$ jlc (10,317)

Interesting point. Thank you for bringing it up.

My answer is that if the human race were in danger of extinction, any viable blastocyst would be worth a whole lot more than 10K!

Jan

I apologize if I have offended you by seeming to attack you instead of your arguments. I will say that I am baffled...I say BAFFLED! to see many of the people on this list wanting to restrict the prerogative of a woman to make a decision that will possibly alter her entire life.

In terms of counseling, I have no problem at all with helping people understand the options they have and the repercussions of those options. The medical profession can do better there! Bit I do NOT want this to come across as, "We know that if you decide to have an abortion you will regret this for the rest of your life. Now - do you really want to go through with this?"

A woman certainly has the right to this decision, at least to whatever degree is not defined as murder. If you do not agree with this, I shall cease to be baffled and become completely FLABBERGASTED!

Jan

This is a question that is interesting to me, but I think it is a different question than is the root of this thread (not that this branch isn't worthwhile).

When we have Uterine Replicators that can carry a blastocyst from conception to birth, then the rule of thumb of 'viable outside the human body' breaks down. Right now, while that rule is (I feel) ultimately doomed, it is the best we can do.

I would suggest that the binary of sentient/non-sentient may be too gross a granularity. I think that there may be subdivisions, with various levels of action appropriate at each point.

Jan

I agree.

Jan

From what I have read, there are a handful of emotions that are innate: fear of spiders, fear of falling, a few others. Most of the rest of the emotions seem to be learned, and anthropology texts come up with some really strange variations in the human species.

I do think that emotions, if properly trained, can serve as a 'short cut' to laborious reasoning. Such 'intuitions' can be valuable - you may not know 'why' that patch of woods look spooky, but you quietly creep backwards and thus avoid the sabretooth.

As a current example, I am obviously responding with a different set of emotions to the situations posed concerning, pregnancy, abortion and/or sale of the tissue and organs from aborted embryos. This thread is full of a spectrum of emotions, not a reflection of innate emotions.

Jan

I think that where I disagree with your argument is that I consider it valid to push the Undo button for an action. Yes, riding my bicycle without a helmet has consequences, but I have health insurance and am a cryonics subscriber to back up that choice. Hopefully, if I fall off and crack my skull, my health insurance will put me back together (let's hope my cryonics subscription is not needed!).

I have made a choice: riding without a helmet. If this should turn out to be a poor choice, then I can try to Undo the harm via a medical procedure.

To me, this differs from an early term abortion only in that I am undeniably valuable to me but a lump of protoplasm is of no value to me. So that makes an abortion a much easier choice - I am only getting rid of something that I do not want.

Jan

This is not a typical type of stance from you...and I may argue against the stance rather than the person

Jan

I may need someone to say to me, "This obscure surgical procedure might have side effects." (They probably would not actually need to say this because I would look up the surgery and its alternatives before I consented to it...but I can hypothesize that your case would be accurate in some instances.) How much would I sue for? Nothing. This happens all of the time. When my boyfriend had massive brain damage in an auto accident, no one mentioned the decades-long sequella of brain damage. When I talk to other people who have had, or their family has had, surgery or other medical procedures, there are often side effects that were not mentioned to them. This is routine in the medical care we receive - as is actively concealing important information from the patient because 'they can't handle it'. (Make sure that you always read your own chart, which they are required to let you do.)

And do you really think that you need to tell a man, "Having a vasectomy can alter your behavior or self image." ? I think that is pretty apparent to the prospective patient, even if he has not done any research on the statistics. Likewise, telling a woman, "Having an abortion might possibly have some psychological side effects." is probably unnecessary. This is not esoteric knowledge. (The women I have talked to who have had them did not experience this, but others probably did - that is part of the decision they chose to make, and not a subtle part, either.)

I think this falls into the category of, "Protecting the little stupid people from the repercussions of their own decisions by requiring them to jump through hoops in order to get society's approval." which is a lawmaking tendency that is strong in liberals. A woman should not need anyone's approval to get a legal abortion (per whatever the definition and limits of 'legal' are at the time).

Jan

Eudiamonia -

Are you telling me what I am feeling? Are you deciding for me that I will be existentially hurt by decisions I choose to make and so I should not be allowed to make them? Are you saying that I have to have counseling for something that women have been doing for thousands of years on their own (abort early term embryos) because you have decided it is damaging for me?

So...I can decide to join the military and go into combat and take the chance of getting killed...but I am not allowed to get the 'day after' shot to terminate a blastocyst?

Hear the outrage in my typety-typing. This is absurd. It hearkens back to Victorian doctors deciding that women did not actually have orgasms; we just thought that we did.

If you would like to ask women what they feel, that is different, but you have not only taken a stance that you will Inform us what we are feeling but that you will then make Rules that we have to follow in order to be magnanimously permitted to exercise free will.

Jan

Existence exists and every time you swat a fly you are removing something from existence. Denying the value of something is not the same thing as denying its existence. A(existence) = A(legit to be rendered non-existent) is not the same as denying that A = A.

Rape and incest have nothing to do with it: If it is legit to end the life of a blob of protoplasm due to rape then it is OK to do it because it is the free choice of the woman to do so. And it is. We can discuss 'when'...but that depends on our arriving on a basic agreement of 'what'.

Jan

My opinion is totally different. I abhor the idea of having a child - internal parasite, sapping your strength; total waste of my time and life after it is born. Sex is fun, and for me it forms a bond with the partner. That is all it needs to be or do. It may be an 'affirmation of life' for you, but is not the case for everyone.

Keep the little drippy-nosed suckers away from me: prevent conception, with abortion as a back up measure.

Jan, not a mom

My initial reaction is, Bravo! Let us use the otherwise wasted parts from dead bodies to help save other lives! Totipotent stem cells from an embryo or a fetus are terrifically powerful tools for research and therapy. They have been successfully used to counter macular degeneration and Parkinsons, among other disorders.

If your reaction to this video (which is possibly fake - see jdg's link to Reason article) is a reaction against abortion per se, then that is a separate discussion. The main thing is that these 'things' (human or otherwise) are already dead and it is good that their body parts can be used for improving the lives of people who are not-dead.

Legal harvest of fetal stem cells from aborted fetuses follows guidelines that are developed by the individual countries, but there is a general consensus on the following precepts (ED Biomed, 2002):

"There is a ‘strong’ consensus about some of the central conditions for good clinical practice regarding EFTT. These concern the following conditions:
1) the decision to abort should not be influenced by
the subsequent EFTT;
2) commercialisation is not acceptable;
3) tissue may only be obtained from dead embryos or fetuses;
4) informed consent should be obtained;
5) the decision to terminate the pregnancy must be
made before consent for donating EFTT is
solicited;
6) approval of experimental study by a qualified ethics committee

Interestingly, those parameters, arrived at by various ethics councils (Sweden and Canada are the ones I recall), were very similar, though the councils acted independently.

The existence an EKG does not prove that something is human - chickens have known EKG patterns, but that will not prevent me from having chicken for lunch.

The future of stem cell research probably does not lie in cells harvested from aborted fetuses, but in reconditioning your own endogenous stem cells to make different lines and tissues as needed. This is difficult, and it is more difficult for some tissues than for others (liver cells were a real problem). Using these fetal cells can bridge the gap between our current knowledge and the ability to clone our own body parts.

The last comment that I want to make is that this is an individual choice. On the 'murder of an adult human' we have a large social consensus - and we have laws against that. There is not a large consensus on whether abortion is right or wrong, which means that there should not be a law against it - it should be up to the individual.

Jan

I think you have clearly defined the problem and its best solution, nsnelson.

Jan

jdg -

I was appalled to learn that the text of a law could be amended (to the degree of 100% changed) in committee - after it was voted on and approved. This should cease. And everyone who votes on a bill or law should have to sign a statement that says that he read and understood the full damn thing.

Also, any money voted to finance a specific program must go to that specific program and there is no need to have wording in every act and bill to insure that - there is a strong default for the money to go for the voted use and only for that use.

Laws have expiration dates. I would suggest that laws expire 10 or 20 years after they are passed. If the public wants that law again, they can pass it again. Right now, we accrete laws like a mudball rolling down a leafy hillside. We have to reverse this tendency.

I disagree with you on plea bargaining. I think that there should be a standard vending-machine plea bargain for misdemeanors. If you spare the court the hassle and overhead of a trial, you get whatever the vending machine plea bargain is. (And the number of felonies should be TINY. It is currently a felony in CA to put a false registration stamp on your license plate, for example...!)

Jan

Outcry sometimes works. If you find a contact for him, put it out as a thread in the Gulch and see what happens. The difference between the contacts he will get from Gulchers and from most other people is that their emails/comments will be based on emotion and ours will be based on logic.

Jan

This is the origin of 'outlaw' - a person who was outside of the law, hence, not under its protection. In Medieval Iceland, if the Ting exiled you for (say) 3 years, then during those 3 years someone (a bounty hunter hired by your enemies) could legally kill you without it being considered murder.

Icelandic Law also had a provision for weregild. Weregild (man-gold) was a fee that you could pay in reparation for an ill deed (killing cow or kinsman). If the injured party did not choose to accept weregild, they could insist that you 'go to the island' and fight it out. (Radford, R. S. "Going to the Island: A Legal and Economic Analysis of the Medieval Icelandic Duel". Southern California Law Rev. 62 (1989) 615-44)

Some of these historic laws bear consideration in terms of whether they would be valuable in some form in today's society.

Jan

Good to hear from you again. I will welcome the return of your insightful an scintillating comments. I have been having to listen to all of these bozo's whilst you were gone (and vice versa, so I probably got the better end of the deal).

Jan, being quiet now

I can get along with the idiot berserker part! But I try to wiggle a brain cell once in a while and act prudently.

Jan

The solution has to work for Liberals and Conservatives alike, but it is a topic for night terrors to think of many of the intelligent and well-intentioned liberals I know re-writing the Constitution. They would turn the US into an explicitly socialist country because they want to take care of everybody.

So the result of pleasing liberals by leveling the playing field with respect to race and gender (as well as religion) and by making the gov butt out of people's private lives is something that we have in common with them. Encoding in stone the right of the gov to absorb 90% of everyone's income and mandate urban mini-homes to provide uniform 'little boxes' is where I fear it would go.

This makes me prefer the current flawed document to a re-write...because you are correct: Liberals will have as much a right to write it their way as we do to write it ours. In a Better World, where our culture were not so dominantly socialistic, a re-write would be an excellent solution.

Jan

I thought actors were offered for what they would bring to the film as well as for their fit or talent...If you sign a big name, then you automatically get their 'fans and friends' coming to your movie.

The proverbial death knell in the Movie Industry is, "...difficult to work with..." I think this actress (who I do not know) is likely to acquire that label.

Jan

If wiggys is correct about how this will work, it will resolve itself because people are more portable than buildings. The resolution will not be without significant cost to the affluent neighborhoods, but this is what I would see happening if the plan wiggys describes is implemented and then 'everything is left alone':

The low rent towers will be built in good neighborhoods. Crime will increase; property values will go down. The people who own adjacent properties will sell their homes as soon as their foresight and wisdom dictates. They will move to some neighborhood somewhere there is not a low income intrusion.

Either the place they move to will have protection against forcible low income building projects or it will not: if the former, then new 'good neighborhoods will form'; if the latter, repeat the sequence.

Jan

I always wonder that people are willing to discuss their arms and habits on the internet. I would think this would be a good topic on which to be silent.

Jan

But not where I want to be. AmericanGreatness did not say that suicide was not 'a choice', but that it's 'not much of a choice'.

Jan

I looked at the linked site (at work - so just scanned it) and I gather that you are a proponent of a series of Constitutional Amendments to rectify what is wrong with the gov. I am too...but this site has made me aware how difficult it would be to screen out the liberals from the process. Liberals are currently more numerous, better entrenched in the educational system, and better organized than Conservatives and Libertarians are pretty chaotic.

So I theoretically agree with you, but I cannot connect the dots to 'get there'.

Jan

Sorry, Salty. I was trying to be a bit lighthearted about the 'penny wise and pound foolish' aspect of government cost control that I have often seen. For example, Susanne's $64 pencil. One could say: "Wow! I have really cut costs in our department...our pencils now only cost $60 each!

The real problem there is that they don't just put in an order for pencils at Walmart or on Amazon. And that is itself dwarfed by the spending that goes on by big government agencies (that should not even exist).

I was not trying to hijack cause and effect, just a poor attempt at a bit of humor.

Jan