I believe I am now fully Pro-Life.

Wait, so you can only get pregnant if your married?

 

Ok, so the holy matrimony and 'core family' are irrelevant at Federal level.

And if some States do not want o recognize marriage and family, then that's cool too.......

Ok, I see where you are coming from. I have hard it before, because elimination of marriage and core family is what certain factions have been pushing for a long time.

Benefits are irrelevant to me in this discussion.

IMO there are benefits in promoting marriage and core family values, but we'll have to agree to disagree here.

 

LOL - You might get a kick out of this: it's an excerpt from Jean-François Revel's awesome book Last Exit to Utopia: The Survival of Socialism in a Post-Soviet Era:

 

No that’s not the point. The point is that we are now subsidizing the marriages of people who are engaging in a paradigm in which they are inherently incapable of procreating within the confines of their marriage.

As such procreation can’t be the reason we are providing benefits to married couples. So what is it?

 

Read my last post please.

 

No I like marriage and core family values. I would advocate, if marriage was returned back to the states, that my state recognize heterosexual marriages. For exactly the reasons you said AS WELL AS incentivizing procreation.

 

States can recognize it all day long even while Federal Government does too. Why does it have to be one-or-the-other?

 

All great points

 

I can applaud your position, and I hope it adds to people's understanding of the complexities involved. I don't have experience like yours, so my views have a different foundation, that being that no matter how righteous you think your motives are, how much you believe are acting as the instrument of your higher power- you are still not the person involved, the person who has to deal with all the consequences either way. Everybody makes mistakes, and most of us have made big ones. Right or wrong- we all have the right to make the personal choices that impact our lives, but not the personal choices of others. If you do that, you are doing more than something you see as righteous- you are usurping the sovereign authority of that person over their own life and body. I don't think any one has the right to do that for any reason.

 

I support some general right to abortion for a limited time frame, but I would have voted against that stupid Senate bill too TBH.
From their preface about blacks and LGBT victimhood to their edict that all terms shall be construed liberally, the thing is a troll piece from inception. Since pregnancy is generally an at-risk situation, any doctor could do any procedure he wanted in the name of abortion at any point along the way if that bill had be passed.

 

A bit off-point here- but the difficulty of writing a bill that has a chance of passing if far more difficult than many people think. Congress is a "committee", and in a committee, every person wants something in return for their support. There's an old saying that if you want to ruin a good idea, give it to a committee. Another is- That a camel is a horse designed by a committee.. I've had to work with some smaller ones, and I agree. I can't see how anything can get passed in congress without huge compromise. That's one of the reasons so many bill are packed with unrelated "pork" expenditures- they had to buy the votes of those members. Pitiful.

 

I don't think this bill was ever intended to be passed by the Senate. It was a radical left-wing attempt to get people on the record voting "no" so they could have something to lament in the campaign.

 

Very well stated. A few things to consider:

• At the time of Roe V Wade, ultrasound was not widely available. The science and our knowledge of what is in the womb has skyrocketed over the last 1/2 century and it's perfectly proper that our regulations should be updated to reflect that gain of knowledge and information.
• The idea that 15 weeks of unrestricted abortion is an anti-abortion position is a ridiculous proposition held only by the most extreme of the abortion absolutists. In truth it's a very reasonable pro-choice position.

 

Because they don't, my friend.

Nice post, and you and Bowerbird touched on something that all too often gets conveniently overlooked in the discussions and debates surrounding this issue - What about the woman's right to life?

What the anti-abortion absolutists are telling women is this: At the moment of conception you have entered a state of slavery. You, your life and your rights have been negated. You are NOTHING.

And to your point about righteousness and more precisely those who presume to think and speak and act for God, they tell us that God has endowed us with certain unalienable rights, and then they presume to arrogate to themselves the very power of God Himself and take away what only God can give and take away from us!!

Such is the folly of men...



...and if that is not blasphemy I don't know what is.

 

I wouldn't be surprised; the lack of integrity an honor we are seeing these days in congress is appalling. Part of the problem is that if the rules aren't enforced, there are no rules- and congress has no effective way to enforce it's own rules. The "honor system" has degraded over time, and in the last 5-10 years has disappeared; been abandoned it seems.

 

The rate is driven by black women and it's horrible. Without them, our mortality rates are similar to the rest of the western world. I was trying to figure this out.

I was unable to get Continent wide results for Africa, but, I was able to get figures for Caribbean black women, and they have the same maternal mortality rates as US non-black women and European women. That's interesting but here is where it gets really weird. If they move to the US, their daughters will have the same horrific maternal mortality rates that US black women do, and I mean horrible, as in nearly every US black family is touched by this while the rest of the population is largely untouched.

While wrestling with this, I found: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16549493/ Black Americans are in a constant state of Vit D deficiency. And Vit D levels are strongly linked to a wide array of health outcomes. You want to do something very beneficial for yourself and those you love? Make sure they maintain optimum vit d levels.

Here's another thing, simply taking Vit D does not seem to provide the same benefits as getting out in the sun more, though it's certainly advisable to do both, so long as you do not overdo it.

But, the Caribbean is on the equator and so it takes much less sun exposure to optimize Vit D levels in a dark skinned person, there, than it does in the US and this becomes more pronounced as you move further North.

I think supplements and making sure you spend regular quality time in the sunshine is very important and becomes more important if you are darker skinned and living closer to the poles than your ancestors did.

IDIOTS DELIBERATELY MISCONSTRUED WHAT SEN. BILL CASSIDY SAID: Racial disparities in maternal mortality is getting to be one of those issues for which one must robotically repeat the progressive talking points. No further comment is permitted.

​

“Sometimes maternal mortality includes up to a year after birth and would include someone being killed by her boyfriend,” Cassidy said. “In my mind, it’s better to restrict your definition to that which is the perinatal, if you will — the time just before and in the subsequent period after she has delivered.”

That obviously an intellectually defensible point. The good Senator has a solid track record on trying to solve this terrible issue. How bad? "Four Black mothers die for every white mother and two Black babies die for every one white baby. In the United States, Black mothers are three times more likely to die in childbirth than white mothers." It's nearly beyond belief that a subset of our society is dealing with this level of carnage, on top of the others they suffer from as well.

"Cassidy is a co-sponsor of the Maternal Health Quality Improvement Act, a 2021 bill that would direct the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to allocate funding to support maternal health. The bill was included in an omnibus spending bill, which passed in March."

 

Personally, I only care about what I do with my kids as far as what you do is your business.

 

Sooooo Balck women are “less”? We can just chop them out of the statistics because of skin colour? I am sitting here with my mouth on the floor. Black, white, brindle women are women and they ALL deserve not to face death. And if you really drilled down the stats you will find it is poverty that is the common factor. But even without that your fractured health care system allows too muck individual freedom for its medical staff. UK has the NICE guidelines we have https://www.health.gov.au/resources...-documents#health-professional-summary-sheets as well as Statewide best practice guidelines.

Yep! POVERTY! It is not skin colour but poverty. Now we have a rural/metro disparity especially with infant mortality despite aeromedical transport but I am talking here where it can take four hours to retrieve a patient from a remote location but even factoring that in our maternal mortality rates are better than half that of the USA. Plus our immigrants mostly work in rural and remote locations because THAT Aus where we need skilled workers and that is how our immigration is set up - visas are much easier in remote areas.

Vitamin D deficiency does NOT explain the difference because you would see the impact here as well. We have a dark skinned indigenous population as well as a large Immigrant population from countries as diverse as India, Philippines, Africa you name the country we have immigrants from there. Again if this were the issue we would see a replication of that here and we don’t. We DO see the impact of poverty on our indigenous population (same chronic health profiles as American Indian and Inuit) Multi generational housing, alcoholism, living in remote communities with poorer health care acces and THEY ado not have America’s horrific maternal mortality rate.

.

Supplements will not replace good free antenatal and perinatal care
A relatively large share of pregnancy-related deaths in the U.S. occur after birth.
To better understand the high maternal death rate in the U.S., it is helpful to know when they happen.

• Around one-third of U.S. pregnancy-related deaths, counted up to one year postbirth, occur during pregnancy (Exhibit 2).
• 17 percent of deaths occur on the day of delivery.
• 52 percent occur after delivery, or postpartum:
  • 19 percent of all maternal deaths occur between one and six days postpartum.
  • 21 percent of all maternal deaths are between one and six weeks postpartum.
  • 12 percent of all maternal deaths take place during the remaining portion of the year; these are also known as late maternal deaths.5

https://www.commonwealthfund.org/pu...ality-maternity-care-us-compared-10-countries

F’ing idiot! He should do a modicum of research FIRST
What We Mean by Maternal Mortality4
There are three commonly used measures of maternal deaths in the United States. While they all capture some aspect of maternal deaths, they are not equivalent.

Pregnancy-associated death: Death while pregnant or within one year of the end of the pregnancy, irrespective of cause.

Pregnancy-related death: Death during pregnancy or within one year of the end of pregnancy from a pregnancy complication, a chain of events initiated by pregnancy, or the aggravation of an unrelated condition by the physiologic effects of pregnancy. Used in the U.S. only, this CDC measure is typically reported as a ratio per 100,000 births.

Maternal mortality: Death while pregnant or within 42 days of the end of pregnancy, irrespective of the duration and site of the pregnancy, from any cause related to or aggravated by the pregnancy or its management, but not from accidental or incidental causes. Used by the World Health Organization (WHO) in international comparisons, this measure is reported as a ratio per 100,000 births.
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/pu...ality-maternity-care-us-compared-10-countries

Again what is the link to POVERTY? Affordable health care? Antenatal and perinatal care? One of the real issues is the lack of Midwives in the USA. Midwives here do most of the care. Many are independent practitioners. But in the USA OBGYN medicos decided that midwives would cut into their profits so the profession never got the respect it has elsewhere and with that the pay and rewards.

Significant racial/ethnic inequities exist in pregnancy care with non-Hispanic black women incurring 3 to 4 times higher rates of pregnancy-related death than non-Hispanic white women.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7377107/

 

Yes but often 15 weeks is still too early to diagnose some of the more devastating foetal abnormalities

 

I thought the same when I was a teenager with raving hormones and abortion had recently become legal. Then I majored in biology and learn what is life and how it is created. Been anti-abortion ever since.

 

Anti-choice.

 

Yeah you seem confused, though to be fair it also sounds like you've heard from some people on the left who are also confused though I haven't seen them here. Of course it's alive. Of course it's human. So what? So are tumors. So is each individual cell in your body that you could grow on a tissue culture separately from the body if you wanted. What's actually morally relevant is whether there is a mind - whether there is an actual person capable of feeling/experiencing anything being harmed. There is no mind in the embryo and early fetus, and so there is no other persons rights to consider besides the mother at that point.

Doesn't matter. Identical twins begin with identical DNA (rare differences by birth due to random errors). That doesn't make them any less of persons just because they're not genetically unique.

Not any more than an egg is a chicken, or that a blueprint is a house. It's not a person yet, and it takes a lot to get there.

No it doesn't. Beings have minds though. Doesn't strictly have to be human, but a mind at least.

Here are dictionary definitions, #2 is relevant for our purposes (the broadest definition of being is just something that exists, which isn't relevant for us here):

'
Definition of being
noun
the fact of existing; existence (as opposed to nonexistence).
conscious, mortal existence; life:Our being is as an instantaneous flash of light in the midst of eternal night.
substance or nature of such a being as to arouse fear.
something that exists:inanimate beings.
a living thing:strange, exotic beings that live in the depths of the sea.
"

Perhaps you didn't know that an embryo is a mindless human-shaped collection of cells that has no mental existence at all?

No it's not. Unrelated. I mean, I hope there are souls, but to recognize something as a "being" only means it has its own mind.

 

And have no problem with the innocent human being being killed simply because the mother doesn't want it to live?

 

Red herring
" It should be noted that varying definitions of medical necessity for abortion have ricocheted along a continuum with consideration of a “broad range of physical, emotional, psychological, demographic, and familial factors relevant to a woman’s well-being” at one extreme and “conditions which place a woman in danger of death” at the other.1,2 However, while the occasional politician or news reporter will still indicate that late-term abortions are most often performed in the case of “severe fetal anomalies” or to “save the woman’s life,” the trajectory of the peer-reviewed research literature has been obvious for decades: most late-term abortions are elective, done on healthy women with healthy fetuses, and for the same reasons given by women experiencing first trimester abortions."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6457018/

Yes there are times in a medical emergency when the baby does not survive, that is far different from the mother deciding she just doesn't want to child to live so has it killed.

Tell me, when the mother did lose the baby did you or the doctor console her by telling her how sorry you were she lost her fetus or her baby?

 

But what is your opinion on abortion, not people choosing things, but abortion ITSELF?