Religion?

[Username17]

Crissa got it in one. In the case of a child being reared by one parent or the other, the divorce or deabeat parentage is considered a pre-mature termination of a contract. The parent still raising the child had entered into a common law contract to bring the child to adulthood with the other parent. And so long as they hold to their side of the bargain the other parent is treated exactly like a ball player who stops playing before the end of his contract or a construction firm who didn't complete work on a building.

Adoption is a special magical world in which another investor comes in and purchases all of the rights to all of the contracts and everyone else is left free and clear with no obligations, financial or otherwise.

---

And by the way: the socialist argument for Abortion is much simpler:

Do we need more children? I mean, in the world? OK then, unrestricted access to abortion it is.

If the answer was yes, then we would apply a series of sticks and carrots to incentivize women to give birth to more babies. This would probably start by treating a prospective mother as a worker producing something needed by the republic - babies. And giving her payment according to the value of that work for successfully completing it. If the answer was a sufficiently emphatic yes, we would even mandate the completion of pregnancies, both by banning abortion procedures in cases where the woman's life was not in any danger and by mandating that women got pregnant in the first place.

But since we are not, last I checked, in severe immediate danger of running out of people in the next generation, such extreme measures are simply unwarranted and pointless - so we don't do them.

-Username17

[Lago_AM3P]

Crissa got it in one. In the case of a child being reared by one parent or the other, the divorce or deabeat parentage is considered a pre-mature termination of a contract. The parent still raising the child had entered into a common law contract to bring the child to adulthood with the other parent. And so long as they hold to their side of the bargain the other parent is treated exactly like a ball player who stops playing before the end of his contract or a construction firm who didn't complete work on a building.

So why couldn't this argument be used to demolish your point in the first place? I.e. when the woman had sex they entered into a common law contract to bring the baby to term?

[Username17]

A contract with who?

-Username17

[Lago_AM3P]

Society in general.

That is, they hold claim to all of the children in the US unless another group had hold of them. Normally, this defaults to the parents but if they give up rights to the child the stewardship is up for grabs.

They interpret abortion as giving up ownership of the little brat so thw ownership automatically goes to government... which then states that they want to carry the kid to term.

Of course, this argument only applies if you believe that a fetus is a person with full rights. But I think the anti-slavery one just accepted that dubious premise as true in the first place for simplicity.

[Koumei]

1195081282[/unixtime]]ownership automatically goes to government... which then states that they want to carry the kid to term.

If the government has a way of carrying the kid to term that doesn't involve the original parent doing so, they're welcome to it.

But you can't seriously say that by having sex people are promising the government to have a baby. Well, you can seriously say it, but you can't say it and be considered sane at the same time.

[Lago_AM3P]

But you can't seriously say that by having sex people are promising the government to have a baby. Well, you can seriously say it, but you can't say it and be considered sane at the same time.

You have to remember the caliber of people we're dealing with.

Seriously, the pro-life reaction to 'sex is a powerful natural human urge and LOTS OF people want to have it' is 'well, you'll just have to live with the consequences if it ends up in a baby'. I don't think it's a stretch to have this group claim that 'having heterosexual sex is an implied contract that you're willing to take care of a baby if one pops up, otherwise society assumes ownership'. Then you get the Catch-22 of 'even though you defaulted on the contract, we still expect a minimum level of compensation/payment. Which means that you're carrying the child to term'.

[Neeek]

1195098578[/unixtime]] I don't think it's a stretch to have this group claim that 'having heterosexual sex is an implied contract that you're willing to take care of a baby if one pops up, otherwise society assumes ownership'.

For there to be an implied contract, there has to be detrimental reliance upon the implied contract causing damages to the party claiming breach. Society will have a hard time winning that particular argument in most (any, really) abortion cases.

The truly funny thing about the anti-abortion crowd is they have no idea what they want. Try asking one of them what penalty should be applied to a woman who gets an abortion. They rarely, if ever have any answer.

[Lago_AM3P]

Try asking one of them what penalty should be applied to a woman who gets an abortion. They rarely, if ever have any answer.

They do have an answer, they just know that the proposed range of punishments are either:

A) Dumb and petty. Seriously, if they slapped a $500 fine and 20 days jail time on getting an abortion, how does this punishment jive at all with--in their words--killing children? So the penalty for having an abortion needs to be severe enough to fulfill both a deterrent purpose and a revenge motive. Mostly a revenge motive. But then that makes the punishment seem:

B) Incredibly fucking malicious. If abortion was a crime that ended up with young women spending years in jail, seriously, how would that shit fly? Our prison system is already strained to the breaking point--how is throwing hundreds of thousands more women who are otherwise productive citizens going to fucking help? Are you going to force parents to rat out their own sons and daughters or throw them into the slammer too? Are you going to start breaking patient confidentiality to find which doctors are killing babies?

Seriously, if you can't even come up with a good, workable punishment then shut the fuck up about criminalizing abortion. It's why Prohibition was an absolute fucking failure.

[CalibronXXX]

1195101608[/unixtime]]The truly funny thing about the anti-abortion crowd is they have no idea what they want.

Perfectly correct. Like any large politically charged group we are made up mostly of drooling morons. Those of us who will actually accept that people are inherently selfish and don't much care about the potential human being they want to kill for the sake of convenience as long as they're able to convince themselves it is a thing and not a child or what is right or wrong, after all the vast majority of out opponents are fully into the relative truth school of thought and refuse to even acknowledgethe possibility of a universal right and wrong, but I digress, we set up abortion education centers with sonogram machines and do what we can to get these girls who are unsure of their decision to seriously consider all the implications of an abortion; I don't have the data with me, but I believe it was that over 70% of the women who were planning on aborting their children who come to one of these facilities change their minds.

1195101608[/unixtime]]Try asking one of them what penalty should be applied to a woman who gets an abortion. They rarely, if ever have any answer.

Criminalizing it in today's society would never work anyway. Changes need to be made on a deeper level before you can even think about putting out an effective law. Conservatives are just not sure of what to do to change things and are grasping at straws.

[Lago_AM3P]

riminalizing it in today's society would never work anyway. Changes need to be made on a deeper level before you can even think about putting out an effective law. Conservatives are just not sure of what to do to change things and are grasping at straws.

Let's talk about Prohibition real fast.

I think alcohol/drug consumption is one of the biggest problems in society. A lot fewer people would die if we totally got rid of it. No, even if it was legalized, a significantly high number of crimes are created just from people under the influence--to speak nothing of the health and social concerns. If God came up to me and asked 'Lago, I'm going to remove all alcohol, cigarettes, and recreational drugs from the planet for all time' I'd tell him to go for it.

Yet I'll be the first to say that Prohibition was one of the biggest fucking wastes of time ever, somewhere between the time it took Han Fei to jerk off on a stack of formerly blank papers that later was passed off as the Legalist Screed to hide his onanism and somewhere between the time where Clemenceau bit into a pillow while Lloyd George jammed a rolled-up piece of paper his ass to create the Versailles Treaty. I'd even be willing to go as far as to say that this idea is a major reason why crime is higher in America than in other countries. I think all it did was give us some badass Mafia movies at the horrible cost of actually having criminal organizations called Murder Inc.

If the pro-life organization got their way and even got through the most punitive version of their laws, we'd have a crisis on our hands worse than Prohibition. I'm calling it.


(edited for the creation of more unnecessary vulgarity)

[CalibronXXX]

It's not going to happen anyway. Society's going to hell in a handbasket and I doubt this country will stave off what is effectively anarchy for more than another handful of generations.

Hopefully something better will rise from the ashes or the Second Coming happens sometime before that point.

Wow, yeah, unnecessary vulgarity indeed.

[Koumei]

Though I'm no longer able to believe even in the possibility of any divine entity that doesn't actively hate us (and hate us enough to make things perpetually miserable, rather than just declaring Exterminatus), and even a malevolent being I can't really believe in these days, I am open to the concepts of a Universal right and wrong.

The key thing, however, is that there's no real way to figure out what they are. I'd say "Go with your gut instinct", because I'm impulsive like that, and if I do something that is against my instinct (such as lying), I feel really bad about it afterwards. So I trust my instinct on morality. So if there *is* a Universal right and wrong, then they'd have to be what I feel is right and wrong (and not what I want to be right and wrong).

Because no holy text can have authority on that, on the grounds of them being made of lies and fail. Likewise no 60HD Outsider [Awesome, Extraplanar] is there to tell us.

By the same token, there might not be absolute truths, which still doesn't change the fact that I'll adhere to these "I feel it's right" things.

Now, what do these instincts tell me about abortion? I don't know; I've never been in the situation. Now, they tell me that contraceptive are an awesome idea, and that consensual sex between any 2 people who are smart enough for it to *be* consensual just for pleasure/because they like each other is a fantastic idea. They tell me we shouldn't flood the world any more than it already is. But abortion? I don't know yet.

I'll make a guess though, and try to think logically. There's a person who actually does seriously exist, and a person who may or may not exist. They have the potential to begin existing for real (or to die at birth), and they have the potential to do all kinds of things if they do go ahead and live. But nothing is guaranteed at all there. But the person who *does* exist shouldn't have to suffer for the sake of someone who *potentially* exists.

[CalibronXXX]

A relatively short period of moderate inconvenience and a, again relatively speaking, very short period of extreme pain and/or discomfort versus a human life. This is what it comes down to most of the time and I am saddened, but not surprised, to see people prefer to kill another human being to spare themselves a little hardship.

People suck and I'm not surprised when they do horrible things.

[Koumei]

While I agree that people do suck, what benefit is there to the world at large if you bring another one into it? That person, should they survive (and remember, though the odds are better, it's still Schrödinger's Cat until you drive out of the hospital with a healthy baby), will most likely suck as well. Additionally, they will suffer a lot, because life sucks, and they'll be a drain on resources in general when we could really do with less people all round.

So you'd be most likely doing the world a favour. You'd be doing yourself a favour (a period of discomfort and annoyance, a period of excruciating pain, the moodiness that accompanies you through it and the strain you put on those around you, post-natal depression, having to put up with the little shit until it grows into a real person, throwing your career and personal life away for the first year or so, and in many cases, not quite being the same again physically - for the worse). You'd also potentially be doing them a favour (if given the option, I'd opt to have not been born and instead be aborted).

All for the small chance that they'll be born healthy, enjoy life, and not turn out to be a waste of space. It's better to focus on the life of the person who actually does currently exist in the here and now.

Besides, given Christians have the whole "You go to Heaven if you weren't given the chance to make your own choices" thing (and if you're going by Catholicism, one Pope randomly declared Limbo existed to guilt people into getting knocked up, then another Pope randomly declared it to not exist. And Popes have their power of bullshit, and can do that. So the most recent rules revision takes precedence and unborn don't go to Limbo.*), they are WAY better getting a free ride and skipping the shitty "life" part.

*And even if that wasn't the case, Limbo is still better than Earth, even taking Slaadi into consideration.

[Draco_Argentum]

1195108548[/unixtime]]Wow, yeah, unnecessary vulgarity indeed.

The description of the treaty of Versailles is rather forgiving really.

[tzor]

1195098578[/unixtime]]Seriously, the pro-life reaction to 'sex is a powerful natural human urge and LOTS OF people want to have it' is 'well, you'll just have to live with the consequences if it ends up in a baby'.

Seriously, I don't think that is the reaction at all. I think there are some fringe groups that think this way but for the most part most pro-life groups are simply in a panic mode. They see all these, what they think are, unnecessary deaths and they want to prevent that. It's the same feeling one gets when one sees a whole beach of oil coated birds, your first thought is to save as many as possible. Since the pro-life community is as a whole so miserably unsucessful, (considering the number of abortions that occur and the relatively few number of "rescues" that happen) the implication of real success is generally not even considered by most of the pro-life community.

Those that do realize that "we" that is "We the People" have a real social contract with ourselves and therefore we as a people have that vested interest. But that implication really hasn't sunk into the pro-life mindset because you see pro-life isn't just about children. It's from conception to natural death, and the implications of that is so vast that given the general state of things it's something that most easily decide not to think about.

[CalibronXXX]

Koumei, our world views just vary too dramatically for me to even comment on that. Nice talking to you though.

[Bigode]

Lago: is the onanism some twisted reference to something real, or just completely needless profanity?

Calibron: do you extend this to brainless fetuses?

[Lago_AM3P]

Lago: is the onanism some twisted reference to something real, or just completely needless profanity?

Onanism is one of Mark Twain's essays on how to perform masturbation correctly. He also goes into detail about the person whom the term is named after (Onan, BTW) in Letters of the Earth.

So, uh, it does indeed fall into the completely needless profanity category.

[tzor]

1195118579[/unixtime]](and if you're going by Catholicism, one Pope randomly declared Limbo existed to guilt people into getting knocked up, then another Pope randomly declared it to not exist. And Popes have their power of bullshit, and can do that. So the most recent rules revision takes precedence and unborn don't go to Limbo.*)

Sigh, not again. That is so wrong in so many ways that it is not even funny. I don't want to bore you in details so I'll give the executive summary version. I'll try to avoid using Latin as well.

First of all there are two limbos. There is the temporary limbo, and there is the eternal limbo. The former was the place where the faithful waited until the resurrection. It's referred to as the "Bossom of Abraham" in the Gospels. The gates were opened and everyone went inside. Thus it was considered "temporary."

Then there was the question of if baptism was necessary what happened to those who were unable to get it. Unborn babies were the biggest problem that people worried about because childbirth at the time was often fatal for the mother, the child or both. Theologians (not the Pope) speculated that perhaps there was an eternal limbo where they would live in moderate happiness. This went on for quite some time until in modern times it was eventually decided that we simply have no firggin' clue.

That's in one sense the problem with the "good news." It's not about "them" it's about "you." Even you getting off your shelf and helping them is still about you. There are a lot of things apparently on a need to know basis and we apparently don't need to know. So the wild theological speculation was dropped other than whatever it is, we do know that "God is Love" and thus will come up with any excuse to find forgiveness. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states this idea in a precise way, "God has bound salvation to the sacraments, but God is not bound by the sacraments." In other words He can forgive whoever he wants to even if he has to go over his own red tape.

Limbo was not and never was a doctrine of the church. It was a speculation of theologists. The just war theory is also a speculation of theologists as well.

We now return you to the subject of masturbation, already in progress. (It is ironc that so many of the so called "sexual" sins of the Old Testament are actually sins against duty or hospitality. Onan's sin was refusing to raise a son for his bother as was the custom through the use of a rather odd and yes not very effective way of contraception.)

[Crissa]

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hHbh ... wD8ST5NG80

And yet, anti-abortion groups do just that.

*sigh*

At the same time, child welfare and services go begging for money.

-Crissa

[Cielingcat]

I'm starting to think that Koumei is in fact the evil twin. Or maybe the evil robot one.

[CalibronXXX]

1195152399[/unixtime]]Lago: is the onanism some twisted reference to something real, or just completely needless profanity?

Calibron: do you extend this to brainless fetuses?

If you're conceived missing one of the organs completely necessary for you to be alive then you don't really count as human anymore than some cloned, functioning human heart cells.

[Koumei]

That's true, Calibron. I assume it comes down to personal experience, and there is probably nothing that can convince me that you don't have a constant opium drip connected into your bloodstream to give you your worldview, but I could be wrong here. Agree to disagree and all that.

[CalibronXXX]

Hah, that's an interesting way to put it. A Christian actively seeking God's will is endowed with a joy and peace of mind that unbelievers can't really understand, so it is a little like being on drugs, but with all the negative effects removed.

My father died recently and I've been able to accept that with peace and support others that were crushed by his death. He was a well loved man and we had a very good, almost equal, relationship even though I'm only a few years out of my teens. I was given such strength by the Lord that I was able to get up at his viewing and not only recite the tribute I had written for him on his last birthday, but also read another, more controversial, piece that detailed his life and inner being, as I understood them, in it's entirety; good and bad alike. I thank the Lord everyday for what he's done for me.