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This is what abortion has led to

Posted by ycandrea 5 years, 1 month ago to Government
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OK. I just vomited and I am still very shaken up when I heard that the governors of Virginia and New York want to kill babies after they are born in the name of abortion rights. I am really upset. I have always believed a baby is a human being with the right to live from the point of conception. Yes, a woman has a right to make choices about her body, but she does not have the right to kill another human being. She can give it up for adoption if she doesn’t want the baby. But now they can kill the child after it is born. Isn’t that murder? So, how do all of you who think it's OK to kill humans inside the womb think about killing them outside the womb feel? To me, there is no difference but some of you rationalize it. So did Ayn Rand. This is one issue I did not agree with her about and this is why. This is where your rights to abortion/murder have led. There should be a category for morality.
SOURCE URL: https://www.countable.us/articles/20668-virginia-s-moderate-governor-admits-abortion-bill-allows-babies-killed-birth?fbclid=IwAR1QAcFMnVwjI6ZDtvr-oGf8m9tWmxAuMytl7pnKDFTHSMNP8q9LW8AjBtY


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  • Posted by Solver 5 years, 1 month ago
    After hearing this democratic suggestion about killing babies after they are born, my first question was, “how long after they are born? (10 minutes, 10 days, 10 years?)
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  • Posted by $ AJAshinoff 5 years, 1 month ago
    Whats happening is absolutely vile and those who condone it are less than animals. Disgusting.
    This pic attached to this link shows the progressive politics that brought us where we are. Apologies, I can't post it directly.
    https://1drv.ms/u/s!AoEhhif6eYPVhkXdb...
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    • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
      That cartoon, once again appealing to deceptive emotional imagery rather than conceptual understanding, is a disgusting smear by anti-abortionists. Even progressive politics has not brought us that. Protection of the rights of a woman to not be barbarically forced to bear a child she does not want is not "vile" 'disgusting" and "less than animals".
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  • Posted by LibertyBelle 5 years, 1 month ago
    I am not prepared to say that a fetus is a human being from the point of conception, but I think that when it has brain waves, it is. And in any case, killing a live baby after it has survived an abortion is certainly murder.
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    • Posted by $ AJAshinoff 5 years, 1 month ago
      To me at the first sign of mitosis the process toward human life has begun. While events could still thwart the continued development into a child to say its not human, at any part of the life cycle is denying reality.
      My 2 bits.
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      • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
        No one denies the reality of a process towards human life that has begun, or that the entity is "human" in the sense of having human dna and the potential to become a human being. Confusing a person with anything with human dna before birth is the denial of reality.
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    • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
      It is no less "human" before brain waves in the sense of human dna; it is no more human in the sense of a person with rights when it has brain waves before being born.
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      • Posted by LibertyBelle 5 years, 1 month ago
        I believe that doctors classify a person as "dead" when the brain has ceased to show any brain-wave activity.
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        • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
          A person has to be a person before becoming a dead person. It does not follow from that that only brain activity is required to become a person, only that if you are a person and your brain stops you are then a dead person. Is that what you meant?

          At conception it is "human" in the sense of being human cells with human dna, but not a person. When it develops "brain waves" at a time still well before birth it is still human in that sense, but still not yet a person.
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          • Posted by LibertyBelle 5 years, 1 month ago
            Well, one has to have brain waves to be a conscious being, doesn't he?
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            • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
              Not every conscious being is a human being. Having primitive brain activity, let alone consciousness, is a necessary condition for being a human, not a sufficient condition. You can't argue from 'no brain activity in person implies person is dead' to get 'any kind of brain activity implies human person'. That would be a fallacy in several ways.
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  • Posted by $ rainman0720 5 years, 1 month ago
    I'm still trying to figure out when the idea of terminating the life of an unborn child became synonymous with--and just another manifestation of--"reproductive health care".

    They scream "You can't tell me what to do with my body!". But that little body inside of them can't scream, can't recoil in horror in anticipation of what's about to happen.
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    • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
      The "little body" that will not come a person can't do that because it's not a human person with a mental capacity to even conceive of it. It can't conceive of anything. It's what you imagine yourself.
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      • Posted by 5 years, 1 month ago
        Then what is it? It is a human life. You can rationalize this all you want, but your stance makes no sense to a thinking person.
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        • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
          Emotionally defiant lack of knowledge does not define the meaning of thinking. That a "little body" fetus cannot not think conceptually about a future human life and is not a person is fact, no "rationalization". A fetus that cannot breath, eat or be aware of the world other than a few vague thumps and noises is not the imagined little kid running around inside in a playpen observing and learning about the world.
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          • Posted by $ rainman0720 5 years, 1 month ago
            Well, the fetus breaths amniotic fluid, and it eats via the umbilical cord.

            But how old were you when you had your first cognitive thought? At what age did you become sentient?

            Since I highly doubt a 1 month old child can think conceptually abut a future human life, they by your definition it's also not a person.
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            • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
              The parasitic dependence of a fetus in not eating and breathing. A new born infant immediately begins to perceive the external world. That is the beginning of the active exercise of the conscious mind in contrast to passive sentience. It does not mean your snide "doubt" that a one month old thinks "conceptually about a future human life".
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          • Posted by 5 years, 1 month ago
            Are you really claiming lack of knowledge is why many of us consider it murder to kill a baby in the process of being born? That can very well be said of your opposing side also.
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            • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
              There is overwhelming lack of knowledge of the nature and source of rights as well as the distinction between a person and the unborn. Emotions routinely replace concepts.

              The explanations of the rights of the woman and of the fallacies of strained rationalizations for "rights" of the unborn show where the knowledge is and isn't. It isn't in the personal attacks and emotionally defiant dogma by anti-abortionists who don't acknowledge responses, let alone attempt to answer them. This is illustrated over and over by repetitive contradictory appeals shrieking that doctors are "murdering" "unborn babies, while ignoring the impact of forcing women to bear unwanted children.

              There is very little knowledge or interest in Ayn Rand's philosophy on this forum.
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  • Posted by bsmith51 5 years, 1 month ago
    The first order of war is to confuse and confound the enemy. We are certainly in a war, but the battle to destroy our culture is only one part, and perhaps just the beginning.
    War with whom, you might ask? Perhaps the Comintern, established in 1919. Though dissolved in 1943, its mission seems to continue, primarily in the USA through the Democrat Party..
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    • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
      The right of a woman to not bear a child is not a communist conspiracy to "destroy the culture". The rights of the individual are the opposite.
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  • Posted by bsmith51 5 years, 1 month ago
    "One can evade reality but one cannot escape the consequences of evading reality." Defying this simple platitude seems to have been the single greatest mission of our time.
    What reality have we worked hardest at evading? I would say cause and effect, starting with the removal of consequence from our sexual urges. First we created "The Pill," then we went wild. From there began the great flood of human degeneracy.
    No wonder the Muslims feel threatened by our great western civilization.
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    • Posted by CircuitGuy 5 years, 1 month ago
      "feel threatened by our great western civilization."
      I think reactionary elements of all the major religions of the world feel threatened by reason and liberty, i.e. "Western civilization".
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      • Posted by bsmith51 5 years, 1 month ago
        What I meant and should have said was, "threatened by the perversions of...." I have no complaint re western civilization except that we do not defend it against its enemies within.
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    • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
      The right of abortion does not evade consequences. It recognizes the consequences of not taking action and responds in conformance with causal factors required to then not bear a child. Having sex is not a duty to bear an unwanted child any more than stepping off a curb in front of an oncoming bus is a duty to be run over -- you embrace cause and effect by properly taking the action of jumping out of the way to avoid it. It is not "going wild" or "a great flood of human degeneracy" and neither was the invention of "the pill".

      Neither was the invention of anesthesia to avoid pain -- which was also opposed by the Church as contrary to nature determined by God -- an avoidance of causality. The invention of methods of contraception and abortion, like anesthesia, depended on understanding the mechanisms of causality in order to achieve a human value and avoid an unwanted disvalue.

      Moral choice in principle requires identifying means in accordance with causality in order to achieve human values, not following duties whether or not imposed by religion. See Ayn Rand's "Causality Versus Duty" in *Philosophy: Who Needs It". It's telling that you take the side of the Muslims whose mystical duties reject human understanding of causality and rational thought and action.
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      • Posted by LibertyBelle 5 years, 1 month ago
        And what about "Of Living Death" in The Voice of Reason.?
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        • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
          In that post I was referring to the role of causality versus duty in ethics, refuting the false claim that abortion and contraception allegedly deny causality. In fact they rationally employs causality and deny an unwanted duty falsely promoted as if it were causality. That was the reason for citing only the article "Causality versus Duty".

          "Of Living Death" is another great article dealing with a different aspect: the vicious anti-human motives of the Catholic Church’s injunctions on sex, contraception and abortion. That article was referred to elsewhere on this page in the context of "mental health" as a valid reason for abortion: https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...
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  • Posted by dnr 5 years, 1 month ago
    Since there are no higher powers and we are alone in the universe and we will be done in another few thousand years, and we have Objectivism to guide us, then a womens choice, is a women choice and no government or anyone else should be able to tell her what or what not to do with her offspring. The government should have no role what-so-ever in this choice.
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    • Posted by exceller 5 years, 1 month ago
      What a distorted logic, if it is logic at all.

      We have laws. Actually, had them since the Ten Commandments came into existence a few thousand years ago.

      It says: "Thou shall not kill".

      It is NOT the woman's choice to kill the newborn. It is NOT abortion any more.

      While there are arguments back and forth when does life start and I don't want to get into that, there is no argument about a newborn child.

      It is a human, capable of surviving outside the womb and if its life terminated, it is murder.

      Plain and simple.
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      • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
        Appealing to mysticism and the Ten Commandments is not logic and not an argument for government controlling women who don't want to bear children..

        No one has argued for killing children. The article stirring up all this anti-abortion hysteria in the name of "children" already born is phony.
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    • Posted by 5 years, 1 month ago
      Really? So, we do not need the Constitution to protect our rights anymore? And if we do, the Constitution does not apply to "offspring". We are all "offsprings".
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      • Posted by dnr 5 years, 1 month ago
        The question is do people with the Objectivism philosophy need a constitution? The answer is "yes." Amazingly enough, our constitution does not answer any of these questions. It is a "framework" and we keep trying to understand its "meaning." Certainly our founders could not have conceived of our current world, but just tried to lay down some basic principles. All questions we look at should try to be answered on the grounds of this foundation. I don't think that either of our two party system is equipped or able follow these principles.
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        • Posted by CircuitGuy 5 years, 1 month ago
          "tried to lay down some basic principles."
          The issue of abortion is one where two individuals' rights are in conflict. It makes me think of thought experiments in which you can push someone in front of a train to save someone else. I think of it as wrong to take action to that kills someone, even if it's to save another. But I also think it's wrong to use force to make someone take action to sustain a life. Applied to abortion, I might think we should use force to stop someone from killing the fetus, but we should not use force to make the mother incubate the fetus. Their lives are tied together, though, so forcing her not to kill is the same as forcing her to support another. I don't see how outlaw hurting the fetus without saying once you're pregnant you lose all rights. Society decides if you can work a dangerous job, work around chemicals, ignore a doctor's orders to rest, take medical interventions that put the fetus at risk, and so on.

          I agree with you that a constitution is an important framework but cannot resolve complicated questions where people's rights are in conflict.
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          • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
            Two individual human beings' rights are not in conflict. There is no such thing as the rights of those who have not been born.
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            • Posted by $ WilliamShipley 5 years, 1 month ago
              My son was born 3 weeks early, no big deal, a little treatment for bilirubin, but I sat in my wife's room holding him that day getting to know him, there was obviously something going on behind those eyes.

              So, when a woman is 3 weeks from birth I know exactly what's in there -- it's a baby. Take it out and you'll get what I was holding. Now there is no instant when this happens. From conception on there is a continuity. About the only explicit change is a heartbeat, but that's really early.

              It makes the issue really clear to pretend the baby doesn't exist until it's outside and breathes it's first breath. But that isn't reality.
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              • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                The act of birth is an abrupt change, not a barely noticeable change in a continuum. The entity exists before that under vastly different conditions, including the lack of cognition of the external world in any but the most vague and indirect way, but not as a person. It is still a potential person. "Take it out", prematurely or not, and it is no longer just a potential. You were not holding a baby in a womb, and what was "going on behind those eyes" was not the same as when it was in the womb.
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                • Posted by 5 years, 1 month ago
                  A baby inside the womb has just as much cognition of themselves as they do outside the womb. It is just a new experience when we come out of the womb. Just as our whole lives are made up of new experiences. We don't change what we are by the act of being born. Your opinions on this matter just do not make sense to me.
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                  • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                    There is no "baby inside the womb". That is a metaphor. The fetus is no more an "unborn child" than you are an "undead corpse" available for composting. You do have the potential to be dead.

                    The fetus does not have "cognition of themselves". It passively reacts to vague stimuli. Birth is not just another new experience in "our whole lives made up of new experiences". It is the first experience of the new born person. Becoming a biologically independent person from a biologically parasitic is a "change in what we are", to be identified and distinguished conceptually, not lumped together as if the essential differences were irrelevant.
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                • Posted by $ WilliamShipley 5 years, 1 month ago
                  If the act of birth is an abrupt change, is a baby born by c-section not really a person, just a potential?

                  You can imagine it suddenly changes into something else, but there is ample evidence that a late term baby reacts to external stimuli, including sounds from the mother's environment.

                  Other than starting to breathe, the mind and nervous system are exactly the same immediately before birth and after it. Pretty much all the systems in the body are functioning just the same.

                  In my son's case he needed bilirubin lights because the liver is one of the last organs to mature and his wasn't quite up to managing his body.
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                  • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                    Passively reacting to stimuli in the womb is not perception of the external world. Prior to birth the fetus has the biological apparatus to exercise its mental and physical capacities, but cannot yet do so for obvious reasons. It is still a potential.
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                    • Posted by $ WilliamShipley 5 years, 1 month ago
                      When you go to sleep do you stop being a human being because you stop responding to the external world? We judge a human's capabilities by what they could do, not necessarily what they are doing at the moment. Just prior to birth, the baby is fully capable of doing everything it can afterward, it is the same organism. It just hasn't been presented with the opportunity.

                      The other big difference is breathing on their own, but we don't declare someone dead because they are on a respirator with clear brain activity.
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                      • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                        A sleeping person has to first be a person. Sleeping is a normal part of life, included in the concept 'person'. That does not make nine months of development to become a person just 'not what you happen to be doing at the moment'. "Brain activity", regardless of what it is and what it accomplishes, does not imply being a person.

                        A fetus "capable" of what it could do if it is later born is a potential person. You are not an undead corpse, a kind of corpse, because you "just haven't been presented with the opportunity" to cease all life functions.
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                      • Posted by PeterSmith 5 years, 1 month ago
                        The fundamental differences between a sleeping human and the unborn are just as self-evident as any of the other false-analogies that are routinely brought out by the religious left in this thread.
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                        • Posted by $ WilliamShipley 5 years, 1 month ago
                          That's a statement, not a logical argument. Can you elaborate on what those differences are? Specifically between one a couple of days before and after birth. A 20 year old sleeping is going to have a lot more going on.

                          I'm making looking at this from an objective biological perspective without any reference to a soul -- which is the religious argument.
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                          • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                            You have to be a person before you can be a sleeping person. Moral principles pertain to an entire life span of the person, not moment by moment out of context. It's a biological fact that people require sleep; that doesn't make us lose our rights every time we go to bed. This is a philosophy rooted in fact, not rationalism. The concept of man includes all aspects of man, including the nature and necessity of sleep, and so does the concept of man's rights.

                            A fetus is a potential person, not a person, and so are the original cells at conception. They are part of the development of what will be a person, and are a requirement for the person's life to begin as a person. The concept of rights does not apply to a potential human being, and can't be smuggled into cells or fetuses in the name of an entire "life" including before becoming a person at birth. The concept of rights cannot be rationalistically made to apply with a verbal manipulation. The floating abstraction version of 'rights' remains a floating abstraction.

                            This is neither religion nor context dropping analytical philosophy.
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                            • Posted by $ WilliamShipley 5 years, 1 month ago
                              I have carefully avoided mentioning rights because those are acknowledged by the members of the society you are in. And the use of the word "person" is not a biological term so once again it has to do with what the members of the society indicate. We acknowledge the rights of personhood at various points in the human's development. For example we don't allow you to vote until you are 18 in the U.S. so from the point of politics, you aren't a person until then.

                              Biologically, though, I stick with my position that the organism is biologically identical before and after birth. Of course after birth it will go through another period of rapid change because it's in a significantly different environment and has to do that breathing thing.
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                              • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                                An objective morality is not cultural relativism. It does not depend on "society". One cannot discuss or understand the violation of rights of a woman forced to bear children or the alleged "rights" of the unborn by carefully avoiding mentioning the central concept of rights.

                                A person is a human being. Everyone knows what that means. It does not require "voting". Moral philosophy does not require advanced special knowledge of the special sciences such as biology to understand what a person, a fetus and more primitive stages are. People knew this centuries ago.

                                The fetus is not biologically identical to a new born infant. It's functioning is radically different, as has been discussed on this forum several times.

                                Having ruled out thinking in terms of rights, person, philosophy, and the difference between pre and post birth, insisting that only a structural "biology of an organism" out of context and without regard to function may be employed, you are understandably left not able to make essential distinctions, and in the name of science, emotionally accept the barbaric process of forcing women to bear children.
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                                • Posted by $ WilliamShipley 5 years, 1 month ago
                                  Beware of arguments about objective reality that consist of "everyone knows what that means". I have repeatedly said that objectively just before and just after birth it's the same biological organism. Objectively they ARE the same.

                                  Can you give any objective, measurable difference in what it is. (By the way, you may have to take it out to check).
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                                • Posted by CircuitGuy 5 years, 1 month ago
                                  "The fetus is not biologically identical to a new born infant. "
                                  "the barbaric process of forcing women to bear children."
                                  Thank you for the interesting discussion. This stands out to me b/c I find the use of force to make people be incubators for another absolutely barbaric and immoral. At the same time, I see babies under 3 months as being in the "fourth trimester". Loud sounds, even a vacuum cleaner, consistent with the sounds in the womb sooth them. This makes me think newborns and third-trimester fetuses are similar in some ways.

                                  So I am torn but err on the side of not forcing people to support/carry someone.
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                          • Posted by PeterSmith 5 years, 1 month ago
                            I don't need to make an argument for the self evident.
                            No abortion occurs a couple of days before birth, so it's an irrelevant comparison anyway.
                            A sleeping person is not an unborn person for obvious reasons that if you can't see, I'm not sure we have a basis for any discussion anyway.
                            For example, if you dispute the self evident fact that 1+1 = 2, requiring supporting arguments for something that straight forward, then no real discussion is possible.
                            In other words, you are intentionally playing dumb, to avoid conceding.
                            Also, detailed arguments have been repeatedly provided by others here, so I would just direct you to any post by ewv.
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                            • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                              Some abortions do occur a couple of days before impending birth, but is very rare typically done for reasons of health.
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                              • -1
                                Posted by PeterSmith 5 years, 1 month ago
                                Yes I know, but over 90% of abortions are in the first trimester and they want them all banned, but have no politically literate arguments, so are left with dishonest appeal-to-emotions, by the visuals of the rarest type of abortion.
                                It gets tiresome.
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                                • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                                  The clump of undifferentiated mass of cells well after conception doesn't even qualify as a parasitic organism, let a lone a person. It is not human in any way other than human cells. The anti-abortionists chanting otherwise are so ridiculous that they have to appeal to the substitute emotional imagery they conjure for late pregnancy that you refer to. Even that demagoguery isn't enough for them so they now dishonestly go beyond birth to hysterical claims of literal post birth "infanticide" (a redundancy, but they don't grasp that) as "abortion" (a self-contradiction), which is what they have now done on this forum by promoting the dishonest article on Virginia.

                                  A good lecture to listen to or review is Leonard Peikoff's 1998 Ford Hall Forum talk "A Picture is Not an Argument" at http://www.peikoff.com/2014/11/17/a-p... One of the picture-substitutes he describes is the anti-abortionists' imagery replacing concepts with percepts and emotion.
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            • Posted by CircuitGuy 5 years, 1 month ago
              "There is no such thing as the rights of those who have not been born."
              When do rights begin?
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              • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                When one is born and becomes a person. But with the necessity of parental responsibility some rights come later with maturity. Minors, for example, can't own property.
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                • Posted by CircuitGuy 5 years, 1 month ago
                  That seems arbitrary. Maybe it has to be. Some teenagers clearly understand the concept of creating value for willing customers and that they own what they create. Some adults do not understand that. Some are mentally delayed, but some otherwise competent people never learned that wealth comes from work amd money is a medium of exchange.

                  It seems arbitrary to draw the lines at birth and 18.
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                  • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                    Birth is a fact, not arbitrary. For later rights, civil rights such as property ownership requirements defined in law must be objectively formulated to serve a proper purpose. That is not arbitrary, but there are optional ranges for definitions (just like the simpler case of speed limits).

                    Objectivity in law means both an objective justification and an objective definition telling everyone what the law is. If you can't justify a particular point over others within a range then it doesn't matter which one it is, but something must be chosen and fixed so that everyone knows what it is and you must know that it is optional before doing it or invoking secondary considerations to decide. So there is a sense in which it has to be optional, but that does not mean arbitrary.

                    A key point is to remember that you aren't trying to discover something intrinsic to reality, and neither are you subjectively deciding. You must, in accordance with the proper principles, objectively identify goals and relevant facts to whatever degree of precision you can and need to, defined in a way that is practical to implement for the purpose.

                    This also arises in defining birth, which does not occur instantaneously -- is it 1 minute after this, or required to be before that, etc. But the requirement to be born -- outside of the womb as a biologically independent entity -- is not arbitrary. Deciding on such definitions is not a big controversy if everyone understands the basic principles and the process isn't corrupted by an anti-abortion "rights of cells" agenda, etc.

                    For laws regarding later stages of adolescent and adult life, people do mature at different rates and have other differences, which must be taken into account when defining a range of options and possible exceptions depending on well-defined conditions.

                    Adults can also differ, but the law can specify what can be normally and reasonably understood. If some don't take the responsibility to do that then they are outside of the law without excuse. If a large portion of the culture is ignorant of basic principles then trying to establish a civilized society is a big problem no matter what you do.
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                    • Posted by CircuitGuy 5 years, 1 month ago
                      I still do not understand why we draw the lines where we do, both for life and capacity to enter contracts. For being held responsible for serious crimes, we take capacity on a case-by-case basis. In a hypothetical case where we could save a fetus and move it to an incubator without harm to the mother, maybe we're justified in using force to do it. I have heard selective pressures led birth to happen when it does because if the fetus grew larger the risk of death during birth would be greater than the risk being born earlier. Birth is clearly defined, but I don't see why it's a milestone for rights.
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                      • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                        It's a milestone for rights because after birth there is a person. Before that it is a parasitic organism that is a potential person. The newborn person is a biologically independent organism with a human consciousness aware of the external world and whose use rapidly develops to focus and think, though in pre-conceptual form at the very beginning.

                        As Ayn Rand put it in IOE, "And although I hesitate to talk about volition on the preconceptual level—because the subject isn't aware of it in those terms—even a preconceptual infant has the power to look around or not look, to listen or not listen. He has a certain minimal, primitive form of volition over the function of his senses. But volition in the full sense of a conscious choice, and a choice which he can observe by introspection, begins when he forms concepts..."

                        Birth is the beginning of the fundamental right to life, required for all other rights, and which requires a person, not a potential person. That an earlier birth might be viable, with or without artificial incubation, means that it is still a potential, and does not justify forcing the woman, violating her rights.

                        Other rights accumulate with the capacity to exercise them. That is the principle for rights as a moral concept, remembering that it an objective process based on known facts and principles, neither a discovery of the intrinsic nor subjective inventions, as discussed previously.

                        Implementing it in civil rights is a political and legal process, requiring establishment of legal definitions and for which the onset of various derivative rights is in optional ranges as discussed previously.

                        That principle of the objective versus the subjective and intrinsic is very important throughout all the branches of philosophy and you will see Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff refer to it frequently. It is the way knowledge and philosophy, and how we formulate them in conceptual form, are based in facts, not arbitrary or mystic.

                        For why civil rights like the right to enter into contracts begin when they do, and what that depends on, you would have to look into the legal history and the arguments given to see why they begin as defined in law and whether or not you think it was reasonable.
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                        • Posted by CircuitGuy 5 years, 1 month ago
                          "even a preconceptual infant has the power to look around or not look"
                          I felt like this started at around 3 months of age for my kids, but I cannot be sure.
                          "That an earlier birth might be viable, with or without artificial incubation, means that it is still a potential, and does not justify forcing the woman, violating her rights."
                          I know. I try to imagine future technologies that could save the fetus without violating anyone's rights. For right now, people look to this philosophical issue as justification to violate people's rights to their own bodies.
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                          • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                            The "looking around" you refer at three months is much more advanced than the basic choice of even an infant to want to just take in what is around him in the most general wonder that is typical.
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            • Posted by 5 years, 1 month ago
              That is your opinion.
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              • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                Repeatedly dismissing anything that conflicts with your assertions as "just opinion" is not an argument. Not every opinion has the same worth, it depends on the reasons for it.

                The concept of rights is a moral concept based on the factual nature of living people who use their minds to comprehend the external world and make choices. See Ayn Rand's "The Objectivist Ethics" and "Man's Rights". That is the basis for the fact that rights pertain to people, not whatever someone feels like. It's not "just opinion".

                To take the concept of rights and misapply it as an entitlement to be born by an entity without the characteristics that give rise to morality and rights is to misuse the concept of rights as a floating abstraction that is meaningless. Yet that is at best what anti-abortionists do when they glibly demand "rights" for the unborn based on a vague notion of human rights. Worse are the religious mystics demanding a duty to procreate and protect mystical souls in accordance with faith in duty to God's Will.

                That cognitive misappropriation of the concept 'rights' is not just as good as any other "opinion". It sabotages rational understanding. Further using it to rationalize government force to control other people by the force of law is an unconscionable injustice and violation of rights on the basis of nothing but subjectivism -- mostly inspired in this case by its origins in, or overt repetition of, religious faith.

                Such is the nature of faith and force when reason is abandoned for competing and conflicting subjective "opinions" deemed to be 'just as good' as any other opinion, while denying the relevance of the rational basis for "opinions" the perpetrator does not happen to like.
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                • Posted by 5 years, 1 month ago
                  You mean like what you do? You dismiss everyone's opinions if they are not in line with yours. You have no facts to back up what you are saying. They are your opinions.
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                  • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                    Backing up "opinions", i.e., conclusions, with facts and reasons is not "dismissing everyone's opinions" and is the opposite of the competing arbitrary opinions of faith and force. Your "opinions", i.e., bald assertions, have been rejected in reason with explanation. Your arbitrary opinions do not become true by denouncing "opinions" you don't like as nothing but "opinions".
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        • Posted by CircuitGuy 5 years, 1 month ago
          "do people with the Objectivism philosophy need a constitution? The answer is "yes." "
          I used to think a constitution needed to be structured just right to prevent mob rule. I'm beginning to think a constitution is just codifying the philosophy behind a democratic republic that holds rights above the will the of the majority. That means no constitution can be powerful enough to prevent mob rule. We need philosophy, maybe Objectivism or maybe a broader philosophy that hold individual rights as sacrosanct.
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          • Posted by $ WilliamShipley 5 years, 1 month ago
            The problem is that we have mob rule. We will always have mob rule so it's important to educate the mob, not just put a constitution in place.

            Because all it takes is a leader with a lot of public support and you get "a New Deal", who needs to pay attention to that old constitution. You get Supreme Court judges upholding the concept that growing wheat for your own use is "Interstate commerce".

            This would be the problem with any real "Gulch", because it would probably be stunningly productive and attract looters. If they became numerous enough they would vote in new rules, or seize Midas Mulligan's property "for the common good".

            Might does not make right, but it can certainly make reality.
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            • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
              We do not always have to have mob rule. A constitutional government prevents that. "All it takes" to subvert that is not a "leader with a lot of public support". That "public support" for mob rule requires a public that does not understand the concept of the rights of the individual and the necessity of a government limited to protecting that. A public that does understand it is not a "mob". A-philosophical libertarians plunge into politics without regard for understanding the philosophical basis of "public opinion", which is not trying to "educate a mob".
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              • Posted by $ WilliamShipley 5 years, 1 month ago
                Yes, and we live in such a public which does not understand the concept of the rights of the individual. The majority of this country has bought into collectivist thinking -- which is why much of the constitutional limits on government are ignored.

                A constitutional government does not prevent mob rule if the people running the government ignore it.
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                • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                  You wrote that "We will always have mob rule". That isn't true. It depends on the proper ideas being accepted.
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                  • Posted by $ WilliamShipley 5 years, 1 month ago
                    If the ideas are accepted then the mob is still ruling, it's just ruling according to a rational moral code. Never forget that if it changes it's mind, the moral code will not stop it.

                    An area where I think Rand is guilty of wishful thinking is that postulating a philosophy that it is immoral to initiate force against another human being does not automatically make other human beings observe that philosophy. The use of force has been and sadly will continue to be one of the forces that have driven historical development. Most nations of the world exist because someone with a bunch of weapons came and killed the people who didn't do what they said. It's only in football that you can throw a yellow flag for excessive force and they have to stop.
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                    • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                      There is no such thing as a "mob ruling by a rational moral code".

                      Ayn Rand did not "postulate" a philosophy, and philosophy, including her philosophy based on reason, is far broader than "Immoral to initiate force". That premise of anti-intellectual, a-philosophical libertarianism, which concrete bound cynical mentality declaring everything to permanently be a "mob", also can't see a cause of the world-history beyond "here now weapons".

                      It is not true that "we will always have mob rule". The people with whom you live and work among in this country today are not just a "mob". This country was not founded as "rule by a mob", and in the 19th century especially, was not "ruled by a mob".

                      The politics of a country follows its broadly accepted philosophy. Ayn Rand recognized that cause and advocated changing fundamental ideas over the time that that takes, not "wishful thinking" from "postulating" libertarianism. Whether or not a country is "ruled by a mob" depends on what the people understand and think about the importance of reason and individualism.
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            • Posted by CircuitGuy 5 years, 1 month ago
              "We will always have mob rule so it's important to educate the mob, not just put a constitution in place."
              Yes. I used to think the constitution needed "teeth" to prevent mob rule, but pieces of paper do not have teeth.

              "This would be the problem with any real "Gulch", because it would probably be stunningly productive and attract looters."
              Even if outside force could be prevented, eventually citizens get careless with their republic. The prosperity leads to a feeling that there's no danger whatsoever of the republic turning into a mob.
              I don't know if the quote/story is apocryphal, but Ben Franklin supposedly said it's a Republic "if you can keep it" walking out of the constitutional convention.
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              • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                Franklin did say that.

                A proper society based on understanding the right philosophical ideas retains knowledge and rationality as virtues; it does not fall by default into recklessly turning into a mob.

                The Enlightenment made the constitution and the founding of this country possible, but it did not have a full philosophical defense of the rights of the individual, and the emphasis on egoism was only implicit in the "right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". Those intellectual weaknesses made the counter Enlightenment appeal to altruism and collectivism much easier.
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      • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
        No one said a constitution is not required. It limits government to protecting the rights of the individual, not enforcing religious entitlements in the name of "offspring".
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  • Posted by jimslag 5 years, 1 month ago
    I wrote about this on Facebook yesterday. The fact that the Democrats will have blood on their hands because I consider it murder. It would be classified as a homicide, death caused by another person. It just shows that our politicians hate us, hate Christians, hate America. I would say Democrats but the Republicans do it also. I always call our politicians the Big Government Party, it just has 2 wings that constantly battle each other. A meme has it right, we could blame Democrats, we could blame Republicans, I blame us because we elected people who care more about about power and money than putting the good of the country first.
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    • Posted by bsmith51 5 years, 1 month ago
      My Facebook post: If anyone out there thinks it's okay for a woman to kill her baby up to the moment of and during birth, please unfriend me and remove all contacts related to me. I want no more association with you.
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      • Posted by jimslag 5 years, 1 month ago
        My Facebook post from yesterday:
        So, the Dumocrats in Virginia are debating murder of a human being. They are pushing a bill that will allow 'abortion' after birth. In my eyes, that is murder and Dumocrats will have blood on their hands. Just another reason that the Dumocrats Hate God, Hate Christians, Hate America. Just another reason to not vote for any Democrat,
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        • Posted by bobsprinkle 5 years, 1 month ago
          First.....I despise facebook...different strokes I suppose.
          Next, I suspect that once you get outside the DC area of Virginia and eliminate the state legislature locale most of Virginia does NOT agree with Tran or the governor.
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          • Posted by jimslag 5 years, 1 month ago
            I really don't care much for Facebook itself. However, It is the only way I keep in contact with friends from the military and some from overseas. I check it every so often just to check up on them and scan some of the posts but I don't live on there like some do.
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        • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
          The bill does not allow "abortion after birth". There is no such thing. It is a contradiction in terms. The article is dishonestly trying to create an impression that doesn't even make sense.
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  • Posted by $ blarman 5 years, 1 month ago
    What many do not know is that Colorado already has a similar on the books and has for some time. They just flew under the radar until New York's bill passed and it became a hot topic.

    To me, the most disgusting thing is that while the provision claims that it must be "for the health of the mother", this is a smokescreen because they can cite anything including emotional duress or economic hardship as a "health" consideration.
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    • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
      Health does in fact include avoiding emotional duress, especially the long term duress from an unchosen responsibility for bearing a child that was not wanted. Contrary to demands for religious duty to sacrifice, "health of the mother" is a value, not a "smokescreen".

      Here is an excerpt from Ayn Rand writing on this topic regarding a reform partially repealing NY's then 86-year old anti-abortion law in 1969. It is a principled, moral statement, not a "smokescreen".

      "Readers of The Objectivist do not need lengthy arguments to know why the present law is irrational and immoral. I refer you to my article 'Of Living Death' (in the September-November 1968 issues of this magazine [https://campus.aynrand.org/works/1968...]), particularly to the passage: 'Abortion is a moral right—which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved; morally, nothing other than her wish in the matter is to be considered.'
      ...

      "A consistently proper stand on this issue would require the total repeal of the law forbidding abortion. This is not likely to pass at present, but the kind of amended laws that have been proposed would represent a great step forward, would save many lives and alleviate an incalculable amount of human suffering—provided they include a clause which permits legal abortion when the pregnancy endangers a woman's physical or mental health. Such a clause would protect a woman from lifelong despair and would give her a chance to assert her rights.

      A news story in The New York Times (January 30, 1969) said: 'The provision about mental health is particularly significant because opponents of abortion-law change, led by the Roman Catholic bishops of the state, have argued that this would allow women with unwanted pregnancies to obtain legal abortions simply by attesting that they were distraught about having the child.' Yes, of course. That is the point. (Judge for yourself the motives—and the humanity—of men who would raise an objection of that kind.)

      "A clause including the protection of a woman's mental health, is essential to a meaningful abortion-law reform. Without it, any reform passed would be worse than none: it would be a pretense that might delay actual reform for another 86 years.

      "There are few political actions today that we can support without supporting a number of dangerous contradictions at the same time. The abortion-law reform is one such action; it is clear-cut, unequivocal and crucially important. It is not a partisan issue in the narrow sense of practical politics. It is a fundamental moral issue of enlightened respect for individual rights versus savagely primitive superstition."


      The article referred to, "Of Living Death", was from a lecture at Boston’s Ford Hall Forum in Dec. 1968 and as a radio address and was anthologized in The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought. It is "an extended analysis of the 1968 papal encyclical Humanae Vitae, laying bare the vicious motives behind the Catholic Church’s views on sex, contraception and abortion." https://campus.aynrand.org/works/1968... (1989).
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  • Posted by Dobrien 5 years, 1 month ago
    The body parts and adrenochrome are more valuable the closer to full term. The pro choice and PP folks are operating in their own self interest but is it ethical self interest?
    https://youtu.be/jjxwVuozMnU.
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    • Posted by $ Suzanne43 5 years, 1 month ago
      Thanks for reminding me about that.
      Follow the money.
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      • Posted by Dobrien 5 years, 1 month ago
        Money and power for the Demonrats nothing else matters.
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        • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
          Woman who choose not to bear a child are not "Demonrats" and it is not done for money and power. They make choice based on what they want for the rest of their lives.
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          • Posted by Dobrien 5 years, 1 month ago
            I was talking about the planned Parenthood people in the video. This is done for money . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjxwV...
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            • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
              They do it for research, but it doesn't happen for free so they try to recover funding for it. "Demonrats" for money and power doesn't explain it as a sole or primary motive. The bigger funding source is Federal subsidies, which no NGO should be getting.
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              • Posted by Dobrien 5 years, 1 month ago
                “Over two years ago, citizen journalists at The Center for Medical Progress first caught Planned Parenthood’s top abortion doctors in a series of undercover videos callously and flippantly negotiating the sale of tiny baby hearts, lungs, livers, and brains,”
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              • Posted by Dobrien 5 years, 1 month ago
                You are wrong sir . “They do it for research , but I doesn’t happen for free “ planned parenthood does not do any research . The buyer is On site at PP and the specimen is harvested by an employee of the buyer not a PP employee. The director of a PP clinic is video taped negotiating price per specimen and jokes that she wants a Lamborghini.
                https://youtu.be/6LPlHjP1DVw
                There is plenty more evidence from undercover investigators. When or if you excuse this for some reason I will offer more clear evidence. I agree For PP the majority of funding comes from fed subsidies.
                The “specimens “ meaning Organs. Brains. Lungs , and other parts of the fetus. They are all purchased separately.
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                • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                  I know that Planned Parenthood doesn't do it's own research. It supports the kind of research it desires by supplying the organs to those who do. Someone joking about a Lamborghini, which almost no one anywhere buys or could afford, doesn't mean that they are providing organs or functioning as an organizasation at all solely or primarily for money.
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                  • Posted by Dobrien 5 years, 1 month ago
                    I knew you would ignore the reality of directors of those clinics profiting from “specimens “
                    But $50-75 per part of which could mean $500 to $750 per abortion x20 per week is big money. BTW you clearly wrote they do it for research.
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                    • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                      They do what they in fact do with the organ specimens for the purpose of research. That is all it meant. I don't speculate about what they get on average per abortion; such extrapolation would only be a guess. The total is far less than the subsidies and there is no evidence that they are getting rich from it or that that is the motive of the organization. If even a few of them are getting a lot of money from the research specimens it should be documented and exposed.
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                      • Posted by $ jbrenner 5 years, 1 month ago
                        The harvesting of embryos is completely unnecessary now for tissue engineering research. Two separate research groups back in 2006 (one led by Yamanaka) pioneered the genetic engineering necessary to make one's own stem cells act as if they were inside a mother's womb.

                        https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1...

                        Using one's own stem cells is far cheaper and safer. This is why the "specimens" get so little now.
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                        • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                          The specimens are used for research broader than tissue engineering. But whatever the state of progress today, the discovery of use of one's own stem cells did not make it equivalent to embryonic stem cells.

                          Anti-abortionists opposed to stem cell research pronounced a false equivalence from the beginning as propaganda to ban use of embryonic stem cells. They partially succeeded when the Bush administration intruded in the scientific research on behalf of religion by banning funding, moving it to 'approved' work. Despite the fact that the taxes did not go down because the funding was only shifted, there was a lot of protest and private funding increased to continue the embryonic stem cell research.
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                          • Posted by $ jbrenner 5 years, 1 month ago
                            The key aspect of embryonic stem cells is that they are pluripotent. Yamanaka's technology is in induced pluripotent stem cells.

                            I didn't agree or disagree with Bush on embryonic stem cells, but Yamanaka and others adapted to come up with a solution that was both ethically and economically better.

                            The embryonic stem cell debate is at this point essentially moot.
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                            • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                              Whatever the future scientific and economic progress, not using embryonic stem cells is not ethically better and neither is banning scientific research to pander to religion, which is reprehensible . That principle is not a moot point.
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                              • Posted by $ jbrenner 5 years, 1 month ago
                                The reason is that it is ethically better (and it is) is because one has control over one's own cells. The reason why it is scientifically better is the dramatically lower chance of immune rejection, which is a BIG problem. The other reason that it is ethically better to use one's own cells is the greatly reduced risk of lawsuits. Bringing unnecessary third parties into the process makes the stem cell debate a much thornier problem than it should be, for patient, clinician, etc.
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                                • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                                  Any best choice is "ethical", but who goes around talking like that, in abstractions so much broader than necessary and which drops the meaning? You wouldn't say you carried furniture in a truck instead of a car because it's more ethical.

                                  Don't you see something peculiar in the fad to routinely refer to embryonic stem cells as not "ethical", instilling the association "unethical embryonic stem cells" to be automatic? It reflects the drive by anti-abortionists to inculcate the notion that ebryonic stem cells are allegedly "unethical" because they are embryonic.

                                  "Control over one's own cells' explains nothing for ethics. Whose control over what cells in comparison with what?

                                  "Risk of lawsuits" from irrationalists is most ethically eliminated by removing the improper legal grounds for them so there is no standing. There is no "third party" rationally involved in embryo cells.
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                                  • jbrenner replied 5 years, 1 month ago
    • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
      Of course it is in a woman's ethical self interest to choose whether or not to bear a child. It concerns a large portion of her life and the values she chooses to pursue.
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      • Posted by Dobrien 5 years, 1 month ago
        My comment said nothing about the “woman’s ethic self interest” it was about the pro life activists (Dems) and Planned Parenthood.
        Democratic candidates recieved between $30- 60 million in campaign donations. Basically a kick back from fed funds.
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        • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
          Providing abortions, which is apparently most of what Planned Parenthood does, is in the women's self interest, which interest is ethical. It doesn't mean like Planned Parenthood.

          Planned Parenthood is also a politically "progressive" organization comprised of mostly or all leftists. Of course they support Democrats. Those Federal subsidies should not exist at all, but it doesn't mean that Planned Parenthood exists for money and power as a kickback scheme rather than their stated goals.

          There are all kinds of financial corruption throughout the whole system, but that is not what determines ideological goals of leftists exploiting and participating in the corruption and it doesn't mean that everyone who supports the right of abortion is a leftist. The left 'package-deals' a lot with its "pro-choice" stance, including Obamacare and worse, which is not what Ayn Rand supported.
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          • Posted by Dobrien 5 years, 1 month ago
            Taking money from the Govt provided to them by the D’s and giving even $1 let alone $30 million back in Campaign donations is clearly a kickback.
            Stating other fraud and corruption exists doesn’t strengthen your support of such actions.
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            • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
              I don't support corruption. The organizations taking subsidies appropriated by Congress, and individuals or even the organizations giving money to candidates does not imply illegal kickbacks. I would expect those people to support Democrats regardless of specific pork to Planned Parenthood. But the whole system is rotten when political interests with subsidies and other possible favors can buy what they want. No one should be able to buy government policy.
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              • Posted by Dobrien 5 years, 1 month ago
                I did not say you support corruption. In fact I strongly believe you are as frustrated with corruption as any critical thinker should be.
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                • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                  You wrote, "Stating other fraud and corruption exists doesn’t strengthen your support of such actions", as if all I do is state the existence without condemning it.
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                  • Posted by Dobrien 5 years, 1 month ago
                    Rereading my response I should have wrote it doesn’t strengthen the Support your argument ,Instead of it doesn’t strengthen your support of such actions. My apologies ,I stand corrected.
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                    • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                      What does "should have wrote it doesn't strengthen the Support your argument" mean?
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                      • Posted by Dobrien 5 years, 1 month ago
                        Stating other fraud and corruption exists doesn’t strengthen your Argument that planned Parenthood acts ethically. Here is another example of un ethical behavior or worse.
                        They have consistently turned a blind eye and even gives suggestions to cover up sex trafficking of minors.
                        Case in point: In 2008, Live Action released its child sexual abuse investigation into Planned Parenthood, which found that eight Planned Parenthood facilities in six different states were willing to cover up sexual abuse, including disregarding mandatory reporting laws of suspected statutory rape. Facilities even provided instructions to the undercover investigators on how to circumvent parental consent laws.

                        Yet, this abortion corporation, which flaunts the law, continued to receive half a billion dollars every year from the taxpayer, while politicians and media alike approved.

                        In 2011, Live Action’s first investigation was followed by another, which set out to see how Planned Parenthood would respond to sex traffickers seeking services, including abortions, for their underage sex slaves.

                        In this investigation, Live Action sent a male and female undercover investigator into Planned Parenthood facilities in New Jersey, Virginia, New York, and D.C., posing as pimps seeking health services, including abortions, for underaged girls. Live Action claimed the videos proved Planned Parenthood was in violation of the law, which states that sex trafficking of minors is a crime and anyone who aids or abets a sex trafficker could also be punished with a crime.

                        And again, the millions in taxpayer dollars kept flowing to Planned Parenthood, despite the fact that government dollars can be removed when providers of Title X Family Planning funds fail to report child abuse.

                        Planned Parenthood’s response was to simply deny the accusation while claiming they would retain staffers. And they were able to get away with it, because instead of joining with Live Action and demanding an investigation, the media became part of Planned Parenthood’s PR machine, attempting to alleviate all concerns.

                        Even when, in 2016, Live Action produced FOIA documents disproving Planned Parenthood’s claim that it had contacted authorities to report the pimp, the media turned a blind eye.
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  • Posted by $ jbrenner 5 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    There may not be third parties "rationally involved" with embryonic cells, but there are nonetheless such third parties (lawyers, government agencies (particularly the FDA).

    Embryonic stem cells are not unethical by their nature. What gives them value is their pluripotency, their ability to differentiate into any organ type. If you can get that functionality more cheaply, with fewer legal and regulatory entanglements, and for less money, why expose yourself to the additional risk for no added benefit?
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    • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
      That does not just give in to the irrational, it sanctions it by calling use of the cells unethical instead of the attacks. Would you also routinely refer to taxation as paying "more ethical taxes", leaving unmentioned the unethical IRS? The automatic use of "unethical stem cells" has been instilled by propagandists who want people to automatically accept it as unethical because the cells are embryonic.
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      • Posted by $ jbrenner 5 years, 1 month ago
        What you fail to appreciate is that embryonic stem cells have a much lower value (perhaps even negative) from a technical standpoint as well, at least until humanity has mastered how to control the growth and differentiation of stem cells. Any pluripotent stem cell is going to have so much higher a risk for becoming cancerous at this point in time that there are very few businesspersons who would take on that risk, even if one takes the FDA out of the equation, and those who do will at least try to minimize that risk by using induced pluripotent stem cells rather than embryonic. Perhaps in another decade or two, we will know how to control this well enough such that people like me will be able to "do no harm" in the use of stem cells, but we aren't there yet except for adult stem cells.
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      • Posted by $ jbrenner 5 years, 1 month ago
        You misunderstood me, and I think intentionally so. The ethics in my argument are based on simple utilitarianism regarding squandering of a resource. A better analogy to my argument would be building an oil refinery now in California when you know there are going to be both individuals and governments that are going to oppose you instead of building that refinery in Texas where the opposition will be substantially less. Minimizing unnecessary risk is a critical part of any business strategy.

        An even better analogy would be to invest in solar energy instead of fossil fuels. The energy associated with solar cell manufacturing solar cells is more than you typically get out of them. Moreover, enough of the chemicals, particularly arsenic, involved in solar cell manufacturing have enough real hazards to make the environmental argument for solar cells a specious one. In that case, the environmental benefits are highly dubious and the cost is over twice that of fossil fuel-derived energy. The choice should be an obvious one.

        Perhaps the best analogy to the one I am drawing regarding the lack of value of embryonic stem cells vs. induced pluripotent stem cells would be to say that we should be using horses and carriages instead of cars.
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  • Posted by Dobrien 5 years, 1 month ago
    Parenthood Organization Itself
    2686
    Q
    !!mG7VJxZNCI
    10 Feb 2019 - 5:24:09 PM
    https://www.liveaction.org/what-we-do...
    Why do D's push to fund [PP] using taxpayer dollars ($500m/year)?
    Where does the money go?
    Past political donations of [PP]?
    What is the process of disposal re: aborted fetus?
    What regulations (who monitors) are in place to ensure that process is being followed?
    Why is there a new push by D's to legalize late term abortions?
    See past drops re: [PP] re: Congressional report (WARNING: GRAPHIC)
    This has nothing to do w/ a woman's right to choose (tactic they deploy when challenged to activate liberals/media hysteria).
    The focus is on the organization itself.
    https://www.crainsnewyork.com/awards/...
    Ask yourself a very simple question:
    Given the amount of evidence demonstrating illegal & disturbing activities by [PP]- where is the FBI investigation?
    https://www.foxnews.com/politics/plan...
    [RR][MCCABE]
    What senior political officials are providing cover to [PP]?
    Will action be taken by DOJ/FBI?
    2019?
    Q
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  • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    Olduglycarl: "To obtain maximum freedom one needs to embrace maximum responsibility...otherwise someone's gona regulate your ass."

    Freedom means freedom from physical compulsion. The morality of freedom, i.e., the rights of the individual, are principles based on the nature of man -- his requirements to live as a rational human being. That requires recognizing the same rights of others. They do not require, and are incompatible with, the imposition of unwanted duties in the name of "embracing responsibility" and crude threats of "regulate your ass".

    Olduglycarl: "Life begins at conception, Life that becomes aware of it's environment, aware of pain and hunger, begins very soon after that."

    A living cell in not a living person. Living cells at "conception" do not mean a human being that lives and has rights at conception, which is nonsensical. Awareness of the "environment" and "pain and hunger" do not "begin soon after" conception, and neither define being a person nor have anything to do with the basis of rights. The progression from a few cells at conception to a fetus is a potential human being, not a person with rights. The demands that a woman bear a child she does not want are a barbaric violation of the rights of a woman, not a "responsibility".
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  • Posted by $ 25n56il4 5 years, 1 month ago
    Like I said in my earlier post...I agree with all who posted. But, and this is important. There was a time, not too long ago, when a woman's life could be totally ruined by an unexpected pregnancy. Happily today, society is more accepting of this and it proves we have grown up. But in your expressions, consider what may have happened long before some of you were born and don't let your expressions be too harmful to someone who didn't have your opportunities. I had a friend who didn't have a choice, a darling mother of three healthy boys who lost her only little girl because of society's prejudices and ignorance. She never got over it.
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  • Posted by PeterSmith 5 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    "To obtain maximum freedom one needs to embrace maximum responsibility...otherwise someone's gona regulate your ass."
    Not at all. This is like saying, "to obtain maximum freedom, one needs to embrace maximum tyranny."

    Freedom is defined in Objectivism, as a rights protecting government.

    "Life begins at conception, Life that becomes aware of it's environment, aware of pain and hunger, begins very soon after that."
    Not human life, but more importantly, no RIGHTS begin until you are born.

    "Leftest, the global delete, aka, the great unwashed, want you complacent or dead."
    That is your position, along with anyone else who doesn't understand how rights work, so advocates reducing half the population to the level of cattle.
    If you are anti-rights, as anti-abortionists necessarily are, then you are anti-LIFE.
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    • Posted by $ Olduglycarl 5 years, 1 month ago
      The Issue at hand, Pete...is they think it's ok to kill During birth or AFTER it is born! And you think not, that is murder?
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      • Posted by PeterSmith 5 years, 1 month ago
        Except no one is advocating such a thing.

        Even Northam clearly stated, "And its done in case where there may be severe deformities, where there may be a fetus that is non-viable."
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        • Posted by $ Olduglycarl 5 years, 1 month ago
          Late term abortion is exactly that...and the left wants to take it further...you know that, that is who and what they are.
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          • Posted by PeterSmith 5 years, 1 month ago
            Late term abortion is exactly what?
            Other than a perfectly legitimate exercise of a persons individual rights?

            "the left wants to take it further..."
            The left are the ones trying to ban abortion, by trying to mischaracterize it as murder, or something.

            You are also still continuing to try and push a line you have been clearly proved wrong on.
            You said that people were advocating to kill "AFTER" birth, but clearly that's not what has been suggested at all, and the transcript proves it.
            It's the height of intellectual dishonesty to continue to double down, not only on a topic you clearly don't understand, but even when your direct assertions are directly proven wrong.
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  • Posted by j_IR1776wg 5 years, 1 month ago
    All life is a process begun in conception and ending in death. In a human pregnancy, the process is divided into arbitrary stages based on the major changes in the developing fetus. The exiting from the womb is merely another step in the process. These changes will continue for the rest of his life. The child is and will continue to be dependent on its parents for many years. The sole critical unanswered question is when, at what point in time, ought this living entity comes under the protection of the Constitution. Specifically, the fifth amendment, the full text of which is:


    "No person shall be held to answer for a capital,
    or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."

    As to the relevant part concerning abortion, "No person shall... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law...", the argument has waxed and waned pro and anti abortion throughout our history without resulting in a universally accepted definition of whether a fetus in utero acquires personhood and constitutional protection at conception, or, at some point after exiting the womb.


    Ayn Rand, a virulent pro-choice advocate, distinguished between early pregnancy as "protoplasm" not worthy of rights, and, the later stages of pregnancy.

    "Never mind the vicious nonsense of claiming that an embryo has a “right to life.” A piece of protoplasm has no rights—and no life in the human sense of the term. One may argue about the later stages of a pregnancy, but the essential issue concerns only the first three months. To equate a potential with an actual, is vicious; to advocate the sacrifice of the latter to the former, is unspeakable. . . . Observe that by ascribing rights to the unborn, i.e., the nonliving, the anti-abortionists obliterate the rights of the living: the right of young people to set the course of their own lives. The task of raising a child is a tremendous, lifelong responsibility, which no one should undertake unwittingly or unwillingly. Procreation is not a duty: human beings are not stock-farm animals. For conscientious persons, an unwanted pregnancy is a disaster; to oppose its termination is to advocate sacrifice, not for the sake of anyone’s benefit, but for the sake of misery qua misery, for the sake of forbidding happiness and fulfillment to living human beings."

    The Ayn Rand Letter “A Last Survey”
    The Ayn Rand Letter, IV, 2, 3

    "...but the essential issue concerns only the first three months..."

    Even Rand was open to the argument that as the term of pregnancy neared its end, that living thing in the womb was no longer "a piece of protoplasm" but a living person finishing another stage in a life-long process. Birth is not an abrupt change.

    Therefore, I conclude that abortion should be legal in the first trimester and criminally illegal there after.
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    • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
      Ayn Rand most certainly did not support your attempt to criminalize abortions after the first three months of pregnancy. She did not say she was "open to the argument" that a fetus is a "living person finishing another stage in a life-long process" and "Birth is not an abrupt change". Contrary to your assertion she did not morally "distinguish between early pregnancy" "not worthy of rights and later stages" that you claim are.

      She wrote in "Of Living Death" in her anthology The Voice of Reason:

      "A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born. The living take precedence over the not-yet-living (or the unborn).

      "Abortion is a moral right—which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved; morally, nothing other than her wish in the matter is to be considered. Who can conceivably have the right to dictate to her what disposition she is to make of the functions of her own body?"

      "Exiting from the womb", i.e., birth, is not "merely another step" of what you called an "arbitrary stage" in the life of a person. Being born is the first step of being the person.

      Leonard Peikoff also explained the principle in his Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand:

      "Just as there are no rights of collections of individuals, so there are no rights of parts of individuals—no rights of arms or of tumors or of any piece of tissue growing within a woman, even if it has the capacity to become in time a human being. A potentiality is not an actuality, and a fertilized ovum, an embryo, or a fetus is not a human being. Rights belong only to man—and men are entities, organisms that are biologically formed and physically separate from one another. That which lives within the body of another can claim no prerogatives against its host.

      "To sentence a woman to bear a child against her will is an unspeakable violation of her rights: her right to liberty (to the functions of her body), her right to the pursuit of happiness, and, sometimes, her right to life itself, even as a serf. Such a sentence represents the sacrifice of the actual to the potential, of a real human being to a piece of protoplasm, which has no life in the human sense of the term. It is sheer perversion of language for people who demand this sacrifice to call themselves 'right-to-lifers'."

      You further misrepresented Ayn Rand by quoting her out of context, "the essential issue concerns only the first three months", without mentioning what she said it is "essential" for, switching her context to mean your claim that she would accept your criminalization after three months.

      In context she wrote "One may argue about the later stages of a pregnancy, but the essential issue concerns only the first three months. To equate a potential with an actual, is vicious; to advocate the sacrifice of the latter to the former, is unspeakable".

      That is the essential issue in the argument. The anti-abortion movement generally wants to ban all abortion including abortion of what they call "life at conception". Ayn Rand observed that the essence of the debate is seen in the nature of the first trimester, for which there are no grounds for even confused argument invoking rationalizations about imagery with "ten little fingers" and the rest of it. That first stage strips the anti-abortionist argument bare to its essentials because it is so obvious that there is no organism at all, even a parasitic organism, let alone one capable of rights. The mysticism and barbarism of sacrificing a woman to that is the essential. That same observation is why the anti-abortion activists, who still want all abortion banned, now play a shell game shifting attention away from it to propagandistic imagery at the latest stage and false associations with "infanticide".

      Her sentence "One may argue" does not mean she was "open" to accepting such arguments over the last six months or that she was "open" to your notion that it is a "person" with "constitutional rights". She explicitly rejected that.

      Neither did the founders of this country, in drafting the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, form a government to prohibit abortion, which was common at the time -- there is no mention of "rights" of embryos and fetuses in the founding documents or their Enlightenment philosophy. They were not Catholic theologians. To "quote" the Constitution, and worse Ayn Rand, as allegedly supporting and "open to" your goal of "criminalization" -- which she emphatically rejected as "unspeakable" -- is not honest. In of "Of Living Death she wrote, "The Catholic church is responsible for this country's disgracefully barbarian anti-abortion laws, which should be repealed and abolished".

      To "argue" about later stages of development requires a basis of more understanding of the nature and source of rights in order to know at least something about how to evaluate and expose rationalizations over secondary factors such developing primitive organs and "twitching when poked". Those who are on a crusade to ban abortion don't have that understanding of rights, only a word "rights" mystically associated with anything "human", including cells, and an emotional obsession with a vague entitlement to be born -- while demanding to sacrifice the rights of the woman. As this thread illustrates, with that kind of premise and lack of understanding no serious discussion is possible from them.
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      • Posted by j_IR1776wg 5 years, 1 month ago
        Mankind has vacillated for untold centuries between Objectivity (Aristotle's Logic and Galileo's experimental method, primarily) and Subjectivity (Protagoras' "Man is the measure of all things, of things that are, that they are, of things that are not, that they are not.").

        To assert facts not in evidence is subjective. To accuse me of dishonesty and agreeing with the mysticism of the Catholic Church and those who believe that conception confers personhood is grotesque. You ought to apologize.

        Nor did I write that the founding fathers created the Constitution and the fifth amendment "to prohibit abortion". Please stop putting words at my fingertips.

        To begin a paragraph " To "argue" about later stages of development requires a basis of more understanding of the nature and source of rights in order to know at least something about how to evaluate and expose rationalizations over secondary factors..." is little more than a floating abstraction written to demonstrate your self-imagined superior intellect and denigrate your opponent. The attempt fails on its face.

        The potentiality of human existence lies in the disconnected state of sperm and ovum. Once joined in the womb and the fertilized cell attaches itself to the wall of the womb, it becomes an actuality, an existent.

        That a woman ought not be a slave to her enjoyment of sex and the whims of the control freak mystics is not in question in the first trimester. But what is the mindset of a woman who carries a living thing inside her body for forty weeks and then chooses to terminate that living thing on the delivery table? what is the mindset of someone who would advocate that the mother's right to terminate that living thing's existence up to the moment its head appears at the entrance of the birth canal?

        According to this site at 38 weeks of gestation:

        "You are 38 weeks pregnant...Development is complete, baby's main job is to gain weight..."

        http://baby2see.com/development/week3...

        "development is complete..." Is there no place in Rand's philosophy to concede that he is a human being waiting to make his appearance on earth?
        And worthy of protection under the fifth amendment?
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        • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
          Your assertion that Ayn Rand was "open" to your arguments against abortion is false, for the detailed reasons given and which you did not address. You modified and twisted out-of-context selected quotes and left out her explicit rejection of your position. To claim that Ayn Rand was "open" to views she explicitly denounced as "unspeakable" -- any banning of abortion -- is not honest.

          Again: "A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born. The living take precedence over the not-yet-living (or the unborn).

          "Abortion is a moral right — which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved; morally, nothing other than her wish in the matter is to be considered. Who can conceivably have the right to dictate to her what disposition she is to make of the functions of her own body?"

          And: "To equate a potential with an actual, is vicious; to advocate the sacrifice of the latter to the former, is unspeakable".

          And: "The Catholic church is responsible for this country's disgracefully barbarian anti-abortion laws, which should be repealed and abolished".

          That was Ayn Rand's position.

          Whether or not you choose to explicitly embrace Catholicism in any of its dogmas or simply choose to carry on its tradition sacrificing women to an unborn potential for nine or six months or any other period, it is still "unspeakable". Banning abortion for six months is still banning abortion. Repudiating your position for what it is is not "dishonest".

          Your assertion that the Constitution, "Specifically, the fifth amendment", "protects" the unborn is also false and a-historical. The founders did not mention or discuss abortion, and protecting an alleged entitlement to be born was not a function or purpose of the Constitution, which pertains to the purpose and organization of government for the people, not the unborn. Claiming that "protection under the Fifth Amendment" pertains to the unborn makes no more sense than would invoking the First Amendment's "freedom of assembly". Like the left, you "find" an entitlement that is not there.

          Understanding the nature and source of rights most certainly is required to discuss and argue for "rights". In particular, the bizarre rationalizations for "rights" of a fetus ignore the nature and source of rights, instead invoking secondary characteristics like "heart beat", "brain activity", "ten little fingers", "twitches when poked", "registers pain", "attaches to the wall of the womb", an alleged "main job of gaining weight", "shape" in an ultrasound and the rest of the nonsense we typically hear as pseudo-scientific appeals attaching a mystical notion of "rights" to the unborn. None of it has anything to do with rights. All of it uses 'rights' as a stolen concept ignoring the meaning and source of a rational concept of moral rights and the facts on which it depends and therefore to what it applies.

          Conceptual understanding is a requirement for rational discussion, not a "floating abstraction written to demonstrate your self-imagined superior intellect and denigrate your opponent" followed by the pretentiously irrelevant academic lingo "The attempt fails on its face".

          Objectivity in use of concepts does not permit a crusade banning abortion with the understanding of 'rights' replaced by the word 'rights' mystically associated with anything 'human' (including cells) and an emotional obsession with a vague entitlement to be born -- while demanding to sacrifice the rights of the woman.

          When a "fertilized cell attaches itself to the wall of the womb" the "actuality, an existent", i.e., a biologically parasitic entity, is still only a potential human being. "Potential" does not mean a free-floating potential that does not exist at all. It has to be something to be a potential for something else. That it is an "actual" something does not turn it into what it is a potential for, an actual person. Before it is born it is not a person as a biologically independent entity. It is only potentially a person. The concept of rights pertains to persons, not what is potentially a person.

          The "mindset of the woman who carries a living thing inside her body for forty weeks and then chooses to terminate that living thing on" what otherwise would have been "the delivery table" is that she chooses not to bear a child for reasons of her own that she has a right to for her own life -- with the vast majority terminating the process long before, and with late term abortions almost entirely for reasons of protecting the life and health of the woman. No one deliberately puts it off to make it harder or does it for joy on a whim.

          The dishonest hysterical imagery of "head appears at the entrance of the birth canal" does not represent when women discover the necessity to make a decision, why they make it, and when they choose to exercise their right to abort the process of bearing a child they do not want or which threatens their own health. Yet the dramatic false imagery is necessary for the misleading polemics. The false anti-conceptual imagery together with the emotional appeals with floating abstractions of 'human' and 'rights' do not excuse banning abortions for all, or anywhere within, the entire nine months -- including "to be a slave to her enjoyment of sex and the whims of the control freak mystics" for "only" six months and remaining lifespan.

          The "mindset of someone who would advocate that the mother's right to terminate that living thing's existence" is the protection of the rights of the woman from the barbaric practice of forcing women to bear children they don't want, including those who may have wanted it but who find their own lives and health threatened and therefore choose not to do it.

          No, there is "no place in Rand's philosophy to concede that he is a human being waiting to make his appearance on earth and worthy of protection under the fifth amendment". Ayn Rand's philosophy explicitly observes that a fetus is a potential human being developing and waiting to be born, if it at all, when it begins to acquire rights -- but without the religious metaphor of "make his appearance on earth".

          As Ayn Rand made clear herself, her philosophy does not make "concessions" to the irrational, there is "no place" in her philosophy for "only" six months of barbarism, and she was not "open" to arguments for that.
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        • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
          j_IR1776wg: "little more than a floating abstraction written to demonstrate your self-imagined superior intellect and denigrate your opponent."

          Please consult the guidelines for posting here.
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          • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
            There is coward on a militant crusade who is routinely downvoting all my posts, without responding. That too is contrary to the guidelines for civilized behavior on this forum.
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  • Posted by PeterSmith 5 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    No, that's what I'M saying.
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    • Posted by mccannon01 5 years, 1 month ago
      For example you posted: "But regulating peoples sex lives is the real agenda behind the anti-abortionists,..."

      I say that accusation is BS, especially as pertaining to those here in the Gulch.

      Also, I have not down voted any of your posts and I wish whoever is doing so would state why.
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      • Posted by PeterSmith 5 years, 1 month ago
        "I say that accusation is BS, especially as pertaining to those here in the Gulch."
        Except it's obviously not BS as it has been made by numerous posters here. Hint: whenever someone brings up a variant of, "don't have sex if you don't want to get pregnant," what they really want is to control peoples sex lives.
        I'm being voted down, because I'm simply demonstrating that the posters here haven't the faintest about what they are saying and my posts are triggering them.
        This is supposed to be an Objectivist forum, but it seems to be quite overrun by confused, religious leftists of the conservative movement.
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        • Posted by mccannon01 5 years, 1 month ago
          "Except it's obviously not BS..." Why? Because you would like that way?

          "...what they really want is to control peoples sex lives." There you go again, making up stuff. No one here wants to control anyone's sex life. The point being made is having sex can have consequences as in a cause-effect relationship. That simple position has nothing to do with any kind of control. It just is, like A=A.
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  • Posted by CircuitGuy 5 years, 1 month ago
    The original source for this fake news is a law that allows late-term abortions if a doctor certifies the pregnancy is putting the mother at risk. The opposite position is the government should use force to protect the fetus at the expense of the mother. That's a rabbit hole of debate I don't want to be part of. I hope that future technology will eliminate this issue.

    The thing that stands out to me is how I and many others are morbidly drawn to looking at train wrecks and how the Internet can provide an endless supply of them.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/01/op...
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  • Posted by BiggestShoelaces 5 years, 1 month ago
    Abortion is a moral right:
    http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/abo...

    Edit: Oh, I have been on the abortion conversation I jumped the gun. Infanticide is murder as they are individuals with inalienable rights.

    Edit 2: You all need to not forget the context of the right to pursuit your happiness and set the course of your life; that there is no duty, especially to being pregnant; and "Who can conceivably have the right to dictate to her what disposition she is to make of the functions of her own body?"
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    • Posted by $ blarman 5 years, 1 month ago
      The right is actually whether or not to have sexual intercourse. Pregnancy is an effect, not the cause. We get to choose the cause, but once chosen results in the effect. That is reality. We simply don't have the power to break the universe and unpair cause and effect.
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      • Posted by BiggestShoelaces 5 years, 1 month ago
        No, a right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness is not about government regulated sex.
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        • Posted by $ blarman 5 years, 1 month ago
          Noone is advocating government regulation. That's a red herring. What should be advocated is self-regulation: don't have sex unless you are willing to take the risk of getting pregnant.

          PS - glad you brought up happiness. How happy are women who have had abortions? Studies say most live under a pall of regret.
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          • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
            Blarman and the anti-abortion rights lobby are advocating gross violation of the rights of the individual, not just "regulation". Their refusal to acknowledge it in their demands to put their theology above human rights doesn't mean they aren't doing it.

            His demand for "self regulation" to not have sex in anticipation of the state coming down on you with prohibitions is just as ugly -- like the culture of 'self regulatory' dhimmitude of the Muslims.

            Anyone who has sex already "takes the risk of pregnancy", with or without contraceptives. Pregnancy does not imply a duty to bear a child. Blarman's appeal to his notion of "don't take the risk" means "don't have sex unless you are willing to take the risk of being forced by theocrats to bear a child". That is oppressive "regulation of sex" and worse.

            His arbitrary pronouncement that unmentioned "studies" have somehow proven that women who don't want children are "happier" if they don't have an abortion takes us back to the Dark Ages when Augustine redefined "happiness" to mean sacrifice to duties imposed by the supernatural.
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          • Posted by BiggestShoelaces 5 years, 1 month ago
            If you are complaining about self-regulating you are nitpicking. Who cares about self-regulating? Where is you concern for drug addicts and their happiness levels? This issue is about legal regulation, which would be immoral.
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            • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
              He isn't "nitpicking" -- it's much worse. You give it to much credit, as if it means at least something. It's a rationalistic evasive flim flam that makes no sense at all. But one that a certain kind of mentality takes seriously. It's a non-rational way of arbitrary thinking posing as serious discussion.
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            • Posted by $ blarman 5 years, 1 month ago
              There is a huge difference between self-regulation of voluntary activities and government-regulation of the same. To argue that the difference is "nitpicking" is to attempt to avoid dealing with the reality of the situation and does not become anyone on this forum.

              "Where is you concern for drug addicts and their happiness levels?"

              I am concerned about the government's responsibility to protect the Right to Pursue happiness, but I don't pretend that happiness can be found in self-delusion and the avoidance of reality. Nor do I pretend that I can divest consequence from choice on a personal whim.
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              • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                Criminal punishment for exercising the right of abortion is not "self regulation"; nor is there is any excuse to demand that the victims of these violations of rights submit with subservient "self regulation" out of dhimmitude to the demands of a theology. Identifying that for what it is is not "avoiding dealing with reality". Primacy of Consciousnes is not reality.
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              • Posted by BiggestShoelaces 5 years, 1 month ago
                Ok, that sounds good, but what do you suppose women that want an abortion to do, and what do you want drug addicts to do? Do you want them come to a rational decision or do you want the government to regulate condom and needle use?

                The difference between government and self regulating are vast, but you stated you are for self-regulating. I meant that if you believe people should be rational, then you complaint is nitpicking compared to the usual topic of government regulated. You are just complaining to complain if your view is just that you wish people would do better
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                • Posted by $ blarman 5 years, 1 month ago
                  "what do you suppose women that want an abortion to do"

                  Not get knocked up in the first place if they aren't willing to bear the resulting child! Use contraception at a bare minimum.

                  The whole argument in this debate is from people who want to have it both ways: they want the pleasure that comes with sex but not the responsibilities that come with the resulting children. It is an avoidance of reality - an attempt to redefine choice and consequence.

                  "what do you want drug addicts to do?"

                  Not shoot up, obviously! I want rational people, absolutely! If one is consuming mind-altering substances, he or she is by definition no longer rational. Thus all talk about using reason on those who have intentionally removed it from their life is in and of itself a farce.

                  "You are just complaining to complain if your view is just that you wish people would do better"

                  To the contrary, I can't avail myself of someone's particular expertise, their products, or their services if they are not in a rational state of mind to conduct business. I lose out on that opportunity to pursue my own self interest - and so do they. Not only that, but the person in a drug-induced irrational state is more likely to infringe upon my self-interested pursuits than the rational person. I'd say those were pretty valid complaints, wouldn't you?
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                  • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                    Blarman: "Not get knocked up in the first place if they aren't willing to bear the resulting child! Use contraception at a bare minim"

                    Getting "knocked up" is a disgusting way to characterize sex. But whatever anyone having sex thinks of it in contrast to that mentality, the purpose of sex is obviously often not to "bear the resulting child", nor is there any need to. There is no duty to bear a child as a result of pregnancy, whether or not contraception is used and whether or not it works if it is.

                    Blarman: "The whole argument in this debate is from people who want to have it both ways: they want the pleasure that comes with sex but not the responsibilities that come with the resulting children. It is an avoidance of reality - an attempt to redefine choice and consequence."

                    This dogma has been refuted here many times and Blarman keeps repeating it as if it means something other than his own authoritarian impositions.

                    The "whole argument" is not from "having it both ways". The argument against the anti-abortionists is that they savagely violate the rights of the individual on behalf of their mystical injunctions demanding a woman to bear a child. What he denigrates as "having it both ways" is a choice to pursue human pleasure and to not bear a child.

                    His mystical injunctions denying that are not "reality" and not bearing a child isn't "avoidance of reality". Bearing a child is a choice, not a duty required to be paid as the cost of pleasure. Choosing pleasure without having to bear a child is not "redefining choice and consequence". It is rejection of Blarman's obnoxious demand to prohibit choice and to dictate the consequences he wants himself.

                    That obnoxious demand is right out of the dogma of the Church denigrating human pleasure as an end in itself while imposing a duty to act in accordance with an imagined God's will dictating what "consequences" are allowed. It is the same Church mentality that tried to ban anesthesia on the dogma that it was Godl's will that people suffer as "natural" to being "His creatures".

                    All of it is disgusting anti-man dogma, not "reality" that we dare not avoid.

                    Blarman: " I want rational people, absolutely!".

                    Is that a joke? Obviously he does not want rational people. He wants submissive people. He demands that we follow mystical dogma in accordance with an imposed duty. He denies the morality, and our right, to make our own choices to achieve our own rational goals through rational means in accordance with rational knowledge of cause and effect -- that he damns as "avoiding reality" for not submitting to a sick, anti-man "reality" he wants to impose.

                    Blarman does not get to dictate to the rest of us what reality is. He does not get to dictate which causal factors, such as the cause and effect of abortion, are not allowed to be employed through choices he prohibits in the name of an unchosen duty he misrepresents as "responsibility".

                    That he comes onto an Ayn Rand Forum demanding such mysticism and duty in the name of reality and responsibility is truly obnoxious.
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                  • Posted by BiggestShoelaces 5 years, 1 month ago
                    You have no right to stop the irrational from doing what they want, as long as it doesn't interfere with another's right.

                    Procreation is not a duty, Sobriety is not a duty. They are not avoiding reality, abortion and drugs are a part of reality, and they made their choice.

                    Rights don't care about your hopes.
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                    • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                      He not only want to prevent what he thinks is irrational, he wants to prevent other's rational choices that conflict with his imposed duties.
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                    • Posted by $ blarman 5 years, 1 month ago
                      "You have no right to stop the irrational from doing what they want, as long as it doesn't interfere with another's right. "

                      I never intimated otherwise. But along the same path, I have no responsibility to treat the irrational as if it were rational.

                      "Procreation is not a duty"

                      Again, I never intimated otherwise. But when one chooses to employ one's procreative powers, one can not choose to divest one's self of the consequences.

                      "Sobriety is not a duty."

                      Here I will simply ask the following question: is it moral to pursue self-delusion, i.e. is there a moral imperative to pursue Reality?

                      "Rights don't care about your hopes."

                      Neither do they respect one's self-afflicted delusions. On the other hand, Rights do carry with them a duty for responsible use or they may be restricted or taken away.
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                      • Posted by BiggestShoelaces 5 years, 1 month ago
                        Rights carry no duty. Duty is the worst anti-concept. And rights cannot be taken away, they are inalienable. I suggest you go read some Objectivist philosophy.
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                        • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                          Blarman is a religionist who has written that Islam is a "beautiful religion" but he "can only follow one master". He also wrote on this forum that he started to read OPAR but became bored and couldn't finish it. Understanding of Ayn Rand's philosophy is not what he is here for, except to try to undermine it -- without understanding it -- with religious conservative rationalizations on behalf of his faith.
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                        • Posted by $ blarman 5 years, 1 month ago
                          Do you believe that it is perfectly acceptable to exercise your right to Speech by yelling "FIRE" in a movie theatre?

                          As to the rest, please answer my very simple and direct question: "is it moral to pursue self-delusion, i.e. is there a moral imperative to pursue Reality?"
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                          • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                            Blarman's post is non-responsive and irrelevant to the rejection of the conservative notion of rights depending on duty. There are no "moral imperatives"; that is a Kantian duty approach to ethics contradicting the requirement of moral standards in order to live.

                            No one said it is "moral to pursue self delusion" or "perfectly acceptable" to panic people in a crowded theater in the name of "free speech". No one has to "answer" Blarman's "simple questions" diverting discussion into irrelevancy.
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                            • Posted by Lucky 5 years, 1 month ago
                              I could not resist answering. I am ruled by the emotional urge to correct errors on the interwebs, sometimes. Now, the use of the word irrelevancy is in fact quite relevant for the whole thread.
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                          • Posted by Lucky 5 years, 1 month ago
                            blarman asks about, yelling FIRE in a crowded theatre.
                            An action that can cause disaster. So should there be a limit on free speech?

                            A good question.
                            Answer- With free speech you may shout FIRE anywhere,

                            but, a government with Objectivist principles would have legislation on these lines-
                            When you are in court you will face charges of Causing panic, Acting in a malicious manner so as to cause damage or injury, Resisting theatre staff who do have the right to remove you fast as others' rights are threatened by you. You may be sued for disruption, and for interfering with the obligations of management to perform a contract with patrons, etc.

                            Similar, driving a car, firing a rifle.

                            blarman- thanks for the question, it made me think, and I note the word theatre, I had to look it up, your usage is correct.
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                          • Posted by BiggestShoelaces 5 years, 1 month ago
                            Causing a panic violates people's rights.

                            It is moral to pursue self-delusion, it is irrational, but it is moral to pursuit your happiness.

                            As ewv points out, you are just pushing a theology which states that rights require following a single path defined by you.
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                            • Posted by $ blarman 5 years, 1 month ago
                              "Causing a panic violates people's rights."

                              So therefore the Right to Speech is not unlimited as you suggest, i.e. there are limits to its proper expression. I completely agree. Duty is nothing more and nothing less than to recognize and respect the boundaries inherent in our expression of Rights. To violate those boundaries and infringe on others' rights is an abrogation of duty and may be penalized.

                              "It is moral to pursue self-delusion, it is irrational, but it is moral to pursuit your happiness."

                              So according to your view, it is entirely moral to be irrational, i.e. refusing to acknowledge Reality. Oooookay, then. I'll leave you to your pursuit of irrationality and the happiness you think may result from such.
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                              • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                                The right to free speech is contextual like all objective principles, not an out of conetext absolute. It requires knowing what it means and applying it accordingly. It is not an out of context absolute requiring "duty" to "limit" it.

                                Duty is an injunction to do what you are told because it is your duty to obey an alleged higher authority, not a "boundary inherent" in rights -- as in the fallacies promoted here to destroy the right of abortion in the name of an arbitrary "duty" to bear a child.

                                It is immoral to pursue self-delusion, which is the opposite of rationality. "Reality" is not the duties you want to impose to prohibit personal moral choice.
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      • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
        Pregnancy can be an effect, birth is not a necessary effect, depending on what else happens with other causes. Abortion prevents a birth in accordance with cause and effect: Abort the process and there is no birth. Cause and effect. You have no right to decree that none of that matters. You want to dictate that once something happens, nothing else is allowed in accordance with cause and effect to change the outcome. Abortion can be a rational choice for a woman who does not want to bear a child; it is not "breaking the universe", which is a mystical notion employed to rationalize an imposed unchosen duty while posturing as natural cause and effect. Religious dogma tries to dictate effects without regard to causes while demanding that its victims not be allowed to identify and use causes and effects in pursuit of their own choices.
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    • Posted by 5 years, 1 month ago
      It ceased being just her body being involved when she created a new body inside herself. If that body is not a human life, then what is it? I strongly disagree with this whole premise because it just does not make sense.
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      • -1
        Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
        The "body", i.e., entity, is an embryo or fetus and nothing more, literally parasitic on the woman's body and only potentially a human being if it were to be born. Human life means person, not a group of cells with human dna.
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        • Posted by 5 years, 1 month ago
          I am mostly referring to the topic at hand, which is abortion to the point of delivery which has become legal in some states. A baby is a baby when it is being born whether you recognize the fact or not.
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          • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
            You wrote that "It ceased being just her body being involved when she created a new body inside herself". And you wrote initially, when you started the thread, "I have always believed a baby is a human being with the right to live from the point of conception."

            That is what I addressed, so don't change the topic of what I addressed as if you meant "the point of delivery". That is not at the "moment of birth", whatever you now mean by "mostly referring" to something else.

            You started the thread with the assertion, "the governors of Virginia and New York want to kill babies after they are born in the name of abortion rights." That is the false impression given by the article you linked to, but it isn't true. It is what the anti-abortion lobby wants to believe because it doesn't itself understand the difference between pre vs post birth -- abortion vs infanticide -- and is drumming up hysteria over "infanticide" as if it means abortion.

            The anti-abortion movement demands to prohibit as much abortion as it can get away with, beginning with conception, and that is a big problem for the rights of the individual, specifically the women it seeks to control. All of it is dishonestly portrayed as opposing "killing babies".
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            • Posted by 5 years, 1 month ago
              My posting was about the progression of abortion and what it is leading to. And yes, abortions do and is leading to killing babies. It is not mystical, or hysterical to see this. Yes, in my opinion, life begins at conception. I believe that that life forming is a human life. That this life, in my opinion, does become aware of its surroundings before it is born. You call it a parasite. We are all parasites living off of all the other living things of the earth. Every living thing is a parasite living off of other living things. Your arguments make no sense. To me. Why do you have such a problem owning your remarks as your opinion? They are certainly not fact.
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              • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                That is non-responsive. You tried to change the clear statement of your post https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post... about conception to "mostly referring" to the "point of delivery". They are opposite ends of the process.

                Your religious opinion that "life begins at conception" to mean a few cells are a person with rights makes no sense. A person is not a few cells without organs, a human mind, and much more. Abortion has nothing to do with "killing babies", either literally or in the confusion of calling everything from cells to a fetus a "baby".

                We are not all "parasites". Getting food from the environment is not the concept of biological parasite.

                These are fact not "just opinion". Your opinions are based on invalid concepts lumping together things that are essentially different, based on feelings. You end up with a war of "opinions" put into the force of law in which you recognize nothing as objective and no way to resolve conflicting subjectivism without force. That is the classical "faith and force" that comes from rejecting reason.
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      • -1
        Posted by BiggestShoelaces 5 years, 1 month ago
        Right pertain to an individual, until a child is born they are not individuals, they require the mother to feed herself to survive.

        The other issue is that the only way to prevent a women from going home and aborting it herself is physical force against her, and by what right do you claim to have the ability to stop her?

        Third, she has a right to pursuit her happiness, including being childless if she so chooses. Its her stem cells and blood and time and effort, it's up to her to choose.

        Man is a rational animal, try reasoning with them to keep it or dispose of it before 3 months, but outlawing it will stop nothing.
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        • Posted by Dobrien 5 years, 1 month ago
          A full term baby doesn’t require the mother to feed it to live. If the mother doesn’t want it then give it up for adoption.
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          • -1
            Posted by BiggestShoelaces 5 years, 1 month ago
            If the mother holds her breath they both die, thats not an individual life.
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            • Posted by exceller 5 years, 1 month ago
              What a stupid comment!
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              • -1
                Posted by BiggestShoelaces 5 years, 1 month ago
                Welcome to the Gulch, where slinging insults as arguments is actually considered no an argument.

                The point as ewv states is that it demonstrates that the fetus is not an individual, and therefore cannot have any individual rights.

                Here is a better argument: A fetus is inside an egg. The egg is used to form a bunch of stem cells into a life form. Until the stems cells have fully formed the genetic zygotes into the fully evolved form of the creature, that creature is not yet ready to exist in the world. Evolution "designed" life to be able to survive the world, and until the creature is fully evolved by the process of fetal development, it is not a life. When does a fetus become an individual? When it makes its first individual "decision" to leave the egg, (i.e., when the water breaks). How can we know this? Well the water breaks when the Surfactant protein A has reached a peak, which means the fetus's lungs are ready to breath air.
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    • Posted by mccannon01 5 years, 1 month ago
      Interesting, but the argument is predicated on what is "potential" vs "actual". The statement of the article in the lexicon, which is presumably Rand's position, is an embryo or fetus is a potential and not an actual. That is, in fact, an opinion. An equally valid opinion would be a "potential" would be separate sperm and egg cells, but when they are joined at conception an "actual" is created. So, which OPINION is the correct one? Flip a coin?

      The article uses the "pull on the heart strings" tactic by saying the "horror" of unwanted parenthood forced on the mother is nothing but slavery. It doesn't mention the adoption option to escape said "slavery".

      Then the article tries to make you believe there really is no difference between the cells of a viable fetus and an infected appendix. My BS meter pegged on that one.

      I have my own copy of the Lexicon as well as many of Rand's books. I definitely agree with her on many topics, but I have great reservations on this one. IMHO a civilization that can come up with reasons to murder its children by the millions is a civilization that doesn't deserve to survive.
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      • Posted by 5 years, 1 month ago
        I do not recognize her authority to determine what is potential vs actual. Ayn Rand does not have the knowledge to understand this. If what is growing inside a human woman is not a human life, then what is it? Especially when it has a brain, and a nervous system? This argument has never made sense to me and is grounded in faulty thinking. Just my two cents.
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        • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
          Ayn Rand did not require your permission or authority to know that an embryo or fetus is before birth a potential human being. It only requires knowing what a person is. She wrote a lot on the nature of man and the source of morality and rights, more than "enough knowledge to understand this". It is the anti-abortionists, who have no defense of the mystical notion of intrinsic "rights" of the unborn who lack knowledge.
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      • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
        An embryo or fetus is a potential human being, not an actual human being and not a free floating "actual" or "potential" without regard to actual what and potential for what.. For something to be a potential it must exist as something: what it actually already is. That does not give it the status of a possibly later stage for which it is still only a potential. That is not subjective opinion. Only human beings have rights, not potential human beings.

        No one said a fetus is "no different" than an infected appendix. An appendix does not have the potential to be a person. They are the same in that neither is a human being and neither have "rights". They are both essentially different from a person. Not every organized collection of (human) cells is a person.

        Not bearing a child is not "murdering children by the millions" and has nothing to do with the hyperbole of our civilization allegedly not deserving to survive. The right of a woman to not be forced to bear a child is a right, to be exercised in accordance with whatever reasons she chooses -- without regard for alleged duties to serve civilization, religion or subjective entitlements of an embryo or fetus, and is not "pulling on heartstrings". Rights are moral principles based on the nature of rational beings, not heartstrings. The lack of concern for women throughout history and into the future being forced to raise unwanted children reveals the motives of those who have supported and imposed that. The Catholic Church and may others argued and still argue that a woman has a duty to bear and care for the child regardless of her values and desires. That is supposed to be the justification for forced child bearing, packaged with the mystical notion of a mystic soul at conception that must be allowed to develop. Whether or not today someone else might later adopt a child or whether or not the potential mother would want to turn a child over to someone else is not relevant to the right to not have it and not going through an unwanted ordeal of having it out of imposed duty.
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        • Posted by PeterSmith 5 years, 1 month ago
          Really well said.
          Also, what's missing is, if they honestly thought that mindless cells are human beings, then opposing abortion doesn't make any sense.
          Humans are worthless by their own definition.
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          • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
            They attribute a mystical quality to the cells felt as implying an intrinsic, i.e., mystic, worth. So they wouldn't say either the cells or human beings are worthless. But the mystical attribution of intrinsic value puts their beliefs above objective human value, with the consequences that women are sacrificed to them.
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        • Posted by mccannon01 5 years, 1 month ago
          Greetings, ewv. OK, referencing my "Flip a coin?" question above, you flipped the proverbial coin and the up side results you got was a human embryo or fetus (vs an elephant, fish, or rat embryo or fetus) is a potential, not actual, human being and wrote a post defending the opinion results of the flip. Fine for you.

          Another flip and the up side may result opining the event of successful fertilization IS an actual human being whereas potential is the existence of the sperm and egg separately before joining. Assuming there is no concern for the mother here is a false assumption as there is very much concern for the mother, but there is also concern for the child (or children as the case may be). The mysticism of the Catholic Church is irrelevant and I don't care what the pope thinks.

          "Not bearing a child is not "murdering children by the millions..." A single mother having an abortion may not have an impact on any civilization, but millions of mothers lining up for millions of abortions carried out to its fullest potential can have a severe impact. Yes, my statement above may be hyperbole, but it was made to illustrate that point.

          The most troubling development I see happening now in the legal world is the changing of the definition of what is called a potential human being such that it encroaches more and more into the area of what used to be considered an actual human being. The argument over "trimesters" seems to have been replaced with arguing over whether or not the child is actually born into the world or not. Could it be possible in my lifetime that an unhappy mother will be able to bring her one year old to a special clinic and have it legally put down? It seems as society becomes increasingly collectivist the value of a single individual (other than the ruling elite) becomes less and less and the lives of the children of the "masses" become worth virtually nothing.

          Edit: Fixed a typo
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          • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
            This isn't about flipping coins. From the first cells to the fetus, it's a potential human being. It has the potential to be born. It isn't a person until it's born. Fertilized cells are not a person and neither is a fetus.

            There are no aborted children. That is a contradiction in terms. Without birth there is no child.

            Sacrificing woman to the unborn because it is potentially a person, forcing her to bear a child she does not want, is barbaric. It is not "concern for the mother" or "child". There is no child. As Ayn Rand put it, to sacrifice the actual woman for a potential child is "unspeakable".

            Zygotes, embryos and fetuses are not "children". An abortion is not "murder", and millions of them are not "murdering children by the millions". That the hyperbole was deliberate only illustrates the kinds of irrational smears employed as emotional manipulation.

            The "impact on civilization" of "millions of abortions" is irrelevant. No one lives and breeds for civilization. That is pure collectivism.

            The moral "impact" of forcing even one woman to bear a child is "unspeakable". With that kind of barbarism no one's rights are safe. That is how our lives become worthless in the eyes of the state.

            The current arguments of "trimesters" is political jockeying by the anti-abortion lobby that has been trying to control as much as it can after progressively losing the battle to prevent both contraception and all abortion. It muddies the waters by trying to ascribe "rights" to the unborn in accordance with accumulating characteristics irrelevant to the concept of 'rights'. They would very much like to force the birth of children and make that the only argument but have been falling to the rights of women, who do not choose to be treated as breeding stock.
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  • Posted by $ Olduglycarl 5 years, 1 month ago
    The only real related choice a women has is: to screw or not to screw...that is the question.

    Ya takes your chances and you deal with the outcome...ahhhh, that's called accountability for one's own actions!
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    • Posted by $ 25n56il4 5 years, 1 month ago
      Now, Carl, sweetie, that's a bit drastic!
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      • Posted by $ Olduglycarl 5 years, 1 month ago
        Not really, Can't have a baby cause I got a headache or any other excuse is no excuse, you are responsible...at least put the baby up for adoption.
        PS...the father must be included in the outcome too...he is responsible as well.

        You know darn well today's left takes no responsibility for anything.

        Angry at the issue...not you dear.
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    • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
      What a sick view of sex and responsibility.
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      • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
        In reference to the mindless bulk 'downvoter', this is what OldUglyCarl wrote:

        "The only real related choice a women has is: to screw or not to screw...that is the question. Ya takes your chances and you deal with the outcome...ahhhh, that's called accountability for one's own actions!"

        That is indeed a sick view of sex and responsibility. This is supposed to be an Ayn Rand forum.
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    • Posted by bsmith51 5 years, 1 month ago
      The Pill, then the Morning-After Pill, took care of that little problem.
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      • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
        Recent medical advances make it easier to avoid the necessity of abortion. They do not eliminate the problem. There are many reasons to possibly want an abortion without or without contraception (including the fact that it may not work). The vicious morality of the Catholic Church still opposes contraception; the pills don't solve that problem either. Only a rational ethics can do that.
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    • Posted by PeterSmith 5 years, 1 month ago
      Yes, regulating peoples sex lives is what the abortion issue is actually about.
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      • Posted by $ Olduglycarl 5 years, 1 month ago
        Not really, it's about avoiding responsibility. It's legalized murder of an innocent human being for the sake of one's convenience. Have a goooood logical reason for not caring for the child?...put it up for adoption.

        Rape, incest, malformation is another thing, and should be dealt with early.
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        • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
          There is no duty to comply with what you demand to impose in the name of "responsibility". There is no "responsibility" to avoid, only a rejection of an arrogant imposition. Abortion is not "murder of an innocent human being". A fetus, an embryo, and the preceding clusters of cells are not "human beings". There is nothing to "murder". Nor is it "innocent": The concepts of guilt or innocence do not apply to such entities -- they are incapable of moral choices.

          A woman who chooses to exercise her right not to bear a child has good reasons for it; it isn't frivolous "convenience" of the moment, though that would be her right as well. You don't tell another person to go through the ordeal of bearing a child only to go through another ordeal of putting the child not wanted at all up for adoption, with no regard in addition for how she will always feel about her unknown child out there somewhere.

          Your cynically cavalier "pay to play" in the name of "responsibility", vicious rhetoric accusing people of "murder", complete illogic of imposing an entitlement to be born in the name of "human rights" and other floating abstractions (like any leftist), and arrogant lack of concern for what you demand to put the woman through -- sneered away as nothing but lack of "convenience" -- are all vicious and disgusting.
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          • Posted by $ Olduglycarl 5 years, 1 month ago
            To pagan humanoids, devoid of conscience and appreciation for one's own existence; for which one played no part in...I am sure it sounds vicious and disgusting...I'll give you that.
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            • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
              It is vicious and disgusting. So is mindless attack on women who choose not to bear children they don't want, smearing them as "pagan humanoids, devoid of conscience and appreciation for one's own existence". So are the militant anti-abortionist trolls 'upvoting' that in support.
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        • Posted by PeterSmith 5 years, 1 month ago
          Well, people have the right to be irresponsible, trying to force responsibility is what the left always tries to do.
          Secondly, abortion doesn't murder anyone, it's not even a rights violation, so should be perfectly legal.
          Having said that, I can understand the arguments re viable fetuses.

          "Rape, incest, malformation is another thing, and should be dealt with early."
          This contradicts the position you put forward originally of abortion being murder.
          Are you saying just because you were raped, you can murder an "innocent human being?"
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          • Posted by $ jbrenner 5 years, 1 month ago
            "People do have the right to be irresponsible". OK, but I don't have to pay for it, as is the case now.

            "Trying to force responsibility is what the left always tries to do." Are you kidding? Sometimes the right acts to force responsibility. The left actively promotes irresponsibility.
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            • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
              "Trying to force responsibility" as unwanted duties is "what the left always tries to do". An example is their wanting (demanding as a duty) that you to pay for abortions. But they are not alone.
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              • Posted by $ jbrenner 5 years, 1 month ago
                OK, I will grant that the left tries to force responsibility on third parties to accept the "sanction of the victim" via paying for abortions when people they don't even know are irresponsible.
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                • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                  Yes that imposition of a false collectivist "responsibility" comes together with what we know is their own irresponsibility. They impose both with force, but get away with in large part through the "sanction of the victim".
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              • Posted by PeterSmith 5 years, 1 month ago
                Wish I could up vote at the moment, because I would be up voting all your posts here.
                Thanks for your patience and clarity.
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                • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                  Thank you. They are trying to drive you down to prevent you from 'voting' yourself and then forcing your posts to be 'hidden'. Stick with it and they will fail. But if you choose to not bother because of the behavior here (not just the bulk 'downvoting') on what is supposed to be an Ayn Rand forum but is not run that way, I can't blame you.
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            • -2
              Posted by PeterSmith 5 years, 1 month ago
              "OK, but I don't have to pay for it, as is the case now."
              That's true. You should no more be forced to pay for someone's abortion, than someone should be forced to carry to term.

              "Are you kidding? Sometimes the right acts to force responsibility. The left actively promotes irresponsibility."
              So, those who are properly defined as right wing, support rights protecting government. Such a government only acts when rights are violated, not merely when someone is acting irresponsible.
              The whole "responsibility" angle, is what conservatives grasp onto, because they don't really know anything about politics.
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              • Posted by $ jbrenner 5 years, 1 month ago
                I disagree with your definition of right wing. There are some who are described as right wing who are "social conservatives" who want to enforce their views on others. Most of those on the so-called "right wing" want limited government, rather than support rights protecting government. I know of no one on the right side of the political aisle who "supports rights protecting government" unless you are referring to ensuring that making sure that police officers don't get killed in the line of duty. Now there are plenty of "right wingers" who want a military that is stationed in every corner of the globe, but even that is not supporting rights protecting government. I want a relatively small military, but it is one of the few proper responsibilities of a limited government.

                The responsibility "angle" is not something to be "grasped onto". When Ayn Rand says that each individual must generate enough self-sustaining actions for his/her own life, that is a responsibility to oneself. Rand also talks about we should not "be our brother's keeper"; in order for that to be possible, each individual has to be his/her own keeper. The problem that society has now is that way too many moochers think that they have no such responsibility to take care of themselves. Then looters assume a responsibility that is not their own to confiscate our well-earned fortunes to pay for the irresponsible.
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                • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                  'Right' and 'left', like 'conservative' and 'liberal', are imprecise terms often used in contradictory ways. The 'right' in this country used to mean 'individualistic'; in Europe where there was no American individualism as in the German Weimar Republic the 'right' meant the nationalistic, religious conservatives. When the Hitler-Stalin pact broke up, the communist propaganda lumped everything that wasn't communist with the fascists as the 'right', including US individualist opponents of communism. The left is still package-dealing individualism with fascism today and the invalid concept has caught on. The term 'right' seems too far gone now to recover. The 'social conservatives' aren't exactly helping.

                  As for the 'responsibility angle', they mix that up as well. The moral responsibility for one's own life is the opposite of conservative duties demanded to be accepted as our "responsibility" -- including the notion of "responsibility" for an entitlement for the unborn to be born in the name of "rights" -- just like the left.
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                  • Posted by CircuitGuy 5 years, 1 month ago
                    This is a great short summary of the meaning of right and left.

                    Liberal is esp confusing b/c in most countries it means classical liberalism, in some ways opposite to US liberalism.
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                    • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                      Is there any significant such individualist classical liberal movement anywhere in Europe now? Europe is generally more collectivist than here.
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                • -1
                  Posted by PeterSmith 5 years, 1 month ago
                  "I disagree with your definition of right wing. There are some who are described as right wing who are "social conservatives" who want to enforce their views on others."
                  Yes, these people are collectivists and therefore left wing like all the rest of collectivists.

                  "Most of those on the so-called "right wing" want limited government, rather than support rights protecting government."
                  Then they are not right wing.
                  "Limited government," is politically illiterate boilerplate.
                  Objectivists support rights protecting government.
                  That is the properly consistent, individualistic and therefore right wing, political position.

                  "When Ayn Rand says that each individual must generate enough self-sustaining actions for his/her own life, that is a responsibility to oneself."
                  Yes. But that's not a political argument. She isn't saying the state's job is to enforce "responsibility" like the anti-abortionists are.
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                  • Posted by $ jbrenner 5 years, 1 month ago
                    I choose to be "politically illiterate" by your definition of limited government. I know what those involved in politics say and do. They choose to enforce their wills over people like me, and like America's Founding Fathers, I reject their right to enforce their wills on me.

                    While I find abortion repugnant, I am not going to stop people from having them for precisely the reasons that Ayn Rand quotes. However, where I disagree with her vehemently is the idea that she can say that just because a baby is outside the womb that he/she now has the right to life when minutes before he/she didn't. That distinction is completely inconsistent with her own definition of self-generating a sufficient number of self-sustaining actions. With Rand's definition, it becomes perfectly OK for Casey Anthony to dump her daughter Caylee into a swamp, where the then almost three-year-old has no hope of extracting herself from the swamp. If it is all about the mother's convenience as Rand claims, then Casey Anthony was well within her right to just absolve herself of any parental responsibility and dump her daughter in the swamp.

                    This is the example that properly defines the "This is what abortion has led to.", not the termination of a pregnancy.
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              • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                The conservative notion of "responsibility" in social policy is imposed duty just as onerous as any socialist premise. It's the same duty mentality as that of the historical Church in its subjective pronouncing mystical duties to God claimed to be intrinsic absolutes and imposed by force accordingly. With no understanding of the rational individualist egoist base for political freedom, they have told us in more modern times that granting freedom requires "responsibilities", i.e., duties to the state and the collective, in return. This line has even been used to rationalize imposing military conscription.

                They do know about politics, but not a political philosophy of freedom and the ethics on which it is based. Faith, family and tradition are no basis for freedom, and we see that in spades with the opposition to a woman's right to her own body, which opposition comes straight out of the old subjectivist Church dogma claiming to be an absolute in terms of intrinsicism. Whether or not they believe the same old dogmas literally, it's the same psychology of thinking.
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          • Posted by $ Olduglycarl 5 years, 1 month ago
            Of course it is murder...no it's not ok, but it is understandable and if it has to be dealt that way, it should be done right away before the baby is fully formed...There are Two victims to consider...adoption would be the better choice...but we are not going to win that battle with the left. There are women that do not abort in incest and rape...either way, that's got to be tough.

            They claim to care, yet the teach bullcrap, the confound the language, they poison the food, they ruin a child's life in all respects and now want to kill them even after birth.

            A baby is a human being that has a right to life, liberty and happiness?
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            • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
              Your own posts are "confounding the language". Abortion is not "of course murder" and no, contradictions are not "understandable", only politically expedient range of the moment manipulations. No one is "poisoning the food" and your claim that "they" "now want to kill children even after birth [which is the only kind there are]" is false. The claim in the article that Northam advocates "child murder" is a falsehood being spread by anti-abortion hysteria.
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            • -1
              Posted by PeterSmith 5 years, 1 month ago
              "Of course it is murder...no it's not ok, but it is understandable and if it has to be dealt that way, it should be done right away before the baby is fully formed"
              What are you even trying to say in this sentence?
              Either abortion is murder, in which case it must be illegal in ALL contexts, or it's not.

              "A baby is a human being that has a right to life, liberty and happiness?"
              What does this have to do with abortion?
              You understand abortion doesn't involve any "baby," right?
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              • Posted by hattrup 5 years, 1 month ago
                Trying to make "conception" a black and white decision point creates a lot other issues not so easy to deal with. Why are two gametes not protected but now a zygote is? And if the zygote os really human, then not doing EVERYTHING to protect it becomes an issue. If people REALLY considered a zygote human then the should receive much more special treatment even before the gametes came together. Otherwise why is a "natural" abortion (not lodged in uterus) any different than one helped along (due to physical activity, "diet", moving too much, morning after pill, iud, etc.). If conception was life one might expect these believers to now, given today's technology, to have it very closely monitored to make sure in lodges in the uterus (and becomes and embryo). In the end, current Roe v. Wade is currently a reasonable compromise in the quite gray area when it comes to using physical force to support your opinion.
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                • Posted by $ blarman 5 years, 1 month ago
                  Gametes can not reproduce themselves - thus one critical factor for life is not fulfilled. To illustrate the absurdity of the argument, by such reasoning every time a woman had a period it would be murder. Or even sex itself, as semen typically contains tens of thousands of spermatozoa...

                  "current Roe v. Wade is currently a reasonable compromise..."

                  It is horrible legal precedent no matter how one slices it. Roe v Wade basically exempted the government from its primary duty to protect the life of the innocent. What is also wrong is that it tramples on States' rights; there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that gave jurisprudence in the case to the Federal Government. It was solely an ideological decision, because even the science they pointed to at the time was horribly flawed and they knew it.
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                  • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                    Fetuses can't "reproduce themselves" either, and a lot more that is a "critical factor" for a human life, i.e., a person.

                    The government does not have a "primary duty to protect the life of the innocent" equivocally misused to mean the unborn. The unborn cannot be "innocent" or "guilty" of anything. The notion makes no sense at all and it isn't even historic: there was no intent in the constitution to ban abortion, just as there is no such thing as "states' rights". Only individual human beings have rights. In particular they have legally protected rights under the 10th and 14th and amendments.
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                    • Posted by PeterSmith 5 years, 1 month ago
                      "The government does not have a "primary duty to protect the life of the innocent" equivocally misused to mean the unborn. The unborn cannot be "innocent" or "guilty" of anything. The notion makes no sense at all and it isn't even historic: there was no intent in the constitution to ban abortion, just as there is no such thing as "states' rights". Only individual human beings have rights. In particular they have legally protected rights under the 10th and 14th and amendments."
                      ^This.
                      So good to have someone point this out so clearly.
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                  • Posted by hattrup 5 years, 1 month ago
                    You neglected offering any info on how (absurd) one should (or should be forced to) act to protect the zygote. Zygote nor embryos cannot reproduce themselves either. Your main argument regarding gametes may be flawed.

                    (My comment regarding Roe was referring to WHEN in the embryos' development our current legal system will begin to give the embryo some rights. I was not particularly referring to the Roe process, nor how it might trample States' rights. In other words, a State deciding an embryo develops rights around 24 weeks is the legal decision determine when an "innocent life" actually exists and the State gets to decide what you eat, how long you sleep, what you drink, how often you see a doctor at your neighbors expense, when and how you should delver and how closely you should be monitored via your Apple Watch or BigBrother, etc.).
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                    • Posted by $ blarman 5 years, 1 month ago
                      Zygotes and embryos certainly have the capability to reproduce and exhibit such at a tremendous rate. Its how one cell becomes the hundreds of millions in a full-term infant. Sexual reproduction, true, comes at a later point, but all of the potential is still there. Indeed, the female is born with all of their egg cells already developed - puberty just begins the process of their release for potential fertilization.

                      "a State deciding an embryo develops rights around 24 weeks is the legal decision"

                      And a completely arbitrary one - which is the entire point of the article. It is a slippery slope argument because it is a judgment call. And because it is a judgment call subject to human biases, it is not bound to moral principle and so that point of judgment can - and will - vary. This article exemplifies the dangers in attempting to justify morality in terms of legality - rather than the other way around.

                      I completely agree that the thought of Big Brother monitoring my health is a repugnant one, but at the same time, it is government's primary duty to protect life: anyone found intentionally destroying life represents a threat to the individual and by extension any moral government. Abortion requires intentional action - actions which should not be condoned by the State.
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                  • -1
                    Posted by PeterSmith 5 years, 1 month ago
                    Forcing someone to carry to term is the rights violation, not having an abortion.
                    Roe v Wade needed to be worded and argued better, by focusing on individual rights and the governments role to protect them.
                    It should've said something like, "since the function of government is to protect rights, only rights violations can be illegal. Since the unborn don't have rights, nor is being carried to term a right, abortion is not a rights violation, so should be perfectly legal."
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                    • Posted by $ blarman 5 years, 1 month ago
                      "Forcing someone to carry to term is the rights violation, not having an abortion."

                      The choice was whether or not to have sex in the first place. Pregnancy is a consequence - not an choice. If you choose to have sex, you choose to take the risk of getting pregnant - with all that pregnancy entails. You want to decrease that risk, use protection, know your cycle, etc., but it is a denial of reality to deny that the responsibility lies in the decision to have sex. No one "chooses" to get pregnant. I could point to any number of childless couples as evidence that it works both ways. Blaming someone else (in this case the unborn) for the consequences of your own actions is not only immature, but immoral. Each of us is responsible for our own decisions and no one else's.

                      Indeed, this whole story is the epitome of the slippery slope fallacy that abortionists must rely on. First, they say that the unborn have no rights, but can't specify when those rights begin or by what methods the acquisition of those rights is maintained. And so the bar for true "humanhood" shifts constantly according to the subjective whim. It enables some to justify abortion based on the desirability of the child, potential for health defects, race, gender, and more. And then, because the bar isn't based on a fixed moral standard, it then becomes okay to kill other people based on any "undesired" categorization such as hair-color... or religion.

                      "Roe v Wade needed to be worded and argued better,"

                      I agree, but here's my version:

                      "Recognizing as per the Declaration of Independence that Life is the primary Right from which all other Rights are derived and that Government's duty is to protect and preserve the inherent Rights of the individual, this court finds that it is the utmost duty of a moral government to protect Life and to punish those who would seek to abrogate that Right as pertaining to another human being. We hold that to attempt to deny the Right of Life to the unborn is to draw an arbitrary line in the sand based not on science, but on ideology. To those who would seek to deny the right to Life to the unborn, we ask them to identify humanity itself, for in doing so they must either acknowledge that Rights are inherent and therefore not subject to the whims of man, or they must argue that Rights are not inherent, but rather the products of some arbitrary judgment. We choose to recognize - with the Declaration of Independence - that rights are inherent."
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                      • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                        The choice to "have sex in the first place" is not the only choice. Blarman arbitrarily decrees that the choices he doesn't like -- for abortion -- don't exist. There is no "responsibility" to bear a child as a consequence of sex. That is Blarman's arbitrary imposition.

                        People do "choose" pregnancy -- they do it by the means of sex, just as all moral choices employ causality as the means to an end. That includes the choice of an abortion to terminate a pregnancy, employed because it causes the termination.

                        A person's rights begin when he is born. Birth is a fact, not what Blarman calls "whim". To claim that it "then becomes okay to kill other people based on any 'undesired' categorization such as hair-color... or religion" is stupid.

                        The subjectivist fallacy of rights of the unborn is emphasized in Blarman's totalitarian theocratic "version" he wants to replace Roe v Wade: He explicitly invokes the false alternative of the "inherent" (intrinsicism) versus "whims" (subjectivism), which are two sides of the same coin. The means for the mystical invocation of intrinsicism is subjectivism claiming to establish the intrinsic in order for the mystic's consciousness to dominate everyone else's. He left out the objective.
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                      • Posted by PeterSmith 5 years, 1 month ago
                        Yes, regulating peoples sex lives is what the issue is actually about to the religious leftists of the conservative movement.
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                        • Posted by $ blarman 5 years, 1 month ago
                          Ah, so you are a member of the "religious leftist conservative movement" (an oxymoron if I've ever seen one) and you are confiding to everyone about your plans to take over the world? Thanks for at least being honest!
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                          • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                            Blarman's 'conclusion' "so you [Peter] are a member of the 'religious leftist conservative movement'" is a typically illogical, arbitrary assertion with no relation whatsoever to what Peter wrote.
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                          • Posted by PeterSmith 5 years, 1 month ago
                            No not me. Obviously.
                            But regulating peoples sex lives is the real agenda behind the anti-abortionists, who are religious leftists.
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                            • Posted by mccannon01 5 years, 1 month ago
                              You keep trying to redefine the issue into "regulating peoples sex lives" and as if some religion has something to do with it, but that is pure BS! It has been made clear that people are free to have all the sex they want, but there may be resultant consequences and responsibilities inherent to the act of having sex. There's a real world cause and effect in play here, whether you like it or not, and it cannot be denied.

                              Sex can be like a loaded gun. A person chooses to pull the trigger and once the round leaves the chamber that person has to own what it does.
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                              • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                                Religion was the source of the modern anti-abortion movement and to a large degree still plays a dominant role. It also was intended to control sex, and anti-abortion laws still do -- if you are punished for sex by religious-inspired laws you are controlled. https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...

                                Sex is not like a loaded gun that cannot be stopped once the trigger is pulled. There are nine months in which to take other causal actions that terminate a pregnancy -- that is the refutation of the arbitrary claims that a person "has" to bear a child. She does not and has no duty to do so. Arbitrarily assigning duties is not "real world cause and effect" that "cannot be denied". The claimed "resultant responsibilities" do not come from the "real world", they come from demands to impose unwanted duties.
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                              • -1
                                Posted by PeterSmith 5 years, 1 month ago
                                "You keep trying to redefine the issue into "regulating peoples sex lives" and as if some religion has something to do with it, but that is pure BS! "
                                What do you mean? You're the one that said, "The choice was whether or not to have sex in the first place," thus betraying what the true motivation here is, from you religious leftists.
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                            • Posted by $ Olduglycarl 5 years, 1 month ago
                              Sex is Not being regulated, have all the sex you want...it's the consequences of that sex that involves another life, an innocent life that played no part in it's making that is at stake.
                              As for religion, the worship of baal in Babylon right up to today commands the new born be toasted upon the fires in the temple.
                              Today, they may not be having a barbecue but the result is the same.

                              Blarman had it right on his dissertation of the Declaration of Independence.
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                              • Posted by PeterSmith 5 years, 1 month ago
                                "Sex is Not being regulated, have all the sex you want...it's the consequences of that sex that involves another life, an innocent life that played no part in it's making that is at stake."
                                No, it doesn't. Only the religious left of the conservative movement think sex is just about procreation, when in reality it is far more important recreationally. Legal abortion is crucial to that.

                                "Today, they may not be having a barbecue but the result is the same."
                                It is not in any way the same. No newborns are involved with abortion.

                                "Blarman had it right on his dissertation of the Declaration of Independence."
                                The Declaration of Independence protects individual rights, including the right to an abortion.
                                It cannot be used as a tool by religious leftists, to justify turning half the population into cattle.
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                                • Posted by $ Olduglycarl 5 years, 1 month ago
                                  To obtain maximum freedom one needs to embrace maximum responsibility...otherwise someone's gona regulate your ass.

                                  Life begins at conception, Life that becomes aware of it's environment, aware of pain and hunger, begins very soon after that.

                                  That moment needs to be determined and the line in the sand drawn at that point.

                                  Leftest, the global delete, aka, the great unwashed, want you complacent or dead...they can't take the competition.
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                                  • PeterSmith replied 5 years, 1 month ago
                                  • ewv replied 5 years, 1 month ago
                • Posted by PeterSmith 5 years, 1 month ago
                  Yep you make a lot of good points. The other thing is the idea that because somebody can't do something, therefore somebody should be forced to provide it for you. In the case of healthcare, socialists want to force you to provide it for others.
                  In the case of the unborn, religious conservatives want to force you to carry to term.
                  It's strange that the latter don't realize how similar they are in principle, to the former.
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          • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
            A "viable fetus" is still only a potential human being and does not have rights.

            You also have to be careful about the meaning of "responsible" and not inadvertently concede false hoods. A couple is responsible to themselves for using suitable protection so as to avoid more serious intervention later. They are not responsible to have a child if they don't. The anti-abortionists tend to package-deal those two.
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          • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
            Peter Smith: "'Rape, incest, malformation is another thing, and should be dealt with early.'
            This contradicts the position you put forward originally of abortion being murder.
            Are you saying just because you were raped, you can murder an 'innocent human being?'"


            They have no answer to that. They are inconsistent, just as they try to finesse the legal penalties they want for what they call "murder": Their bills have morphed from penalizing the woman to putting it all on the doctor, just as their total ban has morphed into "sometimes". Their disregard for the woman was becoming too obvious, so her participation became both murder and not murder for the "convenience" of their Fabian leftist style of incrementalism imposing controls.

            But the inconsistency is inconsistency among floating abstractions because none of it makes sense to begin with: subjectively decreed intrinsic "rights" of what is called an "innocent" entity that cannot be innocent or not-innocent of anything.
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            • Posted by $ jbrenner 5 years, 1 month ago
              I will agree that the anti-abortionists have no answer to rape situations. Rape should be treated as a separate case because of the lack of consent. It was an act of force. Incest could also be the result of an act of force.

              Malformation is fundamentally different in that it is a matter of convenience, and perhaps a justifiable one given the mother's ability and willingness to bear the substantial burden of a malformed child.
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              • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
                Their contradiction is excusing what they call "murder" as a "separate case" if it is in response to a rape. The alleged "innocent baby", in their terminology, didn't cause the rape. That is not their only inconsistency with "special cases", which range as broadly as exempt trimesters to exempt contraception.

                "Bearing the substantial burden of a malformed child" is not a "matter of convenience".

                But misusing the concept of "rights" as a floating abstraction disconnected from the facts that give rise to it as a moral concept is more fundamental than the various narrower contradictions among the arbitrary maneuvering with "special cases".
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      • Posted by ewv 5 years, 1 month ago
        Regulating people's sex lives certainly has historically been the source. Church dogma demanded that sex only be for procreation and damned pleasure. It coupled that vicious dogma with the belief in a mystic soul deemed to have an entitlement to be physically born. Today that continues and even infects more secular beliefs accepting sex -- with no understanding of the basis for the rights of the individual, people are susceptible to the same mystic fallacy of "rights" as somehow intrinsic to any beginnings of human development (which has now morphed into the presence of dna, which subjectivist morality is pushed in the name of "science"). And they're still trying to regulate sex, demanding that it include "responsibility" to the demands of mystics, even if regulating sex is not always still the primary psychological motive.

        Those who are demanding that pregnancy entails a duty to bear a child in the name of "causality" and a conservative duty called "responsibility" -- with no regard for rational moral choices employing different causes to achieve different outcomes -- are echoing the old religious line of duty to God as the ultimate cause that no one dare question or deviate from. Even those whose confusion lies only in the 'intrinsic' notion of human rights mysteriously tied to human cells in the name of "science" invoking dna, "brain activity", "heartbeats", and "twitching when poked" -- none of which are the source of rights -- are a result of the same mystic, intrinsicist philosophy. None of that employs a rational concept of rights based on an objective ethics; it invokes floating abstractions taken from "science" exploited out of context to rationalize old mystic premises, still clung to out of feeling. In the end, the bad premises still lead to regulation of sex in addition to the obvious violations of the broader rights of a woman to choose what to do with her own body.
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