Childbirth, contraception and abortion 2

What's the youngest age that a person can get pregnant and give birth?
Nicoletta Lanese | 2 August 2022

...research hints that the age of menarche is trending downward, meaning the number of children who have their first period before age 10 is likely increasing, (Dr. Melissa Simon, a professor and obstetrician-gynecologist at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago) said.

..."There's a lot of potential dangers of carrying a pregnancy when you're age 9 or 10," Simon said. For example, during pregnancy, the volume of blood in a person's body increases by about 50%, and all that extra fluid can put tremendous strain on a child's heart, Simon said. The child's growing body may also be deprived of critical nutrients, like calcium, as those nutrients get diverted to the developing fetus.

Compared with mothers in their early 20s, mothers aged 10 to 19 face a higher risk of developing dangerously high blood pressure in pregnancy (preeclampsia) that can lead to complications like seizures and coma (eclampsia), according to the World Health Organization (opens in new tab) (WHO). They also face a heightened risk of systemic infections and infections of the uterine lining (puerperal endometritis), according to the WHO, as well as maternal anemia, where the number of healthy, oxygen-carrying red blood cells in the body significantly declines, according to The New York Times (opens in new tab).

"The complications, the morbidity and the mortality are much higher in girls under 15 than girls 16 to 19, although 16 to 19 has a mortality twice as high as women 20 and above," Dr. Ashok Dyalchand, head of the Institute of Health Management Pachod, a public health organization serving marginalized communities in central India, told The New York Times.

Due to their narrow pelvises, children also face a high risk of obstructed labor, a dangerous complication in which the baby gets stuck in the birth canal during delivery, Simon said. Obstructed labor places pressure on the bladder and urethra and raises the risk of pelvic inflammatory disease, an infection of the reproductive organs, according to The New York Times. In addition, obstructed labor can cause the birth canal to rupture, causing holes to appear between the vagina and bladder or rectum through which urine and feces can leak. These holes, or fistulas, require intensive surgeries to repair, Simon said.

Due to such risks, pregnant children would typically be recommended to undergo Cesarean sections (C-sections), rather than vaginal deliveries, Simon said. The major surgery comes with its own risks, such as heavy bleeding, infection and bladder and bowel injuries, and depending on the type of incision made, the procedure can increase the likelihood of requiring a C-section in future pregnancies, according to University of Utah Health (opens in new tab). Having multiple C-sections raises the risk of "placenta accreta," a life-threatening condition where the placenta implants near the C-section scar.

On top of these medical risks, children who become pregnant also endure significant mental trauma, Simon said. "The mental toll of carrying a baby — I can't even fathom what kind of mental toll that would have on a child," she said...

...Lina Medina became the youngest person to give birth in recorded history when she underwent a Cesarean section at the age of 5 years, 7 months and 21 days old (1930s, Peru)...

https://www.livescience.com/youngest-age-give-birth-pregnancy

There have been a number of extremely young mothers. Giving birth at such a young age is dangerous for the child and for the baby.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_youngest_birth_mothers

When the news came out about the 10-year old who had to cross state borders to obtain an abortion, I thought about my own daughter at that age and my heart broke for that poor child and all the others having this event inflicted on them.

Pardon my grossness but I think there should be an event where all these white Republican men should experience a bowling ball passing through their rectum. As the Golden Rule says, "Do not do unto to others what you would not have done unto you."

Molly Jong-Fast (The Atlantic) @MollyJongFast | 8:35 AM · Aug 9, 2022:
IVF is an enormous highly profitable industry. These zealots are going to have a very hard time bringing down the fertility business.

LvilleClinicEscorts @LouClinicEscort | 9:28 AM · Aug 8, 2022:
Anti-Choice Influencers always tell you what they are going after next to ban. They can't help it. It's in their nature to post their plans for everyone to see.
Tweet: IVF Kills ( https://twitter.com/LouClinicEscort/status/1556633378853732352/photo/1 )

>3 mamzel: Pregnant children forced to delivery usually have c-sections, don't they? I think every judge and legislator not exempt for already living this should have to live in a simulation for several days in which they're the primary caregiver for a newborn with special needs while they have to deal with abusive adults (if they're "playing" as a child or teenager), housemates (for young adults), or neighbors as well as antagonistic classmates or employers. That still wouldn't be close to what people actually live through an unwanted pregnancy and having to take responsibility for an unplanned baby.

... but could be intensely enlightening.

Having a child (first or additional) in the USA is an incredibly stressful experience for married adults who planned to be parents of that child. I can't really imagine what it's like for everyone else. But at least the power should try to understand some of the influences of these laws on personal lives.

>5 aspirit: So instead of an extremely uncomfortable natural birth they have to endure major surgery along with all of the risks therein? Either option is unacceptable for a child. It's unfortunate but an abortion is the only option, in my humble opinion. Did the father of this 10-year old's baby ever get brought to justice?

I do like the idea of making them be responsible for a baby-like doll. (I wouldn't trust them with a real baby!) More than a couple of days, though. A month would be better or at least until the baby sleeps through the night. That should be preceded with wearing a baby belt to allow them to experience the discomfort of added weight and change in balance.

>7 mamzel: I agree. What I was pointing out is that pregnant children usually don't have the capability to delivery without surgery—their bodies are too small and not yet fully developed for it!—so that's not one of their experiences.

For the simulation, I wasn't thinking of the doll challenge that young students used to undergo. I was thinking more like continuous virtual or augmented reality. Multiple days of that would be intense, somewhat like the real thing is.

A month would be better or at least until the baby sleeps through the night.

A month.... What kind of genius one-month-old newborn sleeps through the night?! I've heard of lucky parents whose children got to that point at six months. At nine months, I was desperate for continuous hours of sleep, especially as I was working two jobs while acting as the primary caregiver during extreme weather events (that might have been what kept her from gaining the weight needed to sleep better). I could have been willing to actually kill someone in exchange for my baby waking up no more than once a night, which she didn't get to until she was about a year and a half....

Sleep deprivation is a serious issue for parents of newborns, especially if the baby isn't "typical". Sleep is also a big deal after trauma, physical or emotional, such as surgery and the natural disasters that are increasingly common....

And I just realized that natural disasters are now 10 times more frequent than they were when the old guys in our federal government were born. Wow. When their children were born (ETA: or when they were going to abortion clinics, secretly or not!) they likely weren't dealing with record-breaking storms, extreme flooding, major heatwaves, etcetera that us younger folk have had to live through while making family plans.

>8 aspirit:
A month.... What kind of genius one-month-old newborn sleeps through the night?!
Sorry, my two were exceptional in this. Potty training, however...

‘Snip Snip Hooray’: Vasectomies Among the Young and Child-Free May Be Rising
Alisha Haridasani Gupta | Aug. 12, 2022. Updated Aug. 14, 2022

Once the purview of middle-aged dads, this form of contraception is growing in popularity, according to doctors — and a few outspoken men on TikTok.

...In interviews with The New York Times, 10 urologists across the United States said they have seen a notable uptick in bookings for the procedure this summer — especially among younger, child-free men, whose resolve to not reproduce appears to have sharpened in the face of a precarious economy, worsening climate change, and a more restrictive family planning landscape. The weekend after the Supreme Court’s decision in June to overturn Roe v. Wade, Google reported that searches for “vasectomy” and “are vasectomies reversible?” surged.

It is still unclear whether the increased interest in vasectomies is a blip — or the beginning of a long-term trend that could foster greater acceptance of the procedure...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/12/well/vasectomy-contraception-abortion.html

After Roe, teens are teaching themselves sex ed, because the adults won’t
Hannah Natanson | August 23, 2022

...a burgeoning movement of high-schoolers nationwide who, after Roe’s fall, are stepping up to demand more comprehensive lessons on reproduction, contraception and abortion — and who, if the adults refuse, are teaching each other instead.

...anyone pushing for more sex education will face stiff opposition from mostly conservative parents and lawmakers who argue that it is inappropriate and will lead students to become promiscuous — despite a large body of research that shows providing sexual health information and services to students is not linked with increased sexual activity, and the fact that a majority of American adults across political lines support sex education in schools...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/23/teen-sex-education-roe/

>11 margd: It's kind of alarming to realize that there are people who still believe that sex ed causes sex. There's a sort of magical-thinking aspect to the idea, you could imagine that it's the sort of idea that would take root in the minds of people who are raised on a fantasy world where magic spells work and that magical creatures exist and act in the world.

Oh, wait, that might actually be true.

>12 kiparsky: If anything, the graphic images of STDs in sex ed may have prompted thoughts of abstinence in my kids!

I just remember being in school, taking sex ed and thinking it was the weirdest thing to do that one could possibly imagine!

Big task ahead for ethics committees! So much can be learned from animal models. But, inevitably, someone, somewhere, will clone human stem cells. Perhaps to harvest genetically identical replacement organs or tissues from the embryo. One might be tempted if one's child had need. At first, just rich people willing to travel.

Scientists Grow “Synthetic” Embryo With Brain and Beating Heart – Without Eggs or Sperm
University of Cambridge | August 27, 2022

...While the current research was carried out in mouse models, the researchers are developing similar human models with the potential to be directed towards the generation of specific organ types to understand mechanisms behind crucial processes that would be otherwise impossible to study in real embryos. At present, UK law permits human embryos to be studied in the laboratory only up to the 14th day of development.

If the methods developed by Zernicka-Goetz’s team are shown to be successful with human stem cells in the future, they could also be used to guide development of synthetic organs for patients awaiting transplants...

...“It should also be possible to affect and heal adult organs by using the knowledge we have on how they are made."...

https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-grow-synthetic-embryo-with-brain-and-beating...

Human "organoids" are presently being grown in laboratories to study diseases. The cells are adult skin cells in most cases and are treated with various growth factors to facilitate cell reproduction and transition into cells of specific organs. Whether those could ever be used for therapy is not clear to me, but would get around the prickly problem of synthetic embryos.

>14 krazy4katz: Well, it kind of is. Among other things, sex is just weird, and that's something that should be covered in a well-taught sex ed class!

Pregnant women held for months in one Alabama jail to protect fetuses from drugs
Amy Yurkanin | Sep. 07, 2022

https://www.al.com/news/2022/09/pregnant-women-held-for-months-in-one-alabama-ja...

https://www.mediaite.com/tv/greg-gutfeld-blasts-democrats-as-party-of-young-angr...
Greg Gutfeld Blasts Democrats as Party of ‘Young, Angry, Single Women’ Who ‘Place Abortion Before Babies’

***
What is wrong with young women today? Why don't they appreciate the opportunity of being never-ending sperm depositories and nine-month ovens the way females did back in the good old 1950's?

Pharmacies supporting anti-abortion laws are refusing to stand up for the rights of patients, who are suffering, perhaps dying, without treatment for autoimmune disorders.

Medication prescriptions for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease, lupus, psoriasis, leukemia, breast cancer, lung cancer, lymphoma, and other painful and dangerous disorders are being denied because of the small possibility the medications may abort an embryo or fetus. This is happening even to patients who are physically incapable of viable pregnancies.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/26/us-abortion-bans-restrict-access-e...

Millions of Americans are losing access to maternal care. Here's what can be done
Rachel Treisman | October 12, 2022

...Access to maternity care is decreasing in the parts of the U.S. that need it the most, affecting nearly 7 million women of childbearing age and some 500,000 babies.

That's according to a report released Tuesday by March of Dimes, a nonprofit focused on maternal and infant health. It finds that 36% of counties nationwide — largely in the Midwest and South — constitute "maternity care deserts," meaning they have no obstetric hospitals or birth centers and no obstetric providers.

{Map of US}

...Five percent of counties have a worse designation {than in 2020}, and there's been a 2% increase in counties classified as maternity care deserts — accounting for some 15,933 women living in more than 1,000 counties.

March of Dimes says these changes are driven primarily by the loss of obstetric providers and hospital services within counties, as a result of financial and logistical challenges including the COVID pandemic.

And it warns the result is disproportionately harming rural communities and people of color: One in 4 Native American babies, and 1 in 6 Black babies, were born in areas with limited or no access to maternity care services...

https://www.npr.org/2022/10/12/1128335563/maternity-care-deserts-march-of-dimes-...
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NOWHERE TO GO: MATERNITY CARE DESERTS ACROSS THE U.S. (2022 REPORT)
March of Dimes

...Florida had the most women impacted by improvements to maternity care access (more than 92,000).

Ohio had the most women impacted by overall reductions in access to care (over 97,000)...

https://www.marchofdimes.org/research/maternity-care-deserts-report.aspx

Came across an interesting number in the Times the other day. Apparently, the standard fee for a surrogate mother in Ukraine is about $20,000. This is in addition to maternal care support from the agency that she works with, and we might have to think about converting for the cost of living differential between US an Ukraine, but it's a useful baseline number to have in mind when talking about the effects of this law.

Now, if you consider what that means, in terms of US law, any person who is prevented from obtaining an abortion is being compelled by the state to do a job of work that has a pretty well defined market value. While we can and should consider compulsory labor as slavery, there is also the concept in US law of "regulatory takings". I wonder if that framework might be more useful as an avenue in law. The right wing has invested a lot of their energy in building up that framework to protect property, maybe we can use it to protect people as well?

Health department medical detectives find 84% of U.S. maternal deaths are preventable
April Dembosky | October 21, 2022

...Even more striking to nurse-detectives like Sheffield-Abdullah, is that 53% of the deaths occurred well after women left the hospital, between seven days and a year after delivery.

"We are so baby focused," she says. "Once the baby is here, it's almost like the mother is discarded. Like a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. The mom is the wrapper, and the baby is the candy. Once you remove the wrapper, you just discard the wrapper. And what we really need to be thinking about is that fourth trimester, that time after the baby is born."...

What it means to focus on the 'fourth trimester'
Will abortion rulings threaten maternal mortality further?

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/10/21/1129115162/maternal-mortali...

Meanwhile, in Russia...

Russian priest says that if women had as many children as God intended for them to have, they wouldn't be as sad when their sons are mobilized.

1:01 https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1584968900764372992

- Anton Gerashchenko @Gerashchenko_en | 2:03 PM · Oct 25, 2022
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margd: Ass. My Cdn grandmothers, with 5 and 6 kids each, were inconsolable when their sons (3 of them) were sent overseas in WW2. Another son unhappily served at home as he had some minor disability, I forget what.

What a pregnancy actually looks like before 10 weeks – in pictures
Poppy Noor | 19 Oct 2022

In 13 US states, abortion is banned even in the earliest stages of pregnancy. But we rarely see what such tissue really looks like...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/18/pregnancy-weeks-abortion-tissue

>25 margd: !!!!!

>25 margd: There has been considerable confusion about those images. Some viewers can't get over the difference between digitally enhanced photos carefully staged to zoom into detail we can't see with our own eyes vs. these photos that reproduce what we could see on our own.

I also noticed complaints about the removal of fluids by people who think that would somehow make the tissue look more like an autonomous living human (in a petri dish!) instead of collected menstrual waste. I don't know whether they've never seen what monthly shedding look like or they're too surprised to think through their statements.

These images are obviously striking against the anti-choice propaganda.

I remember being shocked by real-life placentas in a biology lab. Pig placentas (from a slaughterhouse) were amazing things with velcro-like cotyledons about the size of a quarter for each piglet that one could imagine re-attaching.

Straight from the delivery room at a local hospital, however, human placentas were a basin of bloody, indistinguishable tissue. Incredibly complex things...not at all like the images I had seen. (Nowadays, universities would be hard pressed to obtain such tissue for undergraduate labs? When my grandson was born in 2021, a bit (cord?) was taken for research(?) and the rest was whisked away labeled ~hazardous for disposal accordingly.)

Pols who talk about re-implanting ectopic pregnancies should first take that lab!!

HOT MIC: Brian Kemp open to banning contraception
Richard Eberwein | 9/15/22

During public appearance at the University of Georgia last week, Gov. Brian Kemp (R) expressed his openness to ban contraception depending on “where the legislatures are.”

“You could take up pretty much anything but you got to be in the legislative session to do that,” Kemp said in comments provided by a Democratic source on the condition of anonymity. “I think, I’d have to check and see because there are a lot of legalities.”...

https://heartlandsignal.com/2022/09/15/hot-mic-brian-kemp-open-to-banning-contra...

8 billion and counting
Casey Briggs | 14 Nov 2022

This week, the world’s population ticks over a historic milestone. But in the next century, society will be reshaped dramatically — and soon we’ll hit a decline we’ll never reverse.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-13/earths-population-reaches-eight-billion-p...
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NASA Scientists Present Theory About Why We Haven't Met Other Intelligent Life. It's Crushing.
Mary Papenfuss | November 12, 2022

NASA scientists have explained in a new paper why they believe it’s likely we haven’t ever encountered intelligent extraterrestrial life — and it’s heartbreaking.

All intelligent life, they argue, has likely destroyed itself before reaching a sophisticated enough point in evolution to support such an encounter. And the same fate likely awaits humans unless we take action, they believe...

https://news.yahoo.com/nasa-scientists-present-theory-why-050531254.html

Jonathan H. Jiang et al. 2022. Avoiding the “Great Filter”: Extraterrestrial Life and Humanity’s Future in the Universe. Oct 2022. 11 p. https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2210/2210.10582.pdf

Abstract
Our Universe is a vast, tantalizing enigma - a mystery that has aroused humankind’s innate curiosity for eons. Begging questions on alien lifeforms have been thus far unfruitful, even with the bounding advancements we have embarked upon in recent years. Coupled with logical assumption and calculations such as those made by Dr. Frank Drake starting in the early 1960s, evidence of life should exist in abundance in our galaxy alone, and yet in practice we’ve produced
no clear affirmation of anything beyond our own planet. So, where is everybody? The silence of the universe beyond Earth reveals a pattern of both human limitation and steadfast curiosity. Even as ambitious programs such as SETI aim to solve the technological challenges, the results have thus far turned up empty for any signs of life in the galaxy. We postulate that an existential disaster may lay in wait as our society advances exponentially towards space exploration, acting as the Great Filter: a phenomenon that wipes out civilizations before they can encounter each other, which may explain the cosmic silence. In this article, we propose several possible scenarios, including anthropogenic and natural hazards, both of which can be prevented with reforms in individual, institutional and intrinsic behaviors. We also take into account multiple calamity candidates: nuclear warfare, pathogens and pandemics, artificial intelligence, meteorite impacts,
and climate change. Each of these categories have various influences but lack critical adjustment to accommodate to their high risk. The Great Filter has the potential to eradicate life as we know it, especially as our rate of progress correlates directly to the severity of our fall. This indicates a necessary period of introspection, followed by appropriate refinements to properly approach our predicament, and addressing the challenges and methods in which we may be able to mitigate risk to mankind and the nearly 9 million other species on Earth.

My sister retained part of placenta after birth of 1st child. She lost so much blood she was literally white as a sheet by the time she reached hospital that would care for her...

Martina Navratilova Martina | 7:52 PM · Dec 16, 2022:
How the fuck is this legal?!?

Quote Tweet
Jessica Valenti @JessicaValenti | 12:32 PM · Dec 16, 2022:
I write about abortion every day (http://jessica.substack.com), feminist books (Sex Object, The Purity Myth & more) & embarrass myself on TikTik (auntiekilljoy)

An Idaho woman who is miscarrying and been denied an abortion because of state law has been documenting herself getting sicker and sicker over the last two days
0:37 ( https://twitter.com/JessicaValenti/status/1603805360514637824 )

I debated posting this because it’s so distressing, but I think it’s important for people to see.

Lots of folks asking how to help: I've been in touch with her (as have others, I'm sure) and will definitely update if there's anything.

For those who are new to my account, I keep track of these (unfortunately common) stories at my daily newsletter:
https://jessica.substack.com/p/abortion-every-day-121622#details
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Idaho's total abortion ban is now in effect. Effective August 25, 2022, anyone who performs an abortion of a clinically diagnosable pregnancy is guilty of a felony unless the abortion is necessary to save the life of the pregnant woman or in the case of rape or incest. Aug 29, 2022 ( https://www.hollandhart.com/idaho-abortion-laws-new-law-and-emtala-exception-now... )
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Dr. Comilla @comilla_s | 9:16 AM · Dec 17, 2022 from Lakewood, CO
Emergency Department Doctor 17 yrs, PhD, Mom. American Heart Association, Associate Clinical Professor.

This is exactly what we knew would happen as ER doctors. Women having to wait until they are “emergent” (Low blood pressure, high fevers, bleeding out), to get the care they need. We have failed as a nation. This is awful. #RoeVsWade

I wonder what would happen if doctors in Idaho decided to refuse medical treatment to politicians who signed on to this legislation...

What >31 margd: posted illustrates why it is more important that ever to vote in elections for local representatives to your state legislature.

I have been active in Postcards to Voters, which does many national GOTV campaigns but also local. We wrote for Kansas when they put an amendment to the constitution outlawing abortion on the primary ballot and it was defeated! How much influence we had in getting out the Democratic vote is unclear but we need to be vigilant. Runoffs, elections at random times of the year etc are very important. It has been reported that many people take our postcards to the voting booth so that is encouraging.

ETA: Postcards are particularly useful for random elections that people might not know about.

The flip side: We kill people all the time, take a permanently comatose person off life support, but we do not intend to kill an innocent person instead we remove the disproportionate means of keeping a dying person alive, since we are not helping the person. If we take someone of a ventilator and he started breathing on his own (which happens occasionally) we would not then smother him because killing him was not our intention. So it is perfectly rational to believe that it is always wrong to kill an innocent biological human being. And since the unborn are innocent biological human beings it follows that it is wrong to kill them....JMJ....

>34 brone: Not if the child will not survive, but refusing to take necessary measures means the mother, too, will die.

We were shocked to learn that a relative told MDs that if it came to a choice between his wife & his baby, to save the baby. Fast forward forty years, wife indicates she will not avail herself of our AED if husband has heart attack...

>34 brone: Your argument presumes a fertilized egg is "an innocent human being" that now has rights that the mother does not have. I will not argue this because there is no way to settle this question here and will cause a huge unending argument. I just want to clarify that the abortion question has always been about when that embryo develops its own "right" to survive. It is a difficult question with a number of scientific and ethical issues.

>34 brone: Your position might feel convincing to you as you type it out, but if you're trying to spell out an ethical position then you're going to have to do a little more work.

To begin with, there's some loaded language in there - for example, the word "innocent" sets up a set of value judgements about which victims are "worthy" and which are not, so it tends to weaken the idea that you've got a general case here. I can see why it's a tempting word there, since the only human beings which can be uncritically labelled this way are those which have clearly never taken any ethically significant actions at all: if you've never been an ethical actor, you presumably cannot be anything but "innocent". But for this word to be meaningful here, you have to have a clear understanding of how a person ceases to be able to claim innocence (and therefore become killable by your standards).

There are also some assumptions, for example your position depends on the assumption that a fetus has the same ethical status as "a human being", which requires some justification, which might turn out to be a harder job than you think it is.

It's also not clear whether under your position it's ethically permissible to gratuitously harm or endanger a human being (supposing that you consider them to be "innocent") or if your rule is only about directly causing their death. So, if I see an innocent human being, under your rules, am I allowed to intentionally break their arm, if I can do so with no danger of causing their death? Can I expose them to elevated risk of fatal harm, if there's a a statistical chance that they will come away unhurt? Can I cause them harm that will significantly shorten their life, if I can ensure that I'm somehow distanced from their eventual (and, thanks to my intervention, inevitable) early death?

If you're laying out ground rules for allowable treatment of human beings, and you're using those rules to restrict the fundamental freedoms of other people, you're going to have to address these questions. If the cases I list above are licensed in your ethics, then I as a human being have no particular reason to take your ethics seriously, because they're obviously no use to you or to anyone. Imagine that you have a mortal enemy who is bound by a code of ethics. You would presumably not be comforted if the loopholes above were part of their code!

So let's assume that your code of ethics closes those loopholes, and, as you suggest, that it is not just a personal code of ethics binding an individual's behavior but that it is binding on public policy (for example, that your code of ethics can guide public policy on abortion). In that case, your focus on abortion seems misguided. To take the obvious situation, there are something like 3 billion people currently inhabiting regions of the world which in all likelihood will become effectively uninhabitable over the course of the next century. Those people will either move or die. Current immigration policy in the US and other temperate-climate countries is, broadly speaking, that they should die. This does not consider people suffering and dying and being immiserated from climate-related causes in the temperate-climate zones. For example, think of those who lose their lives or their homes due to wildfire and flooding in the West and in the South. I will point out that many of these people are former fetuses, which seems to be important to you, and that they are therefore transitively to be considered "human beings". (It's not clear whether they can be called "innocent", perhaps you can help us out on that one)

If we do the math, we're talking about three orders of magnitude difference in the number of human lives per year at stake, and US policy can greatly affect those numbers. If you find that "it is wrong to kill an innocent human being" is a convincing case for restrictions on abortion, then clearly it is much more convincing as a justification for taking actually effective action on climate. However, I don't see the so-called "pro-life" advocates taking up that banner, which suggests to me that they are not actually driven by the ethics that you spell out.

Your thoughts?

Thankyou for inviting my thoughts, here they are out front, nothing between lines. Catholic life has never been led in a vacuum even in its earliest days. The cultural factors that existed 2,000 thousand years ago still exist today. The Catholic Church contrary to some very much exists in America. Catholic life in America has always been shaped by mass immigration, first from Europe, now from South America the Catholic part of this latest mass migration will be apparent with the upcoming generation. Left nor right labels cannot be legitimately put on Catholics becuase these are secular connotations neither of these blocs offers a fitting home to the Catholic, as I said, both are fundamentally secular, indeed we face an issue to disengage from either of these labels. Because we oppose many of the things liberals support we are thought to be "on the right". Catholics look back on 2,000 years of tradition to appropiate a fundamental locus of thinking. This does not mean we are opposed to the evolution of good thoughts, we are always open to what is good and true for myself and contemporaries....JMJ....

>38 brone: we are always open to what is good...

I suspect this will make your head explode, but imagine having control of all those factors that now result in major malformations (spinal bifida, congenital heart disease, hypospadias, etc.), neurodevelopmental issues (autism, etc.)...

NowThis @nowthisnews | 2:03 PM · Dec 23, 2022:
Science communicator @HashemGhaili imagined what an artificial womb facility, a place where babies are born outside the human body, could one day look like. 🤯

While this technology doesn't currently exist, some think it could in the next few decades.

Science Communicator Imagines Artificial Womb Facility of the Future
Science communicator @HashemGhaili imagined what an artificial womb facility, a place where babies are born outside the human body, could one day look like.

1:44 ( https://twitter.com/nowthisnews/status/1606364768595476493 )

>38 brone: Being Jewish, I understand your desire not to be labeled. Judaism also has very left and right wing factions.

I did read once (and I didn't know this), that the Talmud, which interprets the Old Testament (accurately or not, I don't know) declares that life begins when the baby can survive outside the mother's womb — of course no one believes we should apply that standard!! However it is very different from the Catholic view that life begins at conception.

Anyway, I think Roe v. Wade was a reasonable compromise in a secular setting as a limit on how old a pregnancy can be and still permit abortion. I believe that religion should only play a role in an individual's personal choice — not as the standard of the entire country.

>40 krazy4katz: I'm not sure I'd be so quick to say what nobody believes. To me it doesn't make a lot of sense to try to identify or to argue about an imaginary defined point at which life "begins" - the whole idea seems sort of cockeyed to me - nor does that seem to have any particular relevance to the question of abortion.

The whole business is really a red herring. People who are pregnant and don't want to be don't tend to wait until the last minute to have an abortion, after all. Late-term abortions are generally the result of a late-term medical situation which makes it impossible for a woman to go through with a wanted pregnancy - or, in a distressing number of cases, the result of anti-choice activists impeding a woman's ability to pursue the reproductive health care which is her simple human right.

So if you ask me, a woman's right to an abortion ends when the umbilical cord is cut. Up until then, it's up to her and nobody else.

>41 kiparsky: I agree with you that when life begins is not a good set point. What I meant was that religious beliefs use that as an argument against abortion at any stage. I also agree that most abortions are early unless there is suddenly a life threatening event. I would not go as far as your last sentence suggests. In that case I would suggest adoption.

>42 krazy4katz: I would not go as far as your last sentence suggests. In that case I would suggest adoption.

Again, I think the question is a red herring, for the reasons we agree on. The anti contingent have these weird fantasies about how women pursue abortion, because they get a pleasurable little thrill of horror from contemplating a woman waiting until the very last possible moment in order to enjoy the full experience of pregnancy before sadistically ending a newly-formed life. And they then cry out "oh, they want to allow abortion at any time! these evil people!", as though this is a thing that happens. I call it the "recreational abortion delusion", and it's basically a rhetorical move to get people to split hairs about when "life begins". I'm not going to play that game.

Now, do I think that this will ever be relevant? No, I do not. Anyone who can devise a scenario where a woman waits until labor begins to choose to have an abortion is frankly a pretty sick pervert who needs serious help. But the same goes for anyone who indulges in the recreational abortion delusion in general. They fantasize about women as some sort of sadistic monsters, because that is a useful rhetorical exercise for them. By getting us to join in that weird and twisted fantasy, they get to shift the argument from a private choice and a personal right to a public policy issue about "defending babies from monsters". The question is not "when does life begin", that is a pseudo-philosophical question akin to angels dancing on the head of a pin. The question is, when does the matter become an issue of public policy. And the clearest possible answer is: when the two bodies are separated. There is, as far as I can see, no other sensible place to draw that line, which is why I draw that line at that point.

>40 krazy4katz: Jewish people know that Jacob, Jeremiah, Esau, and Samson were known by God, all were named prior to their births, all with a specific roll for their lives, Jeremiah it is said that God knew him before he was formed in the womb, this would seem to me to apply personhood satus in the womb at least to religious people....AMDG....

>44 brone:
I didn't want to get in to a religious debate about this but somehow it is unavoidable. Many people now believe that a lot of the Old Testament, which of course has been translated a number of times through many languages, was written metaphorically. Genesis, of course, being the obvious example. I am also a biological scientist, so the metaphorical analysis works for me. I don't believe in a true Adam and Eve but rather in Darwinian evolutionary theory, which has been strengthened by the work of many in the last 100 years.

Interestingly, there was an article a few months ago about a rabbi, a Unitarian minister and a Buddhist (yeah, I know!!) who sued Florida governor Ron DeSantis over state anti-abortion laws. The rabbi initiated the lawsuit stating that the law contradicted his First Amendment Rights since supposedly life begins at birth according to an interpretation of the Old Testament as noted, I think, in the Talmud (don't quite remember). The problem is, as you state, in another part of the Bible, there could be a different interpretation of this issue. However, knowing the future of Jacob, Jeremiah, Esau and Samson prior to birth (and how much prior to birth??) does not necessarily mean that it is true for all conceptions. And God could know, I suppose, which conceptions would result in live births and which would not.

ETA: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/unitarian-buddhist-ministers-are-joining-ra...

Religious people are certainly free to apply restrictions on their own behavior based on their beliefs, but it is not fair to place that on others who may not share them. I have known people who had abortions at very critical points in their lifetimes. The lives they have now, after being able to finish their education, meet and marry someone with whom they could form a lasting relationship and the children they eventually had, are far better than if they had not had abortions. It was very traumatic and sad at the time and I know those people suffered tremendously, but I believe, looking back, they made the correct decisions. This is, of course, my personal view, not theirs. I don't know what they think.

Best wishes,

k4k

PS. Sorry! Another interpretation from another part of the Old Testament in Exodus. I could go on, but I will try not to...

https://floridaphoenix.com/2022/08/25/jewish-congregations-mount-legal-challenge...

>43 kiparsky: OK. I understand.

>44 brone: For one, God Almighty surely knew Mount Sinai and its rôle for existence before it was formed; does that give mountains personhood status?

For another... Jacob wanted to marry Rachel, but was tricked into marrying Leah, so he waited seven more years to marry Rachel, leaving Leah saying “...the Lord has seen my misery. Surely my husband will love me now.” (Genesis 29:32, NIV). Not only did Jacob have children with Rachel and Leah, he had children with their servants, Zilpah and Bilhah. Those stories you use to justify fetus personhood seem not to consider women people.

>38 brone: Left nor right labels cannot be legitimately put on Catholics becuase these are secular connotations

The left-right continuum is one dimensional and necessarily simplifying. A small, weird sect might defy placement. But Catholics make up 21% of the US population, and 6 out of the 9 Supreme Court justices, and the majority of both parties is Christian. Catholic thought has long been factored into the separation between left and right in the US sense.

neither of these blocs offers a fitting home to the Catholic, as I said, both are fundamentally secular

23% of Democrats and 13% of Republicans don't identify with a religion (in 2020), up from 9% and 4% in 2006. Over 70% of both parties in both time periods were Christian, with 15-20% of the total being Catholic. You're calling organizations built by Christians secular.

Catholics look back on 2,000 years of tradition to appropiate a fundamental locus of thinking.

As a mathematician who dabbles in Stoicism, only 2,000 years of tradition? You're not the only people who look at history.

And again, pro-life versus pro-choice is a modern debate; prior to modern medicine, there was not safe abortion (especially surgical) and there was little known about the details of conception. As I said on another thread, more than a couple hundred years ago it seems like (unreliable) abortion drugs were common and nobody cared or really knew for sure until quickening.

The Catholic Church contrary to some very much exists in America.

Contrary to who? I'd complain that you are acting like the Catholic Church is something new in the US, like it's something we wouldn't be familiar with and the left-right division is fundamentally alien to.

>39 margd: Perhaps Huxley's Brave New World, and Wells' Island of Dr Moreau are not so much pieces of fiction but prophecy. My thoughts on the matter are not the ideology of Sanger and Dr Mengele I believe what the Roman Church teaches on the subject of you're last sentence. Procedures designed to influence the generic inheritance of a child which are not Therupeutic are morally wrong. To try to correct a genetic dis-order is permissible, where as to manipulate the genectic structure to produce a human being by selection is wrong. Attempts to "breed" humans through cloning, twin fission in the labratory is immoral. Production of human beings for the sake of experimentation reduces the experiments to simply disposable biological material. In fact any research which jeopardizes the health of the unborn child is morally wrong. All this from a child born 2,000 years ago, Merry Christmas margd....JMJ....PS Hello Dolly (cloned ewe) goodbye humanity....

>49 brone: the ideology of ... Dr Mengele

It's not clear how Josef Mengele reached South America, but I'll note that Bishop Alois Hudal and Father Krunoslav Draganović were influential in running Nazis to South America and may well have run him, and that the church as a whole signed a Reichskonkordat with the Nazis rather than rallying 41% of the population of Nazi Germany against the Nazis.

My thoughts on the matter are not the ideology of Sanger

What, exactly? Margaret Sanger was opposed to abortion, though I would point to what I said above about safe abortions changing things. She was all about contraception, giving women a choice about whether or not to get pregnant. When you oppose contraception and abortion, we're going back to that question about whether you treat women as people; you've declared that any time they have sex, they have to run the chance of suffering a dangerous medical condition for nine months with a fatality rate of 17.4 per 100,000 births in the US, reaching 240 per 100,000 births(!) for Black mothers over 40 in 2018. (For comparison, skydiving killed 1.35 per 100,000 jumps in 2001, the highest of the last 20 years. Though I've never heard of someone being forcibly skydived...)

All this from a child born 2,000 years ago

All this from one interpretation of the Bible that frequently seems to have ignored what the adult Jesus said. It's a frequent condemnation of Christianity that they'd rather focus on all the tiny rules instead of things Jesus said and did, like eating with the prostitutes and tax-collectors and saying you should love your neighbor as yourself.

>49 brone: >50 prosfilaes: I believe Margaret Sanger was the person who established Planned Parenthood, correct? At the time, I think the idea was to offer contraception in order to reduce the number of black people and “purify the white race”. That is why they were located in areas with large African American populations. However, Planned Parenthood has acknowledged this part of their history and apologized. Now they are there to offer all women healthcare that would otherwise not be available to them including contraception and abortion.

As far as religion goes, there are good and bad people of all religions, so unfortunately you can’t trust people just because they say they are Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist or whatever. As it is said: actions speak louder than words.

About gene editing in humans, there will be controversy about that for a long time. I feel it is quite scary. For example, although it is true that you could get rid of many horrible genetic diseases, I believe that could be done without mass producing babies in little incubators. Also, there are the edge cases. For example: autism. Would we get rid of that? Some people with autism are brilliant and learn to adapt their behavior to the world. ADHD: I think those people would rather be born than not. To avoid what happened in China, there will have to be extremely strict regulations on gene editing of fetuses.

>51 krazy4katz: At the time, I think the idea was to offer contraception in order to reduce the number of black people and “purify the white race”.

It was not; she was not a simple person, and believed in eugenics, but doesn't seem to have been racist, even if she turned a blind eye to racists. She wanted every woman to have a chance to control her own reproduction.

I seem to be the only con here in this pro con group, Speaking of Sanger and using the same criteria for cancelling many historical figures in America, dont youse guys think we should cancel Sanger for the horrible ideas she foisted upon us, common guys she was a eugenicist, you know what they believe in. I wont embarrass you with her quotes. Just throwing it out there lets cancel her for the same reasons Juniper Serra is canceled....JMJ....

>53 brone: I'm sorry you feel alone here. I don't know whether that reflects the unwillingness of people to discuss this or the general perspective of the LT community.

The point is that Sanger is no longer alive and the organization she founded acknowledged her views on eugenics (thank you >52 prosfilaes: for correcting me), apologized, and now does more for women's health in impoverished communities than the medical establishment. So they turned bad into good. We can cancel her without cancelling Planned Parenthood. Her quoted beliefs would not reflect the beliefs of women whose only wish is for personal control over their bodies and voluntarily use Planned Parenthood's services for that purpose.

Not all religions believe that the soul ("life") begins at conception. And there is no scientific way to measure this as far as I know. Science can tell us how organs of the body develop over time and when they become functional, including the brain, if that matters. The soul is a spiritual concept and, can not be measured as far as I know. This is unfortunate, but then, all life is a mystery. We are still learning. Instead, I guess I focus on my efforts on gun control and aspects of health care (or lack of it) that clearly impact human life in a negative way.

Best wishes,
k4k

>53 brone: I don't think Margaret Sanger needs a lot of "cancelling", since nobody seems to think much about her today. Certainly, the people who are working to ensure that women live with the basic freedom to own their own bodies are not doing it because "Margaret Sanger said so". They're doing it because women are human beings and human dignity demands that a person's body belongs to them, and only to them, regardless of anyone else's superstitious beliefs.

As for your post about "gene editing", this is only tangentially related to the subject of abortion. The connection would be, I suppose, that in both case you would like to impose your superstitious beliefs on what you would like to not do on others who may not share your superstition or your interpretation of that superstition. This is surely wrong. To see this, pick any superstitious belief that you do not hold and imagine being told that you must now alter your behavior to conform with that belief. It might be a dietary restriction, such as abstaining from pork, from meat, or from all animal products, or it might be a restriction on choice of clothing, or it might be a prohibition on walking under ladders, it doesn't make a lot of difference. I know people who will insist that it would be a terrible thing to conceive a child under an inauspicious astrological configuration - if they want to plan their life by the stars, they're welcome to their own eccentricity, but if they try to force you to do so then they're dangerous fanatics. The same holds for anyone trying to force their superstitions on other people.

Public policy must be made in the public good, not to satisfy one cult or another.

>53 brone: lets cancel her for the same reasons Juniper Serra is canceled.

You don't understand what it means to cancel a historical figure. It's to take someone being treated as a hero and showing their bad sides, sides that often overwhelm their heroic sides for many people.

Sanger doesn't have statues. The Planned Parenthood removed her name from the headquarters. They've stopped giving out the Margaret Sanger awards. She's a minor historical figure mentioned mostly by right-wingers who want to bring up a straw woman to beat on instead of actually discussing the issues at hand.

On the other hand, Juniper Serra was literally canonized by the Catholic Church, a man that committed genocide, enslaving a group of people to destroy their culture and religion. Being canonized is the exact opposite of being canceled.

Oh, and again, you think the world is anti-Catholic and you're being treated unfairly, and you think that a man that enslaved people and forced them to convert to Catholicism was being treated unfairly?

I just read the Wikipedia page on Margaret Sanger and realized I knew very little about her. She brought more “modern” methods of birth control (eg. the diaphragm) to this country from Europe, which was a tremendous improvement over methods used here. She was actually against abortion. At the very end they mentioned the part she played in encouraging eugenics. A complex person: some great things and some bad things.

>56 prosfilaes: Once upon a time there was a diminutive professor teaching on a sub tropical Island in the Mediterranean,at the age of 35 he traded that in for a perilous journey accross the Atlantic, spending future decades in privation, disease, exhaustion,suffering life long infections for the better position of committing genocide and enslavement to spend the rest of his life as a precursor to Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, overseeing enslavement to destroy a culture. All this narrative runs contrary to the truth the absurd lies you believe is wokism 101, when the book "death camps" came out it became the gospel of the elete the pampered from Stanford hopped into their BMWs and Tipped over every statue, sign or picture of the Saint.on the Camino Real. All under the sanction of the Neusome, McCarthy both "catholics" and many "catholic" assembly members.They even passed a bill authorizing poor little Saint Juniper to be sledhammered, blowtorched, spraypainted, and desecrated. Bill338. The passions of the anti Catholic frenzy of our current age is astounding when our "catholic" leaders join in the persecution. In 1773 there was a memorandum written to the Viceroy of Mexico from alta California it is the first written legal code written by Serra called by Pope JPll " a bill of rights for native Americans", Before the calumnious book was written, Serras' contribution to California were: Textiles, Polyphony, monogamy, food preservation, irrigation, ceramics, carpentry, animal husbandry, masonry,forging, and my favorite viticulture for that alone every vineyard in California should have a statue to serra. The real Serra was more than a mere predecessor of Peace Corp projects, the lies dont overshadow the truth of who this great man was. He opened up the gates of heaven to those who never heard of the gospel. Those days are gone now and we now celebrate a Sybaritic, bacchanal, any form of license, really, licentiousness, is held up for public approbation. We should return instead to the anthropology of Serra which was and still is the respect of every human life from (the moment) of conception till Natural death....JMJ....

>58 brone: at the age of 35 he traded that in for a perilous journey accross the Atlantic, spending future decades in privation, disease, exhaustion,suffering life long infections for the better position of committing genocide and enslavement to spend the rest of his life as a precursor to Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, overseeing enslavement to destroy a culture.

Mao Zedong engaged in the Long March, traditionally 8,000 miles and argued to be merely 3,700 miles under miserable conditions. Enduring suffering for your beliefs does not prove your beliefs are true or that your actions were righteous.

And why is Mao bad? Most people would talk about how he forced people into effective slavery and destroyed any cultural tradition he considered bad. That's exactly what Juniper Serra is accused of, and you've never directly responded to.

He opened up the gates of heaven to those who never heard of the gospel.

Antiochus IV Epiphanes opened the gates of Mount Olympus to those who had never heard of Zeus. Why is Antiochus IV Epiphanes bad, and Juniper Serra good?

The passions of the anti Catholic frenzy of our current age is astounding

You have no empathy. None. You complain about being silenced, and venerate a man who silenced a whole community, because you don't like their pagan beliefs. You imagine that those that don't agree with you should be happy with a man who forced your beliefs on others.

Those days are gone now and we now celebrate a Sybaritic, bacchanal, any form of license, really, licentiousness, is held up for public approbation. We should return instead to the anthropology of Serra which was and still is the respect of every human life from (the moment) of conception till Natural death....JMJ....

Incoherent ranting. I could ironman your arguments, but as the student of 2,000 years of Catholic thought, you should be more than armed with the skills of rhetoric and logic.

>58 brone: Given that we seem to be talking about the USA, a country which explicitly prohibits the establishment of a state religion, and given that as a practitioner of a minority sect you would probably not want to be compelled to practice according to the beliefs of the sect commanding a plurality in this country, it seems odd that the only arguments you're offering are based on your religious fantasy of choice.

Have you any arguments rooted in the more usual ground for public policy? Or are you only arguing that "if you already believe everything I believe, then you believe what I believe"? (which is really the only thing that any argument from religion can ever accomplish in a public policy debate)

>60 kiparsky: You at least seem to be reasonable, so let me think on your post a little and see if I believe what you do.... JMJ....

Abortion Access Tied to Suicide Rates Among Young Women
Michael DePeau-Wilson, MedPage Today | December 28, 2022

...In a longitudinal ecologic study using state-based data from 1974 to 2016, enforcement of Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers (TRAP) laws was associated with higher suicide rates among reproductive-age women ... but not among women of post-reproductive age...

Nor was enforcement of TRAP laws associated with deaths due to motor vehicle crashes...

Additionally, enforcement of a TRAP law was associated with a 5.81% higher annual rate of suicide than in pre-enforcement years...

"Taken together, the results suggest that the association between restricting access to abortion and suicide rates is specific to the women who are most affected by this restriction, which are young women," (author) Barzilay told MedPage Today...

https://www.medpagetoday.com/obgyn/abortion/102418
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Original Investigation:

Jonathan Zandberg et al. 2022. Association Between State-Level Access to Reproductive Care and Suicide Rates Among Women of Reproductive Age in the United States. JAMA Psychiatry. Published online December 28, 2022. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2022.4394
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Editorial:

Tyler J. VanderWeele 2022. Abortion and Mental Health—Context and Common Ground (editorial). JAMA Psychiatry. Published online December 28, 2022. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2022.3530 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abstract/2799598

It is wrong to intentionally kill innocent biological human beings. The unborn are persons with right to life. You and I were once embryos, and it is always wrong to kill us. Abortion deprives the unborn of a future like ours. Abortion unjustly impairs a being's development....JMJ....

>63 brone: The fact that you're posting instead of engaging in sex deprives the unborn of a future. As many women and studies have attested, banning abortion impairs the mother's development.

>63 brone: There is no legitimate reason to doubt that billions of people - most of them former embryos - will be killed as a result of effects of climate change and in attempts to escape from them, for example by trying to migrate from Central America to the US or from Africa to Europe. These deaths are locked in, and they are the direct result of the generation of energy by burning fossil fuels, and other CO2-generating consumption, by the wealthy nations of the world over the last century.

No intelligent person can claim to have been ignorant of this in in the last three decades, as the facts have been widely available and not seriously disputed in that time. And yet, many people in those wealthy nations have continued to take actions which they knew full well were contributing to these billions of deaths, and they continue to do so to this day.

Are you one of those people? If so, are you familiar with a line from the bible about beams and motes?

>65 kiparsky:

What you're referring to is what many Catholics would call a "consistent ethic of life". Respect for human life cannot be reduced to single-issue culture war slogans, nor is it the exclusive province of either the political left or right. It is grossly inconsistent to be against abortion while at the same time being apparently indifferent or unconcerned about the loss of human life caused by war, poverty, illiteracy, preventable diseases, climate change, economic systems, human trafficking, racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, patriarchy, xenophobia, religious intolerance, autocratic governance, torture, etc, and actually in favour of capital punishment, civilian ownership of small arms and light weapons, possession of nuclear weapons, militarism, some forms of torture ("enhanced interrogation techniques"), etc.

And yes, thanks for the reminder. Catholics are humbled by the beams in our own eyes and the eyes of our Church. We're just not sure what to do about it! Two thousand years of institutionalised religion does not change quickly, although Pope Francis' launch of a global consultation process is at least a positive step. But be assured that most of us, while not in favour of abortion, are also opposed to theocracy and don't believe that our personal religious and moral choices should be forced on the populations of pluralistic democracies. I've lived under a theocracy (not a Christian one) and it's not something I'd recommend.

Might also be worth pointing out that Catholic moral theology, through something called the principle of double effect, is actually more lenient than many of the right wing laws against abortion, and does not preclude medical procedures to safeguard the health of the mother even if they result in an abortion. But our culture warriors seem to ignore that.

Edited to add: Many of our anti-abortion culture warriors also tend to be against measures which would arguably reduce the demand for abortion, such as meaningful sex education, access to family planning, poverty alleviation, empowerment of women and girls, etc. Again, an apparent inconsistency.

>66 John5918: What you're referring to is what many Catholics would call a "consistent ethic of life".

The term is new to me, but the idea is one I'm familiar with: in ethics, it's assumed that consistency is a core requirement of any ethical rules, and the so-called "pro-life" movement has consistently failed in this regard, going back (in my experience) to the 1990s, when they threatened to murder the wife of the head of my school's medical clinic (she was on a list of a few dozen people who were marked for death, and fortunately was not one of those that the so-called pro-life movement actually murdered.

But be assured that most of us, while not in favour of abortion, are also opposed to theocracy and don't believe that our personal religious and moral choices should be forced on the populations of pluralistic democracies.

Very few people are in favor of abortion. If you know anyone who's had an abortion, it's not something you'd particularly seek out for yourself or for anyone you care about. When a woman decides that an abortion is her best option, that is because a number of things have gone wrong, not because she's excited by the opportunity to undergo an invasive and unpleasant procedure, or to undergo the weeks of pregnancy that lead up to it. This is why there is no "pro-abortion" movement in this country. It's called "pro-choice" because that's what most people are in favor of: if a woman, in the circumstances she's in, decides that an abortion is the best option for her, then that is the last legitimate word on the subject. No other person has the right to involve themselves in the decision, period.

This used to be a core conservative value, I might add.

Edited to add: Many of our anti-abortion culture warriors also tend to be against measures which would arguably reduce the demand for abortion, such as meaningful sex education, access to family planning, poverty alleviation, empowerment of women and girls, etc. Again, an apparent inconsistency.

Indeed. I think I've pointed this out here before: the so-called "anti-abortion" movement in America is no more anti-abortion than it is pro-life. It's just plain old misogyny, end of story.

(As you say, if the so-called "anti-abortion" movement were actually opposed to abortion, they would be screaming for the establishment of Planned Parenthood clinics, publicly funded, on every block in their city, since no organization in the world has prevented more abortions than Planned Parenthood. If they were seriously interested in reducing the number of abortions, they would boot every "abstinence-based" sex ed program out of every school in this country and teach real facts about bodies and how they work and what people can do to not get pregnant when they have sex, because they're going to have sex. Abstinence-based sex ed promotes abortions, period. And on, and on, and on. I think we both agree on the dire hypocrisy of the misogyny movement)

My last post on this subject mysteriously diappeared must have been my fault. Anyway lets see how this one does. One understands when a state which does not have the authority takes the perogative of defining which human beings are or are not the subject of rights and which consequently grants to some the power to violate the fundamental right to life, contradicts the democratic ideal to which it continues to appeal and undermines the very foundation on which it is built by allowing the rights of the weakest to be violated, the state also allows the law of force to prevail over the force of law one sees, that the idea of an absolute tolerance of freedom of choice for some destroys the very foundation of a just social life. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger....JMJ....

>68 brone: You seem to be asserting that laws should be based on your personal and idiosyncratic and religiously motivated definitions of "life". That's not how laws work in the US. This is a pluralistic nation populated by people of every known religious faith and a great number of people of no religion whatsoever. If you are not willing to abide by, for example, shariah law, then you have no right to impose your own flavor of shariah law on others.

If you want to convince people that they should live in a totalitarian society in which the government can determine their medical and economic future, you're going to have to come up with a reason that is not based on "because my preferred reading of my preferred novel says so", since many other people do not base their lives on your preferred novel, and of those who do, many do not share your preferred reading.

>68 brone: As an American who is not a Christian, and whose religion allows for abortion under certain circumstances, why should I legally be required to follow Cardinal Ratzinger’s interpretation of the beginning of life? Indeed, if I am not religious at all, am I allowed to be guided by secular ethics instead? I think that is the problem here. As stated by someone else previously, the standard way of determining “the rule of law” in the US is specifically not based on any particular religion, as stated in the Bill of Rights. Do you think this is something that should be changed?

To be clear: the statement that life begins at conception or that the soul is implanted at conception is a religious concept and not universally accepted by all religions or non religious people. There is no basis in science for this. Indeed science may never be able to determine this -- I don’t know.

>68 brone: when a state which does not have the authority takes the perogative of defining which human beings are or are not the subject of rights and which consequently grants to some the power to violate the fundamental right to life

A state has to take the prerogative of defining which creatures are or are not the subject of rights and how the rights apply. For example, you don't believe that "the fundamental right to life" applies to people found guilty of certain crimes. There's no point in justifying it; for the purpose of this discussion, it's enough to say that you believe in the death penalty and therefore "the fundamental right to life" can be taken without any claim of necessity, whereas others believe the fundamental right to life is violated by the death penalty. When does a zygote become a creature with life? The idea that a single cell or two is a person is ludicrous to me.

When does the "fundamental right to life" become an obligation on others? Even after death, one has the right to deny life to others by denying the use of one's organs. You're saying that a fetus has the right to compel the use of the mother's body in intense ways, ways that are injurious and possibly deadly to the mother.

>71 prosfilaes: One thing that I found misleading is the "heartbeat law" that many states have or are trying to put in place that would block abortion at 6 weeks when a supposed "heartbeat" is detected. There is no heart at 6 weeks so there can be no heartbeat. I noticed lately that the press has been a bit more careful about describing it without explaining it.

At 6 weeks, there are cells that will eventually form part of the heart that are randomly contracting. In fact, when those cells are placed in a laboratory culture dish with nutrients and oxygen, they still contract randomly. Part of the problem may be getting the truth out to people who do not have a background in science. No matter what one's ultimate decision about abortion is, people should be told the truth.

Canadian Abortionist Dr. Ellen Wiebe defends euthanizing people with mental illness, as the horror stories of Canada's killing regime hit international headlines. 10,000 last year, Suicide activists like Wiebe have opened up her abortion clinic to dispatch life on the other end of life's cycle. Capitalists are starting to advertise this Canadian Benefit, the Canadian fashion company Simon has a short film called the "beautiful exit". Warm scenes of love, companionship and love flash across the screen with an eager victim proclaiming a cute little Madison Ave. jingle " It takes dying to figure out what living is all about" Wiebe says, "all Canadians have rights to assisted death". She has killed over 400 in two years proclaiming her "work" through (MAID) medical aid in dying is " the most rewarding work we can ever do" In the killing fields of Canada she's hailed as a "pioneer" and will mostly be honored as a hero and given this years prize of "The Order of Canada", protest against this up there and see what happens to you....AMDG....

>73 brone: If you're trying to say that "some implies all", then I will remind you that some Catholic priests have committed horrible crimes against children. Are you going to claim that the general claim that "all catholic priests commit horrible crimes against children" is valid?

If not, then what is the relevance of mentioning the beliefs of some particular abortion provider?

(feel free to ignore this if it's too uncomfortable for you to admit that you're unable to respond - we will all understand perfectly)

Five million children worldwide die before fifth birthday, says UN (Guardian)

Five million children worldwide died before their fifth birthday in 2021, with almost half (47%) dying during their first month, according to new UN figures. Most of the deaths could have been prevented with better healthcare, say campaigners, adding that deaths among newborn babies haven’t reduced significantly since 2017...

An interesting "pro-life" statistic.

>75 John5918: I wonder how many children (under 10) have died in the congo in Colbalt mines banging rocks all day (rare earth mines) getting material to make batteries for electric cars in Communist China. An interesting "climate change" statistic....JMJ....

>76 brone:

Indeed. It's part of the "consistent ethic of life". If we value human life, we need to oppose a whole range of death-dealing policies and systems and work for a more comprehensive life-giving worldview.

>76 brone: >77 John5918: I agree that right now this should be the focus of our efforts to make this a better more compassionate world.

>76 brone: Yes, we've pointed out many examples of lives that the so-called "pro-life" movement mysteriously fails to give a damn about, and cobalt miners in Africa are indeed among them.
Thanks for helping, but I think we call get the picture: the so-called "pro-life" movement is no more about life than the so-called "taliban" is about scholarship.

>74 kiparsky: K if you go to the fake traditional catholic group you will see my many vehement and outspoken posts on this subject many of which are deleted by Admin who is a very prominent poster in this group also, I was kicked off for daring to question the coverups and the ongoing abuses going on in my Church. I currently post them on the Christian goup where I continually condemn the very thing you might think i'm uncomfortable with. Check it out for yourself as I said before I do believe you are reasonable....JMJ....

>75 John5918: You and your statistics " kill one person and its murder, kill a million and its a statistic" Uncle Joe Stalin....JMJ....

>81 brone:

The death of even one person is a tragedy and every effort should be made to prevent it. The death of five million children is not just a statistic nor a stand-alone tragedy, it is tragic evidence of a systemic problem, and making every effort to prevent it includes studying why it is happening and then seeking appropriate interventions. In this case providing better healthcare to mothers and babies is one obvious solution. The question is why societies are not willing to do so.

>79 kiparsky: K The Taliban is about death, Abortion is death, Euthanasia is death, war is death. I am for life from conception to natural death, I belong to no movement, political party, left or right ideology, I'm just an old subway worker if I was as sophisticated as youse guys (just kidding) I'd call me a Distributionist, and a Catholic Intragalist....AMDG....

>80 brone: Either you're not following me or vice versa. Let's back up a step: in >73 brone: you posted a claim about the beliefs of one abortion provider. Was this meant to be relevant to a discussion of "Childbirth, contraception, and abortion"? If so, what is the relevance?

>82 John5918: In your collective mind maybe but where I come from there are many agencies Catholic and others fighting this "systemic problem" of the destruction of the family....JMJ....

>85 brone:

Well yes, there are many agencies trying to deal with these systemic problems, not only where you come from. But it doesn't answer the question as to why resources are not put into providing proper health care for mothers and babies, leading to five million children a year dying from preventable causes.

>83 brone: Okay, if you're for "life", then presumably you're opposed to the so-called "pro-life" movement, right? You wouldn't want to be associated with a movement that uses lethal violence and threats of violence against doctors and against pregnant women if you're "for life", I suppose.

You also wouldn't want to be part of a movement that, by opposing measures like contraception and comprehensive sex education in schools and by limiting access to pregnancy-preventing services like Planned Parenthood, has been directly responsible for countless unplanned and unwanted pregnancies, and therefore directly causes abortions, right?

It's not that complicated: if you want to prevent abortions, you want to prevent unplanned pregnancies. There are some well-known ways to do that, and they are all opposed by the so-called "anti-abortion" movement, and they are all policy goals of the pro-choice movement. If you actually want to prevent abortions - if you're not just virtue signalling, that is - then you want to get involved with the pro-choice movement.

If you want to go a bit further and be actually pro life, that's great. We'd be glad to have you. Join up with Extinction Rebellion, work to end restrictions on migration between countries (how many people die because of these racist laws every year?), work for the restoration of serious gun control in the US, work to end the failed "war on drugs". There's lots of work to do, and lots of lives on the line every day. Pick something worth while and start getting involved.

>86 John5918: I'm reminded of the quote: "When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist."

>88 kiparsky:

Dom Helder Camara, I believe, a Brazilian Catholic bishop who was a proponent of liberation theology. There is a body of teaching known as Catholic Social Doctrine which focuses on systemic issues such as the dignity of the human person, justice and peace, the common good, the preferential option for the poor, care for the environment, good governance, participation, subsidiarity, rights and responsibilities, and the dignity of labour. In various parallel threads brone has consistently derided this as "communism", but who knows, maybe a conversion is now on the cards? Catholic Social Doctrine is very popular with peoples facing poverty, oppression, marginalisation, discrimination, violence, autocratic governance, etc, but not with right wing culture warriors.

>87 kiparsky:

Plus capital punishment, of course.

>89 John5918: Indeed. "Liberation" seems to me to be the only sort of theology worthy of the name.

maybe a conversion is now on the cards

Borrowing from another tradition: by this merit may all beings swiftly realize enlightenment...

>83 brone: Isn't it nice to be able to reduce the act of living to one simplistic formula

>85 brone: John has a collective mind? Does that make the Catholic church a hive mind?

>83 brone: I belong to no movement, political party, left or right ideology,

I'm hard put to remember anything you've said that doesn't fall on the right wing of American politics. You could give https://www.librarything.com/topic/324069#8033216 to just about anyone, and they would say that's from someone on the right wing. It's not even a principled conservatism, it's from the partisanship that jumps up to blame the other side when something goes wrong, even if nobody really knows what happened or why it happened yet.

You can keep saying that as much as you want, but you're not convincing anyone. You're anti-abortion, go on about illegal immigrants and communism, and rant about the Democratic president you call "Joey". You're right-wing.

a Catholic Intragalist.

That's anti-American. It's something that's gone against the beliefs of all the Founding Fathers, all the Presidents, virtually all US citizens then and now, as well as the indigenous peoples of the US. Marxism was at least something that the Founding Fathers never got to consider; Catholic integralism was known about and firmly rejected. To quote Wikipedia, "In 1785 Delaware was one of the four states (the others being Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia) where Catholics were not virtually under civil disabilities." It's not clear how many of the Founding Fathers would have endorsed the current separation of church and state as it is; it's very clear that they had no interest in the Catholics ruling the US, however.

And it's weird. A Catholic integralist should be at worst ambivalent about the second Catholic US president in history. Immigration from south of the border is largely Catholic and thus desirable, unless the concern is that they will leave their Catholic nations for a sinful US. You, on the other hand, read just like someone on the US right wing; Biden bad, illegal immigrants horrible and something to be stopped at all cost.

Cesare Santangelo an abortionist fron DC where "extremely late term"' babies were recovered (dead) prompting calls for investigation. Santangelo is quoted over ten years ago "he would not save a baby born alive", "technically you know we would be obliged to help it, you know to survive. But, you know, it probably would'nt, It's all in how vigorously you do things to help a fetus survive. Let's say you delivered before we got to the termination part of the procedure here, you know? Then we would do things-we would- we would not help it. We would'nt incubate, it would be you know, uh, a person, a terminal person in the hospital, lets say, that had cancer you know? You would'nt do any extra procedures to help that person survive. Like ' do not resusitate' orders. We do the same thing here. This in an interview in 2013, these babies were discovered recently where Cesare is still at it....JMJ....

Safe haven baby boxes a concept founded by the "extremely lethal and violent pro life person" Monica Kelsey. These save haven boxes are located in 134 locations throughout the country, In Ocala Fl on last tuesday an infant was placed in the box which is equipped with heating, cooling, and medical emergency alarm. The fire chief is quoted as saying, "We are so happy this community was prepared for this situation. We know the baby will be loved by an adoptive family and we are thrilled to be part of protecting infants from abandonment". something just has to be done about these right wingers....AMDG....

>95 brone: You never answered the question asked by >60 kiparsky:. Why not?

Bottom line: quoting rare examples of abuse is not getting at the critical point. If you could state how you think the United States, as a country whose laws are not governed by religion (as stated by >60 kiparsky:), should approach this issue, that would be helpful. For the record, both Judaism and Islam permit abortion under certain circumstances and do prioritize the wellbeing of the mother. I am talking about the original religious philosophies, not the right-wing offshoots that have developed over many centuries.

Also, I think calling the Safe Haven people right wingers (with negative connotations) is incorrect. They are saving lives and giving those babies to people who want them and will love them. What could possibly be wrong with that? The babies will grow up much happier than if forced to live with parents who don't want them or are unable to provide for them.

>88 kiparsky:, >89 John5918:

I don't want to hijack this thread with religion, but this morning I came across a reflection by Catholic priest Fr Richard Rohr entitled Disrupting the Status Quo which I think speaks to that quote from Dom Helder Camara as well as issues of systemic (or structural) violence.

One of the gifts of the prophets is that they evoke a crisis where one did not appear to exist before their truth-telling. In the 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. was blamed for creating violence—but those who had eyes to see and were ready to hear recognized, “My God, the violence was already there!” Structural violence was inherent in the system, but it was denied and disguised. No one was willing to talk about it... Prophets always talk about the untalkable and open a huge new area of “talkability.” For those who are willing to go there, it helps us see what we didn’t know how to see until they helped us to see it... Prophets generate a crisis... because while everybody else is saying the emperor is beautifully clothed, they are willing to say, “No, he’s naked.” We’re not supposed to say that the emperor has no clothes! It’s the nature of culture to have its agreed-upon lies. Culture holds itself together by projecting its shadow side elsewhere... the prophet’s job is first to deconstruct current illusions, which is the status quo, and then reconstruct on a new and honest foundation. That is why the prophet is never popular with the comfortable or with those in power...

>97 John5918: That's a pretty good quote, but I see it as more to do with plain old organizing than with religion. Apart from the loaded word "prophet", what's described there is a very secular phenomenon, isn't it?

>94 brone: >95 brone: People do good things. That doesn't mean their politics are correct. People do bad things. That's doesn't mean all of their politics are wrong. This isn't an argument.

Safe haven baby boxes are like having lighting strips on airplanes to mark the way to an exit after a crash. Yes, they're good, but when they're used, it's a sign that everything has gone horribly, horribly wrong. Society has drastically, cruelly failed if it forced a woman to carry a child for nine months and then made her feel she had to take it home and then abandon it in the most impersonal, anonymous way.

>98 kiparsky:

Indeed. Such dynamics tend to be the same whether viewed through a religious or secular lens and phrased in religious or secular language!

https://www.union-bulletin.com/news/national/florida-agency-warns-pharmacists-no...
Florida agency warns pharmacists not to dispense abortion pills

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — With pharmacies in some states preparing to dispense abortion pills, Florida’s Agency for Healthcare Administration sent a letter Thursday (1-12-23) to all state health care providers warning them that to do so in Florida is illegal.

>101 Molly3028: Florida, the state where they've heard of medicine, thought about it, and decided it's a bad idea.

Tens of thousands of pro dignity for babies have marched passed The Capitol today (average age 20) for the fiftieth year in a row to contintue to stand up for life from the womb to the tomb....AMDG....

>103 brone: Yes, but what about the answer to >60 kiparsky:?

By the way, I am done. I won't respond anymore so you don't have to worry.

Best wishes,

k4k

>104 krazy4katz: In answer to >60 kiparsky: Kiparsky he knows what the Catholic Church's stand on Abortion is and it is not religious fantasy as he says . Th Churches public policy is basically this. If any women regardless of age, religious views, marital status or immigration status- who is pregnant and is in need, can come to the Catholic Church and we will give you the services and support you need to carry your baby to term, regardless of your ability to pay, futhermore, we will not abandon you and your baby after delivery,but,rather, we will see to it that you have the resources that you and your child both need and deserve. No one will be turned away from life affirming care, if you have an abortion that you regret whether recently or in the distanr past, come to us as well so we may offer services to help you....This is the public policy of the Archdiocese of NY....JMJ....

>105 brone: To me, all religions are fantasy. You might disagree on that point, and that's your privilege, but a rational person has to accept that an argument from religion can never be convincing, even to someone who nominally shares the same religious persuasion, since religion is all about interpretation, and interpretation cannot be compelled. There is an official Catholic Church dogma, and if you happen to be the sort of person who believes exactly what the official Catholic Church says, then your beliefs can be predicted pretty easily. However, most Catholics do not follow this official dogma strictly, and in particular surveys have shown consistently that most Catholics think the church is either partially or completely out to lunch on abortion.

So if you're trying to convince someone by saying "the church says", that's not going to convince anyone, ever. Either they already believe what you believe, and you haven't convinced them of anything, or they don't believe what you believe, and they're not going to change their beliefs because the church says so. Which brings us again to the question which I asked quite a while back and which you promised to consider and which >104 krazy4katz: has patiently reminded you of several times:

Have you any arguments rooted in the more usual ground for public policy? Or are you only arguing that "if you already believe everything I believe, then you believe what I believe"? (which is really the only thing that any argument from religion can ever accomplish in a public policy debate)

If you want to bow out and say that your only arguments are ones that nobody will find convincing, then that's fine. I won't call you names or denigrate your religious beliefs or anything. I just want to know if you believe it's possible to make a rational argument to support your position, or if you think your position can only be supported by reference to the supernatural.

As for your idea - which is completely irrelevant to this question - that the Catholic church is a place that a woman will go for support if she is pregnant: maybe you think that's a thing that happens. I can assure you that women, especially those in the church, are aware of exactly what the official church thinks of women, and they're not touching that unless compelled, usually by a male relative who can make their life intolerable or by simple lack of resources. I hope that fact makes you at least a little bit uncomfortable, because if doesn't then you're a much less decent person than I'd like to believe.

Idaho woman shares 19-day miscarriage on TikTok, says state's abortion laws prevented her from getting care
Carmen Broesder, 35, said she visited the ER three times before receiving care.
Mary Kekatos | January 21, 2023

...In a series of TikTok videos -- along with medical records, photos and videos shared with ABC News -- (Carmen Broesder, 35) said that despite bleeding heavily and suffering intense cramps, she was denied a dilation and curettage, or D&C, which removes tissue from inside the uterus, multiple times.

...In an audio recording of the conversation Broesder had with the physician about why she couldn't get a D&C, he said "there is some trepidation" about performing one in the wake of Idaho's new abortion law.

...(Dr. Sadia Haider, an OBGYN at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago), who was not involved in Broesder's care, said the fear of criminalization and inability to provide care, even in situations where abortion providers might deem it necessary, might prevent them from acting. "They might have initially acted sooner, they might have acted more aggressively to provide, taken more actions to intervene if they could have and by delaying that care, you're putting the patients in a worse situation clinically and more at risk of bad outcome"...

Broesder said the doctor at St. Luke's did discover part of the embryo was stuck in her cervix, so she received a procedure to remove part of the remaining tissue and was prescribed misoprostol, which treats postpartum bleeding, induces labor and causes an abortion.

From the day Broesder's miscarriage started to when it ended, she said it was a total of 19 days of bleeding...

https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Health/idaho-woman-shares-19-day-miscarriage-tiktok-s...

I think it's time to bring this up again.

Catholic/Religious Hospitals in the USA
https://www.librarything.com/topic/322259#7837883

Patients infrequently know whether or not the hospital they go to is religiously affiliated.

Does it matter?

Yes, it does.

Attendance at religious health care facilities can affect a patient’s access to services because of religious interpretations about care designated by the institution. Specific to Catholic health care facilities, clinicians are expected to abide by the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, which places limitations on reproductive and end-of-life-care methods{...}. Prior evidence has highlighted restrictions to care in Catholic facilities specific to contraception, sterilization, miscarriage management, and abortion.

from "Patient Views on Religious Institutional Health Care" by Maryam Guiahi, MD, MSc; Patricia E. Helbin; Stephanie B. Teal, MD, MPH; et al (2019) in JAMA Network Open
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2757998

>108 aspirit: Thanks for that. To me, the idea that a supposed medical facility would deny needed care to a patient on religious grounds is systematic and planned malpractice, and I'd like to see any such facility lose its licensing and the people running it jailed. But that's just me, I guess I'm kind of a people person.

>109 kiparsky: I agree.

It’s More Dangerous to Be Pregnant in Post-Roe America
On the 50th anniversary of the landmark ruling, the slogan “abortion is health care” has never felt so urgent.
Molly Jong-Fast | January 25, 2023

“Because it’s such a pithy and memorable phrase people think it must not be true,” NARAL’s Angela Vasquez-Giroux told me, “but abortion is actually health care...We all knew this would impact women who were seeking abortion care, but we weren’t prepared for how it would impact America as a whole. What it really underlines is that it’s actually not safe to be pregnant in America"...

...What’s become clear over the past seven months is that post-Roe America isn’t in the middle of an abortion crisis, it’s in the throes of a health care crisis. And it’s only going to get worse.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/01/roe-v-wade-abortion-laws

>111 margd: Whats become clear in post Roe is that the mega influential planned parent hood is in choas, as the thousands of young people marching in Wash the other day (ignored by big media) will in future months and years cause the Abortion for profit industry to be putting up out of business signs....AMDG....

>112 brone: Talk about "thousands of young people" is fine, but what about the tens of thousands of young people who marched to the voting booths to defeat candidates who were pitching the misogyny line? We've already seen Republicans backing away from that, clearly they know that the idea is an election loser. What are you all going to do when "pro-life" stops being a convenient way for marginal Republicans to get fanatics to come out and vote for them, and starts being a way to ensure that they're perpetually unemployed losers whining on Fox news?

I think you might be misreading the situation badly. Americans do not want to be ruled by the Taliban, they do not want Shariah law, and they're not going to be voting for anyone selling it. I mean, did you miss the last election or something?

>112 brone: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/07/06/majority-of-public-disapproves-o... . I mean if you want facts. You can look at the Kansas amendment vote as well.

>114 prosfilaes: I wrote "Postcards to Voters" to warn people in Kansas about the amendment vote. Very proud of making the effort to do that. They put it on the primary ballot to confuse people. Fewer people turn out for the primaries so the postcards were a great way to warn them. The number of voters who voted in the primaries was significantly higher this past year.

Planned Parenthood is an official 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that provides healthcare for women everywhere. I am proud to donate every year. :-)
https://www.plannedparenthood.org

>116 krazy4katz: Good for you. There's no organization in this world who prevents more abortions, year on year, than Planned Parenthood. If the so-called "pro-lifers" actually wanted to prevent abortions, they'd be showering money on Planned Parenthood. Anyone who thinks they're "anti-abortion" and isn't donating to Planned Parenthood clearly has not thought this through (the clue is in the name...)

The Custody Battles Awaiting Mothers of Children Conceived in Rape (21:48)
Britta Greene | January 27, 2023

Exceptions in the case of rape used to be considered a necessity in abortion legislation, even within the pro-life movement. But today ten states have no rape exception in their abortion laws, and more will likely consider moving in that direction this year. “I think few people understand how common this scenario actually is,” the contributing writer Eren Orbey, who has reported on the issue, says; according to C.D.C. statistics, nearly three million women have become pregnant as a result of rape. With abortion laws changing, more and more women will be forced to carry these pregnancies to term. In some cases, they’ll find themselves tied to their assailants through the family-court system until their children turn eighteen. “Many states . . . require a conviction for first-degree rape—which is really hard to come by even if there’s a lot of evidence—in order to terminate parental rights,” Lucy Guarnera, a professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia, says. Orbey talks with Guarnera, one of a few researchers who have studied this issue in depth, and with a mother of twins about the challenges of parenthood under these conditions. “The reality is: these exceptions are far less effective than we assume they are,” Orbey says. “They create the false impression that we’re taking care of all rape survivors when we’re not.”

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/tnyradiohour/segments/custody-conceived-rap...

Press release
Biden-Harris Administration Proposes New Rules to Expand Access to Birth Control Coverage Under the Affordable Care Act
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services | Jan 30, 2023

Today, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) and the Departments of Labor and the Treasury (Departments) proposed a rule to strengthen access to birth control coverage under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Under the ACA, most plans are required to offer coverage of birth control with no out-of-pocket cost. To date, millions of women have benefited from this coverage. Today’s rule proposes to expand and strengthen access to this coverage so that all women who need or want birth control are able to obtain it. The action is the latest effort by the Biden-Harris Administration to bolster access to birth control at no cost.

...In 2018, final regulations expanded exemptions for religious beliefs and moral convictions allowing private health plans and insurers to exclude coverage of contraceptive services. The proposed rules released today would remove the moral exemption and retain the existing religious exemption. The 2018 rules include an optional accommodation that allows objecting employers and private colleges and universities to completely remove themselves from providing birth control coverage while ensuring women and covered dependents enrolled in their plans can access contraceptive services at no additional charge. Under the 2018 rules, these women and covered dependents would get this contraceptive access only if their employer or college or university voluntarily elects the accommodation—leaving many without access to no-cost contraceptives.

The proposed rules seek to ensure broader access to contraceptive services by creating an independent pathway for individuals enrolled in plans arranged or offered by objecting entities to make their own choice to access contraceptive services directly through a willing contraceptive provider without any cost. This would allow women and covered dependents to navigate their own care and still obtain birth control at no cost in the event their plan or insurer has a religious exemption and, if eligible, has not elected the optional accommodation. The proposed rules would leave in place the existing religious exemption for entities and individuals with objections, as well as the optional accommodation for coverage.

....For more information on the proposed rules, consult the fact sheet available at https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/fact-sheets/coverage-certain-preventive-services-un....

To review or comment on the proposed rules during its 60-day public comment period, visit {https://www.federalregister.gov}.

In addition, HHS also recently released a report entitled: “Marking the 50th Anniversary of Roe: Biden-Harris Administration Efforts to Protect Reproductive Health Care,” which outlines the actions HHS has taken in the face of the health crisis precipitated by the Dobbs decision.

HHS actions have been centered on six core priorities:

Protecting Access to Abortion Services
Safeguarding Access to Birth Control
Protecting Patient Privacy
Promoting Access to Accurate Information
Ensuring Non-discrimination in Healthcare Delivery
Evidence-Based Decision Making at FDA

The full report can be read at https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/roe-report.pdf - PDF.

https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/press-releases/biden-harris-administration-proposes...

>119 margd: Well, I guess this is good. I hope it works.

Bergoglio (pope Francis) is defended by Broglio (head of Catholic bishops in US) "President Joe Biden" is wrong when he was Quoted the other day on Taxpayer funding of abortions, the president suggested last tuesday that neither the pope nor all Catholic bishops oppose public funding of abortions in the US. The Abp said" forcing Catholics to fund abortions undermines their freedom by forcing people of good conscience to participate in a grave evil against their will"....AMDG....

>121 brone: I assume you're aware of what "scare quotes" signify. Are you trying to suggest that Joe Biden is not actually the president of the USA? If so, please name the person to whom you think that title belongs, and present some reason why you believe that. If you do not believe that, please do not litter this forum with bullshit. If you want to engage in serious discussion, please do so, but if you're just here to troll you might as well go chase yourself somewhere else, because nobody's got time for that sort of nonsense.

Here is the actual article for accuracy:
https://www.usccb.org/news/2023/president-us-bishops-conference-bishops-united-p...
Please note the source of this article, which may be biased.

It is interesting to note that all the people making policy in this article are men — and women will be the ones who suffer because of this. Catholic women will not be forced to have abortions against their will. Anyone who chooses abortion should be able to get it as a matter of personal freedom.

It is my impression that we do not pay for abortions with tax dollars in this country. That is why Planned Parenthood is set up and receives donations to take care of women who can not afford or do not have insurance for this procedure. I could be wrong but I don't think so. And the medication makes it much less expensive, making this heath care available to more people.

Here is the other side:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/01/22/fact-she...

Please note that it does not say anything about federal dollars paying for abortion. The only question would be if medicaid allows abortion.

If we follow religious dogma instead of science, we would not have any freedom.

ETA: OK, the first article links to information on the Hyde Amendment, which prevents tax dollars from being used to pay for abortions. So this article is in response to an attempt by some members of Congress to eliminate the Hyde Amendment.

Speaking of taxes. I object to property tax exempt churches and such. Speaking of such they have a lot of gall IMO talking about tax on anyone or for anything until they start paying their fair share.

A Trump-appointed Texas judge could force a major abortion pill off the market
Heard on All Things Considered (4:00)
Sarah McCammon | February 1, 2023

...A decision is expected soon in the case (brought by a coalition of individuals and groups opposed to abortion) challenging the Food and Drug Administration's approval more than 20 years ago of the abortion drug mifepristone, which a growing number of patients use to terminate pregnancies.

...That decision is now up to a federal judge in Texas, Matthew Kacsmaryk — a Trump appointee with longstanding affiliations with the religious right, including work as an attorney with a conservative Christian legal group based in the state.

...Any appeals in the case would go to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit – widely known as a conservative jurisdiction – and then to the U.S. Supreme Court.

If Judge Kacsmaryk sides with the anti-abortion group, mifepristone would have to be pulled from the market, at least temporarily. The FDA could choose to restart the approval process, which could take years.

(Jenny Ma, senior counsel with the Center for Reproductive Rights) stresses that because this is a federal case, the impact could be felt nationwide, not only in states with abortion bans...

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/01/1153593174/mifepristone-abortion-pill-federal-tex...

>124 lriley: Churches in the USA not only get out of contributing to tax funds, they are allowed to take from them.

The first example coming up for me in a search today is "Religious Groups Received $6-10 Billion In COVID-19 Relief Funds, Hope For More" (2020 | NPR). But the financial support of local governments that don't receive property or some of the sales taxes are probably more significant.

The exemptions and payouts for churches are estimated to reduce government (local through federal) funding by up to $100 billion annually.

Meanwhile, woman and other people who can be impregnated (including children) but are poor enough to fall within the insurance coverage gap are denied healthcare basically for being seen as contributing too little into the economic system to have earned government support. That leaves the religious at the mercy of their churches and the billing systems of their hospitals. (Synagogues and their associates seem to be better at actually providing care but are less common.) Everyone else is SOL.

edited to correct typos

>126 aspirit: Basically their freeloading is built into the system and hardly ever questioned by anyone. It's not a wonder why so many christians believe this is a christian nation even if there's nothing really that codifies that. Meanwhile religious groups often are driving the debate on so many social and cultural issues and so many people like Brone would have a christian style shariya state and the lives of so many others outside their circles matter not a whit to them. Their complaints that they're being forced is actually them trying to force others.

I do sometimes wonder what the reaction would be if someone tried to introduce the idea of religion into a sane society.

"Wait, let me get this straight. You want me to believe that there's an invisible man in the sky who cares strongly about what things we do, and the only indication of this is some vague and contradictory text that was written a few thousand years ago? And only a few people are allowed to tell us what this really means? And you're one of those few people? Hang on, I think I see what you're up to!"

I was born and brought up in a Jewish family — refugees on both sides but different generations: my father (an 18-year old Austrian escaping the Holocaust) and my mother's mother (escaping the pogroms of eastern Europe in the early 1900s). Right now, I read mostly Buddhist and Baha'i literature because kindness, compassion and unity among people of all cultures and backgrounds is believed to be the way to a better world. I am not sure the Baha'is believe that abortion is OK, but they are not as dogmatic as other religions. They don't hate. No philosophy/religion is perfect, but it brings me relief to read about compassion and love for humanity instead of all this other stuff.

>129 krazy4katz:

I suspect >128 kiparsky: knows they are presenting a caricature of religion, but sadly it's one which does accurately describe large, influential and highly visible groups of religious people, particularly when they have allowed ideological culture war values to override their foundational religious values. Thanks for reminding us that there is a different side to most religions, that of compassion and love of humanity, and that not all religious people believe in theocracy, imposing their own personal morality on everybody.

>129 krazy4katz: The Baha'i Temple (1920) in Chicago is gorgeous! Unity is its theme. (A Muslim friend insisted I had to see it.)

"...The building’s architect, Louis Bourgeois...felt the design of the temple needed to reflect the Bahá’í belief of oneness for humanity, as well as the unity of all religions. In describing his design, he said, “There are combinations of mathematical lines, symbolizing those of the universe, and in their intricate merging of circle into circle, and circle within circle, we visualize the merging of all religions into one.”

https://www.architecture.org/learn/resources/buildings-of-chicago/building/bahai...

Once again, the attention shifts from people and our healthcare under threat to a general admiration of religions.

>132 aspirit:

Sorry if it feels like that. I interpreted it more as an affirmation once again that many religious people are on board with you when it comes to threats to people and healthcare.

>123 krazy4katz: It is also interesting to note that half of the babies aborted are female....JMJ....

>130 John5918: As a professed Roman Catholic you won't get in any trouble with that post in this group....AMDG

>133 John5918: you know what? No, I'm not giving any more of myself to these "But the love of God!" setups. I'm a little slow to remember how this goes, but I have.

Birthed Americans are dying or becoming disabled in large numbers from misinformation and medical neglect.

Teens being used as political examples are being forced by relatives and church leaders into surgeries to make them more sexually appealing while being denied contraceptives and books about personal health, interpersonal relationships, and political history.

New legislative bills to restrict healthcare, including access to prescribed medications that save lives, are being considered this week.

The building that doesn't get enough discussion, I think, is the one in which the Supreme Court meets.

edited because there was a typo, then I figured I might as smooth out a few lines for when I bother with this thread again

>122 kiparsky: Joe Biden is the President of the United States of America, once again you use the clever Marxist tactic of accusing me of the offense you yourself use by implication, then backing off, "if so please name' ect, that somehow a bishop who says a Biden comment is not true (about abortion) becomes some other issue that's bugging you. The serious subject I bring up is "litter" and "BS" and "nonsense" and of course the subject of PRO-CON is in this group has been abortion which I am Pro-baby. As far as "chasing myself somewhere else" I expect that eventually youse guys will find a way to do that ask 5398 he's a pro at that....AMDG....

Speaking of tax dollars, the GAO reports that planned parenthood (charges 400-2500 per) the Marie Stopes foundation, and the international planned parenthood (tax funded abortions outside our borders) received a massive amount of American taxpayer's dollars in total 1.8 billion in three years from 2016 through 2018. The Biden administration has expanded it futher....JMJ....

Again speaking of tax dollars the RC church in the USA gets to freeload off the tax system.

>138 brone: "I am Pro-baby"

Really. Because I haven't seen one of your posts that is pro-baby. You've got a thing about abortion, but even fetuses can't expect much from you, like healthcare or nutrition. Babies you haven't mentioned, nor have many of your policies seemed good for them.

>130 John5918: I don't want to divert any further from the subject at hand, but I want to say that I did not mean that to be a caricature so much as a view from the perspective of someone who seeks convincing arguments.

To bring this back to relevance, I think we can agree that whatever your view about the place of religion in the world, an argument about public policy cannot be based on religious preferences, since those are inherently private (not necessarily even shared by your co-religionists, as we've seen quite often) and cannot convince anyone who does not come pre-convinced.

It's certainly reasonable to discuss religious perspectives on matters of public policy, of course, but that's a discussion of religious perspectives, not about public policy.

>138 brone: If you're bringing up a serious subject, you do yourself a disservice by muddying the waters with pointless and pathetic trolling.

As for "marxist" tactics, don't make me laugh. Calling bullshit when I see bullshit is just a matter of paying respect to the truth. See Harry Frankfurt's well-known essay on the subject.

>139 brone: Good news for people who want to prevent abortions. Again, nobody in this world prevents more abortions than Planned Parenthood. More tax dollars for them means they can expand their services, and help prevent more unplanned pregnancies. That's what you want, isn't it?

And if you're the sort of person who believes in a god, then you might want to reflect on the fact that that god would be responsible for more abortions, by orders of magnitude, than all of humanity could ever have dreamed of. Are you sure you're reading your book right? "Go thou and do likewise", isn't that the line?

>134 brone: Not sure I understand your point. Statistically, 50% of embryos should be male and 50% female based on chromosomal genetics, so nothing surprising or biased about that.

In other words: XX x XY = XX + XY + XX + XY = 2XX + 2XY. Sorry I can't make the square, which is much easier to visualize.

>141 prosfilaes: Would the babies I mention banging rocks in Africa for colbalt get an honorable mention...or the female children I've mentioned being mutalited in this country with drugs and barbaric surgery in the name of gender ideology, or the numerous times I have spoken out against Islamic laws meant to enslave their women and female children....JMJ....

>146 brone: None of those are babies.

the babies I mention banging rocks in Africa for colbalt

The 40,000 children working in the DRC? Gee, why would you mention them, and not the 72.1 million other child laborers in Africa?

the female children I've mentioned being mutalited in this country with drugs and barbaric surgery in the name of gender ideology

Are you talking about transmen? Nobody gets gender affirmation surgery until they're adult, at least not in the US. And neither the drugs nor the surgery are in the name of gender ideology; they're in the name of helping people live happy, fulfilled lives. If you really wanted to discuss it, you'd argue either (a) happy fulfilled lives shouldn't be our main goal or (b) it doesn't produce happy fulfilled lives.

the numerous times I have spoken out against Islamic laws meant to enslave their women and female children

Again, not babies. And you've stood for a man who enslaved Native Americans, so I get the feeling it's more about Islam and less about slavery.

So many tragedies. These 3 are just a tiny piece of what women (and girls) are facing in this country.

https://www.axios.com/2022/08/20/woman-abortion-denied-louisiana

https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2022/09/27/affidavits-2-more-raped-minors-...

https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/08/health/ohio-abortion-long/index.html

Walgreens Sparks Calls For Boycotts After Refusing To Dispense Abortion Pills In Some States
Alison Durkee | Mar 7, 2023

Topline
Walgreens is coming under an increasing amount of scrutiny after it confirmed last week it won’t sell the abortion drug mifepristone in states where Republican attorneys general told the pharmacy not to—even if abortion is still legal there—as Democrats have called to boycott the company while it also faces potential legal action from anti-abortion rights activists.

Walgreens confirmed to Politico last week it would not sell or ship mifepristone, which is used to terminate a pregnancy, in at least 21 states after Republican attorneys general had sent requests for the pharmacy not to—including in some states where abortion remains legal, such as Alaska, Florida, Iowa, Kansas and Montana.

That’s now sparked significant pushback from the left, with California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) saying on Twitter Monday, “California won't be doing business with Walgreens — or any company that cowers to the extremists and puts women's lives at risk … We’re done.”...

...Walgreens issued a new statement Monday in response to the controversy reinforcing the pharmacy’s dedication to providing mifepristone where abortion is legal—even though it is legal in some of the states where they’ve said they won’t dispense it—and limited commenting on the company’s Instagram and Facebook accounts Monday.

Walgreens’ commitment to still provide mifepristone in some states has drawn ire from anti-abortion rights advocates, who have staged protests at Walgreens locations, and Politico reports anti-abortion groups are looking into taking legal action against Walgreens and other pharmacies that dispense the drug.

...Republican attorneys general sent similar requests to CVS, Albertsons, Rite Aid, Costco, Walmart and Kroger asking them not to send abortion pills, Politico reports, but none have commented yet on whether or not they’re giving into those demands...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2023/03/07/walgreens-sparks-calls-for-...

In a first, five pregnant women sue the state of Texas over abortion ban
Abhinav Singh | Updated: Mar 07, 2023

In what comes as a first, five pregnant women who were denied abortions despite grave risks to their lives have sued the state of Texas...In the suit, the women have asked the court to clearly clarify what are the exceptions and under what conditions abortion can be granted to one...

https://www.wionews.com/world/in-a-first-five-pregnant-women-sue-the-state-of-te...

Lucky the child lived in China, not Texas, coz you know politicians would never think to except fetus-in-fetu in their abortion legislation...

Fetus Removed From Brain of 1-Year-Old Girl
— Intracranial fetus-in-fetu identified in child with motor delay
Judy George | March 9, 2023
https://www.medpagetoday.com/neurology/generalneurology/103475

>146 brone: Are the female children who are being mutilated in this country the female children who are having their clitoris removed, or their labia sewn together? Or are those female children not important? Do you belong to any groups interested in banning this female mutilation? Donated money to any organization which seeks to ban this practice?