Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

Posted: **March 6th, 2006, 5:57 pm**

I agree with what SooZen says that its the woman's choice, not society's and not men's. but, its important to know that 'choice' is itself to a large degree a product of social pressures.

women like all people choose from their own experience against a background of socially constituted values. which is why having public discussions about these issues is so crucial.

there is a very common position -- replicated in this thread a few times -- that abortion is, if anything, the lesser of two evils, i.e. it is evil but it'd be even worse for the gov't to restrict it through law. someone wrote that no-one is for abortion -- supposing that it is an intrinisically bad thing.

i think this form of structuring the discourse is harmful b/c it pressures women in an already stressful situation. it fosters guilt, as if the women needs a compelling justification to have an abortion. we need another perspective to be voiced to correct the skewed moralism that even Pro-Choice people reiterate. so,

i am Pro-Abortion. women who have abortions are not to be excused, but to be applauded for being courageous, independent.

Posted: **March 6th, 2006, 6:46 pm**

This debate seems to be not so much about abortions, but about fetuses. Do they have a soul? Are they a human being? After that, the arguments follow naturally. Is it possible to debate something when the fundamental nature of the object of your debate is different for each side?

Posted: **March 6th, 2006, 9:56 pm**

do fetuses have a soul?
No, but neither do adults. there is no such thing as a soul.

are fetuses human beings? of course. sperm are human sperms, eggs are human eggs, toenail clippings are human toenail clippings. all different ways of being human.

as with all difficult questions of politics, how the debate is understood, what the debate is about, how to frame the questions is key to the dispute because that is part of what the debates' about. however, the simplified view you presented doesn't succeed in clarifying anything one bit.

Posted: **March 6th, 2006, 10:56 pm**

But this is undeniably an issue with much genuine uncertainty and disagreement over when "human life begins",

mnaz

a life is created upon conception. bullshit arguments about the then slippery slope are just that - bullshit. no, life doesnt begin when one thinks about having sex or when sperm is launched, or when the egg drops. life beings at conception. after that, it's simply maturity.

firsty

It is a women’s rights issue, an unwanted fetus is using another already living persons body to sustain itself, a woman’s body, not a mans body, without it, the fetus is dead, not yet a life

abstoint

that whole insistence that it's a woman's right to have an abortion. you say it is, i say it isnt. we have a stalemate there. rights are tricky things, and, yes, the way our system has set it up is that a fetus isnt a life until it's born. that something magical happens upon popping out that gives it the right to life that other air-breathing humans have. an unborn child may depend on the mother to live, that doesnt mean that the mother owns that life from a moral standpoint.

firsty

whether a fetus is a life or not is indeterminate and at any rate is irrelevant. women are not slaves condemned to sacrifice themselves for the sake of babies.

e_dog

i guess if you're not going to consider fetuses to be immature human beings and you're going to consider them to be a health condition, then your logic makes sense.

firsty

even if one regards a fetus as a living human being, there can be examples where killing a human being may be morally justied even if the person killed was not at fault like an attacker or slaveowner.

e_dog

But the actual soul... the spirit that lights our bodily lamps, is eternal... never dies. If you believe that statement is b.s., then I suggest a change of consciousness from a fetus has the ability to support itself and it is murder to abort it to a more full acceptance of quality of life versus quantity

mtmynd

Oh damn,
I seem to have been reading the wrong thread.
I should have said 'living' instead of 'human being'.
I apologize for not writing several paragraphs of eloquent bullshit.

Posted: **March 6th, 2006, 11:42 pm**

Is it possible to debate something when the fundamental nature of the object of your debate is different for each side?

there's no need to get defensive and 'apologize.' i think you raise an important point. but the conclusion is more surprising than intended. almost all key debates are such that the nature of the object of dispute is precisely, along with our responses to it, in question. my point is that

calling something a 'living human being' does not settle the issue in the sense in which you are suggesting that whether you think a fetus is a living human being means that therefore abortion is immoral. you can say that a fetus is a human life and still think abortion's okay. i do, for example. by analogy -- though i'm not saying its equivalent -- a part of ones body may be alive; that doesn't mean that destroying it is a problem. words like 'life' and 'being' while nice sounding are too general to carry much moral weight. saying that the debate is about what constitutes 'life' is stylistically very common but that doesn't mean it isn't theoretically quite confused. the key point is that there is NO sharp dividing line between the collection of minute processes that go into the development of an organism. firsty thinks that somehow conception is some momentous event with cosmic significance. why that is is not explained. others think that birth is such an occasion. i tend to agree with those latter, but the fact that it is better for society to treat a born child as a legal person rather than, say, only a child that has developed selfawareness -- thus making infanticide illegal -- is not determined by anything metaphysical like a 'soul' but rather is a result of a certain moral sensibility. under radically different conditions of existing, such as a famine, infanticide could be considered moral too. the point is, absolutes are human inventions and that is what occurs in the abortion debate -- a clash of techniques of moralization.

Posted: **March 7th, 2006, 10:35 am**

firsty thinks that somehow conception is some momentous event with cosmic significance. why that is is not explained.

no i dont. conception is the point at which a new human being is created. that's it. period. attaching that fact to condescending bullshit like "some momentous event with cosmic significance" is, well, condescending bullshit, full of semantic games that are the only way to morally justify one person's decision to end that human being's life.

you go ahead, edog, and applaud women who have abortions, most of whom spend several years trying to come to terms with their decision, something done completely within the law and reasonable social norms. your flippant assessment of abortion not only insults people who'd rather have a society without abortions, but also the people most directly affected by them in the first place, not to mention the aborted fetuses themselves.

Posted: **March 7th, 2006, 1:54 pm**

firsty,

lets be clear. in a utopian fantasy i'd prefer a world in which women didnt need to have abortions. i'd prefer that persons waited until marriage to have intercourse, if ever, and i'd even consider supporting a law making intercourse without condoms a crime abscent a procreation license, for reasons of public health.

my reason for suggesting valorization of abortion is to counteract the guilt feelings that cause the suffering which you mention. maybe one reason why women have difficulty recovering from abortions and suffer emotional consequences is precisely because anti-abortion opponents and religious morality have made abortion seem like something akin to murder. if abortion were simply considered a medical procedure, or similar to contraception or even abstinance, there'd be less guilt and hence less suffering for the woman.

as for your position that conception creates a human being (no cosmic significance). what is a human being? being means something that exists. human means human. a dead body is a human being. but cremation isn't killing. we consider certain organ functioning failures to be 'death' e.g. when the brain and/or circulation or respiration don't work. why then is a state of the biologic process when the brain doesn't even exist, in a fertilized egg or primitive fetus, etc, count as the sort of human being which is a moral-legal person? what i meant by attributing a 'momentous' event to your idea of conception is that you are assuming there's a point when a biological process(es) becomes a 'human being' in a way that draws a line of significance. i don't see that the difference between eggs and sperm and a fertilized egg, in itself, has any significance.

Posted: **March 7th, 2006, 7:17 pm**

Everyone; thank YOU!

E-dog, I agree with everything you say. Cecil, SooZen, ST, Cats ~ thank you. As usual, many many good points. Too many, too much, for me to post to each of them ...

firsty ... I don't know... me think you doth protest too much. I don't know where to begin, so I'll just pick this one:

…the biggest issue i have with deb's post is that it seems to say that one evil is necessary because of other evils. – firsty

Evil’s your term, not mine. … please don’t twist my words, firsty. I was sticking with facts, and I don’t label facts ‘evil’ – though what they show at times, can be most difficult to look at.

… women want men to have more responsibility for pregnancies, but still want to be able to have abortions without notifying the father. there is a huge double standard in western society that protects women not only from abuse of power (which is valid) but also, in many ways, from criticism, and that is wrong.

I don’t know, I don’t have the stats, for how many women want to have abortions without notifying the father, but I’m sure more women do include the fathers in the choice then don’t.

But for those that don’t, many times they don’t because of domestic abuse. Most people who use choice and choose abortion, and don’t tell the biological father, have good reason:

http://endabuse.org/resources/facts/

Prevalence of Domestic Violence

* Estimates range from 960,000 incidents of violence against a current or former spouse, boyfriend, or girlfriend per year to three million women who are physically abused by their husband or boyfriend per year.
* Around the world, at least one in every three women has been beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused during her lifetime.
* Nearly one-third of American women (31 percent) report being physically or sexually abused by a husband or boyfriend at some point in their lives, according to a 1998 Commonwealth Fund survey.
* Nearly 25 percent of American women report being raped and/or physically assaulted by a current or former spouse, cohabiting partner, or date at some time in their lifetime, according to the National Violence Against Women Survey, conducted from November 1995 to May 1996.5
* Thirty percent of Americans say they know a woman who has been physically abused by her husband or boyfriend in the past year.
* In the year 2001, more than half a million American women (588,490 women) were victims of nonfatal violence committed by an intimate partner.
* Intimate partner violence is primarily a crime against women. In 2001, women accounted for 85 percent of the victims of intimate partner violence (588,490 total) and men accounted for approximately 15 percent of the victims (103,220 total).
* While women are less likely than men to be victims of violent crimes overall, women are five to eight times more likely than men to be victimized by an intimate partner.
* In 2001, intimate partner violence made up 20 percent of violent crime against women. The same year, intimate partners committed three percent of all violent crime against men.
* As many as 324,000 women each year experience intimate partner violence during their pregnancy.
* Women of all races are about equally vulnerable to violence by an intimate.
* Male violence against women does much more damage than female violence against men; women are much more likely to be injured than men.
* The most rapid growth in domestic relations caseloads is occurring in domestic violence filings. Between 1993 and 1995, 18 of 32 states with three year filing figures reported an increase of 20 percent or more.14
* Women are seven to 14 times more likely than men to report suffering severe physical assaults from an intimate partner.15

Domestic Homicides

* On average, more than three women are murdered by their husbands or boyfriends in this country every day. In 2000, 1,247 women were killed by an intimate partner. The same year, 440 men were killed by an intimate partner.16
* Women are much more likely than men to be killed by an intimate partner. In 2000, intimate partner homicides accounted for 33.5 percent of the murders of women and less than four percent of the murders of men.17
* Pregnant and recently pregnant women are more likely to be victims of homicide than to die of any other cause18 , and evidence exists that a significant proportion of all female homicide victims are killed by their intimate partners.19
* Research suggests that injury related deaths, including homicide and suicide, account for approximately one-third of all maternal mortality cases, while medical reasons make up the rest. But, homicide is the leading cause of death overall for pregnant women, followed by cancer, acute and chronic respiratory conditions, motor vehicle collisions and drug overdose, peripartum and postpartum cardiomyopthy, and suicide.20

Health Issues

* The health-related costs of rape, physical assault, stalking and homicide committed by intimate partners exceed $5.8 billion each year. Of that amount, nearly $4.1 billion are for direct medical and mental health care services, and nearly $1.8 billion are for the indirect costs of lost productivity or wages.21
* About half of all female victims of intimate violence report an injury of some type, and about 20 percent of them seek medical assistance.22
* Thirty-seven percent of women who sought treatment in emergency rooms for violence-related injuries in 1994 were injured by a current or former spouse, boyfriend or girlfriend.23

Domestic Violence and Youth

* Approximately one in five female high school students reports being physically and/or sexually abused by a dating partner.24
* Eight percent of high school age girls said “yes” when asked if “a boyfriend or date has ever forced sex against your will.”25
* Forty percent of girls age 14 to 17 report knowing someone their age who has been hit or beaten by a boyfriend.26
* During the 1996-1997 school year, there were an estimated 4,000 incidents of rape or other types of sexual assault in public schools across the country.27

Domestic Violence and Children

* In a national survey of more than 6,000 American families, 50 percent of the men who frequently assaulted their wives also frequently abused their children.28
* Slightly more than half of female victims of intimate violence live in households with children under age 12.29
* Studies suggest that between 3.3 - 10 million children witness some form of domestic violence annually.30

Rape

* Three in four women (76 percent) who reported they had been raped and/or physically assaulted since age 18 said that a current or former husband, cohabiting partner, or date committed the assault.31
* One in five (21 percent) women reported she had been raped or physically or sexually assaulted in her lifetime.32
* Nearly one-fifth of women (18 percent) reported experiencing a completed or attempted rape at some time in their lives; one in 33 men (three percent) reported experiencing a completed or attempted rape at some time in their lives.33
* In 2000, 48 percent of the rapes/sexual assaults committed against people age 12 and over were reported to the police.34
* In 2001, 41,740 women were victims of rape/sexual assault committed by an intimate partner.35
* Rapes/sexual assaults committed by strangers are more likely to be reported to the police than rapes/sexual assaults committed by “nonstrangers,” including intimate partners, other relatives and friends or acquaintances. Between 1992 and 2000, 41 percent of the rapes/sexual assaults committed by strangers were reported to the police. During the same time period, 24 percent of the rapes/sexual assaults committed by an intimate were reported.36

This is why they don't always tell the man they are getting an abortion, and I wholey support their right NOT to have to tell.

--- fyi ~ it's the people (the faces, the tears) behind those that make up these stats; who are the main reasons why having abortion as a choice is so important.

Cuz, it's not about 'casual' intercourse. (If only it was...)

Most everyone is equipped to be a biological parent; however not everyone is equipped to be a mother or a father. Just because the majority of us are born physically able to reproduce, doesn’t mean that the majority of us SHOULD be reproducing.

Yet, it happens … for many reasons, so then what?

Many don’t have what it takes to be a mother or a father – and many of those that don’t, already know this … so what?

We’ll force them to have a child anyway. And this is supposed to be fair to whom? The child?

The question that should be answered is: What kind of life would this child have? That's the question that choice, and abortions, is answering.

If congress denies the choice of abortion, that denial will go against both women & men.

You can’t have a – conception without a male and a female. Both, equally. And the choice of abortion is for both male & females, but because babies are carried inside mothers, and women do most of the work regarding children, and because there is domestic violence … the final choice needs to be the women’s.

And, as you've seen by the postings in this thread; there are responsible people making responsible choices. Using this right, well.

However, If it happens that congress does decide to take away this choice; from men and women; then to compensate for losing our ability to choose; and to give that child the best life – a quality life – congress must then place legal responsibility equally on both the male & female producers of that creation, and all that this entails, i.e:

Which means mean men need to be held responsible for their part in:

Health care costs: for the mother and child.
Food and Living costs: a clean home, healthy food, clothing, toys, etc.,
Education expenses; from pre-school through college

Just to name the biggest.

And this is part of what I meant when I wanted to see congress all hot about; putting that issue on the table - abortion ban, or not. It needs to be.

But … unless those in the ‘right to life’ camp – and congress are also factoring in ALL these issue, and doing the work – giving the money necessary and creating the necessary laws and structures around maintaining a quality life for the child ‘they’ are saving … then things will revert back to that harsher, crueler time we had before. That time where domestic violence was the untalked about, unquestioned and uncriticized standard for the times.

You mention double standards, well those double standards were far worse then the ones we have now.

Fiesty ... sometimes, the best most loving decision is an abortion. It’s personal, and each situation is it’s own, and as such can’t be legislated (morally or ethically) beyond having the right to simply having the right to choose.

Sometimes, because we now have this right, I've heard there have been women who have used abortions as they means of birth control (for whatever reason) … and that's sick.

I don't know the stats, but I'd say they are very few, and far between. But consider this; how good of a parent would a person like that be? And how about the guy who went to bed with her? What kind of dad would he make?

and... making (forcing) someone like that, to have a baby, is cruel to the child! and becomes another form of abuse - because it doesn't have the child’s best interest at heart.

And neither does a blanket ban on abortions, have the childs best interests of the child at heart.

Banning abortions is not the fix, and being "pro-life" imo means more than going around knocking people for having abortions, or those who support the right to choose.

Posted: **March 13th, 2006, 12:44 pm**

What Andrew Sullivan says in this article makes sense! He just may be on to something ...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0, ... 14,00.html
The Sunday Times March 12, 2006

Pro-lifers achieve a victory they can’t handle
Andrew Sullivan

One of the banes of American politics in the past 25 years or so has been the domination of ideology over pragmatism in political discourse. Sometimes it is invigorating: only in America do you still have a real, lively, evenly matched debate about whether gays are inferior to straights, whether the death penalty is a moral necessity, or whether embryonic stem-cell research is an abomination.

But for people caught in the middle — gay couples wanting some legal protections short of marriage, people with Parkinson’s needing scientific stem-cell research to save their own lives, or women dealing with an unexpected pregnancy — the polarisation offers no relief.

The safety valve is federalism, the constitutional system that allows different states to have different laws. And so in Massachusetts gay couples enjoy real equality under law — better than the British civil partnership compromise — while in Virginia they have reduced rights even to enter into private contracts. And President Bush can prevent federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research, while California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger can kick-start a massive programme designed to do exactly what the president abhors.

This is the way it is supposed to work, and in a country that includes both San Francisco and Salt Lake City, Greenwich Village and Colorado Springs, it makes a lot of sense. In the 1960s and early 1970s abortion laws were similarly diverse, with most states moving towards a European-style compromise — allowing for legal first-trimester abortions with an array of restrictions on others.

Then the Supreme Court stepped in, and in one of the more far-reaching cases in its history, Roe v Wade, ruled to designate abortion a constitutional right. And so, overnight, every state had to comply with the most liberal abortion regime imaginable. Even preventing the near-infanticide of late-term, partial-birth abortions became impossible. And the conservative Christian response to this piece of judicial overreach was critical to the emergence of what is now the religious right.

But last week came the glimmers of the end of that era. Despite two new justices on the Supreme Court who are supposed to be hostile to Roe, the court still has no secure majority for overturning it. But it’s getting closer and closer. The religious right, moreover, is in no mood to wait. So South Dakota became the first state to pass and have the governor sign a law that represents the full ambition of the pro-life movement. This is the moment they have long waited for.

And it’s the moment when their ideology may come undone. For decades the pro-life movement has railed against both Roe and activist courts and upped the rhetorical ante so that even the morning-after pill is regarded as tantamount to murder. Because the court ensured that pro-lifers’ principles would never be put into practice, they could entertain purist ideologies to their hearts’ content. But now they actually have to begin to deal with the practical implications of recriminalising abortion. And their first step has been instructive.

The South Dakota bill is Roe in reverse. It criminalises all abortions at any stage after conception. There are no exceptions even for rape, incest or the health of the mother. Even where the mother’s life may be at stake, the law demands that doctors “make reasonable medical efforts under the circumstances to preserve both the life of the mother and the life of her unborn child”. The penalty is five years in prison for the doctor.

The shrewder types in the pro-life movement don’t want this law passed right now. While they agree with the law in substance, they fear that the Supreme Court is not quite ready to legitimise such a drastic step. They worry that the law will get struck down swiftly and firmly and end up helping support Roe, scare the American centre and put back their cause.

The trouble they face, however, is a profound one. When you have spent the past couple of decades arguing that the abortion of a day-old zygote is morally indistinguishable from the killing of a 10-year-old child, you have essentially rejected any possibility of a compromise.

For the Republican party the dilemma is particularly acute. Karl Rove has reconstructed the party so that its core membership is that of evangelical Christians who believe politics should be governed by religious principles. These people can brook no compromise on the abortion issue and the gay issue. So they want a total ban on all abortions, and a constitutional ban on any legal protections for gay couples.

Most Americans, however, want something far less drastic. A large majority favours either civil unions or civil marriage for gay couples. And a big majority wants more restrictive abortion laws but not an outright ban — let alone something as draconian as South Dakota’s. In the past Karl Rove could pander to the religious base, knowing that the Supreme Court would never allow the issue to actually matter, or the laws to actually change.

He has now been hoisted on a faith-based petard. After South Dakota, the debate is transformed from an abstract discussion of whether you’re for “life” or for “choice” into a series of very practical questions. Should a doctor be prosecuted for first-degree or second-degree murder? Should the mother be prosecuted as well? How can we enforce an exception for rape or incest when we only have the word of a woman to that effect?

That debate itself galvanises the pro-choice Democratic voter, and freaks out the moderate Republicans as well. Gay marriage bans only ever affected a small minority, so it was hard for a backlash to the backlash to gain ground. But not on the abortion issue.

The lesson is an obvious one: be careful what you wish for. But the good news is that Americans will now have to abandon ideology for real politics: what can be done? How do we practically lower the abortion rate? How do we enforce abortion bans of varying degrees? That debate was prematurely ended three decades ago. The religious right and the Republican party may well regret that it is now poised to resume.

---- end article

Posted: **March 24th, 2006, 3:04 pm**

This business could be even better than gambling!

"Sioux Tribal Leader to Allow Abortions on Tribal Land in S. Dakota --
In South Dakota, the leader of the Oglala Sioux Tribe on the Pine Ridge Reservation has reportedly announced plans to allow Planned Parenthood to open a clinic on the reservation in defiance of the state's new ban on abortion. Cecilia Fire Thunder, who is a former nurse, said the clinic will be allowed to open because the state has no jurisdiction over tribal lands."

www.democracynow.org

Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

Ban on Most Abortions Advances in South Dakota

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