War on Women

[Kidlicious]

Women who have had an abortion and didn't have a substance abuse problem prior are 3.9x more likely to have a substance abuse problem after the abortion.

http://afterabortion.org/1999/new-study-confirms-link-between-abortion-and-substance-abuse/

[kentonio]

I can't help but notice you seem to have linked from a pro-life website there. Do you think this is really the most effective place to get non-biased news from?

[Kidlicious]

Pro-life

[kentonio]

Pro-life

"Hey guys!! Guys!!! This website that's dedicated to pro-life views says that abortion is a bad thing!! They've even posted a study from 1997 so it must be news!!"

[Kidlicious]

Why would they need more studies? And why would I trust a site that isn't pro-life?

[rah]

I think it's called balance. Read both sides and make an intelligent and informed judgement.

Opps, sorry, I forgot who I was talking too.

[Kidlicious]

I think it's called balance. Read both sides and make an intelligent and informed judgement.

Opps, sorry, I forgot who I was talking too.

If that's what you should do Ken has failed.

[Dry]

Okay, let's start over. Please explain, with as little ambiguity as possible, why it is morally permissible to kill a fetus, and why it is not morally permissible to kill a newborn.

Ok, let start with a simplified time line of human development. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenatal_development

Trimester 1:
Week 3-9: The organs are forming. The being in the womb is called an embryo.
Week 9: Organs are formed. The brain activity start at days 54. The embryo is now called a foetus.
Week 9-13: Organs find their final place/position/shape.

Trimester 2
From week 13 to week 26, one by one, the different biological functions activate
Week 26, The nervous system develops enough to control some body functions (emphasis on 'some')
Until end of second trimester, the foetus is not viable outside the womb. That is week 24-28 depending on available technology.

Trimester3: finalization of nervous system connections, and final touch of a bunch of functionalities that mostly will have an effect on the quality of life.

Most democratic countries allow abortion without restriction more or less until end of first trimester (week 12).
My understanding of it resides in 3 points:
1. Nature (or God if you're a theist) do it more than men:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscarriage

About 30% to 40% of all fertilized eggs miscarry, often before a woman knows she is pregnant.

https://www.guttmacher.org/media/pre...sandfacts.html

Half of pregnancies among American women are unintended, and about four in 10 of these end in abortion. Nine in 10 abortions occur in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.

So, if God took 30-40% of the foetuses that leaves 70-60% for men to deal with. 9/10 of 4/10 of half of 60-70% equal 11-14%, God beats men by aborting 35% of all pregnancies, wanted and unwanted vs 12.5% for men.
2. Chemical abortion (drug) works safely and efficiently only until week 12. It is the least painful (for the foetus), least invasive and life threatening (for the mother), and closest to the natural/godly one. This is the preferred method of abortion doctors. The reason some seem to 'press' the mothers for it, is because they fear the surgical abortion. No doctors wants that. And time is running. If for some reason you had to abort your child at some point of the pregnancy, now is the least painful time for you as well as for him. The problem is to detect the pregnancy before week 13 so usually the mother has only a few days to make up her mind about keeping the baby or not.
3. Even with the brain active, the foetus is unable to control or 'feel' its organs. The nervous system just reacts on stimuli's, but there is no communication with the brain.

Now, for the second trimester, things are a little more difficult.
God (or nature) seem to be ageist on that topic:

http://www.babycentre.co.uk/a1014773/understanding-late-miscarriage

The older you are, the higher the chance that your baby will have a chromosomal abnormality. At 30, the risk of miscarriage is one in 10. Between the ages of 35 and 39, the risk is thought to be one in four. At 40, the risk is one in two.

The older you are, the more likely God will kill your unborn child. Up to 50% if you are 40+
On the human side, human laws allow abortion the second trimester but with restrictions. Most laws involve health or life threats for the foetus or the mother. These laws seem to mimic nature's (or God's) law, because the reasons for natural 2nd trimester miscarriage usually involves health or malformation problems.
For the US, we are talking about less than 2% (10% of half of 40% of 60-70%, see previous link) of pregnancies here.
Now, we are between week 13 and 24. The brain has developed and begins communicating with the nervous system. The foetus will feel pain. The foetus is not viable outside the womb, science cannot save him if the mother dies or if the life of the mother is in danger because of the pregnancy. There is no way science can take over if the pregnancy means the death of the mother. Nature get rid of some - but not all - of these potentially dangerous or malformed cases. But who should decide for the others cases?
The really big discussion between reasonable people is and should be on this second trimester abortion. I don't want to make this post too long, so I am not going to develop my PoV here/now.

For the third trimester, foetus is viable, feels pain... You have your unborn child here. I know no country that do allow third term abortion.
If the life of the mother is threaten, you can always get the baby out and try his chances outside the womb. At least if the technology exist in your country.
Terminating a foetus development that could be saved otherwise is a crime.

So in short:
1st Trimester: Embryos have the awareness/nervous system of a starfish and nature/God seems to kill them on a wimp (30-40% of all pregnancies). That's a lot more than the 11-14% human ones.
2nd trimester: Difficult debate. We are in the grey zone. Nature/gods seem to select who lives and who dies a lot more (2%-50% miscarriage) than man do (2%). Both, men and gods based their decision mostly on heath/viability grounds.
3rd trimester: Nature seem to like to kill mothers. Only God knows why. Men (science) manage now to save some babies without killing the mother.

God - if he/she/it/they exist - wins as the greatest baby/foetus killer over any doctor on earth. On all trimesters.
And He seems keen to kill mothers the 3rd one like He doesn't care.

So why is it morally acceptable to abort the development of a being that although being fully formed physically and having a nervous system does not fully feel pain, while nature does it on a regular base? It is a personal, ethical question. Most government do not interfere with individual choices. Just like they do not interfere with your vegan/carnivorous choice. But if you are willing to minimize the pain of both the to-be-child as well as the mother, then 1st trimester is the least painful time. And why do we leave that decision to the mother rather than old priests? Well, because she is the one who has the most parameters of the equation, she is the least ignorant of the situation in which the to-be-child will have to survive. Old priests are not those who will feed, support, raise the child. And because 99% of mothers have good intentions when it comes to the future of their offspring. I have the feeling that this percentage cannot be reached by clerics of any religion.
Why is it morally debated when the being starts connecting the nervous system with the brain while nature seem happy to get rid of 2 to 50% of them? Well precisely, the morality, legality of it is debated. But most important is who should take the decision? Again, old priests or the mother? Should we trust nature that has shown how much she doesn't care over the 200,000+ years of homo sapiens pre-historical, 'close to nature' life? Or should we grant us some privilege in the decision?
And why is it morally wrong to terminate fully functional, 3rd trimester unborn children that we can at least try to save? Do I really need to explain why?

[giblets]

This week, Newsweek has decided to take on what it's calling "America's Abortion Wars." It's a reasonable choice of topic — Planned Parenthood has been slammed with anti-choice propaganda and repeated attempts at defunding (even though it doesn't use federal funds to provide abortions), and just a few weeks ago, Robert Lewis Dear launched a terrorist attack on a Colorado Planned Parenthood center that killed three people, explaining in court that he was "a warrior for the babies." As far as the state of abortion rights in 2015 goes, "war" about sums it up.

Which is why I was flabbergasted by Newsweek's cover image: a computer-enhanced illustration of a well-developed, relatively late-term fetus with no sign of the actual person in whose uterus it is presumably housed.

At a guess, it looks to be between twelve and fourteen weeks along – just at the upper limit of the fetal age for most abortions, or a bit older – although given the nature of its digital, um, "improvements," it's hard to tell. For one thing, if the Newsweek fetus is twelve weeks along, it looks about five times bigger than the translucent, two-inch-long fetuses you normally find at that stage; this image looks less like an actual pregnancy, and more like an adorable computer-generated alien.

Or, to be blunt: More like a baby. And, given the presence of the word "ABORTION" in all caps, we can assume it's not going to be around for long. Intentionally or not, the Newsweek cover sums up what's wrong with how we talk about abortion: Everything is about the fetus, which is humanized, and the actual pregnant person is erased.

Granted, I'm only talking about the cover, here — not the story inside, but there's a long history of fetal images being used to scare people and rile up anti-abortion sentiment. It's why mandatory ultrasound laws exist. It's why anti-abortion protesters hold up gory, bloody images of fetuses at protests, and why "crisis pregnancy centers" (anti-abortion organizations that market themselves as abortion and pre-natal care clinics) show unsuspecting pregnant people movies like "The Silent Scream," which purports to show an ultrasound of an abortion in progress. Supposedly, you can see the fetus screaming in pain.

Doctors have been forced, time and time again, to issue public statements about the inaccuracy of these images. (In "The Silent Scream," for example, not only is the reportedly 12-week fetus not screaming, medical research concluded in the Journal of the American Medical Association that it doesn't have the developed nervous system that would allow it to feel pain.) But the tactic has entered the mainstream of conservative politics — even when that means that conservative politicians have to lie. Carly Fiorina, for example, appears to have either imagined or hallucinated the abortion video she described on stage at a Republican debate, in which — and I quote — you can see "a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says, 'We have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.'"

Compared to Fiorina's statements, the Newsweek cover may seem relatively responsible and subdued. But it's still misleading about how abortion works. For one thing, the image on the cover is not exactly representative. In reality, nine out of ten abortions take place inside the first twelve weeks of pregnancy, meaning that the Newsweek fetus represents the upper end of the range, not the average; in many cases, the embryo being removed is less "futuristic Gerber baby," more "lentil-sized clump of cells."

Furthermore, even in cases in which someone aborts a pregnancy after twelve weeks, the pregnancy is in many cases not healthy: Second and third-trimester abortions often happen because the mother's life is at risk, or because of severe birth defects that don't show up until later in the pregnancy. These aren't livable disabilities — they're conditions like anencephaly, in which the fetus fails to develop a skull and upper brain, and could not possibly survive outside the womb. Surgical abortions are also undertaken during miscarriages, to prevent infection. So even in cases where a fetus was carried long enough to look very human, it probably wouldn't look like a healthy, happy baby.

But talking about the fetus, and what it looks like, is beside the point. All of these scenarios involve a decision made by one person: a woman. (Or non-binary person, or transgender man.) Deciding whether to stay pregnant is not about the fetus. It's about them: their lives, safety, and futures. By focusing exclusively on fetuses, and promoting the imagery of endangered, persecuted "babies" in the womb, people who oppose abortion are able to totally avoid talking about the ways in which their positions endanger and persecute the actual people carrying those fetuses around.

Newsweek may not have intended this, but putting the phrase "abortion wars" next to a fetus ignores so many of the casualties of these wars. It ignores Robert Lewis Dear's victims, murdered abortion doctors, and rape victims forced to carry their rapists' children to term. It erases poor women forced to have children they can't afford, and people who aren't able to pursue educations because they had children too early. It leaves out any person who wants to control their own body, but can't, because of abortion restrictions. Put "abortion wars" next to their faces, and you get a whole different message – one that's much closer to the truth.

http://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/news/a32660/why-does-newsweeks-abortion-wars-cover-show-a-cartoon-fetus-instead-of-a-woman/

[Kidlicious]

The idea of women being persecuted in the West is an absurdity.

[giblets]

The idea of women being persecuted in the West is an absurdity.

What if they're white Christian women?

[Kidlicious]

Women, in fact, aren't persecuted anywhere, not because of their gender. That's a whopper there giblets.

[Kidlicious]

What if they're white Christian women?

How are they persecuted? Women are persecuted in Syria for different reasons. One of those reasons is if they are christian, but not because they are women.

[C0ckney]

[giblets]

Women, in fact, aren't persecuted anywhere, not because of their gender. That's a whopper there giblets.

So female genital mutilation has nothing to do with gender...? Or do you mean anywhere in the US?