I am having trouble following this to your point.

It seems almost as if you want everyone to treat fertilization as a big deal, but since we don't, it therefore is not a big deal? Or are you saying it isn't and we don't and that's cool?

It strikes me that your experiences with IVF have heavily influenced your thinking here. And while this is understandable, I am not sure we should use a clinical setting where people pay big bucks and have big hopes as the window through which we evaluate how "everyone" treats the process.

Or I am missing it?

I would add that you do seem to be driving towards a benchmark at successful implant, which is only one step or so past conception relative to delivery, and so still puts you substantially ahead of the pack on this thread.

heh,

Despite the fact that you drew in a great number of good posts you want to lump them into two simple catagories. Thats not honest and bringing that dishonesty to your attention does not make anyone a bleeping meathead.

Even the two simple catagrories are not accurate and takes more of your credibility away.

You are the one who wants to lump every single instance of abortion into one simple catagory, unallowable. Thats a position that gives cause to ponder your last sentence to me and gives rise to a simple, back at ya bubba.

dang, square one again.

Yes, in fact, it MUST be simple.

It must be simplifiable. It surely WILL be simplified, by advocates and openents and fence sitters too. It must not contain the words "rubrik", "stem cell", "chattel", or "goo". It must not reference religion in a derogatory way or cite anyone whose day job was philosophy or who lived more than fifty years ago. It must not mention Martin Luther King.

It must answer the question: "when does life begin?" without mumbling.

It must, and will in fact, be broken down into one or two sentences, which in fact it has, and those are generally the sentences that I summarized. Ask around. I mean not your friends or advocates. Do it. Ask around of strangers and people who call themselves moderates how they would summarize the pro abortion postion in two sentences.

As for the "every single instance" thing, that's your fiction. I never stipulated that. In fact, all I asked was an argument for the general case. I repeatedly asked people to lay off the damn incest rape of a teen cases. I would be happy with one answer that covered, say, 60% to 80% of the incidents. Which I suspect is actually all one type of instance: healthy adult non-poor moms after consensensual sex, leaving healthy moms and healthy babies, and the problem is mom doesn't think she wants and/or can handle the baby. I am sure someone will race in with a statistic here.

And once more, just in case you were thinking about tossing out another fictional accusation, I never once claimed I wanted to outlaw abortions. I will mail you a $100 gift card to Planned Parenthood if you can find one post where I said that I wanted to outlaw abortions.

Okay when does life begin. As soon as the sperm is formed.

There two short sentences with a grand total of one dozen words.

You are a mass murderer everytime you jerk off. Watch them under a microscope, they are moving with purpose under their own power.

Now since we have established that you are a murderer what say you now?

Hi Sarvis,

I’m really tired—the twins have been up a lot so I’m not sure how clear I can be right now but I’ll try.

First, I think experience should inform our choices—if not that, what else? After all, it’s your experience that’s informing your choices here and many might make the same claim that your experience is coloring your judgment, that your epiphany colored by your experience is not how we should view this or a valid lens. I would disagree as I said in the earlier thread I do value the epiphany and think that experience is precisely the proper lens through which to modify understanding.

It’s not about a clinical setting (and big bucks has nothing to do with it) defining how everyone treats the process. It’s that fertilization as a criterion seems really arbitrary to me. If that’s really going to be the dividing line we use than it needs to be a consistent one. If we believe that sex yielding fertilization is ‘life’ then that needs to be the case across the board and the reality is nobody really does and people don’t act that way. The dividing line than needs to be universal (a maxim) and I have a really hard time buying that criterion as ‘life’ when I know that fertilization (whatever else it may be) isn’t that—and when everyone’s actions reject that as a principle in practice and in the way we view what fertilization means while waiting for, well, conception. That’s a disconnect.

We don’t treat fertilization as a big deal (and that’s OK because we’re by all indications not ‘there’, at ‘life’ yet) and it’s sort of disingenuous to claim that as the dividing line (not that I think you’re being disingenuous but as a standard it is) when we don’t really seem to believe that—it becomes an artificial construct, a convenient fiction. Most of us seem to act and believe it’s further down the line.

It’s a poor standard in both basis and application and that troubles me immensely. If I’m going to make a moral decision and hang it on a specific line I want it to be something less incongruous. You’re not religious but I am and I have a hard time with so capricious a definition of life, one that is so scattershot.

So—how to make that decision? Incidentally—I realize that this is not about a legal standard or enforcing one’s position but one of the reasons I’m so reluctant to tell someone what to do or limit their choices is because I don’t think anyone really knows when ‘life’ begins. Absent a standard or very firm knowledge I have real trouble advocating for positions based on my hunches.

If I had to guess I’m probably most comfortable with the old sense of the quickening. Heart beats can be measured, neural activity can be detected and dipole impulses measured within that several months time frame. Brain activity, heart beat, internal organs and all parts there is pretty persuasive to me.

But if I’m going to try to make a call I really don’t want it to be on an artificial construct, a convenient fiction, like fertilization because if you can have a fertilized egg inside you and by all measures not be pregnant that’s not ‘life’ that’s not when it happens. I can’t reconcile that reality with fertilization as the standard. I need something better than that.

not to belabor this (a little pregnancy humor there) but when I found out I was pregnant with triplets, I was absolutely terrified. Seriously, besides feeling like some kind of fertile freak, all I could envision were these tiny premature, sickly babies - I didn't know anyone who knew anyone who had triplets. I knew nothing about the risks, outcomes, statistics or any of that kind of thing. I talked to my doctor about it and he recommended "selective reduction"...another way of saying I could abort one, thereby reducing the pregnancy to twins, much more manageable and less risky. I was stunned at his cavalier attitude, it was like, hey - no problem, this is the way we handle that. He even had a patient give me a phone call so I could talk to someone who'd recently had the procedure done. When she called me, I asked her why she did it, expecting to hear my concerns about prematurity echoed back but she said "I'm not a high-energy person. Triplets were out of the question for me."

I started reading up on it. There was no internet in 1990, but I joined an organization for mothers of multiples, they sent me all kinds of information and supportive literature and I began to see that although this was definitely not going to be the pregnancy I'd always envisioned - in just about every single case I read about, the women who were monitored and followed guidelines for high risk pregnancies like mine ended up with three healthy babies. It wasn't nearly as scary to me after I educated myself about it - which is what my doctor should have done, present all options.

I switched doctors after that, yada, yada, yada, everyone knows the rest, everything turned out fine. I brought this up only because so often when abortion arguments surface, it invariably gets into reasons of teenagers, or rape, incest, wife-beaters, poverty etc.and I often wonder about that woman I spoke with on the phone. Her reasons for the abortion were clearly for convenience sake. "Triplets were out of the question," she said. You rarely hear much about those.

he he. couldn't resist.

it would also be immoral to take a vow of chastity, then wouldn't it? I mean, all them little buggers live and die without even a chance at going to the show.

someone needs to email that to the pope.

"Selective reduction?"

Not that I'd be able to get the question out before stabbing Dr. Mengele in the neck with a pen, but I would like to ask him to address the "selective" part of that.

Not so much the "reduction" part, 'cause I'm pretty clear on that part.

But as to the actual selection process, isn't that like Sophie's Choice?

Who decides which of the three triplets is "reduced?"

You?

Him?

Coin toss?

Duck duck goose?

("Honey, if he says the 'runt of the litter' I'm going to cut off his nuts with a pair of dull scissors.)

Fertile freak!

Nobody can do me, like me.

There's all kinds of stuff that needs to be emailed to the pope. But I won't open that can of worms tonight. We have disagreed but you have made some very good top posts recently and should be congratulated for it.

Maybe somebody will.

couldn't resist.

When do chocolate and peanut butter become a Reeses Peanut Butter Cup?

(1) Mixing in the mold

(2) Wrapping in foil cups

(3) Consumer Consuming

I mostly enjoyed it.

And even learned a thing or two.

I am perfectly fine with it. Those who practice it don't deserve to have daughters. The other plus side is that there may be enough of it that the coveted sons will find no mates ending that particular family geneline forever.

Everyone wins.

And am very grateful for them.

Interesting that this thread does not address the mortality rate of pregnant women. Perhaps it was discussed in the previous thread. Women still die from having children. Large numbers of women have permanent damage to their health due to pregnancy and child birth. Would Sarvis give his bladder up for a fetus, I wonder? How about his legs? My sister continues to have her varicose veins stripped. I cry when I think of her legs, and what those pregnancies have done to them.

I understand the cavalier attitude toward the health of the mothers, I do live in Utah, after all.

That discretion quote is increasingly one of my favorites. I still think highly of Ron Paul. What I've come to understand better is that I don't live in America and increasingly not on Earth either. I'm far more interested in celestial governments.

But you have hit on a point that is very important. The good news is that you are open to change and growing as you learn. I am sure you know that people hit a point where they stop and then just cultivate degrees of sophistication around their bad habits until the sophistication goes too or... they get mean.

As long as we are able to change our minds we will not lose them.

Abortion is a sticky wicket. There is something in us that knows more than we care to.

It would be less colorful and it wouldn't be the fray. You might as well ask what would the world look like if we didn't have the color green. Every comment made is open for response. That is what makes the whole what it is. I responded to something said, I didn't just generate something out of left field and there's a reason why there's a player in left field too. Balls get hit there.