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raynebc
Member #11,908
May 2010

Edgar still doesn't understand literal criteria for life versus philosophical requirements like retaining memory, critical thinking and other unscientific "requirements" to be considered alive. A human embryo is already human, it doesn't require more time to become human. His uneducated feelings on the matter are irrelevant. Pro-life people don't consider naturally occurring miscarriages to be murder, that's just another dumb distraction pro-choicers use to dodge responsibility.

I'm not purely pro-life, I balance it with responsibility. If a woman was raped, she didn't choose to procreate so she shouldn't have to carry her offspring to term. If a woman had sex for recreation and merely regrets that the natural progression of reproduction creates another life, it's immoral to kill it out of convenience.

Edgar Reynaldo
Major Reynaldo
May 2007
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In your own words :

raynebc said:

That it has its own DNA and living cells means it's alive.

So why don't you have any respect for animals or plants? Your disrespect for life different from your own is what gives me my disrespect for human lives.

If all it takes is DNA and living cells, then that makes hair follicles 'alive' too.

The real story, from an ultrasound technician :

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10157599109579274&id=507224273

Erin Maus
Member #7,537
July 2006
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raynebc, do you believe men should be forced to pay child support?

If Republicans were really pro-life, they'd be clammering for improving maternal care. It's ironic such ostentatiously pro-life states like Alabama are worst in the country for things like maternal and infant mortality rate. Words vs actions. But let's legislate the womb and leave it to the free market once the baby's born.

---
ItsyRealm, a quirky 2D/3D RPG where you fight, skill, and explore in a medieval world with horrors unimaginable.
they / she

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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Life is not black and white. The universe is chaotic. Surely it gives you a sense of nobility sitting on your high horse, but that doesn't make you right. You're arguing a subjective point. There's no universally correct answer. Obviously we are all in disagreement about what is right. That's not the right time for government regulation.

The truth is that not all life is special. It's trivial to create it. If you're such a prude that you believe that people shouldn't have sex recreationally then good luck convincing anyone of that. That just makes it sound like you need to get laid. :P And if you do believe that people should have sex recreationally and that it's expensive these days to raise a child then you should be able to reason that it makes a lot of sense to be able to stop accidental pregnancies before it's too late.

We should not force rape babies to be born. That's a horrible existence to have. If two crack addicts fuck and the female gets pregnant the best thing they can do for that baby is to terminate it. There's a very small chance that it will be enough to overcome the addiction for one of the parents, but basically zero for both parents. It doesn't make sense.

People are not going to use abortion as their birth control mechanism. It's costly, and it's not without risk. It's not birth control. It's a last means to prevent an unwanted pregnancy after the birth control mechanisms have failed. And people have every right to do so.

Sex is a lot of fun. It's healthy, physically and emotionally. It would be different if we could easily afford to support children, but these days it takes 2 full-time parents to pay the bills for a small family of 1 or 2 kids.

The majority of people are going to choose to have the kid anyway. The people that would choose abortion are not necessarily going to provide the best life for these children. Parents need to want to be good parents. There's no law against being a bad parent. It's again subjective what's good and what's bad. There are laws to regulate definite abuses, but there's a large gray area, and you can't force parents to do their best.

It simply doesn't make sense to oppose abortion. Of course the images are difficult. Newsflash: pregnancy is pretty messy too. So are monthly periods for women. That doesn't make them bad. Men are largely oblivious to that because we don't live that. Women live with that on a monthly basis.

And the images that were posted of livestock meat products were finished products. That's not the messy image. The messy image is the actual forcible death and bleeding out and draining the carcass. By the time it gets to the butcher the blood has been drained. There's still a face/head, perhaps, but otherwise it's a very gray image compared to the original act.

Those images of fetuses and babies being exposed doesn't sway me. Nobody would say that those aren't difficult images to see in isolation, but seeing them daily it would be no different than butchering cows daily. People can and do deal with these images daily. It's not a big deal. And the line being drawn makes no sense. You haven't justified why these "lives" are more valuable than other lives. It makes a whole lot more sense to empower BOTH parents, man and woman, over the baby-to-be that isn't yet conscious and has nothing yet to lose.

That baby could become the next Darwin or it could become the next Hitler. There's no way of knowing, and so let live or terminate you cannot say whether it's the right or wrong thing to do. That's life. It's mostly gray. It's very rarely black and white. There's nothing wrong with gray.

Append:

I can attest that condoms are not very reliable. It's really trivial to break them, and it's most likely to happen when the male has the least control in the transaction, and he's the only one that knows the end is near. For anybody using them I encourage adequate lubrication, which sometimes means artificial lubrication. At best it's something like 97.93% effective (which doesn't really sound great on a "good year"). But at worst it's 0%. Still worth using, but it's ridiculous to assert that they're foolproof. They're definitely not.

That pretty much rules out the options that men have to protect themselves.

Edgar Reynaldo
Major Reynaldo
May 2007
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GullRaDriel
Member #3,861
September 2003
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I really want to know in which way do men feels so superior that they think they can decide what's good for women better than the women themselves.

I really hope that we can ASAP put miscarried/unwanted babies into the belly of pro life men who do not want abortion.

"Code is like shit - it only smells if it is not yours"
Allegro Wiki, full of examples and articles !!

raynebc
Member #11,908
May 2010

Edgar: I do have respect for plants and animals. My pet ferrets are carnivores, so they also eat meat. I take good care of them and feed them a diet entirely appropriate for their species: All meat, bones and organs. I am raising several flowers, herbs, fruits and vegetables. Hair doesn't have its own unique DNA. Your ability to repeatedly make bad arguments is impressive. Your ultrasound technician post is a call to allow killing of offspring for comparably rare medical conditions that are not the norm. Most pro life people are willing to excuse the use of abortion in the case of rape, incest or significant danger to the mother's health. Many would allow it for extremely deformed fetuses that can't survive. The overwhelming majority of abortions don't fit into those descriptors. Using extreme outlier examples to make the average case is bad policy, like trying to ban guns after a mass shooting.

Aaron: Yes, men should be forced to pay for child support. If they refuse to work to pay for their children, they should do manual labor under threat of incarceration to repay their debt to their partner and child. If two parents aren't willing to raise the children they create, they should practice safer sex (multiple forms of birth control because using only one leaves too high a failure rate) or give the child up for adoption. Pro lifers would largely be glad to pay more taxes to go to maternal and infant medical care if it meant curtailing abortion. And since you missed it: We don't care about the woman's body, we care about the additional life inside the woman's body.

bamccaig: Whether something is alive or dead is not as subjective as some people pretend it is. If you want to make the argument that the fetus is a human life but it doesn't deserve rights that supersede the mother's desire to destroy it on a whim for any reason, then make that argument plainly and honestly. The truth is people are selfish, and they want to do what makes them feel good without dealing with the consequences. When the consequences involve life or death of your own offspring, there is good reason to question peoples' motivations. It may have been an accident on your part, but please don't state the lie that abortion prevents unwanted pregnancy. It ends an unwanted pregnancy, which means ending a life, which is why there is a moral debate. In a moral world, people wouldn't consider killing their offspring on demand and would only procreate in committed relationships where they would raise the child.

GullRaDriel: Do you happen to know how many women are pro-life? You'd probably be surprised to know that a 2015 poll by Vox revealed that women labeled themselves pro-life more than men did. If a pregnancy has miscarried, no significant population of people would object to it being removed from the woman's uterus, you're just posting dumb sh*t now. If it were medically viable to transfer an unwanted pregnancy of any stage to a woman who wants a child, or if there was technology to bring the fetus to term outside of a human body, pro-lifers would largely be for it.

Bottom line, don't be selfish and see sex as a mere plaything when its natural purpose has always been procreation.

Erin Maus
Member #7,537
July 2006
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I respect that you're consistent, raynebc, even if I don't agree with your views at all.

> We don't care about the woman's body, we care about the additional life inside the woman's body.

But did you word that slightly wrong?

> Bottom line, don't be selfish and see sex as a mere plaything when its natural purpose has always been procreation.

Just because it's natural doesn't make it right or good. That's a fallacy (appeal to nature fallacy).

---
ItsyRealm, a quirky 2D/3D RPG where you fight, skill, and explore in a medieval world with horrors unimaginable.
they / she

Edgar Reynaldo
Major Reynaldo
May 2007
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raynebc said:

Hair doesn't have its own unique DNA.

Hair has DNA, and the follicles are alive.

raynebc said:

Pro lifers would largely be glad to pay more taxes to go to maternal and infant medical care if it meant curtailing abortion.

Yeah right. Republicans repeatedly vote to defund education and child care as well as Planned Parenthood and affordable birth control.

raynebc said:

And since you missed it: We don't care about the woman's body, we care about the additional life inside the woman's body.

And that's why you're not qualified to decide what happens. Pro choice puts the life of the woman ahead of the life of the baby inside her, as it should be. This is why we will always disagree.

raynebc
Member #11,908
May 2010

But did you word that slightly wrong?

I'll clarify that pro-lifers don't care to restrict what a woman does to her own body, but a fetus is biologically a different living body.

Just because it's natural doesn't make it right or good. That's a fallacy (appeal to nature fallacy).

I've had arguments with people where they claim pregnancy wasn't the expected outcome of sex. There's a disconnect from what people want and how the universe operates.

Hair has DNA, and the follicles are alive.

I don't know if you're being sarcastic or if you are actually deluded enough to think that's a valid counter-argument. Hair has its owner's DNA, not its own unique DNA. For various reasons it is not classifiable as a distinct life form.

Republicans repeatedly vote to defund education and child care as well as Planned Parenthood and affordable birth control.

Democrats and Republicans disagree on how to achieve common goals, what a shock. Out of control tax and spend shouldn't always be the answer.

Pro choice puts the life of the woman ahead of the life of the baby inside her, as it should be. This is why we will always disagree.

If you've finally decided to stop with the false equivalencies and be honest, I thank you. This is entirely the crux of the argument, whether a mother has any right to kill its offspring for any reason ranging from convenience to preserving her own life. Pro lifers believe the ending of a human life should be well justified, pro choicers much less so even if they mostly value human life after it is born.

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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The thing is nature has a lot of examples of the killing of offspring even after birth. It's not at all a new phenomenon, and it's not exclusive to humans. Other primates, mammals, and far more distant groups of animals like birds and fish also occasionally kill their offspring (and often, eat them).

For example, prior to Western civilizations reaching the Inuit they apparently killed many/most female babies. Estimates range from 15% to 80%. Logic dictates they were probably trying to limit the population to those most productive. Where survival was extreme they needed as many men as possible to hunt seals and whales, and probably far fewer women who likely didn't go on the hunts unless they were extremely desperate. They probably only needed a few women to reproduce and take care of the young children.

What this tells us is that morality is subjective. It made sense for past civilizations to kill off children that they could not afford. Similarly, in the wild, when an animal is struggling to survive it will typically abandon its offspring when times get desperate because it needs to focus on its own survival (and sometimes that means just eating the offspring yourself).

This seems to give us plenty of backing to justify abortion in fact. It's obviously far more humane to terminate the pregnancy than to wait for the birth and then kill the baby. Odds are humans that seek abortion in our day are doing so for many of the same reasons: lack of resources probably being number one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide_(zoology)#Infanticide_by_parents_and_caregivers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filial_cannibalism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savaging

Would it make you feel better if we eat the fetus? ??? >:(

Append:

Side note: I think that there's a bit more to being human than just "life" and DNA.

video

To assert that an undeveloped "fetus" is already human really downplays what it means to be human, which could over time have dire consequences.

raynebc
Member #11,908
May 2010

Survival of a mother in extreme scarcity could justify a wild animal to abandon or cannibalize its offspring. Survival of a tribal community in extreme scarcity could justify their sex selective infanticide. But then you have places like China, where their one child policy led to men being more socially valuable and baby girls were killed more for social reasons and not for survival. If you believe men and women are equally valuable, as Western civilization generally does, that can't be tolerated. Unwanted pregnancies in Western countries don't cause the mother to starve to death, there are plenty of social safety nets in place. There are plenty of non government entities that will even pay for the mother's medical care so she can carry the baby to term and then give the baby up for adoption. It is far more compassionate and moral to give a baby up for adoption when you know the baby will have all its basic needs provided by at least the government than to abort it.

Don't fall back into the trap of equating philosophical arguments about humanity with literal, objective definitions of humanity. You can argue an adult has more value than a baby or a fetus, but that doesn't mean the latter two have no value.

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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Safety nets will help to keep the mother and child alive, but they sure as fuck won't give them a comfortable, luxrious life like many of us get to live. If you don't want children you aren't going to suffer through that life if you don't have to. And guess what? You don't have to. Abortion is safe and very reliable.

Interestingly women rarely choose adoption. They much prefer abortion over adoption. It's a lot easier. The "problem" is gone much faster, and there's less emotional stress on the mother compared to when one gives birth and then has to give up the baby. Let alone the physical stresses, which are substantial. Women don't want to carry a baby to term to give it away. It's a lot to ask. It's unreasonable to demand.

And there are countless orphans already in our society that could be adopted. It's easy to argue that bringing more unwanted babies into the world is exacerbating that problem, decreasing the odds that an older child will be adopted because the adoptive parents would probably prefer a baby with fewer behaviour issues (from being in the "system", because it's hell).

I know a social worker too, and she has a lot of trouble keeping foster parents to take care of the kids in her agency's care. It seems most of them are doing it for the money. They don't provide a good life. They often give the worst care they can get away with, while pocketing as much cash as they can. She fired one of them a few months ago because they weren't working out. They were living in a house owned by the agency. And they refused to leave after being fired. They squatted in the house for a month before the police were involved to drag them out.

How righteous of you to prefer children are brought into that kind of life instead of just being ended before they begin. You must be so proud of yourself.

Life is not black and white.

raynebc
Member #11,908
May 2010

Even if a child isn't adopted, they have a good shot at a good life in the USA even if they don't live a life of luxury. Certainly better than never being given a chance. I am proud of this stance, it is what is righteous. It's unreasonable to demand that everybody acknowledge that having sex for fun and then killing offspring out of convenience is a just or moral set of choices. Killing your own kind to have fun without consequences is wrong, and that is a black and white assessment I will stand by.

LennyLen
Member #5,313
December 2004
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raynebc said:

It's unreasonable to demand that everybody acknowledge that having sex for fun and then killing offspring out of convenience is a just or moral set of choices. Killing your own kind to have fun without consequences is wrong, and that is a black and white assessment I will stand by.

You call other people unreasonable for having a different set of morals to you and then admit you see things in black and white. You're the one being unreasonable here.

For the record, I also don't think that abortion for convenience sake is a good thing. But I also accept that other people have different views to mine and that there is no objective right or wrong opinion.

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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raynebc said:

Even if a child isn't adopted, they have a good shot at a good life in the USA even if they don't live a life of luxury.

I'm sure you've gone to visit a few orphanages to verify this fact. Surely you aren't just pulling it out of your ass. Maybe you grew up in the foster care system and know what it's like? Surely you've spent time living in extremely impoverished communities, and have experienced first hand how bad life can be in America. Because if you have no idea what you're talking about then it would certainly NOT be very righteous to dictate what should happen to these life forms, as if you were some kind of omnipotent being.

raynebc said:

Certainly better than never being given a chance.

That's like saying that 5 is greater than null. It's nonsense. There can be no comparison. Countless sperm die every day that were never given a chance. It makes no difference. A consciousness that never existed cannot feel any which way about having never existed.

raynebc said:

I am proud of this stance, it is what is righteous.

Careful of being proud of ideas. That tends to close the mind to different ideas.

raynebc said:

It's unreasonable to demand that everybody acknowledge that having sex for fun and then killing offspring out of convenience is a just or moral set of choices.

It took me several passes over this sentence to make any sense of it. I don't know what to make of that, but found it noteworthy anyway.

I think you said that it's unreasonable to expect people to allow other people the freedom to terminate a pregnancy that has nothing to do with them. Which is unreasonable. If my wife gets pregnant you have absolutely zero control over what we do with that fetus. It's completely none of your business if we decide to abort it.

It's not the "pro-choice" group that is forcing anything on anyone. Nobody is saying that if you knock up your old lady (or whoever) that you have to abort it. By all means, if she agrees with you, and if you're fucking her hopefully you've done what you could to established a minimum level of compatibility, then carry the baby to term and either keep it or give it up for adoption. You have that right, and nobody is taking that away from you.

Odds are pretty good at this point that we'd also keep it since we're mature, my wife's clock is ticking, and she's excited about babies. I certainly still worry myself silly about how I'll continue to provide enough for us, let alone children...

It's the "pro-life" group that is trying to dictate what other people do with their lives. You have absolutely no entitlement to do this. Abortion is proven safe and effective (in fact, mothers that abort often feel immediate relief, whereas mothers that give their baby up for adoption often suffer long term emotional pain). There's no reason to believe that the terminated fetus feels anything at all. Nobody asked you how their abortion made you feel because it doesn't matter how you feel about it. It's none of your business.

raynebc said:

Killing your own kind to have fun without consequences is wrong, and that is a black and white assessment I will stand by.

And again where we differ is with the definition "your own kind". I imagine if we were to discover a fetus outside the womb we'd probably think it was some kind of alien being. It vaguely resembles a human, depending on how far along it is, but it's far from being fully human. It takes approximately 9 months to make a human. At 5 months (4 months premature) the baby only has about a 50% chance of survival with doctors doing everything possible for them. They are still not developed enough to even have good odds of being artificially supported through the rest of their development. That's not a human. There are actual humans with much more minor developmental inadequacies that we might consider less than human (e.g., sociopaths and psychopaths), but are still more human than a fetus at even 6 months of development.

If given the necessary time and energy a fetus might become human, like a caterpillar will eventually become a butterfly if given the chance, but the universe won't even feel the ripple if it doesn't. That caterpillar is not a butterfly yet. The DNA will not change. The caterpillar is already a unique set of DNA, which the butterfly will share, but just like the fetus is not a human, in its caterpillar form it is not a butterfly.

raynebc
Member #11,908
May 2010

LennyLen is a bit more reasonable than some of the people I've been arguing with here, in that he realizes there are ethical concerns with abortion.

Bam is not somebody I can reason with. He thinks parents can decide to kill their fetus and that life has no rights. He thinks the mere possibility of a hard life is worse than the parents making that choice to destroy their offspring in the womb, pulling it out, sometimes in pieces. He doesn't believe anybody should be upset that a mother has elected to kill her offspring. He equates sex cells like sperm with actual distinct human lives. He argues that since it isn't a fully developed human, it doesn't count as human. Sure, any uneducated simpleton could come across a fetus in a toilet (this has happened before) and not immediately recognize it as human, but people with experience can still understand what it is. To him, some humans are more equal than others. Caterpillars don't change species when they metamorphose into butterflies, and sadly I can't say this dumb comparison surprises me since it is typical of the weak excuses for murder I've seen in this thread. The bottom line is that a human fetus is a human at conception, it doesn't require time to develop to become a member of the human species. This is fact, and no amount of wishful ignorance will change it.

I don't believe there's anything more I have to say on the matter, but I don't expect the idiotic counter arguments will stop.

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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You don't need to tell everybody else what I think because I've already done that. Also, there's a really good chance you'll get some of it wrong, like suggesting that I believe sperm, which I slaughter by the millions every day, are actual distinct human lives. That's more close to what you believe, not me. But again, my ideas are already well expressed in this thread so there's no need for you to try to smear me by misrepresenting my ideas.

raynebc said:

Sure, any uneducated simpleton could come across a fetus in a toilet (this has happened before) and not immediately recognize it as human, but people with experience can still understand what it is.

Just for the record, what do you suppose is done when a fetus is found in a toilet? Do you expect that the police are called? A murder investigation is launched? An autopsy is performed? The fetus is placed in a wooden casket and buried in a cemetery? Or perhaps they send it to a funeral home to be cremated?

Or you think it gets bagged up in a plastic bag and thrown away like garbage? That is, of course, assuming it's too big to just be flushed down the toilet. ::) :-/ >:(

Edgar Reynaldo
Major Reynaldo
May 2007
avatar

Queue the star trek music.

Allegro.cc, taking threads where they've never gone before.

I think we've all put forth some decent arguments. The problem is, none of us are right about how other people should choose. It's a subjective choice, not an objective one.

When your cat has still born babies, do you mourn their death? Do you pray? Do you hold a ceremony? Place a marker on their grave? Or do you just bury them and move on?

Nothing here has convinced me that it's wrong to abort a baby fetus when it's barely even developed. There are term limits for this very reason. Now if you gave birth to a baby and then killed it because you didn't want it, I would be against that. But I do not equate the two.

I think it's far more hypocritical of people to claim a fetus is sacred life when they hold zero value for the lives of the thousands of animals they slaughter to feed themselves. It's hypocrisy at its worst.

So far, we have discussed religion, politics, immigration, rape, abortion, sex, is there any other taboo subject we've yet to discuss?

We might as well let this thread go down in the infamy it deserves. ;)

LennyLen
Member #5,313
December 2004
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So far, we have discussed religion, politics, immigration, rape, abortion, sex, is there any other taboo subject we've yet to discuss?

How about Euthanasia?

I believe those with a terminal illness who are suffering should be allowed to choose to end their life.

GullRaDriel
Member #3,861
September 2003
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There is a debate in France regarding end if life.

"Code is like shit - it only smells if it is not yours"
Allegro Wiki, full of examples and articles !!

raynebc
Member #11,908
May 2010

While I disagree with suicide, if somebody has an illness that multiple doctors agree can't be cured, the patient could decide their life isn't worth living anymore and pursue ending it. A doctor shouldn't be required to participate in an assisted suicide. I'm not sure I'd consider it a good idea to allow people who are merely mentally ill to commit suicide, as they can often be helped.

Edgar Reynaldo
Major Reynaldo
May 2007
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I feel about euthanasia the same way I feel about abortion. It should be avoided as much as possible, but in the end, it's up to the person involved to make that decision themselves.

Simply because there are other better options. But if someone is suffering and they can not bear it anymore, and nothing else helps, then I would be okay with it.

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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raynebc said:

While I disagree with suicide, if somebody has an illness that multiple doctors agree can't be cured, the patient could decide their life isn't worth living anymore and pursue ending it.

What happened to all life being precious? Whereas a fetus' life has barely begun, has no consciousness, and has no strong human bonds; a person that has been living for years, like decades, has very strong bonds. Seems like you arbitrarily go one way or the next with no real morality at your core.

raynebc said:

A doctor shouldn't be required to participate in an assisted suicide.

You believe anyone should be able to euthanize a loved one on a whim? How the Hell are we supposed to determine if it was murder, suicide, or assisted suicide? >:( ???

raynebc said:

I'm not sure I'd consider it a good idea to allow people who are merely mentally ill to commit suicide, as they can often be helped.

There's a huge distinction between assisted suicide and suicide. While the latter is generally understood to be a desperate cry for help, and often the person can be helped, the former is merely a way out of an impossible life where there are no other options.

It is quite surprising though to see celebrities that you would think have all of the best resources in the world still committing suicide. :-/ It's a touchy subject. I suppose in some instances those with deep psychological wounds may also be living an impossible life. But they're generally still capable of killing themselves so no need for assistance.

Of course, there's no point criminalizing suicide because if they're successful there's nobody to punish, and if they're unsuccessful what they need is therapy and treatment, not punishment, to deter/prevent another attempt. And punishing them is likely to only add onto the weight of the world that lead to their decision in the first place.

It seems compassion is the best response in every case.

raynebc
Member #11,908
May 2010

I didn't expect Bam to see the difference between taking one's own life and taking another's life when it is not able to consent. It's not worth getting into another debate where I'll see endless disingenuous arguments.



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