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Anti-Abortion Centers Find Pregnant Teens Online, Then Save Their Data

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Re: Anti-Abortion Centers Find Pregnant Teens Online, Then Save Their Data

#171

Post by asoneth »

luxuryballs wrote: post #30
bbarn wrote: post #4

A former girlfriend of mine went to what she thought was a clinic, and was effectively scared out of having one, and had twins at 18. These scummy tactics work, or people wouldn't do them.

Quoted post unavailable.

I respect your question and have the same question from the reverse side. I similarly have difficulty understanding how Christians who follow a doctrine that appears to be so kind can behave in ways that seem so cruel and heartless to the rest of us.

I suspect it is down to unbridgeable axiomatic differences.

You see a fertilized egg as a human with rights, I see it as a cell with interesting potential, not particularly more deserving of rights than any other cell with potential.

Even if I accepted that a fertilized egg has human rights, I don't understand why those rights outweigh the autonomy of the donor/host. What if I told you that your blood, bone marrow, kidney, or even lung could save another human's life at relatively minimal risk to your survival? (It's true, and I recommend everyone reading this be an organ donor and sign up for bethematch.com) But should the state be allowed to legally compel you to undertake these risks to save another human life?

Judging the stories of pro-life advocates who get abortions while convincing themselves that "their situation is different" my assumption is that there is a basic lack of human empathy. I've found that this squares with the fact that many people oppose benefits and rights for others but then begin to support them when it personally impacts them.

Re: Anti-Abortion Centers Find Pregnant Teens Online, Then Save Their Data

#172

Post by rcoveson »

snikeris wrote: post #116
welshwelsh wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not killing someone. A fetus isn't a person. > I can’t imagine anything LESS scummy than helping save the lives of those babies who are now likely very glad they were born So would it be ethical to rape someone and force them to give birth? Because the babies would be happy to be born and experiencing life? That's the same logic you're using. A fetus isn't a person. It's not sentient. It doesn't have hopes and d…

> I know, and I'm sure you know, that's the real issue. Lots of people are uncomfortable with the concept of consequence-free sex. Hard disagree that the abortion issue is primarily about consequence-free sex. You stated the issue in the first line: > A fetus isn't a person. Pro-life people vehemently disagree about this, and it's not coming from a place of prudishness. They are outraged because they feel like babies…

I'm outraged because nobody in this thread is as interested in drawing a line somewhere between "postcoital contraception" and "aborting a nearly-viable fetus" as they are in holding the line on either side of "fertilized embryo" and "infant".

I guess I'll add to the chorus of people who "just don't understand the other side" in saying that I don't understand either side. Arguing for fertilized embryo rights makes no sense to me. But arguing in favor of abortion and not even mentioning where the line is drawn makes just as little sense. Oft-repeated phrases like "a fetus isn't a person" sound scary to me. It's casual dismissiveness that falls back on pure terminology, and the thing being dismissed might have a brain comparable to that of an infant. Specificity is extremely important here.

If people are going to act like abortion rights are the most obviously ethical thing in the world, I really wish they'd stop using the word fetus. The obvious, strong argument for abortion only applies to abortions before the fetus is morally person-like. Once a fetus is sufficiently person-like, we must at least admit that the moral calculus is complicated, since at that point there's more than one significant outcome for a feeling, thinking thing.

Re: Anti-Abortion Centers Find Pregnant Teens Online, Then Save Their Data

#173

Post by trs8080 »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #146
welshwelsh wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not killing someone. A fetus isn't a person. > I can’t imagine anything LESS scummy than helping save the lives of those babies who are now likely very glad they were born So would it be ethical to rape someone and force them to give birth? Because the babies would be happy to be born and experiencing life? That's the same logic you're using. A fetus isn't a person. It's not sentient. It doesn't have hopes and d…

A fetus isn't a person. It's not sentient. It doesn't have hopes and dreams. Defining a person as someone with hopes and dreams is nice poetically, but not great legally. Quite a few adults go through life without hope or dreams, but are still people. A one month old child isn't developed enough to have hopes and dreams, but is a person. Stepping away from the metaphor of hopes and dreams, you can start to observe RE…

> Stepping away from the metaphor of hopes and dreams, you can start to observe REM movement in utero at 28 weeks. So in a literal sense, it is likely fetuses do dream.

> A clump of four cells isn't a person, but there is a very reasonable case for 39 week old fetus being as much of a person as a 1 day old infant born at 38 weeks.

But only 1% of abortions in the US happen after 21 weeks [1]. So there's a blanket ban despite 99% of abortions happening before that 28 week cutoff? How does that track?

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/ss/ss7009a1.htm#T10_down

Re: Anti-Abortion Centers Find Pregnant Teens Online, Then Save Their Data

#174

Post by ralfd »

Starlevel001 wrote: post #99
jonhohle wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively, you could say we are progressing to understand that outdated concepts like viability have no scientific basis and human rights should be extended to all humans, even those in early developmental phases. The idea that some humans can be killed because they are “less” is a very primitive and prejudicial idea.

A foetus is less developed than my toe. I don't see anyone calling to give my toe human rights.

> A foetus is less developed than my toe.

I think much confusion comes from miscommunication and unclear meaning of words.

Embryo -> until the ninth week after conception, inner organs are not yet present.

Fetus -> from the ninth week (heart, hands, feet, brain and other inner organs are present) until birth.

While a nine week old fetus is very small and the size of your big toe, it does grow very fast after that point. Anyway, even a nine month old unborn is still called a fetus.

Re: Anti-Abortion Centers Find Pregnant Teens Online, Then Save Their Data

#175

Post by nonameiguess »

beardyw wrote: post #12

I find this whole thing so puzzling. In the UK, not so different from the USA, this is not really a thing at all. Even amongst Christians I have never heard it brought up. Is it a political thing, and if so how did it become so?

This goes back a long way. Many of the early American colonies were founded by religious extremist sects being pushed out of wherever they came from. The US and UK both experienced the First Great Awakening, but the Second Great Awakening was unique to the US. This led to entirely new sects like the Adventists and Latter Day Saints. It led to an extreme backlash against Enlightenment ideals. Post-millenialism spread rapidly and many Americans were convinced the return of Christ was imminent and American society needed to be purified, which resulted in the first tight intermingling of religion with politics. Religious organizations needed political clout to accomplish their social goals, which were not restricted to their own followers. This was heightened all the more by the reality that the outlying territories didn't have real governments and religious leaders were the only leaders around. Revivalism mixed with frontier folk libertarianism to produce what would eventually become prosperity gospel teaching that the strength of one's adherence to strict behavior and love of Christ would lead to material success, and thus the rich must be pious. The Third Great Awakening gave us American Christian organizations that became increasingly all about social reform in light of the belief that Christ's return was imminent, leading to the very earliest alliance of the Republican party with activist Christians, which was the effort to abolish slavery. That alliance eventually dovetailed quite nicely with the American GOP's post-New Deal long game to cut taxes, business regulation, and social welfare spending, thanks to those earlier seeds of prosperity gospel. This also explains the largely unique to the US "god and guns" phenomenon, which is more about identity politics than religious doctrine because revivalism was tied so tightly to the frontier, where personal firearms ownership and proficiency was all but mandatory.

All in all, I think you get a nice picture of how something well-intended can end up in a bad place. The righteous fervor to make society better resulted in ending slavery, fighting against tenements, but then they ran out of the most obvious evils and we got prohibition, anti-homosexual laws, and this mobilization of single-issue voters that judge all office holders solely by whether they'll try to abolish abortion and don't care about anything else they do. Tack that onto the naked charlatanism of prosperity gospel and you more or less get everything wrong with 20th-century American evangelicalism.

Re: Anti-Abortion Centers Find Pregnant Teens Online, Then Save Their Data

#176

Post by noworriesnate »

inetknght wrote: post #129
luxuryballs wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

> helping save the lives of those babies who are now likely very glad they were born I have met many people who hated their lives for many reasons. What makes you think these children won't? Some of the reasons include: - parents didn't want the children - children grew up poor - children grew up with disabilities - children were put up for adoption - the world is becoming uninhabitable for the children's children I…

What if instead of presuming whether the children will hate their lives, we let them grow up to a certain age, say age 9, and then ask them if they hate their lives? If they say yes, kill them, if they say no, let them live. There is no moral difference between this solution and abortion if the fetus is a baby. If the fetus is not a baby then there is a moral difference though, so... I guess the real question is whether or not the fetus is a baby.

My point is, any open-minded debate about abortion will always return to this question. As long as pro-abortion people ignore this question, they are talking past the pro-lifers and will never understand us.

Re: Anti-Abortion Centers Find Pregnant Teens Online, Then Save Their Data

#177

Post by hellojesus »

rajup wrote: post #106
comrh wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Republicans won a majority of the Congressional popular vote in 2016 And then lost the popular vote in 2018 and 2020. Not sure why 2016 would be particularly relevant

Not that I support this ruling in any way or form, but the 2016 election led to the current slate of justices who came up with this ruling. It is probably good and by design that we don’t change justices with the popular vote.

The entire point of life appointments is to remove partisanship from judicial decisions. If the judges were up for election, their performance would most certainly suffer.

For example, look at the Federal Reserve. They are supposed to be independent from politics, but their head is appointed by the president every X years, and so they naturally make the decisions that guarantee them reelection and not the decisions which would maximize economic stability/utility.

Re: Anti-Abortion Centers Find Pregnant Teens Online, Then Save Their Data

#178

Post by hellisothers »

snikeris wrote: post #116
welshwelsh wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not killing someone. A fetus isn't a person. > I can’t imagine anything LESS scummy than helping save the lives of those babies who are now likely very glad they were born So would it be ethical to rape someone and force them to give birth? Because the babies would be happy to be born and experiencing life? That's the same logic you're using. A fetus isn't a person. It's not sentient. It doesn't have hopes and d…

> I know, and I'm sure you know, that's the real issue. Lots of people are uncomfortable with the concept of consequence-free sex. Hard disagree that the abortion issue is primarily about consequence-free sex. You stated the issue in the first line: > A fetus isn't a person. Pro-life people vehemently disagree about this, and it's not coming from a place of prudishness. They are outraged because they feel like babies…

If you believe abortion isn’t about consequence free sex I encourage to listen to this interview with a conservative intellectual about conservative philosophy generally and abortion and sex specifically. For her there is a bold bright line connecting the two https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/31/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...

TL;DR: abortion enables casual sex, casual sex is bad for society and women specifically, therefore being pro-life is being pro-woman.

Re: Anti-Abortion Centers Find Pregnant Teens Online, Then Save Their Data

#179

Post by jonhohle »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #122
jonhohle wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are over a million abortions performed every year in the US. If your belief is that these are humans with all the rights of any other human, that’s a staggering human rights issue. The concept of viability is legal fiction. Given the technology, there’s no reason a fetus couldn’t live at any stage of development and likewise, until about age 3 or so, no child will live without external support. Culturally, we c…

> Given the technology, there’s no reason a fetus couldn’t live at any stage of development This cannot be true, and just because a fetus could live does not mean the quality of life is worth living. Not to mention the staggering costs of NICU healthcare. The numbers I was asking about were specifically post 20 week, as a reply to parkingrift’s concerns.

Babies survive outside the womb prior to 20 weeks. That will continue to go down as technology progresses. What does cost have to do with whether someone is a person?

Re: Anti-Abortion Centers Find Pregnant Teens Online, Then Save Their Data

#180

Post by falcolas »

Grustaf wrote: post #164
kraf wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not likely... There's a good chance she's alone with the kids and has to take on multiple jobs. Don't you think she will have sacrificed a lot of her own life for unwanted kids? Do you know somebody who's happy with a situation like this? I'm sure they exist but if you'll ask me for odds in a tough country like the USA I'll tell you they're bad.

I don't know the answer, it's an honest question. Obviously having children changes your life completely, it is a huge burden and you have to "sacrifice" a lot. But almost nobody regrets it. Probably because we are hardwired to have children. The joy outweighs any sacrifices. I don't know anyone that wishes they hadn't let their children be born, no matter how harsh their circumstances.

> But almost nobody regrets it.

It's worth noting how taboo it is to admit that you hate your children, and thus how vastly under-reported this attitude ends up being.

> I don't know anyone that wishes they hadn't let their children be born, no matter how harsh their circumstances.

I, in contrast, know several children who wish they hadn't been forced to grow up in abject poverty with an absentee parent who has no time or energy for them because of how much they have to work.

Perhaps it's selfishness on the parent's part.

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