How to make abortions rare?

[Vynn]

But on the topic of abortion it is LEGAL to murder a child the day before it is born and not the day after. Even a ten year old can see through this.

I doubt that! Where do you get that from?

I think he means that in the sense that in a few states, if the mothers life is in jeopardy and it can only be saved by the child being aborted, and the doctor feels he/she must do that, it's legal to abort up to the moment of delivery.

[QuestionMark]

I doubt that! Where do you get that from?

There are only three states in America(to my quick google fact check) that have illegalized partial birth abortions.

[catwixen]

In cases of life threatened for the mother?
I will go look it up. 

[Vynn]

I doubt that! Where do you get that from?

There are only three states in America(to my quick google fact check) that have illegalized partial birth abortions.

Up to the day of delivery?  Or by a certain time?

[Assyriankey]

Penalties are not education.

Sure they are. Dude gets 900 years in prison. Everyone else thinks, that's insane, he's never getting out. Doing what he did is a bad idea.

Gotcha!  I think...

Is there any evidence that this approach (of teaching others by penalising one individual) works as you think it does?

[Vynn]

I would assume that it does work, but very poorly. Certainly people that have been in jail, or know people in jail, or know people who have been in jail, don't seem to learn from it. A quick study of the statistics of repeat offenders will prove that.

[QuestionMark]

Is there any evidence that this approach (of teaching others by penalising one individual) works as you think it does?

? My friend Chris refuses to do any illegal drug, because he knows that he will lose his job. He knows that he will lose his job because he's experienced other people losing their jobs. Chris learned from the penalties on others that doing illegal drugs is not worth it. He was educated by penalty, by proxy.

[Alkan]

Teach abstinence, sexual function as having a primarily reproductive purpose, and that parenting potential should be a deciding factor in choosing sexual partners, just in case a pregnancy results.

Yeah, and that really worked well with Sarah Palin's daughter, Bristol.         
                                                                                                    /(    )\   
                                                                                                    \()/
                                                                                                     /___\
                                                                                                     | / \ |
                                                                                                     ||  ||

Sorry man, but teaching people absolute abstinence only increases the craving in most human beings. What we should be doing is teaching people how to exorcise their sexual desires safely.

[Assyriankey]

Is there any evidence that this approach (of teaching others by penalising one individual) works as you think it does?

? My friend Chris refuses to do any illegal drug, because he knows that he will lose his job. He knows that he will lose his job because he's experienced other people losing their jobs. Chris learned from the penalties on others that doing illegal drugs is not worth it. He was educated by penalty, by proxy.

Personal anecdotes are pillow talk on a forum.

Do you have any stats which show penalties to be an effective method of teaching others about our laws?

[hideousmonster]

Teach abstinence, sexual function as having a primarily reproductive purpose, and that parenting potential should be a deciding factor in choosing sexual partners, just in case a pregnancy results.

Yeah, and that really worked well with Sarah Palin's daughter, Bristol.         
                                                                                                    /(    )\   
                                                                                                    \()/
                                                                                                     /___\
                                                                                                     | / \ |
                                                                                                     ||  ||

Sorry man, but teaching people absolute abstinence only increases the craving in most human beings. What we should be doing is teaching people how to exorcise their sexual desires safely.

Funny. I didn't know Sarah Palin's daughter had an abortion.

[velkyn]

If sex is only for reproduction, then why do so many fertiziled eggs get naturally aborted?  I suppose if God can't design a coherent reproductive system, you got to make very time "count". 

Why did God make sex fun if it's so bad to do?  Why not sex by touching pinkies and not have the orgasm involved at all? 


If we chose partners by "parenting potential" that would have eliminated God himself.  He wasn't around to raise Jesus, now was he?

Bristol Palin didn't have an abortion....yet.  She supposedly used abstinence but that didnt' work either.  She is marrying someoen who didn't want kids per his internet description of himself. 

Masturbation can be fun, but I find sex much more fun.  Why tell me that I can't do what the body is meant for?  It is only a religion's idea that "sex is only for reproduction". 

[JustMyron]

If sex is only for reproduction, then why do so many fertiziled eggs get naturally aborted?  I suppose if God can't design a coherent reproductive system, you got to make very time "count". 

Why did God make sex fun if it's so bad to do?  Why not sex by touching pinkies and not have the orgasm involved at all? 

Not speaking from a religious perspective here, but what hideousmonster said earlier was that sex was primarily for reproduction. Sure, it's fun, but its main function is to continue the species. Which means it's not "bad", but if you're not looking to reproduce you might want to think twice about it. Sex is fun because those who have more sex have more babies, and those who have more babies generally won out under natural selection. The idea that sex being enjoyable demonstrates that its primary purpose is enjoyment would be very nice if it was true, but it's not.

And sure, we could argue about the categorization of purposes for sex. But can we agree that one major purpose for sex is reproduction, and we don't have the ability to avoid sex's reproductive purpose and have it be purely about enjoyment? That's really the point.

If we chose partners by "parenting potential" that would have eliminated God himself.  He wasn't around to raise Jesus, now was he?

Bristol Palin didn't have an abortion....yet.  She supposedly used abstinence but that didnt' work either.  She is marrying someoen who didn't want kids per his internet description of himself. 

If Bristol Palin had chosen partners by parenting potential, she wouldn't be a part of this discussion. Which is the point those who advocate taking a parenting potential into consideration are trying to get across. Please don't make a false dichotomy between having abortions and raising unwanted chilren. There is a third alternative, in being responsible about those who you have sex with.

Masturbation can be fun, but I find sex much more fun.

Ok, fair enough. But it's also sensible to weigh how much fun having an abortion would be when risking a pregnancy you couldn't handle. Contraception fails, so you're taking a risk.

Why tell me that I can't do what the body is meant for?  It is only a religion's idea that "sex is only for reproduction".

I'm not religious, but I do think the body is geared towards survival and reproduction. That's what life does. It's only since the advent of cheap contraception that's effective enough that people can lie to themselves and say a pregnancy can't happen to them that sex purely for fun has become a popular idea. You can fool yourself into thinking that your body is meant for recreational enjoyment, and I'm not trying to take your choices away, even to the extent of a recreational abortion. But some choices are ones I'll respect much more than others, because some are more realistic and responsible in light of the facts.

[rickymooston]

Sorry I meant to throw this in a while ago. Its a bit of a curve ball but the center for disease control compiles statistics on American abortion. My intuition was stats in US should be SIMULAR to those in Canada.  Finally, I CHECKED.  I do believe that the teen pregnancy rate in US is higher but all the same, the vast majority of abortions are not teens; i.e. 80% of abortions are not teens in the US.   Sadly, you have to do a bit of deduction to work that out and in particular, I have NO CLUE, how many of the abortions occur at age 25; the 20% is an over estimate.

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss5511a1.htm

Basically if you guess from the data below:

Teen pregnancy rate in the US (from women between the ages of 17 and 19 inclusive) is less than 20%, for one's less than 17, it is less than 1%!!!

80% of American abortions are for women 20 years and older!!! That is women, who probably know about birth control, even without the availability of sex education.

(Note: In Canada, our teen rate is indeed less but our overall abortion rate is higher.)

The highest percentages of reported abortions were for women who were unmarried (82%), white (55%), and aged <25 years (51%). Of all abortions for which gestational age was reported, 61% were performed at <8 weeks' gestation and 88% at <13 weeks.

Women aged 20--24 years obtained 33% of all abortions for which age was adequately reported. Adolescents aged <15 years obtained <1.0% of all abortions in the 48 areas that reported age. Among the 48 reporting areas, age was not reported for 0.6% of patients; however, this percentage ranged from 0 (in 19 areas) to 4.6% (Nevada) (Table 4). Abortion ratios were highest for adolescents aged <15 years (830 per 1,000 live births) and lowest for women aged 30--34 years (144 per 1,000) (Figure 2, Table 4).

MY CONCLUSION: At best, abstinence only programs can at BEST eliminate 20% of the abortions. (In Canada our teen abortion rate is LOWER but our overall abortion rate is HIGHER. In fact, our rate is about double that of the US.)

[QuestionMark]

If sex is only for reproduction,

Sorry I stopped reading there.

Nobody said that sex was only for reproduction.

[QuestionMark]

Sorry I meant to throw this in a while ago.

You should have thrown it in earlier, it's good stats.

[rickymooston]

Sorry I meant to throw this in a while ago.

You should have thrown it in earlier, it's good stats.

Thanks. I was rather surprised when I'd looked into the Canadian case, and so ... yeah, I should have. 

[Sweetling]

I have heard of teenagers who got pregnanat from a one night stand and later aborted their fetus.  That is sad that shouldn't happen.  To abort a perfectley healthy fetus that could grow up and be a productive happy member of society is wrong.

I have to say that I'm shocked that no one has challenged this statement.  There is no objective truth that aborting a "perfectly healthy fetus" (and I'll address the fetus part in a moment) is wrong.  Each of us has our own feelings on the issue; even many avowed abortion rights advocates would not ever get an abortion themselves.  But to say that abortion is always objectively wrong if the (fetus) is healthy is a grave mistake.  Read up on your progressive literature and find some alternative views out there.

That perfectly healthy fetus could also grow up to be Pol Pot.  If you could go back in time, would you give Frau Hitler a pessary to induce abortion?  It's silly to include conjecture about the moral potential of a prenate.

Also, the notion that it's appropriate for a twelve-year-old, but not an eighteen-year-old, to have an abortion seems random.  Where's the cutoff?  Have you seen some of the eighteen-year-olds out there?

Back to the fetus thing.  If aborted early, it's not even close to being a fetus.  Early on, it's a clump of cells, and later, an embryo.  Let's use the proper terms here.  No sane person relishes the idea of a late-term fetus being miscarried or aborted, but an early abortion is quantitatively a different matter.  Let's not get into when the heart starts beating, or when the nervous system forms - we all know it or can look it up.

Finally, I'll just remind everyone of the oft-repeated fact that nature (or, for our believers, a god) permits or performs millions of miscarriages of healthy blastocysts/embryos/fetuses each year, due to problems with Potential Mom or outside factors.  So nature, or god, doesn't appear to find abortion abhorrent.

Okay, enjoy tearing me apart!

[QuestionMark]

I have to say that I'm shocked that no one has challenged this statement. 

You're shocked that no one else has a seared conscience in the same way you do?

Abortion is always objectively wrong.

[Vynn]

Abortion is always objectively wrong.

Nothing is objectively wrong.

[QuestionMark]

Nothing is objectively wrong.

Sweet already believes that some things are objectively wrong. So that premise is not shared.

[Vynn]

Nothing is objectively wrong.

Sweet already believes that some things are objectively wrong. So that premise is not shared.

I was countering your statement, not hers. 

[QuestionMark]

Right, But you countered both. Because I'm sharing her premise, that some things are objectively wrong, and offering a challenge to continue in the direction of proving that abortion is always objectively wrong. But you are invalidating her by saying that nothing is objectively wrong(in an attempt to invalidate me).

[rickymooston]

I have heard that in the US we have the highest teenage pregnanacy rate.  It is as high as 1/3 of all girls and woman under 20 get pregnant.

If this (1/3 rate) were true why do girls under 20 make up no more than 20% of abortions. (Possibly less depending on who many 25 year old have abortions.) (See my post a bit above with stats from CDC)

  I have heard of teenagers who got pregnanat from a one night stand and later aborted their fetus.  That is sad that shouldn't happen.  To abort a perfectley healthy fetus that could grow up and be a productive happy member of society is wrong.

You are against morning after pills?

I think that people who eventually struggle to get pregnant later in life MIGHT regret having pregnancy come so easily when they were in their 20s?

Will a child with unready parents grow up "productive/happy"? I'm not sure. Adoption is a possibililty but that means the 20 year old has to stop living for 9 months and also have faith in the quality of the adoption process. (There ARE many qualified families that probably might give  a healthy baby a good home.)

[Vynn]

Right, But you countered both. Because I'm sharing her premise, that some things are objectively wrong, and offering a challenge to continue in the direction of proving that abortion is always objectively wrong. But you are invalidating her by saying that nothing is objectively wrong(in an attempt to invalidate me).

I'm on no one's side, QM. If Sweetling believes that something can be objectively wrong, than i disagree with her on that point. I'm not attempting to "invalidate" anyone.

You made a statement that i countered with the same assuredness and demonstration as you.

[Doubting Thomas]

I have heard that in the US we have the highest teenage pregnancy rate.  It is as high as 1/3 of all girls and woman under 20 get pregnant.

If this (1/3 rate) were true why do girls under 20 make up no more than 20% of abortions. (Possibly less depending on who many 25 year old have abortions.) (See my post a bit above with stats from CDC)

  I have heard of teenagers who got pregnant from a one night stand and later aborted their fetus.  That is sad that shouldn't happen.  To abort a perfectly healthy fetus that could grow up and be a productive happy member of society is wrong.

You are against morning after pills?

I think that people who eventually struggle to get pregnant later in life MIGHT regret having pregnancy come so easily when they were in their 20s?

Will a child with unready parents grow up "productive/happy"? I'm not sure. Adoption is a possibility but that means the 20 year old has to stop living for 9 months and also have faith in the quality of the adoption process. (There ARE many qualified families that probably might give a healthy baby a good home.)

I am not against the morning after pill, the is going from the shaded area of gray to black though.  About the teenage pregnancy rate, I heard it on the News the pregnancy rate for woman and girls under 20 is one third, one third of all girls and woman under twenty get pregnant.  Also, I heard recently that 50% of all pregnancies are not planed, so that is probably part of the problem that leads to abortions.  I mean about what I said earlier, healthy fetuses to be born of healthy mothers, they shouldn't be aborted.  That just isn't the right thing to do.

It is better to use a condom or use the birth control pill, or simply don't insemanate.  That is how I see it honestly.  The thing about abortion, is you're not like letting it die, your killing the fetus, which is a lot different than if you used a condom, or had the pill, in which case you wouldn't be in that situation.

That being said, I would not judge someone as a bad person because they didn't have the baby and then give it up for adoption.  I realize that we may sit here and say, "Well I would never do that, or I would certainly do this."  The fact is simply don't know what you would do in that situation, but from an objective nonbiased opinion, you have to admit a clear and simple argument can be made that the abortion of a healthy fetus, that came from healthy parents, is simply not the right thing to do.  That being said I do hope that the prolife people and the prochoice people can come together like Hillary Clinton said, and find come on ground to make abortions rare.  They are still going to happen, even some of them are necessary, but others are wrong really, and we should try to reach out, as a nation and frankly help the poor people, bring their fetus to term so that they can enjoy life too!

Sing Kumbya with me, on three, 1,2,...3,

Ever sperm is sacred, every sperm is good, whenever a sperm is wasted God gets quite irate!

[JustMyron]

Nothing is objectively wrong.

Is this something you actually believe, or were you just demonstrating that QM made an unsuported statement and you can too?

If you think there is no such thing as objective right and wrong, I would be interested in your reasoning. Perhaps in another thread, though...

Personally, I'm not 100% sure what the objective right and wrong is in every situation, and I seriously question people who are absolutely certain of it themselves, but I'd like to think there is such a thing. It may be like free will, where even if we can't prove it exists, it's important to the integrity of society that we act as if it does. Otherwise any debate degenerates into "I think this is right, you think otherwise, but both of our viewpoints are equally valid, and that's all there is to say." At which point means other than debate come into play in an effort for each side to get their way.

[Vynn]

Is this something you actually believe, or were you just demonstrating that QM made an unsuported statement and you can too?

Both.

If you think there is no such thing as objective right and wrong, I would be interested in your reasoning. Perhaps in another thread, though...

I think some things are logical, and some things aren't, but that there's no absolute right and wrong as in various situations the dynamic may change to make wrong things right and vice versa.

Personally, I'm not 100% sure what the objective right and wrong is in every situation, and I seriously question people who are absolutely certain of it themselves, but I'd like to think there is such a thing. It may be like free will, where even if we can't prove it exists, it's important to the integrity of society that we act as if it does.

I agree to an extent, but i think it depends on the intelligence of the people involved. If intelligent people understand these concepts they can handle it and the society can function through that knowledge.

Otherwise any debate degenerates into "I think this is right, you think otherwise, but both of our viewpoints are equally valid, and that's all there is to say." At which point means other than debate come into play in an effort for each side to get their way.

What type of debate? One stance is more logical than the other. Debate properly done should demonstrate which argument is more logical than the other.

[JustMyron]

That perfectly healthy fetus could also grow up to be Pol Pot.  If you could go back in time, would you give Frau Hitler a pessary to induce abortion?  It's silly to include conjecture about the moral potential of a prenate.

No, I wouldn't abort Hilter. If I had the ability to go back in time and change things, I'd change the conditions that brought Hitler to power, or gave him his ideas about how to run a country, but let him live.

And it's not silly to consider the potential of a bit of life (however you would like to categorize it) when deciding how it should be treated. It may not be possible to tell the future with certainty, but that doesn't mean there's no point in attempting to make the best reasoned guess we can.

Finally, I'll just remind everyone of the oft-repeated fact that nature (or, for our believers, a god) permits or performs millions of miscarriages of healthy blastocysts/embryos/fetuses each year, due to problems with Potential Mom or outside factors.  So nature, or god, doesn't appear to find abortion abhorrent.

You have a legitimate point here. If something made the laws of physics, and that same something made laws of objective right and wrong (if there is no such thing, this entire conversation seems to me to be pointless, so let's assume for the sake of the argument that objective right and wrong exist), then it would appear that that something doesn't mind abortion in some circumstances. However, my view is that same something gave us (or caused us to develop through natural means, I should say) a sense of right and wrong that's contingent on our ability to control things. If we have a choice about whether to abort, that's different from a "naturally occuring" abortion.

How? Consistency. If you were to say that because not all fertilized eggs make it through the gestation process, it's OK for us to abort as well, then the same argument could be used to justify murder on the basis of the fact that natural disasters occur. After all, nature or God doesn't appear to find killing people abhorrent either. Are you suggesting we shouldn't?

No sane person relishes the idea of a late-term fetus being miscarried or aborted, but an early abortion is quantitatively a different matter.  

Why is an early abortion necessarily a different matter? I happen to agree with you, but I recognize it as a matter of opionion, and it's legitimate for someone else to hold the contrasting view that human life is what's worth protecting, at whatever level of development it might be at. Your expressed opionions implicitly support this in a way, in that aborting a late term fetus is treated in your view substantially the same as a born baby. And in the vast majority of cases, further development after birth doesn't substantially affect the amount of protection we offer to members of our societies. We don't treat it as "more wrong" to murder someone who has spent years developing valuable knowledge, skills and understanding than to murder a baby who can't walk or talk or understand much of what's going on around it. So if we don't differentiate based on development after birth, why should we differentiate before birth? I happen to think doing so is legitimate in some circumstances, but justifying that view is tricky when you really think about it, and I'm not 100% certain I'm right.

[JustMyron]

I think some things are logical, and some things aren't, but that there's no absolute right and wrong as in various situations the dynamic may change to make wrong things right and vice versa.

Hm. I think there's an ambiguity when you say "things". Is "things"= "actions"? As in different actions can be right under different circumstances? In that case, I would agree (I have difficulty with "x is always wrong", even in the case of things like murder). But I think there are certain principles (which we may or may not have completely understood yet) which lead to a consistent view about which actions are right and wrong in various situations. The principles which are in line with our long-term best interests (as broadly defined as possible) under the laws of physics/nature would be the principles that are "truly" or "objectively" right or wrong, to which everyone must (in my view) eventually agree. Although it will be a long time before we get there...

One example would be utilitarianism. If you get two people who subscribe to this principle together, they may disagree on what the "right" course of action is, but they have a means of discussing it and coming to an agreement. So they can disagree on what action is objectively right or wrong, but they treat their agreed-upon principle as if it is objectively right to follow it. Without this, the debate can be logical but eventually reaches an impasse.

Example: If your stance is that there is no such thing as objectively right, then if you subscribed to utility and someone else subscribed to something else (say empathy - "treat everyone the way you would want to be treated") you would have to admit that their conclusions were just as valid as yours (provided of course that you both used a valid logical process to reach your conclusions). At that point, debate stops.

[velkyn]

If sex is only for reproduction,

Sorry I stopped reading there.

Nobody said that sex was only for reproduction.

really sorry that you can't read if something dares to disagree with you.  I guess willful ignorance does that to a person.

"Teach abstinence, sexual function as having a primarily reproductive purpose,"  Is it for fun?   Can it only be for fun?  Sex between homosexuals isn't for reproduction at all.