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What Has the 'Pro-Life' Movement Won?

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Boydstun

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2 minutes ago, StrictlyLogical said:

So we need some sort of Objective (rather than historical) Constitutionalist who actually believes in individual rights as against the mob or the State (not a leftist) and as against dogmatic religion (not a conservative)… from where could such persons arise in the political landscape?

I nominate Tara Smith.

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2 hours ago, Grames said:

I never understood this "forced labor" angle.

It's the rights-angle at a practical level between the adults, namely the pregnant woman and adults who, by the law, want to have a say in the pregnancy. It is to those adults, with their metaphysics and moral ideals, that the pregnant woman can become enslaved, impressed into the service of their projects for her body, and indirectly her future, instead of her own projects and ambitions in life. This can happen only if she is a pregnant woman trying to procure an abortion in the term before the fetus/baby is capable of sustained life outside the womb, with or without artificial support. The judgment of that capability has been in the province of the attending physician, so it is a decision on the development at hand, although there tends to be a clustering of the become-capable ones around a certain time in the term, given the particular stage of medical technology at the time, that is, given the present capabilities to artificially sustain the life of the delivered little one outside the womb. You probably know that capability for sustained life outside the womb, with or without artificial support, is the definition of viability (Colletti v. Franklin 1978). It is not a definition of personhood or rights-bearing of the little one. The significance of the viability stage was that people not the mother could after that point carry out there project of continuing the development to infancy, childhood, and adulthood, without impressing the mother into the service of their project. When I talk of impressment for services, it means forced labor, which is slavery—like in military conscription, but for another sort of endeavor.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

PS – I'm sorry this repeats what I have said before in somewhat different layout of presentation. But it is very hard for people who have always thought of this issue in terms of rights of the potential human being in the uterus versus rights of the mother. Reorienting to the rights in play over this, realistically, as between adult citizens is apparently difficult, so much repetition is in order.

Pushing the picture that what is at issue is whether the fetus (or earlier) has standing for rights to the house, the mother's uterus, versus the rights of the mother to her body, to her autonomy in devising her own life, reminds me of the way religious people push the picture that in every moral issue, say whether to commit adultery, they are only carrying out God's directions for proper living. So you get these parties to the issue, namely God or the potential human being, that are really a mask for the believer's own values, and a distraction.

Edited by Boydstun
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2 hours ago, Grames said:

I never understood this "forced labor" angle.

In the case of consensual activity and knowing the consequence, you have somewhat of an argument. But would you see it differently in the case of rape, or teenagers who don't know what they are doing?

Edited by Easy Truth
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On 6/29/2022 at 4:18 PM, Boydstun said:

When I talk of impressment for services, it means forced labor, which is slavery—like in military conscription, but for another sort of endeavor.

But a woman voluntarily had penis-in-vagina sex which is the only way to get pregnant.  There is more than a little whining about the metaphysical facts of biology going on here (as opposed to man-made facts which are legitimately open to dispute).  The combination of desiring to have that particular manner of sexual activity while also avoiding the potential consequence is dishonest.  Pregnancy is so easily avoided (trivially so, just don't do that one thing) that I suspect that it isn't really the underlying issue that is powering all the melodrama from the pro-abortion side.  (There is also melodrama from the anti-abortion total ban side of the issue which is also childish but not my focus here.)

The idea or principle that one should not necessarily indulge every appetite or impulse as it strikes is apparently very threatening to some people at a psychological or sense-of-life level.  That self-control is possible and virtuous is a very anti-egalitarian idea in a very egalitarian age.  For some women the idea that somewhere someone does not approve of their life choices, that they are judged, is intolerable.  To put the idea most succinctly, it's the slut shaming aspect of the issue that makes it so spicy.

  

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I voluntarily had a person on bike relationship which sometimes can result in breaking ones arm. Damn it I guess I can't go to the doctor and get a splint now because who am I to skirt the consequences of my actions.

They're either this dumb or they think you are.

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36 minutes ago, 2046 said:

I voluntarily had a person on bike relationship which sometimes can result in breaking ones arm. Damn it I guess I can't go to the doctor and get a splint now because who am I to skirt the consequences of my actions.

They're either this dumb or they think you are.

I'm guessing they differentiate between a broken bone and a living thing (the unborn).  Fixing a broken bone doesn't result in the death of a living thing, abortion does.  That's the prolife view.    

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15 hours ago, Grames said:

But a woman voluntarily had penis-in-vagina sex which is the only way to get pregnant.  . . . The combination of desiring to have that particular manner of sexual activity while also avoiding the potential consequence is dishonest.  Pregnancy is so easily avoided (trivially so, just don't do that one thing) that I suspect that it isn't really the underlying issue that is powering all the melodrama from the pro-abortion side.  (There is also melodrama from the anti-abortion total ban side of the issue which is also childish but not my focus here.)

The idea or principle that one should not necessarily indulge every appetite or impulse as it strikes is apparently very threatening to some people at a psychological or sense-of-life level.  That self-control is possible and virtuous is a very anti-egalitarian idea in a very egalitarian age.  For some women the idea that somewhere someone does not approve of their life choices, that they are judged, is intolerable.  To put the idea most succinctly, it's the slut shaming aspect of the issue that makes it so spicy.

  

Have you been so fortunate as to have had a wife? Does she know you wrote that?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A man not getting enough sleep last night and dozing off at the wheel while driving home today AND NEGLECTING TO FASTEN HIS SEAT BELT OR HAVE A FUNCTIONING AIR BAG, fails to avoid the consequence of going through the windshield.

A woman voluntarily having penis-in-vagina sex . . . desiring to have that particular manner of sexual activity, AND NEGLECTING TO TAKE THE PILL; INSTALL IUD; DEMAND HER PARTNER PUT A RUBBER ON HIS WILLY, AND IF THAT RENDERS HIM WITHOUT AN ERECTION, GET A NEW PARTNER; OR WAIT UNTIL AFTER MENOPAUSE, thereby avoiding pregnancy, "is dishonest. Pregnancy is so easily avoided . . .  " BEING BORN MALE OR BECOME ELDERLY.

Edited by Boydstun
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15 hours ago, Grames said:

But a woman voluntarily had penis-in-vagina sex which is the only way to get pregnant.

Voluntary sex is not the only way to get pregnant. Not all sex is voluntary.

(Also, penis-in-vagina is not the only way to get pregnant, for whatever that's worth.)

15 hours ago, Grames said:

There is more than a little whining about the metaphysical facts of biology going on here (as opposed to man-made facts which are legitimately open to dispute).  The combination of desiring to have that particular manner of sexual activity while also avoiding the potential consequence is dishonest.

I know of no woman bemoaning pregnancy, as such (at least with respect to the current debate). They are desiring to have sexual activity and embrace the potential consequence -- and meet it head on -- by being able to seek a legal abortion after the fact. There's nothing dishonest about it.

15 hours ago, Grames said:

Pregnancy is so easily avoided (trivially so, just don't do that one thing)

Sex is not trivial. "Just don't have sex" is bunk advice.

Sex, pleasure, intimacy, and the host of things which accompany it, are the furthest from "trivial" they could possibly be. Pregnancy might be avoided through abstinence (rape notwithstanding), as obesity might be avoided through starvation, but neither "solution" serves our greater goal.

Birth control is a better approach, but it isn't completely effective. More to the point, creating remedies for undesirable consequences on any level is not "dishonest"; it is capital-h Honest. Human beings mess up. Our actions create further problems we must then deal with. Legal abortion is not a means of avoiding the consequences of one's mistakes: it is the means by which we deal with those consequences.

15 hours ago, Grames said:

For some women the idea that somewhere someone does not approve of their life choices, that they are judged, is intolerable. 

Perhaps. But I believe that what more greatly animates the present discussion is not that someone does not "approve of their life choices"; rather that they seek to make their choices illegal.

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2 hours ago, Craig24 said:

I'm guessing they differentiate between a broken bone and a living thing (the unborn).  Fixing a broken bone doesn't result in the death of a living thing, abortion does.  That's the prolife view.    

People find it hard often to hold two different things in their mind. They don't often see when they are shifting the goalposts or moving one criticism to cover up another. The best advocates will say "yes we are forcing you to labor because we think it's murder." That's quite a different thing than "you're not taking responsibility for the consequences of your actions" or "no one's forcing you to undergo some sort of labor." But it is common to retreat from one criticism into another.

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4 hours ago, Doug Morris said:

The grounds for the judgments are relevant.  Aren't a lot of anti-abortion people really anti-sex?

They are really against sexual promiscuity, not sex itself.  That is like the difference between being in favor of selfishness in ethics versus being in favor of acting like Genghis Khan or a later Ottoman Empire Sultan.

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7 hours ago, Boydstun said:

Have you been so fortunate as to have had a wife? Does she know you wrote that?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A man not getting enough sleep last night and dozing off at the wheel while driving home today AND NEGLECTING TO FASTEN HIS SEAT BELT OR HAVE A FUNCTIONING AIR BAG, fails to avoid the consequence of going through the windshield.

A woman voluntarily having penis-in-vagina sex . . . desiring to have that particular manner of sexual activity, AND NEGLECTING TO TAKE THE PILL; INSTALL IUD; DEMAND HER PARTNER PUT A RUBBER ON HIS WILLY, AND IF THAT RENDERS HIM WITHOUT AN ERECTION, GET A NEW PARTNER; OR WAIT UNTIL AFTER MENOPAUSE, thereby avoiding pregnancy, "is dishonest. Pregnancy is so easily avoided . . .  " BEING BORN MALE OR BECOME ELDERLY.

The reason automobiles exist and the reason to get one is for transport, not killing the driver.  The reason the reproductive faculties exist is reproduction and it is not a malfunction when reproductive activity results in reproduction.  Taking a breath of clear air results in respiration.  Eating good food results in digestion.  Exactly where is the controversy?   

To follow on with more biological examples, taking a breath of foul air does not result in respiration but a coughing fit and an urgent need to move toward good air.  Eating rotten or poisoned food (even if it tasted good) does not result in digestion but regurgitation, sickness or even death.  So then if sex, even good sex, results in an unwanted pregnancy then the maybe the sex wasn't such a good idea after all regardless of how it felt at the time.  That is my modest proposal submitted for the consideration of all and sundry.

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2 hours ago, Grames said:

. . . The reason the reproductive faculties exist is reproduction and it is not a malfunction when reproductive activity results in reproduction.  . . .

Human brain is for improving nature, improving lot of human individual and fellows in nature, because it is possible to us and we choose it. In a hundred years humans are unlikely to leave reproduction to sex. They will put reproduction to production, though the joys of bringing up infants and children will remain. Many functions of human brain areas and functions appearing in ancestral species were repurposed in the evolution of the human brain arrived at by 25,000 years ago. And what the species did by their inventions and cultural developments since then is fantastic, including better health, less hunger, and rising treatment of women as first-rate self-directing human agents, not reproductive chattel for direction by the tribal witch doctors, and including liberation of humankind from the tribe for the enjoyment of individual life and bodily pleasure and choice in bonding and a liberating recognition of the virtue of those. Even by his time, Kant recognized and welcomed that with humans, sex had repurposed primarily to sexual enjoyment (Lectures on Anthropology). Some moral constraints have rational bases, and to find them, we don't need intonations of demands and brute-law left over from the witch doctors (Kant was a step more decent than that, contra Rand's caricature), still sprung from the same primordial suspicion that someone is actually happy in and with life from brain down to the fingertips and the same primordial urge for domination. Nature's evolutionary purposes are something to keep an eye on, including on the urge to domination, and all the while humans have and do and should remake the materials supplied by nature; do our own engineering (the Pill; the IUD; the condom—conspicuously absent from Mr. Grames' list of preventatives) for us. The regressive, subjectivist, fantastical hearing Nature or God disapproving human redirections of natural teleology by human intelligence and choices are delusional and deaf to the glory of human being, however much bolstering they get from Notre Dame or the Supreme Court. There is nothing modest or decent about those drums.

Edited by Boydstun
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On 6/30/2022 at 7:12 PM, Grames said:

The combination of desiring to have that particular manner of sexual activity while also avoiding the potential consequence is dishonest. 

But isn't avoiding the consequence, having an abortion? Wouldn't that be the honest way to deal with it when a mistake has been made? (Not even taking the cases where it has been forced on the mother as in rape etc.)

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18 hours ago, Boydstun said:

Human brain is for improving nature,....

I am glad I was able to provide you the opportunity to repeat a favorite sermon but it isn't responsive to the point I made. Some, not all, but some of the energy on the pro-abortion side comes from women who really shouldn't be getting pregnant in the first place.  I used the term slut-shaming and the responses come back about wives and fiancés.   One night stands and casual friends-with-benefits sex are the acts that identify a slut.  Those are not acts compatible with self-esteem or pride.  Am I wrong?

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6 hours ago, Easy Truth said:

But isn't avoiding the consequence, having an abortion? Wouldn't that be the honest way to deal with it when a mistake has been made? (Not even taking the cases where it has been forced on the mother as in rape etc.)

"Avoiding the consequence" here is actually the mental evasion before the sex happened.  A series of range-of-the-moment reactions is no way to go through life.

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1 hour ago, Grames said:

I am glad I was able to provide you the opportunity to repeat a favorite sermon but it isn't responsive to the point I made. Some, not all, but some of the energy on the pro-abortion side comes from women who really shouldn't be getting pregnant in the first place.  I used the term slut-shaming and the responses come back about wives and fiancés.   One night stands and casual friends-with-benefits sex are the acts that identify a slut.  Those are not acts compatible with self-esteem or pride.  Am I wrong?

Yes you are wrong and in no position to be speaking about such things. You are exactly in the arm-chair floating in la-la land as Nathaniel Branden when he pontificated that gay people were of low self-esteem necessarily, could note of them only what he wanted to see, exclude them by fiat-, subjectivist-definition of being incapable of romantic love, and remained ignorant of what he was pontificating about.

My response to your post was not on what you had brought up therein, because your post was a diversion, an evasion of the plain main points I had raised in the post preceding yours. 

Yours are one cover-up after another of your denigrations of other people's sexual activities that are purely for the purpose of pleasure and love. I was by nature a monogamous man. That was personality, not some aimed-for choice of false nobility. The same is true of the men and the women I've known who are not of my personality in that respect. "The Pill; the IUD; the condom—conspicuously absent from Mr. Grames' list of preventatives." May you remain alone and without family! you with the insolence upstream to pontificate that we gay people should not be allowed adoption of children.

20 hours ago, Boydstun said:

Human brain is for improving nature, improving lot of human individual and fellows in nature, because it is possible to us and we choose it. In a hundred years humans are unlikely to leave reproduction to sex. They will put reproduction to production, though the joys of bringing up infants and children will remain. Many functions of human brain areas and functions appearing in ancestral species were repurposed in the evolution of the human brain arrived at by 25,000 years ago. And what the species did by their inventions and cultural developments since then is fantastic, including better health, less hunger, and rising treatment of women as first-rate self-directing human agents, not reproductive chattel for direction by the tribal witch doctors, and including liberation of humankind from the tribe for the enjoyment of individual life and bodily pleasure and choice in bonding and a liberating recognition of the virtue of those. Even by his time, Kant recognized and welcomed that with humans, sex had repurposed primarily to sexual enjoyment (Lectures on Anthropology). Some moral constraints have rational bases, and to find them, we don't need intonations of demands and brute-law left over from the witch doctors (Kant was a step more decent than that, contra Rand's caricature), still sprung from the same primordial suspicion that someone is actually happy in and with life from brain down to the fingertips and the same primordial urge for domination. Nature's evolutionary purposes are something to keep an eye on, including on the urge to domination, and all the while humans have and do and should remake the materials supplied by nature; do our own engineering (the Pill; the IUD; the condom—conspicuously absent from Mr. Grames' list of preventatives) for us. The regressive, subjectivist, fantastical hearing Nature or God disapproving human redirections of natural teleology by human intelligence and choices are delusional and deaf to the glory of human being, however much bolstering they get from Notre Dame or the Supreme Court. There is nothing modest or decent about those drums.

 

Edited by Boydstun
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On 7/1/2022 at 9:15 PM, Grames said:

They are really against sexual promiscuity, not sex itself.  That is like the difference between being in favor of selfishness in ethics versus being in favor of acting like Genghis Khan or a later Ottoman Empire Sultan.

More like that they have a thing against sex for pleasure, so the only truly proper way to have sex is with procreation in mind. That way, if you need an abortion, that's your fault for having sex out of wedlock. 

On 7/1/2022 at 9:47 PM, Grames said:

That is my modest proposal submitted for the consideration of all and sundry.

It's sentences like these that make it hard to take your position seriously in this thread. As in, it sounds like sarcasm and you think it's hilarious that anyone would think laws against abortion are really a big deal. If all you mean to say is that needing an abortion is not a good thing, and should be avoided by first having sex responsibly that's fine. Otherwise, you are making an argument about legality through morality, which you know isn't proper. 

Let's be real here, if you think that antiabortion is an inconvenience but nothing much worse than that. Have you vowed celibacy until marriage or when you're ready to have a kid? 

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On 7/2/2022 at 8:16 PM, Boydstun said:

May you remain alone and without family! you with the insolence upstream to pontificate that we gay people should not be allowed adoption of children.

That was not what I said, merely that it would be reasonable and understandable if a state were to bar gay adoption for the protection of children.  I have since gained some finer grained knowledge of possibly the real problem: children with genetically unrelated male stepparents in the household have a many times greater risk of being abused or killed (not just the murdered but also those getting into danger due to less parental attention).  The phenomenon has been named the "Cinderella effect".

People have sex for all kinds of reasons, including poor reasons.  It is simply not the case that sex is always indicative of someone pursuing pleasure and love.

On 7/2/2022 at 8:16 PM, Boydstun said:

"The Pill; the IUD; the condom—conspicuously absent from Mr. Grames' list of preventatives."

Did I make a list of preventatives?  No, and why should I when the topic is abortion and contraception had already failed or was absent?  Contraception is used by people of both sexes with some sense of responsibility and an extended time horizon in their thoughts, not the kind of anti-conceptual and range-of-the-moment mentality I was criticizing.

Perhaps you simply are not aware of potential scale of the problem.  Most abortions are due to this mentality in action.

 

image.jpeg.dca5ddee7bbc5605f1f8974f10785490.jpeg

Abortion would be a less controversial issue if few cared about it.  If only the 7.7% abortions with valid reasons took place there would a lot less people paying attention to the issue.

Of further interest on this sidebar is Gay Parenting: Promise and Pitfalls | Dave Rubin & Dr. Jordan B. Peterson

 

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On 7/2/2022 at 10:27 PM, Eiuol said:

More like that they have a thing against sex for pleasure, so the only truly proper way to have sex is with procreation in mind. That way, if you need an abortion, that's your fault for having sex out of wedlock. 

Even between sexual partners in a committed relationship most sex does not result in pregnancy, so this is not plausible.  However a good heuristic for whether or not one should have sex with someone is if a pregnancy would be completely unacceptable then don't have the sex.  

 

On 7/2/2022 at 10:27 PM, Eiuol said:

It's sentences like these that make it hard to take your position seriously in this thread. As in, it sounds like sarcasm and you think it's hilarious

I confess, I think sluts are hilarious.  Sluts and drunks (similar mentality) ought to be ridiculed at every opportunity.  Not just because ridicule can be entertaining but it can be persuasive to get people to change their behavior.

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12 hours ago, Grames said:

I confess, I think sluts are hilarious.  Sluts and drunks (similar mentality) ought to be ridiculed at every opportunity.  Not just because ridicule can be entertaining but it can be persuasive to get people to change their behavior.

When you are this much of a miserable old man, your ridicule is of no value. It's similar to knowing Bill O'Reilly is out there shaking his fist at you on TV.

Edited by 2046
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