But How Will I Survive Fundie Parents?
In a comment to an earlier post, reader Robert Madewell calls our attention to the above T-shirt (I’m not going to dignify the site by linking to it), which you are supposed to put on your toddler. Robert says:
I found a truly disgusting T for a baby. Now tell me what kind of mother would put this T-shirt on her baby?
It’s vulgarity defined.
November 4th, 2007 at 2:47 pm
I don’t see the problem. Roe v. Wade was all about mandatory abortions for everyone, regardless of whether they want the child or not. -eyeroll-
Don’t know about you, but I’d rather those-those-those “women” get coathanger abortions in dark alleys than in a nice, clean hospital environment, because they’re all filthy sluts in the first place.
November 4th, 2007 at 4:00 pm
As an atheist, I am constantly ashamed of my fellow godless for their rabid and unthinking support of abortion. If life begins at conception (and why wouldn’t it, aside from it being inconvenient? ), then we are all parties to the most shameful and massive slaughter in the history of mankind. (Before you accuse me of overstatement, check this out.). Worldwide, there have been roughly 48 million total deaths since 1/1/2007. There have been 38 million abortions in that same time.
And all so that some people can live without having to deal with the consequences of their own actions.
I hope we’re sure of what we’re doing. 38 million, man. 38 million.
November 4th, 2007 at 5:43 pm
Roy:
Abortion is not an easy decision, nor should it be. My support is neither rabid nor unthinking. And no, life does not begin at conception. Why would it?
I covered abortion more thoroughly in this article:
Abortion Debate Settled
November 5th, 2007 at 8:28 am
I “survived” Roe vs Wade? Did someone TRY to abort them and it didn’t work? My children don’t attend church, does that mean they “survived” religion?
I personally think it’s a poor choice of words (and yes, vulgar)…as if mom tried to abort them and they survived the procedure…almost funny in a way.
November 5th, 2007 at 1:45 pm
It doesn’t really matter if life begins at conception, birth, or sometime in between. Just because something is “alive” doesn’t mean we should value it as if it were human. Or does Evil Roy not take antibiotics?
November 5th, 2007 at 2:48 pm
I’ve thought for a while now that the entire abortion debate is nothing more than a convenient excuse for opposing groups of people to yell at each other. Pro-choice advocates have, somewhat justifiably, been reacting to the right by simply fighting to preserve the legal rights of women. The pro-lifers, on the other hand, have taken an otherwise admirable goal and twisted it into a religious battlecry.
Here’s how I see it, for what its worth. I think you could round up all of the people in this country who think we don’t have enough abortions and they still wouldn’t fill a phone booth. The bottom line is that nearly everyone, no matter what they think of abortion, would love to see the overall number of procedures performed drop. Bill Clinton once wisely said, with regard to abortion, that it ought to be “safe, legal, and rare”. Can we at least agree that the smallest number of abortions possible is universally desirable? I think we can.
Those on the right need to realize a few things. First, abortion will always be with us. It cannot be legislated out of existence. It is an unpleasant fact of life we all have to live with, kind of like religion. Second, comprehensive, no-holds-barred sex education will go much, much further in reducing the number of abortions than their infantile abstinence-only crusade. I took a sex-ed class in college, and it scared the hell out of me. Besides, anyone who has kids ought to have realized that the more you tell a child they can’t do something the more the child is likely to do it. Religion’s obsession with personal sexual behavior has made it impossible for us to talk to kids rationally about the most natural part of human existence. They’ve cloaked it in a saucy, tempting mystery most teens can’t resist. Oh, and another thing about sexual repression. If we could somehow get millions of young Muslim men laid we’d have a lot fewer suicide bombers looking forward to 72 virgins in paradise.
But I think pro-choice people need to think about a few things. For me, since I don’t believe in a soul, I think that the one trait that makes humans “special” is our intellectual capability. What makes me “me” is my brain thoughts and memories, and when I die, I cease to be. Likewise, before my brain turned on cognitively, there was no such thing as me, only a potential. Hell, I’ve washed billions of potential offspring down the shower drain. Does that make me a mass murderer? No.
So, what am I getting at? I think a woman ought to be able to obtain an abortion for any reason at any point before we can reasonably assume the child’s mental development has reached that critical “human” point, if that makes any sense. Most medical professionals seem to think that the first trimester does not include any notable neurological activity, although if anyone has better information on this and isn’t deluded by religion I’ll be willing to listen. Once into the second trimester, I think reasonable restrictions could be put in place, basically eliminating the birth control reason to have an abortion. I am not a woman, so I somewhat presumptuously say that three months ought to be enough time to decide whether to have the child or not. After that, I think things become more serious.
November 5th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
Sorry, I wasn’t finished. Continuing: Once into the third trimester, there is a realistic possibility of the child surviving outside the womb, should that become necessary. While the option for a woman should never be banned outright, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that six months along the only viable reason to abort the pregnancy is if the woman’s life is in danger.
I think a series of progressively more restrictive, but otherwise reasonable, limitations on abortions as the child develops into a viable, functioning, mentally active human being is the only way to settle this argument. Most women, I would imagine, already terminate their pregnancies early, so I don’t imagine later restrictions will impact a relatively large number of women. And remember, if you are a reasonable person, you already know that comprehensive sex education will go a long way to help women to not even need to consider abortion as an option.
If you are not a reasonable person, you are probably in a religious stupor, and rational arguments are beyond you. You will continue to treat women as walking wombs who have no right to sexual liberation. You will continue to eschew reason and instead scream idiotic “pro-life” slogans outside of abortion clinics or the Supreme Court, hoping to scare enough ignorant dopes into taking your side. You will continue to knock down straw men and conjure the image of Jesus crying. You and your co-believers have tainted civilization with your primitive beliefs, and your opposition to abortion is only one vivid example.
November 5th, 2007 at 4:44 pm
Watcher, did you just equate a human embryo with a bacterium? Are you serious or just trolling? If you can’t see the difference between a human embryo (or any embryo for that matter) and a unicellular bacteria, well, then you’re beyond help.
I am not an authority on biology, but it seems there are distinct stages of growth involved here; An unfertilized egg, an embryo inside the uterus, and a baby outside the uterus. I think everyone would agree that killing newborns is wrong, so I’ll leave it at that for now. The difference between an embryo at 10 days and a fetus at 6 months is largely a matter of degrees; both are a set of constantly dividing cells that will will irrevocably and inevitably become a person. (I’m talking about essence here—I know that lungs haven’t formed, eyes are still rudimentary etc., but they are ESSENTIALLY the same thing.) The difference between an unfertilized egg / sperm cell and a 10 day old fetus is NOT a difference of degrees—it is an essential difference; they are different KINDS of things. Any date that we pick as an acceptable date to have an abortion by is simply an artificial, arbitrary boundary. There is no doubt that life begins at birth—no biologist argues this. What is disputed is when HUMAN life begins. And that depends on how we define human life. Since there is no soul I assert that biological life is all the life we have. Period.
So if we decide to pick some random date as the last period of pregnancy that a woman can have an abortion, what happens if science finds a way (and it will) to remove that fetus from the womb BEFORE that date, and carry it to term outside of the womb. Does that mean that that baby isn’t a “real” person because it hasn’t passed the magical date decreed by some legislative body as being the date “humanness” begins? What happens if science finds a way to take a fertilized egg and carry it to term without any human mother at all?
It is because of these questions that I say we should be very, very sure that we know precisely when life begins. Because if we’re wrong . .
November 5th, 2007 at 5:45 pm
Long time reader, first time poster, but oy moy, that shirt….
Brian, I think you’re making some very good points. I don’t see any much in your posts that I disagree with, apart from the fact that I personally do believe in something that can be called a soul; but I also believe in a form of reincarnation which, oddly enough, makes the debate even less of an issue. I have the view that something came before the physical body and lasts after it, and is unaffected by abortion as it will simply move on to another potential body. And that it doesn’t even arrive until the foetus is anything approaching aware—in other words that the ’soul’ is consciousness. And if the ’soul’ is damnfool enough to try to set up home in a non-viable environment then it’s a useful other-life experience for it.
Anyway, having put my spiritual cards on the table, I’d like to turn to the practical issues.
On a purely practical level, it’s a good idea to avoid having an unnecessary medical procedure, and a lot of the time it is possible to avoid requiring an abortion. Which would also limit the risk of requiring other sorts of medical treatments…
But sometimes accidents can and do happen. Or, of course, it wasn’t the woman’s idea in the first place. Or there’s a very real problem with the pregnancy which means that going to term just isn’t an option.
I might go even further than Brian and suggest that in the majority of cases 8 weeks is enough time to know that a) you’re pregnant and b) that you do not want to go through with it.
There are, of course, exceptions to this.
I have heard of a number of cases, even in Britain where the anti-abortion debate is less extreme, maybe—where a pregnancy has gone on for longer than the woman wanted due to the sort of hoops she’s had to jump through to get the go-ahead. This means that the procedure goes from a relatively safe and straight-forward one to something much more complex and risky due to the increased development of the foetus—which is still an unviable roughly humanoid conglomeration of cells, but much larger than it would have been a few weeks previously.
There are two matters on the table with regard to abortions in Britain at the moment—one is a drive to lower the limit from its current 24 week cut-off due to increased efficiency in premature birth care—some 22 or 23 week births can survive but still very few—and the other is to make it easier to get an abortion in the first place.
According to a BBC report, 89% of abortions in Britain were carried out before 13 weeks (although it doesn’t say if that’s counting from conception or from the onset of the last menstruation, which could shave it down to 11 weeks)—so making it easier to get an abortion would probably end up meaning that any abortions carried out after about 20 weeks would be purely medical. Which would should make nearly everyone happy—although I’m not holding my breath.
Going back to the more emotive issues connected with the debate—there’s a big difference between ‘alive’ and ’sentient’. Plants, tumours, and bacteria can all be said to be alive, in that they grow and reproduce, but destroying them is not considered murder—even by the Jains who, IIRC, will avoid killing even insects. And even killing animals is not generally considered murder by most groups of people, including many pro-lifers, even though not only domestic pets but also food animals can be considered to be more sentient than a 16-week foetus.
By 20 weeks the issue gets more complex, certainly, as the foetus approaches viability outside the womb due to increasingly sophisticated technology. But by that point the majority of abortions are for physiological medical reasons.
Any abortions requested at that point for ’social’ reasons tend to be extreme cases—and extreme cases make bad laws.
November 5th, 2007 at 10:50 pm
Roy:
I appreciate your thoughtful comments. You are correct. We shouldn’t blindly support abortion rights, just because it’s the “liberal thing to do”. Never blindly support anything. Look at all of the evidence, weigh it thoughtfully, bring in your own moral code, and come to a decision. Also, be willing to reevaluate your positions occasionally, either as new information becomes available or just because your opinions about life change over time.
The Watcher is not trolling. He really thinks like that. And he’s really not “beyond help”. I mostly agree with him, at least for the very earliest stages of pregnancy. (I’m not sure how far into the pregnancy he considers bacteria and fetuses to be equivalent.)
The reality is that there is almost certainly a gradation between mere genetic potential and full human life that spans the nine months of pregnancy. I don’t know the point at which one turns into the other. I don’t know where to draw the line. Claiming that life begins at conception seems to be as groundless as claiming that life begins at birth.
One problem is that there are very few hard boundaries in a pregnancy. I can only think of three:
1. Conception
2. Implantation
3. Birth
None of these is a good boundary to set as an abortion limit.
At conception, you have one cell (the zygote) floating around in there. I just cannot call that life. It’s a blueprint. It’s potential. But it isn’t life. (Yes, technically, it is “alive”, but only in the same way that your white blood cells are alive.)
The zygote starts dividing, producing a blastocyst, a clump of 70-100 undifferentiated cells. Fertility clinics throw these things away all the time. Again, I don’t see how a small clump of undifferentiated cells is anything more than potential at this point. Flush away without thought, guilt, or emotion, I say.
Then implantation occurs. I believe that at this point the terminology changes to start calling it an embryo, even though initially it is still undifferentiated. Anyway, this begins the long process whereby the undifferentiated cells become more numerous and start to differentiate. If anybody can figure out at which point during that process the embryo becomes a human life, they are smarter and wiser than I.
November 5th, 2007 at 11:15 pm
… -long comment shock-
Someone once said, “life doesn’t start at conception, because we don’t have funerals for miscarriages”. I believe life begins when a baby/zygote/fetus can survive outside the womb, personally, even though there’s really no clear-cut “bam! person” moment (or, alternately, the third trimester). I think that’s a safe definition, though many would disagree.
November 6th, 2007 at 9:00 pm
Evil Roy, I’m sorry but you have missed the point. How are you proposing to force women to carry these unwanted zygotes to the point they could be delivered? How are you proposing to stop miscarriages, surely a subconscious “murder”. BWAA BWAA BWAA. As long as humans have recognized the state of pregnancy there have been attempts to end it. Perhaps if we ever develop a mass of clone zombies without consciousness we could transplant all these unwanted POTENTIAL human beings to their bodies but in the meantime you are telling me, that my worth as a fully grown functioning human being with dependents is worth less than that of a late period. And don’t go for the strawman of late term abortion; more than 90% of late term (after 17 weeks) abortions are due to serious genetic defects. So if you choose to sacrifice your whole life and that of your whole family to raise a child that would not have survived bar our advanced medical skills and who will never appreciate the world it is born into, or if you would like to spend 12 hours in labour to give birth to a baby that will die within hours, go for it. No one is making you have an abortion. Oh I forgot, you can’t have one!
November 7th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
Sorry Ausyoyo but it’s YOU missing the point. Before you preemptively accuse me of attacking a straw man, maybe you should reconsider your dismissal of my argument on the grounds that I can’t have a baby. Nothing could be less relevant to the issue at hand, but nice (ad hominem) try. And FYI; the miscarriage thing = strawman.
If the fact that these babies wouldn’t be alive if not for “our advanced medical skills” is reason to destroy them, then what about people on life support? Or people taking HIV medications, or people on dialysis? Hell, what about you? Ever had a vaccination?? None of them (nor possibly, you) would be alive if not for science. Should their right to life be forfeited so that someone else doesn’t have to take care of them?
I hesitate to respond to the rest of your “argument”– “would never appreciate the world it was born into”?, “12 hours in labour to give birth to a baby that will die within hours”?? Ooooooh 12 WHOLE hours!! You poor, poor thing–perhaps you’d have been better off aborted.
If you don’t want to face this dire consequence, I have some advice –don’t have sex if you are unprepared to have a baby (the former CAUSES the latter, btw). Unless you are a child, you have been raped, or you can prove that prior to getting pregnant you had no idea that sex causes babies, and if your “potential” baby is healthy enough to survive infancy, then I have little respect for your desire to evade the consequences of your own actions.
What I find alarming is that I never ever said that abortion should not be legal–I merely said I have grave concerns–yet you are clearly upset with me. I guess zealotry cuts both ways, eh?
I’ll make this as plain as I can. All that matters is when are these “zygotes” human beings? If we are destroying them BEFORE that time, then ok. But if they ARE humans, then how could we ever justify what we have done?
EDIT: in my second post I wrote, ” There is no doubt that life begins at birth . . .” I meant to say “There is no doubt that BIOLOGICAL life begins at CONCEPTION”.
November 7th, 2007 at 4:24 pm
“12 hours in labour to give birth to a baby that will die within hours”?? Ooooooh 12 WHOLE hours!! You poor, poor thing–perhaps you’d have been better off aborted.
If you don’t want to face this dire consequence, I have some advice –don’t have sex if you are unprepared to have a baby (the former CAUSES the latter, btw). Unless you are a child, you have been raped, or you can prove that prior to getting pregnant you had no idea that sex causes babies, and if your “potential” baby is healthy enough to survive infancy, then I have little respect for your desire to evade the consequences of your own actions.
really, I thought it took two people but I suppose its just the girls again, oh i forgot gender is a strawman, I suppose all those boys carring unwanted children will be pleased to get the acknowlegment.
A) it is common practice to make women carrying babies that are not going to live go thru the delivery process, it has happened to my best friend. wether it is one hour or 20 and it is frequently a long labour, just TRY and imagine going through this yourself.
B) What if the baby is not going to survive infancy as i stated or will be so profoundly disabled that they have no or minimal quality of life? Are you the one who will be unemployed, with huge bills and a proabably broken relationship and have your other children destined to very poor and miserable life to care for this “person”. This person who never knows that you exsist?
C) Yes we should all be very very restrained and never have sex as contraception may fail. Sounds like the real world doesnt it?
My main point is that you cannot force women to have unwanted children without becoming monsterous yourself.
Would you really want to be responsible for the misery that is several south american countries where legal abortion is totally denied, or the joys of african countries where it is financially imposssible, will you nurse the septic shock cases back to health? will you look after the motherless children? Dont talk of strawmen when you are talking of real live women.
November 7th, 2007 at 10:02 pm
This is starting to devolve into an emotional battle. I’m not sure too much more can be said at this point that would benefit the debate, so I’m going to close off comments.