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Bringing you atheist articles and building active godless communities takes hundreds of hours and resources each month. If you find any joy or stimulation at Atheist Republic, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner.
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I can't come to a personal moral resolution to the issue, there are scenarios that conflict in my mind.
I don't have to close my mind if I am conflicted, please don't suggest I am not entitled to an opinion just because I can't resolve an issue consistently.
Well, TD, you can be as conflicted as you like but you will never face being pregnant. So, in the end, your opinion makes little, if any difference to me.
It's not about scenarios, it's about a woman's right to determine how her body is used. There is no reason to believe women are any less moral than men is there? I like to think I am a reasonably moral person, but I have never once made a moral choice using my cock, is this a trick I have failed to learn?
Either women deserve equal rights, which must include the right to decide how their body is used, or they don't. I can't see any moral argument for the latter. I am obviously basing my decision at least in part on the assumption that women are at least as moral as men, and are capable of making the decision in an appropriate way.
It may have escaped your notice but promiscuity is predominantly a male preoccupation, and again do we have any reason to believe women are less likely to take proper precautions with contraception than men?
Your scenarios seem again like extreme rhetoric, this time to stigmatise women, and I am starting to think you don't even realise you're doing it?
You're ending a life though, and that's not something you should take lightly. I'd view it the same if it were the man who was carrying the child. No one is stigmatizing women at all here. If it were about keeping women down and such, then it would be men who were more against abortion then women, but we see with the polling data that it's the opposite.
It's a difficult situation because women are temperamentally agreeable, so they often go along with the sex, and end up pregnant while the man just walks away. There's no good answer to what to do in this situation. The man is more responsible than the woman, and yet the woman has to choose between a rock and a hard place. She can either terminate the pregnancy or she can make the man pay for his fair share of expenses associated with raising it. Any man who puts a woman in such a situation is a dickhead, even when abortion is fully legal.
So no, I don't think abortion is a good thing at all, but I'm also not in favour of banning it either because men are dicks with their dicks, and women have to deal with the consequences, and sometimes termination seems like the best route. I'm against it personally, but I also fully understand why people do it.
How exactly did you come to that conclusion (marked in bold)?
@glacier
"So no, I don't think abortion is a good thing at all, but I'm also not in favour of banning it either because men are dicks with their dicks, and women have to deal with the consequences, and sometimes termination seems like the best route. I'm against it personally, but I also fully understand why people do it."
Well. Good. Then we are in agreement. It's a right women should have regardless of your (or my) feels about the idea of aborting a feotus.
"either because men are dicks with their dicks, and women have to deal with the consequences,"
What a sexist load of shit
You assume women can only be victims and have to b treated liike children.
"You're ending a life though, and that's not something you should take lightly. "
I'd argue the life hasn't properly begun in early pregnancy as the foetus in unviable without the woman's body, and is insentient. Show one post where anyone has claimed abortion should be taken lightly, that's a hyperbolic red herring.
--------------------------------
"No one is stigmatizing women at all here."
"It's a difficult situation because ***women are temperamentally agreeable, so they often go along with the sex,** and end up pregnant while the man just walks away. "
Irony overload, is it me or are you unaware that you're doing it?
---------------------------------
" I'm against it personally, but I also fully understand why people do it."
With the greatest of respect I'm not sure you are. There are a wide range of reasons a woman may seek a termination, you are generalising here to portray women as gullible agreeable dupes who've become pregnant through lack of the ability to say no to sex. I'm guessing many women would find those sentiments more than a little patronising and insulting.
I'm glad you don't oppose their right to seek an abortion for their own reasons anyway.
Glacier, you wrote, “I'm against it personally, but I also fully understand why people do it.”
No.
No, you do not fully understand why. You cannot.
@Glacier
"You are ending a life."
What you really mean is: you are ending a potential of organism of cells with potential to be similar to your own life.
If you equate a blastocyst as the same level of life, (via rights) as your own, what about the rights of your fingernails? The hair on your head you ruthlessly chopped off?
Sure, this particular life has lots of potential, and has a merging of dna information that is still combined to be far less than 1% different from the dna of the two parents, but again you run into trouble, quickly with this definition. What about identical twins? Triplets, etc? The splitting of fertilized egg can occur as late as 3 days (or possibly more!) after initial "sperm meets the egg." What about fertilized eggs where something goes horribly wrong and yet unbeknownst to the parents, this "life" has no chance of developing into a healthy baby? The potential is suddenly gone. Somewhere between 30-60 percent of all successfully fertilized eggs do not make it to healthy birth, in nature. With much of the failures happening within the first few days and the parents of never even aware of the "potential" of life lost.
.
Also: I highly doubt anyone here is saying: oh what we want is that any pregnant women can kill their baby on a whim, if they are having a bad day, even at week 40. That abortion can be a "expensive" way to do birth control for sexual partners that can not be bothered with much cheaper/simpler birth control. Or even that abortion should be tax dollar supported. (It is not in the US except extreme emergency cases,) and Planned Parenthood's abortion side of things donation funds is very well funded. (Thank Pence and the viral donate to PP in his name campaign for that one!)
I think all anyone is asking really is that women have a right over their own bodies, rather than being governed by the non scientific, non factual based opinion of others. And it would be real nice if education and family planning tools was available to everyone for low cost, so the poorer, disadvantaged women do not have to carry this burden. (Pun intended as well.)
My scenarios are one example where I would be conflicted, there are millions of others, I am not going to list all of them.
Proof men are more promiscuous than women plz.
Forbidding abortion gives the unborn fetus more free will than the whole that is providing for it, which is perverse.
I believe you have a right to not have sex. Rape victims or those of sexual abuse and for medical reasons physical and mental should be able to have an abortion.
What makes you think you have the right to tell people what they can do with their own bodies?
But we do tell people what they can and can't do with their own body. We do have that right in law.
What law is that?
The badly maligned and horribly ineffective laws forbidding prostitution? (I am not for prostitution, but the current laws forbidding it only make the situation worse.) - off topic - but: instead the laws should be focused on the "Johns," (basic economics dictate you always go after demand not supply when you wish to reduce prevalence of a good or service.)
Can not think of any other laws. Perhaps the various local laws regarding covering up of certain body parts in public places? Another law I do not agree with, made redundant by public indecency and lewd exposure laws and not really related to how one uses their body, and more just how one covers it.
@Ali
Oh yes! Because abstinence only programs like the Purity Pledge work so well!
Wait...no they don't:
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/08/23/545289168/abstinenc...
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/05/the-unintended-conseq...
https://www.marieclaire.com/politics/a27333/secret-evangelical-christian...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3194801/
Thank you I was hoping someone would spare me the time of finding the research that showed religious based abstinence training was and is an abject and disgraceful failure. Blighting the lives of children unlucky enough to be subjected to it.
The truth is what growing children need. A candid and helpful schooling of the consequences of unprotected sex and how best to protect themselves and any partners they may decide to have sex with. Regardless of gender or position, and with all the BS of hellfire and damnation removed and saved for the church pulpit where it belongs.
I don't think abortion in itself is a "good thing" - but then of course, nobody does.
I feel that being male would preclude me from speaking against it or voting against it. I can only say that while I have reservations about the potential of causing harm, I do not believe that women would willingly cause harm.
I wish my mom had gotten a abortion when I was a fetus because that would mean I will never be born.
Why not just simply that your dad never had sex with your mother? Much simpler.
Also, wishing on change to what has already been done is a silly waste of time.
You are alive, seize the day. Do not dwell on the past, but do work in the present to better your future.
@Michael, here too? Come on, man. Cheer up. Every life is precious. Don't think that way.
P.S.: @Sheldon: "'I'm guessing many women would find those sentiments more than a little patronising and insulting."
Your guess is correct.
Every life is precious? How so? If women are aloud to kill their kids before they are born, then that completely contradicts your statement. If all life is precious, then abortions shouldn't be a thing. If you think it up to "choice" then it's my choice to think life is meaningless. Just like how it's a "choice" for people to kill another person for stupid reasons, or how it's a criminal's "choice" to rob a bank. If life is all about choices, then life isn't precious. You just say that just so you can help me feel better but you know that in the end, there's no point since you don't know me and you know for a fact that no matter what I say, people here will always disagree and say I am wrong. I like to debate, but if no one agrees with me at all then there's no point . If abortions are a okay thing to do, since it's a matter of "choice" then no, Life is not precious at all, since there are times where you have to kill someone in order to save another, even if that living being did nothing wrong whatsoever. Saying all life is precious is obviously a stupid lie to give someone false hope that life is worth living when in reality it doesn't.
Yes, life is precious and life begins when you are born. Don't mix getting rid of blastocysts with murdering human beings. It has nothing to do one with the other.
The fact that you were lucky to came into existence and that you could die at any moment makes every instant even more precious and special, can't you see?
"can't you see?"
no he can't ms. flam...
theist always tend to interpret it differently..they do it all the time..
No. I don't. Because since God does not exist, and I am just a bunch of cells, it's obvious that nothing I ever do in life is gonna accomplish anything. The idea of being born is now considered "lucky" like it's as normal as finding a penny on the ground. That's life. Random events happening with no reason whatsoever.
@Michael
Life has reason, it can be whatever reason you want it to be. Your life reason can be to wallow in misery and depression all the time. Sometimes depression is a chemical imbalance in your head, which there is help for. If you do not want your life to be wallowing in misery and depression and something better, do something about it.
No because then people like Athiests will just call me stupid and ignorant. Real life sucks but yet I have to deal with it or else I am not worth living.
I am an atheist, and I never called you stupid or ignorant. Life at time can certainly suck, and it is a good idea to deal with it so you can lower the "suckage."
Only you can decide if you think life is worth living, no one else can make that decision for you, and if someone tells you that your life is not worth living, know they are full of shit.
My suggestion to you? Get out and get something done, it can be small, and simple to start. Not something you have to do (work/school) but something you want to do. Or perhaps something that you been meaning to do but have not gotten around to, cleaning out your room, organizing your collection. Trying out a new recipe if you like food and interested in learning to cook better, etc.
What makes you think life is more than it really is? I am told here that life is nothing more than just multiplying and dying cells and nothing more. You think you are "happy" and/or "free", but yet you are actually nothing but a living creature who does what they desire because they think that's the point of them existing. You are seriously pathetic.
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