Posts made by Higgs

@blackwing:

If the newborn is suddenly stopped from suckling on the tit, it DOESN'T die. Not at all the same thing.

I'm not quite sure what you're trying to prove. I've already admitted that the dependence of a foetus on its mother is in some ways unique - mostly in the sense that the foetus is dependent on one person whereas a newborn baby can in theory substitute another person for the source of its nutrients, warmth, shelter, etc.

Still, I'm really not sure where this gets you. I'm still not persuaded by the suggestion that a foetus isn't a person just because it is wholly dependent upon another person quite simply because I think everyone is dependent on other people. The fact that a foetus is dependent (at least immediately) on one person whereas I am dependent on hundreds of them doesn't seem to me to create a qualitative difference between the foetus and me. It places additional weighty responsibilities on the mother, to be sure, but it does not - to me - mean that the foetus is simply part of her any more than I am part of my employer just because I rely on him for my wages, or my milkman because I rely on him for something to put on my cornflakes.

Send him a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. I've heard that'll cure what ails ya'.

@obras62:

There are enough other issues to be worried about .

Certainly there are plenty of other issues to be worried about, but worrying isn't rationed - and a bit more worrying won't kill you! (Take it from me).  More to the point, I don't think abortion is unrelated to the other problems we should definitely be worried about. In fact, it seems very connected: if we don't have a society that values the life and welfare of the most vulnerable and helpless, then why should we expect to care for - say - the poor or homeless or abused? Or those 'unwanted children' (a terrible phrase) that you allude to? If we as a society privilege individual choice and individual autonomy even when it overrides the welfare of another person, then do we not risk becoming a society of naked  individualism and self-interested violence?

@blackwing:

A newborn doesn't have to actually BE CONNECTED to the mother's body to survive via an umbilical cord. A newborn survives via the help and care of others, not via being force-fed nutrients via a tube connected to another person.

Assuming, of course, that the newborn isn't breastfeeding - in which case being "force-fed nutrients via a tube connected to another person" is pretty much exactly what's going on.

Yes, of course a foetus exists in a state of dependency on another person which is in some ways quite unique; not least because its survival is wholly and entirely dependent upon that other person. But the broader point is that I reject the idea that independence - or even independent survival - is what constitutes a person. This seems to me like dangerously individualistic thinking. If we think instead of human beings as intrinsically interdependent, I think it becomes much harder to argue that a foetus is not a person simply because it is connected to and wholly reliant on somebody else.

@blackwing:

Do you recognize that when a foetus is in the mother, it is growing and developing to be an individual person not needing to be connected to another to gain life?

Sort of. I do see your point - a foetus is dependent upon its mother to live. But then, a newborn baby is also dependent upon other people to live (principally, in most cases, its mother). In fact, all of us are dependent on other people to live to varying extents. So the idea that only an "individual person" is worthy of life doesn't really work for me. I just don't think anybody is that much of an individual.

I'm a bit sick of the idea that gay people have no choice at all about what we do, as though we're some sort of animal or automaton that just acts out of blind unthinking instinct. Let's be quite clear: we do have quite a bit of choice.

We do not have any choice over who we are attracted to.

We do (normally) have complete control over how we act on our attractions.

We do not have any choice over who we fall in love with.

We do (normally) have complete control over what kinds of relationships we form.

We do not have much control over the way sexuality and 'sexual orientation' are constructed in the culture and the historical moment in which we happen to live.

We do have some control over what sexuality we choose to identify with and how we choose to project that identity.

So let's stop it with this "we don't choose to be gay" bollocks. This is true only in one sense: in the narrow sense of individual attraction.  In many other ways, it turns out we have a fair bit of choice after all.

@wonten:

Neither the Greeks or the Romans had a concept of homosexuality or heterosexuality.
[….]
So what is the verdict on how the Greek and Roman civilizations treated their LGBT citizens? Certainly there was a lot of discrimination and extreme social stigma for any relationship between men that fell outside of a very tight set of parameters.
However compared to what was to follow into much of the 20th Century, they were centuries ahead of their time.

I agree with your first statement: the Greeks and Romans did not have a concept of homosexuality or heterosexuality. These ideas were not invented until the 19th century. I think it is therefore problematic to ask "how the Greek and Roman civilizations treated their LGBT citizens". There were no such citizens: it is anachronistic to apply this kind of language to the ancient world.

Sex in antiquity was not primarily about sexual identity; it was about social status. Sex was a political act in the ancient world, in which a superior partner (usually a free citizen male) dominated an inferior partner (a woman, a boy, a slave or a foreigner). There were of course limits on what was acceptable, particularly with citizen boys, but they are not our limits and they look quite weird and unfamiliar to us.

For this reason I think it is really wrong to say that the ancients were "centuries ahead of their time." No, they were very much of their time! As were those who followed. In fact, I would say that medieval sexual ethics - which privileged mutuality (if not quite equality) in marriage and generally ruled out children and slaves as sexual partners - were far more similar to our sexual ethics today than those of the ancients.

@wrestling82:

The fact they saw children as sexual objects yet frowned upon consenting adults is pretty disturbing.

Why is it "disturbing"? Why should we be "disturbed" that people in a different culture and a different time had different sexual ethics (and a different worldview generally) from us?

Is it "disturbing" perhaps because it relativises our own sexual ethics - because it suggests that what we believe to be right and true is not necessarily any truer than what people believed 2500 years ago? Is it "disturbing" because it upsets our ideas of moral progress and enlightenment? And does it suggest that perhaps people thousands of years from now might view our own sexual ethics as weird and bizarre and wrong - much as we view that of the ancient Greeks?

Well I could do your googling for you and list all the many hundreds of sites where this theory is comprehensively refuted.

But for your benefit I'll keep it simple: no. Hydrogen peroxide does not cure AIDS.

Ah, questions to which the answer is "no."

How can you hate Macron? He's like crème brûlée - bland, tasteless, inoffensive. Sweet and safe to feed to small children and sick people. The least divisive of all possible dessert-options.  Nobody loves it. Nobody even really enjoys it. But you can't hate it because there's nothing there to hate.

I think the urge to form tribes is very deeply ingrained in human nature. It's nice and comforting to feel that you belong to a group with a definite set of values and a sense of what is wrong with the world and who is responsible for it. Belonging to a tribe also means you don't have to do too much thinking, and you can deal with the massive amounts of information coming at you by filtering it all through the familiar, reassuring world-view of the tribe. The world can be a complex, frightening and profoundly challenging place. Pledging adherence to a tribe is a way of dealing with the anxiety and the complexity of experience, while shutting out things that might threaten your own identity and your sense of yourself.

I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it's probably necessary to some extent. And there are good and healthy sorts of tribal communities too, founded on genuinely shared values without being closed to the perspective of outsiders. Unfortunately a very unhealthy and divisive sort of tribalism has largely taken over much of our political discourse, and when it comes to politics the actual issues at stake are often less important than the symbolic markers of identity - of belonging to one tribe or another.  These symbols are the things that tell us who we should hate.

From a true outsider's perspective (that is, to someone not invested in a tribal conflict), it is often hard to tell what the real issues at stake are: to me, as a non-American, the vicious war of words between 'liberals' and 'conservatives' seems ludicrous and inexplicable, because both sides obviously have vastly more in common than they have dividing them. But I am sure this is not how it seems to those who think that the symbols of their difference have real and important meaning. And for those of us on the right-hand side of the Atlantic, our divisions which seem similarly all-important and all-consuming are no doubt mystifying.

This situation is pernicious primarily because - while we may have differences of opinion and ideology - we nevertheless have shared interests as members of a common community. Illusory divisions disguise or diminish those shared interests. It is a danger, because if we focus only on the things that divide us - or things that we imagine divide us - we may eventually get to the point where we in fact have no shared community at all and the very things we claim to be fighting over will have disappeared.

I have lived all my life in countries with various forms of "single payer" healthcare systems. The point I would make is that there is huge diversity between different systems. Americans sometimes speak of "single payer" systems as though they are all the same. But in fact they are very different: France and the UK, for instance, both have a "single payer" model but it works in very different ways. The one thing that virtually all of these systems have in common is that they are more economically efficient than the American model, which even under Obamacare seems to represent the worst of both worlds: limited coverage, sub-optimal outcomes and maximum cost.

Really the argument you should be having is not simply whether you want a government-operated model, but what sort of government-operated model is likely to best meet the needs and desires of Americans.

@blackwing:

BUT I DON'T! Not until born…. Sorry! That's kinda the whole point, ya know?!  :haha:

Yes. This is the point at issue. I think a foetus is a person, you don't. This is the crux of the argument, and everything else is secondary.

But I'm not sure this necessarily resolves matters: for instance, why is a newborn a person and a foetus not one? Isn't this terribly arbitrary? If it's okay to kill a foetus at a late stage of prgnancy, isn't it okay also to kill a newborn if there are good reasons for doing so? And if not, why not?

@TheNewt:

I am only for abortion when a woman has been raped, or been the victim of incest, or her life is in danger if she has a child.

I would accept that abortion might be permissible if it is medically necessary to save the life of the mother. But if you think that the foetus is a person (with rights and interests that need to be protected in law) then I don't think it is coherent to say that abortion should be permitted in cases of rape or incest. Why does it matter how the child was conceived? The fact that the father might be culpable does not reduce in any way our obligation to protect the child. (If you accept that we have such an obligation - if you don't, it won't be an issue for you).

For me, this is not primarily about the mother at all. I'm not anti-women or anti-women-who-have-sex.  I don't think that women who get pregnant need to be punished or made to take personal responsibility for what they have done.  And it's not primarily about politics either: it's not about whether I trust "conservatives" or who might be anti-science or backward or misogynistic. It is, for me, a straightforward but very difficult question about how much of a moral duty we have as a society to care for our unborn children.

American politics is not my particular field of expertise, but I think there are some assumptions at work here: first that Catholics generally identify as 'conservative' or Republican. Yet American Catholics have historically supported the Democratic Party in numbers, and although there are some elements of Catholic teaching that would seem to favour the GOP (abortion, gay marriage, etc.), there are other elements of Catholic doctrine that are politically left-wing (Catholic social teaching, attitudes to imprisonment and the death penalty, etc.).  So there's no particular reason for Catholics to favour one party over the other at the present time.

Moreover, minority groups in America tend to be politically volatile. Before 9/11, most Muslim Americans were Republican voters. Today, following the War on Terror and assaults on the civil liberties of Muslim Americans led (in large part) by Republicans, most Muslim Americans vote Democratic. That has been a very dramatic and fast electoral shift  spurred on by the perception that the Republican Party is hostile to Muslims.

So I think there's no reason at all for the GOP to take Hispanic voters for granted. They might vote for a Republican candidate, or they might not. But prior experience suggests that minorities are unlikely to vote for any party that appears to be hostile towards them.

@brianboru72:

The point of discussion is who should have the right to decide on aborting an unborn embryo- and the answer, plain and simple, has to be the person DIRECTLY, PHYSICALLY involved- the one who is forced to spend nine months (if ever) to carry it to term- and that is the mother. Men do NOT get that right because their body is not directly involved. Their health will NOT be affected- neither will their ability to work, earn a living, or function normally.
ONLY the woman is physically impacted and that's why it's her right to decide.

I am familiar with this logic. The problem is that it is obviously going to fail to persuade those who do not think that the woman is the only person involved, or the only person who has a stake in what happens to a foetus. Even leaving the foetus itself out of the matter (and I think the claim that the foetus has interests which deserve protection is a powerful one), other people are also affected by a woman's decision to have an abortion: most immediately the father, the two families, and so on, and ultimately everyone who belongs to a 'moral community' that is responsible for the care and welfare of unborn children. I am personally averse to the rather individualistic view that sees pregnancy as simply one person's problem. I rather think that unborn children belong to their communities as much as anyone else does, and their fate is not to be left in the hands of one person (whose choices, in turn, are not to be borne alone).

I do take your point that carrying a child is a uniquely physical imposition upon a woman, and it is one that has implications on her life for at least forty weeks, and maybe much longer. So requiring that woman to carry her child to term is certainly no small imposition and not to be required lightly. The physical and emotional demands childbirth makes on the mother must be a very serious consideration in any discussion about the morality of abortion. But I do not think this means that the woman concerned is therefore the only person who has a stake in the future of the child, and the only person whose decisions about the child should matter.

@royalcrown89:

No woman should be told what to do with her body and until we get to a point where natural born men can give birth to children, this is not an issue where men should have much of a say. Women have the right to bring a child into this world if they want. They also have a right not to bring one into this world. It's sad that even today we still do not want women to hold any iota of power, not even when it comes to their own bodies.

The reality, of course, is that we do live in a society where everybody is told what they can and cannot do with their own body. Leaving aside the problematic idea of 'the body' as separate from but intimate private property of the self, nobody has unrestricted sovereignty over their own flesh. I understand that this issue is made emotional because of the long history of male control over reproduction in Western societies, but it is a nonsense to say that women should have total control over their own bodies even if you deny the claim (made, I assume, by most opponents of abortion) that it is what abortion does to somebody else's body that matters. If we could all agree that there was only one body involved (and one person to whom that body belongs), I suspect abortion would not even be an issue.

I'm also dubious about the idea that men are not entitled to an opinion on abortion because they can't bear children. This seems like a really arbitrary limitation: should infertile women or women past the age of menopause be entitled to an opinion on abortion? Should those who are not of military age have an opinion on foreign policy? Should only the dying (or only doctors) have an opinion on euthanasia?  Should only African American men be able to express an opinion on the Black Lives Matter movement? The reality of course is that abortion is an issue that affects all of us to varying degrees, and nobody's opinion is intrinsically better than anyone else's because of the group to which they happen to belong. Rather than trying to shut down the voices of half the population, I'd suggest that it would be better to foster debate which is respectful and compassionate. One can, after all, try to understand the perspective of a prospective mother without thinking that her decisions are necessarily the best or right ones. Unfortunately, the battle-lines are so firmly-drawn at present that it is very difficult to see much space for respect or compassion on either side towards people with whom we disagree.

I am not comfortable with either of the polarised options offered, though I will say that I am definitely uneasy with the idea of abortion. But it seems to me that there are a lot of tangential issues being raised here that are not really relevant to the main question. Yes, no doubt many conservatives are hypocritical. Yes, no doubt there is a certain irony in a 'pro-life' stance that nevertheless embraces the death penalty or war. Yes, opposing abortion raises imperatives about caring for young mothers and unwanted children. All of these are valid points, but they seem to me to be deflections from the raw force of the main argument.

The core questions - it seems to me - are these: Is an unborn child a person? Does it have rights? Does it have interests that should be protected? Can it be right to sacrifice its interests in favour of those of another person?

If an unborn child does have such rights, at what point in the pregnancy do they apply? At what point between conception and birth does it have a moral claim upon us? At what point is that moral claim so great that the interests of the mother should be regarded as secondary? And should any behaviour on the part of the mother that potentially endangers the foetus be seen as culpable?

If an unborn child does not have such rights, then does anybody? At what point in a person's life do they stop being a mere organism and become a person?  If we can morally kill a foetus, then why not a newborn? Why not a severely brain-damaged child or disabled adult?  Why not anyone at all if convenience dictates?

I think these are all profoundly challenging questions, and I don't pretend to have simple answers to any of them. But I think they are real questions, and they deserve to be discussed seriously. I am afraid that abortion has been largely removed from the domain of ethics and placed in the domain of political rhetoric. Which does us all a huge disservice, whichever side of the argument we may find ourselves on.

And who would you prefer? Theresa May, who repeatedly voted against equalising the age of consent, repealing Section 28 and allowing gay adoption? Or perhaps Tim Farron, who refuses to say whether he thinks gay sex is a sin?