What ticks me off no end is the folks who (often successfully) fight against physician assisted suicide. Dementia is the interesting test case, but I think should still be allowed.
With all the talk about 'controlling our bodies' in terms of abortion, and I can see both sides of that one, your own life is the one thing you really own. To have that control taken away is the worst kind of insult by the state.
I think the core problem is giving out a "free pass" to kill people. Very few people (at least in my experience) think that assisted suicide itself is bad, but the abuse potential is massive. And the action is, by definition, irreversible.
Plus, the people that need this are (quite obviously) unable to make this happen on their own. So this comes with the additional moral qualms of whether this is really what the wanted and if their mental state clear enough to make a decision like this.
Lastly, not killing these people is the "safe choice" - you're not getting sued for not killing a person. In the end, it probably boils down to this.
How so? We don't have to create a system in which it is legal to shoot someone in the head and then claim they asked you to do it. Have it be a medical procedure that must be done in a hospital by government certified doctors. You can even require a psych evaluation before it becomes an option.
I can understand there being some gray area in which it isn't clear that the person has all their faculties to the point they can request it, but that shouldn't stop us from creating a system that works for all the obvious cases.
This is the reverse case, though. Plus, child abuse can in principle be found out and mitigated. Death is irreversible.
Incentives are different too. Outside of highly fundamentalist cultures, there isn't really a strong benefit to a family from pressuring someone to keep a child. In developed countries, children are a huge liability for the first ~20 years of their life. Meanwhile, with assisted suicide, there are strong incentives around cessation of ongoing medical care (costs), and obviously inheritance.
Between that and possibility of presenting some murders as assisted suicide, I think if the idea is to be implemented, it really needs to be done extra carefully.
Child abuse is just one thing. There are people who don't have the capability to give proper physical and mental care, they don't even know anything, just wanted a cute thing because they don't have anything else to do. Then there genetical disease. Many just wanted a boy, so they play gamble and give birth to 3 girls. These kids are here for someone's selfish wish, may live miserable life in 3rd world countries. Bring someone to life, but don't let anyone escape unless going through huge suffering whole life.
Car kills many, doesn't stopped that from banning cars completely. Yes do it carefully, but no. Even people who live alone, doesn't have anything valuable, are not able to die with dignity. Must suffer.
Sure, but they also pressure folks into marriage and birth and organ donation and all sorts of things. It is definitely possible to do it in ways that help minimize this.
And even then: We already allow families to decide to take folks off of life support.
There's a system in india where mercy killings are normal and there are plenty of stories of families plotting to kill their elders. It could end up like that if normalized.
Well the first problem is that it's not legal. Lets fix that problem for fixating on the secondary issue of the American legal system exacerbating principal-agent problems
> Very few people (at least in my experience) think that assisted suicide itself is bad, but the abuse potential is massive.
Many terminally ill people receive substandard palliative care, and want assisted suicide – it seems likely that at least some wouldn't want it any more (or might never have sought it in the first place) if their palliative care was better.
What are the ethics of saying to people "we aren't going to do anything to fix the substandard palliative care you are receiving, but we are happy to help you kill yourself"?
This isn't how it works, though - they are two separate issues.
Of course we shouldn't have substandard care, palliative or not. Of course we should try not to let people suffer. It isn't like palliative care is at all affected by whether or not we have assisted suicide, as we can obviously have good palliative care without allowing assisted suicide at all (or the opposite, but we aren't that cruel yet).
But not matter how much we try to make folks comfortable, it simply doesn't always happen and not everyone wants to die slowly, even if they are comfortable in the meantime. Even the most comfortable care we can muster for the majority of folks doesn't result in a good quality of life, after all. (Of course, some folks are more comfortable than others just because of income and situation, which we can lessen but not get rid of entirely).
Assisted suicide shouldn't always come from the folks receiving palliative care, either. I'm fine with folks having plans in place to die if they have dementia, for example, or if their wish for a decade has been to kill themselves, despite getting are. Or heck, even if someone wants to die at x age, if they live that long. Well-planned assisted suicide should be available.
You are a person who has never been in the very unfortunate position of needing to die. That’s why suicide will never be accepted. Because so few people ever get stuck in that situation.
I'm very on the fence on this topic; I've watched family members/friends pass in varying degrees of pain, and at least in those cases I'm not sure having assisted suicide would have helped that much. What _definitely would_ have helped would have been better end of life care.
> who has never been in the very unfortunate position of needing to die.
Defining that line is very, very, tricky. People only reach this point at a desperate time, when they are potentailly very vulnerable. There's a huge difference between two people in an end-of-life situation, one who is willing to die and one who isn't, yet both may "need" to die, and we have the meansright now to provide an easier transition from "terminally ill" to the former, but yet people end up in the second bucket all the time.
> Because so few people ever get stuck in that situation.
Yet we have many many people who have suicidal thoughts, and who commit suicide (arguably needlessly), when we have methods of helping. We should have the same methods of helping people who are terminally ill.
(That's not to get into the mess of what do the family of the patient want; things get messy _really_ fast when money is on the line as I've unfortunately witnessed, and it tears families apart.)
The line is not difficult to draw. Again, you’ve never experienced it. There are states of existence where it becomes a simple and plain object in your mind that you must die because of the objective and real factors of your circumstances and not because of a feeling or notion. Until you experience that, it will all be fuzzy, grey, wushu washy fluff in the sky. Because it’s never been real to you.
You know how people will sometimes change their mind when confronted with reality? You know how some men scoff at a dangerous activity until they are pushed out from the crowd to do it themselves? The reality of the situation sets in. All of a sudden your mind is revealing to you things that you had not considered before. Revealing intuitions and details that it had not performed for you because your brain doesn’t consider things in detail until they are perceived as important to you — until they are in front of you. This also happens for death. All of a sudden, details fill in that have never been emphasized in the idiot internet threads. All the details of how a suicide attempt can go wrong, where the line of death really is, all the ways that you might feel pain. It’s completely overwhelming if you are suddenly in desperate need of death. It’s the experience of the most marginalized and abused group of people to ever exist. Forced to die in gruesome and terrible ways and in horrific home made contraptions that very often create a huge amount of pain before fulfilling their purpose.
It is very tricky to define the line for terminally ill people. But the reality is that if you ended up on the wrong side of the line you would welcome the choice.
It's not the same line as "Life is wretched and miserable (because of depression, bankruptcy, relationship breakdown...) and therefore I'd like to check out." Those are all at least potentially fixable with reasonable odds of success.
Something like locked-in syndrome after a bad stroke, or late-stage Alzheimer's - potentially a vegetative state that can last a decade - isn't.
The real problem is making sure the choice is free and informed - not being "encouraged" by other family members for personal gain, revenge, or some other unacceptable motivation. Possibly after a person is no longer considered legally competent, but may still be signalling a current desire to avoid death even though they left a living will stating they would welcome it.
It does indeed get messy very, very quickly.
Open legalisation complicates all of that and turns it into a much harder problem than it is already. The courts would spend a lot of time dealing with those cases.
> making sure the choice is free and informed - not being "encouraged" by other family members
How would you do this?
One way or the other, I think you would end up attempting to create a metric for QoL. Some people, for example, might want death after losing their limbs, or their sight - a difficult life, but not a painful one, some people are born without these facilities and manage to live fruitful lives. If you allow death for those cases, why not evaluate regular suicides the same way?
I think once we figure out depression, assisted suicide will become uncontroversial. If you understand what dying means (end of everything you have and will ever have) and don't have depression, but you want to die then we should let you make that decission. You must have good reasons.
The "potential for abuse" GP is talking about could be rephrased as: with assisted suicide, many more people would find themselves in the very unfortunate position of needing to die, just for reasons external to them.
There are lots of things that are abused but still not illegal, like cars, giving birth. If people can bring someone without their consent to have poor life, there should also a way to exit if one wants. Otherwise life is a prison for many.
And we see how this has worked out for abortion. The 0.10% case of either saving a woman's life or in cases of rape and incest as turned into the justification for aborting 189 babies for every 1000 live births -- or in the african american community 487 babies for every 1000 live births.
Once you open the flood gates, you will have plenty who kill themselves who otherwise wouldn't with just a little bit of extra support.
> The 0.10% case of either saving a woman's life or in cases of rape and incest as turned into the justification
...for nothing. The right to abortion isn't premised on any of those, in general. The only one that is particularly relevant as a justification is protecting the life of the mother, and that mostly has to do with abortions later in pregnancy, Cobstitutionally.
Otherwise, the justification of abortion is bodily autonomy.
By name, no. It’s a popular term which I think maps pretty well to a large and significant subset of “privacy” law under the Supreme Court’s 5th (as applies to the federal government) and 14th (as applies to the States) Amendment “due process” jurisprudence.
> What's the justification for the drugs laws then?
Arguably, none. The only case which has reached the Supreme Court in which I ama aware of the relevant Constitutional argument was kind-of considered against the Controlled Substances Act used it as an argument in the lower courts for Constitutional avoidance (a doctrine under which the courts read ambiguity in laws to favor an interpretation which does not violate the Constitution), and the Court refused to apply it because the law was not ambiguously crafted so as to permit the reading preferred, even if it was Cobstitutionally necessary; because invalidity of the law itself was not argued at the lower court, the Supreme Court declined to consider it for the first time on appeal. United States v. Oakland Cannabis Buyers' Cooperative, 532 U.S. 483 (2001).
That would cover forced conception/abortions, but how does it cover the right to an abortion?
It's not like becoming pregnant is "being forced to give birth";
if it is the distinction is meaningless since not allowing <x> is forcing you to not do <x>, and forcing you to do <x> is disallowing you to not do <x>.
Becomming pregnant is not being forced to give birth but being forced to carrying pregnancy to term and giving birth is being forced to give birth.
But you are right. This distinction is meaningless by itself.
What actually has meaning is if what we are forcing/forbidding you to do with your body puts your health and life at risk for some other benefit, for example for benefit of a single new other human.
Forcing someone to carry pregnancy to term to save the life of this new human is like forcing someone to giva a kidney to save some other person's life.
But it's a little different - I'm not responsible for someone needing a kidney, but a person who becomes pregnant is (in most cases) responsible for that. That doesn't mean anyone should be "forced to carrying pregnancy to term", but it also doesn't mean they shouldn't be punished for not doing so.
Being punished for not doing something is the same as being forced to do this.
And being responsible for getting pregnant shouldn't be automatically punished with being forced to risk your health and life for benefit of human that is not you. Unless pregnancy is a crime there should be no punishment at all. Let alone the corporal punisment.
> And being responsible for getting pregnant shouldn't be automatically punished with being forced to risk your health and life for benefit of human that is not you.
Why not? Those are the stakes of sex and we all know it going in. I'm a man, but I know that if I accidentally get a woman pregnant one of the consequences will be being forced to monetarily support the resulting child. She knows going in that pregnancy is a potential consequence. Neither of us is "innocent" here, we both took a gamble and lost. The question is, if one believes that a fetus is a person with a right to life, do we not also believe that those who knowingly engaged in its creation have a responsibility towards it?
> Unless pregnancy is a crime there should be no punishment at all. Let alone the corporal punisment.
Having children is not a crime, yet we routinely force people to be responsible for their children. One could say that the crime is being irresponsible, but then one could just as easily say the same about terminating a pregnancy.
Because getting pregnant is not a crime so it shouldn't be punished.
> Those are the stakes of sex and we all know it going in.
You can say that about crimes as well. Knowing the stakes doesn't mean that something that follows is not a punishment. And we should be punishing only crimes. And we shouldn't be using corporal punishments at all.
> I'm a man, but I know that if I accidentally get a woman pregnant one of the consequences will be being forced to monetarily support the resulting child.
That's a horrible idea too unless you are voluntarily choosing to do it.
> Neither of us is "innocent" here, we both took a gamble and lost.
That doesn't mean either of you should suffer any punishment.
> The question is, if one believes that a fetus is a person with a right to life, do we not also believe that those who knowingly engaged in its creation have a responsibility towards it?
Even if you believe a fetus is as much of a person as adult human you still can't compel other human to risk her health and life for that person even if not risking it means this person dies. Even if she's responsible for giving this human life.
Human that needs a kidney also has the right to live but you can't ensure that right is fulfilled by taking involuntarily kidneys of other people.
What's more, even if your child needs a kidney to survive you are not obliged to provide it and punished for not doing so.
An yet if somebody needs a uterus (and the rest of your body with all it's fragile systems) you are forced to provide it if it's your kid.
> Having children is not a crime, yet we routinely force people to be responsible for their children. One could say that the crime is being irresponsible, but then one could just as easily say the same about terminating a pregnancy.
When the child is born, you don't have to take it with you from the hospital. If you did, you voluntarily assumed the rights of a parent with all the responsibilities. When you neglect a child you are punished for violation of this voluntary agreement.
You don't voluntarily agree to getting pregnant and giving birth unless you are planning it and wanting it. Having sex is not acceptance of being forced to deliver a child. Acceptance could be assumed if having children was the only reason people have sex. But people use sex as communication and bonding tool.
> Having sex is not acceptance of being forced to deliver a child. [...] You don't voluntarily agree to getting pregnant and giving birth unless you are planning it and wanting it.
When people engage in sports they don't voluntarily agree to being injured or injuring others, they don't plan for or want it, yet these things are known risks of playing sports.
I'm saying that having sex, something that no one needs to do to survive, is acceptance of the risk of becoming pregnant[0], the same way that playing a sport is acceptance of the risk of becoming injured. If people choose to engage in activity with a known risk of a certain outcome, is that outcome not their responsibility should it occur?
> When the child is born, you don't have to take it with you from the hospital. If you did, you voluntarily assumed the rights of a parent with all the responsibilities. When you neglect a child you are punished for violation of this voluntary agreement.
Given that sex is a voluntary act with known risks, one that no one forced you to engage in, I do not think that it is unreasonable to apply the same standard: you have assumed the responsibilities of pregnancy and can, conceptually[1], be punished for violation of that responsibility.
[0] For the sake of brevity it should be assumed that by "becoming pregnant" I am referring to the state of both sexes as regards their potential future state of parenthood.
[1] I don't necessarily agree with doing so, I just don't think the issue is nearly as neat and tidy as people make it out to be.
> If people choose to engage in activity with a known risk of a certain outcome, is that outcome not their responsibility should it occur?
Is a person legally responsible for the injury if he engages in skydiving but then gets injured because the pilot of his plane made a mistake or manufacturer technician of his plane didn't prepare it correctly?
Is a person walking at night legally responsible for getting mugged, because there's a known risk of getting mugged?
Is the responsibility for any action with known risk solely on the person undertaking the action?
And if this person is legally defined to be responsible should this person and only this person be corporeally punished for engaging with this risky action when it results in undesirable outcome for herself?
Since father is also equally responsible why not take out one of his organs he can live without as a punishment for the undesirable outcome? Or why not give him 100 lashes or something?
Why corporal punishment for a women but just a fine for a man?
Refusing women abortion is similarly barbaric. We just don't notice it.
> Is a person legally responsible for the injury if he engages in skydiving but then gets injured because the pilot of his plane made a mistake or manufacturer technician of his plane didn't prepare it correctly?
I don't see how that tracks. You appear to be saying "if birth control fails", but birth control is known to be less than 100% effective the same way protective sports equipment is. Arguably you have a point if the birth control in question is defective.
> Is a person walking at night legally responsible for getting mugged, because there's a known risk of getting mugged?
> Is the responsibility for any action with known risk solely on the person undertaking the action?
So the sperm and egg are committing a crime now? They are not conscious actors, they don't have responsibility.
> Since father is also equally responsible why not take out one of his organs he can live without as a punishment for the undesirable outcome?
> Why corporal punishment for a women but just a fine for a man?
We already have child support to extract responsibility, in some form, from the father. I think it would be fair to say that money is not nearly as big a deal as the pregnancy, so yeah maybe there should be a different form of responsibility enforced. Taking an organ doesn't really accomplish anything though, because the purpose isn't to punish but to support the child and taking an organ does nothing for that.
> Refusing women abortion is similarly barbaric. We just don't notice it.
I don't agree. While I'm certainly uncomfortable with the idea of forcing people to endure pregnancy and its consequences against their will, if one takes the position that fetuses are people and deserve the same human rights as everyone else, and quite a lot of people do (though for the record I lean toward not agreeing on this), then I don't think the issue is quite as straight-forward as saying that the mother (or father for that matter, but obviously his situation is different) bears no responsibility towards the fetus.
> So the sperm and egg are committing a crime now? They are not conscious actors, they don't have responsibility.
I never claimed that. If anything, I am claiming that there's no responsibility that needs to be assigned to anyone because it's not a reprehensible act. And the only responsibility there is here, is the one that women voluntarily might or might not take upon herself.
> Taking an organ doesn't really accomplish anything though, because the purpose isn't to punish but to support the child and taking an organ does nothing for that.
You may always use that organ to help someone else in exchange for support for the child. Body of the woman is lawfully coerced to sustain harm and we don't do the same with man.
> I don't think the issue is quite as straight-forward as saying that the mother (or father for that matter, but obviously his situation is different) bears no responsibility towards the fetus.
Even if there's a responsibility. Even if we consider getting conceived the worst thing two humans can do to another it doesn't mean that is should be corporeally punished.
We shouldn't (and in almost all cases we don't) legally force people to risk their health and life to help someone else, even to save someone else's life. No matter how much responsibility the person is burdened with. We don't even take the kidneys of serial killers, even though the responsibility that they brought upon themselves is orders of magnitude larger than any other.
neither is signing a contract, but you can be penalised for breaking one. Neither is joining the army, but you can be punished for deserting. You are suggesting that if it's not a crime to take on a responsibility, you can't be punished for betraying it - that doesn't follow to me.
> you don't have to take it with you from the hospital. If you did, you voluntarily assumed the rights of a parent
why don't you assume the potential consequence of bringing a pregnancy to full term by voluntarily having sex, and not aborting in early terms?
> you still can't compel other human to risk her health and life
No, but you can penalise them. Can you not penalise members of the army for deserting? Yes, because they took on that responsibility. Who takes on the responsibility for a strangers kidney problems?
> if your child needs a kidney to survive you are not obliged to provide it
you aren't responsible for such a condition.
> yet if somebody needs a uterus
because you put them there? Can I lock you in a cage and claim no responsibility in getting you out?
> You are suggesting that if it's not a crime to take on a responsibility, you can't be punished for betraying it - that doesn't follow to me.
I'm suggesting the exactly opposite. That by having sex and getting pregnant you don't enter any contract and you don't automatically agree to take any responsibility. You can be punished for violating terms of something you voluntarily agreed to.
> why don't you assume the potential consequence of bringing a pregnancy to full term by voluntarily having sex, and not aborting in early terms?
If you made a voluntary decision to not abort in early terms then probably we can assume that.
>> if your child needs a kidney to survive you are not obliged to provide it
> you aren't responsible for such a condition.
You might be. This might be a genetic birth defect (which is your responsibility for having sex by your count because it's one of the possible outcomes you are assumed to accept). Or you might have damaged you kid kidney with bad diet or herbal remedies or just beating the kid. And you still wouldn't be obliged to provide your kidney as a replacement. The point is, the law should never require of you the piece of your body.
> because you put them there? Can I lock you in a cage and claim no responsibility in getting you out?
Absolutely. However you'll be fully responsible for putting me there, if it was illegal.
> I'm suggesting the exactly opposite. That by having sex and getting pregnant you don't enter any contract and you don't automatically agree to take any responsibility. You can be punished for violating terms of something you voluntarily agreed to.
I don't think this reasoning tracks. Let's say you're in a bar and get into a heated argument with another person and you decide to "take it outside", as it were. You don't have to fight this person, no one is making you, you both decided to engage in the activity. Now one of you ends up severely injured or maybe even dead, not because that was the intention but because of bad luck.
You agreed to the fight, with the known probability of significant bodily harm even though neither party desired that outcome. Do either of you have any responsibility for that outcome?
> The point is, the law should never require of you the piece of your body.
I think this is your strongest argument, because I honestly cannot think of a reason the state should be allowed to do that and the only counter argument I can muster is that there's currently no other way to bring a fetus to term, which I feel is a weak justification.
> Do either of you have any responsibility for that outcome?
Sure. But does that mean that as a punishment we should break your legs or take a kidney out of each of you?
If conceiving an unwanted child is harm, then just make mother and father pay a fine and give mother an abortion. Don't punish her with damage to her health.
And if conceiving an unwanted child is not a harm, them do the same just without any punishment.
> I think this is your strongest argument, because I honestly cannot think of a reason the state should be allowed to do that and the only counter argument I can muster is that there's currently no other way to bring a fetus to term, which I feel is a weak justification.
That's my main point, that I think is the strongest argument in existence for any right to choice of abortion, even limited. Since I got this point across I'm perfectly happy to end this thread at that. Thank you.
The contract example was just to demonstrate the law absolutely allows punishment for betraying responsibility, not that you sign a literal contract. If you have sex, that should be considered voluntarily agreement to the consequences. AFAIK, you can sue people over matters where no contract exists - societal laws aren't all literal contracts.
> then probably we can assume that
then penalise non-medical late-term abortions?
> This might be a genetic birth defect (which is your responsibility for having sex by your count because it's one of the possible outcomes you are assumed to accept)
but acting in good faith, there's no formal responsibility to pass on good genes. An interesting concept, but moot in modern society. Also, it doesn't follow that "donating a kidney" fixes the issue in the same way "not aborting" would.
> or just beating the kid
In which case you would obviously be punished.
> you still wouldn't be obliged to provide your kidney as a replacement
My original comments agree this is true, but also state it doesn't mean you can't be punished/penalised.
> the law should never require of you the piece of your body
Then can I state your doctors can never retrieve/tamper with a piece of someone else's body, even if it exists inside your womb?
> However you'll be fully responsible for putting me there, if it was illegal
And I where a jailer who put you in there legally, but illegally left you there to rot? The legality of the first act would not change my initial responsibility to let you out.
if you decide to for example continually give blood to another person to keep them alive, you are allowed at any point to revoke your consent for this procedure even if it makes the other person die.
it doesnt matter that the women entered the pregnancy knowing the consequences, she is allowed to revoke the babies privilege to use her body whenever she wants.
> And please don't say "that's different, it affects other people!"
Preempting the flaw in your strawman doesn’t invalidate it. A woman choosing to abort a pregnancy has no bearing on anyone but her. In contrast, the anti-vaccine crowd both directly, and indirectly, contribute to the propagation of disease.
Your right to bodily autonomy stops at society’s doorstep, which is broadly agreeing that the unvaccinated don’t get to participate in the non-essential aspects of society, otherwise furthering the risk to everyone else without reason.
A zygote, an embryo, and a fetus are genetically fully human, and are distinct individuals from the mother. So saying "has no bearing on anyone but [the mother]" is... legally correct, but morally much more grey. And saying "it only affects one person" is also pre-empting the objection to the strawman.
"Genetically fully human": having 2x23 chromosomes with the full complement of DNA that normal human cells contain; that is, not haploid like spermatozoa or ova.
"Distinct individual": Genetically different from the parent, and not just different with a transcription error.
Why it's relevant: Because "it's her body" and "it affects nobody else" aren't relevant arguments when it's not just her body, when there's another individual there. Now we have to have a real moral/ethical discussion, and we can't short-circuit it with dismissive strawmen.
But I'm fairly sure you knew all of that. I suspect that you just want to keep using the strawmen to avoid having the actual ethical/moral discussion.
> then why do so many pro-choicers also hate vaxxers? And please don't say "that's different, it affects other people!"
Er, why not? The fact that it affects what is legally a non-person entity in whom the State has a legitimate interest is why abortion rights have different parameters later in pregnancy, so why wouldn't it be the consistent that vaccination having public health impacts that affect the life and health of other actual people is relevant?
Can you explain what you mean? Are zygote, embryos, foetus and various categorisations of foetal development arbitrary? Or do you mean "arbitrary" specifically in terms of personhood (i.e. there might be a clearly distinguishable stage where the heart starts beating, but this bears no obvious relationship to personhood)
> That one is arbitrary is not an argument against it and in favor of a different (and equally arbitrary) one.
True, but that's not my aim. I am instead attacking the notion of personhood, which was a dependency of your own argument, not mine. If there are no meaningful indicators of personhood, the only way to avoid aborting a person is to set a limit at a point where a foetus is still likely to be a non-person, because detailed gauges of personhood are otherwise unavailable.
I think a better direction for this argument would be to burden you with the question; why aren't we allowed to terminate once a child is born? pre-empting the argument "but then there are no health risks / autonomy considerations" - does that mean all abortions are done for purely health-risk reasons?
There are other reasons people want to get abortions, such as knowing they can't provide for the child or give them a safe/stable household. Adoption is rare, and the foster system in most countries absolutely ruins kids. So those aren't good alternatives.
What you mean by that? There is extremely high demand to adopt newborns, which is why parents desperate for children adopt from other countries. There is currently a waiting list of 2 million families willing to adopt newborns.
Children in foster care are different story - people are much less willing to adopt older kids.
Maybe finish adopting all those kids who exist and need families right now, regardless of where they’re from, rather than force people to give birth to more babies that need adoption.
> Domestic – If you are looking to adopt a newborn or young infant, you are looking at a domestic adoption. It’s that simple.
> more babies that need adoption.
That's a strange way of looking at it. When you say it like that, it sounds as if a new baby will create an imbalance between supply and demand. There's 2 million families waiting to adopt a newborn, so a new baby will help balance that, not imbalance it.
Fertility is dropping, so I wonder if there will be an even higher demand for newborns in the future.
Most folks in the US are too poor to adopt and it doesn't matter how well they'd care for the child: It isn't exactly a free process just looking out for the needs of the child. (I'd argue that if we were just looking out for the child, the legal costs would be covered by taxes and eligibility wouldn't be put on finances at all. We'd have to use tax money to support the child without adoption, after all).
My parents looked into adopting from another country - it was a program they were introduced to through church. It cost $20,000 plus travel... in the 1990s.
I mean that most kids who end up without a home were never up for adoption anyway, for whatever reason the child was taken away from a home that couldn't take care of it and as you mentioned, they're too old now.
We should provide free birth control and better sex education. Morning after contraception should also be free -- a fertilized, un-implanted egg is not a human -- it's a potential human.
>a fertilized, un-implanted egg is not a human -- it's a potential human.
Is there a scientific reason for that idea? I don't see how implantation can really be considered a transition from potential human to human. I think with enough scientific advances a human could be raised entirely outside the womb, and in that case there would be no implantation.
I think the way GP phrased it is a shorthand for "egg just after fertilization" - because today, fertilized eggs either get implanted early or rejected by the mother's body. When science and technology advances to the point of making it possible to gestate humans entirely outside of the womb, the way we talk about this will have to adjust to be more precise.
(Implantation itself doesn't feel like the transition point either, but it's just the last obvious discrete step before the continuous progression all the way to birth.)
I don't see why we can't try to adjust to be more precise now.
It seems strange to say that our current definition is not the correct long-term definition, but we'll keep using the current one. To me that's basically saying our current definition of human is wrong, and I don't see why it's acceptable to use a wrong definition.
In countries with a good safety net (including parental leave and child care help), comprehensive sex education, free access to contraception and abortion and general health care, abortion rates are often lower.
I'm not sure it avoids the majority since a decent amount of folks have the knowledge and tools to simply avoid the pregnancy in the first place, but it does lower it.
I'm not certain there is a level of foster care that could provide good outcomes. I think that's a bit of a pipedream. If your argument is instead that a shitty life is better than no life at all, I couldn't really disagree. But I think it's somewhat inhumane to bring a new life into the world knowing it will be suffering.
I think the main reason kids in foster care suffer is that the kids are already old and have been through a traumatic situation that caused them to have to be put into foster care. That trauma plus the transition can leave emotional scars. Another problem is the foster parents cannot fully take in the kid. The kid can be taken away from them by the government and given back to the kid's original parents.
Putting a newborn up for adoption is different, it doesn't have either of those problems. There are 2 million families in the US waiting to adopt a newborn.
I'd hope someone would know fairly early in the pregnancy if they will be able to provide for a child or not. (i.e. before the baby can feel pain, is basically a complete human being, etc.)
That's why there's so much interest in defining limits around abortions. Late term abortions are pretty much described as horrific by the vast majority. There should be room for political agreement here.
Most abortions are as soon as the woman knows she's pregnant. Very, very few are late term, and, as a sibling mentions, those are almost universally due to health risks (possibly also a major change in financial status, relationship, etc).
To be clear, you are right that a late term abortion is pretty horrific. They're also -traumatic-. No one is -intentionally- waiting around to get an abortion; there isn't room for political argument here because anyone who finds themselves pregnant at a late stage and doesn't want to be is already in the case of "reasonable exception". A medical complication, a change in financial status to where she can't support it (when before she thought she could), etc.
No one is finding out they're pregnant in the first trimester, and then just can't make up their mind until the third, and we as a society need to set a date she has to make up her mind, or force her to keep it against her will. That's a made up justification, and as we continue to see, the same forces that make that justification don't even stop there.
>“[t]here aren’t good data on how often later abortions are for medical reasons.”
>“Based on limited research and discussions with researchers in the field, Dr. Foster believes that abortions for fetal anomaly ‘make up a small minority of later abortion’ and that those for life endangerment are even harder to characterize,” the report stated.
For perspective, note that the studies you're referring to are studying a rare occurrence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion refers to CDC statistics that 1% of abortions may be at 21+ weeks, but even that is with the caveat that what they're really looking at is medical procedures, and thus that "According to the CDC, due to data collection difficulties the data must be viewed as tentative and some fetal deaths reported beyond 20 weeks may be natural deaths erroneously classified as abortions if the removal of the dead fetus is accomplished by the same procedure as an induced abortion." Additionally, 56% of women declined to participate in the study, and there will surely be some correlation between that choice and the cause for the termination.
Of course that doesn't invalidate the findings; but it is a a fairly small number of events they're talking about here, that's all.
>Additionally, 56% of women declined to participate in the study, and there will surely be some correlation between that choice and the cause for the termination.
I think you're misunderstanding how the sentence I quoted relates to the study. The study I linked to actually only studied women who had abortions unrelated to fetal anomalies or life endangerment. So none of the 56% who declined to participate in the study nor any of the 44% who accepted to participate in it had abortions related to fetal anomalies or life endangerment.
The quote I quoted was basically an offhand remark that the paper made to justify its relevance, not backed up by evidence in the paper, but instead backed up by a citation to a different paper that I found hard to understand in a quick skim.
Not to mention the reply left out my original "possibly also a major change in financial status, relationship, etc", since my entire point was that late term abortions, while for a variety of reasons, are not simply people taking the most expensive, most traumatic, most controversial option as a form of contraceptive. It's for a variety of nuanced, complex reasons that aren't "for convenience", as the convenient path is always to abort or prevent the pregnancy earlier. Which is why pro-choice advocates say it should be between the woman and her doctor, -not- government; the fact the situation is arising at all means it is exceptional.
I did see that, but since it was in parentheses I interpreted it as you saying that was lower likelihood.
The general way I interpret the meaning of parentheses is that it's a part of the sentence that provides extra information, but the sentence would still be correct if it was removed.
I know it's relevant because it's the politics that are setting the rules right now, but political agreement isn't really the crux of the discussion for me. It's about minimizing suffering and the ethics of controlling someone else's body.
That said, I don't think there will be political agreement because it's not 100% about the rules around abortions anyway. It's a political instrument at this point. Either side is trying to win, not do what's right, and that's how things have gotten so extreme.
Well he did qualify the reasons he provided as being only 0.1%. So obviously there are 99.9% more reasons.
But then here you come with the ~93% of reasons that boil down to convenience. It's more convenient to murder this baby than to not murder it so murder it is.
There is a very important and overlooked 7% of abortions that are medically related that save the whole concept of legal abortion for me. Mothers who want babies but, because literally everything in biology can go wrong in ways that make abortion the only humane option, those poor women can't. And they don't need police investigating their terminations in the middle of unimaginable grief.
> But then here you come with the ~93% of reasons that boil down to convenience.
It is absolutely not convenience. To flip it another way, these are often homes you would never allow to adopt a baby, or homes where the child is inevitably taken by child services due to abuse or incapacity of the parent(s). Then they end up in foster care, far too late to be adopted by the nice well-to-do family with a white picket fence, and they bounce around the foster system.
The foster system can't even handle all the kids that aren't adopted, and some kids end up too broken to stay in care. What happens then? At some point they just throw a bunch of broken kids into a shitty house together and have a child services worker come check in on them every day or so.
You're right. Those homes are too difficult, too far gone. They have no hope anyway. There's no point in giving them an opportunity when killing is easier.
My understanding is that prior to abortion being legalized, attempted abortion was not an uncommon cause of death. If someone is so willing to avoid pregnancy that they kill themselves, I don't know if it can be reasonably described as convenience anymore.
Too bad we can't ask unwanted babies if they would rather have been born into a bad life.
This isn't directed at you, but I have had countless conversations about this very topic. The detriments are greatly overstated. I've found usually people are talking of these things outside looking in in an ideological vacuum, and not an experiential one.
Let's take societal outcomes for african americans, as an example. What people don't realize is, when people speak of abortions in a vaccuum (and lets be frank -- it's usually white liberals who champion it the hardest), the elephant in the room is with african american women carry out the disproportionate volume of abortions, and the the overwhelming majority of Planned Parenthood locations being located in poor and black neighborhoods. There is a large argument now that is catching on in many african american communities that maybe if we had the estimated 11 million more black babies born in this country, black representation would be much better off in all matters of the socioeconomic and political spheres, resulting in better lives overall for the general population. In 2015, in association with National Black Pro-Life Coalition, Protecting Black Life, and National Black Pro-Life Union met with CURE to deliver a congressional report detailing all of these facts, and making the strong case that the economic and societal impact of all the abortions in the black community is far greater. I encourage everyone to read it: https://www.congress.gov/115/meeting/house/106562/witnesses/...
If society wants more babies, the path is easy: provide financial help for couples and single mothers. The way it currently is, abortion is very attractive.
Your data shows that the trend of abortion in Sweden is stable since the 70s. So, no, there is no correlation between abortion and a decrease in birth rates.
Exactly. People seem to forget why birthrates were so high in the past. It is not just lack of abortion (which happened), but the fact that more children would provide additional help in the daily farm work. In other words, it was very cheap ho have children and the financial benefit existed. In a post-industrial society, these incentives are reversed. It is very expensive to have children, and there are no financial incentives. That's why we have the declining birth rates everywhere we have an economically developed society.
Eh, spurious reasoning. The 0.10% case is not the underpinning for the right to abortion in the United States. In our jurisprudence the right to abortion is guaranteed by the constitutional right to privacy. So, your argument starts from a false premise, and the facts that happen to be true don't redeem it.
And homosexuality, despite it not resulting in children. And welfare. And mandatory paid maternity leave. And...basically everything that would actually ensure children are not a burden on the parent.
Do you have citations for the numbers you provided? Thanks! (I’m genuinely asking because it never occurred to me that you can track the amount of a private medical procedures occurrence across states and stuff…)
No sorry, it is my numbers that are outdated. I was referencing a 2015 congressional report. Abortion rates have been declining sharply over the past few years, so that's good news at least.
Depends on why. If rates have been declining because people are more educated about birth control and family planning, that's good news indeed. If it's because of new restrictions on access to abortion, that's not fixing the problem at all.
Unless you're vegan, you participate in the ending of life as well.
At the stages of development when most abortions are performed, the life that is being ended is much less of a life than that of a cow, or pig, or chicken, or even fish, that ends up being killed for food.
If people truly believe that ending abortion is a moral and ethical issue, then the only consistent stance is to also be vegan and push for laws requiring everyone else be vegan.
Yeah, I know someone who said for basically their entire adult life "if I ever get like that, just shoot me" and meant it quite seriously. Unfortunately, they indeed spent their last few years gradually degrading in the throes of dementia. Very sad to see, and even more sad to know they would have absolutely hated being left to "rot" in such a way. The only consolation is the person hopefully didn't "know"? Who knows? :\
People say all sorts of things, but if they don't commit to writing directions down, how are people supposed to know what the person really wanted? Also, someone might say one thing, until death becomes immanent, and then they realize they want something else.
I have written a formal, witnessed statement of my wishes, in the event that I'm unable to utter them. My physician has a copy; there's a copy in my desk-drawer at home, with my will.
I understand that different health authorities here have different policies on the registration and application of such "living wills". I have no confidence that if I get sick in the wrong place, my statement will even be noticed, let alone respected. Also, there's no reason why a paramedic coming to my home would know to look in my desk-drawer (I live on my own), and so discover that I don't want any CPR, ever.
And ultimately, these living wills are advisory only; medics can't be sued for ignoring them.
It's a bloody mess. I really hope I don't ever get demented.
The problem is the possibility that physician assisted suicide will be abused to clear out people who are costly to treat by gently urging them to take the option, or other similar scenarios like a family urging someone to take the option so they can get early inheritance.
It's one of those things that I might support in idealistic principle but where I develop serious reservations when I factor in how ugly people can be in real life.
There are organisations in the EU that will assist suicide in certain circumstances.
Sir T Pratchett wrote extensively about being on the wrong end of dementia. He didn't have much to say about abortion when he was dealing with cognitive decline.
Especially since current practice when it comes to dementia is waiting till the patient forgets how to swollow food and then let him/her starve to death.
With all the talk about 'controlling our bodies' in terms of abortion, and I can see both sides of that one, your own life is the one thing you really own. To have that control taken away is the worst kind of insult by the state.