Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade; states can ban abortion

Terminal Blue

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Abortion is a bad thing because you already made the person at that point.
What a truly miserable and soulless idea of personhood.

You want to know what being treated as livestock is like? Culling the undesirables, that's what treating people as livestock is like.
..also, what a terrible insult to livestock.

I'm sure it was. It's still wrong, but good job drawing lines where some human beings aren't "persons" to you.
If you don't draw those lines, if you decide that all human existence must be equally significant, then that lowers the standard for human significance to basically nothing. What you're really saying is that it's not important whether a human being thinks or feels or possesses its own independent existence. The only important thing about a human being is that it can turn nutrients into meat.

You don't love life. You don't love humanity. If you did, you would not place a fertilized cell or an inanimate hunk of flesh on the same level as a living human capable of emotion and free will.

You can talk about moral hypocrisy all you want, but that fundamentally broken conception of the value of a human life will inevitably lead you to far greater and more laughable forms of hypocrisy. Explain to me why a fertilized human zygote has more value than the fertilized zygote of a rat? Does it think or feel more? Does it care about its existence or fear its death? Is it capable of freedom or independence?

You are aware that probably most of everyone ever born came about unplanned, and those parents got the same life changing experience, right?
Most people who were ever born lived at a time when if you bore a child you didn't want or couldn't support the solution was to crush it with a rock.
 

Casual Shinji

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Most people who were ever born lived at a time when if you bore a child you didn't want or couldn't support the solution was to crush it with a rock.
Anyone wanna take bets on the increase in percentage to dead babies being found in the garbage in the coming years? I'll start with a modest 25%
 

tstorm823

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You're the one claiming that you need to violate the autonomy of people who are unquestionably persons.
We do that all the time for purposes much less extreme than not killing people. "Oh my God, they're making that person take their psychiatric medicine, it's treating them like livestock!"
So, in a way, you are right. But probably for not the reason you think.
I said nobody should line themselves up with it, and your response is like "yeah, I don't, bet you didn't see that one coming." I did, I did see that one coming.
Fact that especially Christians are against abortion just shows how little they understand the Bible. Bible is clearly pro-abortion. In only verses that it even mentions something like abortion it even encourages it:
Question: do you believe that drinking water that was blessed by a priest with a sprinkle of dirt from the church floor would cause spontaneous abortions? If that ritual were performed exactly as described, what do you think the outcome would be? (If you don't say "the woman would be unharmed and the priest would declare that she had been sexually faithful", you're lying.)

Second question: do you think being in the Bible is a valid argument for something being legal. (If you don't say "no", you're lying.)

And one more thing, if you know that abortions have been around for thousands of years, and Christians were about as on board with it as anyone else, what makes you think religion is the driving factor changing things now? Hint: the technology to see inside a womb is very, very recent.
 
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tstorm823

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If you don't draw those lines, if you decide that all human existence must be equally significant, then that lowers the standard for human significance to basically nothing. What you're really saying is that it's not important whether a human being thinks or feels or possesses its own independent existence.

Explain to me why a fertilized human zygote has more value than the fertilized zygote of a rat? Does it think or feel more? Does it care about its existence or fear its death? Is it capable of freedom or independence?
You have no possible way of directly evidencing that any human being of any age thinks or feels the way you do. It is impossible to see the inner life of another, but we all take a leap of faith that the inner life of others is as amazing and important to them as ours' is to ourselves. The standard is set so low not because human life doesn't have deeper value, but because you can't judge that value from the outside. You have to believe that every human being, no matter how different from you they may appear, has a life and experience of equal worth to your own. That is the single rational option.
 
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Silvanus

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You have no possible way of directly evidencing that any human being of any age thinks or feels the way you do.
This sentence was written by the same person who, a few short pages ago, stated confidently that the entire world will feel the same way he does about the topic "inevitably" in the future.
 

immortalfrieza

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Most people who were ever born lived at a time when if you bore a child you didn't want or couldn't support the solution was to crush it with a rock.
Or just wait a week and the child will have likely died anyway, and if they don't, just sell them. This is after the good chance of the mother having died from the consequences of childbirth.

Fact that especially Christians are against abortion just shows how little they understand the Bible. Bible is clearly pro-abortion. In only verses that it even mentions something like abortion it even encourages it:



Abortions did happen back in the day of the Bible and the fact that Bible doesn't condemn abortions should be quite telling.
It's almost like people have decided to hate something for no actual reason and know it thus they come up with excuses that don't hold water under any scrutiny whatsoever. Religious people are against abortion not even because their own faith says so, not to mention on the basis of any facts, but because they think that their faith is against abortion and as a result end up convincing other religious people that their faith is against abortion.

Christians hating abortion is only the least of this. It's a social law that if someone stands at a street corner shouting nonsense and raving like a madman, sooner or later someone else will stop and listen, and then there's 2 people raving, then it gets easier to get more and more which only enhances the power of the nonsense. If humanity has shown anything, it's that there doesn't need to be a single fact backing up anything to get a lot of people believing something is true and fighting in the name of that lie even if it's completely obvious that it is a lie.
 
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Seanchaidh

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We do that all the time for purposes much less extreme than not killing people. "Oh my God, they're making that person take their psychiatric medicine, it's treating them like livestock!"
you're talking about people who have been judged as being unable to make rational decisions

great comparison, really selling me on your respect for the rights of pregnant people
 

TheMysteriousGX

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Worth noting that a lot of organizations "helping pregnant people avoid abortion" are so critically underfunded that they help *maybe* a half dozen people a year or just fucking lie

 

Casual Shinji

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Apparently there's been a spike in vasectomies, at least in Florida, which... good. Some men out there actually taking responsibilty (wish the parents of Alito, Kavanaugh, Thomas, Barrett, and Gorsuch did), taking some of the heat off of women. Also, the procedure is reversable.

Ofcourse none of this would've been necessary if five members of SCOTUS weren't giant pieces of shit.
 
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Terminal Blue

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You have no possible way of directly evidencing that any human being of any age thinks or feels the way you do. It is impossible to see the inner life of another, but we all take a leap of faith that the inner life of others is as amazing and important to them as ours' is to ourselves.
Cognitive empathy, the skill of understanding that other human beings have minds and think and feel in the same way we do is hardly a leap of faith, it's as natural to most humans as breathing. The alternative position, that we can only trust in the reality of our own consciousness, may indeed be true, but is so unintuitive to human thought that it only exists as a philosophical hypothesis. Humans are social animals and our lives place us in positions of extreme dependence on one another, it directly benefits us to understand the minds of other people on whom we depend.

But empathy can lie to us. Neurodivergent people in particular (myself included) often struggle with feeling empathy towards things that do not actually have human consciousness. As a child I didn't like throwing away old clothes because even if I intellectually understood that they didn't have feelings, I still felt like I was hurting or abandoning them. Does this mean that the law should cater to my misplaced feelings of empathy? Should we redefine clothes as people and imprison people who throw them away because my "leap of faith" took me to the wrong place?

We can't base our laws entirely on the way we feel about things, in order to be fair and consistent we have to base them in our best understanding of the physical reality around us, and in that reality my clothes don't care about being thrown away, and a fertilized zygote doesn't care whether it dies. After all, most fertilized human zygotes will end up spontaneously aborting anyway.

We can care about and respect the feelings of people (and we should) without needing to write those feelings into law and demand that everyone feel the same thing.

The standard is set so low not because human life doesn't have deeper value, but because you can't judge that value from the outside.
You think that kind of solipsistic nonsense is going to fool me?

The value of human life is judged every day. The same states that are moving to ban abortion also have laws that allow designated law enforcement officers to kill people in the course of their duties. Some even have the death penalty. The same parties that are legislating to ban abortion also tend to support the idea that people have the right to defend their property with lethal force. In the medical profession, decisions have to be made all the time about how to deal with the clinical reality of life and death, which can sometimes conflict with the emotional or religious beliefs people have about life and death.

But let me point out the even more obvious. Any argument that might call into question our knowledge of the personhood of other human beings would also utterly, utterly demolish anyone claiming to know the existence or intention of God. No source of religious authority can survive that kind of ontological skepticism, and that includes anyone claiming that their God opposes abortion or has decided that life begins at conception.

One might ask why a God who opposes abortion would design our bodies in such a way as to spontaneously abort the majority of fertilized zygotes, or why he gave us a curved birth canal that makes it difficult and dangerous for us to give birth unassisted and has killed countless mothers and children alike in childbirth. But I guess the ways of God are mysterious when it's convenient for them to be, and easily intelligible when it's not.

You have to believe that every human being, no matter how different from you they may appear, has a life and experience of equal worth to your own. That is the single rational option.
Do animals, no matter how different they appear, also have a life and experience of equal worth to my own?

What about plants?

Heck, do you actually know that rocks don't have a life and experience of equal worth to mine?

Is the single rational option, faced with an inability to know these things in an absolute sense, to believe that the answer is yes?
 
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Trunkage

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I said nobody should line themselves up with it, and your response is like "yeah, I don't, bet you didn't see that one coming." I did, I did see that coming
Just pointing out the clear constitutional violations that everyone has told you before

Specifically I worded this because you pretend you have an argument against it that does not jive witj reality. We are just going to keep pointng it out until you do

Pretending it a bad argument is a bad argument. But that's never been the point. Forcing ideology onto people is the point so, therefore, any arguement that disagrees with it must be bad. And dont think about it. What you are doing is very plain to see
 

tstorm823

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This sentence was written by the same person who, a few short pages ago, stated confidently that the entire world will feel the same way he does about the topic "inevitably" in the future.
And then there were lots of other words after that sentence. Funny how paragraphs work.
This is also the amount of stake you have in the realm of abortion. But you just need to tell them wimminz how to live their lives. Don't pretend you care about the lives of the children; you don't care about anyone's lives other than your own.
You telling me not to pretend to think things is you pretending I think opposite of what I'm saying. You keep telling me I'm terrible because you need me to be terrible or else you might notice that I'm right about this.
you're talking about people who have been judged as being unable to make rational decisions

great comparison, really selling me on your respect for the rights of pregnant people
Now you're just admitting that you have no respect for some groups of humans. You think medicating people with mental problems is disrespectful and you're also ok with it? Did you miss the obvious consequence of this statement?
We can't base our laws entirely on the way we feel about things, in order to be fair and consistent we have to base them in our best understanding of the physical reality around us, and in that reality my clothes don't care about being thrown away, and a fertilized zygote doesn't care whether it dies. After all, most fertilized human zygotes will end up spontaneously aborting anyway.
You're so, so close. I agree that in order to be fair and consistent, we need to use our best understanding of the physical reality. That is what I am doing. Asking if someone or something cares is not a question of physical reality. Again, you cannot observe the thoughts or feelings of another person. That's not a measurable physical reality, you're trying to use guesses about subjective feelings as a standard of physical reality rather than... you know... the physical reality of being human.

Miscarriages are tragedies. You don't get to say "everybody dies, so we may as well kill them, what's the difference." Fetuses dying is not justification for killing more of them.
But let me point out the even more obvious. Any argument that might call into question our knowledge of the personhood of other human beings would also utterly, utterly demolish anyone claiming to know the existence or intention of God. No source of religious authority can survive that kind of ontological skepticism, and that includes anyone claiming that their God opposes abortion or has decided that life begins at conception.
Good thing literally nobody here is making religious arguments against abortion. Some poeple, funny enough, are trying to make religious arguments for abortion. I can't possibly be the only one noticing that pattern.
Do animals, no matter how different they appear, also have a life and experience of equal worth to my own?

What about plants?

Heck, do you actually know that rocks don't have a life and experience of equal worth to mine?

Is the single rational option, faced with an inability to know these things in an absolute sense, to believe that the answer is yes?
No, none of that follows, because you are not those things. The rationale here is "I am a human, this is my experience in my own mind, thus I assume other humans also have like experiences." As you are not a plant, there is no reason to extent that assumption to plants.
 

Seanchaidh

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Now you're just admitting that you have no respect for some groups of humans.
Incorrect.

You think medicating people with mental problems is disrespectful and you're also ok with it?
I haven't actually expressed an opinion about whether such is OK. This is more than your sophistry deserves, but I'll give you one:

(CONTENT WARNINGS: non-specific discussion of suicide, probably some other things that deserve a CW)

It is not necessarily OK. The treatment of mental illness is often appalling, especially when it comes to those who are judged as not having sufficient faculties to make decisions for themselves. Such people are often taken advantage of or are not treated with the respect their personhood demands. They sometimes are treated like livestock (though usually not as a supply of babies for creepy evangelical Christians and Catholics as far as I know).

Nevertheless, it is also possible for paternalism to be justified. Sometimes people really do lack the clarity to make decisions about themselves, especially at certain moments. Forcible medication obviously does not respect the wishes of someone at the time of medication. But what if the person has different wishes at other times about how they wish to be treated at the present time? What if the person desires beforehand that their at-the-moment wishes regarding a medical treatment be overridden later? What if a person comes to the view afterward, that they would rather have been forced to accept medical treatment than not? It is from these possibilities that possibly adequate justifications for paternalism can come.

Those who have tried to kill themselves, for example, usually seem to come to the view that they'd rather live and that they are glad that they did live rather than die. So even though their wish might in the moment be to die, it is reasonable to save people who are trying to kill themselves and to see whether they change their mind. A respect for their autonomy demands both that they be saved in the crucial moment and that they be allowed euthanasia later if that's truly what they want after careful consideration.

A reasonable medical ethics will have mechanisms to find the wishes of people when they are more lucid and respect those wishes both when they are lucid and when they are not. If you want to justify paternalism, you must go to great lengths to provide the possibility of a veto for the one on whose behalf you are allegedly acting; that possibility may of necessity come in the future, and then corrective measures would be taken if in that future the person disagrees with the actions taken in the present. It may also be written down in the past or given, with the informed and rational consent of the patient, to a medical power of attorney. But it has to be there.

The ethical considerations of such cases are complex, and what constitutes respect is also not as clear cut as in other cases. The waters, one might say, are a bit muddy. And that is why I am not terrifically surprised that you would want to abuse these people for an example; for lack of a persuasive argument, you prefer to attempt to promote confusion.

Pregnant people do not, at least not for being pregnant, lack the capacity to make decisions. They are capable of making rational choices. And one such choice is an abortion. It's not going to be reasonable in some far flung future to override their wishes. If they do not wish to place another person into society, it is absolutely correct not to force them to take part in doing so-- whether doing so comes at significant medical risk, as today, or great expense, as in the United States today, or not. It will never be reasonable to enslave the pregnant to produce babies; it does not matter whether they chose to be pregnant or to do something that carried the risk of becoming pregnant. At all.

Did you miss the obvious consequence of this statement?
Did you think about it for more than a millisecond?
 

tstorm823

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Pregnant people do not, at least not for being pregnant, lack the capacity to make decisions.
Prisoners can make rational decisions, we imprison them.
Minors can make reasonable rational decisions, we vaccinate them.
Bodily autonomy is violated constantly, it is an argument that nobody thinks holds water in any argument other than abortion. Not to take any credit away from the thought you put into the post, because you did, but you landed on "well yeah, we violate bodily autonomy when someone can't make rational decisions for themselves", and I can't fathom the principle where society gets a vested interest in stepping in when we think someone is irrational but can't step in when a rational person is killing someone.
 
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Terminal Blue

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Asking if someone or something cares is not a question of physical reality.
Firstly, how do you know that physical reality exists?

Secondly, assuming physical reality does exist, what would lead you to think that the capacity for cognition is not determined by physical features of reality?

Again, do you think there is any question over whether or not plants have thoughts and feelings? Are we compelled to accept panpsychism because we cannot absolutely rule out that rocks might be conscious?

That's not a measurable physical reality, you're trying to use guesses about subjective feelings as a standard of physical reality rather than... you know... the physical reality of being human.
Oof, that is desperate.

Okay, for the sake of argument let's accept your point here. Let's accept put aside any question about the capacity for cognition, and focus purely on the physical state of being human.

And let's also accept that a fertilized human embryo is a human, and that we are obliged to assume that possesses a will and personhood equivalent to our own even if we cannot see or experience that personhood directly, merely on the basis that we cannot directly experience the falsification of that assumption.

Now here's a question. Does it actually matter whether that embryo is alive?

What is the difference between a living human and a dead human? There are physical differences in the metabolic processes, but on the basic level of physical reality both are still human. Dead people do not appear to possess the capacity for cognition or consciousness, but we've decided that doesn't matter since we can't ever know whether those exist anyway.

In fact, if we follow your logic, we have to assume that because corpses are human, they must possess a will and personhood equivalent to our own. Even if they don't seem like they do, we cannot definitively rule out the idea that corpses have thoughts. This means that cremating them should be considered murder, burying them in the ground should be considered a horrifying form of torture. After all, I wouldn't want to be buried in a wooden box or burned up in a furnace, so we must assume that a corpse, being human like me, would not want these things either and that inflicting it on them is a terrible violation of their rights as individuals..

Now, let's go back to the fundamental mistake you made, which was assuming that there can be an objective understanding of physical reality distinct from our subjective thoughts. Assuming all human minds are the same as mine, then no human can experience or interact with physical reality outside of the medium of their own senses and cognition. The idea that some objects in reality are human and others are not is a thought that requires a mind to think it. Even more obviously, the idea that being alive and/or conscious is preferable to being dead and/or in a coma is a cognitive bias introduced by our inability to imagine ourselves outside of the state of life or consciousness, since being alive and conscious is all we have ever experienced. We cannot remove that cognitive bias from human experience, even if it is "subjective", because consciousness is a precondition of our ability to engage with physical reality.

So, if I am basing my understanding of the needs and will of other humans on my own, then I cannot remember being an embryo. I was not conscious at that point. I cannot understand what I would want at that point in my existence because I wasn't there. Had I died at that point, it might have mattered to other people (probably not) but it wouldn't have mattered to me.

You cannot have it both ways. You cannot insist that we adhere to the physical reality of being human to determine personhood and then simultaneously demand that we empathize with a state that is outside of our capacity to experience the physical reality of being human.

Miscarriages are tragedies.
"Tragedy is when I cut my finger, comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die."

Again, you can't have this cake and eat it.

Some poeple, funny enough, are trying to make religious arguments for abortion.
And?

There is nothing inherently wrong with basing your own life, decision and ethics on religious dogma. It is your life to dispose of as you see fit, even in ways others might think are silly and unreasonable. If you want to believe that it is wrong to have an abortion, then by all means believe that. But if you want to claim that this belief is the only reasonable belief, then you have stepped into a world that really should have higher standards, and wrapping the argument in the mangled corpse of idealism is not going to help as much as you think.

No, none of that follows, because you are not those things.
How do you know?
 
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Eacaraxe

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Are you high at the moment?
After taking a good, hard look at the emetic typhoon this threads devolved to over the past few pages, I only wish I were high.

But let me make this real simple for you. You're farting out the "abortion is eugenics!" trope, despite every attempt to say otherwise. I'm pointing out it's real funny this only seems to come from certain circles, when the conversation's about women's choice to terminate unwanted pregnancy. But when it comes to state and federal agents "allegedly" forcing women detainees to abort, abusing pregnant women detainees to the point of inducing miscarriage, and in some cases surgically sterilizing women detainees, and those women are part of ethnic and national outgroups, those "eugenics is bad!" people get real fuckin' quiet.
 
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Seanchaidh

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Prisoners can make rational decisions, we imprison them.
Abolish prisons.

But failing that, recognize that you're talking about people whom society (such as it is) has judged through its official legal mechanisms do not deserve certain rights. You feel the same about pregnant people.

Minors can make reasonable rational decisions, we vaccinate them.
And now we force them to give birth! How admirable.

Bodily autonomy is violated constantly,
That is not terribly surprising in a society that values the profit and property of the rich ahead of the lives of the poor. But it also isn't a compelling ethical argument.

it is an argument that nobody thinks holds water in any argument other than abortion.
You just mentioned vaccines! "Nobody"!!! You're denying the personhood (or even the corporeal nature) of people who are inarguably persons left and right here.

Not to take any credit away from the thought you put into the post, because you did, but you landed on "well yeah, we violate bodily autonomy when someone can't make rational decisions for themselves",
Not precisely. I gave justifications for doing so that only apply in specific situations in very limited ways-- ways that clearly have as their objective the facilitation of the rational desires of those whose autonomy might be compromised. But they do allow people who would hurt themselves and who, in their most lucid frames of mind do not want to hurt themselves, to allow others to protect them. Or to protect such a person in the absence of information about what they want with the intention of gaining that information rather than letting it be lost forever or indefinitely.

In the specific example you gave, I would only consider what happened "OK" if the person, having been medicated, then agreed that they wanted to be medicated in such situations. If they didn't, then you'd have to stop!
 

Seanchaidh

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(double post because it wouldn't let me post it as one)

and I can't fathom the principle where society gets a vested interest in stepping in when we think someone is irrational but can't step in when a rational person is killing someone.
Do you believe that it is justified to force people to give blood in order to save lives? To force people to donate organs if it will save a life without taking one? We tend to regard forcible organ harvesting as an inexcusable horror even if it would result in saving the life of someone who actually does have desires that they can communicate, human relationships, and so forth. We do not, in fact, have an organ harvesting lottery to facilitate all the transplants that people need. Indeed, it is typical that prisoners aren't allowed to donate their organs to anyone but immediate family even by choice for the ethical complications; despite our prison system being a horror show, that's still not a line people typically want to be anywhere near. So please, tell me more about how autonomy is "never" decisive for anything but abortion.

At the point that pregnant people choose to abort, they are the ones who rank highest (and no one else comes close) on the list of people with an interest in the decision. The potential children are not yet capable of caring one way or another; they have no wishes to respect. Their termination might cause anguish, but not their own.

What is more likely than your predicted future is one in which routine access to abortion will coexist with recognitions of fetal personhood (or something analogous) in situations in which the bearer wishes it-- because if a fetus is wanted, then killing it is in fact robbing the pregnant person of a child. But if not, then it doesn't. Easy.