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The 8th Amendment Part 2 - Mod Warning in OP
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nozzferrahhtoo wrote: »And once again here is a case of you ignoring everything I said and asked you and simply repeating your rhetoric unedited in any way. What a fetus LOOKS like should have zero impact on the debate. There is nothing about the SHAPE of something that should mediate our moral and ethical concerns. For example if our technology reaches the point where I could install your sentience onto the physical equivalent of a toaster, that fact you look nothing like a human at all would not in the least bit detract from the mass of moral and ethical concern I should have towards your well being.
Discourse is the way to establish what a persons views are. However you did not deign to reply to my last post to you, choosing instead to entirely ignore it. So forgive me if my sympathy for your difficulty is zero. Were I seeing you making the attempt in good faith I would feel sympathy, but the opposite seems to be the case. Especially given your shift from talking WITH me to talking ABOUT me in ways that do not represent me accurately.
However I am genuinely baffled what part of my views is causing you the difficulty. It really is quite simple. I believe rights, and moral and ethical concerns, are in the business of mediating the actions of, and well being of, sentient entities. The fetus is not a sentience entity and never has been. Therefore I have no moral and ethical concerns for it.
If you could zero in on what aspect of that actually causes your difficulties I can certainly elaborate on it.
I certainly do not see what is "extreme" either. We have had a few users of boards.ie claiming that fetus/child has no rights until birth and can happily be killed at ANY point for ANY reason on that continuum.
THAT is extreme but I have little reason to doubt their sincerity. With one exception; a user who touted that nonsense in an attempt to make the pro choice side look bad for years, but as soon as the referendum was announced he instantly shifted his position to the complete opposite extreme and is now claiming no fetus should be aborted ever for ANY non medical reason. Quite the shift and quite the timely one too. Suspect I think.
My positions in comparison to those extremes are very moderate and central on the continuum. And my positions do not appear to differ from many pro choice speakers here AT ALL. I am just much more expressive about the reasoning I have behind them. My conclusions are pretty average however. What part of arguing for abortion by choice in society up to an ideal of 16 weeks are you seeing as "extreme" here exactly? Is that not what pretty much ever other pro choice speaker here is calling for on this site? OR here?
Errrrr no it is not "exactly" what we are being asked to vote on at all. By a long shot. It is of course unclear whether you are lying here, or merely ignorant of what the vote actually is, but it would behoove you and your credibility on the site to change it either way. Especially as all three citations you have offered to back up your scare mongering and paranoia are.... well.... to posts made by yourself.
If you have evidence that the government intend to implement something 100% longer than the recommendations of the Citizens Assembly, or that Clinics will A) appear and
flout the law.... I am all ears. But assertion of this scare mongering is not going to get me there.
However even if your fantastical and unsubstantiated fantasy were to come to pass..... the reality is that in countries with no abortion at all..... in countries with limits like the UK..... and in countries with VERY flexible (if any) limits like Canada....... when we seek figures on women who have sought abortions we find that consistently 96 to 98% of them seek abortion in or before week 16. Over 92% in fact in or before week 12. So not only do your paranoid concerns appear invalid and unsubstantiated, that are also irrelevant and not really all that concerning.
But it is certainly telling, revealing even, that you can not establish a single argument against what me and others are ACTUALLY campaigning for, so you have to go to extremes we have not espoused to attack that instead. All with nothing but YOUR personal assurances such extremes will come to pass.
But I can make you an open promise. If Repeal happens (of which I have more than small doubts will occur), and if clinics or other outlets start performing abortions past the stage that law says they should be, then contact me. You will find an ally in me on the front lines of campaigning to have their head on a plate in terms of full justice and law.
I find it superfluous to requirements and given the non-linear increase in complications and issues around later term abortions not all that useful either. I think campaigning for, and enforcing, abortion options at 12 or 16 weeks is more than enough and I see no good reason for giving it solely as an option at 24 weeks. Of course including here the same caveat as before regarding the difference between choosing to have an abortion, and requiring one for medical or other reasons.
I am committed to the well being of sentient entities. No more. No less. The pregnant women is one. The 12/16/20 week fetus inside her is not one. At all. And never has been.
That is indeed one of the pre-requisites of consciousness and sentience. And a fetus at, say, 16 weeks pretty much lacks the relevant activity ENTIRELY. An analogy I often use is to radio waves. Imagine in the analogy that Sentience=Radio waves. At 16 weeks the fact is NOT ONLY that there are no radio waves..... but the radio TOWER itself has not even been built yet. So often with abortion we are not JUST talking about places where certain brain activity is absent, but much of the pre-requisites for producing them (the radio tower) is too.
Then they are more than welcome to discuss it with me if they exist, and have any interest in doing so. Your mere invention of them to suit yourself however is as uninteresting as it is suspect and unimpressive. Which is to say: Very. But it is certainly interesting that of all the pro choice posters you speak of, not a single one feels moved to confront me. If this is not at least SOME evidence such people only exist in your fantasy la la land, I am not sure what is.
Wrong about what? I am consistent in my views even if no one else is. I am campaigning for choice based abortion up to 16 weeks. You are asking me about an entity at 22 weeks. It is outside the purview of my position therefore. However if a mother in the UK decided, after it's removal from her womb not to put it on life support and to let it die..... like we do with adult patients when we turn their life support off for example...... then I would not be losing any sleep over it. But it is not what I am campaigning for, or interested in seeing, implemented here in Ireland.
Let me try to sum up the basis of what we are disagreeing on, nozzferrahhtoo.
You are insisting that if anyone wants to engage with you on whether a life in the womb is a human being - and therefore deserving rights and protections - they must do so on the basis of a reductivist biologically measurable definition of personhood. They might have a different biological definition than you but that is the only kind of disagreement you will allow as valid.
I don't accept your restriction of the discussion to those grounds.
Not because you are ending the whole mind body debate before it even starts.
But because that is not how most people think.
Most of us don't see other people as people based on something about them we measure biologically.
You seem to accept that is the reality of how the rest of us are but you also think we are all mistaken.nozzferrahhtoo wrote:And it is consistently amazing to me how many people simply do not know. They think what they think because they think it. No other reason than that. And the only thing more baffling than that reality, is the fact that this does not seem to bother them at all. That their most cherished opinions has no basis in argument, evidence, data or reasoning and their only defence of it is to become emotional or hostile.
I think we can therefore agree on one thing. You are out on a limb with this. And that fact is really lit up in neon when you say
If you want a rational argument I'd offer one based on reductio ad absurdum.You are asking me about an entity at 22 weeks. It is outside the purview of my position therefore. However if a mother in the UK decided, after it's removal from her womb not to put it on life support and to let it die..... like we do with adult patients when we turn their life support off for example...... then I would not be losing any sleep over it.
I think I speak for most of us when I say that what you just described above is so untenable that it means either your reasoning is faulty or, more likely, at least one of your premises is also untenable.
And I would offer that the untenable premise is that personhood has a biologically measurable definition.
(And for those playing at home and feeling that maybe a different definition might work; if you abandon 'personhood begins with regular brain waves/sentience' then all the other definitions -Gastrulation, Early Organ formation, Quickening, Thalamus formation -put the definition of personhood earlier. Voting yes would be voting to take the lives of tens of thousands of these human beings.)
Finally the quote from nozzferrahhtoo above, about a woman ending the life of a 22 week premature baby in an incubator, was the last thing in his post. It wasn't hidden, it was the culmination of his argument.
And right underneath
Call me Al, crustybla, DubInMeath, Fizzlesque, frag420, January, PopePalpatine, Simi, swampgas and Yeah_Right
all thanked him for it.
I don't want to stick anyone with views that aren't theirs but unless each of them somehow make it clear that this is not actually their view the obvious thing is to assume it is.
Still you've got to admire nozzferrahhtoo's willingness to stick with this all the wayThe harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting velocity the line ran through the grooves;- ran foul. Ahab stooped to clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the heavy eye-splice in the rope's final end flew out of the stark-empty tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its depths.0
This discussion has been closed.
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