The New York Times, on June 5, 2012, reported that so-called "morning-after pills" work by preventing women's eggs from being fertilized, and not by preventing fertilized eggs from being implanted in the womb. The latest scientific findings show that "the pills delay ovulation, the release of eggs from ovaries that occurs before eggs are fertilized, and some pills also thicken cervical mucus so sperm have trouble swimming."
In short, morning-after pills do not operate on fertilized eggs at all. Why should this matter? Because many conservative Republicans, as well as the official Catholic Church, believe the metaphor that Fertilized Eggs Are People, and that preventing such egg-people from being implanted in the womb constitutes "abortion," and hence, in their view, baby-killing. The Times article correctly reports that "it turns out that the politically charged debate over morning-after pills and abortion, a divisive issue in this election year, is probably rooted in outdated or incorrect scientific guesses about how the pills work."
That's the truth. Does the truth matter?
It has now been six weeks since that report was made public. But there has been no call from conservative Republicans and the Catholic Church supporting the use of "morning-after pills" to prevent the murder of babies on the grounds that you can't murder babies who don't exist.
The point is clear. The truth doesn't matter.
The point was made over a decade ago in my (George Lakoff's) book Moral Politics, which observed that conservatives against abortion were not in favor of guaranteed prenatal or postnatal care for mothers and children. Such care is crucial in determining the health and survivability of the babies. In short, conservatives against such policies do not care about the well-being of the babies at all.
The issue really has been control -- who controls reproduction, men or women? Hence, the prevalence of parental and spousal notification laws governing abortions. The abortion issue is really about male control in family life -- and in society in general. It also involves the notion that women who engage in immoral behavior, such as sex with partners they do not seek to have children with, ought to bear the consequences of their actions as a "just punishment." To establish that control, both conservative Republicans and the Catholic Church propose taking a metaphor literally, that A Fertilized Egg Is A Person. Taking the metaphor literally allows for the claim that preventing abortions constitutes saving lives.
That this is a metaphor is clear. Imagine that you want to buy a horse. You pay for a horse, and what is delivered to you is a fertilized horse egg. You would probably feel cheated. You can't ride or race a fertilized horse egg. It isn't a horse. Even in Texas. You need a mare and a lot of development. A single cell isn't a horse, a cluster of undifferentiated cells (technically, a "blastocyst") isn't a horse, a cluster of differentiated cells isn't a horse, a horse embryo isn't a horse, and a horse fetus isn't a horse. You would feel cheated if you were sold any of them.
Why mention Texas? Because the Republican Party of Texas recently came out with its 2012 platform. The party proposes a ban on all means to prevent the development of a person, from single-cell to cell cluster, from cell cluster to embryo, from embryo to fetus, from fetus to person. It bans the prevention of development, whether abortion or the morning-after pill, calling for a Human Life Amendment to the Constitution and protection of cells and cell clusters under the Fourteenth Amendment. This means no freedom for families, couples, and rape victims to decide whether or not they need to allow the development of fertilized cells -- or even the fertilization of unfertilized cells. They want to enshrine in the Constitution the metaphor that Cells Are People, in this case, Americans, which they see as protecting human life, and American life.
There is much that is wrong with this. First, cells and cell clusters (or "blastocysts") are not people.
Second, the GOP's policy does not protect American life at all. For example, arguing that this bill guarantees that "all innocent human life must be respected and safeguarded from fertilization to natural death" is nonsense. Real safeguarding of human life would involve measures that the Republican-dominated Texas legislature opposes: universal health care, a renewal of the Violence Against Women Act, protection against starvation, and a ban on poisonous food and environmental pollution in the name of corporate profit.
Specifically, it does not mean improved pre- and postnatal care, which could in fact save children's lives. The U.S. has a skyrocketing infant mortality rate, to great part due to lacking pre- and postnatal care. According to the 2011 United Nations World Population Prospects report, we rank number 34 in infant mortality. As a comparison, Japan (rank 3 on the list) has less than half as many infant deaths. By next year, the U.S. is expected to be 49 (according to the CIA World Factbook).
When couples want to have a child, the issue of development becomes paramount. Fertilization is not automatic. Sometimes artificial insemination techniques are needed. Even in normal cases, development is, or should be, monitored closely, with regular tests. Would-be mothers need to be very careful, since what happens in prenatal development matters. No alcohol. No drugs. Watch out for poisons like pesticides in foods. Eat carefully. Each stage of development is crucial. A child is not automatic. A child is a lot more than an egg, a blastocyst, an embryo, or a fetus. Development takes intention, effort, physical protection, and good health care.
The Texas GOP evokes the Cells Are Americans metaphor by referring to cells as unborn children. Based on this metaphor, human attributes are mapped onto cell clusters: people have feelings, people have constitutional rights, people can be crime victims, people can experience physical pain, and so on.
The Texas GOP then extends the metaphor to constitutional rights, requesting "total Constitutional rights for the unborn child." It extends it to victimhood in urging the State to "consider the unborn child as an equal victim in any crime, including domestic violence." This means that a young woman who is raped by her father or uncle will be kept from stopping cell development in her body. The same Crime Victim Frame is used by the Texas GOP to prevent surrogate pregnancies, calling the commonplace practice "human embryo trafficking" and asking for a ban on it.
The notion of a crime victim, of course, implies the ability to experience mental or physical pain, afflicted by a villain. The GOP introduces this notion by supporting legislation that requires doctors to "provide pain relief" for cells and cell clusters during abortion.
Here's what progressives need to do: Never use the Cells Are People metaphor, even in arguing against conservative policy. Never use the term baby or unborn child to refer to a blastocyst, embryo, or fetus.
Stop using the term abortion. It has misleading properties. When we speak of "aborting a mission," the mission was intentional and planned, and the original idea was to bring it to an end state. What happens with an unwelcome pregnancy is nothing like this. The pregnancy was not intentional, not planned, and there was never any intention of bringing it to an end state. Rather, what is desired is development prevention, keeping any development from happening. That development can be prevented at many stages, from unfertilized cells (via morning-after pills), to blastocyst to embryo, from embryo to fetus, from fetus to a non-fully-formed-human, to an unviable human (one that can't live outside the womb). The earlier the development prevention, the better for the woman.
Never use the expression partial birth abortion. It's a conservative political tool, not a medical reality. Here's the Texas GOP in its 2012 platform: "We oppose partial birth abortion." The term was invented by a hired, conservative language professional. The image is grisly, and that was the point. But no such thing exists. The medical condition it is supposed to represent is one where a potential child cannot survive, either because it has no brain, or because of some other equally awful condition. And usually, the mother's life is at risk. This has nothing to do with either giving birth or with more common reasons for preventing development.
Whenever possible, avoid the term morning-after pill. It evokes a prototypical frame of immoral behavior, bad decision-making, the inability to "just say no" at a party or during a date. It excludes the fact that the treatment can help rape victims prevent development, be used in cases where other birth control methods failed, and so on.
Never evoke the Consumer Frame. It has been introduced to the debate by the term Pro-Choice, and is now used everywhere. For example, in the GOP's 2012 platform, where a decision for development prevention is labeled as a woman ordering an abortion, as if she were shopping. The frame hides the fact that such decisions are never made easily and are commonly made by men and women, and often their families, together.
The reason not to use the above language is that it can both hide reality and does not adequately communicate the moral values that underlie progressive policy. The right to limit development is a matter of liberty and family freedom.
First of all, all of the issues above concern men as well as women. Remember, 100 percent of all pregnancies are caused by men, and a child implies lifelong involvement for the man as well as the woman.
Describing pregnancies and development prevention as women's issues hides that fact. Additionally, in violence against women such as rape, the man is the issue. We need to get over the idea that these are women's issues.
For many women the issue of preventing a pregnancy is a matter of liberty, of the freedom to live your life as you want. You can think of it as a pro-liberty issue. It is also a matter of having the family that makes sense to you, and so it is a pro-family issue, a matter of Family Freedom, the freedom to plan your own family.
Women seeking freedom have always, and will always, seek to control development of life within their bodies. Where there have been laws against this, there have always been back-alley abortions, which are dangerous and have led to the maiming and death of women.
Furthermore, protecting human life is a real issue in the United States. Protecting human life is one of the moral mandates of government. The lives and health of infants, children, and mothers -- as well as all other Americans -- should be protected through accessible and improved health care, pre- and postnatal care, a ban on poisonous food and environmental pollution, a renewal of the Violence Against Women Act, and so on. Even in Texas.
You raise race horses. You've used two of your best to breed a horse you expect will do very well for you. Insemination is a success.
I come along and say, "It's not a horse yet, just a clump of cells, so it's all right if I kill it." And I do. What's your reaction?
You'll respond that the difference is, I wanted the horse. But under your morality, killing it is just fine--as long as I, the owner, do it myself.
So it's also interesting that you use the metaphor of an economic transaction--buying the horse--as if human life at its earliest stages were something owned by another. At what point does the child cease to be owned by its parents, then? If it's still reliant on them after birth, and could therefore be considered their property, wouldn't it be moral to end his or her life after birth?
1) Children are dependent by nature. They need to be cared for and taught or they die.
2) Society doesn't always agree with how a parent is caring for a child.
When do we have the right to intervene and how may we intervene?
My answer is simple. We assign every child certain rights. In order to give a child a right, the whole of society must pledge that the child WILL get something. That means that if the parent won't pro
Then we note that parents have two choices. Comply with the minimum standards we have laid out or **turn the child over to society**.
This is self-balancing in that we can demand nothing of parents that we won't do ourselves.
We currently could, for example, demand that couples getting fertility treatments either gestate all their embryos or turn the surplus embryos over to the state to gestate in paid surrogate mothers. If we were willing to spend the money to gestate them ourselves we would earn the right to make this demand.
The day we invent artificial wombs we can demand that either the parent's gestate the fetus or the fetus be turned over to us to gestate.
But we can't demand anything we aren't willing to do ourselves.
And if you think it's a life in the womb, what's wrong with treating the woman with love and compassion and that it is possible for her to have love and compassion for this human life inside of her? Where's the monstrosity in that?
You show "love and compassion" for a woman by respecting and supporting any choice she makes.
You walk the walk ( as opposed to just talking that talk ) by supporting social safety net programs, medical care, education, food assistance, and all that stuff that a woman needs so that she can choose to keep a wanted pregnancy even if her finances aren't so good.
If you want to do that, welcome to the pro-choice camp. That is what we are about. Supporting women with whatever choice they make in a loving and respectful way.
You can start out by not calling people murderers and demanding they choose the way you tell them.
If your friend is engaging in destructive behavior, can you "[respect and support] any choice she makes"? Or will you aim to guide her away from decisions that will harm her? Note that to do so takes a level of intolerance: meaning, you must refuse to tolerate behaviors in your friend that you know are detrimental to her.
This isn't to say that one can force another person to make one decision or another. But we can refuse to condone the harmful decision.
Just don't go to some fantasy special FX'd up political advocacy site. Get something from an actual medical authority. Check out a medical text at a library if nothing else.
I also heartily recommend reading this study:
http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/user_upload/animalwelfare/94.pdf
It was meant to explore a question about animal wellbeing and determine whether the fetus suffers if a pregnant cattle is slaughtered. But it discovers a lot of stuff about fetal biology in mammals that applies to us and is very relevant to the abortion debate. Because it wasn't authored with a pro or anti-choice agenda and is meant for a medical journal it gets you to actual scientiic data without punditry and spin.
Heck, some of their first propaganda pieces were made by stealing dead babies from the morgue, ,dismembering them, and photographing the result. Very revolting and nothing at all like your typical elective abortion.
You might want to spend some time praying for and hugging yourself, you're in dire need of them yourself.
But if you are correct on this issue, then your position (of aforementioned Arbiter) must also take credit for every other action, by man and nature, occurring under his vigil. A god who allows us the choice, or allows another to choose for us, to have sex and then deny us the choice as to the consequences is the same as a god who allows us to contract disease, or have them descend upon us, and then refuses us remedy.
But you are wrong. The narcissistic obsession with predetermined uniqueness is a delusion. The soul is, in the strict theistic sense, is a fabrication, used to subdue and soothe the cowed peasants of a wonderful afterlife.
In short, stop saying "I bet you're happy your mom saw you as more than some cells." It's a foundation-less argument because the theistic foundation is faulty. More on that from people with more room to write.
Imagine this question in a debate: What is your position on reproductive rights? Either you're for it, or you're against it. And if you're against liberty, it looks bad.
I truly do believe it is about life vs choice. And I think life trumps choice. Many disagree.
There would not be so much passion here if the issue were not difficult, but please don't act as if it is simple.
Your philosophical nonsense is fine, have all the debates you'd like, make all the proclamations you want, believe whatever you'd like to believe, but you're not qualified to make medical decisions. You do not possess the education, the background, the experience or the understanding to decide what decision a patient and her physician make.
Just because some people have told you some highly fictionalized stories about procedures they don't like and don't understand, it doesn't mean that you have any clue why, how or in what circumstances a woman makes the choice to either continue or terminate a pregnancy.
A fetus is NOT a "separate" human being, a woman is. You're making a lot of decisions about separate human beings without any information or understanding at all. It is very much about what goes on in a woman's body, since that is the site of pregnancy, and the only "separate" human being in question is the woman.
It's not your business. If you want to get pregnant and have a baby, knock yourself out, if you want to perform your own appendectomy, go right head. Do NOT think that you have the right to decide for anyone else, overriding their physician's recommendations when or IF they have the right to an appendectomy.
I truly don't think you understand what "choice" actually refers to, or you wouldn't state such a ridiculous dichotomy. Choice is life, and the one whose life is in question is the one only one who gets to make that decision, it doesn't matter if you disagree.
If you wanted to have a say in this discussion, go to medical school, do an Ob/Gyn residency and fellowship and try to understand the myriad of factors that affect this procedure, you know nothing, and your opinion is worth exactly that.
If it's your body, you decide, if it's not, no one cares what you think. If you had any clue about why your statements are so laughably uninformed, you might understand why your presumption about making the decisions for anyone is so arrogant.
Please don't act like you have any clue what you're talking about when all you're doing is mouthing talking points that you clearly don't understand.
We all have restictions on rights and liberties.....I have the right to swing my arm....but that right ends at your nose. I have a right to pursue happiness, but that right ends when it puts other lives in danger or ends other lives....pure an simple
ASK.
If I need your kidney I can't take. I can't sic te government on you. I can't demand. I can only ASK.
You may give or withhold as you choose for any reason whatsover. My life is important, but nothing is so important that we steal human tissue.
Nothing.
Never.
Ever.
It is the GIFT of life to give of your flesh to another. It is special precisely because it is VOLUNTARY.
"Depleted Uranium and Birth Defects". Go ahead. Do it. Follow the links to pictures.
Realize that OUR policies created these monstrosities.
Imagine your wife, or daughter, giving birth to something like that.
Access to abortion can be a blessing. It all depends on the circumstances.
The same set of people excommunicated a nun for daring to approve the abortion of a woman who was 11 weeks pregnant, a mother of 4, and about to die from lethally high blood pressure due to the pregnancy. According to the bishop, the mother's life is NEVER more important than that of the embryo, even if the embryo has no chance of survival and the mother's life is in danger.
The house just rejected amendments to bill that outlaws abortions in DC that would make exceptions for the woman's life, her health. One of them was specifically about terminating a pregnancy so that the mother could undergo cancer treatment, which is not compatible with pregnancy.
Are you going to force her to nurture the foetus to full term?
If you are, you're a monster.
If you're not, and you think some abortions are allowable, then all your posturing that an abortion is a life destroyed is essentially hypocrisy.
And don't kid yourselves it's a religious deal, Christian folks. Check out the law of jealousies, straight from the lips of God himself in advice to Moses on what a man is to do if he suspects his wife has been unfaithful.
Basically you take your wife to a priest who guilt trips her and prays to God that she miscarries if she's pregnant and has been unfaithful. That's right, and let's say it again - A priest prays to God that a woman should miscarry as part of a procedure recommended by God in person.
It's all in your happy family Bible.
What I especially enjoy about this delightful bit of scripture is the fact that no differentiation is recommended as to the fate of the foetus based on who the father is. I suspect because the zealots who made it all up understood very little of the mechanics of the reproductive process. Like all scripture writers and ventriloquists for God, they were thoroughly ignorant of science.
Many purists on both sides have argued your point about consistency. It is a simple and obvious point.
All pro life abortion restrictions have valued the life of the mother over the life of the unborn child if only one can live. But rarely is that "choice" the only one.
The "rape and incest" exceptions many on the pro life side for many are simply a recognition of three things.
1. They have been used by the pro choice world to make abortion seem essential.
2. They are a tiny, tiny, percentage of abortions, and thus that exception in our political world of compromise might be a tradeoff that had to be made to pass legislation to protect the more common abortions.
3. The recognition of the absolute awfulness of the situation and the difficulty of being absolutely intellectually consistent.
Nothing brilliant here or in your post.
You might want to learn a little more about the New Covenant before you expound on Christianity.
Claiming religious authority over the moral choices made by people in modern secular democracies is a non-starter. A woman in a free society may decide to seek religious advice, or she may decide otherwise. The delightful thing about her being part of a free society is that no-one can impose the dark constraints of ancient prejudices upon her.
The rest of your blathering just proves my point while making it clear you've missed it.
The function of thought experiments is to provide clarity and focus to complex problems.
And this one absolutely is a slam dunk for the pro-choice lobby. As soon as you allow the idea of an abortion in the case of rape, you've acknowledged the principle that the foetus is a foetus, and that you can empathise with a woman's emotional condition in not wanting to nurture and bear it. The fact that your empathy doesn't extend any further than that case is a failure of your imagination. Why should that failure impact a woman you've never met? Mind your own business.
Decide on your own moral choices. If you want to spend your one and only chance of being alive dodging the disapproval of an imaginary uber-parent, hey, God bless! But don't seek to force that decaying, poisonous nonsense on anyone else. It's really not nice.
Sentience requires oxygen. A brain without oxygen is like a car on the moon. It may have an engine, it may be full of fuel, but it won't start without air.
Studies of fetal biology show clearly that there is nobody there till first breath:
http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/user_upload/animalwelfare/94.pdf
The earlier the development prevention, the better for the woman."
Oh, that's fresh. Now, let's not call it abortion anymore? Just one more way to dehumanize the human in the womb. Can I stop my 6 week old from developing into a toddler? Can I stop my child from developing into an adolescent? No, that would be murder. However, in the womb, it's a totally different situation, right? Wrong, in my view. Abortion, or 'development prevention' is the ending of human life.
You claim to believe in God as I do, and therefore I ask you again, do you really, truly, in your heart, believe that God's design for women included taking the life of their offspring? Shouldn't we be striving to live as God intended for us?
In between, there is foetal development. So when does a collection of cells become a human? One answer is that it is at the moment when the foetus can exist without support. This makes sense because it has fully developed organs and can function independently.
But this gets complicated by the concept of "soul". When does the soul become attached to the foetus? The temptation is to say it is when the egg is fertilized. But this doesn't work because 50%-70% do not implant - that would mean that all those souls were killed naturally.
The other problem is "where does a soul come from"? Does god make a new one? Does a soul develop organically at the same time as the foetus? There are no answers to those questions in any scripture.
So that leaves us with a practical world where making abortion illegal does not reduce the incidence http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20085681, so declaring it murder doesn't work .
Europe has developed a model that minimizes abortions. First, excellent sex education. Second, cheap contraception to reduce unwanted pregnancies. Third, a welfare net to make it easier to be a mother. Those three things are why Holland has an abortion rate of 6.5/1000 pregnancies, versus the US 22/1000.
Last time I checked, 100% of people die. This does not imply that we don't have dignity or our lives can be taken by someone else without error. And there is a big difference between spontaneous, accidental, or natural death and death from an act of the will. If someone trips and falls off a cliff no one has sinned. If I push them, I have sinned.
BEFORE I created you[r body] in the womb I knew you[r soul].
There is no physical "you" to know before your body starts developing. so the "you" it knew while daddy's eyes were twinkling must be your soul.
Ergo, the soul exists prior to the flesh and at some point joins the flesh. The "Breath of Life" quote indicates when this happens and scientific research actually backs that one up.
Your brain doesn't turn on till first breath cause you don't have enough Oxygen in the womb to run it.