"As a brief introduction, I was raised in a large homeschooling family influenced by the Christian Patriarchy and Quiverfull movements. I grew up an evangelical Christian, though with some fundamentalist aspects. I found my beliefs challenged in college and am today an atheist and a feminist...These are her follow-up posts since this piece "went viral" a week and a half ago:
...If you’re just here because you liked my article on the pro-life movement, I’d invite you to stick around because I have several followup posts already planned and in the works, including posts tentatively called “Pro-Life, Anti-Abortion, or Anti-Choice? Sorting through the Labels,” “What Being Pro-Life Would Look Like,” and “Science, Young Earth Creationism, and the Pro-Life Movement.”"
Think about bulimia. We reject bulimia as disordered because it seeks to have only half of eating’s natural end — the pleasure of eating — while rejecting the other — being full. When the act of eating is not allowed to achieve its natural end, the act is detrimental to the organism.Thus explaining the Catholic opposition to artificial sweeteners.
Must I, having heard the Pope renew the Church's ban on birth control devices, veto the funding of contraceptive programs for non-Catholics or dissenting Catholics in my State? I accept the Church's teaching on abortion. Must I insist you do? By law? By denying you Medicaid funding? By a constitutional amendment? If so, which one? Would that be the best way to avoid abortions or to prevent them?Or the debate from September here.
Oh really! And that's knowable how?Well the claim is that:
Well, not knowable, but easily predicted.
Pro-lifers who know the biology in question are apparently okay with God killing unborn babies if that is His will.This is a ridiculous argument.
"This "as far as I know" X, therefore pro-lifers are hyprocrites, way of arguing, which appears earlier in the thread and in the original article is rather unhelpful."The point wasn't that they were hypocrites, it was that they are inconsistent. And comparing activism around fertility treatments to activism around abortion — in scope or depth — is special pleading nonsense.
Don’t gag doctors. That’s the heart of a letter from the Texas Medical Association (TMA) to the Department of State Health Services (DSHS). TMA President Michael E. Speer, MD, points out DSHS’s proposed rules would impose a “gag order” on physicians who participate in the Texas Women’s Health Program (TWHP), barring them from discussing elective abortion with their patients even if the patient asked about it or if the standard of care indicated it should be discussed as an option.posted by Miko at 3:07 PM on November 8, 2012
“If the state indeed wants doctors to participate in the program, this is a step in the opposite direction,” added Dr. Speer. Many Texas physicians may leave the program because these rules, if enacted, would force them to choose between practicing medicine in accordance with the standard of care and medical ethics, or in accordance with a rule created to serve a political ideology.
I think the medical fact that at eight months gestation a 'fetus' is physically indistinguishable from a 'baby' and quite capable of surving outside the womb (they usually do, when delivered early) is a very strong, rational argument for treating them the same under the law.
ArkhanJG: While I admire Mrs Anne's attempt to argue the case that pro-lifers have for decades - that banning abortion only puts women's lives at much greater risk without reducing actual abortions, and that good sex education and above all good access to cheap or free contraception drastically reduces abortion, I fear it's pretty pointless.ArkhanJG, judging from the entire rest of your post, I am forced to presume you confused the phrases "pro-life" and "pro-choice" in these two paragraphs. True?
Pro-choice is above all anti-sex. And often anti-women either by accident or sometimes, design.
Jahaza: Forbidding abortion is not making an external intervention into someone's body.So...
resurrexit: Because then it's murder, and you won't deny a society made up of humans is harmed by homicide.Unless you support the mandatory sentencing of a woman convicted of having an abortion to either life in prison, or the death penalty, you don't actually intend to treat abortion as a premeditated murder.
winna: I don't think abortion is bad, either.I am opposed to all three operations, but agree that they are sometimes necessary. And this is not some idle hypothetical for me, either - I've had two of those, and I don't recommend them to anyone "just for kicks". But, to save my own, developed, clearly independent life, I was willing to sacrifice some growing tissue inside of me that was my own flesh & blood. I know: shockingly immoral to those of you who are Christian Scientists. Too bad; stay the fuck out of my hospital room.
I am also indifferent to the moral implications of tonsillectomy or appendectomy.
ersatz: Ersatz, so true. Men are not expected to give up their agency for others.ersatz didn't say they were equal. In fact, a couple posts down ersatz specifically points this out.
>You're familiar with the history of the military draft in the United States?
I'm sorry, but this is a bad example. First, even when they are in the military, society invests men with power against women (191 convictions out of 3192 sexual assault reports). Second, the draft has been discontinued since 1973. That's the same year as Roe v. Wade, but one of these two has not been a matter of serious contention since. Third, the current nature of the military and family planning rights imposes on poor people because more affluent people can choose whether to enlist or not or whether to cross state/country lines. Finally, for the past forty years American youth has had no need to worry about the draft, but still has to worry about family planning. I don't want to overshare here, but IME these two are not equal at all.
resurrexit: IAmBroom, we did that in this thread, it got crazy. Historically mothers weren't prosecuted, the abortionists were. I think we got into it pretty deeply on that post before some of the more militant folks just got all pro-choice-version-of-abortion-clinic-bombers and kind of shut it down.Don't really give a shit that we've discussed it before, nor how it went. It's still a completely relevant point.
To prevent women from having to rely on public assistance, abortions should be made more widely available. In addition, there is strong evidence that making abortions available will allow women to be healthier, with brighter economic outlooks. By turning women away when they seek abortions, we risk keeping both women and their children in poverty — and, possibly, in harm's way from domestic violence.As always, it's society's most vulnerable who are harmed by moral crusades.
Drinky Die: the point there is that Jesus can disapprove of something without that implying a legal prohibition is necessary.So the only arbiter (of any real & lasting consequence) of morality in the entire universe ... sometimes disapproves of things, but doesn't bother going so far as to tell his worshipers he does so?
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