the inevitable abortion post

[melannen]

Monday night, both of my laptop's PCMCIA card slots stopped working, so until I get around to fixing that, I won't have 'net access on the laptop. I get to see how long I can last without being on lj every single waking hour

Comments

[stellar_dust]

WORD. I'd go for a few more rights for the father, if he wants to proactively accept them and is competent (see my last post), but otherwise, WORD.

*Why* do you think this makes you a poor candidate for office? This is a well-thought-out, detailed, supported, extremely readable argument. You'd kick everyone else's asses with a prepared speech like this! Srsly.

[stellar_dust]

(um, where's footnote (9)?)

[melannen]

(Shh, you never saw that, that was an 8)

[melannen]

It's possible there is a follow-up post about fathers' rights coming.

But it would be nearly as long and silly as this one was, and I wanted to keep this in the language of women's reproductive rights, so I decided to quit while I was ahead.

(just assume that for the purposes of this post, all the fathers are either completely absent or unconditionally supportive.)

[kenosis_kalon]

"6Note: I reserve the right to test this method on anyone who comments on this post who is not willing to engage in rational discussion. Other people are welcome to use it as well. I'm sure people who don't menstruate have some equivalent topic that they could bring up."

Tempting to offer irrational comment to test this theory since graphic description of menstruation just frustrates me in the irony of being denied something I can certainly do without but hating the lack as symbolic of my exclusion from a group I otherwise find myself rationally belonging to.

Then I come back to the problem my opinion of your opinion of me is too high to be decieved into believing any irrational comment was serious, if it's not so obfuscated by spurrious logic as to be believable thereby defeating the ploy before it began through an act of sheer ego (to disguise the intuition that the horse is dead and bludgeoning it further won't help.)

[melannen]

Well, I mean, if you *really* wanted to read about all the things you wish you never needed to know about being a girl, I did link to tmi_chix, which has all the gory details you ever dreamed of ... (and they're very good about being non-exclusionary)

#1

[frey_at_last]

Hum, all interesting, but about your premise (that murder is complex) - aren't social ethics culturally defined, and thus open to development? If so (and please correct me/make any distinctions), then I don't think you can apply the ethical systems of primitive societies to our own, without a more extensive argument. A few thoughts on this:

It's a fundamental concept through all human cultures and histories. Even in societies that practiced state-sponsored human sacrifice of their own citizens, there was usually, first, some ritual that ceremonially declared the sacrificial victim to be other, no longer one of us.

You seem to be invoking "the noble savage," if inadvertently, by limiting "all human cultures and histories" to mostly primitive societies and tribes1. Regardless of whether the ancient Hebrews or yet undiscovered tribes in the Pacific have such-and-such conception of murder, *we*, after three thousand years of Western civilization, have a different one. Similarly,

Lately, there's been a real push to be true Christians

#2

[frey_at_last]

[1] I'll give you that the most basic distinction of any society is "us and them," but I think (and I'm not a sociologist) that the boundaries and ramifications are more circumstantial than universal principles. In your biblical examples, individuals or groups were defined as "the other" *mostly* out of self-preservation, no? This is one of the reasons I reject the "infants as interlopers" concept, and why I agree with your "why I don't like abortion" paragraph. I don't accept that abortion is necessary for our survival. Certainly not our society taken as a whole. We could have ten thousand women a year die from childbirth, starvation, exposure due to poverty, and coathanger abortions, and our society would chug along just fine. Grisly, but no more grisly than saying that a million some (I actually have *no* numbers) abortions, some of them partial-birth abortions, are necessary for the health of our society. Like in your examples of societal infanticide, decisions made "for the good of society" are often very hard luck for the

Re: #2

[frey_at_last]

Even if I *did* accept that murder is only "killing of the other" (I'd probably have to redefine that until it lost it's meaning)

Sorry, I meant "killing of someone in the in-group"

Re: #2

[frey_at_last]

And, on second thought, my "3/5 clause" image is just an image, not an actual part of my argument. It was the tobacco trade that kept slavery legal in America and not in England, but it was the NORTH originally responsible for that wiley vote-worth thing. (Not that black slaves would have been allowed to vote for themselves, however, and their exclusion from white society precludes any wrangling about their voting rights, anyway.)

Re: #2

[melannen]

I feel really bad about not giving this the response it deserves, but my brain is oatmeal right now (mmm, oatmeal!) and I really couldn't manage it, so I hope you don't mind if a proper reply is a bit later coming. Perhaps I'll work on it on the train to Katy's tomorrow.

[kidzero]

Hm.

That is an extremely well thought out post. I don't agree with it completely, but it did make me think. A lot. Like since I read it at work seven hours ago.

That said, I do agree with a good amount of it. Thanks for putting this out there.

Side note: any chance of you expanding on that "Batman and Robin never kill" statement? :) One of these days, I'm going to post to s_d about the story where Superman became a murderer and how wrong it was.

[melannen]

Hmm. How would you like me to expand? If I started going on about *why* it's a true statement, I could go on for pages and pages and probably end up re-reading all of s_d. q