It is funny (and by funny, I mean sort of pathetic-sad) to hear conservatives bemoaning progress and progressive ideals and realities. I recently was reading how one conservative was objecting to progress as an ideal... questioning whether we are, as a world, getting better.
Here's the truth: We are objectively getting better and making progress. Human lives are better now than they used to be.
People who are gay can live with less fear of being killed or beaten or imprisoned. That IS progress.
Women have rights to vote and work and make their own choices. They can choose to marry who they want. That is objectively progress. Women are objectively better off now.
By and large we no longer embrace slavery as an option. That is progress.
Our Wars no longer involve indiscriminate Slaughter or genocide. That is progress. People are safer.
We are objectively better educated as a whole.
Poor people have more options.
Our healthcare is better. We are living longer.
Transgender folks are no longer beaten or killed or harassed to the degree they were.
We have more places that Embrace religious liberty.
We DO have more rights and less infringements of those rights in more places.
More people (many more) are more literate.
My people are no longer slaughtered or threatened or imprisoned for not agreeing with the state religion as we once were. Thank God.
In just about every objective measure, we have made so much progress.
Yes, some religions that in the past used to have more "liberty" to oppress and shame and marginalize those who disagree with them no longer have that degree of "liberty." But that is progress as well.
Many researchers and thinkers have pointed to the data to support the notion that the world IS getting better, progressing to a better place.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sex-murder-and-the-meaning-life/201803/ten-ways-the-world-is-getting-better
For those who are insisting that our "progress" (as they might say it, in scare quotes) is not real or not worthwhile, they're just wrong. They're confusing being able to force and push their religion on others against their will as a backward step. Or perhaps they're just overwhelmed by what they perceive to be a flood of bad news, thinking that it's the norm.
That is their mistake. We do make progress/are living in a world that's getting progressively better in a huge number of measurable ways and that's a good thing.
For those who say that not all progress is good, I don't think they're getting it right.
Not all change is good. The change to a much more deeply engrained fossil fuel society and all the pollution and harm that results is NOT good, of course. But then, it's not progress. It's just change.
When people speak of making progress in the world, they are generally referring to Webster's third definition, "gradual betterment." Yes, there is the definition of progress as another step in a journey (and that journey could be good or bad), but that isn't what people mean when they speak of making progress in the world to a better place.
And I will note that not all progress is equally good or equally valid. 100 years ago, people with disabilities were often kept at home, hidden away or, worse, placed in horrifying institutions, locked away from "the normal people." That was, of course, a great immoral tragedy. Fifty years ago, that started changing, with people being deinstitutionalized and "allowed" to get out of their homes into "Day Programs..." That was an improvement, it was progress from the "bad old days" of institutionalization. But still, being isolated away from the world in what amounts to adult day cares to be kept safe, but contained is not really living.
Maya Angelou has a quote that is applicable here:
"Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better."
We know now that the better solution for adults with disabilities is not day programs, but community involvement to as large a degree as possible. Getting your own home is better than a group home. Getting out to volunteer at the library, to go to church, to clean the garden is better than a day program. Getting a job is better than being in a sheltered workshop (look it up, if you don't know).
The point being that just because the day program was not the best solution, it was progress and a positive change. And now, people are moving away from that to any even better, plugged into community life and THAT is positive change, progress.
Things are getting better. The data shows it. Believe the data. Believe reality.
And, for those fundamentalists (Muslim fundamentalists, Mormon fundamentalists, Christian fundamentalists, etc) who feel like things are getting worse because their views are no longer in the mainstream and, indeed, are considered harmful and bad, you just have to keep in mind that your loss of opportunity to oppress because of your religious views IS progress, too.
143 comments:
Stan, talking on this issue with Craig over at Stan's blog said...
it is a mistake to believe that "'better' is something that can be objectively measured and achieved." We are not good as a race at determining either "beneficial" or "harmful". We know this, given our own common term, "unexpected consequences."
1. We CAN reasonably measure "better." Children dying to preventable illness in infancy at lower rates IS reasonably (I say objectively, but certainly reasonably) Good. We don't need to debate much about this. It would be asinine to argue that more children dying younger would be a good thing.
Gay and transgender folk NOT being killed or imprisoned for being openly gay or transgender IS a good thing. The oppression of people is always a bad thing, reasonable people CAN agree. I think objectively, but at the very least, we can reasonably agree to this, all of us people of good will.
Less pollution and toxins in our air and water IS a reasonable good and improvement. More pollution and toxins in our air and water IS a reasonable Bad result. We can measure this and agree upon it reasonably.
More literacy IS an objective or at least reasonable good. And we have more of it. We are better off with more educated and literate people in the world. The world is objectively better as a result. Lives are improved, harm diminished.
etc, etc.
To argue that "we can't know what is and isn't good progress" is an idiot's argument. Not saying that Stan is making that argument, but IF he is, it is the argument of an idiot.
2. We ARE reasonably good at recognizing good and bad actions and consequences. People of good will can look at a genocide or an oppression of a people and recognize that THIS IS BAD. It isn't rocket science.
3. Yes, Stan IS correct that we don't always know all the consequences of our actions. Their ALWAYS will be unexpected consequences and unintended bad results from actions taken in good faith to do good. Such is life in an imperfect world.
But what is the answer? To do nothing but heed to the conservative status quo and hope for the best? OR do we take actions and base policies on the best knowledge we currently have?
Of course, we do the latter.
Conservatism (classically defined) has its place. Being prudent in our policy making recognizing that we don't always know the consequences is reasonable. BUT, when it comes to needed actions to alleviate suffering, then yes, we should take those actions in as prudent and well-considered manner as possible.
Like I mention in my post, it WAS an improvement to deinstitutionalize folks with disabilities. AND it was not a perfect solution to end up with group homes and day programs for these adults, but it was an improvement.
We do the best we know how to do until we learn to do better. Then we do better.
It's just not as hard as some make it out to be.
Wow. Over at Stan's blog where he and Craig are talking about this topic, Craig says, and I quote...
most are coming from a presumption that better is defined by western culture. We clearly have clashes between cultures who hold that their position is better. On the one side it seems better if people aren’t killed for their sexual activities, yet a significant portion of the world would suggest that sex outside of certain rigid parameters should be punished with death. They’d argue that such was good.
Absent on objective standard of good and evil, we have no clear way to determine better.
This is the problem with the whole Bible as Rulebook gang of Phariseeism... It just becomes petty in its tyranny and evil.
Yes, Yes! Hell, Yes! We CAN determine that it's wrong to kill people for doing "sex the wrong way..." Human rights.
IF one accepts the very reasonable (and, to many of us, Christian) notion that humans have certain basic rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and some others think "You know, it's okay for me to take this person's life because I don't like the way he's doing sex..." we KNOW that the latter is a great evil that's wrong and that letting people make up their own minds about consensual sexual activity IS better.
Good Lord, the degree of filth these folk seem to embrace in the worship of the false god of "the bible" (by which they mean, "MY UNDERSTANDING of the Bible," by which they mean, "What I say, because I and the people like ME are the ones who are rightly understanding God and who can say authoritatively what God thinks is good..."
In pursuing a god of their own making, they embrace evil and harm and depravity.
So, to answer Craig's dilemma: Yes, yes, we CAN know which is better.
Given a choice between depriving someone of life and liberty because they disagree with what I think is moral (but is harming no one) and NOT depriving someone of life and liberty just because they disagree with me, the BETTER more MORAL and RATIONAL option is the one defined by a respect for human rights.
The other is just an embrace of evil, mistaken for a good.
And yes, I do recognize that cultures are different. I am wary of any elevation of Western civilization over the rest of the world.
But an acknowledgement of basic human rights is NOT limited to western civilization, so it would be presumptuous to say that those who support human rights as a measure of decency and justice are rejecting the values of the rest of the world.
Yes, sometimes cultures will disagree. I would never insist another culture must meet my values. However, when some cultures (Muslim fundamentalists, Christian fundamentalists, certain other cultures) think it is okay and even good to mutilate girls' genitals, to stone to death adulterers or homosexuals or otherwise violate human rights, that is a line that I do not think we can cross and remain moral or rational.
Dan, have you read Steven Pinker's book?
Actually, Craig, the two things most responsible for the mass improvement in the world is secular humanism and science (hint: the Enlightenment).
Motivated by faith is no vice. Blinded by old dogma is.
They followed their intellect - we Christians call that process the image and likeness of the living God: faith seeking understanding as St Anselm encourages.
Or, as you dead dogma folks call it: the infamy of modernism.
_____
From your shallow life of dead dogma, you’ve swallowed fake news. Coyne is the extremist. It only takes an open curious mind and two clicks. You consistently fail right at “open.”
This is Pinker:
“How could they do it? Nothing melts the heart like a helpless baby. Even a biologist's cold calculations tell us that nurturing an offspring that carries our genes is the whole point of our existence. Neonaticide, many think, could be only a product of pathology. The psychiatrists uncover childhood trauma. The defense lawyers argue temporary psychosis. The pundits blame a throwaway society, permissive sex education and, of course, rock lyrics.
But it's hard to maintain that neonaticide is an illness when we learn that it has been practiced and accepted in most cultures throughout history. And that neonaticidal women do not commonly show signs of psychopathology. In a classic 1970 study of statistics of child killing, a psychiatrist, Phillip Resnick, found that mothers who kill their older children are frequently psychotic, depressed or suicidal, but mothers who kill their newborns are usually not. (It was this difference that led Resnick to argue that the category infanticide be split into neonaticide, the killing of a baby on the day of its birth, and filicide, the killing of a child older than one day. )
Killing a baby is an immoral act, and we often express our outrage at the immoral by calling it a sickness. But normal human motives are not always moral, and neonaticide does not have to be a product of malfunctioning neural circuitry or a dysfunctional upbringing. We can try to understand what would lead a mother to kill her newborn, remembering that to understand is not necessarily to forgive.”
What is it in “We can try to understand what would lead a mother to kill her newborn, remembering that to understand is not necessarily to forgive” that you don’t understand?
Your rash, presumptive lying mistake? Probably.
It’s your faith in dead dogma.
Nice diversion, though, from having to admit that Roman and Anglican scientists - really all Roman and Anglican christians - don’t have to check their brains at the church door as you would like them to do.
It’s no surprise that facts so disturb your world that you cannot continue in thought. If you had a living faith rather than dead dogma, you’d have no fear of facts and all courage to engage with issues while humble enough to accept mysteries.
Here, perhaps if you read again and try nonanxious thought, you can absorb the last sentence and see the obvious: Pinker is calling for compassion from understanding. Your default is judgment from ignorance.
“It seems obvious that we need a clear boundary to confer personhood on a human being and grant it a right to life. Otherwise, we approach a slippery slope that ends in the disposal of inconvenient people or in grotesque deliberations on the value of individual lives. But the endless abortion debate shows how hard it is to locate the boundary. Anti-abortionists draw the line at conception, but that implies we should shed tears every time an invisible conceptus fails to implant in the uterus -- and, to carry the argument to its logical conclusion, that we should prosecute for murder anyone who uses an IUD. Those in favor of abortion draw the line at viability, but viability is a fuzzy gradient that depends on how great a risk of an impaired child the parents are willing to tolerate. The only thing both sides agree on is that the line must be drawn at some point before birth.
Neonaticide forces us to examine even that boundary. To a biologist, birth is as arbitrary a milestone as any other. Many mammals bear offspring that see and walk as soon as they hit the ground. But the incomplete 9-month-old human fetus must be evicted from the womb before its outsize head gets too big to fit through its mother's pelvis. The usual primate assembly process spills into the first years in the world. And that complicates our definition of personhood.
What makes a living being a person with a right not to be killed? Animal-rights extremists would seem to have the easiest argument to make: that all sentient beings have a right to life. But champions of that argument must conclude that delousing a child is akin to mass murder; the rest of us must look for an argument that draws a smaller circle. Perhaps only the members of our own species, Homo sapiens, have a right to life? But that is simply chauvinism; a person of one race could just as easily say that people of another race have no right to life...
... No, the right to life must come, the moral philosophers say, from morally significant traits that we humans happen to possess. One such trait is having a unique sequence of experiences that defines us as individuals and connects us to other people. Other traits include an ability to reflect upon ourselves as a continuous locus of consciousness, to form and savor plans for the future, to dread death and to express the choice not to die. And there's the rub: our immature neonates don't possess these traits any more than mice do.
Several moral philosophers have concluded that neonates are not persons, and thus neonaticide should not be classified as murder. Michael Tooley has gone so far as to say that neonaticide ought to be permitted during an interval after birth. Most philosophers (to say nothing of nonphilosophers) recoil from that last step, but the very fact that there can be a debate about the personhood of neonates, but no debate about the personhood of older children, makes it clearer why we feel more sympathy for an Amy Grossberg than for a Susan Smith.
So how do you provide grounds for outlawing neonaticide? The facts don't make it easy. Some philosophers suggest that people intuitively see neonates as so similar to older babies that you couldn't allow neonaticide without coarsening the way people treat children and other people in general. Again, the facts say otherwise. Studies in both modern and hunter-gatherer societies have found that neonaticidal women don't kill anyone but their newborns, and when they give birth later under better conditions, they can be devoted, loving mothers.
The laws of biology were not kind to Amy Grossberg and Melissa Drexler, and they are not kind to us as we struggle to make moral sense of the teen-agers' actions. One predicament is that our moral system needs a crisp inauguration of personhood, but the assembly process for Homo sapiens is gradual, piecemeal and uncertain. Another problem is that the emotional circuitry of mothers has evolved to cope with this uncertain process, so the baby killers turn out to be not moral monsters but nice, normal (and sometimes religious) young women. These are dilemmas we will probably never resolve, and any policy will leave us with uncomfortable cases. We will most likely muddle through, keeping birth as a conspicuous legal boundary but showing mercy to the anguished girls who feel they had no choice but to run afoul of it.”
I'm interested, Marshall, whether you would call for an abortion in the case where the mother will die if the pregnancy is not terminated. If you would, or if you would not, on what basis are you elevating the mother's life over the fetus or the fetus over the mother's life?
You, too, Craig. What would be your decision and on what philosophical basis does your decision rest? Let me not characterize what you think. Tell us outright.
In the minuscule percentage of the times where there is a 100% chance of the mother dying, I would reluctantly accept that abortion might be necessary. Of course, if a surgical procedure is necessary to save the mother, why wouldn’t you choose a cesarean?
The problem with your question is that from a practical sense, I would gladly accept a law stating that the only circumstance where abortion is legal is the 1% where it is guaranteed that the mother would die, and abortion was the only viable option.
Unfortunately, no one on the left would make that deal. So it’s a moot point.
Of course,let’s use something exceedingly rare to make policy.
Thank you for responding. Let's go to school for a little while as I wait for my wife to get home from the salon:
"In the minuscule percentage of times" - a phrase redolent of Situational Ethics from early 20th century liberal theology: something your kind of Christians - and people like Marshall - don't like. No absolute moral system; have to take into account the situation.
Minuscule in our society can mean tens of thousands of times. Reluctance is disregarded. In each case you are employing some definition of value of human life in order to decide. Once, twice, doesn't matter. You're using some system of ethics that have to be observed with reason and consistently to make sense. Otherwise, it's just your whim.
A Cesarean takes a certain level of stamina, ability to endure blood loss, ability to undergo anesthesia for the duration, etc. But you know all that. Bad dodge on your part.
No doctor can guarantee anything. When it comes to taking measures to void death, it's a judgment call. But you know that. Bad dodge on your part.
And then you try to divert attention to "the left." Bad dodge on your part.
The question wasn't about policy. I asked you on what basis you would save the mother over the fetus.
You dodge and diverted.
Your responded. But you refused to make yourself clear on what you think.
So much for asking you to be clear.
I'll leave Craig's comment in this case, to help illustrate the problem that the right has on abortion.
The principle:
"Generally, abortions should be avoided, BUT THERE ARE EXCEPTIONS to that rule, where we defer to the preference of the mother/family..."
...is the same principle that the Democrats have. It's the same principle that the vast majority of conservatives have, in fact (with a few opting to force the woman to have a baby even if it involves her death... Those tiny few are at least not hypocritical... they're just operating from a position of insanity and oppression).
We're operating from the same principle, just drawing the lines at different places and the Democrats are not being hypocritical in attacking those who draw the line at a different place, calling them baby killers and murderers. Another follow up question to Craig, et al, is "Are you a supporter of murder and killing babies and evil because you support abortion in some cases?"
Thanks, Feodor, for drawing out at least a partial answer from Craig and exposing the hypocrisy. Would that they would be self aware enough to recognize the hypocrisy and maybe modify their approach.
Lest I be (falsely) accused of misrepresenting Craig's position (again), I'll allow Craig the opportunity to clarify if I've got his position correct.
Craig, IS THIS your position:
"Generally, abortions should be avoided, BUT THERE ARE EXCEPTIONS to that rule, where we defer to the preference of the mother/family..."
...or have I misunderstood your words?
" I would gladly accept a law stating that the only circumstance where abortion is legal is the 1% where it is guaranteed that the mother would die, and abortion was the only viable option. "
What we haven't gotten is how Marshall and Craig define what is a human person in a way that grounds their privileging either the mother over the fetus for some set of moral reasons of the fetus over the mother for some moral reasons.
These moral reasons necessarily have to relate to evaluating which is the fuller case of a human person.
Mr. Pinker cites some reasons from philosophers - which Marshall disparages without the ability to present an opposing argument.
I wonder if Craig's rudimentary thinking has parallel with what those philosophers, as presented by Mr Pinker, argue:
"... having a unique sequence of experiences that defines us as individuals and connects us to other people. Other traits include an ability to reflect upon ourselves as a continuous locus of consciousness, to form and savor plans for the future, to dread death and to express the choice not to die."
These, of course, are the kinds of descriptions of a full human person that medical ethics use to privilege the mother's life over a fetus that has not lived a life of memories and not had a network of human relations in the world.
The pertinence to your post, Dan, is of course that secular Enlightenment philosophers, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Locke, Hume, etc., taught the west and subsequently the world to reason out what is a human person based on reflecting upon the evidence of human life in place of using ancient religious texts and culturally bound religious institutions.
Reasoning out with our best, most generous reflection on human life is what prompted new and progressive understandings of human rights. The scientific revolution from the Enlightenment sadly produced techniques that were turned to making the slave trade and colonial dispossession efficient. But other projects of the Enlightenment led to more critical reflection about what is a human being and what rights should all human beings have. Eventually, the critical spirit overcame the instrumental abuse. Over the centuries since, we have steadily while wobbly progressed in our love of human life, our love of freedom, of human creativity, human choice, and our amazement of how nature's biology seeks adaptive diversity.
We are entrusted by God to use our divine likeness to reason with our best intelligent efforts to make life better for all. Yet, there are limits on our understanding and our ability to make things perfect. Medical science is one. We must depend upon our best judgments when competing concerns leave us difficult choices.
A woman has the right over her body. A fetus without lived experiences, without memories, without social psychology and relationships does not, in sad cases, trump a woman's right over her body. (How much less a zygote or embryo!) Until the fetus has the capacity to achieve full human development outside a woman's body.
Craig abdicates his own request that we ask him to clarify his thoughts. He avoided answering the question even though he needn’t have written anything. And then, when his diversions are pointed out, he huffs and blames others. Cheap and shallow.
I think the problem is that we ask reasonable questions and, IF they answer them, it exposes holes in their arguments and hypocrisy in their positions. So, rather than answering reasonable questions directly, they opt to obfuscate and dodge, to claim they've answered what they haven't answered and hope no one notices.
Faced with engaging in adult dialog and answering questions and admitting to the holes, they are opting for not engaging in adult dialog and then blame others for not being nice enough.
Meh.
Succinctly and clearly put. I agree.
Amazingly obtuse, rigidly blind denials of the thousands? tens of thousands? of medical cases every year where doctors have to make the decision to either save the mother because her body cannot bear the pregnancy or save the child.
(Craig, at least, clearly acknowledges reality, refusing outright denial while pushing diversion.)
Or Marshall is aware that he has zero answer to decide in such cases and tries the old conservative cover-up.
Marshall here is being either incredibly shallow or typically corrupt.
From Marshall’s cited article: “There are rare circumstances in which a mother’s life is in jeopardy due to either pre-existing conditions or pregnancy complications.”
Did you not see it, Marshall? Did you read it and not understand it? Or did you just choose to ignore it hoping no one would notice?
In cases where the mother’s life may be in “jeopardy” if the pregnancy continues, who gets the privilege in deciding who lives?
Craig leaves it to the mother/family. Which means that he cannot come up with a description of the human person that guides them in any way. The implication of which, given Craig’s moral position on abortion, leaves the family in the ethical vacuum of deciding whom to murder in order to save the other.
What are your grounds for choosing whom to save in such cases? Come on, make yourself clear.
I did. And you are unable to defend your diversions as an avoidance of answering the question: why do you privilege the mother’s life? On what moral basis?
My answer to your second question is, I don’t know if there is a specific objective moral rationale that fits 100% or the incredibly rare situations you posit. The reality is that anyone in that incredibly rare situation, I’d be inclined to give grace and love in either choice. If I was in that incredibly rare situation, I’d exhaust every possible option, but would probably favor the mother.
Just because I can justify (at some level) killing an innocent human being, doesn’t mean I wouldn’t ask forgiveness.
I certainly wouldn’t celebrate the decision or the outcome.
So, it appears that I'm right, although it's hard to tell given your penchant for not directly answering questions.
"Generally, abortions should be avoided, BUT THERE ARE EXCEPTIONS to that rule, where we defer to the preference of the mother/family..."
Marshall plays the fool who thinks he can hide his shit. In this case, he shares the shit of his cited author.
The article cannot make clear, because the writer does not want to be honest, that when, in their judgment the mother's life is in jeopardy (note, they cannot be sure: it is a judgment call) they will remove a non-viable fetus from the mother. Thus killing it. Because they privilege the mother's life over the fetus's life. This is what they do. What the author writes tries to hide these facts, whether thinking to fool themselves, fool sycophants' like Marshall, or fool God, we don't know. So, they don't tell us - depriving Marshall of thoughts and words for "himself" - on what moral grounds they privilege the mother's life over the fetus's life.
What they declare they won't do is take measures to speed up the demise of the non-viable fetus. In fact, they may take measures that allows the suffocation, organ failure, starvation, or what have you, take longer.
And Marshall thinks this is the Christian thing to do.
Feo, you’re right about one thing. The incredibly rare circumstance you’ve set out, do force a family to decide which living, unique, human, persons is going to have their life ended.
I appreciate you acknowledging the fact that abortion is the ending of an innocent human life and is something that should be mourned, not cheered.
If the choice was between my life and my wife or children, I’d choose to die to save them any time.
There are two problems with your hypothetical/question.
1. You are acknowledging that abortion is the ending of a human life, a position virtually nobody on your side accepts.
2. Your question assumed an objective moral standard, something Dan denies.
But you got your answers.
Well, thankfully, we got an honest kernel from Craig in amongst the chaff of non-sequiturs and non-pertinent offensive/defensive dodges: he hasn't thought that much about how his faith commitments to dead dogma cannot rise to the pastoral challenge of thousands? tens of thousands? real life cases. If we consider triage, taking those that can be easily and successfully helped before the more chancy cases, we now have millions of cases over a decade.
And medical ethics are put into play every day in every hospital, a dozen times. Craig has not explored how much healthcare depends upon ethical reflection from policy to stint, labs to laparoscopy. That's not his fault. He needn't bother. Others can take care of that.
But acting like he can enter the debate and criticize from ignorance is just low character.
Abortions are way down, right? Because of education and science. 2 things from the Enlightenment that have greatly improved the emotional, physical, spiritual lives of hundreds of thousands.
Thanks, Dan, for reminding us of modernity's progress in ushering us toward being better people.
That’s something to celebrate. Unfortunately, only the educated, the sensitive, the humane, the deeply spiritual do. Because our faith does not make us afraid and tribal.
Craig, if you have to twist my words to soothe your conscience, I don’t mind. I don’t want you to be in spiritual pain. A troubled conscience does lead most people to more expansive, Christ-like views, but one must choose that for oneself. I pray, when you’re ready, that you can attend to difficult truths instead of avoiding them by twisting my testimony. Which is:
A fetus is not a fully human life. It is potentially so. For much of the reasoning Pinker covers. Because this is my philosophically grounded, objective - cognitively-based, moral standard of judgment, using my divinely imaging capacity of reasoning, I, thankfully, am not in the position of deciding who to murder. Your approach boils down to just that. I’d rethink it if I were you.
A fetus is a fully human being based on the life stage it is in. But if the magic birth canal makes you sleep better at night you stick with it.
I’d post the links, but I suspect you’ve seen what drs and scientists say, and chosen philosophy and metaphysical solace on this.
I’ve answered your questions, how y’all twist, spin, and delete isn’t my problem.
A one day old fetus is fully human being, deserving of all rights of all born humans? What's your proof for that?
Can you admit that this is an unproven and unprovable opinion, not a fact?
And Craig says drs and scientists like a million of them are storming the gates to stop the murders.
He openly lies about drs and scientists.
He’s stopped responding with kernels of reason and returned to corrupt posturing. But before he left he admitted that in his thinking, with his words, he prefers to murder the little human being in preference to murdering the big human being.
Though, still, without being able to say why he chooses to murder the little one.
Dan,
I'm not sure if your question was intended for me or not. My position is that a "one day old fetus" is a "fully human being" based on it's current developmental phase of life. Therefore it is deserving of all the rights appropriate for it's current developmental phase. I'd suggest that the fundamental rights of all human beings "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" would apply.
Beyond that, unless you can prove that a "one day old fetus" is something other than fully human, I see no value in continuing.
Lest my purpose be misunderstood, I'm merely answering for two reasons.
One, to continue to demonstrate the lie in the "don"t answer questions" trope.
Two, to point out the likelihood that the answer will be deleted and characterized falsely.
That is an attempt to partially answer the questions asked of you. But can you answer all the questions asked of you and do so fully? Do you recognize that it's not a fact that a one day old fetus is fully human deserving of All rights of a human who has been born? Do you recognize that this is your opinion? Do you recognize that you cannot prove your opinion to be a fact?
Read this and understand carefully... No one is denying that a one day old fetus is fully a human fetus. It is, as a point of fact, a human fetus. Of course it is. That's not the question being asked. Do you understand that?
The question is, is a fully human fetus at one day old fully deserving of All Rights a birthed human is? Your answer appears to be no. Given that you would say that a mother can choose whether or not to abort that one day old fetus if her life is threatened.
Can I choose to kill, for instance, my neighbor if I feel my life is threatened. No. Why? Because he is fully human fully deserving of All rights of a human being. But a fetus, at least at one day old, is different. Do you agree with that reality?
Also, despite your protestations that you have in fact answer the questions, do you recognize that you failed to answer the pertinent questions clearly and directly? That is a question I'm putting to you, Craig.
Dan,
If you read what I wrote, you'll fine the answers you claim to seek.
If only you were are forthcoming with answers to the questions of others, as you expect others to be with your questions.
Do you realize that I've never said that a "one day old fetus" is deserving of "All Rights a birthed human"? Do you realize that since I've never said this, you asking is simply foolish?
If you have new specific questions, ask.
That a one day old fetus is or isn’t a fully human being depends on your conviction of what constitutes a fully human being. That you say it is, isn’t an answer to my question. Not that you need to have one. But being unable to say what makes for a fully human being deprived you of any basis on which to rationally claim that for a one day old human fetus.
And then, why you prefer the mother as a fully human being to save over the fetus, according to you but for reasons unknown, also a human being.
It’s the unrevealed logic of choosing between equals that you’ve also not answered.
That’s two questions that are related. And unanswered. Should we ask you to be clearer or has your request to let you know when you haven’t been withdrawn?
If you have a specific question I haven't answered, by all means, point it out. With the blizzard of repetitive asking of the same question over and over again, and the deleted answers it's possible I've missed something.
So a follow-up question, Craig is do you truly think that you did answer the questions the rest of you? Do you truly not understand that you did not answer all the questions directly? Is it a problem with your understanding of writing and communication or do you recognize that you did not answer, for instance, do you recognize that this is just your opinion and not an established fact?
So to your two points, about putting the LIE to the idea that you don't answer questions, you literally did not answer the question asked of you. You played around with the question, you answered some OTHER questions, but you have not answered the pertinent questions in this conversation. So no you did not "put the lie" to anything. Indeed you bore out that you do not answer all the questions, not directly, not clearly, not at all.
To your second point, we can see that don't delete willy-nilly your comments. What I have done is to expect you to answer the questions that are asked of you, and then to delete other comments that are not an answer to the questions asked, to push you to actually answer the questions that are being asked of you. Again, given that you simply factually do not answer the questions, I don't know what else to do to try to get you to participate in an adult level conversation.
1. What makes for a fully human being, Craig?
(Inferentially: What are the cases of less than fully human being? Providing your thoughts on that could additionally clarify the composition of your convictions for us.)
No. Of course not. Having rigorous and reasoned out grounds for making judgments about life and death?
Like Bartleby, Craig prefers not to.
And of course Craig's not answering the question and it is not at all clear that he even knows that he's not answering it. Meanwhile, Marshall is emailing me multiple emails asking why he can't comment. And when I pointed out he can as soon as he answers those five questions asked in previous post ... he can start commenting again. I asked him if you could just give me his definition for enemy of the people. He went back and forth several emails saying he had answered. Saying he could answer. And yet despite all these words, neither of these gentlemen can answer some basic reasonable questions, pertinent to the discussion. Again, I'm not even sure that they don't know they're not answering it.
What can you do?
Yes! It does seem like I cycle between believing that they intentionally hide (divert, dodge, deny, lie) from acknowledging they have no rational answer to oppose our own.
Or that’s all they have and they think that that stuff is a rational answer. Which explains a lot regarding white peoples in America.
Dan,
Do you understand that “a” follow up question is not 3 follow up questions? Do you understand that the first of “a follow up quest” is incoherent and makes no sense.
Do you understand that when you ask a question of me, that you are asking for my answer? You may not like my answer, or it may not agree with your answer, but to suggest that my answer is not an answer is to deny reality.
To your “a” follow up questions.
1. To the best I can decipher your incoherent rambling, yes.
2. No
3. Again, rambling and incoherent. But, if you dispute the factuality of an answer provide evidence that demonstrates your claim. An answer is an answer regardless of your belief about its factuality.
Given your propensity to run away when asked questions elsewhere, I find it amusing that you get so upset about my answering your questions here.
“What can you do?”
Embrace grace.
Answer the questions you are asked the same way you expect others to answer your questions.
Stop the random deletions and false characterization of what you delete.
Hold yourself and your lackey to the same standards you hold others to.
Provide proof when you make claims.
While that’s not everything? It’s a start.
Dodging. Diversion. Denial. Prevarication.
1. What makes for a fully human being, Craig?
You’ve not provided your definition. Nor the material - theological; philosophical; biological; psychological - from which you’ve constructed your definition.
You’re a failed lackey to your own claims. Give them the best grounding you can.
Or admit you have nine.
Avoiding me while calling me names is your worst strategy. Stupidity is the only inferred conclusion I can draw about you without your guts to put clear thoughts on the table.
If you have to fall asleep characterize my position in order to ask me to define my position that I see no reason to waste anymore of my time.
If you can’t admit that after a week you just don’t have an answer, may never have gone in search of an answer, but just keep up a smokescreen of dodges, diversions, Daniels, blaming the other side for your own procrastinating prevarications...
... then it’s clear you have wasted everyone's time by posing as someone who has anything close to informed, deliberative thinking. Clearly you do not. And you should quite sleeping on that fact.
If I had already answered a question that you didn’t get, I’d repeat in all caps and thrown it in your face.
You, not having an answer to repeat... choose to lie.
And you think you have more character than I do. Which is a lie on top of the lie it results from. Mesmerizing in you dimensions of self delusion. Marshall is a true believer, a fanatic of lies. He luxuriates in the fire of lies. You, you keep starting and stifling, starting and stifling. Like you’re punishing your own conscience in public but only you know what’s it privately about.
Which is why I'm more inclined to just cut them off. I am always open to conversation. It doesn't have to be polite, I don't have to agree with the person in that conversation. But it DOES need to be a conversation where they understand that a question is being asked and that they understand the question and that they answer the question being asked.
These two fellows - and to be honest, I see the problem in many conservative circles so it's not just these two fellas - just don't seem to either understand the question or to be able to discern what is being asked or to answer in such a way that an actual conversation can take place.
Truly, what can a person do with that level of an inability to understand and communicate?
The truly lazy, ghettoed minds the have depress me. So much of white America is filled with white peoples whose socio/religious underpinnings have moved away from aspiration, curiosity, generosity, spiritual growth. Astounding the slide toward depravity and brutalization.
I gave you and Marshall answers you’d been demanding for months but you two couldn’t share and post it.
You’re credibility is worth shit, Craig. You’re hypocrisy is sky high.
Craig, if you want to comment here, please answer the questions asked of you.
We see before us, Dan, the irrational fear of progress and how people who are unconscious of this fear inside them have developed an array of defenses - handed down over generations buttressed by outmoded forms of faith and identity - to ward off being conscious that change for the better means true sharing and caring.
So many of the things we learned in kindergarten were repressed beginning right after.
I'm relatively sure that Craig is not wanting or able to have this conversation where he can and does actually answer the questions that are put to him and that are outstanding. But in a good faith effort to help make it easier for him to understand let me repeat some of the very reasonable questions that he has not clearly - or at all - answered...
1. Do you recognize that it's not a fact that a one day old fetus is fully human deserving of All rights of a human who has been born?
2. Do you recognize that this isn't an unproven opinion?
3. If that is your opinion, do you recognize that you cannot prove your opinion to be a fact?
And I think that feo's questions are pertinent to this discussion and I think a reasonable adult who is wanting to make their case against abortion should be prepared to answer it.
4. What makes for a fully human being, Craig?
Craig, you're partial and indirect and confusing answer, the best I can make out so far oh, is this...
Do you realize that I've never said that a 'one day old fetus' is deserving of 'all rights a birth human'? Do you realize that since I've never said this you asking is simply foolish?
Given that your premise that abortion is murder or wrong, it would seem to hinge upon the unproven notion that a fetus is fully human and therefore due all the rights of a birthed human. Now your vague response suggests that you don't think the fetus is deserving of All Rights that a birthed a human has. But then, why oppose abortion if the fetus is not fully deserving of all human rights? And no, it's not foolish. It's a pertinent part of the abortion debate. Understand?
Craig, telling us that you've answered the question is not an answer to the question. Saying I didn't say that is not an answer to the question. And answer to the question is an answer to the question. Therefore I'm deleting your comment. Because I was just asking you to simply answer the questions directly and clearly. It's not that difficult.
However, and to show you how it's done, I will answer your question and do so directly and clearly.
You asked,
"if a fetus is not fully human than what percentage of a human is it?"
The answer, which I've already made abundantly clear, is that a human fetus IS fully a human fetus.
That is not the question. Do you understand that that is not the question?
The question is, is a human fetus fully deserving of all the rights of a birted human? Otherwise known as a human or a person. That is the question you need to answer if you want to comment here.
"The question is, is a human fetus fully deserving of all the rights of a birted human?"
Yes, that's the question you keep asking. But It doesn't accurately reflect what I've said. It's been answered, a deleted answer is still an answer.
I do appreciate that you've condescended to answering one question. I hope that you weren't inconvenienced or strained in any way to do so. I gratefully appreciate you choosing to grace this thread with this one answer.
One clue to the answer you seek, would be to look and see if I've ever claimed that a fetus was endowed with "All the rights" of a "birthed human"? If I haven't, then it's a safe bet that my answer would be no.
FYI, If your too dense, obtuse, or drunk with power to clue in, the answer is no. Of course, you already knew that.
I won't press my luck here asking any more questions, but I do have some more for you.
Question: Does the earth go around the sun, and why?
Craig: yes it does.
Uh, and why?
Craig: Yes, it does.
And what is the sun?
Craig: Yes, it does.
Craig: Now I’ve answered all your questions and proven that the earth goes around the sun.
??? Wtf?
Yes, feodor, you've sized it up a plea. I'm just not at all sure that he recognizes he's making utterly no sense. I didn't ask him, for instance, if he said that. I asked him what his answer was to these questions. And, STILL, no answers to the questions asked.
Craig does appear to be saying now that no, fetuses are not fully deserving of all rights normally associated with being a human. So if that's the case, then why do you oppose abortion? On what basis?
Craig, no goal posts have changed. This has been the conversation and the questions all along.
Your side tends to say that abortion means murdering a human baby. To establish that as a reality, then one must first establish that a fetus is the same thing as a birthed baby.
Which is why these questions matter. Which is why you need to answer them if you're going to comment here.
It appears, now, you find yourself backed into a corner and have to admit that you do not think of the fetus as a human being in the sense of being a birthed human with all the rights that come along with being a human.
Humans have certain rights. A fetus is not quite the same. Yes, it is a human fetus. No it is not a human. There is a distinction.
At least that's appears to be what you're saying. But you feel like you're trapped in a corner so you're being evasive and dodging and missing the point and just not answering the actual questions that are asked of you.
1. Are you now saying that a fetus is not the same as a baby that has been birthed?
2. Are you saying that a fetus does not have all the rights one has as a human?
3. Are you saying that those who call abortion murder are wrong and have no fact-based reason to make such a claim given that a fetus is not equivalent to Human being that has been birthed?
March 8th: “... whether you would call for an abortion in the case where the mother will die if the pregnancy is not terminated. If you would, or if you would not, on what basis are you elevating the mother's life over the fetus or the fetus over the mother's life?” “You, too, Craig. What would be your decision and on what philosophical basis does your decision rest? Let me not characterize what you think. Tell us outright.”
A week later and he hasn’t gotten to part 2.
The goalposts haven’t moved.
We’re just a week older as Craig obfuscates and lays fake blame.
Shallow and prone to lying.
Craig has questions. None of which he can answer because he doesn’t know what makes a human being, even though he privileges the mother’s life over the fetus. So I answered them.
Maybe you have differences, Dan?
______
2. If the fetus is not "fully human", at what point does it become "fully human"?
- See answer to 1.
1. Define "fully human"?
- “The right to life must come… from morally significant traits that we humans happen to possess: having a unique sequence of experiences that defines us as individuals and connects us to other people; an ability to reflect upon ourselves as a continuous locus of consciousness; to form and savor plans for the future;
to dread death…”
3. At what point in gestation does the fetus go through Haekle's phases?
- You mean von Baer. And what is the relevance?
4. Do you realize that defining things as less than "fully human" has been the justification for slavery, The Holocaust, and genocide?
- There are two inferences in the way you put your question that show you haven’t learned to pay attention to what you say and how you say it, as well as that such revelation uncovers how you haven’t been trained to think very deeply along the lines you want to think you think deeply:
a. Do you realize that “things” is not a word that should be used unless one is a slave-holder, Nazi, or congenial to genocide? A forming human being is not a thing.
b. The inference of the way you put your question - equating a zygote with an enslaved person, a Jew or homosexual or Ukrainian, or a Hutu or Cambodian - is breathtakingly brutal to fully human beings under the violence of slavery, torture, and death.… brutal in the opposite direction from which you just twisted what brutal means.
Defining fetal life as potential fully human beings does not allow for the willful slaughter of human beings. Defining a zygote or a fetus as equal to the fully human being in such a way that removes the rights a fully human being has over her own body is exactly the path down which lies slavery.
5. Do you realize that Margaret Sanger (a women that the left praises and names awards after) believed that blacks were not "fully human"?
Of course. Just like we realize that our democratic system was established by geniuses who were racist slave owners and misogynists writing “all men are created equal.” Or that Einstein and Oppenheimer developed nuclear science for weapons that they later hated and regretted and tried to keep the US from using.
It’s called the ability to hold two or more things in one’s mind at the same time.
6. Do you disagree that abortion should be "safe, legal, and rare"?
No. That’s why I cannot comprehend the right’s desire to wipe away access to female healthcare (making all kinds of procedures unsafe and unduly burdened), to oppose full sex education and access to contraception (making abortion more necessary and frequent), and not respecting the rights of all men, thus a tendency to unconstitutionality, hence illegally abrogating a woman’s right to her own body.
7. Does the magic reside inherently in the birth canal, or is there some other magic that transforms the fetus from less than "fully human" to "fully human"?
See answer to 1.
8. Do the pre-born have any rights at all?
Only when separation from the mother doesn’t mean certain death. Only then is the being ready to be defined as an individual and set to begin the journey outlined in the answer to #1.
Until then, the being that is potentially a fully human being is dependent for development on a fully human being, who has sole right over the biological operations of her body. She may choose to discontinue the biological operation of a pregnancy if her continued expression of life as a fully human being is jeopardized by the pregnancy. As just a few examples, her continued expression as a fully human being may be jeopardized by medical issues, psychological issues [e.g. there is an age before which girls are physically ready to carry a pregnancy but not psychologically ready: pregnancy would harm their continued expression of being fully human] or jeopardized by a pregnancy resulting from force and violence. There are many situations like this; too many to list here.
In fact, in my view, the dependence of fetal development upon fully human beings is so primary that this position makes clear why cloning and laboratory development of human beings is abhorrent and cannot be allowed.
Your view, if we piece it together in the context of your inability to provide any framework for what constitutes a human being, seems to rest on mere DNA. We can grow DNA. We can clone DNA. Your kind of human being can be grown in a lab.
Lastly, in my view, a newborn individual's dependency upon fully human beings in order to continue expressing their fully human life extends to family AND society. You are responsible for the lives born in your society. That responsibility bears upon you as you take up adult citizenship, as you give and take from communal resources. To exert command over the body of someone in your society before birth and then relinquish it altogether upon birth, is a monstrously inhuman pattern of behavior.
But it's your faith. Not mine.
Since my comments on the other thread have been there for just under 24 hours, I'm going to assume I'm good to go with comments here. With that in mind, I first respond to the troll, who said:
"From Marshall’s cited article: “There are rare circumstances in which a mother’s life is in jeopardy due to either pre-existing conditions or pregnancy complications.”
Did you not see it, Marshall? Did you read it and not understand it? Or did you just choose to ignore it hoping no one would notice?
In cases where the mother’s life may be in “jeopardy” if the pregnancy continues, who gets the privilege in deciding who lives?"
The article to which feo refers is one he did not read himself...not seriously. For in it, he would have seen that the medical professionals therein expressed that in cases of pregnancy complications, they move to give birth to the child, either by inducing delivery or C-Section, with the aim to save both mother AND child. It may be true that the risk to the child is greater, but abortion leaves no chance at all and in their opinion, puts the mother at GREATER risk than delivery by either of the two means indicated.
So, to say that the child may die regardless is NOT the same...except to brutalizers like feo...as aborting the child and killing it directly. Each of us may die for any number of reasons while in the care of doctors intending to save us. Their attempts to save, though they may fail, are in now way akin to aborting, any more than failed attempts to save adults is akin to killing them. What an absolutely idiotic suggestion.
Once again, there is no medical justification for aborting a child. As one of the medical professionals stated, the only person who benefits from an abortion is the abortionist.
Marshall has been drinking. He thinks his lies work better the second time around. From his article with the parts that deny Marshall’s lies in all caps:
“There are rare circumstances in which a mother’s life is in jeopardy due to either pre-existing conditions or pregnancy complications. It is extremely rare for this to occur PRIOR TO THE POINT OF VIABILITY (currently 22 weeks after last menstrual period, 20 weeks after fertilization). AFTER 20 weeks fertilization age, it is never necessary to intentionally kill the fetal human being in order to save a woman’s life. [5] In cases where the mother’s life actually is in danger in the LATTER HALF of pregnancy, there is not time for an abortion, because an abortion typically is a two to three-day process. Instead, immediate delivery is needed in these situations, and can be done in a medically appropriate way (labor induction or C-section) by the woman’s own physician.”
Clearly the authors do not want Marshall to pay attention to what happens BEFORE 20 weeks when the mother’s health is in jeopardy. They’d rather he not look and so do not talk about realities. Much like Craig’s refusal.
As to when one becomes a person, the answer is "at conception" or "at fertilization". Everything that feo posted that attempts to rationalize the murder of the unborn is just that...rationalizations...cheap ones at that. The first definition of "person" in Merriam-Webster's online dictionary is "human, individual".
Dan wants to suggest that a fetus, or embryo, or zygote is certainly a human fetus/embryo/zygote, but not "fully human". That's nonsense and biologically unsubstantiated. It IS fully human, just not fully developed. A baby isn't fully developed. A toddler isn't fully developed. A teenager isn't fully developed. feo isn't fully developed. But they are all...even feo...fully human beings...fully persons...fully endowed by their Creator with the unalienable right to life. Such is true of people still in the earlier developmental stages of fetus, embryo, zygote, etc.
And still again, feo wants to believe there is some point at which abortion MUST be done. The article I posted does not insist this is the case. There is STILL a difference between killing the child and trying to deliver it, even "prior to the point of viability". But nothing in the article suggests that an abortion is even a necessary option at that early stage, or that it would make a difference to the outcome at all! Indeed, the following suggests there is no evidence that abortion has EVER saved a woman's life:
http://afterabortion.org/2016/no-medical-evidence-finds-abortion-can-save-a-mothers-life/
So, if this is true...and as this article says that if it isn't, there certainly should be ample opportunity to provide evidence to the contrary, then the whole issue is moot and all arguments defending the practice has little to do with the life of any mother. Worse, it is a worthless debate to suppose there is some point after fertilization wherein the born can insist the unborn is not a person, not "fully" human and not equal in value to the mother, the abortionist and the promoters of the practice who need to rationalize it in order to have sex without consequence.
Dan, are we allowed to laugh at Marshall's appeal to the Merriam-Webster dictionary? If not, too late. So, a "person" is a "human, individual." Did you, Marshall, happen to look up "individual"? No? Here you go: existing as a distinct entity : SEPARATE.
Should we define "separate" for you?
______
Marshall: "... the abortionist and the promoters of the practice who need to rationalize it in order to have sex without consequence..."
Merriam-Webster: "condom (noun) : a sheath commonly of rubber worn over the penis (as to prevent conception or venereal infection during coitus)" - First Known Use of condom circa 1706
or
Merrriam-Webster: "birth control pill (noun) : any of various preparations that usually contain both a progestin (such as norethindrone) and an estrogen (such as ethinyl estradiol), are taken orally especially on a daily basis, and act as contraceptives typically preventing ovulation - First Know Use of birth control pill 1951
______
Right-wing nut jobs like Marshall want to deny sexual education, sexual health information and services, and easy access to contraception. Hence, they are against the reduction of abortions.
So, on the checklist, my sense of where were are at:
Craig
- Privileges the woman over the fetus
- Why? Don't know
- What is a human being? [we can only infer since Craig has refused and diverted from a week of requests to make himself clear, but it seems most likely DNA. Though, he has vaguely whispered elsewhere of certain stages of fetal development that may be a better marker for Craig than simple conception.]
Result: When medical judgment determines that continuing a pregnancy will likely kill the mother, Craig reluctantly says killing the fetus is the recommendation, though families are up to themselves. Craig provides not reasoning why he would choose to kill the fetus instead of letting the mother die.
Marshall
- Neither is privileged because there never is a problem. Never happens. (Actually, about 20,000 every year.)
- Why? N/A no sweat. (Actually, about 20,000 every year.)
- What is a human being? DNA. A one celled organism is a full human being.
Result: Everything's fine, no problem. When one or the other dies or both die, it's God's choice and medicine cannot intervene in saving one over the other. Medicine should try to save both even if this means that both will surely die.
Feodor
- Privilege the mother over the fetus.
- Why? Because the mother is a full human being who bears individual desires, plans, memories, and exists in a family/social network of relationships that are full of meaning for others. The non-viable fetus is not.
- What is a human being? A human being means the engagement of cognitive, emotional, psychological, and relational life capacities. When a fetus is viable: able to live bodily separately on its own, the human being can begin their journey.
Result: Abortion is a tragically necessary option available for the health of the human being; such difficult experiences can be avoided with full scale availability of normal healthcare services like education and easy access to contraceptives.
Dan
.......
(you can fill your own position in._
________
Turns out that Craig and Marshall's philosophical position - or, in Craig's case, admitted lack thereof - allows cloning or the lab production of human beings. In fact, Marshall's position encourages it. Human DNA defines a person, and medicine should be about nothing but making sure that human person lives. Control of care is, therefore, an issue since normal human pregnancy is always full of various risks. So, grow us in a lab is the full result of Marshall's best thinking.
From my view, the non-viable fetus is dependent upon the body of the mother and is not a full human being. Of course, in human rights, the mother has full rights over her own body under non-viable conditions and is free to decide to carry or not.
"Did you, Marshall, happen to look up "individual"? No? Here you go: existing as a distinct entity : SEPARATE."
It IS a distinct entity, separate from its mother. It's unique DNA makes it so. Thanks for helping with my position. You're a pip.
"Right-wing nut jobs like Marshall want to deny sexual education, sexual health information and services, and easy access to contraception. Hence, they are against the reduction of abortions."
Wow. This is inane. First, I'm no nut job simply because you're losing the argument.
Secondly, I don't wish to deny sex education. I insist it should be mandatory beginning around middle school at least.
Thirdly, I have no desire to restrict sexual health information (depending upon what you meant by that) and/or services and nothing in this conversation so much as hints as such a thing.
Fourth, I have no wish to impede anyone's access to contraception. But we're not discussing contraception here. We're discussing abortion. Pay attention.
Fifth, none of the above having any bearing on whether or not abortions are either necessary in the first place, or necessary to reduce abortions or even actually have anything to do with reducing abortions (that's debatable as well).
"So, on the checklist, my sense of where were are at"
You have no sense...common or otherwise.
"Marshall
- Neither is privileged because there never is a problem. Never happens. (Actually, about 20,000 every year.)"
Are you trying to say that 20,000 murderous mothers are saved by killing their own kids every year? That's not true and you couldn't prove that if your tried. Helpful hint: citing abortionists who claim they saved a women's lives by helping them murder their own children isn't proof.
" What is a human being? DNA. A one celled organism is a full human being."
According to biology and medical professionals, a fertilized ovum is a full human being at the earliest stage of its development, with its own DNA that is distinct from its mother.
"Result: Everything's fine, no problem. When one or the other dies or both die, it's God's choice and medicine cannot intervene in saving one over the other. Medicine should try to save both even if this means that both will surely die."
This is a purposely fraudulent representation of both my position and reality. Whether or not a pregnant woman will "surely" die is not altered by murdering her unborn child. There is no medical reason to abort a child. That's my position because that's the reality.
Separate means when you die, I don't die. That' why conjoined twins are SEPARATED: so that the death of one doesn't cause the death of the other. Just like mother and fetus, idiot: the fetus is not separate.
-
You've lost all the arguments. A one cell organism is not a full human being. You are perverse.
-
You don't want sex education. You don't want women's clinics all over the country that full inform women of all medical and drug options. You're on record. You want sharia law.
-
An average of 20,000 life saving abortions on pre-20 week pregnancies are performed each year. Facts.
-
As for an organism with distinct DNA in the body, there are about 100 trillion cells in the human body, but only maybe one in 10 of those cells is actually — human. The rest are from bacteria, viruses and other microorganisms. Congratulations, Marshall, you're very, very pregnant. Surprisingly with higher life forms than yourself.
-
Your authors acknowledge that the 20,000 abortions of non-viable fetuses before 20 weeks are a fact.
The group, American Right to Life acknowledges that there are medical cases where the child has to be removed so that the mother lives. The direct result is that the fetus dies. You and this group do not care that the fetus takes longer to die. Just as long as the doctor saves the mother's life and lets the fetus die outside the womb.
Whatever you have to tell yourself, this is killing the fetus to save the mother.
"If a doctor can only save the mother and not the child also, that is a tragedy, but it is not an intentional killing... A mom on the verge of death from preeclampsia is saved by a doctor (not by an abortionist) who delivers the baby. The only way that doctor would thereby become an abortionist is if that doctor then performed an overt act to kill the baby. Removing the baby is not the same as killing the baby. Saving the mother often requires delivering the baby, but never killing the baby. That baby may not survive the premature delivery but the child's death must not be the intent of the medical intervention."
And let’s keep celebrating the good news from Dan’s post!
E.g. The American abortion rate is at an all-time low. We have better birth control to thank.
"Just like mother and fetus, idiot: the fetus is not separate."
That's funny. You calling me an "idiot". Thanks for the laugh. But I didn't say the fetus was separate, as in, not dependent upon its mother. It will continue to be until at least its teenage years. I said it was a separate entity. Its dependency doesn't mitigate that.
"You've lost all the arguments."
You're free to pretend that's true, just like the Black Knight chose to pretend he was not yet beaten after having had his arms and legs separated from his body in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
"A one cell organism is not a full human being."
A fertilized ovum is a full human being at the earliest stage of its development. You're perverse in refusing to accept this biological fact. You're clearly anti-science.
"You don't want sex education. You don't want women's clinics all over the country that full inform women of all medical and drug options. You're on record."
I am? Where? Provide the evidence and the date and time when I said such a thing. This discussion is about abortion. You're on record as being a brutalizer of the worst kind...supporting and enabling the unnecessary killing of the most innocent and defenseless of our kind.
"An average of 20,000 life saving abortions on pre-20 week pregnancies are performed each year. Facts."
Say it again, it won't be any truer. It's only a fact if you can provide factual evidence that any of those abortions were absolutely necessary to save the life of any of those women. You can't because it isn't true.
"As for an organism with distinct DNA in the body, there are about 100 trillion cells in the human body, but only maybe one in 10 of those cells is actually — human."
Wow. And you think you've won this debate! We're not talking about any of those other trillions of cells in the human body. We're not even talking about other human cells at all! We're talking about one person who at one point of its life was only one cell. What's more, not one of those other non-human cells will become anything more than what they are. The fertilized human ovum has already become a person and will eventually become a fully formed human adult. Someday so might you.
"Your authors acknowledge that the 20,000 abortions of non-viable fetuses before 20 weeks are a fact."
No they didn't.
"The group, American Right to Life acknowledges that there are medical cases where the child has to be removed so that the mother lives. The direct result is that the fetus dies."
They acknowledged the need to remove, but they didn't acknowledge that the direct result is death of the child. Rather, they acknowledge that the child may die. You want to insist that it most definitely will and that somehow that equates to an abortion.
"The American abortion rate is at an all-time low. We have better birth control to thank."
First, that would be an "all-time low" since Roe v Wade...not simply an all-time low. Secondly, whatever prevents conception is better than allowing conception and then aborting.
Marshall, I can well understand your fury at seeing the irrational implications of your crude thinking made clear. It is no surprise that your usual defense strategies of denials, diversion, dodges and lies are trotted out.
But I do thank you for putting down your answers to how thousands of medical cases of catastrophic pregnancies should be handled based on your approach to moral definitions of the human person. Craig could not finish his own responses, perhaps because he perceives the immoral production his thinking leads to. That you can't see the inhuman, mechanistic consequences of your own thinking is a different problem.
But you've been helpful to us in clarifying your thought. We will carry out the naming of corruption for you.
_____
Slavery is at an all-time-low since Emancipation, too. And abrogation of rights for non-white people at an all-time-low since voting rights legislation of the 60s.
Your desire for the 1950s is noted.
The immorality is all yours, fp, as you continue to defend and support the unnecessary taking of human life...and then dare to call ME inhuman. Your nazi/klansmen arrogance of presuming which of your fellow man is worthy of full humanity and "personhood" is crystal clear, as is your false posturing as a Christian.
Your desire for child sacrifice in the service of sexual self-gratification is noted.
You defend the caging and abuse of children while taking a woman’s right to her body away from her over a one called organism.
God sees the corruption.
You pretend children are being caged rather than protected from predators and support the brutal murder of the unborn and dare pretend that's not the most heinous form of child abuse.
You are the definition of corruption and sin. If you wish to continue attacking me personally, you'll continue to lose since you can't whitewash your position as morally superior in any way.
“You pretend children are being caged rather than protected from predators”
You just did it. You defend the caging and abuse of children while taking a woman’s right to her body away from her over a one called organism.
God sees the corruption.
“Inside an old warehouse in south Texas, hundreds of children wait away from their parents in a series of cages created by metal fencing.
One cage had 20 children inside. Scattered about are bottles of water, bags of chips and large foil sheets intended to serve as blankets....
In each of the past four years, 1,000 or more immigrant children who arrived at the southern U.S. border without their parents have reported being sexually abused while in government custody, according to federal records released Tuesday.
The data from the Department of Health and Human Services was made public by Rep. Ted Deutch, D-Fla., before a congressional hearing on the Trump administration's policy of separating migrant families.”
Ah, and you double-down on your lying by citing a source who speaks the same lie. Not at all surprised.
You support putting these kids at risk, which is the reality. Adult migrants are schooled in how to abuse our system. That includes sending the kids first by themselves and it is that which puts them at risk. Not sheltering them in large rooms separated from others by barriers that are easy to erect...in this case, chain link, which you liars prefer to call "cages" so as to further demonize those tasked with dealing with the mess you lefties created. And the shamelessness with which you defend these abuses, as well as the shamelessness of blaming others for those abuses, is typical of your corruption.
It’s your government of lies, no doubt. Thank God real researchers check your HHS Department and Homeland Security.
The data and reality are clear. You’re bunkered in with your fanatic extremism.
And your sellout soul.
Nothing at all extreme about any of my positions, except that they are all extremely logical, moral and reflective of reality. But thanks for playing.
Your are a fundamentalist, Marshall. If you cannot acknowledge that you are off your rocker. Your logic and morals reflect only the reality of the real extreme end of your colon.
Not playing these games with you, fp. You've never proven me "off my rocker" and you aren't familiar with logic or morals enough to comment on either. If you want to get back on the subject, fine. Otherwise, I leave you to your delusions.
If DNA makes a human being, you can clone one or grow one in a lab.
And capital punishment is murder.
Try to pay attention. The DNA of the person in the womb is what differentiates it from the mother...it makes it a distnctly unique and separate person from its mother.
Cloning is a separate issue of no relevance to the abotion question. However, if a person could indeed be cloned, I would oppose the clone's murder as well.
Capital punishment is not murder. Not in any sense of the word.
Your only philosophical definition of the human person is based solely on human DNA.
Therefore, DNA must have all rights and protections from destruction. You makes this claim for the one-called zygote and must also insist the same for every DNA carrying being following.
So:
1. Your argument raises the highest stakes for the first moment of the full DNA to its last. (We’ll ignore the fact that dead people have full human DNA, and therefore are, according to you, invested with as full a set of rights as anyone and shouldn’t have decisions made for them.)
Nothing can protect human persons as zygotes and fetuses like a laboratory. In your system built on DNA as the sole and complete definition of the human person, that’s the best place to grow an unborn child. No accidents, diseases, failures of the mother’s body, etc.
2. There can be no argument against cloning within your system.
3. Anything with himan DNA cannot be destroyed. Therefore capital punishment is immoral.
So is amputation, which destroys human DNA.
So is removing the appendix, a tooth, a corn, a callous, cutting one’s hair, etc.
All of these acts destroy human DNA.
That you cannot understand the implications of your definition is not due to your attention span.
It is due to your extraordinarily short brain span.
[Dan, this is the real problem with Craig’s lies about Nigeria:
Craig, why are you lying about the situation in Nigeria? Or do you just not understand if? Nomadic cattle herders and rising numbers of farmers illegally acquiring land are in conflict with each other. Same thing happened in the US Midwest over a hundred years ago. This is about livelihood not religion, liar. And each side has been killing the other with over a thousand fatalities.
You always take your shallow understanding as license to manipulate real tragedies to divert from real tragedies.
That’s corrupt.]
"Your only philosophical definition of the human person is based solely on human DNA."
No it's not. No it's not at all. Clearly you pulled that out of your backside, where you spend way too much time. Therefore, you follow the above idiocy with even greater idiocy and attribute it falsely to me.
So:
1. That's not my argument. That's your distortion of my argument, invented because your argument has failed in epic fashion in the face of my true arguments.
2. Now you're saying I expressed a "system"? No. I was completely focused on the immorality of abortion, a procedure never necessary to save a mother's life.
3. Even if I was making this argument...which I clearly wasn't, though you desperately need me to...it doesn't follow that capital punishment would then be immoral. Nothing I've said about the immorality of abortion leads to that inane conclusion.
"That you cannot understand the implications of your definition is not due to your attention span.
It is due to your extraordinarily short brain span."
That's funny. You invent this absurdity and then dare trash MY intelligence? That's rich. You base all your latest blatherings on your own inability to comprehend plain English. None of what you've said has the slightest relationship to anything I've said. Thus my position doesn't imply any of it, regardless of how badly you need to believe it does.
But you just keep making crap up. That's what liars do.
Your answer on the 16th: “According to biology and medical professionals, a fertilized ovum is a full human being at the earliest stage of its development, with its own DNA that is distinct from its mother.” And the on the 18th, you reconfirmed: "It [the zygote] IS a distinct entity, separate from its mother. It's unique DNA makes it so."
You today: “‘-[Feo:] Your only philosophical definition of the human person is based solely on human DNA.’No it's not. No it's not at all. Clearly you pulled that out of your backside.”
I knew you were an asshole. I didn’t know you were my asshole.
You agreed on the 16th that that was your position of what constitutes a human being. Now you recant that answer, in which case everything you’ve written from the 16th to yesterday is a lie; or what you just wrote today is a lie.
Which is it?
Dan, has a Marshall ever so clearly demonstrated that his normal practice is to lie on a daily basis as here in this thread?
It’s a lesson to us that while generally speaking, over distances of time, we are getting better now after the Enlightenment established the principle of human rights and freedom, we have a very long ways to go to root out clan brutality that responds to freedom in fear.
Thank God, the universal value of truth works to set creation free.
"Your answer on the 16th: “According to biology and medical professionals, a fertilized ovum is a full human being at the earliest stage of its development, with its own DNA that is distinct from its mother.” And the on the 18th, you reconfirmed: "It [the zygote] IS a distinct entity, separate from its mother. It's unique DNA makes it so.""
EXACTLY, but unfortunately you prefer to lie about what this means. The above comments of mine state why the "my body, my choice" argument is lame. The comments speak to the fact that the child is distinct from the woman, and it's unique DNA are testament to that fact. Try to keep up.
"I knew you were an asshole. I didn’t know you were my asshole."
What an asshole thing to say...even for an asshole like you.
"You agreed on the 16th that that was your position of what constitutes a human being."
Simply not true. It was all about why the child is distinct from its mother. But you're lying because you're once again losing to someone you unjustly regard as inferior to you. Seek help for that.
"Dan, has a Marshall ever so clearly demonstrated that his normal practice is to lie on a daily basis as here in this thread?"
Now you lie about me being the liar. You're hilarious! And you do it to protect your right to murder your own children. Talk about "clan brutality"!! I defend against the unjust and unnecessary practice, while you defend it and I'm supposed to be the brutal one? Incredible the things a false priest will say!
"Thank God, the universal value of truth works to set creation free."
If only truth was something you actually valued! Then even YOU would be set free! I pray for that day, false priest.
You are continuing to affirm your answer to the question, "What is a human being," with DNA as the sole ground on which the human person is constituted.
On the 16th, your text: " 'What is a human being? DNA. A one celled organism is a full human being.' According to biology and medical professionals, a fertilized ovum is a full human being at the earliest stage of its development, with its own DNA that is distinct from its mother."
On the 18th, your text: "The DNA of the person in the womb is what differentiates it from the mother...it makes it a distinctly unique and separate person from its mother."
So, I simply summed up your answer: Your only philosophical definition of the human person is based solely on human DNA.
To which you recanted what you've written above: "’No it's not. No it's not at all."
Either this recantation earlier today is a lie. Or you lied in everything you've written before today.
You got caught, didn't you, Marshall? You've never before realized how poorly served anyone is who thinks DNA is the answer to what constitutes a human being. You have zero practice at moral philosophy and so dropped a high-school sophomore turd.
You just never knew until now what the idiot implications are of just thinking that DNA is the answer.
This is the very reason why, when you keep trying to say, no, no, no, no, I was just talking about distinctness from the mother, you've never added any different answer to the question, what makes a human being. Because you don't have a different answer.
You quoted my summary of your position by repeating your answer of DNA: " 'What is a human being? DNA. A one celled organism is a full human being.' According to biology and medical professionals, a fertilized ovum is a full human being at the earliest stage of its development, with its own DNA that is distinct from its mother."
And, of course, you are now resorting to denials without any correcting, dodges without any direction, diversions without cover, and lies upon lies in frantic scribbling over the last 24 hours.
"You are continuing to affirm your answer to the question, "What is a human being," with DNA as the sole ground on which the human person is constituted."
Pathetic. It's not my answer as I didn't offer an answer to that question. It's the answer you insist on attributing to me because you think you've "caught" me in something YOU think gives you justification for thinking poorly of me. Again, pathetic.
"On the 16th, your text: " 'What is a human being? DNA. A one celled organism is a full human being.'"
But I never said that. The first time that is mentioned is by YOU, you lying buffoon, as a line in your "checklist" posted March 16, 2019 at 10:16 AM, wherein you attributed it to me. Yet nowhere prior to you typing "- What is a human being? DNA. A one celled organism is a full human being." under my name does anything like that appear in a comment posted by me. Thus, you show yourself once more to be the Son of the Father of Lies.
Then, I followed up your lie with what my position had been by saying...
"According to biology and medical professionals, a fertilized ovum is a full human being at the earliest stage of its development, with its own DNA that is distinct from its mother."
Thus, the distinction between what you claim I said and what I actually said was clearly made...clear to anyone but you, because you're not very bright. I further clarified my position with the following:
"The DNA of the person in the womb is what differentiates it from the mother...it makes it a distinctly unique and separate person from its mother."
You gather these statements to pretend they are an answer to the question "What is a human being?" despite their not at all being posted as answers to that question. As such then, I didn't recant an answer to a question to which I never put an answer in the first place. I objected to your insisting that "DNA" was an answer of mine. In short, you're a freakin' liar. A straight out, inveterate, unapologetic and not-very-good liar.
"You got caught, didn't you, Marshall?"
Clearly I did not, unless you mean I got caught believing it was possible to engage in honest discourse with such a lying false priest as you. That's MY bad.
"You've never before realized how poorly served anyone is who thinks DNA is the answer to what constitutes a human being."
I never had to since I never imagined anyone suggesting such a thing until you did by trying to pretend it constitutes my position. You got caught, didn't you, feo? Caught lying AGAIN! as if that's at all surprising.
"You have zero practice at moral philosophy..."
How would YOU know? You're totally unfamiliar with morality, being a baby killer and all.
"You just never knew until now what the idiot implications are of just thinking that DNA is the answer."
Why would I, since that's not my answer? However, I was well aware of what an idiot you are even before you tried to pretend that was my answer to a question to which I never submitted an answer in this entire thread.
"This is the very reason why, when you keep trying to say, no, no, no, no, I was just talking about distinctness from the mother, you've never added any different answer to the question, what makes a human being. Because you don't have a different answer."
The very reason why I kept saying no I was just talking about the distinctness from the mother is because I was only addressing the distinctness from the mother. I wasn't answer any question regarding what makes a human being. Thus, you have no idea what my answer to that question could be, since the question has not yet been posed to me, and I'm not obliged to answer a question not yet posed just because you lie about what my answer is.
"And, of course, you are now resorting to denials without any correcting, dodges without any direction, diversions without cover, and lies upon lies in frantic scribbling over the last 24 hours."
The lies and dodges and denials are all yours as usual, false priest. How can I lie about something I never said, by repeating the fact that I never said it?
It's so sad how badly you need to convince yourself that you're intellectually superior and how tremendously you fail with every attempt. And if you so routinely fail against the likes of me, you really have to be an idiot.
Feodor: "So, on the checklist, my sense of where were are at: - What is a human being? DNA. A one celled organism is a full human being.
Marshall’s first response: "According to biology and medical professionals, a fertilized ovum is a full human being at the earliest stage of its development, with its own DNA that is distinct from its mother.”
[no objection yet regarding DNA as defining what a human being is]
Feodor objects to DNA as the sole constituent for defining the human being: "A one cell organism is not a full human being."
Marshall’s second response:
A fertilized ovum is a full human being at the earliest stage of its development. You're perverse in refusing to accept this biological fact. You're clearly anti-science.
[still no objection regarding DNA as the sole definition of a human being]
Feodor: "Marshall, I can well understand your fury at seeing the irrational implications of your crude thinking made clear… But I do thank you for putting down your answers… That you can't see the inhuman, mechanistic consequences of your own thinking is a different problem. But you've been helpful to us in clarifying your thought. We will carry out the naming of corruption for you.”
*For five frothing responses on the 17th there is STILL no objection by Marshall to characterizing his position as DNA is the sole determinant of a human being. NOTHING. THEN, on the 18th, he puts forward DAN AGAIN!
Marshall: "Try to pay attention. The DNA of the person in the womb is what differentiates it from the mother...it makes it a distnctly unique and separate person from its mother.”
Feodor, making it simple for Marshall: "Your only philosophical definition of the human person is based solely on human DNA. Therefore, DNA must have all rights and protections from destruction. You makes this claim for the one-called zygote and must also insist the same for every DNA carrying being following. [Followed by 9 examples of how ignorantly and willfully stupid Marshall is at understanding what makes a human being.]
ONLY NOW!, do you object in anxious fear that you’ve been caught out. And here is where you make it clear not only that you are an asshole… but my asshole. I own you.
Marshall: "No it's not. No it's not at all. Clearly you pulled that out of your backside…”
_____
Merriam-Webster
facile adjective
Definition of facile
1 a (1) FOR FEODOR: easily accomplished or attained (a facile victory)
(2) FOR MARSHALL: SHALLOW, SIMPLISTIC
b HOW FEODOR OWNS MARSHAL: used or comprehended with ease
c HOW MARSHALL GETS OWNED SO EASILY: readily manifested and often lacking sincerity or depth (facile tears(
"Feodor objects to DNA as the sole constituent for defining the human being"
feo objects to that which no one said.
" "A one cell organism is not a full human being.""
Depends upon the "one cell organism". A fertilized human ovum, being a one cell organism, is a person...a full human being. feo, comprised of trillions of cells, is not yet a fully formed human being. He has yet to develop a mind or a soul.
"For five frothing responses on the 17th there is STILL no objection by Marshall to characterizing his position as DNA is the sole determinant of a human being."
I don't know why you're frothing, but that's not been my characterization at all. It's been the one you're falsely trying to attribute to me.
"Feodor, making it simple for Marshall: "Your only philosophical definition of the human person is based solely on human DNA."
No it's not. But you're simple-minded enough to continue trying to pretend it is.
"Therefore, DNA must have all rights and protections from destruction."
If you say so, but that's not based on anything I've ever said.
"You makes this claim for the one-called zygote and must also insist the same for every DNA carrying being following."
Wow. That's really stupid, as well as false. My claim for the human zygote is that it deserves protections because it is a person and it's stage of development doesn't mitigate that. From that, it in no way follows that anything containing DNA is entitled to the same protection. That's just more buffoonery of your own making that you're trying to attribute to me, because you've lost the debate. Goofy distortions is all that's left to you. It must really suck for you to lose so often to one you believe is intellectually inferior!
"ONLY NOW!, do you object in anxious fear that you’ve been caught out."
Yeah...*yawn*...I'm petrified.
"And here is where you make it clear not only that you are an asshole… but my asshole."
Spoken like an actual false priest lacking so much as a hint of Christianity.
"I own you."
It's true. I find it hard to resist proving how it must really suck for you to lose so often to one you believe is intellectually inferior! Because you lose so often! It's the one thing at which you're especially superior!
What follows the last quote of yours above is pure, unadulterated fantasy that is at once both incredibly pathetic and absolutely hilarious! Ah, the things you try to make yourself believe!
99% of this most recent is true... to you: impotent denials and airy vitriol.
But you’re still clinging to empty hope that you can back out where you were five says ago. Which is, according to Merriam-Webster and your... sorry, I’m laughing... philosophy built on a dictionary:
Person: Individual: Distinct and Separate: DNA.
In your... sorry, had to laugh again... system, DNA begins the whole thing. For you, that’s what constitutes the human being.
You can’t run from it, Marshall. Though you cane think better of it and try again.
If you're truly laughing, it demonstrates mental disorder on your part, as the insane often find humor where none exists. Or, it is forced and fake laughter, a put on, to bolster your desperate and failing attempts to suggest you're "winning" when you're once again so obviously not.
There is no empty hope to which I cling aside from the hope that God will bestow upon you the epiphany you so desperately need which will lead you to become a true Christian instead of the fake you so clearly are.
You can start by refusing from this point forward the urge to speak falsely about what I believe or have said, particularly when my actual beliefs are easily seen in previous comments or easily obtained upon a sincere request to provide them. Yet still, as this most recent comment of yours clearly demonstrates, you prefer to double-down on your mistepresentations of my position...on your insistence that I've said what I never said. I know you and truth are as oil and water, but give truth a chance. You'll be better able to pull off this fake intellectual Christian thing of yours. Of course, you'd then be without rationalization for infanticide, so...
How pathetic of you to think that playing the victim is the lie that will convince.
The sincere request came on March 8th: "I'm interested, Marshall, whether you would call for an abortion in the case where the mother will die if the pregnancy is not terminated. If you would, or if you would not, on what basis are you elevating the mother's life over the fetus or the fetus over the mother's life?"
A fact you acknowledged on March 9th on Craig’s blog: “… a response I gave to that most rare of questions: a reasonable one asked by feo."
The response, though, and all your responses then failed the reason test.
1. You hide behind authors who hide their own admission that when the mother's life is in jeopardy (note, they cannot be sure: it is a judgment call) they will remove a non-viable fetus from the mother. This means certain death for the fetus and certain life for the mother.
2. And when called out on it, you deny what they couldn't hide well enough for simply smart readers. “There are rare circumstances in which a mother’s life is in jeopardy due to either pre-existing conditions or pregnancy complications. It is extremely rare for this to occur prior to the point of viability... after 20 weeks fertilization age, it is never necessary to intentionally kill the fetal human being in order to save a woman’s life."
They clearly admit that before 20 weeks, it is sometimes necessary to intentionally kill the fetal human being.
________
Subsequently, you turned to Merriam-Webster. (pause for laughs) And there your appeal to authority meets yet another failure.
DNA>Distinct and Separate>Individual>Person
But, lately, you've given up that lie.
________
You ask me to refuse from this point forward... to speak falsely about what you believe or have said.
I can only go where you go. And you don't believe anymore what you wrote. Because I demonstrated that you really were not aware of what you said.
You are lost in your own irrationality. Pointing that out is only providing help to you, because you really need to spend a lot of time figuring out some new things. Get going. It's just possible that you can do it.
"How pathetic of you to think that playing the victim is the lie that will convince."
Seems you have no idea what "playing the victim" means. If one is truly a victim of some slight or harm, one is not "playing", is one? You continue to misrepresent my position. You do so in spite of my many corrections and reminders as to what my position is. Therefore, I am truly a victim of your bad behavior. That's not "playing" at anything. Like all else I post, it is reality.
"The response, though, and all your responses then failed the reason test."
Hardly. But then, you're not reasonable and have a difficult time with the concept of "reasoning", so I understand your confusion.
"1. You hide behind authors who hide their own admission that when the mother's life is in jeopardy (note, they cannot be sure: it is a judgment call) they will remove a non-viable fetus from the mother."
I don't hide. There's no need as my position is moral and righteous, keeping with Christian teaching.
YOU, on the other hand, hide behind the fact that the authors did not address 1st trimester threats on a mother's life because, they say, such threats are rare.
"This means certain death for the fetus and certain life for the mother."
You are't qualified to insist it means "certain" death, and advances continue to make that less and less certain all the time. Regardless, to whatever extent a chance might exist that the child would survive such an early delivery, that chance is worth taking over purposely killing the child, particularly when there is no benefit to the mother to do so. Being so eager to murder innocent children, you might not see or understand that. But those of us committed to life certainly do.
So you hide behind this:
"“There are rare circumstances in which a mother’s life is in jeopardy due to either pre-existing conditions or pregnancy complications. It is extremely rare for this to occur prior to the point of viability..."
You take this to mean "in jeopardy" equates to "certain death if we don't kill that kid". I don't think that's what the authors are suggesting. It doesn't mean there is no possibility that there are any protocols short of abortion that exist to address the jeopardy in which a mother might be. You just want it to mean that so you can go on merrily supporting the non-existent "right" to murder one's own child. How brutalizing!
"DNA>Distinct and Separate>Individual>Person
But, lately, you've given up that lie."
I never put forth that progression. YOU did, and you continue to do it despite my many attempts to correct your intentional distortion. Clearly you have some innate and pathological need to lie. Here it is yet again: The being gestating within its mother is a separate individual person distinct from its mother by virtue of its own DNA which is distinctly different that its mother. This is basic biology and as one who doesn't deny science, I cannot argue with it in order to rationalize murdering an unborn person. Evidently you have no problem doing so because you're a brutalizer as all hellspawn are.
"I can only go where you go."
Yet clearly you don't. Indeed, you take great pains to do otherwise. Where I go is truth. You prefer lies as a good false priest does.
"Because I demonstrated that you really were not aware of what you said."
What you demonstrated was either poor comprehension skills, or how much of a liar you are. Hard to decide where to place my bet.
"You are lost in your own irrationality."
So you need to believe.
"...you really need to spend a lot of time figuring out some new things."
So you need to believe.
Your scissors make you think you can lie.
"...after 20 weeks fertilization age, it is never necessary to intentionally kill the fetal human being in order to save a woman’s life."
They clearly admit that before 20 weeks, it is sometimes necessary to intentionally kill the fetal human being.
Dan, it seems clear we need to re-summarize what Craig and Marshall have communicated about medical ethics and a rational definition of what constitutes a human being fully invested with rights equal to all others.
First, I apologize to Craig. Marshall seemed to have been brave enough to offer his best approach at defining the human being. What is clear, now, after his repeated recantations, that all he was doing was leading us on a long goose chase while he misled and diverted and lied his way around and around what ends up only being his ten day long avoidance of admitting that his best thinking are sophomoric fecal pellets circling his brain pan.
You, Craig, acknowledged your limits, admitting that you don't know why you privilege the mother when her life is in jeopardy because you do not have a basic philosophical definition of the human person that provides the platform to reason out the moral value difference between an adult and fetus.
You, Marshall, engaged only in false reasoning and bad faith diversions, doges, denials, and lies. After, though, venturing out on the DNA only limb.
What we have, then, Dan, are two Christian people who remain fixed on theological positions that deny a woman's right to her own body not because they have reasoned out some overriding moral grounds but simply because they have no way of thinking about it that has been developed since Calvin's Consistory governance of Geneva in the mid-1500s.
Craig and Marshall are making moral decisions based solely on theological doctrine untouched by the modern Enlightenment that you have raised up as the reason for all the advances humankind has made for 350 years.
The summary, at bottom, is that Craig and Marshall are simply making decisions from Christian dogma in analogue fashion to Sharia law: absolutely without any unmediated rational process whatsoever. Purely from belief. They are not making any use of the cognitive reasoning capacity that God has endowed human beings with and which God kept faith with his creation by trusting that we would praise him by using our best thoughts.
This is pretty disheartening news. Not surprising, but stark in how they have shown us here how completely dissembling they must be in order to sound like sense, and not centuries old, cracked and disintegrating creedal parchment.
Craig and Marshall's kind of faith is the dead kind. It is not the faith that seeks understanding as Anselm commended all Christians to do.
"They clearly admit that before 20 weeks, it is sometimes necessary to intentionally kill the fetal human being."
Once more proving that lying is your thing, as what you say is not at all borne out by reading once again what you yourself excerpted from the article. They did NOT admit any such thing no matter how desperately you need them to have.
"Dan, it seems clear we need to re-summarize what Craig and Marshall have communicated about medical ethics and a rational definition of what constitutes a human being fully invested with rights equal to all others."
Perhaps, but you should understand what I've communicated first...which you clearly don't given how you continue to portray me as having said things I've not said.
"First, I apologize to Craig."
Yeah, right. There's just so much about which you need to apologize. Hey! That'd be a good use of your blog! It would keep you busy for quite some time.
"Marshall seemed to have been brave enough to offer his best approach at defining the human being."
See? You're about to "summarize" something I've not yet done. I've not yet provided my "definition" of "the human being".
"What is clear, now, after his repeated recantations..."
What is clear, now...and has been for several years...is that you confuse "recantation" with repeated corrections of your willful (or perhaps, stupid) misrepresentations of my comments. The truth exposes your failure, so you make shit up. It's what you do.
"...all he was doing was leading us on a long goose chase while he misled and diverted and lied his way around and around what ends up only being his ten day long avoidance of admitting that his best thinking are sophomoric fecal pellets circling his brain pan."
So in losing like is normal for him, he defaults to his typical sophomoric behavior, like the good fake Christian he proves himself once again of being.
"What we have, then, Dan..."
...are two guys striving to adhere to Christian teaching without compromise, who refuse to rationalize the murder of the unborn and then pretend to be morally sound in doing so...thereby calling evil "good". That's what false priests and fake christians do.
"They are not making any use of the cognitive reasoning capacity that God has endowed human beings with and which God kept faith with his creation by trusting that we would praise him by using our best thoughts."
Well, this is clearly untrue. We reason that God's will as regards the sanctity of life has been reinforced by scientific advances, not mitigated. We don't use "reasoning capacity" to advance rationalizations that are no less cheap because of your arrogant mental contortions. You're a murderer, feo. Be man enough to admit it. You don't seek understanding of what true faith is. You seek loopholes to cover your craven evil. God's not fooled by fools like you.
“Perhaps, but you should understand what I've communicated first... I've not yet provided my "definition" of "the human being".”
This is exactly what I summarized.
Ten days. 30 to 40 comments, a few of which lately and repetitiously claim you didn’t answer the question while at the same time not offering an answer to the question.
Your entire presence here consists only in diversion, dodge, denial, and lies.
And you’ve added yet another comment that offers nothing but. Because you are nothing but.
"Ten days. 30 to 40 comments, a few of which lately and repetitiously claim you didn’t answer the question while at the same time not offering an answer to the question."
Offer an answer? But you've been offering up answers and pretending they were mine!! Seems clear you're content with pretending...why the change of heart now? More to the point, you've been wasting time with your preferred answers rather then ever giving a fly rat's feo what my position is.
"Your entire presence here consists only in diversion, dodge, denial, and lies."
My entire presence here is a mix of repeating what I've already said and making you look like the total buffoon you are. (The latter part of that sentence didn't require my doing what you so easily do yourself!)
"And you’ve added yet another comment that offers nothing but. Because you are nothing but."
I'm so hurt.
And, still, gutless diversions to cover your DNA embarrassment. To keep up this facile pantomime of reason for so long indicated how deep your shame goes.
So you need to believe. There's no reason I need feel embarrassment aside from that which I feel for you, as I would for anyone who acts in such an embarrassing way as you. I can only imagine how constantly embarrassed your family and friends are by you...assuming you actually have any.
For my part, aside from snarky shots at you, everything about my position is factual and consistent with Christian teachings of morality...something of which, to your further embarrassment and shame, you show no desire to abide...assuming you know anything about it in the first place, which doesn't seem to be the case.
“... everything about my position is factual and consistent...” “I've not yet provided my "definition" of "the human being.”
And it remains the consistent fact that you haven’t.
Gutless?
Hiding that you don’t have one? (i.e. the now recanted DNA)
Know that what you have is pedantically shallow?
Pick one and stop your weak ass nonesense.
You mean you're no longer intent on telling me what my position is? And why do you say I "recanted" something regarding DNA? I didn't recant anything because I had nothing for which I felt any such need. Still don't.
My definition of what a person is (because "personhood" is the real issue here)is the same as the actual definition one would find in a dictionary.
Merriam-Webster: human, individual
Dictionary.com: 1. a human being, whether an adult or child
2. a human being as distinguished from an animal or a thing. (which puts feo's status in question)
legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com : In general usage, a human being;
It's pretty cut and dried. A person is the product of the procreative act between a man and a woman. It is a person by virtue of the fact that it took two persons of the opposite sex to unite their procreative donations for the purpose of bringing forth a new person. It's not rocket science, and even a false priest like you should be able to understand it. I've no doubt you do, but your desire to preserve the imagined "right" to murder your own child compels you to wallow in cheap rationalization dressed up as philosophical moralizing. I mean, talk about weak-assed nonsense! That's what your mental contortions are!
We've been down your Merriam-Webster road, Marshall and it leads you to where you do not want to go - at least as you say recently. You can always double back, being an inveterate liar.
As flipping around the dictionary shows us, and you have confirmed days ago: "Person" is an "Individual" which is "Distinct and Separate" because of DNA.
Your fantasy now is the we can just stop at the first definition and make decisions about life and death for a pregnant woman? God, how infantile and brutal. You're basically a monstering at this point. (A point you've visited before.)
or...
Then, in apparent psychosis, after pining your hopes on the dictionary you abandon what it says and trot out something it doesn't say: a product between a man and a woman.
Well, this is isn't going to serve you any better, because it ends up at in the same place. Granted that you are mostly just a wad, sperm is only a delivery service for the haploid DNA and centriole that they zygote uses. The other haploid DNA the zygote uses is from the oocyte.
1. Cleary, a sperm, being only half the DNA found in the male, cannot be equated with the male.
2. So, a man is not a sperm.
3. Clearly, the oocyte, being only half the DNA found female, cannot be equated the female.
4. So, a woman is not an oocyte.
Therefore, using your action, a person is the product of the fusion of the haploid DNA material and centriole from the sperm and the haploid DNA material from the oocyte.
In other words, DNA. You've been at this point before but, when your fantasy that it helps us make moral decisions for the life of the mother was blown away, you recanted.
Try again. And stop putting yourself in the biology lab: your'e horrible at it. And do go out to space again, Mr Cadet. You just get weird, on top of stupid and brutal.
For a tragedy that re-humanizes all that Marshall's lies and monstrous lies about lies have tried to strip away from us:
"A routine ultrasound appointment turned my life upside down. One month prior, I had received the news that the baby I was carrying was a boy. During my second ultrasound, when I was 19 weeks pregnant, the technician was as talkative and excited as I was and re-confirmed the baby’s sex. I suppose it was purely a mother’s intuition that gave me a large knot in the back of my throat as she finished with her on-screen measurements. As I wiped the sticky gel from my swollen stomach, I was quickly ushered into a small room. Within minutes, I was meeting with specialists and discussing a condition that I had never heard of. Phrases such as “fatal birth defect,” “no chance of survival” and “medical abortion” echoed in the stark white room while, in my stomach, I could feel my second son kicking and fighting for his life. The only tool I had to guide me with the unthinkable decision that suddenly loomed was the unconditional love I had for my child, as well as my ability to sacrifice my own desires for the well-being of my children.
With little experience in making a literally life-altering choice like this for one of my sons, I remembered a concept I had once learned in college. I had studied ancient Greek culture, which had many words for different types of love. One of these types of love is known as agape. The basis of agape, outside of the common Christian theological context, is unconditional, self-sacrificing love. Agape is reserved for relationships where deep love and care for another’s well-being exists, often exceeding the needs and desires of oneself. This extraordinary type of love may best be displayed through a mother’s love.
The agape that I felt for my first son required small, mundane sacrifices that are common with raising a young child. But it was not until that moment in the doctor’s office at five months pregnant with my second child that I was faced with a decision that would require a life-changing sacrifice for the sake of unconditional love.
My unborn son was diagnosed with a birth defect known as a congenital diaphragmatic hernia (CDH). I learned that there is only an initial 50 percent chance of survival in infants diagnosed with this defect. There was a large hole in my son’s diaphragm that enabled all the organs that are typically located in his abdomen to grow inside his tiny chest instead. Because of this, his heart was unable to develop properly and his lungs were deformed. The extent of the damage inside his body took his chance of survival down to nearly zero and made surgery after birth impossible. I was left with only two options: continue with the pregnancy for four more months knowing that he would not survive or end the pregnancy. Due to legal restrictions on medical abortions in the state of Pennsylvania, I was given just seven short days to make the biggest and most difficult decision of my life.
For the next week, I considered what my life would be like for the remaining four months of my pregnancy ― feeling my son kick and grow, and knowing that each day he was one day closer to dying. In these days, I often spoke the words, “My heart is broken.” Looking back, the phrase seems much too cliché to depict the actual pain that I was feeling. Each day that I woke up and felt my son kick inside my body was torturous ― a form of cruel and unusual punishment.
"I often prayed that God would take me instead, and just as often I fell to my knees, shouting words of rage. I incessantly wondered why this had happened to me ― I was a good person. I saw mothers with healthy babies carrying on with their lives and who became frustrated over matters that now seemed so minuscule to me. I wanted to grab each one of them and scream, Stop cleaning! Cherish your healthy baby! I wondered if other women had ever thought the same about me while watching me interact with my first child. I cried for all the moments that I had been too busy to cherish and then I cried for those women too. I realized there would be no happy ending regardless of which option I chose.
As a mother, I desperately wanted to cling to my unborn son for as long as possible. I wanted to try every procedure, technique, theory or machine that professionals could dream up. In these days, I thought a lot about miracles and the possibility of a miracle happening for me. I had never been particularly spiritual or religious ― or lucky ― as my circumstances continued to prove. Being someone who had always relied on evidence and realism, I faced the facts that I had been given. I imagined how indescribably awful it would be for my son to come into a whole new and scary world, perhaps in pain. After several second opinions, I discovered that his small body was incapable of life outside of my womb and there was nothing that doctors or surgeons could do or invent to save him.
After the worst seven days of my life, I made the decision to end my pregnancy. In my mind, I had made the decision to end my son’s life. There had been so many factors to consider: my own mental capabilities, the happiness and stability of my first son, and, most importantly, the comfort of my fatally ill son. Sadly, I knew I was not mentally capable of enduring four more months of torture. I also knew I had a healthy 3-year-old who needed his mother to be of sound mind to care for him.
The day I was scheduled to terminate my pregnancy, I was hesitant. The doctor and his assistants struggled to inject a needle, which was filled with a chemical that would stop my son’s heart from beating, directly into my uterus. Every instinct I had as a mother was screaming, Protect your child!, and I was lying there, allowing these strangers in white coats to end my son’s life. To say it felt unnatural as the needle entered my stomach would be a gross understatement. For the first time in seven days, the tears came without noise. It was something much deeper than the physical capabilities of human vocal cords that silenced me. In that moment, my unconscious mind must have sensed that this was more than I could handle, and for a moment, I simply slipped away.
Christmas carols played on the radio and snow fell lightly on the ground on the way home. After the procedure, I expected that my son would fade away immediately. Instead, I felt him kick and move within me for two hours after the chemical injection. During these two hours, I spoke to him, sang lullabies and told him all about the big brother he would never know. Desperately, I begged for his forgiveness for the decision that I had made. The last time I felt him squirm in my uterus, I somehow knew that it would be the final time that I ever felt him move, and it was. After 12 hours of labor, he was born on Dec. 6, 2011, weighing only one tiny pound. I named him Azlend, after the brave and powerful lion from one of my favorite childhood books, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The next day, burial arrangements were made.
Looking back now, I am not sure how I got through the next days or months. I constantly found myself wondering if I had made the right decision, and more often than not, I was convinced that I had made the wrong one. I was plagued with nightmares and a sense of overwhelming guilt. I often discussed my feelings with my mother, and she would sob along with me while telling me, “I wish I could take away all of your pain.” Hearing her words, I was once again reminded of agape ― that self-sacrificing, unconditional love. It was her words that made me realize that I was like so many mothers.
For some, a medical abortion may seem unjust or cruel, but for me, it will always be the epitome of agape. I was given the opportunity to alleviate my son’s pain and take it onto myself, and I did. I am certain that I will be forever haunted by the choices I made during those seven days of my life. Now I am reminded of my final decision each day in countless ways, and still, as the years go by, women with babies make me cry and Christmas carols still evoke tragic memories instead of magical ones.
I will always wonder if Azlend could have found a way to beat the odds if I had not terminated my pregnancy, and I will never know if I made the right decision. This has been, perhaps, the most difficult concept I am faced with in the absence of my son. I do know, however, that the decision to end my pregnancy has taught me more about a mother’s love than I would have ever known to be possible.
Being a mother is much more than kissing boo-boos, ensuring that vegetables are eaten, and seeing that teeth are brushed. Being a mother, to me, means loving another person in a way that forsakes all your selfish wishes and desires in order to do what you believe is best for them. The struggle with doubt and uncertainty that a mother endures while making decisions that affect her children is simply part of being a mother. All that a mother can do is trust that her unconditional and selfless love will lead her to make the right choices for her children. Sometimes this is the greatest feeling in the world and other times it breaks your heart in a way that is forever irreparable. In both circumstances, I have learned that a mother’s love reigns supreme above all else in this world; agape at its finest."
And since Craig likes to deny human life with words like, minuscule, in order to justify his lofty brutality:
"I was raped when I was 17 years old. I had a baby when I was 18 years old. My baby died when I was 19 years old. I cannot recall the color of the sky when I woke up the morning I was raped, or what I did in the hours leading up to the assault. I think of it in terms of Before and After, and I’m caught right in between the two. Instead, I remember this: a boy from school who I thought was a friend. I invited him over to my house for a movie. His hand skimmed up my leg. When I asked him to stop, all he said was, “I don’t want to.” I thought if I got up it would diffuse the tension and surely he wouldn’t follow me in my own house. I went to the kitchen to get some water.
I remember this: Him pressing up behind me against the kitchen counter, knocking the breath out of me. His hand over my mouth that turned into a hand around my throat. The sound of a seam ripping, the ledge of the counter scraping my belly, my hands slipping against granite. Time stretching out in both directions. I struggled, tried to move away, and a miserable noise yanked out of my chest when that hand constricted until I began to pass out. I stopped fighting. Aside from one shattering bit, I went still. I was outside of myself, watching myself ― my body was bent over there and whatever was happening to it was happening without me.
I don’t remember him leaving my house. I vaguely recall kneeling down and cleaning spots of blood off the white tile of the kitchen floor. My mind was operating on some level beyond self-awareness. It never occurred to me to keep my clothes or to go and wake my mother, to call the police or seek help in any way. I was not capable of processing what had happened. I laid down in my bed, tried wrapping my arms around myself, but I could not bear to be touched ― not even by my own hand. I wondered if I was capable of drowning myself in our pool. I imagined myself sinking down, staring up from the bottom and opening my mouth.
I was an honor student in high school, a varsity cheerleader, and I sang in the show choir. I was another junior worried about her ACT scores. There were expectations I had set for myself ― an excess of possibilities I wanted to touch and explore. Within three months of the rape, my grades plummeted. I quit the cheerleader squad. I began getting sick and missing school. I lost weight. I was actively suicidal and making plans.
It was in the After, almost eight months later, when my mother found a book on recovery after rape wrapped in newspaper under my bed. She cried and apologized, recounting all the signs I had displayed over the past months. Her guilt and concern were like thick, suffocating tentacles around me. I did not want to be loved at that time. My body was filth.
When I thought it could not be any worse, that there was nothing below this, my mother took me to her gynecologist to have me tested for STIs and pregnancy. Only the pregnancy test came back positive. I was so mentally unstable in the months after my rape, my mind ripped away from my body and it never occurred to me that the sickness I had been experiencing over those months could have an origin. I was frail. My stomach was hardly swollen. My periods had always been splotchy and irregular. I was poison ― what could possibly take root in me?
The nurse looked away from me and rolled her eyes. She ticked off a box on my chart. “Do you know who the father is?” Her voice was flat.
“I was raped,” I told her as I watched the pen stop moving between her fingers.
My mother went back with me for the ultrasound. I was so afraid to look up at the sonographer’s screen and be confronted with undeniable evidence.
“Do you want to know what it is?” the tech asked. I must have said yes, because she patted my arm and said, “It’s a girl.”
"She went silent, right after. As she was scanning the head and taking measurements, her eyes grew dark. The tech cleaned off my stomach and asked us to follow her into a conference room. My mother fidgeted at my side. All I could do was stare at the chair across from me. We both knew then, I think, that something terrible was about to happen.
The doctor came to us and spread the ultrasound pictures across the table. She pointed to darkness where gray brain matter ought to be. She called it hydranencephaly, a congenital defect in which the brain fails to develop either cerebral hemisphere, instead filling with cerebrospinal fluid. The fetus continued to experience development because the brain stem was still intact, but she would be born blind, deaf, completely cognitively stunted, prone to seizures, diabetes insipidus, insomnia, hypothermia and more. The list of every agonizing disorder she would suffer was tremendous.
“This condition is not compatible with life,” she said with the sort of neutrality someone uses when they are a spectator to disaster.
A short, painful existence. I thought it was my fault and that I had done this to her. No one could convince me otherwise. I was both victim and perpetrator, in the unique position of having no agency in either.
My mother asked what our options were, but I was already eight months along and would have to see this pregnancy through to the end. At the time, abortions were allowed in Alabama “up to the stage of fetal viability, usually between 24 and 26 weeks gestation.” It was already too late for me. Even if I was able to go out of state to seek out the possibility of a “late-term abortion,” I would still be obstructed by time, paperwork, politics and money.
“I wish I could do more,” she said. “I know how wrong this must seem to you.”
The words that came to my mind were “cruel” and “inhumane.” I had already suffered one trauma. Was that not enough? I was so fragile, hanging on to my life by a thread, desperate for some sense of normality, and still more was now being taken from me in the most visceral sense.
I quit school the second week of my senior year. Sometimes I would spot my rapist in the crowded halls ― he was everywhere I looked even if he was was not actually there. My mother and stepfather asked if I wanted to report him, but I could not imagine confronting that night in front of a room of strangers. I wasn’t strong enough, and I could not survive the dissection in court. I could barely function through the press of shame, depression, anxiety, anger and the white-hot grief that had begun to reticulate itself through the heart of me.
My daughter was born Oct. 27, 2005. I named her Zoe Lily. I did not want to touch her at first, convinced I would cause her more pain. I was afraid she would die in my arms, afraid I would look at her and feel the same disgust I felt for myself. They took her away. The neurologist came and asked how we wanted to proceed. He asked if we wanted to intubate her because she lacked the instinct to suck and inquired about what other lifesaving measures we wanted to take. The most basic functions of her body were being controlled by her brainstem, but that was it. It would be a kindness, he explained, to make her comfortable and let her go in peace.
"I remember curling in on myself in the maternity ward, 18 years old, retraumatized and flashing back to the attack, paralyzed by indecision. My milk came in, and I was furious ― it felt like a cruel joke. I could not imagine then how this would evolve over a year, how I could be so full of love for this child and also wish she had never been born. We took Zoe home. We took her home knowing full well she would die there. For a year my family loved her.
We figured out how to feed her with a bottle by placing a finger under her chin, gently pushing upward until she bit down on the nipple to express milk. It took two hours for her to finish a bottle. We held her through countless sleepless nights because her body was unable to metabolize sleep hormones. She would lock up in tonic seizures, big blue eyes jerking to one side. She would go stiff lying beside me, and I would gather her in my arms, my nose in her hair, trying to memorize the soft smell of her. Sometimes I hoped she would go still, that her heart would stop, so that she would be free from suffering. I begged for it and dreaded it in equal measure.
We wrapped her in electric blankets in the middle of the Alabama summer because she couldn’t regulate her own temperature. We spent every major holiday in the hospital that year. On Thanksgiving, her lips were turning blue and she stopped eating because she had developed a kidney infection. She nearly died from the antibiotics.
On Christmas, we watched as she was stuck over and over again for IV placements and her veins blew one by one. She was put on Zantac, anti-diuretics, Synthroid, Klonopin, lorazepam, melatonin, Miralax. She was diagnosed with diabetes insipidus. We strung up red stockings at the foot of her hospital bed and listened to the chime of her heart monitor.
Between all of this, I started college at the local university. I was in and out of classes to take Zoe to doctor appointments, to switch out with my mother so she could go to work. I enrolled in the nursing program because it made the most sense at the time, given the situation. I made one friend, who two years later would become my husband. My life was in a spiral, but I felt like I had some tenuous control over it.
On Easter, we were back in the hospital with a urinary tract infection, proteinuria, uncontrollable fever, and the pediatrician told us to prepare ourselves, that this was what the end looked like. We were sent home when Zoe was considered stable. Unlike the day of my attack, I remember the day Zoe died with brutal clarity.
She had been having seizures all night. This wasn’t uncommon, but my mother and I agreed we would take her to the ER at dawn to start the work-up. I got dressed to go, but my mother told me to wait until after my 8 o’clock class. It was the week of midterm tests, and we agreed I shouldn’t skip, especially because they probably wouldn’t even be back in triage until after I had finished. I could meet them later. I kissed Zoe’s cheek.
I was in the middle of writing an email to my English professor explaining that I had a family emergency and wouldn’t make the evening lecture. My mother was not answering her phone, and I distinctly remember thinking, Maybe this is it, and some terrible part of me was relieved at the thought.
Nothing can prepare you for losing a child, even when you know it is coming. My best friend walked through the door of my family home. “We need to go to the hospital. Zoe just died.” I crumpled to the floor. It seemed like the only thing to do. I laid there sobbing, and just as it was during my assault, I was no longer in my body. I fixated on a dead moth on a window sill. The sun beat down on me through the glass. Her heart had stopped. She died in my stepfather’s arms. I could not bring myself to look at her in death. I, too, felt like a husk.
At home we put all her things out of sight. I held her pajamas in my hands and felt such emptiness. I just wanted to slip socks over her tiny feet one more time, kiss her hands. We buried her with the blankets she could never be separated from. I wanted to lie down beside her. I wanted it all to be over. How was I meant to keep going? It was like a black hole opened up at the middle of me, sucking in and shredding all the pieces that were once good and tender, until there was nothing left of the person I was. Nothing at all.
The grief is consuming even now, and although it has no teeth or jaws, it still swallows me whole. It has derailed me countless times over the 12 years since her death. I am in bits. A part of me is still there wiping blood from white tile. I am a dead moth on the window sill. I am buried under so much dirt. And I am here in these words. I am immense.
I have three daughters now, and I love them with the sort of ferocity that can choke me sometimes. But I would be lying if I said I do not also grieve what was taken from me. I grieve the person I might have become if had not been a young victim, a young mother, forced into unimaginable circumstance, seeded by compounding traumas. Did that girl not also deserve mercy? Was her life any less important?
It should not have been this way. If I had been allowed the option to choose a “late-term abortion,” would I? Yes. A hundred times over, yes. It would have been a kindness. Zoe would not have had to endure so much pain in the briefness of her life. Her heart could have been stopped when she was warm and safe inside me, and she would have been spared all that came after.
Perhaps I could have been spared as well.
To Craig on his most recent post yesterday (on his blog where I am blocked) responding to comments here on Dan’s blog where he doesn’t dare face us again in the open.
“You should reflect a moment on the cowardice it takes to name me but not face me. Your conscience is bothered.
You want personal stories about women who choose not to have abortions? To what end? Every woman already has that right.
You’re trying to take away rights. And refusing human realities - “cherry pick” - while you do.”
I provided what you and Marshall asked for: between you you have it in your hands. It’s not my problem if the two of you aren’t mature enough to share, post, and then attempt to criticize the plan. (Two handfuls of laws that each, separately, havecstaristical effext on reducing gun violence.)
Your lying diversionary blame game just echoes the fear, the feeling stupid, the resentful rage you bear within you.
Your boss will delete this, but Dan did not think he was required to go to my blog to read the comments he deleted that contained answers to question he was asking yet again. Yet you expect me to piece together your non-answers spread out among three different blogs and seek them out. You're an idiot, as well as a coward and fake Christian. Like your boss.
You make up all the new conditions you want, Marshall. It still amounts to the fact that you and Craig, both asking for my plan, can’t share with each other to get it.
You lied to each other. You can’t do the simplest of playground requirements.
Because you know you’re beat. Andvthat you’ll have to face your senseless brutality.
No new conditions, feo. Scattering your response in three parts among the comments section of three blogs is something your boss wouldn't tolerate. He wouldn't even go to my blog where I reposted my deleted answers to his questions asked yet again. It's not a bew condition to expect you to respond comprehensively at one place in a civil manner. Indeed, it's pretty much common courtesy, if not a rule of discourse. And as Craig and I read each other's blogs, we wouldn't pretend the question hadn't been answered, as is the routine tactic of Dan.
More lies, denials, and diversions.
They are not in the comments section, idiot. You don’t allow that. One part is in your private hands. One part is in Craig’s private hands. As soon as you two can cooperate - it’s a real challenge to your maturity and a testament to whether you really want an answer - you get the whole thing and can take, finally, your best shallow tries at criticism.
But just like offering your best thoughts about what constitutes human nature, you dare not do it. You know you’ll look stupid. The very reason I gave you and Craig this ever so simple test: you now know how gutless you are.
Oh, gee! You really got me there, feo boy!!! What I have isn't actually in the comments section of my blog! It's actually two posts wherein I address each of your twenty impotent suggestions and why they're totally useless. Golly! How will I ever live down my egregious error??!! "Idiot" indeed.
The only real challenge is for you to act like the Christian no one could possibly be you are and cut the crap. You can "challenge" us all you like, but that has to be with solid arguments honestly and civilly presented....not with Easter Egg hunts that demonstrate you don't even believe your own crap.
As to my thoughts on human nature and personhood, you've yet to show any flaw in my position. You're too cowardly and deceitful to represent it accurately.
So take your "test" and put it back up your backside whence it came. You have no way to justify or rationalize such baselessly arrogant condescension. Posers like you never can.
What position? You’ve denied the only possibility you’ve offered: DNA makes a distinct human person. That hair swimming in your soup is a human person. And more fully human than you’re aged, motility challenged sperm, which is only half a human.
And if you have my plan in front of you on your blog... then you have what you’ve asked for. But, that’s a lie isn’t it? You know what you posted isn’t all of it. This is how you lie to Craig. He knows he has another part. You know it, too. He knows you know he knows. You know he knows you know.
But the two of you just keep lying openly, knowingly to each other, because you cannot afford to see yourself out in the open, looking stupid. You’d rather lie. And Craig agrees.
Two tools.
Again upu lie about what I've said. The sorriest and most pathetic part is when actually copy and paste my words and STILL misrepresent them. So to pretend I ever suggested anything that would lead to your idiocy that a human hair is a person because of human DNA within it proves the high degree of your stupidity and deceit. Ckearly you're TRYING to make my position ludicrous because of your total failure in finding true fault in anything I say. If yours was truly the superior intellect, you wouldn't have to lie.
And speaking of lying, it was YOU who said those 20 impotent suggestions wasn't your whole plan. It was YOU who said I could get the whole plan by retrieving the other 2 parts from 2 other places. Now you're suggesting I have the whole plan in front of me? Incredible! Then in the same paragraph, you again say it ISN'T the whole plan!
What Craig and I know is that you think you can dictate to us, that you're totally disordered in your need to be seen as "winning". We have no need to lie about anything. You have no trouble lying about everything.
I'm done here.
Your protestations are frantically empty and duplicitous.
It was you who first trotted out DNA. If a follicle of hair isn’t a human person, then DNA is a sorry excuse for trying to identify what it is that makes the human person a human person a human person. It’s up to you to answer the question in a better way. But, for two weeks of whining, you haven’t even tried.
_____
As for getting what you want, you simply have to learn to share with others who want it, too. It just be that way sometimes. Kindergarten stuff, Marshall. And you haven’t been up to even that
““When does the soul enter the body is the #1 question,” she wrote. “Not when does life begin, as life begins in a flower or an animal with the first cell. So the question is does the life begin (soul entering the body) at conception or at the moment the first breath is taken? If the answer to that question is at conception, then abortion is murder. If the answer to that question is the moment the first breath is taken, then abortion is not murder....
“As with many profound questions, she thought about the lessons she had taken from the life and death of her daughter Robin. Her beloved 3-year-old had died of leukemia in 1953, after six months of brutal treatments and dashed hopes. The tragedy would shape everything from Bush’s views on big issues to her impatience with prattle...
“Judging from both the birth and death of Robin Bush, I have decided that that almost religious experience, that thin line between birth, the first breath that she took, was when the soul, the spirit, that special thing that separates man or woman from animals + plants entered her little body. I was conscious at her birth and I was with her at her death. (As was G.B.) An even stronger impression remains with me of that moment, 27 years ago [when she died]. Of course, extreme grief, but that has softened. I vividly remember that split second, that thin line between breathing and not breathing, the complete knowledge that her soul had left and only the body remained.”
Barbara Bush
Barbara Bush, of course, had five children whom are living still as well as carrying and giving birth to Robin, nursing and mothering her all the way through Robin’s death. Ms Bush was, as well, an intensely political person concerned with right behavior and leadership.
But Marshall and Craig, two men never having given birth or ever contemplated their identity as possibly giving birth, they will dismiss Ms Bush’s expertly considered moral reflections as sentimental anecdote.
They can only do that because they have never, ever availed themselves if the modern capacity of humankind for self-critical reflection and acknowledgment of the simple truth of their own quite rigid subjective limitations as white men in adjudicating truth for the majority of the world’s all other peoples who are not.
Brutal.
The To be clear, it takes 100 billion cells to make up the human brain. The human brain, as we now know, holds the seat of the human person, the soul of that person. Not the foot or the hair.
Solely because Marshall gets by with 1/16 of that 100 billion cells, he is convinced that one cell can carry the human soul. One cell like that found in a follicle of hair or the trimmed callous from my toe. He chooses to believe this because he puts his trust in ink and papyrus that says that one cannot touch a woman during her period, make a shirt from the thread obtained from two different plants, or plow with two different animals or eat pork.
He fails to be a good steward of his god-gifted capacity for intellection. And so has none.
“... the difference between a single cell scraped off his arm versus the single fertilized ovum that, left unimpeded, will grow to be a retiree in Florida.”
You “fail to understand” that the “difference” you want to point out here has nothing to do with DNA. Being so dumb that there is no room for you to go down the dumb ladder, I doubt you can see this. And after weeks of whining, I also doubt that you will ever really try to recover from your DNA fail. But you can try.
What constitutes the real “difference” Marshall? Your moral position on abortion requires you to put some intellectual effort into it.
Marshall, I'm shutting you down. I've asked you to not make any more comments until you address the claims you made in my next post. You've begged off saying you don't have time, but you're still commenting here. I'm giving you a chance to take the time to address the claims you say you can support but can't, not in the real world. Until you answer those questions or admit your mistake, no more comments here ever.
This from a guy too scared to allow me to comment at his blog.
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