Hey, everybody! South Dakota just passed a bill banning abortion!
What do y’all think?
(FIRE IN THE HOLE!)
South Dakota
Hey, everybody!
South Dakota just passed a bill banning abortion!
What do y’all think?
(FIRE IN THE HOLE!)
41 thoughts on “South Dakota”
Comments are closed.
Fireproof underwear
I think I need to buy some fireproof underwear before I state my opinion 🙂
—
Matthew P. Barnson
Over the top
I’m actually wearing fire-proof underwear, so here goes.
I’m all for people shifting this decision from the judicial to the legislative branch, but this law seems way over the top. No exceptions for crime victims? C’mon–do they really believe that’s morally justified? Certainly too far to the right to get much political traction in D.C., I would think. I think a more mainstream approach would have done much better in getting a Roe overturn, which is surely what they’re after. It’s like fighting gun-control by passing a law mandating that citizens carry loaded AK-47’s at all times. You create the straw man for your opponents.
But I’d rather have an immoral state law than an immoral federal ruling. Should be interesting.
No Black and White
It always cracks me up when this is described as a black and white issue. Either you’re for abortion or against abortion.
My thoughts are that once conception occurs, you have a life. Left unharmed, it’ll grow and become a child. That’s plain and simple to me, and to me, any other argument is (he he) silly.
(SESAME STREET NOTE: The word of the week is “silly”. Silly is brought to you by Barnson.Org: Half-Baked Comments, Served Lukewarm.)
So by my earlier hypothesis, any time you have an abortion, you’re committing murder. Plain and simple. And I agree with that.
But if you’re a woman and you’ve been raped and you conceive due to this, I can wholeheartedly understand and support you having an abortion. I still think it’s murder, and I might try (feebly) to convince you to bear the child and let it be adopted. But if I were that woman, what was growing in me would be a violation of my person.
I think the thing that gets me when I think this through is that I come to the conclusion that murder is acceptable in certain circumstances. Obviously if you attack me or my family it’s acceptable in self-defense. But to say it’s okay to kill and un-born child? To agree to that makes sense to me and kills me at the same time.
What an ugly issue.
And when it comes to terminating a pregnancy because it endangers the health of the mother, that’s fine. You’re not choosing to abort a baby, you been forced to choose between two lives. That’s a tough decision, but I’d support that abortion every day as well.
But what I’ll never, ever support is the silly notion that you should be able to have an abortion because you can’t keep your legs together. That needs to be outlawed right now. A woman does have the right to choose what she does with her body. But that’s BEFORE she gets prgenant. Once she’s pregnant, then it’s not just her body anymore.
My $.02 Weed
Summary of my position…
Caveat: I’m an intentional moderate. That means I weigh the issues and try to align my position with what I think will tick off the least people. It doesn’t always work, but it does mean I’m very rarely credited with being unreasonable.
I see the abortion debate as a continuum.
Prior to conception, I see absolutely no problem with aborting an unfertilized egg and sperm. Matter of fact, I think disposal of these things in whatever way suits you is perfectly OK. I’ll leave that to your imagination.
Immediately after conception, I still see very little problem with something like a “Morning After Pill”. That fertilized zygote has not yet attached to the walls of the uterus. It doesn’t have a snowball’s chance of survival, and the fact is that the body itself disposes of most of these naturally anyway. So if you can’t keep your legs together, and you see a doc 24-72 hours later for a pill to help you avoid bringing a child into the world in a horrible situation, more power to you.
Now we’re at the first trimester. At this point, I think the matter should be weighed seriously. Society has an interest in the welfare of the fetus, but that may be best served by the parent not bearing the child into an at-risk situation. See Freakonomics for a better description of why abortion may have a very positive effect on the quality of life for the non-aborted. Note that the book is just looking at statistics: crime rate, per-capita income, that kind of thing. It’s making no moral judgments about the “right” or “wrong” here.
Through the second and third trimesters, I become increasingly uncomfortable with the concept of unfettered access to abortions. That fetus is becoming increasingly more human-like, and at some point in this window has a very viable chance at life outside the womb. Society begins to develop a vested interest in the welfare of the fetus as a future productive citizen, and as part of its responsibility for protecting those who cannot protect themselves, it may have some authority in this area.
I think the solution is: duck the question. If these legislators had, simultaneously with this bill, provided some sort of comprehensive sterilization and/or public sex education and family planning funding, I’d be more inclined to believe they did it for the right reasons. But the classic combination is a pro-abstinence position with an anti-abortion position.
Unfortunately, from a statistical point of view, that combination is worthless.
People are going to screw. It’s in our DNA. You can teach, and hope, that your kids will make choices that don’t hurt themselves, but their overwhelming urge for most of their teens and twenties will be to boink with abandon. Unless you lock ’em up, they are the ones who have to make choices about their sexuality. And if worldwide statistics are any indicator, most choose to have sex.
Banning abortions outright, IMHO, is the wrong way to go. Easy, confidential access to abortions in the first trimester, despite my personal qualms about it, is the right policy for a healthy society. After that time, as that potential life gains viability outside the womb, we bear an increasing responsibility to allow it to flourish, and should provide supportive placement programs into low-risk families.
Be aware that I’m deeply conflicted on this issue, though, and am known to change my opinion frequently. As much as several times a conversation.
(If you’re interested in an overview of why Freakonomy works the way it does, check out Orson Scott Card’s review of the book. I disagree with his final conclusion, because it is not substantiated by the facts, but his exposition of the relevant details is worth a read if you are unfamiliar with the principles involved.)
— Matthew P. Barnson – – – – Thought for the moment: Anyone want the new supermount? 🙂 whats new aboutit klogd: It cleans whiter than white. 🙂 — Seen on #Linux
Hmm
I agree with you up to the morning after pill. After that, I have some dissention.
Once that zygote become implanted in the utereus, you have a life. Whether or not it’s a bunch of cells or it looks like a little human, it’s a life. Appearances mean nothing here. Left alone to natural progression, it will be a human.
Societal statistics that show bad things happen when you don’t abort are a sign of a bad society. We need to change our society to expedite giving children from mothers/parents who don’t want them to mothers/parents who do. I now of two people personally who have went to Russia and China to adopt. Paid tens of thousands of dollars. When there’s plenty of children here who need to be adopted.
But the thing that gets me is who are you and I to say that society is better without that child? For every 10, 100, 1000 children who may turn out bad due to their birth conditions, what about those thst turn out good? We lose them too.
Who are we to say, “Dude, it’s statistically shown you life will probably be bad, so we’re going to kill you.”
Isn’t that what you’re claiming? Instead of saying it to a 16-year-old who can comprehend it, you’re saying it to a bunch of cells that will, without intervention, stand a 90% chance of becoming that 16-year-old.
My $.02 Weed
The Morning After, and Eugenics
I don’t think that whether or not it’s alive is really in question. The question seems to be, who’s assumptions do you accept? The pro-abortionists, who claim that the mother’s freedom to make decisions about her life and body are paramount, or the anti-freedom advocates who want to force a woman to bear a child against her will?
Or to put it another way, do you sympathize with the heartless baby-killers or with the religious nutcases? For every position, there’s an imaginative demagogic stereotype. Like I said, I’m a moderate. I try to see all sides of the argument.
Regardless, the “life” or the “unlife” is irrelevant. You kill untold millions of cells every day simply by living. Nature celebrates the most successful murderers. That proud tree standing in a meadow lives at the expense of the withering trees around it. Our most venerated historical figures are those who won their wars, costing untold lives in the process. The most majestic mammals in Nature are those who are the most efficient at killing. Life, itself, its not precious. It’s cheap: cheaply won, and cheaply lost. We mourn its passage, but for every person removed from humanity, two take their place.
It’s really who’s frame of reference do you buy? Considering that the nation is pretty much split 50/50 on the abortion question, there’s gotta’ be a way to allow democracy to work and appease most of the people most of the time.
I personally don’t think that a return to the 1950’s era, of a woman having to make a 1000+ mile trip whle pregnant in order to get a legal abortion is the correct solution.
Yep, it’s exactly what I’m saying. We’ve been performing that exact eugenics experiment for the past thirty-three years, and the disturbing thing is that it works. I’m not making a value judgment on whether it’s good or bad, but it’s successful, weirdly, in dramatically reducing the crime rate and other negative societal indices in the US.
Your fetal, infant, and child mortality rates in the absence of modern medicine are too optimistic. Prior to the invention of antibiotics, mortality rates from fetus to teenager were almost certainly inverted from what you describe. Most humans have an appallingly small chance of survival without medical intervention. In many areas of the US, fetal and infant mortality rates in the 1800s approached 80%.
I’m also deeply concerned about the rate at which our population is expanding. Basic math and many population studies will tell you that an exponentially-expanding demand compared against a linearly-expanding supply means that eventually demand will far outstrip supply, resulting in widespread deprivation, and probably a massive correction. We’re not there today, and I’m doubting we’ll be there within the next forty years, but I think an enormous population correction is almost guaranteed within the next two centuries unless we do something dramatic about it — or Nature does. That “something” is left up to your imagination 🙂
I’m playing devil’s advocate here: is it possible that a global program of voluntary abortion could prevent a population catastrophe in the future? Is it better that billions die today, than untold tens of billions are saved from early death in the future?
— Matthew P. Barnson – – – – Thought for the moment: A bird in the bush usually has a friend in there with him.
Am I dreaming?
Some people’s views on this are not at all what I expected. Wow.
Matt, you’re proposing that fewer deaths today is better than more deaths tomorrow? A big fan of immediate nuclear holocaust, I suppose? Better that a predator had eaten that first crawling fish? Why did you have children? A you just being silly?
I don’t have the article at my fingertips (and it costs money to pull from the WSJ archive), but I did read a very interesting article about how the crime rate is decreasing but criminality is rising. In other words, if your prison population triples and your crime rate drops, births had nothing to do with it. We’ve more than doubled the incarcerated population since 1990–that’s way ahead of the general population. Freakonomics is hardly airtight.
Weed, if the potential destiny of a sperm-egg combo is what gives it its rights, why are you okay with the morning-after pill? If left to its own devices the zygote will implant and mature into a fetus. It may have longer odds than a blastocyst or embryo, but it’s still a unique DNA set.
Personally, I end up in the same camp as Matt, but for a different reason than compromise. Human beings obtain natural rights through their abilities to apply reason to their perceptions. Ergo, a being that has never had sensory input (because the mechanisms don’t exist) does not have rights. As a fetus develops, however, it does begin to interact with its environment, so at some point it does begin to have capacity to reason (albeit severely limited at this point). That gives the mother some time, maybe as late as 5 months, to decide whether she will keep the child. Too play it safe, we say 3 months, which is plenty of time to decide what you want to do. Mothers take real risks in carrying a baby to term, and an embryo does not have senior claim to a mother’s health.
Another strike against embryos is that their potential is not limited to birth or death. They can be absorbed into another developing embryo, or they can turn into cancerous uterine growths. A fetus is not going to do any of those things–it’s definitely bound for humanhood.
Hmm
I support the morning after pill because a fertilized egg has not made a “connection” with the mother. I define it as once the cells attach to the mother, that connection is made and life has begun. In order for reproduction to take place, sperm and egg come together and implant in the mother. Once that process is started, I feel that anything done to interrupt it is cancelling a life.
It’s not a parasite, it a human in the making. Allowing life to be ended because we can’t make smart choices and our society is all f***ed up is wrong. Maybe I’m overly idealistic here, but how much money is spent on adoptions and fertilizaton procedures while we’re terminiating pregnancies?
Given that, I see the validity of the idea that embryos don’t neccessarily graduate to humans. And I stated before when placed with a deciion of the mother versus the child, the mother wins. But I still feel if the mother is healthy and you terminate the pregnancy, you’re killing a life.
Maybe it’s better for society to have abortions, but it’s not good for our souls.
My $.02 Weed
Idealism
I don’t disagree with you, Weed. Abortion is not a good thing. Neither is war or the death penalty, but in certain circumstances those are justified as well. You say, “Allowing life to be ended because we can’t make smart choices and our society is all f***ed up is wrong.” That’s all well and good, but criminalizing abortion won’t stop people from making stupid choices. It would just result in more children falling through the cracks of the system.
As for fertility practices and adoption, I don’t see what you mean. There’s a ton of evidence indicating that, by and large, infertile couples don’t want minority babies. So it’s not enough to simply throw them into the adoption system and assume they’ll get adopted.
— Ben
Is It Really That Bad?
When is war is justified? I’d say only in self-defense or in defense of another country. (Definitely not over oil 😉 When is the death penalty justified? I can’t quite answer that. I personally don’t understand why the chain gang idea went away. A whole pool of cheap labor to do the jobs nobody wants to. If they did that, I’d say hell with the death penalty and make the criminals work the rest of their life. Much more productive to society that way than to have them on death row for 20 years. Not much of deterrent.
So we throw out the death penalty (except in Texas, where it might be working? Anyone have stats on that?) War is justified in self-defense. So abortion is justified in rape and when the mother’s health is at risk?
A child never being born is better than a child who falls through the cracks? Who are we to say that? I agree that criminalizing abortion won’t stop people from making stupid choices. But it’ll make it harder for them to kill the results.
I hear about “kids falling through the cracks” and “we’re overpopulating the planet”. My lord, it’s the doom and gloom gang. This is the best freaking time to be alive in the history of the makind! We live longer, have more opportunities, can cure most diseases, crime is down overall, and all I hear is howwe can’t bring people into this horrible world.
THEY PUT LEACHES ON PEOPLE TO CURE THEM 200 YEARS AGO!
We make so much food in America we pay farmers to stop growing, but overpopulation is threatening the food supply? There’s plenty of places for us to expand in America, and I bet China has the same opportunities in its west as well.
The media and the liberals have us believing its SOOO bad, but its not. It’s definitely not so bad we need to deny children the right to live
My $.02 Weed
Is it so bad?
No offense Weed, but you’re a white guy who grew up in a middle-class household and went to college. You have no idea what it’s like to be poor and undereducated, with no prospects for making a living wage, and no way to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Life is VERY difficult for those people. It’s easy to say “well, then they shouldn’t be having unprotected sex”, but they are, and I stand by my belief that it’s better to offer them the choice of an abortion than to condemn both them and their children to a life of hardship.
I’m also very lucky to have grown up in a situation where I’ll never know what that’s like. But I’ve spent enough time in New York and DC to see how those people live.
— Ben
No Way To Pull yourself Up
Hmmm…
It’s good to know how I know nothing about this. You have yto go to DC or new York or some other big city to see poor people. Cecil County, MD is a utopia, you all should move here and walk amongst our white picket fences and green lawns.
No offense, Ben, but you’re a white guy who grew up in a middle-class household and went to college.
I know quite a few people, white and black, who were poor and uneducated. They were both women who had 3 kids by age 21, by multiple fathers, none of which stayed around to parent or help supporth these girls. Granted, one had decent parental support but the other didn’t have ANY. And you know what…both these girls worked hard, provided for their kids, and are doing alright.
No way to pull yourself up by your bootstraps? Or no work ethic? Dependent on the welfare of the state instead of struggling for themselves?
I agree sometimes bad things happen to people and they fall down. But don’t preach to me about seeing how bad it can be and how hopeless they are. I’ve seen how bad it can be and how good it can turn out too.
Neither of these girls has abortions. Both their families are doing fine.
Making excuses for people who make bad choices in bad situations makes it real easy for them to not own up to those decisions. “Oh, they’re going to mess up, we know it, so let’s allow them to commit morally wrong acitons to make it easier on everyone.’
Sorry, not going to buy that argument.
I agree we need to do better helping people get ON THEIR FEET, not support them as they stay on the welfare line. There’s been a lot of example of people getting up on their feet to say it can’t be done. We’ve just made it to easy to stay afloat without trying to get ahead.
My $.02 Weed
Some Scary Folk
As someone who has spent many an evening, sometimes sober, in Cecil County, I feel that I have earned the right to state that there are some scary folk in that (red)neck of the woods, Weed not being one of them of course. And I’ve always had a great time.
We need to do both
Yes, we need to help people to get on their feet, but we also need to leave abortion as a option for those who find themselves in trouble. I’m not going to deny that there are people out there who are lazy and would rather live on welfare than work for a living. I don’t deny that in those cases, abortion can be an easy way out for them. But I simply don’t see that as a justification for punishing the CHILDREN who arise through their carelessness.
I’d love to see a world where everyone who gets pregnant has the willpower and the wherewithal to make a good life for themselves and for their children. But with the government cutting programs like CHIP (providing free or inexpensive health care for children), eliminating government subsidies for child care and school lunch programs, and keeping minimum wage at a level that no one can afford to live on (let alone someone with kids), I just don’t see that happening.
The two aims are not mutually exclusive. We can maintain abortion AND work towards education and betterment. Hopefully, if we place enough resources and energy towards improving the situations of the underprivileged, perhaps there will come a time when abortion is largely unnecessary. But that’s no reason to eliminate it now.
— Ben
Not quite right…
The morning after pill works EXACTLY like regular oral contraceptives. That is, It keeps the egg from ever being fertilized by the sperm. Once the zygote is formed, the morning after pill has zero effect on pregnancy.
Details here: http://www.morningafterpill.org/mapinfo1.htm
Although
Although it does seem that the following also occurs:
It can irritate the lining of the uterus so that if the first and second actions fail, and the woman does become pregnant, the human being created will die before he or she can actually attach to the lining of the uterus.
Nevertheless, this is still in line with what traditional birth control pills do.
Not proposing… asking.
You’re misunderstanding what I wrote. I was questioning the value, not endorsing it. It’s an interesting question to explore the value of life: is “a few deaths now to avoid many later” a valid proposition? Why or why not? It’s not rhetorical. It’s a conundrum I hope to explore in a novel one day, with a protagonist forced into that kind of choice: endangering many lives in some sort of terrible event in order to prevent a far more massive holocaust. I’m trying to figure out how a person would deal with such a problem if faced with it as a necessary choice.
Orson Scott Card explored a similar theme in “Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus”. Card posits proposed a society which made the ultimate choice, put to a vote: to sacrifice itself in order to spare the Americas the holocaust that the white man visited upon it. For some background, white settlers were responsible for the genocide of an estimated 120 million people in North and South America. Entire nations were wiped out in just a few years, largely due to smallpox and other European diseases to which the Native Americans had no resistance.
The actions taken by the protagonists in the story were compelling, and yet of ambiguous “goodness”, including purposeful slaughter and mutilation of European settlers to buy time for immunizations to occur.
It’s purely hypothetical. But it’s an interesting mind-bender to explore.
— Matthew P. Barnson – – – – Thought for the moment: The descent to Hades is the same from every place. — Anaxagoras
Wasn’t that on 24
I don’t watch 24, but the commercials were playing the scenario where terrorists were going to blow up the President’s wife, but if he tried to stop them they’d nuke or attack a large portion of the population.
Of course, you’re assuming we can correctly predict the future to know we’re saving more people in the future. An assumption you can make in a book,but in real life???
My $.02 Weed
The future…
I think that, while individual events cannot be predicted, as our understanding of statistics and human variables increases, our ability to predict statistically-likely futures improves. There is a great deal of progress going on in this area right now, particularly with combining statistics and computing simulations to model things. The results are promising, and in certain very specialized areas are very accurate, but we need to get a handle on most of the variables and less limited simulation parameters. That’s a challenge which will take a very, very long time and a lot more computing power than we’ve even dreamt of at this point.
It’s kind of like metaphors: once you reach a point, a metaphor becomes useless because the only fully-correct metaphor is the thing you’re metaphor-izing itself. Same with statistics and simulation/statistical modeling.
So yes, you’re right. But I predict a day when we’ll have sufficient know-how to make large-scale, long-term statistical predictions which come out correct most of the time.
—
Matthew P. Barnson
Giving 110%
Easy on the death toll there. Hard to kill 120 million out of 8.
I think the question is invalid for two reasons: 1) it presumes the future, and 2) it states the obvious.
Weed deals with the first issue, namely that it’s a false dilemma.
On the second, if you can either kill 10 people today, or due to their procreation, 100 in 60 years, you’re suggesting 100 people will be alive at that point. In that case, the 100 are going to die anyway (just not all at once). This makes the question rhetorical (and conflicts with the 1st issue, in an interesting way). The choice is being made by everyone, here and now. When you have children, particularly more than 2, you are rejecting the idea that future deaths are bad.
I think the note at the
I think the note at the start of the referenced article is telling:
I should not have stated the 120 million figure as fact, I agree. It was conjecture, and is probably substantially incorrect. Nevertheles, recent digs near the Amazon river basin suggest that “8 million” is far, far too conservative an estimate by several orders of magnitude.
For a non-scholarly overview of this disparity, touching on the Marajó dig, check out this article: http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Chumash/Population.html
Sorry, pedant alert coming!
I’m suspecting that the short answer is “no, it’s not justified, but it’s fairly common”.
For instance, it’s a well-known fact (now) that automobile manufacturers routinely decide whether or not to extend voluntary recalls on vehicles based on whether or not the problem with them is going to cost them more in lawsuits than the cost of the recall. They know some people are going to die as a result of the defect, but consider the cost in determining whether or not to fix it. I don’t think it’s right, but I do think when doing risk-analysis it’s one of the things that gets considered.
(Note: this has diverged wildly off-topic from abortion; please don’t correlate my comments to the abortion discussion. I’m neither condoning nor condemning abortion, as I have made clear in previous comments.)
There’s little doubt that every human ever living on the planet has died, everyone living today will die, and (barring some really bizarre scientific breakthrough) everybody ever born in the future will die. All that does is make life a zero-sum game unless we create our own end-game.
I choose to believe that both the preservation of human life, and an ever-improving quality of life, are worthwhile goals. Unfortunately, sometimes those two objectives are at loggerheads and I end up with weird philosophical questions like this one.
I think we’ve covered some of this ground before in discussing the Hurricane Katrina aftermath, and the Asian Tsunami. I think the ever-increasing death toll from (for instance) natural disasters are disturbing. I don’t think killing potential parents in order to minimize that toll is the answer, but I think there has to be some answer other than just letting things keep going as they are.
—
Matthew P. Barnson
Life
Yes, once the zygote implants in the uterus, you have life. But do you have a child? I don’t think so.
What you have is a collection of cells that, if nothing goes wrong, could eventually develop into a child. Keep in mind that approximately one in five pregnancies ends in miscarriage, and indeed that percentage may be much higher, given the number of women who miscarry before they’re even aware of their pregnancy. Until a fetus is viable (which, depending on who you ask, may be anywhere from 20 to 24 weeks after conception), what you have is more like a virus or a parasite than a child. A potential child, sure, but not a child in my opinion.
So then, in my opinion, abortion becomes a question of balancing interests. Will giving birth to a child destroy any hope that a particular 14-year-old mother has of pulling herself out of a cycle of poverty? Will putting a child up for adoption damage the delicate psyche of that mother? Is it fair to bring a child into a situation with a parent who is unable or unwilling to care for him or her? Conversely, is it fair to put yet another child into the adoption cycle, where most minority children will be shuttled between foster homes and orphanages?
As far as I’m concerned, the interests of a potential child do not trump the interests of a mother in those situations. I am by no means an advocate of abortion — I believe that much more emphasis needs to be placed on honest and extensive sex education — but I do believe that abortion needs to be maintained as a last resort. People make mistakes, and I don’t think it’s right to punish a mother or a child for those mistakes.
— Ben
14 year olds
I am of the opinion that a 14 year old is not ready to make the decision to have sex, much less bear a child. Therefore, it’s a crime against her to have sex with her, and I would allow abortions for any girls under a certain age. Yes its murder, but these girls aren’t of the age where they can make an iformed decision. I’d preach and beg and plead for adoption, but abortion would be allowed.
How does killing a life inside you damage you psyche any less than giving the baby up for adoption?
A parasite, eh? They’re parasite until 23 or 24. Years, that is. 😉
The adoption cycle? Don’t some adoptions work out? Are they all like what you see on TV? Is it all doom and gloom? I doubt it.
I may be idealistic, but you are quite negative, young man.
And it’s punishment to not allow a woman to have an abortion? Think how it feels to be that poot aborted child…there’s your punishment.
My $.02 Weed
Negative
I’m not negative, I’m pragmatic. Rather than saying “it shouldn’t be this way”, I’m saying, “It’s this way – what do we do about it?”
Side note: In most states, the statutory rape laws involve sex where one partner is *below* a certain age, and the other partner is *above* a certain age. For instance, in Maryland, illegal acts under the statutory rape law include:
(3) Sexual contact with another person who is under 14 years of age and the person performing the sexual contact is four or more years older than the victim; or
(4) A sexual act with another person who is 14 or 15 years of age and the person performing the sexual act is at least 21 years of age. (Source: http://www.ageofconsent.com/maryland.htm)
Therefore, a 14 year old having sex with another 14 year old is NOT a crime.
As for adoptions, yes, sometimes it works. However, there’s information all over the place that people trying to adopt children are largely looking for white children. Minority children are far more likely to be shuffled back and forth from orphanages to foster homes. — Ben
Ready?
They often think they are ready, for the sex part at least. I remember being 15 very well. My interest in sex was only exceeded by that of my girlfriend…
But how do you tell a teenager that they aren’t ready and have them believe you? Never worked on me, even with the fear of God in me. I don’t expect my kids to be very different.
—
Matthew P. Barnson
My point is
My point wasn’t that is was an actual CRIME to have sex with a 14-year-ols, even though in most cases it is. My point was that it was a crime against HER, a crime in nature if not in law.
I find it funny that I’m arging against abortion, and Matt and Ben are arging for. The I state I’d be for abortion if the girl is under-age, and then Matt and Ben argue against me there?
Huh?
I should have specified crime in the natural sense versus crime in the law sense. It’s not wrong of a 14 year-old boy to want to have sex with a 14-year-old girl, because that’s what the charged-up hormones are driving you to do. But it’s wrong to have sex then because you’re not ready for it and you’re not ready for the consequences. Maybe it’s not a “natural” crime, but a societal one, because naturally, a 14-year-old girl is able to reproduce.
But since, yes, 14-year-olds will have sex and get pregnant, and they’re not ready for that, then I’d approve abortions in that case, even though I still think it’s wrong.
But over 18? Sorry, its time for you to account for mistakes.
My $.02 Weed
Against? For?
I think if you read what I’ve read, I’ve done a lot of smarmy commenting, some insightful off-topic meandering, and very little arguing against anybody 🙂 I was just offering a comment on the sexuality of fourteen-year-olds. I don’t think I disagreed with you, but instead stated that I and the girls I ran with were all pretty horny and idiotic :lol:.
My “support” for abortion, as you noted, is heavily caveated and largely limited. Pro-choicers would probably call me a pro-lifer, and pro-lifers would probably call me a pro-choicer. Can’t really win when my opinion isn’t black-and-white.
—
Matthew P. Barnson
Arguing is fun
My actual argument is that there’s no bright line that can be drawn. Girls don’t suddenly become mature and intelligent on their 15th birthday. Some 14-year-olds are remarkably mature, and some 20-year-olds are remarkably immature. I agree with you that abortion should still be available for 14-year-olds – I just think it should also be available for anyone else.
I knew a girl in high school who made some very bad decisions. She was drinking and doing drugs, and at 18 she got pregnant. Her parents were very conservative, and had she told them she was pregnant, they would surely have thrown her out of the house and cut off any support. She was in a bad way. But she was able to get an abortion. The experience was a real wake-up call, and enabled her to change her behavior and put her life in order. Last I heard, she was happily married and living up near Weed.
— Ben
One Final Thought
I’m glad she’s doing well. That story is similar to the girl I know. Bad childhood. Bad parents. Pregnant before she was ready. Turned her life around.
Only difference is how the kids turned out. My friend’s kids are doing well. How you’re friend’s child?
Oops, that’s right. Hard to tell because no one ever got to meet the little one. Conveniently disposed of.
You and I can, and will, argue until we’re blue in the face. But the point remains is that some little girl or boy never got to live. I bet as much as the abortion was a wake up call for your friend, having a baby would have been a bigger one.
But all’s well that ends well, I guess.
My $.02 Weed
One More Final Thought
I hope for your sake that your kids don’t get pregnant at 14.
— Ben
And the same to you
I would hope your concern would be for my kids, not me. Their life would be the ones that became much more difficult. But hopefully I would have raised them to take responsibilty for their actions and not to take the easy way out.
*sigh* Weed
I Think The Bill Is Great
I think both the bill and the timing of the bill are great. As more states move to quickly enact their trigger laws I think those women who were reluctant to vote Democrat in the last election will put Hillary in the White House in 2008.
Socially, I think it’s another disgusting example of our nation putting their stamp of religious morality over individual privacy.
Another suprise
What happened to collective rights?
Cognitive dissonance
I think people are able to hold a remarkable amount of seemingly contradictory opinions without experiencing too much cognitive dissonance. It is only when one of those butts up against a contradictory reality that the dissonance intensifies. At that point, I re-evaluate to figure out if I can hold the two dissonant beliefs or not.
In many cases, the contradiction is not in principle, but implementation.
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Matthew P. Barnson
Nice Try
As I’ve written previously in other posts, I do not support the institutional advancement of collective rights, but instead acknowledge that they exist. This thread would be another example, except that the argument against abortions isn’t ‘for the greater good’ in my opinion. It’s guided by religious dogma.
Funny
Are you saying the start of this thread, re North Dakota, is about religious dogma? Or the whole of this thread, where my decidedly non-religious white honkey a** has been arging against abortion?
Of course, my argument agains abortion is for the greater good of the children who never got to exist, for better or worse, in the world today.
My $.02 Weed
Hey Rowan
What’s you opinion on this? You started this thread, what’s your take. No fair ducking the question! 🙂
My $.02 Weed
Curses! I’d been so content
Curses! I’d been so content to sit in the shadows and watch my monkeys dance for me… 😛
I’ve been swamped, but hopefully I’ll have time tomorrow to post my thoughts on this.
As a little taste, here’s what my thesis will be: Why Baby-Killing Should Stay Legal.
That’s not a joke title, either.
Legal indeed
There was an article this morning (in India) that may hit the US press tomorrow (or maybe it hit yesterday). It was about the first public case of baby killing in the Netherlands, for a 7-mo old that had some disease that caused him a lot of pain. Nobody believes it’s the first baby murder in the country, but it’s the first publicly admitted one.
This is trickier than it sounds, because the kid had a 30-month expected life span. So some might say, why have 23 months of constant pain? Isn’t the alternative of a bullet in the head better than a 30-hour agonizing death (such as by mustard gas, Saddam’s last-used WMD) in everyone’s mind?
The problem, of course, is that if a soldier is going to die slowly by asphyxiation with his skin covered in blisters after mustard gas exposure, the choice to take a bullet over morphine is his.
I can’t imagine the horror of facing this decision as a parent. Whether one agrees with the decision or not, it was a sad article to read.
— BTW, Matt, Rowan left an open <b> tag. I closed it at the beginning of my post but you might want to clean things up. —
B-tag
Thanks. I need to upgrade Drupal, the new version has much better HTML filtering and closing per-post, instead of just making sure the tags are closed by the end of the page.
That involves downtime, though; I like to do it when nobody’s posted in a week 🙂
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Matthew P. Barnson
To finish this thread…
To finish this thread off, South Dakota voters resoundingly rejected the bill. They gathered enough signatures to get a referendum on the bill, and then the voting population slapped it down by a greater than 11-point margin.
Yeah, I know it’s old news, but I ran across this post and decided to update it 🙂
The same day, Oregon voters in a similar voter referendum schooled their legislators in what they consider appropriate bill-writing.
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Matthew P. Barnson