[Politico] Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows

Sounds silly but it is true. I can’t carry a fetus or baby. I can’t get pregnant… it’s not my body. It is really an issue for women.

 

SCOTUS is just another arm of the GOP right now. It's just about politics and no sense of law or justice. Constitution is interpreted to give conservatives what they want.

The real question what is the consequence of having a gov't from top to bottom designed to serve the interests of evangelical christians and the ultra rich?

If the gov't needs to fix elections by preventing more and more people from voting in order to allow a minority of people control a democracy, you have to think at some point it's going to collapse like a house of cards.

 

It’s official. The Republicans hate people with cancer.

 

@Os Trigonum and the media tells me libs have shifted faaaar left.

Who am I gunna vote fer then?

 

Right because to them, woke culture led by the LGBTQ is the greatest threat to this country, not stopping poor people from voting and taking peoples' rights away. So you better vote for those who are fighting for your right to post racist comments on Twitter, and not those fighting for you to being able to vote (so long as its for a Republican).

 

I'm not sure where you are getting these ideas from. The intent of Plan B is to prevent pregnancy, not terminate it. Less likely to be implanted could be the case - I'm not sure but to say that is the design is very wrong.

You described a process that eventually led to a human and confused that with actually being a life/baby/human (which was my original question). No one has a definite answer on when human life actually starts. Just because something is "live" (a cell is alive), doesn't mean it's actual life (or a human). It's all religious, philosophical, or personal opinion. I may, for example, claim the process of life starts with the creation of sperm (and it would be a true statement). I may have a personal opinion that life starts with the creation of sperm. In fact, if there is enough of my opinion out there, we as a group can successfully regulate how men handle their sperm. Masturbations should be illegal (yes, I know sperms die off by themselves, but that's nature instead of man caused so it's fine). This would be all based on my group's opinion, not science.

 

There are nearly 1 million miscarriages every year. I wouldn't be surprised if that number doubles after an abortion ban. Outside of stuffing prisons with a million women a year which will have massive cost to taxpayers and will let other criminals walk the street, you're now talking about adding 2 million potential murder investigations as every miscarriage will have to be treated as a potential crime.

So will a woman who has had a miscarriage now have to have a doctor examine her and provide blood samples to prove she did not take any kind of drug that causes a miscarriage? If a woman leaves the state and comes back without her baby - did she have an abortion or did she miscarriage naturally?

If you took plan B, there is no way for a doctor to be able to tell. So you may have to monitor women's blood constantly to see if they are inducing abortions. Have we learned nothing from the drug trade that once you make something illegal, it really has little impact on supply other than to create a black market that puts women's lives at risk?

This is madness, arguing that a zygote is the same as a human being is based on a belief system and not empirical data. It's a semantics argument, and not one based on any kind of scientific fact.

 

it's a philosophical argument/issue, not necessarily just a disagreement about semantics

 

Isn't that why the Catholic Church has opposed masturbation and contraception?

 

Abortion is one of those issues that really isn't much possibility of much agreement or change of minds. If you believe life begins at conception then abortion is murder.

I don't fault abortion opponents for that belief and other than a philosophical discussion I'm not sure there is much gained from that. What I think matters more is the political debate and what the implications of court rulings and laws. I think there it might be able to make progress and / or find common ground.

I'm not going to fault people for having the belief that life begins at conception but if the ultimate goal is to reduce abortion I think there are better ways of going about it than just legal bans.

 

His argument before was that because a zygote is "alive" and that since it has 46 chromosomes it is "human" there for it is a "living human" - I consider that a semantics argument vs a philosophical one.

Ultimately there isn't a scientific conclusion one can make about when is a human being a human being. It is a philosophical one, and one that is tied very closely to one's spiritual beliefs. And for that reason, I think it should be left out of the court room and left in the woman's mind.

The ideas around morality are largely defined by the larger context of a society and what will make that society function properly. Unfortunately, a lot of that gets tied to religion.

But we can all pretty much agree that murdering people, theft, violence, etc - tend to destabilize society and work to the detriment of the whole. So there's more than a moral issue with these, there's a functional one as well.

Abortion doesn't have a destabilizing impact on society. One can feel that a zygote is a human being and I can respect that belief, but to put that belief, that personal moral code, onto another person and dictate what they can and can not do to their own body is antithesis to someone's personal liberty and to me violates the constitution in that the state isn't allowed to institute religious beliefs.

 

I agree that it's pointless to argue beliefs. And people have their beliefs.

But to impose one's beliefs on others is what to me the issue is. The courts are doing just that, and are failing to uphold separation of church and state.

 

I disagree with this statement. If it's pointless to argue beliefs, what are any of us doing here? and how would we ever hope to change peoples' minds and effect social justice? this just strikes me as an aberrant statement coming from you, unless I misunderstand your point, which is probably the case

 

I think the issue of whether to call a ten-week entity either a "fetus" or a "baby" is a semantic question in the sense that you probably mean (although this semantic question is itself not without philosophical implications).

The question of whether a "zygote" is "human"--and the corresponding question of whether humanness therefore confers moral considerability--is a philosophical question . . . not just a terminological question.

 

I don't disagree with anything you are saying, I'm only speaking in terms of the specific argument that was being made to me.

 

got it

 

We can debate many things on here - what we think, how we evaluate something, or how we view something objectively.

But when it comes to beliefs, there's no point as no one will change their beliefs on here. For example, if someone believes in god, and someone else does not - that's not a debate that has any point - on here. It's been debated ad nauseam in everyone's lives by this point - I don't know anyone where that conversation changed anyone's mind.

 

as a teacher I have no idea what to say to that, other than that my experience over a long teaching career suggests otherwise. I have seen people change their minds over their own beliefs all the time, and on all kinds of topics.

 

Upon further research, Plan B is not abortifacient. Apparently the producer of the drug completed the description of it's effects before testing was fully complete and included prevention of implantation, even though this was not one of the actual effects.

No, I used the definitions of life and human. You can disagree with those definitions, I suppose, or use your own definitions, but the definitions I used were pretty straightforward and well accepted.
Life: the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death
Human: the species homo sapiens sapiens
Sperm is alive, but is not a member of the species homo sapiens sapiens because it is a gamete. It does not contain a full human genetic code, only half of one.

I agree. We should do things in addition to legal bans, such as increase access to contraceptives. Have hormonal IUDs available at low or no cost and push their use once girls start puberty (or as early as they are safe, I don't know if there is an age that IUDs should not be used). We should have comprehensive education on what causes pregnancy and how to avoid it at a time before students start puberty.

 

Sure, which is why I put "on here" meaning the D&D. As a teacher you are dealing with a group of individuals who are trying to learn for one reason or another, and your job is to help them learn and grow through knowledge.

In the D&D, it's just a bunch of Rockets fans debating and in most cases, spewing out their beliefs as a matter of venting. I am not going to get anyone to change deeply held beliefs through arguing with them. From my experiences, that's not how people change their minds. That's all I am saying.