The purpose of this thread is NOT to discuss whether abortion is right or wrong or whether women should have the ability to abort at what stage of pregnancy or whatever. (Of course, the thread might BECOME about one or more of those topics, since thread-hijacking is completely encouraged, here, but it's not the intended focus). The purpose of this thread, hopefully, is to discuss more democratic methods of solving the issue with a more popular outcome that in many cases preserves life and/or uses it instead of destroying it.
Assumed:
Most people find abortion to be unpleasant in its methods and outcome in that evolution demands that we hold life in higher regard than nonlife. Certainly we'd prefer to prevent unwanted life from occurring than to destroy it once it has occurred. (I intend this "universally." In other words, generally speaking, we would rather prevent a virus from making us sick than to catch the virus and allows its life to flourish inside us and THEN kill it with medicine). Use whatever example you wish: tumors, parasites, etc..
Solutions:
There has to be other possible ways to deal with the concern. I'm hoping this thread will generate at least three or four. One "fair" way might be to allow society to determine the best way to deal with the fetus as the majority feels is appropriate. (Hopefully, many of them constructive ways that do not destroy the life, if it can be called that at the particular stage in question). So, a person wanting to be rid of a fetus would simply turn it over to the state. The state then uses that fetus in the way it has been democratically decided that a fetus at that stage and with that viability should be utilized. That way it's the responsibility of the whole society and nobody needs to point fingers at anybody else. (It'd be interesting to allow the "donors" of the fetuses to perhaps have an extra vote on what happens to ALL fetuses, but maybe that idea muddies the water a bit too much...)
I'm sure there's much better ideas out there (what this thread is for), and my idea could certainly be made much better by sensible suggestions, but it would make sense to "spread the blame/guilt" on such a heavy issue as this one.
Very interested in any other ideas or augmentations to the one I've offered that would improve upon it. (Please remember this thread is not about whether abortion is right or wrong or any of the silly semantics that surround the "abortion debate.")
Abortion Solution Possibilities
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Re: Abortion Solution Possibilities
Post #21No, because that would be astoundingly asinine. The definitions of words are decided democratically, and the law uses those definitions. People who enjoy sidetracking a debate with semantics are the ones usually attempting to PRETEND otherwise, because such a person would never "argue" such silly semantics if it were a common definition being used in a legal case that affected his life or freedom. Immaturity is so easy that it's boring and tedious, but I guess it appeals to some...perhaps those people enjoy being seen as tedious and boring?Peter wrote: I have a 25 year old at home that isn't a child yet! Could I argue legally that killing him was nothing more than removing an unwanted lump of flesh from my life?
Your prior posts have intimated that it's not a problem at all, in your view, using your (legally) erroneous "definitions." Is there an award for "pot-stirring" that I don't know about, here?Peter wrote: No, I don't think we can legally define our way out of the problem that killing a fetus is, de facto, killing a child.
A clown once spent his whole act explaining to his audience how much he hated heavy grease paint and funny shoes and outfits. I didn't believe him either.Peter wrote: I don't want to hijack this thread with a debate about what abortion is. We can probably all agree that it should be a last resort.
I'm not surprised, and at this point I'd recommend that you give up on the venture.Peter wrote: I'm still trying to figure out what the OP is asking.
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Peter
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Re: Abortion Solution Possibilities
Post #22Oh my, I seem to have struck an uncivil nerve of yours with my attempt to be honest about what abortion is even if I'm not against it. Again, my apologies for sidetracking the thread. You can be sure it won't happen again.Hatuey wrote:No, because that would be astoundingly asinine. The definitions of words are decided democratically, and the law uses those definitions. People who enjoy sidetracking a debate with semantics are the ones usually attempting to PRETEND otherwise, because such a person would never "argue" such silly semantics if it were a common definition being used in a legal case that affected his life or freedom. Immaturity is so easy that it's boring and tedious, but I guess it appeals to some...perhaps those people enjoy being seen as tedious and boring?Peter wrote: I have a 25 year old at home that isn't a child yet! Could I argue legally that killing him was nothing more than removing an unwanted lump of flesh from my life?
Your prior posts have intimated that it's not a problem at all, in your view, using your (legally) erroneous "definitions." Is there an award for "pot-stirring" that I don't know about, here?Peter wrote: No, I don't think we can legally define our way out of the problem that killing a fetus is, de facto, killing a child.
A clown once spent his whole act explaining to his audience how much he hated heavy grease paint and funny shoes and outfits. I didn't believe him either.Peter wrote: I don't want to hijack this thread with a debate about what abortion is. We can probably all agree that it should be a last resort.
I'm not surprised, and at this point I'd recommend that you give up on the venture.Peter wrote: I'm still trying to figure out what the OP is asking.
Religion is poison because it asks us to give up our most precious faculty, which is that of reason, and to believe things without evidence. It then asks us to respect this, which it calls faith. - Christopher Hitchens
Adoption
Post #23Adoption.
This is not about the state. This is about you and me. What can I do? I can not be irresponsible enough to have a kid I can't take care of... and when my neighbor messes up and has a kid he/she can't take care of, adopt.
Birth control is not a root solution, it's a bandaid. This is why, when you walk into customs in Swaziland, one of the world's biggest AIDS hotspots, where some 10% of the population is orphans, you see a pathetic box of condoms hanging on the wall with a sign telling you to pick one spouse, and you cringe. As if a medical solution could possibly fix things, when there's no infrastructure to support the industry in the first place!
What can the state do? Who knows. It's out of my control. It's out of your control. Let's all do our part, eh? Keep it in your pants, and adopt kids so they don't grow up to perpetuate the cycle of generational poverty.
This is not about the state. This is about you and me. What can I do? I can not be irresponsible enough to have a kid I can't take care of... and when my neighbor messes up and has a kid he/she can't take care of, adopt.
Birth control is not a root solution, it's a bandaid. This is why, when you walk into customs in Swaziland, one of the world's biggest AIDS hotspots, where some 10% of the population is orphans, you see a pathetic box of condoms hanging on the wall with a sign telling you to pick one spouse, and you cringe. As if a medical solution could possibly fix things, when there's no infrastructure to support the industry in the first place!
What can the state do? Who knows. It's out of my control. It's out of your control. Let's all do our part, eh? Keep it in your pants, and adopt kids so they don't grow up to perpetuate the cycle of generational poverty.
Re: Adoption
Post #24The state can pass laws, like it has with abortion laws. That's the point of this thread: to find a better solution that involves the democratic ideas enforced by the power of the state. Maybe adoption should play a role. I don't know. Perhaps those who don't want to incubate a fetus can allow the state to incubate it until it's viable--if that's what the people vote to have done. Perhaps the fetuses can be in a facility and the public votes and decides on a reoccurring basis.Wissing wrote: What can the state do? Who knows. It's out of my control. It's out of your control. Let's all do our part, eh? Keep it in your pants, and adopt kids so they don't grow up to perpetuate the cycle of generational poverty.
People AREN'T responsible regardless of how much we want them to be, and the people who we would most wish to be more responsible are the exact ones who aren't. This thread proposes that the citizens take a more active role in a way that causes less abortion instead of more.
Post #25
If people aren't responsible, it's not the State's job to force them. When it becomes a question of "what can the government do", well, I'll tell you what the government can do. It can become authoritarian. Do we really want the State to control reproduction? Hasn't that been tried?
Nope. It's on all of us, individually, to do our part. If enough people don't step up, we're dead in the water anyway. If we all look to the government to solve our problems, the government will solve them - and you won't like the result. So, while we still can, let's emphasize personal responsibility.
In my limited experience, it seems that the underlying problem is poverty. When you are living paycheck to paycheck, you get used to living for the moment. You don't have time to think a year down the road... you only have time to address immediate needs. One of those needs is a support structure. But instead of a creating a family, with a sense of permanence, in a community, this need is perceived in its most primal, most immediate sense. People procreate without thinking ahead.
So if you want to eliminate the need for abortion, eliminate the poverty in your neighborhood. Eliminate the source of stress, of hurriedness, of short-term thinking, that leaves people without a choice. We need to focus on our communities, on core values. A few people in a government office hundreds of miles away cannot possibly address the local needs in your community - but you can.
Let's de-emphasize politics, emphasize individual responsibility.
Nope. It's on all of us, individually, to do our part. If enough people don't step up, we're dead in the water anyway. If we all look to the government to solve our problems, the government will solve them - and you won't like the result. So, while we still can, let's emphasize personal responsibility.
In my limited experience, it seems that the underlying problem is poverty. When you are living paycheck to paycheck, you get used to living for the moment. You don't have time to think a year down the road... you only have time to address immediate needs. One of those needs is a support structure. But instead of a creating a family, with a sense of permanence, in a community, this need is perceived in its most primal, most immediate sense. People procreate without thinking ahead.
So if you want to eliminate the need for abortion, eliminate the poverty in your neighborhood. Eliminate the source of stress, of hurriedness, of short-term thinking, that leaves people without a choice. We need to focus on our communities, on core values. A few people in a government office hundreds of miles away cannot possibly address the local needs in your community - but you can.
Let's de-emphasize politics, emphasize individual responsibility.
Post #26
Gee. I'd love to create a utopia all by myself in my community that eliminates pain and suffering and poverty and the need for abortions. What a fantastic solution! Do explain how, please.Wissing wrote:
So if you want to eliminate the need for abortion, eliminate the poverty in your neighborhood. Eliminate the source of stress, of hurriedness, of short-term thinking, that leaves people without a choice. We need to focus on our communities, on core values. A few people in a government office hundreds of miles away cannot possibly address the local needs in your community - but you can.
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Post #27
I'm not aware that there's an abortion problem. Do you mean all the people in America and a lot of Middle Eastern counties opposed to it?
(I'm talking ethical philosophy, not legal systems:)
The whole point of human rights is that only you are allowed to say who can and can't do certain things to you, regardless of what someone else wants or is in someone else's interest.
Obviously there are cases such as criminals, the mentally handicapped and children (you may find the use of the three at the same time strange, but they're a lot more alike than you'd think), where rehabilitation (and habilitation in the first place) need to occur, and the general public need to be protected from them, as do they.
The purpose of punishment is not some misguided sense that people who do bad things should have bad things happen to them, it is that we protect people from them doing it again, as well as that person themselves, and try to rehabilitate the perpetrator so that they don't try it again, take other people into consideration, etc.
At this first hurdle, the rights humans have over their own body, opposition to abortion fails immediately. It is always the case that the woman should be allowed to choose not to support a baby. The alternative, when properly written, is that women should on occasion be forced to give up control over their body against their will.
When we speak of human rights, you might assume that these are rights that specifically apply to anyone that's human. The name obviously comes from the fact that the only ones we apply it to currently are human. If we discovered another sentient species, we would likely have very similar if not exactly identical rights for them also.
But do all humans necessarily get human rights, merely by merit of being of this species?
An embryo or foetus younger than 24 weeks (that is or was the current UK limit for abortion) certainly has no observable consciousness, no personality, is not capable of feeling pain. In what sense is it even a person? Children aren't born with all this stuff built in - their personality builds up as they grow up, as does their psychology.
Would you give a single celled embryo human rights? How about a multi-celled embryo?
It seems much more reasonable to bestow human rights on the basis that a creature is capable of making rational moral decisions. Foetuses aren't.
As to whether or not they have the capability of becoming something that can make moral rational decisions (obviously foetuses grow up), we don't force people based on the rights of things that have the potential to exist. If we did, we would have to take all sorts of things into consideration.
If you believe violating a woman's bodily rights (by preventing abortion) is justified for creating a future child, then is it wrong to violate a women's bodily rights to create a future child in manners other than abortion? I'm sure you'd say "of course it's wrong", if you catch the drift of the statement.
So keeping this in mind, even if we didn't immediately have to allow abortion on the basis that it's simply a human right, should we take into concern the foetus? No.
The only real abortion solution for the problem of the number of religious people against it (because it does seem like the only voices speaking out against it are religious) is to point out how bad an idea dualism is. There's no reason to worry about any souls.
(I'm talking ethical philosophy, not legal systems:)
The whole point of human rights is that only you are allowed to say who can and can't do certain things to you, regardless of what someone else wants or is in someone else's interest.
Obviously there are cases such as criminals, the mentally handicapped and children (you may find the use of the three at the same time strange, but they're a lot more alike than you'd think), where rehabilitation (and habilitation in the first place) need to occur, and the general public need to be protected from them, as do they.
The purpose of punishment is not some misguided sense that people who do bad things should have bad things happen to them, it is that we protect people from them doing it again, as well as that person themselves, and try to rehabilitate the perpetrator so that they don't try it again, take other people into consideration, etc.
At this first hurdle, the rights humans have over their own body, opposition to abortion fails immediately. It is always the case that the woman should be allowed to choose not to support a baby. The alternative, when properly written, is that women should on occasion be forced to give up control over their body against their will.
When we speak of human rights, you might assume that these are rights that specifically apply to anyone that's human. The name obviously comes from the fact that the only ones we apply it to currently are human. If we discovered another sentient species, we would likely have very similar if not exactly identical rights for them also.
But do all humans necessarily get human rights, merely by merit of being of this species?
An embryo or foetus younger than 24 weeks (that is or was the current UK limit for abortion) certainly has no observable consciousness, no personality, is not capable of feeling pain. In what sense is it even a person? Children aren't born with all this stuff built in - their personality builds up as they grow up, as does their psychology.
Would you give a single celled embryo human rights? How about a multi-celled embryo?
It seems much more reasonable to bestow human rights on the basis that a creature is capable of making rational moral decisions. Foetuses aren't.
As to whether or not they have the capability of becoming something that can make moral rational decisions (obviously foetuses grow up), we don't force people based on the rights of things that have the potential to exist. If we did, we would have to take all sorts of things into consideration.
If you believe violating a woman's bodily rights (by preventing abortion) is justified for creating a future child, then is it wrong to violate a women's bodily rights to create a future child in manners other than abortion? I'm sure you'd say "of course it's wrong", if you catch the drift of the statement.
So keeping this in mind, even if we didn't immediately have to allow abortion on the basis that it's simply a human right, should we take into concern the foetus? No.
The only real abortion solution for the problem of the number of religious people against it (because it does seem like the only voices speaking out against it are religious) is to point out how bad an idea dualism is. There's no reason to worry about any souls.
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Re: Abortion Solution Possibilities
Post #28My first solution to the abortion issue is the same solution to everything else: cut taxes.... all the way down to zero and let the chips fall as they may. If folks wants an <INSERT WHATEVER> then let them pay for it themselves or let them pay for extra life/health/disability/security insurance.
I doubt most people would find that solution to be palatable.
I offer the following intra-statist solution: Publicly notify people of your intentions and belief about abortion so that opponents can stay away from eachother if they want. That can be done any number of ways:
1) People who oppose abortion sign a public register that says: "I am against abortion."
People who like abortion sign a different public register that says: "I am not against abortion."
or
2) People can were lapel pins that represent their own camps.
or
3) People who have leaky sex can add "....and by the way, I am in support/opposition to abortion." to their pre-safe-sex routine.
I doubt most people would find that solution to be palatable.
I offer the following intra-statist solution: Publicly notify people of your intentions and belief about abortion so that opponents can stay away from eachother if they want. That can be done any number of ways:
1) People who oppose abortion sign a public register that says: "I am against abortion."
People who like abortion sign a different public register that says: "I am not against abortion."
or
2) People can were lapel pins that represent their own camps.
or
3) People who have leaky sex can add "....and by the way, I am in support/opposition to abortion." to their pre-safe-sex routine.
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Peter
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Re: Abortion Solution Possibilities
Post #29Are there actually people who like abortion? I don't like abortion but I'm sure as heck not going to force a woman to have a child unless I'm willing to raise it for her and I've already raised four so I'm done.Charming Anarchist wrote: People who like abortion sign a different public register that says: "I am not against abortion."
Religion is poison because it asks us to give up our most precious faculty, which is that of reason, and to believe things without evidence. It then asks us to respect this, which it calls faith. - Christopher Hitchens
Re: Abortion Solution Possibilities
Post #30I think abortion is a good thing, so I guess you can say I like it. If it weren't good, people wouldn't choose to have abortions. I trust that they are choosing what is, for them, the best of the available alternatives.Peter wrote:Are there actually people who like abortion? I don't like abortion but I'm sure as heck not going to force a woman to have a child unless I'm willing to raise it for her and I've already raised four so I'm done.Charming Anarchist wrote: People who like abortion sign a different public register that says: "I am not against abortion."
