Tag Archives: Politics

10 Things I Have Learned About Abortion from Pro-lifers.

10 Things I Have Learned About Abortion from Pro-lifers.

1. Women choose to have sex. Men are apparently not involved in this decision-making process.

2. Women who do not use birth control are irresponsible and should never have sex.

3. Women who use birth control are also irresponsible, because they know that birth control is not 100% foolproof and should never have sex.

4. Being pro-life has absolutely nothing to do with religion. It’s just a coincidence that my God is opposed to abortion, and if yours isn’t, then you’re worshiping the wrong God.

5. No matter how many examples you find of God-sanctioned infanticide in the Bible, it in no way indicates that God is OK with baby-killing. Baby-killing on his orders is OK because reasons. If he says it’s OK, it’s OK, but he definitely didn’t say abortion was OK except in the parts where he did.

6. All the aborted babies could have gone on to do great things. None of the aborted babies would have been “welfare queens” or criminals or deranged genocidal dictators.

7. People are lined up to adopt babies. If you give your baby up for adoption, it will find a loving family. It definitely, positively, won’t join the half million kids already available for adoption or be one of the 23,000 who age out of the system without being adopted every year. Oh, and it will be happy with its family, who will never turn out to be abusive in any way.

8. It is never OK to abort a baby that resulted from consensual sex. Conception circumstances are paramount, which is why it’s OK to abort rape babies. Consensual sex babies are alive at the moment of conception because of consent. Rape babies are alive at the moment of conception, too, but it’s OK to abort them because they aren’t the consequences of the choice of an irresponsible woman. Don’t ask me to explain this, I’ve tried and tried and still don’t get it.

9. If abortions are illegal, nobody will need them. Only 1% of all abortions are for high-risk situations like the life of the mother or significant defects in the fetus, and letting women die and having babies who are severely handicapped (even if they’re guaranteed to die after birth) is a risk that people who aren’t dealing with these situations are willing to accept.

10. Even if you are too poor to support a child, too young to be a parent, too ill mentally or physically to be a parent, addicted to drugs and unemployed and homeless, married to an abusive spouse or a pedophile, the baby is a gift from God and all your problems will go away as long as you don’t get an abortion.

While You Guys are Writing Anti-Abortion Legislation. . .

While You Guys are Writing Anti-Abortion Legislation. . .

I make no secret of the fact that I feel that abortion should be a choice made by a woman and her doctor (and in some cases, her partner.) I find none of the reasons provided by anti-abortionists to be rational or compelling enough to justify sweeping legislation that impinges on the rights of women whose lives may be lost or destroyed by these limitations. Some of it is insulting to women’s intelligence; some of it is representative of medical ignorance; all of it is based in religion, which should not be influencing government in the first place.

Let me say, though, that the most abhorrent reasons are the ones that portray children as “punishment” for a woman in one way or another. Some state this overtly, some with a bit more circumlocution, but they all boil down to the woman shouldn’t have engaged in sexual intercourse if she didn’t want to have a child, so now she’s just going to have to deal with the consequences of her actions. I can’t even begin to plumb the depths of the awfulness of this argument. There are so many levels of wrong here that it would be impossible to address them in a single blog post.

What I can do is suggest a way that this attitude can be expressed legislatively in a far less discriminatory fashion.

You see, if a child is punishment for having sexual intercourse, then the punishment should be equally distributed between both parties involved in the punishable act. Legislation that prevents access to abortion should not affect only the mothers, but the fathers as well. Much of this might not be necessary, as in the case of faithful married couples who will already be legally obligated to share the financial and other burdens of having a child, but there’s no reason to leave them out completely, either. I’ll get to that.

Include something in this legislation that creates a record of women who request abortions, just to establish a paper trail for legal purposes. If a woman seeks an abortion and is denied it or cannot afford it, the state will perform DNA tests on both the child and the father named by the mother. Just as the ultrasound costs are paid by the mother in these legislative acts, the DNA testing cost must be paid by the father. Once paternity has been established, a judge will decide the best punishment for the father – in some cases, marriage to the mother may be ordered, but mostly it will involve lifetime child support and regular visitation. If the man didn’t want to be a father, then he shouldn’t have had sexual intercourse, after all.

If the father is already married to the mother, DNA tests should also be required, just to make sure that the right father is being punished. This would make having even wanted children more expensive, but we want to be absolutely sure that the right person is being punished for every child that’s born. Some states might even want to do this retroactively, DNA testing every man who, say, applies for public assistance or disability or unemployment, since those are obviously the selfish, irresponsible people who’d go around having recreational sex in the first place, amirite?

This way, states wouldn’t have to limit the procedure to only women seeking abortions, but to all the leeches on society making babies they can’t afford. Oh, yeah. But start with the abortion-seekers. That way the wording that punishes fathers with children can be included in the laws that punish mothers with children. If you want to be taken seriously when you say that you’re not anti-woman when you propose this stuff, then you shouldn’t be leaving fathers out of the picture. Of course, it’s hard to take you seriously when you talk about living, breathing, dependent little human beings as “punishment,” but at least this way you’ll appear a little less disingenuous.

Wednesday Links

Wednesday Links

Here are some references to help you win at logic: The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe explains how logic works and doesn’t work before delving into its top 20 logical fallacies – how to spot them and how to counter them. The Nizkor Project breaks them down by type, and you can search them by name. Logical Fallacies is an encyclopedic reference, a little more detailed than Nizkor, and an easier font and background than Skeptic’s Guide. Thou Shalt Not Commit Logical Fallacies is great if you’re a visual learner, with little icons for each individual fallacy. The Master List of Logical Fallacies is written for writers, has a few different names for some fallacies that you might not recognize, but is maybe a little easier to understand because there’s less Latin.

Speaking of fallacies, one of the big ones is the “teach both sides,” or “teach the controversy,” usually found regarding evolution. Dave Hone, in The Guardian blogs, shows how misleading this is with a specific case of a TV show that showed “both sides of the debate” regarding the evolution of birds. One side is represented by the majority of experts, the other by people who have an opinion.

Genetic research unearths a possible marker for prostate cancer, which may help us develop targeted treatments to cure it.

More on genes and cancer. . .apparently the genetic condition called Laron’s syndrome makes people’s bodies short, but their lives long. Somewhere in their genes, they’re resistant to growth hormones and resistant to cancer. Fascinating.

Phineas Gage is probably the best-known case of the effects of traumatic brain injury on behavior. New technology attempts to recreate the damage that was done by the railroad spike in his head in an effort to understand it better. Mindhacks isn’t sure he wants to know more, but shares it anyway.

Sometimes you need an outside perspective to see that an idea looks stupid. People in the UK think the NRA’s idea to put armed guards in schools is nuts. I think they’re right.

The Keystone pipeline could make this a scene anywhere along its entire length. Maybe that’s better than an ocean spill, but wouldn’t we rather avoid it in the first place if we can?

Rhinos are dangerous animals. Really dangerous. But how can you be scared of one that looks this cute?