cases where a woman has waited too long, and her baby is a fully conscious human being, she should have no choice but to bear that child. She does not have to assume responsibility for the baby, but neither can she simply kill him.
The biological father should have the first say in assuming responsibility when the mother declines.
The power to end another person’s life comes with huge responsibilities. It cannot reside in one person only, with no limits of any kind.
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Feminists will need to pick another method to establish women’s absolute power over life.
Rape, and the regulation of (mostly) male sexuality looks promising, no?
http://maggiemcneill.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/out-of-control/
Lots of love,
JB
judgybitch 
Can’t say I agree 100%, though I agree more than not. The argument that it’s racism preventing white adults from adopting black children is right-ish, but not the way most people will take it. Race-consistent placement appears to be a significant factor in the social worker industry, IE, there are institutional barriers to trans-racial adoption. Social workers don’t want white people to adopt black children (see: http://pages.uoregon.edu/adoption/archive/NabswTRA.htm). Granted, that policy was adopted in 1972, but a quick online search didn’t turn up any evidence that it’s changed, and it’s certainly consistent with the self-righteous racism of the Left.
I likewise don’t think that poverty should be an excuse for abortion, even if women don’t want to give their children up for adoption. Too many people are poor because we subsidize poverty. Too many women take reproductive risks because they know they can kill their child with impunity, or because they expect to be paid by Uncle Sam for any fatherless children they produce. Stop encouraging them to be irresponsible in this way and we’ll see a decrease in promiscuity and a decrease in the number of children born into poverty. There will still be tragic cases of course, but there always are, and using those cases to support pathological policies like LBJ’s Great Society is a cure that’s worse than the disease. See the damage that’s done to the black family, with its 70%+ illegitimacy rate.
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Of course, many of these women think aborting a *boy* should totally be the mother’s decision.
But never a girl
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I do not know if a cigotus is a human being. but if could get pregnant, and maybe after visiting a brothel, I woul not hesitate in aborting. And woul not be much big deal.
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WOULD.
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The way fetuses are treated in the law is very telling. You may wonder what happens when the fetus is destroyed by someone other than the mother, for example if someone pushes a pregnant woman down the stairs and she looses the child. It’s assault, for sure, but is it anything else, since the fetus is not a human?
Different legislatures have different ways of dealing with this. My favorite so far is California. They redefined murder to be the destruction of the life of two seperate entities: humans and fetuses. But fetuses only when it’s carried by someone other than he mother or a doctor acting on her behalf. That’s how convoluted you have to be to avoid calling fetuses human, but to retain the right to treat them as such whenever it’s convenient.
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Hmm, I prefer to count personhood as something more … person-like… Yes, killing a baby/fetus is killing a human, but I doubt anyone would say it’s ok to kill a human-like alien with a personality for no reason. Or an android that has its own free will, even if we created it. Of course, we never had aliens or androids, but their possibility is just for the sake of the argument. So I think DNA is a bit arbitrary as a measure of whether something is murder or not.
Does neural activity mean the baby is above animals like cats, dogs and such? They sure seem to have more personality than an unborn baby… If I’m gonna eat animals and wear their skin, I also won’t count a baby as something holy. But that’s me. Even if it’s logical, I think we should still avoid abortion as much as we can (or easier: avoid unplanned pregnancy).
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The problem with abortion (and trying to lessen its instance) is the same problem with drugs: Try to ban something that people really want, and it just goes underground. It doesn’t go away. Besides that, the desire to kill an unwanted baby is a hardwired, primal urge for many women. (The level of infanticide throughout history is about the same as the rate of abortion is now. In Renaissance Italy, the rate of infanticide even reached 50 percent!) Women are hardwired to discard newborn children they haven’t bonded with yet if said children pose a threat to her ability to secure a provider or to provide for those children which she already does have (and has bonded with.)
The best, most effective way to stop abortion is to stop unwanted pregnancies from happening in the first place. Many poor women either don’t have access to birth control (or lack the cultural discipline and future-planning ability to use the Pill and condoms consistently.) The best bet would be to provide free low-maintenance forms of birth control (shots, implants) to poor women. (Yes, said forms of birth control are expensive, but they cost a hell of a lot less to society than welfare and result in far fewer abortions.Isn’t that what everyone wants?)
Our only alternative would be to place physical or social constraints on poor women (or take welfare away entirely and let them fend for themselves and their fatherless children on their own.) And good luck getting any politician to sign off on THAT….
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what we need to do is find the line between fetus and human baby, and set the line there. probably when emotional and pain related neural activity starts, or close to it, we can leave that up to the guys who figure it out
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As an Indian-American I should point out that there have been multiple studies in India about attitudes towards sex-selective abortion. Turned out men were more likely than women to oppose the abortion of unborn girls.
Click to access the-practice-of-sex-selective-abortion-in-india-may-you-be-the-mother-of-a-hundred-sons.original.pdf
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To people who believe the answer to abortion is the availability of contraceptives, I’d counter that the answer is instead stable homes. It’s virtually unheard of for a mother to abort her child when she and her husband have their own home and food is on the table and the wife feels no pressure to “climb the ladder” of society through material possession and status elevation. What a coincidence that the only thing feminists hate to see more than aborted females is the above scenario.
Young adults are horny. This should be surprising as everybody operating a keyboard here was at one point a young adult. The problem is that sex is always presented as a dualist concept. Either it’s all good or it’s all bad. Women’s lib and sex positivism set about claiming it was all good (and, well, if it wasn’t….RAAAAAAAAAAAPE). Of course this can’t be true. The unintended consequences of sex can be quite harmful. Sex is indeed good when practiced in a controlled environment, much like a zoo. The problem is when you decide cages are pesky and that if the animals are safe behind 6 inch panes of shaterproof glass, they must be just as safe running about the zoo. Enter pandemonium. The monogamous married household where a (hopefully young) husband and wife begin families is the ultimate answer to unwanted pregnancies.
As for the racism and adoption angle, most adopting couples are white. Most parents want to raise kids that look like them. We can’t help it. It’s genetic, especially on the father’s side. We bond better with children that look like us because we view them as closer to us. Nowhere is the danger of this breaking down more evident than in the case of the “redheaded stepchild.” I’ve known my fair share of adopted people. Some are quite close to home without revealing too much. I know a white family that adopted 2 mestizo babies. I know 2 that adopted black babies. I know several that adopted oriental babies. The love is there in all of them, but in many cases the child-parent relationships that happen most organically and in the most healthy way are the ones where you could hardly tell the kid wasn’t conceived and carried to term by the mother.
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http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=babies-paternal-resemblance
Linked source for the resemblance claim.
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First, so sorry for your loss and that experience. Next — gotta ask, considering… “because it is in our best interest as a society to make sure that we limit the number of unwanted babies born into impoverished circumstances with no father present.”
* What’s worse for society to do — compulsory sterilization of potential, but incapable, mothers & un-present fathers, or abortion/murder of the unwanted babies after the fact?
* What’s a worse loss personally — loss of fertility (the parents) or loss of life (the child)?
* What if technology offered (as it assuredly will someday) a 100% fail-proof control of fertility *equally* to both men & women, such that society could decide the fertility switch should be, by default, ‘off’ until such time as both the potential mother & father could meet a societal requirement for parenting?
* Assuming society should offer the “right” of fertility, must society accept it wielded in a feral manner or should society require the meeting of *any* responsibilities in exchange?
* Even considering merely what technology/society currently offer in terms of birth control (quite a lot), should there be no penalties whatsoever for abortions wanted, not for health reasons but, for “lifestyle” choices — iow, not preferred sex/gender, too busy, too poor (although wealthy compared to ancestors)? Is the decision to use/not-use BC, or use/not-use judgement in the choice of partners of the same weighted-ness as choosing to abort, or might society ask how the parents could let things come so far as to needing to abort a life when there were many opportunities at prevention?
* How can society justify offering reproductive “rights” to only one sex/gender (women) when both were involved? (I realize that’s what we currently do.) And further, how can society justify not offering one sex/gender (men) reproductive rights, yet assume responsibilities of that same sex/gender, and punitively at that?
* Society is us. And we are mammals. No “rights” exist in nature, only in society. They are the real ‘social construct’. Haha! Reproductive control has, by technology thus far, given virtual total control to only on sex/gender (women). The biological and pre/historical balance is totally skewed and we’re in a mess as a result. Once technology & society co-operate to deliver male reproductive control on *equal* par with that currently offered to females, an equilibrium will once again result. Should society, based on our current experience of sex/gender dis-equalibrium, only allow deployment of reproductive technologies that assure a balance of reproductive control between the sexes/genders?
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Law isn’t the answer. The implications of “abortion police” and driving the practice underground are too unpalatable.
The solution to this problem is a society wide push to return to morality and personal responsibility.
Teach our youngsters the truth instead of scaring the fuck out of them like we do now, and present adoption for what it is: the only moral choice for an unwanted pregnancy.
We’ve all been lied to. The only way out is to stop lying.
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To that end, wifey and I would consider adoption if it weren’t such a total fuckup of a process. The pain and heartache that many of the folks we know who’ve tried it was worse for them in many ways than a miscarriage and muchmore expensive to boot.
So fix that, too.
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I feel I should pipe up here, because I’ve actually had an abortion, and I’ve got a somewhat different perspective on the ‘baby’-ness of a foetus. You see, I had an induced miscarriage at 8 weeks, and what bled into my sanitary towel was definitely not a baby. It was a red splodge with no defined features about as long as the tip of my thumb. In fact, had I not known I was pregnant, I probably would have assumed I was just having a late, heavy, period.
My thinking (and I assure you I did quite a bit leading up to the abortion, along with my partner) is that until a foetus has a nervous system, it can’t really be considered a child, since it cannot feel. Thus, abortion before that point is no more killing a person than having a tumor removed is – though obviously with different emotional connotations.
As far as I can see, abortion for any reason at all should be justified at this point, as we’re not talking about a child so much as a cell cluster that is using a woman’s resources. If a woman is not physically prepared for having a child, there are significant consequences even without any added threat to life, for example women who do not have enough stored long chain fats to support the developing foetus’s brain will actually break down their own grey matter and pass it to the child. If someone came along and threatened to remove part of my mental functioning…well, I don’t know if I’d kill them, but I hope I wouldn’t get banged up in jail if I did.
All in all, feminists should stop complaining that some people care about their child’s gender. Better no child than an unwanted one, especially in cultures they’re claiming girls are killed over their gender.
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Seeing the issue discussed honestly would be good. I know in China, for example, sons have always acted as their parents social security system. It is not unusual for parents to take their sons to court for failure to properly provide for them (daughters have no such burden placed on them). That is a HUGE incentive to explain the sex selective abortions seen in that country. But, do feminists include that vital piece of information? Absolutely not. The present it as horrible “Patricarchy”, “War on Women, etc… See how they do that? They turn a complex situation involving a unilateral burden placed ONLY on male children and parents´exercising their self-interests into a bogus “hatred of women” and female victimization narrative.
My suspicion is that any situation wherein a culture/subculture is found to be engaged in sex-selective abortion has a similar more-balanced (if not slightly anti-male) explanation.
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Unfair to blame women for gender abortion? Nice try Janice you moron, but if women have full control (remember “my body my choice” at all?) then they get the blame. (No offence JB) Your feeble attempts to blame men are specious at best. Maybe it’s time to start work on cleaning those school toilets? :p
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My feelings on abortion are largely guided by my views on human population. We currently have 7 billion people with a great number of those slowly starving to death. Since food is now readily transported from places where the price is low to places where the price is high, the population rate of one nation has a direct affect on the starvation rate of another.
And let us not forget that starving mothers can miscarry their fetuses.
So you can never really not have abortion. You can only at best determine who has one and under what conditions. The healthy birth of your child here causes the related increase in demand for grain, which makes the price of grain higher, causing aid agencies to be unable to feed more people resulting in a mother in Africa watching her child starve to death in her arms.
Food and resources are no longer isolated questions.
So you have abortion by proxy.
As a result, I view lowering as a moral imperative, because as we’ve seen in Syria, we’re well on our way to gas chambers as the preferred method.
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That was supposed to be “lowering the global population”
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“It is a power than women MUST have, because it is in our best interest as a society to make sure that we limit the number of unwanted babies born into impoverished circumstances with no father present.
Those babies tend to grow up and cause mayhem and chaos.”
I’d encourage you to reconsider this. Eliminate all mandatory/government welfare programs, and allow lethal force to be used even in defense of property crime, and all of a sudden, poor/fatherless babies won’t be a “burden on society” anymore.
There’s a reason that “overpopulation” was never a concern prior to the existence of the welfare state and the ability to quickly and swiftly kill aspiring criminals. The only reason that poor/fatherless children are burdens to society is because society allows them to be.
But I know what you may be thinking. We should just let people starve because they’re poor? We should shoot teenagers who attempt to steal a loaf of bread? How unbelievably cruel!
Maybe. But you seem to already admit that the killing of unborn babies is currently the price we pay for a society where these things don’t happen. Is that NOT cruel? Is arbitrarily murdering millions of babies really better than allowing the unproductive to starve? Than shooting thieves?
While many poor people and many criminals were surely born into difficult circumstances and we can sympathize with them, there are always SOME people born into difficult circumstances who rise above them. Eliminate the welfare state and have a swift and brutal justice system, and the only people who will be dying are the ones who either cannot contribute anything valuable to society, or are actively hostile towards it.
Abort babies, and you never know, you just might be aborting the next Jay-Z, or even (dare I say), Barack Obama. It becomes random and arbitrary. Millions of babies must die so that welfare queens and petty street things can live. This is not a very good trade for society, if you ask me.
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Typo: Should say “petty street THUGS”
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There is plenty of food on earth to feed the peiple we have and more. We are actively paying our farmers NOT to produce food to prevent a glut.
When you see people starving on tv it has nothing to do with food shortages and everything to do with geopolitical issues.
Folks like you have been touting overpopulation for years. Generally you’re city folk that haven’t a clue how truly empty the earth is of people.
We’re in no danger of overpopulating anything at any foreseeable time in the future.
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You’re right. Monogamous married households where at least the husband has a good job are good for preventing abortion. Unfortunately a large chunk of abortions are performed by irresponsible women who just didn’t give enough of a damn to make sure they were either using birth control, or using it consistently.
(From gutmacher.org):
Fifty-four percent of women who have abortions had used a contraceptive method (usually the condom or the pill) during the month they became pregnant. Among those women, 76% of pill users and 49% of condom users report having used their method inconsistently, while 13% of pill users and 14% of condom users report correct use.[8]
• Forty-six percent of women who have abortions had not used a contraceptive method during the month they became pregnant. Of these women, 33% had perceived themselves to be at low risk for pregnancy, 32% had had concerns about contraceptive methods, 26% had had unexpected sex and 1% had been forced to have sex.[8]
• Eight percent of women who have abortions have never used a method of birth control; nonuse is greatest among those who are young, poor, black, Hispanic or less educated.[8]
• About half of unintended pregnancies occur among the 11% of women who are at risk for unintended pregnancy but are not using contraceptives. Most of these women have practiced contraception in the past.[9,10]
In other words, stupidity and irresponsibility are causing the lion’s share of abortions. Not lack of economic opportunity. Low maintenance forms of birth control could cut the number of abortions by 40 percent (as was seen during a pilot program to provide those forms of contraception to the poor in St. Louis a few years back.)
Why aren’t authorities trying to shame women who fail to practice responsibility with their wombs (the way they shame people for second hand smoking)? Are they afraid of turning women off of the idea of free and empowering sex altogether? Do they want lots of fetuses for the abortion mill and lots of unwanted kids for the Welfare-Prison-Industrial-Complex? One has to wonder…
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You are quite correct, Goober. Starvation is a power issue, not a supply and transportation issue. just like it has been recently discovered that oil reserves are NOT a biological by-product, they are actually seepage from a nearly unlimited carbon supply deep beneath the earth’s crust…. Like diamonds, Oil and food are artificially controlled by the wealthy in order to encourage a continual flow of power, money, and influence.
The images of children starving in africa? They are starving because their food is sold to other nations to finance both their government’s army and the armies of guerillas. Their food is made too expensive by price controls of the oil cartels. Their food is stolen from them by the very people claiming to act in their best interests.
Even without modern farming methods, 40 square feet is all it takes to produce enough food to keep an adult healthy year-round.
Anyone claiming ‘overpopulation’ is running a game. if you really want to help overpopulation, rent a gun and buy a bullet and take yourself out of the gene pool. ALL true ‘overpopulation’ exists solely in cities, and is entirely voluntary.
It’s amazing how butt-stupid ‘intellectuals’ always want to control the population of SOMEONE ELSE. You want to help the problem? stick a gun in your mouth and instantly make the world a better, and less populated, place.
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I prefer your unaltered comment 🙂
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that bullet would be better served going after one of the people who cause this bullshit to happen, if that’s the route you’re goin down
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I agree somewhat with your rationale – if abortion is bad for females it is bad for all genders. Those missing females will have a long term impact – China and India now have an excess of males who have NO hope of ever getting married and settling down and having children. And I’m bashing males when I say this, but one of the civilizing effects of women is that they tame men and get them to focus on the future (as in the lives of their children/grand children) rather than just react. But if you have no chance to get married or have children … bad things happen. I suspect that both China and India will face off at some point – they have an excess of men that can only be dealt with by using them as cannon fodder! Sad by true.
But I disagree with much of what else you have to say about abortion as a necessity (but maybe I didn’t fully understand it). If women were really interested or concerned about controlling their bodies, in 2013 you would not get pregnant to begin with!! This is not the 1930s and 40s when women (and men) had little access to knowledge about how NOT to get pregnant let alone the contraception products available (and easily available). It is simple laziness or a way to trap some poor sod into 20 years of support so that the woman doesn’t have to get off her ass and be independent. In 2013 you can have great sex and NOT GET PREGNANT!
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I meant NOT bashing males – sorry!
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JB (and others), Have you read/heard about evictionism?
Basic idea is that the woman can “evict” ie, induce pregnancy at any point, and neither she nor the father is required to support the child if they do not want to, but neither she nor the father has the right to kill the child. If someone else wants to support the baby, they are absolutely allowed to (including paying for the required medical bills in cases of early births).
It seems to me that this protects women’s sovereignty over their own bodies without allowing a single person to decide the fate of another person (because some third person can commit themselves to support the baby who would otherwise die of starvation/dehydration/failure to thrive).
[The video linked is of Walter Block]
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You are correct In my opinion. Both China and India in the future will have a huge issue regarding millions of unmarried men. Especially because the family unit is so much more integral to those cultures than our North American mindsets. In those cultures, parents,grandparents and children all live in in 1 family unit.
One only has to visit the suburbs of Toronto or Vancouver to see the houses built by immigrant families from these cultures. Big enough to house 15+ people because that is the family unit.
As to the abortion issue, I have no religious or moral problems with it. I’m much more in favor of aborting an unwanted child than having some guy trapped into 20 years of child support he is not ready for or having some kid fed into the foster/adoption system.
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it has been recently discovered that oil reserves are NOT a biological by-product, they are actually seepage from a nearly unlimited carbon supply deep beneath the earth’s crust….
Citation needed?
Evidence of abiogenic mechanisms
Theoretical calculations by J.F. Kenney using scaled particle theory (a statistical mechanical model) for a simplified perturbed hard-chain predict that methane compressed to 30,000 bars (3.0 GPa) or 40,000 bars (4.0 GPa) kbar at 1,000 °C (1,830 °F) (conditions in the mantle) is relatively unstable in relation to higher hydrocarbons. However, these calculations do not include methane pyrolysis yielding amorphous carbon and hydrogen, which is recognized as the prevalent reaction at high temperatures.
Experiments in diamond anvil high pressure cells have resulted in partial conversion of methane and inorganic carbonates into light hydrocarbons.
That’s all – a rather weak evidence.
Even without modern farming methods, 40 square feet is all it takes to produce enough food to keep an adult healthy year-round.
Square feet of what? Of any type of soil? At any elevation or slope, in any climate? What about soil salination? Or Sahel turning into desert, as seen from orbit?
There is a close relation between energy intensity put into farming and crop yield. A society built on subsistence farming would form a very flat pyramid with lot of farmers (quite possibly serfs) at the bottom. Not enough free hands (and brains) to support the edifice of modern society.
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Mostly off point, because we’re not running low on arable farmland and we aren’t currently subsistence farming, for the most part.
The earth is not overpopulated with humans. Not even remotely close.
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We? There was a reason the former “Fertile Crescent” is not so exceptionally fertile anymore. Care to explain why?
Modern farming methods depend on an abundant source of fuel, if compared to earlier, less intensive methods. Not only that, but manufacture of farm machinery, artificial fertilizers and “crop protection chemicals” (pesticides, fungicides and herbicides) also requires a source of usable energy in one form or another. The US has quite good deals on petroleum being priced in dollars worldwide. Not surprisingly, being the sole military superpower at the moment has its benefits.
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Cheaper energy sources allow for more surplus food produced than the inverse. That’s all.
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Who would like to see this scenario replayed once more, but with different actors this time?
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I am at least in partial agreeance of the morality of abortion. To save the life of the mother and perhaps other siblings still inside, it is morally justified. The morality of aborting babies for mental or physical deformity. I think sometimes it is justified. It is hard to find a max and min for such conditions but if someone is so damaged that quality of life could be considered nothing but hellish I can’t exactly blame anyway for terminating that. The last time I consider it morally justifiable is in case of rape. (Now we’re talking real forcible rape not regretfulness on the part of a girl who got drunk mind you) Some people really really disagree, but I find it is an issue of self-defense. Pregnancy is dangerous as your own experiences have pointed out and it is also expensive. By law and by moral natural right we are justified to kill those who are a direct and immediate threat to our lives and our materials that we use live by. The attacker doesn’t have to be culpable of their own actions like those actions of a mentally ill person. However, that doesn’t meant your are not entitled to defend your life and even your money. All the moral blame falls squarely on the rapist.
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Professor J. Tainter explained it better.
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I am pro-life (of course with the exception of threat to the mother’s life), but I say that if you support a woman’s right to kill her fetus on-demand, and for any reason, you should be ok with that reason being that the fetus is a female. I mean, pregnancy is ALWAYS a horrible, body-destroying diseas I’de where a PARASITE slowly drains the life out of you for 9 whole months, right? Why should anyone care if the nasty little life-ruiner has a vagina?Sarcasm on the fetus hate, of course.
The problem with choosing any other point other than the moment of conception to decide when a human’s life has value is that you will have MANY different opinions. Whose is right? The points which I have heard people say abortion should stop are: when it has a heartbeat, when it looks “human-like”, first trimester, when it has brainwaves, when it can feel pain, second trimester, when it comes out of the vagina, when it takes its first breath, at 3 months post-birth when it becomes sentient, and many others. It is ALL arbitrary.
That said the fetus’ genitalia is the most ridiculous reason I have heard yet for whether or not it is ok to kill it.
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Also, I value the unborn as human beings, and understand that some people use the word “fetus” in an attempt to dehumanize them, but I think it is a completely appropriate word. Fetus, infant, child, teenager, adult- they’re all just words to describe stages of development.
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