But I’m struggling to get worked up over Roe v Wade.
It’s not covered by the constitution, nor by common law, and as far as I can tell the original SC justification was weak.
So let States decide, as ghastly as that must be for the poor women who have to live in said States.
I agree. I’m also highly pro-choice but if you actually look at the leaked, draft decision, it has merit. There is nothing in the US constitution which says women have a basic right to terminate a fetus. Finessing this as a right to privacy is bogus
The voters must decide in individual states, that’s democracy. Equally, democracy allows the president and senate to pass a law explicitly allowing abortion everywhere if they have enough votes in DC
This decision arguably allows such a vote to ban abortion nationwide, too. https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/1521311115392737280 If the Alito opinion savaging Roe and Casey ends up being the Opinion of the Court, it will unravel many basic rights beyond abortion and will go further than returning the issue to the states: It will enable a GOP Congress to enact a nationwide ban on abortion and contraception.
I’m not sure even the GOP are that stupid . To ban abortion nationwide would cause such a furore that they would be pulverized in future elections . And banning contraception would be unbelievable given most Americans aren’t Catholic.
The democracy angle is a red herring imo. An outright ban on abortion is removing a fundamental right of women that I think should be protected regardless of which party happens to be in power, state or federal level, at any one time. States' Rights - ie "democracy" - was offered in the 1960s as for why racial segregation should continue in parts of the South. It didn't wash then, as a reason for allowing something appalling, and for me it doesn't scrub up any better now.
Funnily enough, I bet you’d argue exactly the opposite way with regard to gun laws and the 2nd Amendment
I would, yes, and I'd be right to do so. Literal minded consistency, regardless of nuance and context, is the enemy of good judgement.
You are so brilliantly boring
Just brilliant, I think you mean. Fat fingers?
But let's not bicker about this abortion banning monstrosity - we clearly agree about it and that's rather precious.
We agree in practice, but I maybe see nuance where you apparently don’t. The unborn child also has rights as @Sean_F eloquently puts it downthread (better than me). Otherwise we’d have no moral problems with third trimester abortion of perfectly viable babies
When do those rights commence? It’s the devil of a question and I respect the beliefs of those who might put it at conception, even if I disagree
No, we don't have a "nuance" issue. I support the right to abortion but with controls around reasons and term limits. I don't support an outright ban or anything close to it.
Sean was making the obvious sound deep. He has a talent for that. So do lots of you grinders on here.
Ooo bitchy!
(but I love you all)
Your brain is so weirdly narrow.
There can be no “fundamental right’ in this debate, not when it comes down to a clash between the fundamental right of a baby to live, versus the fundamental rights of a woman to govern her own body
It’s like saying there is a “fundamental right of a home owner to shoot a burglar dead” or a “fundamental right of a woman to stab her abusive husband”
This is fiercely debatable stuff. It IS nuanced - because two basic rights are clashing
A ball of cells is not a baby. A ball of cells does not have fundamental rights. Calling it a “baby” doesn’t make it a baby. No-one actually treats the early embryo as if it is a baby outside of the abortion debate, because it’s not.
That's just your opinion, bro.
It is demonstrably true that no-one treats early embryos as babies outside of the abortion debate. Lots of early embryos fail to implant in the uterine wall and “die”, without the mother even noticing. If we thought these were babies, we would care about them, we’d want to know about them, we’d mourn them. We don’t. We pay them no attention. You probably had a “sibling” that failed to implant in your mother’s uterine wall. Have you ever mourned this sibling?
You hear people saying that heart disease is the biggest cause of death. Or maybe it’s meant to be cancer. If that ball of cells is a baby, then neither heart disease or cancer are the leading cause of death. It’s failure to implant in the uterine wall, that’s the leading cause of death, your logic says. Why do we spend £billions on treating and researching heart disease but basically nothing on the failure to implant in the uterine wall? Because no-one really believes these early embryos are actually people.
However, people feel a deep loss following a miscarriage in the early months of pregnancy. Why is that, unless they have lost a baby?
Show me someone who has felt deep loss for a failure to implant/miscarriage in the first *fortnight*, a deep loss like that felt when, say, a 6 month a baby dies. No-one does.
As time passes, that ball of cells becomes more and more of a person, so of course we can understand the deep loss people feel at later miscarriages. But the anti-abortionists say life begins at conception. I’m saying that, in reality, people do not act as if life begins at conception outside of abortion debates.
If you want to argue life “begins” at 1 month post-conception, or 2, or 3, those are more nuanced debates. Perhaps they are more nuanced than a political betting comments section can handle. I respect people may differ when quite they want to draw a cut-off date.
But the idea that “life” begins at conception is untenable with our natural biology where the majority of zygotes never make it.
From failure to implant through to stillbirth, there are plenty of conceptions that don't result in the birth of a child. The resulting level of sorrow increases from zero to devastation as the pregnancy progresses.
However, these are all natural processes, very different to active intervention to end the life of an unborn child.
A Tory police chief who pledged to crack down on speeding has been caught driving too fast five times in three months.
Caroline Henry, the Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) for Nottinghamshire, was caught breaking a 30mph limit in a blue Mercedes and a silver Lexus with a personalised number plate between March and June last year.
The five offences took place while she was still campaigning to be the new crime commissioner and after she was elected to the role in May 2021.
Mrs Henry, 52, admitted the offences, including two committed on consecutive days, at a previous hearing in February at Nottingham Magistrates’ Court.
Magistrates were told Mrs Henry, who is the wife of Darren Henry, Broxtowe MP, had written a letter to the court saying she was “very sorry, embarrassed and ashamed”.
A potential PCC by-election. What a mouth watering prospect.
Voters of Nottinghamshire - better get practicing drawing a cock and balls.
Remarkably, turnout for the Wiltshire PCC by-election in August 2021 (after the winner of the May election could not take up his position) was a comparitively decent 16%. Terrible by any other election, but actually higher than the first such election in Wiltshire where turnout was only 15%, which considering the date and no other elections being on wasn't bad.
Another Tory criminal law breaker.
They are coming on a weekly basis.
Fag end of a government long overdue a refresh in oppisition.
What a low the party is plumbing these days.
Surely even PB tories must admit the party now needs a period in opposition and sort out the sleaze and criminality and the kinds of people it makes as candidates.
Only a period? I'm starting to think they deserve an eternity.
An eternity might create its own problems. Democracy needs a viable opposition.
But given how bad things are now for the reputation of the Conservatives, and that we may have another 2.5 years of this to come, and that the worse it gets the further away the next GE will be pushed, it could easily be a political generation. However long it takes for all the big beasts of this government to retire into obscurity.
But I’m struggling to get worked up over Roe v Wade.
It’s not covered by the constitution, nor by common law, and as far as I can tell the original SC justification was weak.
So let States decide, as ghastly as that must be for the poor women who have to live in said States.
I agree. I’m also highly pro-choice but if you actually look at the leaked, draft decision, it has merit. There is nothing in the US constitution which says women have a basic right to terminate a fetus. Finessing this as a right to privacy is bogus
The voters must decide in individual states, that’s democracy. Equally, democracy allows the president and senate to pass a law explicitly allowing abortion everywhere if they have enough votes in DC
This decision arguably allows such a vote to ban abortion nationwide, too. https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/1521311115392737280 If the Alito opinion savaging Roe and Casey ends up being the Opinion of the Court, it will unravel many basic rights beyond abortion and will go further than returning the issue to the states: It will enable a GOP Congress to enact a nationwide ban on abortion and contraception.
I’m not sure even the GOP are that stupid . To ban abortion nationwide would cause such a furore that they would be pulverized in future elections . And banning contraception would be unbelievable given most Americans aren’t Catholic.
The democracy angle is a red herring imo. An outright ban on abortion is removing a fundamental right of women that I think should be protected regardless of which party happens to be in power, state or federal level, at any one time. States' Rights - ie "democracy" - was offered in the 1960s as for why racial segregation should continue in parts of the South. It didn't wash then, as a reason for allowing something appalling, and for me it doesn't scrub up any better now.
Funnily enough, I bet you’d argue exactly the opposite way with regard to gun laws and the 2nd Amendment
I would, yes, and I'd be right to do so. Literal minded consistency, regardless of nuance and context, is the enemy of good judgement.
Whilst I believe we are on the same side as regards the abortion debate and many other liberal positions, your argument fails utterly because of that inconsistency. You cannot argue that States rights are wrong when they are about something you are opposed to such as restrictions on abortion but then argue they are right regarding the 2nd amendment. You have advocated literal minded consistency in one post and then argued against it in the next.
No, I'm gold. It goes like this -
Fundamental human rights should be enshrined. A woman's access to safe and legal abortion is one such. The right to bear arms is not.
People can disagree - both on whether fundamental human rights should be enshrined and if so on what they are - but there's no 'utter fail through inconsistency'. As if!
The notion that abortion on demand is a fundamental human right is ridiculous.
Moreso that in a game of Rights Top Trumps it beats the right to life of the unborn child.
Access to safe and legal abortion with controls around reason and with term limits. The consensus settlement in the West after the struggles of the civil rights era. This is what is under threat in the US. Having been in the vanguard on female empowerment they now seek to roll it back. That's how it looks to me.
If the USA had legalised abortion in Congress, ie in the same manner as other western countries legalised abortion in their parliaments, then there wouldn't have been decades of argument and the current situation.
Instead it was done by court cases.
Ok, yes, but I think this (and certain other imperatives) should be enshrined in something that operates above the level of national governments. So, if a government does something which potentially violates one of these fundamental human rights it can be taken to this higher body and is answerable to it. And this applies even if it passes a law saying otherwise. I realize this cuts across the notion of absolute national sovereignty and of a 'majority rules ok' idea of democracy but that's a feature, imo, not a bug.
But I’m struggling to get worked up over Roe v Wade.
It’s not covered by the constitution, nor by common law, and as far as I can tell the original SC justification was weak.
So let States decide, as ghastly as that must be for the poor women who have to live in said States.
I agree. I’m also highly pro-choice but if you actually look at the leaked, draft decision, it has merit. There is nothing in the US constitution which says women have a basic right to terminate a fetus. Finessing this as a right to privacy is bogus
The voters must decide in individual states, that’s democracy. Equally, democracy allows the president and senate to pass a law explicitly allowing abortion everywhere if they have enough votes in DC
This decision arguably allows such a vote to ban abortion nationwide, too. https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/1521311115392737280 If the Alito opinion savaging Roe and Casey ends up being the Opinion of the Court, it will unravel many basic rights beyond abortion and will go further than returning the issue to the states: It will enable a GOP Congress to enact a nationwide ban on abortion and contraception.
I’m not sure even the GOP are that stupid . To ban abortion nationwide would cause such a furore that they would be pulverized in future elections . And banning contraception would be unbelievable given most Americans aren’t Catholic.
The democracy angle is a red herring imo. An outright ban on abortion is removing a fundamental right of women that I think should be protected regardless of which party happens to be in power, state or federal level, at any one time. States' Rights - ie "democracy" - was offered in the 1960s as for why racial segregation should continue in parts of the South. It didn't wash then, as a reason for allowing something appalling, and for me it doesn't scrub up any better now.
Funnily enough, I bet you’d argue exactly the opposite way with regard to gun laws and the 2nd Amendment
I would, yes, and I'd be right to do so. Literal minded consistency, regardless of nuance and context, is the enemy of good judgement.
You are so brilliantly boring
Just brilliant, I think you mean. Fat fingers?
But let's not bicker about this abortion banning monstrosity - we clearly agree about it and that's rather precious.
We agree in practice, but I maybe see nuance where you apparently don’t. The unborn child also has rights as @Sean_F eloquently puts it downthread (better than me). Otherwise we’d have no moral problems with third trimester abortion of perfectly viable babies
When do those rights commence? It’s the devil of a question and I respect the beliefs of those who might put it at conception, even if I disagree
No, we don't have a "nuance" issue. I support the right to abortion but with controls around reasons and term limits. I don't support an outright ban or anything close to it.
Sean was making the obvious sound deep. He has a talent for that. So do lots of you grinders on here.
Ooo bitchy!
(but I love you all)
Your brain is so weirdly narrow.
There can be no “fundamental right’ in this debate, not when it comes down to a clash between the fundamental right of a baby to live, versus the fundamental rights of a woman to govern her own body
It’s like saying there is a “fundamental right of a home owner to shoot a burglar dead” or a “fundamental right of a woman to stab her abusive husband”
This is fiercely debatable stuff. It IS nuanced - because two basic rights are clashing
A ball of cells is not a baby. A ball of cells does not have fundamental rights. Calling it a “baby” doesn’t make it a baby. No-one actually treats the early embryo as if it is a baby outside of the abortion debate, because it’s not.
That's just your opinion, bro.
It is demonstrably true that no-one treats early embryos as babies outside of the abortion debate. Lots of early embryos fail to implant in the uterine wall and “die”, without the mother even noticing. If we thought these were babies, we would care about them, we’d want to know about them, we’d mourn them. We don’t. We pay them no attention. You probably had a “sibling” that failed to implant in your mother’s uterine wall. Have you ever mourned this sibling?
You hear people saying that heart disease is the biggest cause of death. Or maybe it’s meant to be cancer. If that ball of cells is a baby, then neither heart disease or cancer are the leading cause of death. It’s failure to implant in the uterine wall, that’s the leading cause of death, your logic says. Why do we spend £billions on treating and researching heart disease but basically nothing on the failure to implant in the uterine wall? Because no-one really believes these early embryos are actually people.
However, people feel a deep loss following a miscarriage in the early months of pregnancy. Why is that, unless they have lost a baby?
Show me someone who has felt deep loss for a failure to implant/miscarriage in the first *fortnight*, a deep loss like that felt when, say, a 6 month a baby dies. No-one does.
As time passes, that ball of cells becomes more and more of a person, so of course we can understand the deep loss people feel at later miscarriages. But the anti-abortionists say life begins at conception. I’m saying that, in reality, people do not act as if life begins at conception outside of abortion debates.
If you want to argue life “begins” at 1 month post-conception, or 2, or 3, those are more nuanced debates. Perhaps they are more nuanced than a political betting comments section can handle. I respect people may differ when quite they want to draw a cut-off date.
But the idea that “life” begins at conception is untenable with our natural biology where the majority of zygotes never make it.
From failure to implant through to stillbirth, there are plenty of conceptions that don't result in the birth of a child. The resulting level of sorrow increases from zero to devastation as the pregnancy progresses.
However, these are all natural processes, very different to active intervention to end the life of an unborn child.
A fertilized ovum is not a child.
So when does it become one? And does that matter in this debate?
At birth.
What is special about birth? Topologically speaking, it's just moving from inside a cylinder to outside it. Biologically, it is going from 100% dependency on the mother to 100% dependency on the mother.
As I have already asked, would your answer differ if humans were marsupial? Why?
But I’m struggling to get worked up over Roe v Wade.
It’s not covered by the constitution, nor by common law, and as far as I can tell the original SC justification was weak.
So let States decide, as ghastly as that must be for the poor women who have to live in said States.
I agree. I’m also highly pro-choice but if you actually look at the leaked, draft decision, it has merit. There is nothing in the US constitution which says women have a basic right to terminate a fetus. Finessing this as a right to privacy is bogus
The voters must decide in individual states, that’s democracy. Equally, democracy allows the president and senate to pass a law explicitly allowing abortion everywhere if they have enough votes in DC
This decision arguably allows such a vote to ban abortion nationwide, too. https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/1521311115392737280 If the Alito opinion savaging Roe and Casey ends up being the Opinion of the Court, it will unravel many basic rights beyond abortion and will go further than returning the issue to the states: It will enable a GOP Congress to enact a nationwide ban on abortion and contraception.
I’m not sure even the GOP are that stupid . To ban abortion nationwide would cause such a furore that they would be pulverized in future elections . And banning contraception would be unbelievable given most Americans aren’t Catholic.
The democracy angle is a red herring imo. An outright ban on abortion is removing a fundamental right of women that I think should be protected regardless of which party happens to be in power, state or federal level, at any one time. States' Rights - ie "democracy" - was offered in the 1960s as for why racial segregation should continue in parts of the South. It didn't wash then, as a reason for allowing something appalling, and for me it doesn't scrub up any better now.
Funnily enough, I bet you’d argue exactly the opposite way with regard to gun laws and the 2nd Amendment
I would, yes, and I'd be right to do so. Literal minded consistency, regardless of nuance and context, is the enemy of good judgement.
You are so brilliantly boring
Just brilliant, I think you mean. Fat fingers?
But let's not bicker about this abortion banning monstrosity - we clearly agree about it and that's rather precious.
We agree in practice, but I maybe see nuance where you apparently don’t. The unborn child also has rights as @Sean_F eloquently puts it downthread (better than me). Otherwise we’d have no moral problems with third trimester abortion of perfectly viable babies
When do those rights commence? It’s the devil of a question and I respect the beliefs of those who might put it at conception, even if I disagree
No, we don't have a "nuance" issue. I support the right to abortion but with controls around reasons and term limits. I don't support an outright ban or anything close to it.
Sean was making the obvious sound deep. He has a talent for that. So do lots of you grinders on here.
Ooo bitchy!
(but I love you all)
Your brain is so weirdly narrow.
There can be no “fundamental right’ in this debate, not when it comes down to a clash between the fundamental right of a baby to live, versus the fundamental rights of a woman to govern her own body
It’s like saying there is a “fundamental right of a home owner to shoot a burglar dead” or a “fundamental right of a woman to stab her abusive husband”
This is fiercely debatable stuff. It IS nuanced - because two basic rights are clashing
A ball of cells is not a baby. A ball of cells does not have fundamental rights. Calling it a “baby” doesn’t make it a baby. No-one actually treats the early embryo as if it is a baby outside of the abortion debate, because it’s not.
That's just your opinion, bro.
It is demonstrably true that no-one treats early embryos as babies outside of the abortion debate. Lots of early embryos fail to implant in the uterine wall and “die”, without the mother even noticing. If we thought these were babies, we would care about them, we’d want to know about them, we’d mourn them. We don’t. We pay them no attention. You probably had a “sibling” that failed to implant in your mother’s uterine wall. Have you ever mourned this sibling?
You hear people saying that heart disease is the biggest cause of death. Or maybe it’s meant to be cancer. If that ball of cells is a baby, then neither heart disease or cancer are the leading cause of death. It’s failure to implant in the uterine wall, that’s the leading cause of death, your logic says. Why do we spend £billions on treating and researching heart disease but basically nothing on the failure to implant in the uterine wall? Because no-one really believes these early embryos are actually people.
However, people feel a deep loss following a miscarriage in the early months of pregnancy. Why is that, unless they have lost a baby?
Show me someone who has felt deep loss for a failure to implant/miscarriage in the first *fortnight*, a deep loss like that felt when, say, a 6 month a baby dies. No-one does.
As time passes, that ball of cells becomes more and more of a person, so of course we can understand the deep loss people feel at later miscarriages. But the anti-abortionists say life begins at conception. I’m saying that, in reality, people do not act as if life begins at conception outside of abortion debates.
If you want to argue life “begins” at 1 month post-conception, or 2, or 3, those are more nuanced debates. Perhaps they are more nuanced than a political betting comments section can handle. I respect people may differ when quite they want to draw a cut-off date.
But the idea that “life” begins at conception is untenable with our natural biology where the majority of zygotes never make it.
From failure to implant through to stillbirth, there are plenty of conceptions that don't result in the birth of a child. The resulting level of sorrow increases from zero to devastation as the pregnancy progresses.
However, these are all natural processes, very different to active intervention to end the life of an unborn child.
A fertilized ovum is not a child.
So when does it become one? And does that matter in this debate?
A Tory police chief who pledged to crack down on speeding has been caught driving too fast five times in three months.
Caroline Henry, the Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) for Nottinghamshire, was caught breaking a 30mph limit in a blue Mercedes and a silver Lexus with a personalised number plate between March and June last year.
The five offences took place while she was still campaigning to be the new crime commissioner and after she was elected to the role in May 2021.
Mrs Henry, 52, admitted the offences, including two committed on consecutive days, at a previous hearing in February at Nottingham Magistrates’ Court.
Magistrates were told Mrs Henry, who is the wife of Darren Henry, Broxtowe MP, had written a letter to the court saying she was “very sorry, embarrassed and ashamed”.
A potential PCC by-election. What a mouth watering prospect.
Voters of Nottinghamshire - better get practicing drawing a cock and balls.
Remarkably, turnout for the Wiltshire PCC by-election in August 2021 (after the winner of the May election could not take up his position) was a comparitively decent 16%. Terrible by any other election, but actually higher than the first such election in Wiltshire where turnout was only 15%, which considering the date and no other elections being on wasn't bad.
Another Tory criminal law breaker.
They are coming on a weekly basis.
Fag end of a government long overdue a refresh in oppisition.
What a low the party is plumbing these days.
Surely even PB tories must admit the party now needs a period in opposition and sort out the sleaze and criminality and the kinds of people it makes as candidates.
Only a period? I'm starting to think they deserve an eternity.
An eternity might create its own problems. Democracy needs a viable opposition.
But given how bad things are now for the reputation of the Conservatives, and that we may have another 2.5 years of this to come, and that the worse it gets the further away the next GE will be pushed, it could easily be a political generation. However long it takes for all the big beasts of this government to retire into obscurity.
Well Labour were out of power for 18 years from 1979 to 1997, the Conservatives were out of power for 13 years from 1997 to 2010 and Labour have been out of power for 12 years since they lost power in 2010.
You have to go back to the 1970s to find the last time a party which lost power returned to power in less than a decade
But I’m struggling to get worked up over Roe v Wade.
It’s not covered by the constitution, nor by common law, and as far as I can tell the original SC justification was weak.
So let States decide, as ghastly as that must be for the poor women who have to live in said States.
I agree. I’m also highly pro-choice but if you actually look at the leaked, draft decision, it has merit. There is nothing in the US constitution which says women have a basic right to terminate a fetus. Finessing this as a right to privacy is bogus
The voters must decide in individual states, that’s democracy. Equally, democracy allows the president and senate to pass a law explicitly allowing abortion everywhere if they have enough votes in DC
This decision arguably allows such a vote to ban abortion nationwide, too. https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/1521311115392737280 If the Alito opinion savaging Roe and Casey ends up being the Opinion of the Court, it will unravel many basic rights beyond abortion and will go further than returning the issue to the states: It will enable a GOP Congress to enact a nationwide ban on abortion and contraception.
I’m not sure even the GOP are that stupid . To ban abortion nationwide would cause such a furore that they would be pulverized in future elections . And banning contraception would be unbelievable given most Americans aren’t Catholic.
The democracy angle is a red herring imo. An outright ban on abortion is removing a fundamental right of women that I think should be protected regardless of which party happens to be in power, state or federal level, at any one time. States' Rights - ie "democracy" - was offered in the 1960s as for why racial segregation should continue in parts of the South. It didn't wash then, as a reason for allowing something appalling, and for me it doesn't scrub up any better now.
Funnily enough, I bet you’d argue exactly the opposite way with regard to gun laws and the 2nd Amendment
I would, yes, and I'd be right to do so. Literal minded consistency, regardless of nuance and context, is the enemy of good judgement.
You are so brilliantly boring
Just brilliant, I think you mean. Fat fingers?
But let's not bicker about this abortion banning monstrosity - we clearly agree about it and that's rather precious.
We agree in practice, but I maybe see nuance where you apparently don’t. The unborn child also has rights as @Sean_F eloquently puts it downthread (better than me). Otherwise we’d have no moral problems with third trimester abortion of perfectly viable babies
When do those rights commence? It’s the devil of a question and I respect the beliefs of those who might put it at conception, even if I disagree
No, we don't have a "nuance" issue. I support the right to abortion but with controls around reasons and term limits. I don't support an outright ban or anything close to it.
Sean was making the obvious sound deep. He has a talent for that. So do lots of you grinders on here.
Ooo bitchy!
(but I love you all)
Your brain is so weirdly narrow.
There can be no “fundamental right’ in this debate, not when it comes down to a clash between the fundamental right of a baby to live, versus the fundamental rights of a woman to govern her own body
It’s like saying there is a “fundamental right of a home owner to shoot a burglar dead” or a “fundamental right of a woman to stab her abusive husband”
This is fiercely debatable stuff. It IS nuanced - because two basic rights are clashing
A ball of cells is not a baby. A ball of cells does not have fundamental rights. Calling it a “baby” doesn’t make it a baby. No-one actually treats the early embryo as if it is a baby outside of the abortion debate, because it’s not.
That's just your opinion, bro.
It is demonstrably true that no-one treats early embryos as babies outside of the abortion debate. Lots of early embryos fail to implant in the uterine wall and “die”, without the mother even noticing. If we thought these were babies, we would care about them, we’d want to know about them, we’d mourn them. We don’t. We pay them no attention. You probably had a “sibling” that failed to implant in your mother’s uterine wall. Have you ever mourned this sibling?
You hear people saying that heart disease is the biggest cause of death. Or maybe it’s meant to be cancer. If that ball of cells is a baby, then neither heart disease or cancer are the leading cause of death. It’s failure to implant in the uterine wall, that’s the leading cause of death, your logic says. Why do we spend £billions on treating and researching heart disease but basically nothing on the failure to implant in the uterine wall? Because no-one really believes these early embryos are actually people.
A straw man. No one on PB at this moment - as far as I can see - is adopting the fundamentalist, theo-American, Ban All Abortion argument. Everyone is at least in favour of choice, at least early in the pregnancy. It is after that when it gets thorny. Obvs
There are plenty of people in the US who take that view, mind.
The Pope criticises "Nato barking at Russia’s gate" and suspects the invasion was "facilitated by the West’s attitude". He also questions whether weapons should be sent to Ukraine.
The less said by that kiddy fiddler institution the better it seems.
I don't agree with what he said, but calling the Pope a "kiddy fiddler" just demonstrates to us all (if we needed further evidence) what an ignorant unpleasant and unthinking right wing bigot you are.
Indeed and when Bartholmew Roberts posted under his name Phillip Thompson he said he would be happy to see the Troubles return to Northern Ireland as a price worth paying for a pure Brexit.
I think Barty Bobbins is a total ratbag. But I agree, we need to maintain this standard.
Mods might want to consider this issue.
A blind man on a galloping camel knows that xxxxx is Roberts. I don't agree with posters being able to whitewash their posting history. Though in the case of RT I can understand why he wants to do it. To have hero worshipped Johnson over 99,000 posts would have embarrassed anyone.
Doxxing is strictly forbidden, and I will ban posters who engage in it.
If 'doxxing' means referring to a previous poster's username isn't that inconsistent? A poster who keeps his original username can have posts from years ago dredged up whereas those who change their usernames presumably can't?
Makes no sense to me. Maybe I'll call myself Philip Thompson.
Maybe Bart isn’t Pihlip Thompson? Who the F knows?
Why not just respect his desire to be addressed by his username and stop being a stupid dick
Yes, I think it matters to use preferred name and pronouns, not to "dead-name" someone who self-identifies with a new name.
But I’m struggling to get worked up over Roe v Wade.
It’s not covered by the constitution, nor by common law, and as far as I can tell the original SC justification was weak.
So let States decide, as ghastly as that must be for the poor women who have to live in said States.
I agree. I’m also highly pro-choice but if you actually look at the leaked, draft decision, it has merit. There is nothing in the US constitution which says women have a basic right to terminate a fetus. Finessing this as a right to privacy is bogus
The voters must decide in individual states, that’s democracy. Equally, democracy allows the president and senate to pass a law explicitly allowing abortion everywhere if they have enough votes in DC
This decision arguably allows such a vote to ban abortion nationwide, too. https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/1521311115392737280 If the Alito opinion savaging Roe and Casey ends up being the Opinion of the Court, it will unravel many basic rights beyond abortion and will go further than returning the issue to the states: It will enable a GOP Congress to enact a nationwide ban on abortion and contraception.
I’m not sure even the GOP are that stupid . To ban abortion nationwide would cause such a furore that they would be pulverized in future elections . And banning contraception would be unbelievable given most Americans aren’t Catholic.
The democracy angle is a red herring imo. An outright ban on abortion is removing a fundamental right of women that I think should be protected regardless of which party happens to be in power, state or federal level, at any one time. States' Rights - ie "democracy" - was offered in the 1960s as for why racial segregation should continue in parts of the South. It didn't wash then, as a reason for allowing something appalling, and for me it doesn't scrub up any better now.
Funnily enough, I bet you’d argue exactly the opposite way with regard to gun laws and the 2nd Amendment
I would, yes, and I'd be right to do so. Literal minded consistency, regardless of nuance and context, is the enemy of good judgement.
You are so brilliantly boring
Just brilliant, I think you mean. Fat fingers?
But let's not bicker about this abortion banning monstrosity - we clearly agree about it and that's rather precious.
We agree in practice, but I maybe see nuance where you apparently don’t. The unborn child also has rights as @Sean_F eloquently puts it downthread (better than me). Otherwise we’d have no moral problems with third trimester abortion of perfectly viable babies
When do those rights commence? It’s the devil of a question and I respect the beliefs of those who might put it at conception, even if I disagree
No, we don't have a "nuance" issue. I support the right to abortion but with controls around reasons and term limits. I don't support an outright ban or anything close to it.
Sean was making the obvious sound deep. He has a talent for that. So do lots of you grinders on here.
Ooo bitchy!
(but I love you all)
Your brain is so weirdly narrow.
There can be no “fundamental right’ in this debate, not when it comes down to a clash between the fundamental right of a baby to live, versus the fundamental rights of a woman to govern her own body
It’s like saying there is a “fundamental right of a home owner to shoot a burglar dead” or a “fundamental right of a woman to stab her abusive husband”
This is fiercely debatable stuff. It IS nuanced - because two basic rights are clashing
A ball of cells is not a baby. A ball of cells does not have fundamental rights. Calling it a “baby” doesn’t make it a baby. No-one actually treats the early embryo as if it is a baby outside of the abortion debate, because it’s not.
That's just your opinion, bro.
It is demonstrably true that no-one treats early embryos as babies outside of the abortion debate. Lots of early embryos fail to implant in the uterine wall and “die”, without the mother even noticing. If we thought these were babies, we would care about them, we’d want to know about them, we’d mourn them. We don’t. We pay them no attention. You probably had a “sibling” that failed to implant in your mother’s uterine wall. Have you ever mourned this sibling?
You hear people saying that heart disease is the biggest cause of death. Or maybe it’s meant to be cancer. If that ball of cells is a baby, then neither heart disease or cancer are the leading cause of death. It’s failure to implant in the uterine wall, that’s the leading cause of death, your logic says. Why do we spend £billions on treating and researching heart disease but basically nothing on the failure to implant in the uterine wall? Because no-one really believes these early embryos are actually people.
However, people feel a deep loss following a miscarriage in the early months of pregnancy. Why is that, unless they have lost a baby?
Show me someone who has felt deep loss for a failure to implant/miscarriage in the first *fortnight*, a deep loss like that felt when, say, a 6 month a baby dies. No-one does.
As time passes, that ball of cells becomes more and more of a person, so of course we can understand the deep loss people feel at later miscarriages. But the anti-abortionists say life begins at conception. I’m saying that, in reality, people do not act as if life begins at conception outside of abortion debates.
If you want to argue life “begins” at 1 month post-conception, or 2, or 3, those are more nuanced debates. Perhaps they are more nuanced than a political betting comments section can handle. I respect people may differ when quite they want to draw a cut-off date.
But the idea that “life” begins at conception is untenable with our natural biology where the majority of zygotes never make it.
From failure to implant through to stillbirth, there are plenty of conceptions that don't result in the birth of a child. The resulting level of sorrow increases from zero to devastation as the pregnancy progresses.
However, these are all natural processes, very different to active intervention to end the life of an unborn child.
A fertilized ovum is not a child.
So when does it become one? And does that matter in this debate?
At birth.
In Virginia, there was a bill introduced that would effectively have allowed abortion up to the point of birth for that reason. Would you have agreed with that?
But I’m struggling to get worked up over Roe v Wade.
It’s not covered by the constitution, nor by common law, and as far as I can tell the original SC justification was weak.
So let States decide, as ghastly as that must be for the poor women who have to live in said States.
I agree. I’m also highly pro-choice but if you actually look at the leaked, draft decision, it has merit. There is nothing in the US constitution which says women have a basic right to terminate a fetus. Finessing this as a right to privacy is bogus
The voters must decide in individual states, that’s democracy. Equally, democracy allows the president and senate to pass a law explicitly allowing abortion everywhere if they have enough votes in DC
This decision arguably allows such a vote to ban abortion nationwide, too. https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/1521311115392737280 If the Alito opinion savaging Roe and Casey ends up being the Opinion of the Court, it will unravel many basic rights beyond abortion and will go further than returning the issue to the states: It will enable a GOP Congress to enact a nationwide ban on abortion and contraception.
I’m not sure even the GOP are that stupid . To ban abortion nationwide would cause such a furore that they would be pulverized in future elections . And banning contraception would be unbelievable given most Americans aren’t Catholic.
The democracy angle is a red herring imo. An outright ban on abortion is removing a fundamental right of women that I think should be protected regardless of which party happens to be in power, state or federal level, at any one time. States' Rights - ie "democracy" - was offered in the 1960s as for why racial segregation should continue in parts of the South. It didn't wash then, as a reason for allowing something appalling, and for me it doesn't scrub up any better now.
Funnily enough, I bet you’d argue exactly the opposite way with regard to gun laws and the 2nd Amendment
I would, yes, and I'd be right to do so. Literal minded consistency, regardless of nuance and context, is the enemy of good judgement.
You are so brilliantly boring
Just brilliant, I think you mean. Fat fingers?
But let's not bicker about this abortion banning monstrosity - we clearly agree about it and that's rather precious.
We agree in practice, but I maybe see nuance where you apparently don’t. The unborn child also has rights as @Sean_F eloquently puts it downthread (better than me). Otherwise we’d have no moral problems with third trimester abortion of perfectly viable babies
When do those rights commence? It’s the devil of a question and I respect the beliefs of those who might put it at conception, even if I disagree
No, we don't have a "nuance" issue. I support the right to abortion but with controls around reasons and term limits. I don't support an outright ban or anything close to it.
Sean was making the obvious sound deep. He has a talent for that. So do lots of you grinders on here.
Ooo bitchy!
(but I love you all)
Your brain is so weirdly narrow.
There can be no “fundamental right’ in this debate, not when it comes down to a clash between the fundamental right of a baby to live, versus the fundamental rights of a woman to govern her own body
It’s like saying there is a “fundamental right of a home owner to shoot a burglar dead” or a “fundamental right of a woman to stab her abusive husband”
This is fiercely debatable stuff. It IS nuanced - because two basic rights are clashing
A ball of cells is not a baby. A ball of cells does not have fundamental rights. Calling it a “baby” doesn’t make it a baby. No-one actually treats the early embryo as if it is a baby outside of the abortion debate, because it’s not.
That's just your opinion, bro.
It is demonstrably true that no-one treats early embryos as babies outside of the abortion debate. Lots of early embryos fail to implant in the uterine wall and “die”, without the mother even noticing. If we thought these were babies, we would care about them, we’d want to know about them, we’d mourn them. We don’t. We pay them no attention. You probably had a “sibling” that failed to implant in your mother’s uterine wall. Have you ever mourned this sibling?
You hear people saying that heart disease is the biggest cause of death. Or maybe it’s meant to be cancer. If that ball of cells is a baby, then neither heart disease or cancer are the leading cause of death. It’s failure to implant in the uterine wall, that’s the leading cause of death, your logic says. Why do we spend £billions on treating and researching heart disease but basically nothing on the failure to implant in the uterine wall? Because no-one really believes these early embryos are actually people.
However, people feel a deep loss following a miscarriage in the early months of pregnancy. Why is that, unless they have lost a baby?
Show me someone who has felt deep loss for a failure to implant/miscarriage in the first *fortnight*, a deep loss like that felt when, say, a 6 month a baby dies. No-one does.
As time passes, that ball of cells becomes more and more of a person, so of course we can understand the deep loss people feel at later miscarriages. But the anti-abortionists say life begins at conception. I’m saying that, in reality, people do not act as if life begins at conception outside of abortion debates.
If you want to argue life “begins” at 1 month post-conception, or 2, or 3, those are more nuanced debates. Perhaps they are more nuanced than a political betting comments section can handle. I respect people may differ when quite they want to draw a cut-off date.
But the idea that “life” begins at conception is untenable with our natural biology where the majority of zygotes never make it.
From failure to implant through to stillbirth, there are plenty of conceptions that don't result in the birth of a child. The resulting level of sorrow increases from zero to devastation as the pregnancy progresses.
However, these are all natural processes, very different to active intervention to end the life of an unborn child.
When a (born) child dies from natural causes, we mourn the death. We raise funds for medical research to prevent such deaths. We fight all we can to save that life.
When a very early embryo “dies” of natural causes, we don’t do any of that. No-one actually treats that ball of cells as “an unborn child”. Except when they want to ban abortion. Then they pretend, they make up stories. That ball of cells is a “child” when we want to control women’s lives, when we want to moralise about sex, but not otherwise.
Without spending the rest of the evening reading medical journals to confirm, I am fairly confident that there is medical research into the causes of failure to implant, which can result in some women having considerable difficulty in having children.
And I certainly don't moralise about sex.
There is something called Recurrent Implantation Failure as a problem among those trying IVF. There is research into it, although it attracts a tiny amount of funding compared to cancer or heart disease. These is research into those who have difficulty conceiving; again attracting little attention comparatively. We see these as problems affecting the people who want to be parents. We don’t see them as problems “killing” millions — indeed billions — of “unborn children”.
That a typical natural conception event has a probability below a third of getting to the second trimester, that’s just taken to be how human reproduction works. That is just how human reproduction works. No-one is trying to “save” these supposed “unborn children”. As long as you’re averaging around the typical conception rate, we don’t do anything medically. We just tell you to keep creating those zygotes.
Perhaps the Catholic Church left you ignorant of all this. Perhaps you garnered the impression that God designed us such that conception usually means a baby being born. God didn’t. If God exists, he designed us so that most conception events go nowhere. Either Heaven is full of microscopic balls of cells or God doesn’t think they’re “unborn children” either.
But I’m struggling to get worked up over Roe v Wade.
It’s not covered by the constitution, nor by common law, and as far as I can tell the original SC justification was weak.
So let States decide, as ghastly as that must be for the poor women who have to live in said States.
I agree. I’m also highly pro-choice but if you actually look at the leaked, draft decision, it has merit. There is nothing in the US constitution which says women have a basic right to terminate a fetus. Finessing this as a right to privacy is bogus
The voters must decide in individual states, that’s democracy. Equally, democracy allows the president and senate to pass a law explicitly allowing abortion everywhere if they have enough votes in DC
This decision arguably allows such a vote to ban abortion nationwide, too. https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/1521311115392737280 If the Alito opinion savaging Roe and Casey ends up being the Opinion of the Court, it will unravel many basic rights beyond abortion and will go further than returning the issue to the states: It will enable a GOP Congress to enact a nationwide ban on abortion and contraception.
I’m not sure even the GOP are that stupid . To ban abortion nationwide would cause such a furore that they would be pulverized in future elections . And banning contraception would be unbelievable given most Americans aren’t Catholic.
The democracy angle is a red herring imo. An outright ban on abortion is removing a fundamental right of women that I think should be protected regardless of which party happens to be in power, state or federal level, at any one time. States' Rights - ie "democracy" - was offered in the 1960s as for why racial segregation should continue in parts of the South. It didn't wash then, as a reason for allowing something appalling, and for me it doesn't scrub up any better now.
Funnily enough, I bet you’d argue exactly the opposite way with regard to gun laws and the 2nd Amendment
I would, yes, and I'd be right to do so. Literal minded consistency, regardless of nuance and context, is the enemy of good judgement.
Whilst I believe we are on the same side as regards the abortion debate and many other liberal positions, your argument fails utterly because of that inconsistency. You cannot argue that States rights are wrong when they are about something you are opposed to such as restrictions on abortion but then argue they are right regarding the 2nd amendment. You have advocated literal minded consistency in one post and then argued against it in the next.
No, I'm gold. It goes like this -
Fundamental human rights should be enshrined. A woman's access to safe and legal abortion is one such. The right to bear arms is not.
People can disagree - both on whether fundamental human rights should be enshrined and if so on what they are - but there's no 'utter fail through inconsistency'. As if!
The notion that abortion on demand is a fundamental human right is ridiculous.
Moreso that in a game of Rights Top Trumps it beats the right to life of the unborn child.
Access to safe and legal abortion with controls around reason and with term limits. The consensus settlement in the West after the struggles of the civil rights era. This is what is under threat in the US. Having been in the vanguard on female empowerment they now seek to roll it back. That's how it looks to me.
You just said "controls around reason". I agree with that. However, abortion on demand has no such controls.
I don't support abortion with no controls. Don't know where you're seeing that in anything I've posted. Eg I think our laws in this area are reasonable.
But I’m struggling to get worked up over Roe v Wade.
It’s not covered by the constitution, nor by common law, and as far as I can tell the original SC justification was weak.
So let States decide, as ghastly as that must be for the poor women who have to live in said States.
I agree. I’m also highly pro-choice but if you actually look at the leaked, draft decision, it has merit. There is nothing in the US constitution which says women have a basic right to terminate a fetus. Finessing this as a right to privacy is bogus
The voters must decide in individual states, that’s democracy. Equally, democracy allows the president and senate to pass a law explicitly allowing abortion everywhere if they have enough votes in DC
This decision arguably allows such a vote to ban abortion nationwide, too. https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/1521311115392737280 If the Alito opinion savaging Roe and Casey ends up being the Opinion of the Court, it will unravel many basic rights beyond abortion and will go further than returning the issue to the states: It will enable a GOP Congress to enact a nationwide ban on abortion and contraception.
I’m not sure even the GOP are that stupid . To ban abortion nationwide would cause such a furore that they would be pulverized in future elections . And banning contraception would be unbelievable given most Americans aren’t Catholic.
The democracy angle is a red herring imo. An outright ban on abortion is removing a fundamental right of women that I think should be protected regardless of which party happens to be in power, state or federal level, at any one time. States' Rights - ie "democracy" - was offered in the 1960s as for why racial segregation should continue in parts of the South. It didn't wash then, as a reason for allowing something appalling, and for me it doesn't scrub up any better now.
Funnily enough, I bet you’d argue exactly the opposite way with regard to gun laws and the 2nd Amendment
I would, yes, and I'd be right to do so. Literal minded consistency, regardless of nuance and context, is the enemy of good judgement.
Whilst I believe we are on the same side as regards the abortion debate and many other liberal positions, your argument fails utterly because of that inconsistency. You cannot argue that States rights are wrong when they are about something you are opposed to such as restrictions on abortion but then argue they are right regarding the 2nd amendment. You have advocated literal minded consistency in one post and then argued against it in the next.
No, I'm gold. It goes like this -
Fundamental human rights should be enshrined. A woman's access to safe and legal abortion is one such. The right to bear arms is not.
People can disagree - both on whether fundamental human rights should be enshrined and if so on what they are - but there's no 'utter fail through inconsistency'. As if!
The notion that abortion on demand is a fundamental human right is ridiculous.
Moreso that in a game of Rights Top Trumps it beats the right to life of the unborn child.
Access to safe and legal abortion with controls around reason and with term limits. The consensus settlement in the West after the struggles of the civil rights era. This is what is under threat in the US. Having been in the vanguard on female empowerment they now seek to roll it back. That's how it looks to me.
If the USA had legalised abortion in Congress, ie in the same manner as other western countries legalised abortion in their parliaments, then there wouldn't have been decades of argument and the current situation.
Instead it was done by court cases.
Ok, yes, but I think this (and certain other imperatives) should be enshrined in something that operates above the level of national governments. So, if a government does something which potentially violates one of these fundamental human rights it can be taken to this higher body and is answerable to it. And this applies even if it passes a law saying otherwise. I realize this cuts across the notion of absolute national sovereignty and of a 'majority rules ok' idea of democracy but that's a feature, imo, not a bug.
Which effectively means rules by the Courts. Which is why the US Supreme Court is such a political hit potato because, in many cases, it gets to set the law outside of the democratic process.
So, if the SC does ban abortion, would you accept that given your above argument? Or does your argument only apply to laws of which you approve?
But I’m struggling to get worked up over Roe v Wade.
It’s not covered by the constitution, nor by common law, and as far as I can tell the original SC justification was weak.
So let States decide, as ghastly as that must be for the poor women who have to live in said States.
I agree. I’m also highly pro-choice but if you actually look at the leaked, draft decision, it has merit. There is nothing in the US constitution which says women have a basic right to terminate a fetus. Finessing this as a right to privacy is bogus
The voters must decide in individual states, that’s democracy. Equally, democracy allows the president and senate to pass a law explicitly allowing abortion everywhere if they have enough votes in DC
This decision arguably allows such a vote to ban abortion nationwide, too. https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/1521311115392737280 If the Alito opinion savaging Roe and Casey ends up being the Opinion of the Court, it will unravel many basic rights beyond abortion and will go further than returning the issue to the states: It will enable a GOP Congress to enact a nationwide ban on abortion and contraception.
I’m not sure even the GOP are that stupid . To ban abortion nationwide would cause such a furore that they would be pulverized in future elections . And banning contraception would be unbelievable given most Americans aren’t Catholic.
The democracy angle is a red herring imo. An outright ban on abortion is removing a fundamental right of women that I think should be protected regardless of which party happens to be in power, state or federal level, at any one time. States' Rights - ie "democracy" - was offered in the 1960s as for why racial segregation should continue in parts of the South. It didn't wash then, as a reason for allowing something appalling, and for me it doesn't scrub up any better now.
Funnily enough, I bet you’d argue exactly the opposite way with regard to gun laws and the 2nd Amendment
I would, yes, and I'd be right to do so. Literal minded consistency, regardless of nuance and context, is the enemy of good judgement.
You are so brilliantly boring
Just brilliant, I think you mean. Fat fingers?
But let's not bicker about this abortion banning monstrosity - we clearly agree about it and that's rather precious.
We agree in practice, but I maybe see nuance where you apparently don’t. The unborn child also has rights as @Sean_F eloquently puts it downthread (better than me). Otherwise we’d have no moral problems with third trimester abortion of perfectly viable babies
When do those rights commence? It’s the devil of a question and I respect the beliefs of those who might put it at conception, even if I disagree
No, we don't have a "nuance" issue. I support the right to abortion but with controls around reasons and term limits. I don't support an outright ban or anything close to it.
Sean was making the obvious sound deep. He has a talent for that. So do lots of you grinders on here.
Ooo bitchy!
(but I love you all)
Your brain is so weirdly narrow.
There can be no “fundamental right’ in this debate, not when it comes down to a clash between the fundamental right of a baby to live, versus the fundamental rights of a woman to govern her own body
It’s like saying there is a “fundamental right of a home owner to shoot a burglar dead” or a “fundamental right of a woman to stab her abusive husband”
This is fiercely debatable stuff. It IS nuanced - because two basic rights are clashing
A ball of cells is not a baby. A ball of cells does not have fundamental rights. Calling it a “baby” doesn’t make it a baby. No-one actually treats the early embryo as if it is a baby outside of the abortion debate, because it’s not.
That's just your opinion, bro.
It is demonstrably true that no-one treats early embryos as babies outside of the abortion debate. Lots of early embryos fail to implant in the uterine wall and “die”, without the mother even noticing. If we thought these were babies, we would care about them, we’d want to know about them, we’d mourn them. We don’t. We pay them no attention. You probably had a “sibling” that failed to implant in your mother’s uterine wall. Have you ever mourned this sibling?
You hear people saying that heart disease is the biggest cause of death. Or maybe it’s meant to be cancer. If that ball of cells is a baby, then neither heart disease or cancer are the leading cause of death. It’s failure to implant in the uterine wall, that’s the leading cause of death, your logic says. Why do we spend £billions on treating and researching heart disease but basically nothing on the failure to implant in the uterine wall? Because no-one really believes these early embryos are actually people.
However, people feel a deep loss following a miscarriage in the early months of pregnancy. Why is that, unless they have lost a baby?
Show me someone who has felt deep loss for a failure to implant/miscarriage in the first *fortnight*, a deep loss like that felt when, say, a 6 month a baby dies. No-one does.
As time passes, that ball of cells becomes more and more of a person, so of course we can understand the deep loss people feel at later miscarriages. But the anti-abortionists say life begins at conception. I’m saying that, in reality, people do not act as if life begins at conception outside of abortion debates.
If you want to argue life “begins” at 1 month post-conception, or 2, or 3, those are more nuanced debates. Perhaps they are more nuanced than a political betting comments section can handle. I respect people may differ when quite they want to draw a cut-off date.
But the idea that “life” begins at conception is untenable with our natural biology where the majority of zygotes never make it.
From failure to implant through to stillbirth, there are plenty of conceptions that don't result in the birth of a child. The resulting level of sorrow increases from zero to devastation as the pregnancy progresses.
However, these are all natural processes, very different to active intervention to end the life of an unborn child.
A fertilized ovum is not a child.
So when does it become one? And does that matter in this debate?
At birth.
What is special about birth? Topologically speaking, it's just moving from inside a cylinder to outside it. Biologically, it is going from 100% dependency on the mother to 100% dependency on the mother.
As I have already asked, would your answer differ if humans were marsupial? Why?
I view women as people in their own right and not just as a cylinder.
Biologically a born child can be 0% dependent upon the mother post-birth. A mother can die in childbirth and the child can survive, a mother might give a child up for adoption, a mother may be unfit and the child taken into care, or plenty of other options.
When our children were born my wife found out she was unable to breastfeed which was distressing for her, especially for the judgmental looks she sometimes got from conceited people who insist that bottle is bad without caring about your situation; but I must admit there was a part of me that meant that I enjoyed the fact that a benefit of bottle-feeding is I was able to feed our daughter too as a result.
Being able to let my wife sleep while I got up to do a middle of the night feeding is a nice thing to be able to do - and not something that could be done if your 100% dependency claim was remotely true.
A Tory police chief who pledged to crack down on speeding has been caught driving too fast five times in three months.
Caroline Henry, the Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) for Nottinghamshire, was caught breaking a 30mph limit in a blue Mercedes and a silver Lexus with a personalised number plate between March and June last year.
The five offences took place while she was still campaigning to be the new crime commissioner and after she was elected to the role in May 2021.
Mrs Henry, 52, admitted the offences, including two committed on consecutive days, at a previous hearing in February at Nottingham Magistrates’ Court.
Magistrates were told Mrs Henry, who is the wife of Darren Henry, Broxtowe MP, had written a letter to the court saying she was “very sorry, embarrassed and ashamed”.
A Tory police chief who pledged to crack down on speeding has been caught driving too fast five times in three months.
Caroline Henry, the Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) for Nottinghamshire, was caught breaking a 30mph limit in a blue Mercedes and a silver Lexus with a personalised number plate between March and June last year.
The five offences took place while she was still campaigning to be the new crime commissioner and after she was elected to the role in May 2021.
Mrs Henry, 52, admitted the offences, including two committed on consecutive days, at a previous hearing in February at Nottingham Magistrates’ Court.
Magistrates were told Mrs Henry, who is the wife of Darren Henry, Broxtowe MP, had written a letter to the court saying she was “very sorry, embarrassed and ashamed”.
A potential PCC by-election. What a mouth watering prospect.
Voters of Nottinghamshire - better get practicing drawing a cock and balls.
Remarkably, turnout for the Wiltshire PCC by-election in August 2021 (after the winner of the May election could not take up his position) was a comparitively decent 16%. Terrible by any other election, but actually higher than the first such election in Wiltshire where turnout was only 15%, which considering the date and no other elections being on wasn't bad.
Another Tory criminal law breaker.
They are coming on a weekly basis.
Fag end of a government long overdue a refresh in oppisition.
What a low the party is plumbing these days.
Surely even PB tories must admit the party now needs a period in opposition and sort out the sleaze and criminality and the kinds of people it makes as candidates.
Only a period? I'm starting to think they deserve an eternity.
An eternity might create its own problems. Democracy needs a viable opposition.
But given how bad things are now for the reputation of the Conservatives, and that we may have another 2.5 years of this to come, and that the worse it gets the further away the next GE will be pushed, it could easily be a political generation. However long it takes for all the big beasts of this government to retire into obscurity.
That will take no time at all, as there aren't any.
A Tory police chief who pledged to crack down on speeding has been caught driving too fast five times in three months.
Caroline Henry, the Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) for Nottinghamshire, was caught breaking a 30mph limit in a blue Mercedes and a silver Lexus with a personalised number plate between March and June last year.
The five offences took place while she was still campaigning to be the new crime commissioner and after she was elected to the role in May 2021.
Mrs Henry, 52, admitted the offences, including two committed on consecutive days, at a previous hearing in February at Nottingham Magistrates’ Court.
Magistrates were told Mrs Henry, who is the wife of Darren Henry, Broxtowe MP, had written a letter to the court saying she was “very sorry, embarrassed and ashamed”.
A potential PCC by-election. What a mouth watering prospect.
Voters of Nottinghamshire - better get practicing drawing a cock and balls.
Remarkably, turnout for the Wiltshire PCC by-election in August 2021 (after the winner of the May election could not take up his position) was a comparitively decent 16%. Terrible by any other election, but actually higher than the first such election in Wiltshire where turnout was only 15%, which considering the date and no other elections being on wasn't bad.
Another Tory criminal law breaker.
They are coming on a weekly basis.
Fag end of a government long overdue a refresh in oppisition.
What a low the party is plumbing these days.
Surely even PB tories must admit the party now needs a period in opposition and sort out the sleaze and criminality and the kinds of people it makes as candidates.
Only a period? I'm starting to think they deserve an eternity.
An eternity might create its own problems. Democracy needs a viable opposition.
But given how bad things are now for the reputation of the Conservatives, and that we may have another 2.5 years of this to come, and that the worse it gets the further away the next GE will be pushed, it could easily be a political generation. However long it takes for all the big beasts of this government to retire into obscurity.
Well Labour were out of power for 18 years from 1979 to 1997, the Conservatives were out of power for 13 years from 1997 to 2010 and Labour have been out of power for 12 years since they lost power in 2010.
You have to go back to the 1970s to find the last time a party which lost power returned to power in less than a decade
Good point. Which leads to a couple of linked questions.
During the 60's and 70's, there was a reasonably brisk pendulum. During the 50's and since 1979, the pendulum has got stuck in one position for much longer.
So why the difference (which state is the abberation?), and what will 2024 look more like?
But I’m struggling to get worked up over Roe v Wade.
It’s not covered by the constitution, nor by common law, and as far as I can tell the original SC justification was weak.
So let States decide, as ghastly as that must be for the poor women who have to live in said States.
I agree. I’m also highly pro-choice but if you actually look at the leaked, draft decision, it has merit. There is nothing in the US constitution which says women have a basic right to terminate a fetus. Finessing this as a right to privacy is bogus
The voters must decide in individual states, that’s democracy. Equally, democracy allows the president and senate to pass a law explicitly allowing abortion everywhere if they have enough votes in DC
This decision arguably allows such a vote to ban abortion nationwide, too. https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/1521311115392737280 If the Alito opinion savaging Roe and Casey ends up being the Opinion of the Court, it will unravel many basic rights beyond abortion and will go further than returning the issue to the states: It will enable a GOP Congress to enact a nationwide ban on abortion and contraception.
I’m not sure even the GOP are that stupid . To ban abortion nationwide would cause such a furore that they would be pulverized in future elections . And banning contraception would be unbelievable given most Americans aren’t Catholic.
The democracy angle is a red herring imo. An outright ban on abortion is removing a fundamental right of women that I think should be protected regardless of which party happens to be in power, state or federal level, at any one time. States' Rights - ie "democracy" - was offered in the 1960s as for why racial segregation should continue in parts of the South. It didn't wash then, as a reason for allowing something appalling, and for me it doesn't scrub up any better now.
Funnily enough, I bet you’d argue exactly the opposite way with regard to gun laws and the 2nd Amendment
I would, yes, and I'd be right to do so. Literal minded consistency, regardless of nuance and context, is the enemy of good judgement.
You are so brilliantly boring
Just brilliant, I think you mean. Fat fingers?
But let's not bicker about this abortion banning monstrosity - we clearly agree about it and that's rather precious.
We agree in practice, but I maybe see nuance where you apparently don’t. The unborn child also has rights as @Sean_F eloquently puts it downthread (better than me). Otherwise we’d have no moral problems with third trimester abortion of perfectly viable babies
When do those rights commence? It’s the devil of a question and I respect the beliefs of those who might put it at conception, even if I disagree
No, we don't have a "nuance" issue. I support the right to abortion but with controls around reasons and term limits. I don't support an outright ban or anything close to it.
Sean was making the obvious sound deep. He has a talent for that. So do lots of you grinders on here.
Ooo bitchy!
(but I love you all)
Your brain is so weirdly narrow.
There can be no “fundamental right’ in this debate, not when it comes down to a clash between the fundamental right of a baby to live, versus the fundamental rights of a woman to govern her own body
It’s like saying there is a “fundamental right of a home owner to shoot a burglar dead” or a “fundamental right of a woman to stab her abusive husband”
This is fiercely debatable stuff. It IS nuanced - because two basic rights are clashing
A ball of cells is not a baby. A ball of cells does not have fundamental rights. Calling it a “baby” doesn’t make it a baby. No-one actually treats the early embryo as if it is a baby outside of the abortion debate, because it’s not.
That's just your opinion, bro.
It is demonstrably true that no-one treats early embryos as babies outside of the abortion debate. Lots of early embryos fail to implant in the uterine wall and “die”, without the mother even noticing. If we thought these were babies, we would care about them, we’d want to know about them, we’d mourn them. We don’t. We pay them no attention. You probably had a “sibling” that failed to implant in your mother’s uterine wall. Have you ever mourned this sibling?
You hear people saying that heart disease is the biggest cause of death. Or maybe it’s meant to be cancer. If that ball of cells is a baby, then neither heart disease or cancer are the leading cause of death. It’s failure to implant in the uterine wall, that’s the leading cause of death, your logic says. Why do we spend £billions on treating and researching heart disease but basically nothing on the failure to implant in the uterine wall? Because no-one really believes these early embryos are actually people.
However, people feel a deep loss following a miscarriage in the early months of pregnancy. Why is that, unless they have lost a baby?
Show me someone who has felt deep loss for a failure to implant/miscarriage in the first *fortnight*, a deep loss like that felt when, say, a 6 month a baby dies. No-one does.
As time passes, that ball of cells becomes more and more of a person, so of course we can understand the deep loss people feel at later miscarriages. But the anti-abortionists say life begins at conception. I’m saying that, in reality, people do not act as if life begins at conception outside of abortion debates.
If you want to argue life “begins” at 1 month post-conception, or 2, or 3, those are more nuanced debates. Perhaps they are more nuanced than a political betting comments section can handle. I respect people may differ when quite they want to draw a cut-off date.
But the idea that “life” begins at conception is untenable with our natural biology where the majority of zygotes never make it.
From failure to implant through to stillbirth, there are plenty of conceptions that don't result in the birth of a child. The resulting level of sorrow increases from zero to devastation as the pregnancy progresses.
However, these are all natural processes, very different to active intervention to end the life of an unborn child.
When a (born) child dies from natural causes, we mourn the death. We raise funds for medical research to prevent such deaths. We fight all we can to save that life.
When a very early embryo “dies” of natural causes, we don’t do any of that. No-one actually treats that ball of cells as “an unborn child”. Except when they want to ban abortion. Then they pretend, they make up stories. That ball of cells is a “child” when we want to control women’s lives, when we want to moralise about sex, but not otherwise.
You do seem to be a revoltingly silly little man. Ever been to a 14 week scan to learn quite unexpectedly that the ball of cells is fucked?
I have
I am sorry for your experience.
14 weeks isn’t 2 weeks. Much happens between those two dates, whether you call it magical, miraculous or science. What begins as a single cell becomes, over time, something else, and eventually a person.
The people who are revolting, the people who are minimising what a baby’s life means, are those who insist, against all biology, that an ovum, the instant a sperm penetrates it, has become a person. That’s the nonsense.
But I’m struggling to get worked up over Roe v Wade.
It’s not covered by the constitution, nor by common law, and as far as I can tell the original SC justification was weak.
So let States decide, as ghastly as that must be for the poor women who have to live in said States.
I agree. I’m also highly pro-choice but if you actually look at the leaked, draft decision, it has merit. There is nothing in the US constitution which says women have a basic right to terminate a fetus. Finessing this as a right to privacy is bogus
The voters must decide in individual states, that’s democracy. Equally, democracy allows the president and senate to pass a law explicitly allowing abortion everywhere if they have enough votes in DC
This decision arguably allows such a vote to ban abortion nationwide, too. https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/1521311115392737280 If the Alito opinion savaging Roe and Casey ends up being the Opinion of the Court, it will unravel many basic rights beyond abortion and will go further than returning the issue to the states: It will enable a GOP Congress to enact a nationwide ban on abortion and contraception.
I’m not sure even the GOP are that stupid . To ban abortion nationwide would cause such a furore that they would be pulverized in future elections . And banning contraception would be unbelievable given most Americans aren’t Catholic.
The democracy angle is a red herring imo. An outright ban on abortion is removing a fundamental right of women that I think should be protected regardless of which party happens to be in power, state or federal level, at any one time. States' Rights - ie "democracy" - was offered in the 1960s as for why racial segregation should continue in parts of the South. It didn't wash then, as a reason for allowing something appalling, and for me it doesn't scrub up any better now.
Funnily enough, I bet you’d argue exactly the opposite way with regard to gun laws and the 2nd Amendment
I would, yes, and I'd be right to do so. Literal minded consistency, regardless of nuance and context, is the enemy of good judgement.
You are so brilliantly boring
Just brilliant, I think you mean. Fat fingers?
But let's not bicker about this abortion banning monstrosity - we clearly agree about it and that's rather precious.
We agree in practice, but I maybe see nuance where you apparently don’t. The unborn child also has rights as @Sean_F eloquently puts it downthread (better than me). Otherwise we’d have no moral problems with third trimester abortion of perfectly viable babies
When do those rights commence? It’s the devil of a question and I respect the beliefs of those who might put it at conception, even if I disagree
No, we don't have a "nuance" issue. I support the right to abortion but with controls around reasons and term limits. I don't support an outright ban or anything close to it.
Sean was making the obvious sound deep. He has a talent for that. So do lots of you grinders on here.
Ooo bitchy!
(but I love you all)
Your brain is so weirdly narrow.
There can be no “fundamental right’ in this debate, not when it comes down to a clash between the fundamental right of a baby to live, versus the fundamental rights of a woman to govern her own body
It’s like saying there is a “fundamental right of a home owner to shoot a burglar dead” or a “fundamental right of a woman to stab her abusive husband”
This is fiercely debatable stuff. It IS nuanced - because two basic rights are clashing
A ball of cells is not a baby. A ball of cells does not have fundamental rights. Calling it a “baby” doesn’t make it a baby. No-one actually treats the early embryo as if it is a baby outside of the abortion debate, because it’s not.
That's just your opinion, bro.
It is demonstrably true that no-one treats early embryos as babies outside of the abortion debate. Lots of early embryos fail to implant in the uterine wall and “die”, without the mother even noticing. If we thought these were babies, we would care about them, we’d want to know about them, we’d mourn them. We don’t. We pay them no attention. You probably had a “sibling” that failed to implant in your mother’s uterine wall. Have you ever mourned this sibling?
You hear people saying that heart disease is the biggest cause of death. Or maybe it’s meant to be cancer. If that ball of cells is a baby, then neither heart disease or cancer are the leading cause of death. It’s failure to implant in the uterine wall, that’s the leading cause of death, your logic says. Why do we spend £billions on treating and researching heart disease but basically nothing on the failure to implant in the uterine wall? Because no-one really believes these early embryos are actually people.
However, people feel a deep loss following a miscarriage in the early months of pregnancy. Why is that, unless they have lost a baby?
Show me someone who has felt deep loss for a failure to implant/miscarriage in the first *fortnight*, a deep loss like that felt when, say, a 6 month a baby dies. No-one does.
As time passes, that ball of cells becomes more and more of a person, so of course we can understand the deep loss people feel at later miscarriages. But the anti-abortionists say life begins at conception. I’m saying that, in reality, people do not act as if life begins at conception outside of abortion debates.
If you want to argue life “begins” at 1 month post-conception, or 2, or 3, those are more nuanced debates. Perhaps they are more nuanced than a political betting comments section can handle. I respect people may differ when quite they want to draw a cut-off date.
But the idea that “life” begins at conception is untenable with our natural biology where the majority of zygotes never make it.
From failure to implant through to stillbirth, there are plenty of conceptions that don't result in the birth of a child. The resulting level of sorrow increases from zero to devastation as the pregnancy progresses.
However, these are all natural processes, very different to active intervention to end the life of an unborn child.
A fertilized ovum is not a child.
So when does it become one? And does that matter in this debate?
At birth.
What is special about birth? Topologically speaking, it's just moving from inside a cylinder to outside it. Biologically, it is going from 100% dependency on the mother to 100% dependency on the mother.
As I have already asked, would your answer differ if humans were marsupial? Why?
I view women as people in their own right and not just as a cylinder.
Biologically a born child can be 0% dependent upon the mother post-birth. A mother can die in childbirth and the child can survive, a mother might give a child up for adoption, a mother may be unfit and the child taken into care, or plenty of other options.
When our children were born my wife found out she was unable to breastfeed which was distressing for her, especially for the judgmental looks she sometimes got from conceited people who insist that bottle is bad without caring about your situation; but I must admit there was a part of me that meant that I enjoyed the fact that a benefit of bottle-feeding is I was able to feed our daughter too as a result.
Being able to let my wife sleep while I got up to do a middle of the night feeding is a nice thing to be able to do - and not something that could be done if your 100% dependency claim was remotely true.
Though foetuses can survive for a period of time even if the mother is brain dead. Some have been born after such circumstances.
In that scenario, what is the status of the foetus?
But I’m struggling to get worked up over Roe v Wade.
It’s not covered by the constitution, nor by common law, and as far as I can tell the original SC justification was weak.
So let States decide, as ghastly as that must be for the poor women who have to live in said States.
I agree. I’m also highly pro-choice but if you actually look at the leaked, draft decision, it has merit. There is nothing in the US constitution which says women have a basic right to terminate a fetus. Finessing this as a right to privacy is bogus
The voters must decide in individual states, that’s democracy. Equally, democracy allows the president and senate to pass a law explicitly allowing abortion everywhere if they have enough votes in DC
This decision arguably allows such a vote to ban abortion nationwide, too. https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/1521311115392737280 If the Alito opinion savaging Roe and Casey ends up being the Opinion of the Court, it will unravel many basic rights beyond abortion and will go further than returning the issue to the states: It will enable a GOP Congress to enact a nationwide ban on abortion and contraception.
I’m not sure even the GOP are that stupid . To ban abortion nationwide would cause such a furore that they would be pulverized in future elections . And banning contraception would be unbelievable given most Americans aren’t Catholic.
The democracy angle is a red herring imo. An outright ban on abortion is removing a fundamental right of women that I think should be protected regardless of which party happens to be in power, state or federal level, at any one time. States' Rights - ie "democracy" - was offered in the 1960s as for why racial segregation should continue in parts of the South. It didn't wash then, as a reason for allowing something appalling, and for me it doesn't scrub up any better now.
Funnily enough, I bet you’d argue exactly the opposite way with regard to gun laws and the 2nd Amendment
I would, yes, and I'd be right to do so. Literal minded consistency, regardless of nuance and context, is the enemy of good judgement.
You are so brilliantly boring
Just brilliant, I think you mean. Fat fingers?
But let's not bicker about this abortion banning monstrosity - we clearly agree about it and that's rather precious.
We agree in practice, but I maybe see nuance where you apparently don’t. The unborn child also has rights as @Sean_F eloquently puts it downthread (better than me). Otherwise we’d have no moral problems with third trimester abortion of perfectly viable babies
When do those rights commence? It’s the devil of a question and I respect the beliefs of those who might put it at conception, even if I disagree
No, we don't have a "nuance" issue. I support the right to abortion but with controls around reasons and term limits. I don't support an outright ban or anything close to it.
Sean was making the obvious sound deep. He has a talent for that. So do lots of you grinders on here.
Ooo bitchy!
(but I love you all)
Your brain is so weirdly narrow.
There can be no “fundamental right’ in this debate, not when it comes down to a clash between the fundamental right of a baby to live, versus the fundamental rights of a woman to govern her own body
It’s like saying there is a “fundamental right of a home owner to shoot a burglar dead” or a “fundamental right of a woman to stab her abusive husband”
This is fiercely debatable stuff. It IS nuanced - because two basic rights are clashing
A ball of cells is not a baby. A ball of cells does not have fundamental rights. Calling it a “baby” doesn’t make it a baby. No-one actually treats the early embryo as if it is a baby outside of the abortion debate, because it’s not.
That's just your opinion, bro.
It is demonstrably true that no-one treats early embryos as babies outside of the abortion debate. Lots of early embryos fail to implant in the uterine wall and “die”, without the mother even noticing. If we thought these were babies, we would care about them, we’d want to know about them, we’d mourn them. We don’t. We pay them no attention. You probably had a “sibling” that failed to implant in your mother’s uterine wall. Have you ever mourned this sibling?
You hear people saying that heart disease is the biggest cause of death. Or maybe it’s meant to be cancer. If that ball of cells is a baby, then neither heart disease or cancer are the leading cause of death. It’s failure to implant in the uterine wall, that’s the leading cause of death, your logic says. Why do we spend £billions on treating and researching heart disease but basically nothing on the failure to implant in the uterine wall? Because no-one really believes these early embryos are actually people.
However, people feel a deep loss following a miscarriage in the early months of pregnancy. Why is that, unless they have lost a baby?
Show me someone who has felt deep loss for a failure to implant/miscarriage in the first *fortnight*, a deep loss like that felt when, say, a 6 month a baby dies. No-one does.
As time passes, that ball of cells becomes more and more of a person, so of course we can understand the deep loss people feel at later miscarriages. But the anti-abortionists say life begins at conception. I’m saying that, in reality, people do not act as if life begins at conception outside of abortion debates.
If you want to argue life “begins” at 1 month post-conception, or 2, or 3, those are more nuanced debates. Perhaps they are more nuanced than a political betting comments section can handle. I respect people may differ when quite they want to draw a cut-off date.
But the idea that “life” begins at conception is untenable with our natural biology where the majority of zygotes never make it.
From failure to implant through to stillbirth, there are plenty of conceptions that don't result in the birth of a child. The resulting level of sorrow increases from zero to devastation as the pregnancy progresses.
However, these are all natural processes, very different to active intervention to end the life of an unborn child.
A fertilized ovum is not a child.
So when does it become one? And does that matter in this debate?
At birth.
What is special about birth? Topologically speaking, it's just moving from inside a cylinder to outside it. Biologically, it is going from 100% dependency on the mother to 100% dependency on the mother.
As I have already asked, would your answer differ if humans were marsupial? Why?
Anyone who describes birth merely in topological terms has never been at a birth.
But I’m struggling to get worked up over Roe v Wade.
It’s not covered by the constitution, nor by common law, and as far as I can tell the original SC justification was weak.
So let States decide, as ghastly as that must be for the poor women who have to live in said States.
I agree. I’m also highly pro-choice but if you actually look at the leaked, draft decision, it has merit. There is nothing in the US constitution which says women have a basic right to terminate a fetus. Finessing this as a right to privacy is bogus
The voters must decide in individual states, that’s democracy. Equally, democracy allows the president and senate to pass a law explicitly allowing abortion everywhere if they have enough votes in DC
This decision arguably allows such a vote to ban abortion nationwide, too. https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/1521311115392737280 If the Alito opinion savaging Roe and Casey ends up being the Opinion of the Court, it will unravel many basic rights beyond abortion and will go further than returning the issue to the states: It will enable a GOP Congress to enact a nationwide ban on abortion and contraception.
I’m not sure even the GOP are that stupid . To ban abortion nationwide would cause such a furore that they would be pulverized in future elections . And banning contraception would be unbelievable given most Americans aren’t Catholic.
The democracy angle is a red herring imo. An outright ban on abortion is removing a fundamental right of women that I think should be protected regardless of which party happens to be in power, state or federal level, at any one time. States' Rights - ie "democracy" - was offered in the 1960s as for why racial segregation should continue in parts of the South. It didn't wash then, as a reason for allowing something appalling, and for me it doesn't scrub up any better now.
Funnily enough, I bet you’d argue exactly the opposite way with regard to gun laws and the 2nd Amendment
I would, yes, and I'd be right to do so. Literal minded consistency, regardless of nuance and context, is the enemy of good judgement.
Whilst I believe we are on the same side as regards the abortion debate and many other liberal positions, your argument fails utterly because of that inconsistency. You cannot argue that States rights are wrong when they are about something you are opposed to such as restrictions on abortion but then argue they are right regarding the 2nd amendment. You have advocated literal minded consistency in one post and then argued against it in the next.
No, I'm gold. It goes like this -
Fundamental human rights should be enshrined. A woman's access to safe and legal abortion is one such. The right to bear arms is not.
People can disagree - both on whether fundamental human rights should be enshrined and if so on what they are - but there's no 'utter fail through inconsistency'. As if!
The notion that abortion on demand is a fundamental human right is ridiculous.
Moreso that in a game of Rights Top Trumps it beats the right to life of the unborn child.
Access to safe and legal abortion with controls around reason and with term limits. The consensus settlement in the West after the struggles of the civil rights era. This is what is under threat in the US. Having been in the vanguard on female empowerment they now seek to roll it back. That's how it looks to me.
You just said "controls around reason". I agree with that. However, abortion on demand has no such controls.
I don't support abortion with no controls. Don't know where you're seeing that in anything I've posted. Eg I think our laws in this area are reasonable.
I don't think you support abortion with no controls.
I think our positions are closer together than we initially thought.
But I’m struggling to get worked up over Roe v Wade.
It’s not covered by the constitution, nor by common law, and as far as I can tell the original SC justification was weak.
So let States decide, as ghastly as that must be for the poor women who have to live in said States.
I agree. I’m also highly pro-choice but if you actually look at the leaked, draft decision, it has merit. There is nothing in the US constitution which says women have a basic right to terminate a fetus. Finessing this as a right to privacy is bogus
The voters must decide in individual states, that’s democracy. Equally, democracy allows the president and senate to pass a law explicitly allowing abortion everywhere if they have enough votes in DC
This decision arguably allows such a vote to ban abortion nationwide, too. https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/1521311115392737280 If the Alito opinion savaging Roe and Casey ends up being the Opinion of the Court, it will unravel many basic rights beyond abortion and will go further than returning the issue to the states: It will enable a GOP Congress to enact a nationwide ban on abortion and contraception.
I’m not sure even the GOP are that stupid . To ban abortion nationwide would cause such a furore that they would be pulverized in future elections . And banning contraception would be unbelievable given most Americans aren’t Catholic.
The democracy angle is a red herring imo. An outright ban on abortion is removing a fundamental right of women that I think should be protected regardless of which party happens to be in power, state or federal level, at any one time. States' Rights - ie "democracy" - was offered in the 1960s as for why racial segregation should continue in parts of the South. It didn't wash then, as a reason for allowing something appalling, and for me it doesn't scrub up any better now.
Funnily enough, I bet you’d argue exactly the opposite way with regard to gun laws and the 2nd Amendment
I would, yes, and I'd be right to do so. Literal minded consistency, regardless of nuance and context, is the enemy of good judgement.
You are so brilliantly boring
Just brilliant, I think you mean. Fat fingers?
But let's not bicker about this abortion banning monstrosity - we clearly agree about it and that's rather precious.
We agree in practice, but I maybe see nuance where you apparently don’t. The unborn child also has rights as @Sean_F eloquently puts it downthread (better than me). Otherwise we’d have no moral problems with third trimester abortion of perfectly viable babies
When do those rights commence? It’s the devil of a question and I respect the beliefs of those who might put it at conception, even if I disagree
No, we don't have a "nuance" issue. I support the right to abortion but with controls around reasons and term limits. I don't support an outright ban or anything close to it.
Sean was making the obvious sound deep. He has a talent for that. So do lots of you grinders on here.
Ooo bitchy!
(but I love you all)
Your brain is so weirdly narrow.
There can be no “fundamental right’ in this debate, not when it comes down to a clash between the fundamental right of a baby to live, versus the fundamental rights of a woman to govern her own body
It’s like saying there is a “fundamental right of a home owner to shoot a burglar dead” or a “fundamental right of a woman to stab her abusive husband”
This is fiercely debatable stuff. It IS nuanced - because two basic rights are clashing
A ball of cells is not a baby. A ball of cells does not have fundamental rights. Calling it a “baby” doesn’t make it a baby. No-one actually treats the early embryo as if it is a baby outside of the abortion debate, because it’s not.
That's just your opinion, bro.
It is demonstrably true that no-one treats early embryos as babies outside of the abortion debate. Lots of early embryos fail to implant in the uterine wall and “die”, without the mother even noticing. If we thought these were babies, we would care about them, we’d want to know about them, we’d mourn them. We don’t. We pay them no attention. You probably had a “sibling” that failed to implant in your mother’s uterine wall. Have you ever mourned this sibling?
You hear people saying that heart disease is the biggest cause of death. Or maybe it’s meant to be cancer. If that ball of cells is a baby, then neither heart disease or cancer are the leading cause of death. It’s failure to implant in the uterine wall, that’s the leading cause of death, your logic says. Why do we spend £billions on treating and researching heart disease but basically nothing on the failure to implant in the uterine wall? Because no-one really believes these early embryos are actually people.
However, people feel a deep loss following a miscarriage in the early months of pregnancy. Why is that, unless they have lost a baby?
Show me someone who has felt deep loss for a failure to implant/miscarriage in the first *fortnight*, a deep loss like that felt when, say, a 6 month a baby dies. No-one does.
As time passes, that ball of cells becomes more and more of a person, so of course we can understand the deep loss people feel at later miscarriages. But the anti-abortionists say life begins at conception. I’m saying that, in reality, people do not act as if life begins at conception outside of abortion debates.
If you want to argue life “begins” at 1 month post-conception, or 2, or 3, those are more nuanced debates. Perhaps they are more nuanced than a political betting comments section can handle. I respect people may differ when quite they want to draw a cut-off date.
But the idea that “life” begins at conception is untenable with our natural biology where the majority of zygotes never make it.
From failure to implant through to stillbirth, there are plenty of conceptions that don't result in the birth of a child. The resulting level of sorrow increases from zero to devastation as the pregnancy progresses.
However, these are all natural processes, very different to active intervention to end the life of an unborn child.
A fertilized ovum is not a child.
So when does it become one? And does that matter in this debate?
At birth.
What is special about birth? Topologically speaking, it's just moving from inside a cylinder to outside it. Biologically, it is going from 100% dependency on the mother to 100% dependency on the mother.
As I have already asked, would your answer differ if humans were marsupial? Why?
I view women as people in their own right and not just as a cylinder.
Biologically a born child can be 0% dependent upon the mother post-birth. A mother can die in childbirth and the child can survive, a mother might give a child up for adoption, a mother may be unfit and the child taken into care, or plenty of other options.
When our children were born my wife found out she was unable to breastfeed which was distressing for her, especially for the judgmental looks she sometimes got from conceited people who insist that bottle is bad without caring about your situation; but I must admit there was a part of me that meant that I enjoyed the fact that a benefit of bottle-feeding is I was able to feed our daughter too as a result.
Being able to let my wife sleep while I got up to do a middle of the night feeding is a nice thing to be able to do - and not something that could be done if your 100% dependency claim was remotely true.
Though foetuses can survive for a period of time even if the mother is brain dead. Some have been born after such circumstances.
In that scenario, what is the status of the foetus?
People can be kept alive after brain death, especially with modern machinery. The child may be born to a sadly either deceased or soon-to-be deceased mother which is tragic, but it doesn't change the status.
Until the moment of birth, the foetus is a potential person and not a real one, the woman is one though and her body remains her own body, even if she's sharing it with a foetus that might become a person in the future.
A Tory police chief who pledged to crack down on speeding has been caught driving too fast five times in three months.
Caroline Henry, the Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) for Nottinghamshire, was caught breaking a 30mph limit in a blue Mercedes and a silver Lexus with a personalised number plate between March and June last year.
The five offences took place while she was still campaigning to be the new crime commissioner and after she was elected to the role in May 2021.
Mrs Henry, 52, admitted the offences, including two committed on consecutive days, at a previous hearing in February at Nottingham Magistrates’ Court.
Magistrates were told Mrs Henry, who is the wife of Darren Henry, Broxtowe MP, had written a letter to the court saying she was “very sorry, embarrassed and ashamed”.
A potential PCC by-election. What a mouth watering prospect.
Voters of Nottinghamshire - better get practicing drawing a cock and balls.
Remarkably, turnout for the Wiltshire PCC by-election in August 2021 (after the winner of the May election could not take up his position) was a comparitively decent 16%. Terrible by any other election, but actually higher than the first such election in Wiltshire where turnout was only 15%, which considering the date and no other elections being on wasn't bad.
Another Tory criminal law breaker.
They are coming on a weekly basis.
Fag end of a government long overdue a refresh in oppisition.
What a low the party is plumbing these days.
Surely even PB tories must admit the party now needs a period in opposition and sort out the sleaze and criminality and the kinds of people it makes as candidates.
Only a period? I'm starting to think they deserve an eternity.
An eternity might create its own problems. Democracy needs a viable opposition.
But given how bad things are now for the reputation of the Conservatives, and that we may have another 2.5 years of this to come, and that the worse it gets the further away the next GE will be pushed, it could easily be a political generation. However long it takes for all the big beasts of this government to retire into obscurity.
Well Labour were out of power for 18 years from 1979 to 1997, the Conservatives were out of power for 13 years from 1997 to 2010 and Labour have been out of power for 12 years since they lost power in 2010.
You have to go back to the 1970s to find the last time a party which lost power returned to power in less than a decade
Good point. Which leads to a couple of linked questions.
During the 60's and 70's, there was a reasonably brisk pendulum. During the 50's and since 1979, the pendulum has got stuck in one position for much longer.
So why the difference (which state is the abberation?), and what will 2024 look more like?
Why the 1966 Labour government became so unpopular so quickly is the strange one.
And why after a government became so unpopular people are surprised it lost in 1970 is another strange one.
A Tory police chief who pledged to crack down on speeding has been caught driving too fast five times in three months.
Caroline Henry, the Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) for Nottinghamshire, was caught breaking a 30mph limit in a blue Mercedes and a silver Lexus with a personalised number plate between March and June last year.
The five offences took place while she was still campaigning to be the new crime commissioner and after she was elected to the role in May 2021.
Mrs Henry, 52, admitted the offences, including two committed on consecutive days, at a previous hearing in February at Nottingham Magistrates’ Court.
Magistrates were told Mrs Henry, who is the wife of Darren Henry, Broxtowe MP, had written a letter to the court saying she was “very sorry, embarrassed and ashamed”.
A potential PCC by-election. What a mouth watering prospect.
Voters of Nottinghamshire - better get practicing drawing a cock and balls.
Remarkably, turnout for the Wiltshire PCC by-election in August 2021 (after the winner of the May election could not take up his position) was a comparitively decent 16%. Terrible by any other election, but actually higher than the first such election in Wiltshire where turnout was only 15%, which considering the date and no other elections being on wasn't bad.
Another Tory criminal law breaker.
They are coming on a weekly basis.
Fag end of a government long overdue a refresh in oppisition.
What a low the party is plumbing these days.
Surely even PB tories must admit the party now needs a period in opposition and sort out the sleaze and criminality and the kinds of people it makes as candidates.
Only a period? I'm starting to think they deserve an eternity.
An eternity might create its own problems. Democracy needs a viable opposition.
But given how bad things are now for the reputation of the Conservatives, and that we may have another 2.5 years of this to come, and that the worse it gets the further away the next GE will be pushed, it could easily be a political generation. However long it takes for all the big beasts of this government to retire into obscurity.
Well Labour were out of power for 18 years from 1979 to 1997, the Conservatives were out of power for 13 years from 1997 to 2010 and Labour have been out of power for 12 years since they lost power in 2010.
You have to go back to the 1970s to find the last time a party which lost power returned to power in less than a decade
Good point. Which leads to a couple of linked questions.
During the 60's and 70's, there was a reasonably brisk pendulum. During the 50's and since 1979, the pendulum has got stuck in one position for much longer.
So why the difference (which state is the abberation?), and what will 2024 look more like?
The difference in the 1970s was that both main party leaders, Heath and Wilson were reasonably centrist and more electable and the economy performed poorly with high inflation and regular strikes thus making a change of government more likely as occurred in 1970 and 1974. That culminated of course in Thatcher's election in 1979.
2024 would be par for the course ie an opposition party wins after over a decade out of power, say like 1964 or 2010. If Labour won and the Tories won in 2028/9 that however would be unusual and a return to the 1970s
But I’m struggling to get worked up over Roe v Wade.
It’s not covered by the constitution, nor by common law, and as far as I can tell the original SC justification was weak.
So let States decide, as ghastly as that must be for the poor women who have to live in said States.
I agree. I’m also highly pro-choice but if you actually look at the leaked, draft decision, it has merit. There is nothing in the US constitution which says women have a basic right to terminate a fetus. Finessing this as a right to privacy is bogus
The voters must decide in individual states, that’s democracy. Equally, democracy allows the president and senate to pass a law explicitly allowing abortion everywhere if they have enough votes in DC
This decision arguably allows such a vote to ban abortion nationwide, too. https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/1521311115392737280 If the Alito opinion savaging Roe and Casey ends up being the Opinion of the Court, it will unravel many basic rights beyond abortion and will go further than returning the issue to the states: It will enable a GOP Congress to enact a nationwide ban on abortion and contraception.
I’m not sure even the GOP are that stupid . To ban abortion nationwide would cause such a furore that they would be pulverized in future elections . And banning contraception would be unbelievable given most Americans aren’t Catholic.
The democracy angle is a red herring imo. An outright ban on abortion is removing a fundamental right of women that I think should be protected regardless of which party happens to be in power, state or federal level, at any one time. States' Rights - ie "democracy" - was offered in the 1960s as for why racial segregation should continue in parts of the South. It didn't wash then, as a reason for allowing something appalling, and for me it doesn't scrub up any better now.
Funnily enough, I bet you’d argue exactly the opposite way with regard to gun laws and the 2nd Amendment
I would, yes, and I'd be right to do so. Literal minded consistency, regardless of nuance and context, is the enemy of good judgement.
You are so brilliantly boring
Just brilliant, I think you mean. Fat fingers?
But let's not bicker about this abortion banning monstrosity - we clearly agree about it and that's rather precious.
We agree in practice, but I maybe see nuance where you apparently don’t. The unborn child also has rights as @Sean_F eloquently puts it downthread (better than me). Otherwise we’d have no moral problems with third trimester abortion of perfectly viable babies
When do those rights commence? It’s the devil of a question and I respect the beliefs of those who might put it at conception, even if I disagree
No, we don't have a "nuance" issue. I support the right to abortion but with controls around reasons and term limits. I don't support an outright ban or anything close to it.
Sean was making the obvious sound deep. He has a talent for that. So do lots of you grinders on here.
Ooo bitchy!
(but I love you all)
Your brain is so weirdly narrow.
There can be no “fundamental right’ in this debate, not when it comes down to a clash between the fundamental right of a baby to live, versus the fundamental rights of a woman to govern her own body
It’s like saying there is a “fundamental right of a home owner to shoot a burglar dead” or a “fundamental right of a woman to stab her abusive husband”
This is fiercely debatable stuff. It IS nuanced - because two basic rights are clashing
A ball of cells is not a baby. A ball of cells does not have fundamental rights. Calling it a “baby” doesn’t make it a baby. No-one actually treats the early embryo as if it is a baby outside of the abortion debate, because it’s not.
That's just your opinion, bro.
It is demonstrably true that no-one treats early embryos as babies outside of the abortion debate. Lots of early embryos fail to implant in the uterine wall and “die”, without the mother even noticing. If we thought these were babies, we would care about them, we’d want to know about them, we’d mourn them. We don’t. We pay them no attention. You probably had a “sibling” that failed to implant in your mother’s uterine wall. Have you ever mourned this sibling?
You hear people saying that heart disease is the biggest cause of death. Or maybe it’s meant to be cancer. If that ball of cells is a baby, then neither heart disease or cancer are the leading cause of death. It’s failure to implant in the uterine wall, that’s the leading cause of death, your logic says. Why do we spend £billions on treating and researching heart disease but basically nothing on the failure to implant in the uterine wall? Because no-one really believes these early embryos are actually people.
However, people feel a deep loss following a miscarriage in the early months of pregnancy. Why is that, unless they have lost a baby?
Show me someone who has felt deep loss for a failure to implant/miscarriage in the first *fortnight*, a deep loss like that felt when, say, a 6 month a baby dies. No-one does.
As time passes, that ball of cells becomes more and more of a person, so of course we can understand the deep loss people feel at later miscarriages. But the anti-abortionists say life begins at conception. I’m saying that, in reality, people do not act as if life begins at conception outside of abortion debates.
If you want to argue life “begins” at 1 month post-conception, or 2, or 3, those are more nuanced debates. Perhaps they are more nuanced than a political betting comments section can handle. I respect people may differ when quite they want to draw a cut-off date.
But the idea that “life” begins at conception is untenable with our natural biology where the majority of zygotes never make it.
From failure to implant through to stillbirth, there are plenty of conceptions that don't result in the birth of a child. The resulting level of sorrow increases from zero to devastation as the pregnancy progresses.
However, these are all natural processes, very different to active intervention to end the life of an unborn child.
A fertilized ovum is not a child.
So when does it become one? And does that matter in this debate?
At birth.
Fully out, or just the head showing?
You make a good point about the absurdity of trying to pick a particular moment. Yet you appear to pick your own absurdity, saying “life” begins at conception. So, when exactly? When the sperm penetrates the ovum’s outer layers? When the cell membranes first touch? When they fuse? When the cell contents mix? When the sperm’s DNA enters the ovum? Or not until the sperm and egg DNA is lined up with each other?
There is no single moment, I suggest. The only way to avoid your absurdities is to accept that it’s a process over time. What most countries’ laws do is accept that, accept that the zygote has less rights than the 3 month foetus that has less rights than the 6 months foetus that has less rights than the born child.
But I’m struggling to get worked up over Roe v Wade.
It’s not covered by the constitution, nor by common law, and as far as I can tell the original SC justification was weak.
So let States decide, as ghastly as that must be for the poor women who have to live in said States.
I agree. I’m also highly pro-choice but if you actually look at the leaked, draft decision, it has merit. There is nothing in the US constitution which says women have a basic right to terminate a fetus. Finessing this as a right to privacy is bogus
The voters must decide in individual states, that’s democracy. Equally, democracy allows the president and senate to pass a law explicitly allowing abortion everywhere if they have enough votes in DC
This decision arguably allows such a vote to ban abortion nationwide, too. https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/1521311115392737280 If the Alito opinion savaging Roe and Casey ends up being the Opinion of the Court, it will unravel many basic rights beyond abortion and will go further than returning the issue to the states: It will enable a GOP Congress to enact a nationwide ban on abortion and contraception.
I’m not sure even the GOP are that stupid . To ban abortion nationwide would cause such a furore that they would be pulverized in future elections . And banning contraception would be unbelievable given most Americans aren’t Catholic.
The democracy angle is a red herring imo. An outright ban on abortion is removing a fundamental right of women that I think should be protected regardless of which party happens to be in power, state or federal level, at any one time. States' Rights - ie "democracy" - was offered in the 1960s as for why racial segregation should continue in parts of the South. It didn't wash then, as a reason for allowing something appalling, and for me it doesn't scrub up any better now.
Funnily enough, I bet you’d argue exactly the opposite way with regard to gun laws and the 2nd Amendment
I would, yes, and I'd be right to do so. Literal minded consistency, regardless of nuance and context, is the enemy of good judgement.
You are so brilliantly boring
Just brilliant, I think you mean. Fat fingers?
But let's not bicker about this abortion banning monstrosity - we clearly agree about it and that's rather precious.
We agree in practice, but I maybe see nuance where you apparently don’t. The unborn child also has rights as @Sean_F eloquently puts it downthread (better than me). Otherwise we’d have no moral problems with third trimester abortion of perfectly viable babies
When do those rights commence? It’s the devil of a question and I respect the beliefs of those who might put it at conception, even if I disagree
No, we don't have a "nuance" issue. I support the right to abortion but with controls around reasons and term limits. I don't support an outright ban or anything close to it.
Sean was making the obvious sound deep. He has a talent for that. So do lots of you grinders on here.
Ooo bitchy!
(but I love you all)
Your brain is so weirdly narrow.
There can be no “fundamental right’ in this debate, not when it comes down to a clash between the fundamental right of a baby to live, versus the fundamental rights of a woman to govern her own body
It’s like saying there is a “fundamental right of a home owner to shoot a burglar dead” or a “fundamental right of a woman to stab her abusive husband”
This is fiercely debatable stuff. It IS nuanced - because two basic rights are clashing
A ball of cells is not a baby. A ball of cells does not have fundamental rights. Calling it a “baby” doesn’t make it a baby. No-one actually treats the early embryo as if it is a baby outside of the abortion debate, because it’s not.
That's just your opinion, bro.
It is demonstrably true that no-one treats early embryos as babies outside of the abortion debate. Lots of early embryos fail to implant in the uterine wall and “die”, without the mother even noticing. If we thought these were babies, we would care about them, we’d want to know about them, we’d mourn them. We don’t. We pay them no attention. You probably had a “sibling” that failed to implant in your mother’s uterine wall. Have you ever mourned this sibling?
You hear people saying that heart disease is the biggest cause of death. Or maybe it’s meant to be cancer. If that ball of cells is a baby, then neither heart disease or cancer are the leading cause of death. It’s failure to implant in the uterine wall, that’s the leading cause of death, your logic says. Why do we spend £billions on treating and researching heart disease but basically nothing on the failure to implant in the uterine wall? Because no-one really believes these early embryos are actually people.
However, people feel a deep loss following a miscarriage in the early months of pregnancy. Why is that, unless they have lost a baby?
Show me someone who has felt deep loss for a failure to implant/miscarriage in the first *fortnight*, a deep loss like that felt when, say, a 6 month a baby dies. No-one does.
As time passes, that ball of cells becomes more and more of a person, so of course we can understand the deep loss people feel at later miscarriages. But the anti-abortionists say life begins at conception. I’m saying that, in reality, people do not act as if life begins at conception outside of abortion debates.
If you want to argue life “begins” at 1 month post-conception, or 2, or 3, those are more nuanced debates. Perhaps they are more nuanced than a political betting comments section can handle. I respect people may differ when quite they want to draw a cut-off date.
But the idea that “life” begins at conception is untenable with our natural biology where the majority of zygotes never make it.
From failure to implant through to stillbirth, there are plenty of conceptions that don't result in the birth of a child. The resulting level of sorrow increases from zero to devastation as the pregnancy progresses.
However, these are all natural processes, very different to active intervention to end the life of an unborn child.
A fertilized ovum is not a child.
So when does it become one? And does that matter in this debate?
At birth.
What is special about birth? Topologically speaking, it's just moving from inside a cylinder to outside it. Biologically, it is going from 100% dependency on the mother to 100% dependency on the mother.
As I have already asked, would your answer differ if humans were marsupial? Why?
I have always held that the right time to start considering the foetus as something that should be protected, something 'viable' as 'a life' is the point at which it can reasonably be expected to survive with the help of modern medicine and develop to lead an independent life. There must be a point before which, if the foetus is removed from the mother, it will not be able to continue developing and form an independent human capable of passing through the expected 'ages of man'. This seems to me to be the right point at which to ban abortion except under specific circumstances - evidence of malformity or mortal danger to the mother.
Obviously all this has to be nuanced and will also change to some extent as our medical abilities continue to evolve but for now it seems to me that we should be able to set a reasonable point at which life has moved from being unviable to viable outside the protection of the womb.
I don't believe religious arguments should come into it. Nor do I believe the rights of the child should be ignored right up to he point of birth. I do think there are enough sound minds out there willing to engage in the debate rationally to pick a reasonable point in pregnancy - and I actually think the UK and many other countries do this fairly well. But I also think it is reasonable to expect that this termination date will change as medical expertise continues to evolve and trying to carve lines in stone are futile and counter productive.
But I’m struggling to get worked up over Roe v Wade.
It’s not covered by the constitution, nor by common law, and as far as I can tell the original SC justification was weak.
So let States decide, as ghastly as that must be for the poor women who have to live in said States.
I agree. I’m also highly pro-choice but if you actually look at the leaked, draft decision, it has merit. There is nothing in the US constitution which says women have a basic right to terminate a fetus. Finessing this as a right to privacy is bogus
The voters must decide in individual states, that’s democracy. Equally, democracy allows the president and senate to pass a law explicitly allowing abortion everywhere if they have enough votes in DC
This decision arguably allows such a vote to ban abortion nationwide, too. https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/1521311115392737280 If the Alito opinion savaging Roe and Casey ends up being the Opinion of the Court, it will unravel many basic rights beyond abortion and will go further than returning the issue to the states: It will enable a GOP Congress to enact a nationwide ban on abortion and contraception.
I’m not sure even the GOP are that stupid . To ban abortion nationwide would cause such a furore that they would be pulverized in future elections . And banning contraception would be unbelievable given most Americans aren’t Catholic.
The democracy angle is a red herring imo. An outright ban on abortion is removing a fundamental right of women that I think should be protected regardless of which party happens to be in power, state or federal level, at any one time. States' Rights - ie "democracy" - was offered in the 1960s as for why racial segregation should continue in parts of the South. It didn't wash then, as a reason for allowing something appalling, and for me it doesn't scrub up any better now.
Funnily enough, I bet you’d argue exactly the opposite way with regard to gun laws and the 2nd Amendment
I would, yes, and I'd be right to do so. Literal minded consistency, regardless of nuance and context, is the enemy of good judgement.
Whilst I believe we are on the same side as regards the abortion debate and many other liberal positions, your argument fails utterly because of that inconsistency. You cannot argue that States rights are wrong when they are about something you are opposed to such as restrictions on abortion but then argue they are right regarding the 2nd amendment. You have advocated literal minded consistency in one post and then argued against it in the next.
No, I'm gold. It goes like this -
Fundamental human rights should be enshrined. A woman's access to safe and legal abortion is one such. The right to bear arms is not.
People can disagree - both on whether fundamental human rights should be enshrined and if so on what they are - but there's no 'utter fail through inconsistency'. As if!
The notion that abortion on demand is a fundamental human right is ridiculous.
Moreso that in a game of Rights Top Trumps it beats the right to life of the unborn child.
Access to safe and legal abortion with controls around reason and with term limits. The consensus settlement in the West after the struggles of the civil rights era. This is what is under threat in the US. Having been in the vanguard on female empowerment they now seek to roll it back. That's how it looks to me.
If the USA had legalised abortion in Congress, ie in the same manner as other western countries legalised abortion in their parliaments, then there wouldn't have been decades of argument and the current situation.
Instead it was done by court cases.
Ok, yes, but I think this (and certain other imperatives) should be enshrined in something that operates above the level of national governments. So, if a government does something which potentially violates one of these fundamental human rights it can be taken to this higher body and is answerable to it. And this applies even if it passes a law saying otherwise. I realize this cuts across the notion of absolute national sovereignty and of a 'majority rules ok' idea of democracy but that's a feature, imo, not a bug.
Well many anti-abortionists would say that they are already answering to a higher body ie god.
But in the real world who would you have in this 'higher authority' ?
Nice liberal people from nice liberal countries ?
Or would there also be representatives of more unpleasant places ?
The Pope criticises "Nato barking at Russia’s gate" and suspects the invasion was "facilitated by the West’s attitude". He also questions whether weapons should be sent to Ukraine.
The less said by that kiddy fiddler institution the better it seems.
I don't agree with what he said, but calling the Pope a "kiddy fiddler" just demonstrates to us all (if we needed further evidence) what an ignorant unpleasant and unthinking right wing bigot you are.
Indeed and when Bartholmew Roberts posted under his name "whatever" he said he would be happy to see the Troubles return to Northern Ireland as a price worth paying for a pure Brexit.
I think Barty Bobbins is a total ratbag. But I agree, we need to maintain this standard.
Mods might want to consider this issue.
A blind man on a galloping camel knows that xxxxx is Roberts. I don't agree with posters being able to whitewash their posting history. Though in the case of RT I can understand why he wants to do it. To have hero worshipped Johnson over 99,000 posts would have embarrassed anyone.
Doxxing is strictly forbidden, and I will ban posters who engage in it.
If 'doxxing' means referring to a previous poster's username isn't that inconsistent? A poster who keeps his original username can have posts from years ago dredged up whereas those who change their usernames presumably can't?
Makes no sense to me. Maybe I'll call myself...
If you think someone is lying about changing their mind then it's probably more of a waste of time than usual arguing with a stranger on the internet.
But if you want them to show you the respect of not lying in your debate then you should show them the respect of using their chosen name.
If this is any sort of a community then one of it's appeals is that you know who you are talking to. Everyone has their own style and if year zero is going to be the moment they choose a new username then it becomes much less interesting. Most people know where the different posters are coming from. This will no longer exist. Imagine Big_G changing his name. A whole life story disappears!
OT. Liverpool now 15/1 on Ladbrokes. A very worthwhile bet I would say
Except I haven't attempted to deny who I am. I kept my avatar the same, my views remain my views, and I don't mind people associating my views of the past to my views of the present.
I just ask for the respect of not having my real life name used. Just because you know my name is not a reason to say it and doxx me.
But was it actually your real name? It always felt like a made-up one to me. Can't quite explain why, but it did.
But I’m struggling to get worked up over Roe v Wade.
It’s not covered by the constitution, nor by common law, and as far as I can tell the original SC justification was weak.
So let States decide, as ghastly as that must be for the poor women who have to live in said States.
I agree. I’m also highly pro-choice but if you actually look at the leaked, draft decision, it has merit. There is nothing in the US constitution which says women have a basic right to terminate a fetus. Finessing this as a right to privacy is bogus
The voters must decide in individual states, that’s democracy. Equally, democracy allows the president and senate to pass a law explicitly allowing abortion everywhere if they have enough votes in DC
This decision arguably allows such a vote to ban abortion nationwide, too. https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/1521311115392737280 If the Alito opinion savaging Roe and Casey ends up being the Opinion of the Court, it will unravel many basic rights beyond abortion and will go further than returning the issue to the states: It will enable a GOP Congress to enact a nationwide ban on abortion and contraception.
I’m not sure even the GOP are that stupid . To ban abortion nationwide would cause such a furore that they would be pulverized in future elections . And banning contraception would be unbelievable given most Americans aren’t Catholic.
The democracy angle is a red herring imo. An outright ban on abortion is removing a fundamental right of women that I think should be protected regardless of which party happens to be in power, state or federal level, at any one time. States' Rights - ie "democracy" - was offered in the 1960s as for why racial segregation should continue in parts of the South. It didn't wash then, as a reason for allowing something appalling, and for me it doesn't scrub up any better now.
Funnily enough, I bet you’d argue exactly the opposite way with regard to gun laws and the 2nd Amendment
I would, yes, and I'd be right to do so. Literal minded consistency, regardless of nuance and context, is the enemy of good judgement.
You are so brilliantly boring
Just brilliant, I think you mean. Fat fingers?
But let's not bicker about this abortion banning monstrosity - we clearly agree about it and that's rather precious.
We agree in practice, but I maybe see nuance where you apparently don’t. The unborn child also has rights as @Sean_F eloquently puts it downthread (better than me). Otherwise we’d have no moral problems with third trimester abortion of perfectly viable babies
When do those rights commence? It’s the devil of a question and I respect the beliefs of those who might put it at conception, even if I disagree
No, we don't have a "nuance" issue. I support the right to abortion but with controls around reasons and term limits. I don't support an outright ban or anything close to it.
Sean was making the obvious sound deep. He has a talent for that. So do lots of you grinders on here.
Ooo bitchy!
(but I love you all)
Your brain is so weirdly narrow.
There can be no “fundamental right’ in this debate, not when it comes down to a clash between the fundamental right of a baby to live, versus the fundamental rights of a woman to govern her own body
It’s like saying there is a “fundamental right of a home owner to shoot a burglar dead” or a “fundamental right of a woman to stab her abusive husband”
This is fiercely debatable stuff. It IS nuanced - because two basic rights are clashing
A ball of cells is not a baby. A ball of cells does not have fundamental rights. Calling it a “baby” doesn’t make it a baby. No-one actually treats the early embryo as if it is a baby outside of the abortion debate, because it’s not.
That's just your opinion, bro.
It is demonstrably true that no-one treats early embryos as babies outside of the abortion debate. Lots of early embryos fail to implant in the uterine wall and “die”, without the mother even noticing. If we thought these were babies, we would care about them, we’d want to know about them, we’d mourn them. We don’t. We pay them no attention. You probably had a “sibling” that failed to implant in your mother’s uterine wall. Have you ever mourned this sibling?
You hear people saying that heart disease is the biggest cause of death. Or maybe it’s meant to be cancer. If that ball of cells is a baby, then neither heart disease or cancer are the leading cause of death. It’s failure to implant in the uterine wall, that’s the leading cause of death, your logic says. Why do we spend £billions on treating and researching heart disease but basically nothing on the failure to implant in the uterine wall? Because no-one really believes these early embryos are actually people.
However, people feel a deep loss following a miscarriage in the early months of pregnancy. Why is that, unless they have lost a baby?
Show me someone who has felt deep loss for a failure to implant/miscarriage in the first *fortnight*, a deep loss like that felt when, say, a 6 month a baby dies. No-one does.
As time passes, that ball of cells becomes more and more of a person, so of course we can understand the deep loss people feel at later miscarriages. But the anti-abortionists say life begins at conception. I’m saying that, in reality, people do not act as if life begins at conception outside of abortion debates.
If you want to argue life “begins” at 1 month post-conception, or 2, or 3, those are more nuanced debates. Perhaps they are more nuanced than a political betting comments section can handle. I respect people may differ when quite they want to draw a cut-off date.
But the idea that “life” begins at conception is untenable with our natural biology where the majority of zygotes never make it.
From failure to implant through to stillbirth, there are plenty of conceptions that don't result in the birth of a child. The resulting level of sorrow increases from zero to devastation as the pregnancy progresses.
However, these are all natural processes, very different to active intervention to end the life of an unborn child.
A fertilized ovum is not a child.
So when does it become one? And does that matter in this debate?
I think there are several rational points:
1) fertilisation 2) implantation 3) neural tube formation 4) heartbeat 5) spontaneous fetal movements 6) age of viable survival. 7) first breath
There are arguments for all of these.
One problem is that very early abortions within the first weeks are only possible for women very in tune with their cycle, and the social and emotional capital to act quickly, for example contraceptive failure.
Late term abortions (after first trimester) are only a small minority, and much more often with serious fetal abnormality (which often cannot be diagnosed long before 18 weeks), or with serious social issues (concealed pregnancy, rape, incest, learning difficulties, addiction) or mental or physical health issues. Difficult cases needing sensitive handling.
One thing that I find rare in religious anti-abortionists is real compassion and concern for the welfare of the mothers, and all too often they target them with vile abuse.
I would have far more time for "pro-lifers" if they also argued for sex education in schools, free access to contraception and relationship advice, support for free pregnancy and pediatric care, and generous welfare support. To be fair, some do, but all too often they are bitterly opposed to supporting life after birth.
The Pope criticises "Nato barking at Russia’s gate" and suspects the invasion was "facilitated by the West’s attitude". He also questions whether weapons should be sent to Ukraine.
The less said by that kiddy fiddler institution the better it seems.
I don't agree with what he said, but calling the Pope a "kiddy fiddler" just demonstrates to us all (if we needed further evidence) what an ignorant unpleasant and unthinking right wing bigot you are.
Indeed and when Bartholmew Roberts posted under his name "whatever" he said he would be happy to see the Troubles return to Northern Ireland as a price worth paying for a pure Brexit.
I think Barty Bobbins is a total ratbag. But I agree, we need to maintain this standard.
Mods might want to consider this issue.
A blind man on a galloping camel knows that xxxxx is Roberts. I don't agree with posters being able to whitewash their posting history. Though in the case of RT I can understand why he wants to do it. To have hero worshipped Johnson over 99,000 posts would have embarrassed anyone.
Doxxing is strictly forbidden, and I will ban posters who engage in it.
If 'doxxing' means referring to a previous poster's username isn't that inconsistent? A poster who keeps his original username can have posts from years ago dredged up whereas those who change their usernames presumably can't?
Makes no sense to me. Maybe I'll call myself...
If you think someone is lying about changing their mind then it's probably more of a waste of time than usual arguing with a stranger on the internet.
But if you want them to show you the respect of not lying in your debate then you should show them the respect of using their chosen name.
If this is any sort of a community then one of it's appeals is that you know who you are talking to. Everyone has their own style and if year zero is going to be the moment they choose a new username then it becomes much less interesting. I have no interest in anyones identity. Just consistency. Most people know where the different posters are coming from. This will no longer exist. Imagine Big_G changing his username. A whole life story disappears!
OT. Liverpool now 15/1 on Ladbrokes. A very worthwhile bet I would say
A good tip from rogerdamus? The world is upside down!
But I’m struggling to get worked up over Roe v Wade.
It’s not covered by the constitution, nor by common law, and as far as I can tell the original SC justification was weak.
So let States decide, as ghastly as that must be for the poor women who have to live in said States.
I agree. I’m also highly pro-choice but if you actually look at the leaked, draft decision, it has merit. There is nothing in the US constitution which says women have a basic right to terminate a fetus. Finessing this as a right to privacy is bogus
The voters must decide in individual states, that’s democracy. Equally, democracy allows the president and senate to pass a law explicitly allowing abortion everywhere if they have enough votes in DC
This decision arguably allows such a vote to ban abortion nationwide, too. https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/1521311115392737280 If the Alito opinion savaging Roe and Casey ends up being the Opinion of the Court, it will unravel many basic rights beyond abortion and will go further than returning the issue to the states: It will enable a GOP Congress to enact a nationwide ban on abortion and contraception.
I’m not sure even the GOP are that stupid . To ban abortion nationwide would cause such a furore that they would be pulverized in future elections . And banning contraception would be unbelievable given most Americans aren’t Catholic.
The democracy angle is a red herring imo. An outright ban on abortion is removing a fundamental right of women that I think should be protected regardless of which party happens to be in power, state or federal level, at any one time. States' Rights - ie "democracy" - was offered in the 1960s as for why racial segregation should continue in parts of the South. It didn't wash then, as a reason for allowing something appalling, and for me it doesn't scrub up any better now.
Funnily enough, I bet you’d argue exactly the opposite way with regard to gun laws and the 2nd Amendment
I would, yes, and I'd be right to do so. Literal minded consistency, regardless of nuance and context, is the enemy of good judgement.
You are so brilliantly boring
Just brilliant, I think you mean. Fat fingers?
But let's not bicker about this abortion banning monstrosity - we clearly agree about it and that's rather precious.
We agree in practice, but I maybe see nuance where you apparently don’t. The unborn child also has rights as @Sean_F eloquently puts it downthread (better than me). Otherwise we’d have no moral problems with third trimester abortion of perfectly viable babies
When do those rights commence? It’s the devil of a question and I respect the beliefs of those who might put it at conception, even if I disagree
No, we don't have a "nuance" issue. I support the right to abortion but with controls around reasons and term limits. I don't support an outright ban or anything close to it.
Sean was making the obvious sound deep. He has a talent for that. So do lots of you grinders on here.
Ooo bitchy!
(but I love you all)
Your brain is so weirdly narrow.
There can be no “fundamental right’ in this debate, not when it comes down to a clash between the fundamental right of a baby to live, versus the fundamental rights of a woman to govern her own body
It’s like saying there is a “fundamental right of a home owner to shoot a burglar dead” or a “fundamental right of a woman to stab her abusive husband”
This is fiercely debatable stuff. It IS nuanced - because two basic rights are clashing
A ball of cells is not a baby. A ball of cells does not have fundamental rights. Calling it a “baby” doesn’t make it a baby. No-one actually treats the early embryo as if it is a baby outside of the abortion debate, because it’s not.
That's just your opinion, bro.
But an informed and intelligent one. Which therefore outranks those that are neither. Where would we be if all opinions are deemed equally worthy of respect? In big big trouble.
And a rather pompous and arrogant one too.
You seem to think that anyone who disagrees with you is your inferior.
No, I truly don't. It depends on what a person says and how they say it. I'm biased to people who share my opinions but not, I think, to an unusual degree.
Eg sometimes I've even read one of your posts and gone "Hmm, really disagree with that but it's well expressed and I can tell it's sincere".
There was one the other week, in fact, on ... well I forget now what it was on but it was a good post.
The Pope criticises "Nato barking at Russia’s gate" and suspects the invasion was "facilitated by the West’s attitude". He also questions whether weapons should be sent to Ukraine.
The less said by that kiddy fiddler institution the better it seems.
I don't agree with what he said, but calling the Pope a "kiddy fiddler" just demonstrates to us all (if we needed further evidence) what an ignorant unpleasant and unthinking right wing bigot you are.
Indeed and when Bartholmew Roberts posted under his name "whatever" he said he would be happy to see the Troubles return to Northern Ireland as a price worth paying for a pure Brexit.
I think Barty Bobbins is a total ratbag. But I agree, we need to maintain this standard.
Mods might want to consider this issue.
A blind man on a galloping camel knows that xxxxx is Roberts. I don't agree with posters being able to whitewash their posting history. Though in the case of RT I can understand why he wants to do it. To have hero worshipped Johnson over 99,000 posts would have embarrassed anyone.
Doxxing is strictly forbidden, and I will ban posters who engage in it.
If 'doxxing' means referring to a previous poster's username isn't that inconsistent? A poster who keeps his original username can have posts from years ago dredged up whereas those who change their usernames presumably can't?
Makes no sense to me. Maybe I'll call myself...
If you think someone is lying about changing their mind then it's probably more of a waste of time than usual arguing with a stranger on the internet.
But if you want them to show you the respect of not lying in your debate then you should show them the respect of using their chosen name.
If this is any sort of a community then one of it's appeals is that you know who you are talking to. Everyone has their own style and if year zero is going to be the moment they choose a new username then it becomes much less interesting. Most people know where the different posters are coming from. This will no longer exist. Imagine Big_G changing his name. A whole life story disappears!
OT. Liverpool now 15/1 on Ladbrokes. A very worthwhile bet I would say
Except I haven't attempted to deny who I am. I kept my avatar the same, my views remain my views, and I don't mind people associating my views of the past to my views of the present.
I just ask for the respect of not having my real life name used. Just because you know my name is not a reason to say it and doxx me.
That's fair enough. I have no problem with your choice of name. As you say you haven't made a secret of your original poster identity. Of course I've got no interest in knowing your or anyone's real identity but if someone who you've never heard of in your life insults your intelligence based on your schooling as someone did recently you're surely entitled to ask who the poster used to be!
The Pope criticises "Nato barking at Russia’s gate" and suspects the invasion was "facilitated by the West’s attitude". He also questions whether weapons should be sent to Ukraine.
The less said by that kiddy fiddler institution the better it seems.
I don't agree with what he said, but calling the Pope a "kiddy fiddler" just demonstrates to us all (if we needed further evidence) what an ignorant unpleasant and unthinking right wing bigot you are.
Indeed and when Bartholmew Roberts posted under his name "whatever" he said he would be happy to see the Troubles return to Northern Ireland as a price worth paying for a pure Brexit.
I think Barty Bobbins is a total ratbag. But I agree, we need to maintain this standard.
Mods might want to consider this issue.
A blind man on a galloping camel knows that xxxxx is Roberts. I don't agree with posters being able to whitewash their posting history. Though in the case of RT I can understand why he wants to do it. To have hero worshipped Johnson over 99,000 posts would have embarrassed anyone.
Doxxing is strictly forbidden, and I will ban posters who engage in it.
If 'doxxing' means referring to a previous poster's username isn't that inconsistent? A poster who keeps his original username can have posts from years ago dredged up whereas those who change their usernames presumably can't?
Makes no sense to me. Maybe I'll call myself...
If you think someone is lying about changing their mind then it's probably more of a waste of time than usual arguing with a stranger on the internet.
But if you want them to show you the respect of not lying in your debate then you should show them the respect of using their chosen name.
If this is any sort of a community then one of it's appeals is that you know who you are talking to. Everyone has their own style and if year zero is going to be the moment they choose a new username then it becomes much less interesting. I have no interest in anyones identity. Just consistency. Most people know where the different posters are coming from. This will no longer exist. Imagine Big_G changing his username. A whole life story disappears!
OT. Liverpool now 15/1 on Ladbrokes. A very worthwhile bet I would say
For one reason or another I've changed my username on here, um, about four times. I'd be disappointed if no-one was able to track me through those changes, but I'd hope that if I'd expressed a wish for pseudonymity after using my real name that the rest of the community would respect that.
And, even though I published my name here alongside a thread header, since I post my comments with a pseudonymous username, everyone has paid me the respect of not hounding me with my real name.
Comments
But given how bad things are now for the reputation of the Conservatives, and that we may have another 2.5 years of this to come, and that the worse it gets the further away the next GE will be pushed, it could easily be a political generation. However long it takes for all the big beasts of this government to retire into obscurity.
As I have already asked, would your answer differ if humans were marsupial? Why?
You have to go back to the 1970s to find the last time a party which lost power returned to power in less than a decade
That a typical natural conception event has a probability below a third of getting to the second trimester, that’s just taken to be how human reproduction works. That is just how human reproduction works. No-one is trying to “save” these supposed “unborn children”. As long as you’re averaging around the typical conception rate, we don’t do anything medically. We just tell you to keep creating those zygotes.
Perhaps the Catholic Church left you ignorant of all this. Perhaps you garnered the impression that God designed us such that conception usually means a baby being born. God didn’t. If God exists, he designed us so that most conception events go nowhere. Either Heaven is full of microscopic balls of cells or God doesn’t think they’re “unborn children” either.
So, if the SC does ban abortion, would you accept that given your above argument? Or does your argument only apply to laws of which you approve?
Biologically a born child can be 0% dependent upon the mother post-birth. A mother can die in childbirth and the child can survive, a mother might give a child up for adoption, a mother may be unfit and the child taken into care, or plenty of other options.
When our children were born my wife found out she was unable to breastfeed which was distressing for her, especially for the judgmental looks she sometimes got from conceited people who insist that bottle is bad without caring about your situation; but I must admit there was a part of me that meant that I enjoyed the fact that a benefit of bottle-feeding is I was able to feed our daughter too as a result.
Being able to let my wife sleep while I got up to do a middle of the night feeding is a nice thing to be able to do - and not something that could be done if your 100% dependency claim was remotely true.
During the 60's and 70's, there was a reasonably brisk pendulum. During the 50's and since 1979, the pendulum has got stuck in one position for much longer.
So why the difference (which state is the abberation?), and what will 2024 look more like?
14 weeks isn’t 2 weeks. Much happens between those two dates, whether you call it magical, miraculous or science. What begins as a single cell becomes, over time, something else, and eventually a person.
The people who are revolting, the people who are minimising what a baby’s life means, are those who insist, against all biology, that an ovum, the instant a sperm penetrates it, has become a person. That’s the nonsense.
In that scenario, what is the status of the foetus?
New Thread (and it's by me)
I think our positions are closer together than we initially thought.
Until the moment of birth, the foetus is a potential person and not a real one, the woman is one though and her body remains her own body, even if she's sharing it with a foetus that might become a person in the future.
And why after a government became so unpopular people are surprised it lost in 1970 is another strange one.
2024 would be par for the course ie an opposition party wins after over a decade out of power, say like 1964 or 2010. If Labour won and the Tories won in 2028/9 that however would be unusual and a return to the 1970s
There is no single moment, I suggest. The only way to avoid your absurdities is to accept that it’s a process over time. What most countries’ laws do is accept that, accept that the zygote has less rights than the 3 month foetus that has less rights than the 6 months foetus that has less rights than the born child.
Obviously all this has to be nuanced and will also change to some extent as our medical abilities continue to evolve but for now it seems to me that we should be able to set a reasonable point at which life has moved from being unviable to viable outside the protection of the womb.
I don't believe religious arguments should come into it. Nor do I believe the rights of the child should be ignored right up to he point of birth. I do think there are enough sound minds out there willing to engage in the debate rationally to pick a reasonable point in pregnancy - and I actually think the UK and many other countries do this fairly well. But I also think it is reasonable to expect that this termination date will change as medical expertise continues to evolve and trying to carve lines in stone are futile and counter productive.
But in the real world who would you have in this 'higher authority' ?
Nice liberal people from nice liberal countries ?
Or would there also be representatives of more unpleasant places ?
1) fertilisation
2) implantation
3) neural tube formation
4) heartbeat
5) spontaneous fetal movements
6) age of viable survival.
7) first breath
There are arguments for all of these.
One problem is that very early abortions within the first weeks are only possible for women very in tune with their cycle, and the social and emotional capital to act quickly, for example contraceptive failure.
Late term abortions (after first trimester) are only a small minority, and much more often with serious fetal abnormality (which often cannot be diagnosed long before 18 weeks), or with serious social issues (concealed pregnancy, rape, incest, learning difficulties, addiction) or mental or physical health issues. Difficult cases needing sensitive handling.
One thing that I find rare in religious anti-abortionists is real compassion and concern for the welfare of the mothers, and all too often they target them with vile abuse.
I would have far more time for "pro-lifers" if they also argued for sex education in schools, free access to contraception and relationship advice, support for free pregnancy and pediatric care, and generous welfare support. To be fair, some do, but all too often they are bitterly opposed to supporting life after birth.
Eg sometimes I've even read one of your posts and gone "Hmm, really disagree with that but it's well expressed and I can tell it's sincere".
There was one the other week, in fact, on ... well I forget now what it was on but it was a good post.
That's fair enough. I have no problem with your choice of name. As you say you haven't made a secret of your original poster identity. Of course I've got no interest in knowing your or anyone's real identity but if someone who you've never heard of in your life insults your intelligence based on your schooling as someone did recently you're surely entitled to ask who the poster used to be!
And, even though I published my name here alongside a thread header, since I post my comments with a pseudonymous username, everyone has paid me the respect of not hounding me with my real name.
So, stop being rude.