UKH

US centric thread.. but I think it’s very important and where the US goes, many places follow.
 

I saw an interesting comment on Twitter along the lines that men have an important role on the Supreme Court anti abortion leak...
 

A lot of men will apparently say ‘it’s none of my business - I can’t get involved as i have no experience’..

I think this is weak and dismissive. By saying that, it implies there are arguments for and against abortion, on which men should not comment, which there are in any individual case I’m sure. It must be an agonising decision. But by saying that, it implies we men acknowledge womens right to make those choices - so we are pro choice.

Ok then men.. let’s say we are pro choice if we are, and support women who have to make these difficult choices. Please don’t sit on the fence and imply pro-life (anti-choice) is equally valid! 

(Of course if you are pro-life, I respect your view, disagree vehemently with it and ask that you too would be clear about your position, whilst refraining from imposing it on anyone else)

Quiet day for you today?

Well then, I'm pro-choice, but I'd much rather listen to the opinions of women who are directly affected. 

In particular, whilst obviously respecting their right to express an opinion, I don't want to hear another entitled, morally illiterate, post-reproductive, 'socially conservative', pro-capital punishment, god-bothering misogynist lecturing anyone on how a woman's right is subservient to that of a small collection of preconscious cells.

This is exactly what I will do because I believe in this approach on this subject.

Both the pro-life and pro-choice camps are making very valid arguments, however, they are both wrong as they generally fail to acknowledge the other sides argument and believe the other side is scum.

I don't understand how either camp can hold such strong views, because to do this you have to completely dismantle the counter argument.

This isn't about people in political camps reacting badly to contrary opinions, it's about people protesting about abuse of political power to enact medieval legal changes that a shamefully large conservative minority want in the US. Legal change that will impact everyone in many states run by a Republicans. The change that will result in these states to stop nearly all abortion; in some cases even where pregnancy is a result of rape, a change to enact this would be exceptional in a modern democracy, even in a highly religious country like the US. They are even talking about travel bans to prevent women going to another state to get an abortion. These are people who want to ban abortion but claim individual citizen rights are paramount.

Opens thread.

Male echo chamber.

Leaves thread.

It absolutely has got everything to do with political camps reacting badly to contrary opinions.

What we are seeing in the US is to two sides continuing to push for extreme views causing policies to swing from one end of the spectrum to the other, rather than understating why the other side holds a view, trying to compromise and settle on a policy that keeps everyone equally "unhappy".

Both sides are not taking into account the others views and generally argue their case very poorly. Terms like "baby killers" or to quote this thread "morally illiterate, post-reproductive, 'socially conservative', pro-capital punishment, god-bothering misogynist" which isn't really helpful and won't get us anywhere.

I can't find the article now but I remember reading recently about what I think was a small group campaigning to increase abortion rights to 8 months. If I was to guess, I'd say a consensus among the pro choice group of around 24 weeks would probably be agreeable (this happens to be the UK and some states in the US are around that figure). So this means that (if correct) pro-choice got their way and pro-life have been ignored.

Then you have the pro-life camp that I guess have a no tolerance 0 week allowance.

I'm of the view that 24 weeks is too late (pro-choice camp, put your pitchforks away). I hold this view partly because I know someone that was born at 24 weeks. So the argument said above disagreeing that a "woman's right is subservient to that of a small collection of preconscious cells" doesn't mold much water with me this late on.

But I also believe that there is a time between 0 and 24 weeks where it is just "a small collection of preconscious cells" (pro-life camp, put your pitchforks away). I just don't definitively know what that number is. But I have ideas.

Yes you could probably use science and for me pick a time before brain matter exists. this can be anywhere from 12 apparently.

Or another way is not to use science and use popular opinion and go half way between the 0 and 24 weeks and settle on 12 weeks. Hey there's that number again.

Or to keep pro-choice people happy pick a date which already covers the mass majority of abortions anyway. Apparently more than 9/10 abortions happen before 12 weeks. Hey there's that number again.

Then you bolt on a few exceptions for rape victims or health reasons and hopefully that covers many of the concerns.

I know it's naive to assume that either camp would settle for an average value, but it must be more stable than drifting to either extreme. I expect I'll get responses this this post calling me extreme which will be quite ironic since I'm literally taking the middle ground. The fact that my post above got 15 downvotes for simply saying that both sides have valid arguments just goes to show how divisive this subject is and therefore how important it is to learn to compromise and pay attention to the views of others.

I'm very pro choice but I'm not averse to the 24 week deadline being reexamined in light of advances in medical treatment. However I think a 12 week limit is way too early. If you have irregular periods (or are in denial) you might not realise for a couple of months and then there's always a risk of delays in the process as you need to fit in a doctor's appointment, a scan and then the termination itself. And obviously the decision making about whether to end a pregnancy isn't something that we should be pushing women to rush - it is, after all, a pretty huge decision for some women. To me, foetal viability should be the deciding factor on when to fix the date, obviously alongside the risks to the mother or serious medical conditions that the foetus has that become apparent during pregnancy. 

Not to mention that "12 week" scans screen for some very significant disorders, and that "12 week" scans often take place as late as 14 weeks.

A baby born with Edward's syndrome (screened for at "12 week" scan) only has a 13% chance of surviving beyond their 1st birthday. 

I would also add that this seems like a massive false equivalence. I've seen very little evidence of pro choice activists pushing for increasing liberalisation of abortion limits, in the UK or US. Whereas the pro life lobby (which is massively in the minority - 25%ish) have consistently tried to undermine a woman's right to choose and have tried to enforce this through violent means, including nail bombing clinics and assassinating doctors.

It's about 30% full on pro-life across the US and is in the majority in quite a few of the states with trigger legislation ready to go if the supreme court judgement is made as leaked. That's what's so scary.

What these hard line Republicans want isn't some some reasonable minor reluctant consensus tightening in the law, it's anything from major tightening to a full on religious medievalist attitude on the subject:  exactly what is ready (and can be read) in trigger legislation in various states. It's why montyjohns arguments (which might be acceptable lines of debate in the UK) are so ignorant and so shockingly wide of the horrible reality in the US. Take Texas for example....right now it's effectively 6 weeks with no exception for rape or incest. For now, texans can travel to meet for abortion rights.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/apr/19/texas-abortion-ban-senate-b...

I am incredibly fortunate that I have never been in a position where I've needed to consider an abortion. However like many I do have views on the subject.

​​​​​​Firstly I'd consider myself to be pro life, and am strongly against abortion. Secondly and far importantly though, I very strongly believe that there are circumstances where abortion is the right decision and that women/parents/doctors should have the option of termination available to them.

I'm not sure how religious extremists have hijacked the term 'pro-life' - pretty much everyone is pro life!

The issue is/should be almost a technical one - when does that bunch of dividing cells become a viable life that merits protection? The moment of conception is 'obviously' a nonsense - that would make God the greatest abortionist in history! (I can't remember the figures, but a huge proprtion of early pregnancies are naturally aborted.) At the other extreme, by the time a baby is born it has already acquired most of those characteristics that define being human - intelligence, personality, will to live.

Where the mid point is has to be a fair point of discussion... but legislators on the whole seem to have got it about right for the last 50 years. But hey, here's something else we can break!

Let's step back from the actual/specific law for a moment... humour me for a second or two.

How does a federal body allowing its member states to democratically decide their own laws on any topic get portrayed as some democratic affront? Surely that is the expansion of democracy and in another sense of the term giving "choice"?

Until this week apparently men could be women too, so presumably we all had a say. 

All of a sudden we don't.

Fascinating contribution as ever. 

Is holding a view that life at a certain point beyond conception has sanctity and that it is particularly important to safeguard that life when it has no voice of its own, entitled? In the same way we don't just knock-off the elderly when they become stupified by dementia, or every person who enters a comatose state?

Is that any more morally illiterate than the "my body, my choice" argument?  When it blatantly isn't as simple as "my body my choice" and anyone using that line is as morally illiterate as the most fundamentalist and dogmatic anti-abortionist? 

It is also possible to be pro-capital punishment, deeming that some people through deplorable crimes (Breivik? Pol Pot? Hitler? Putin? Dahmer?) might warrant the death penalty. All the while arguing that an unborn child, potentially in the third trimester and of no more harm to the mother than "ruining her life chances" (my wife was pregnant and abandoned at 15, considered her life destroyed and her planned medical career flattened as a result, went through with the pregnancy and has a wonderful successful daughter and has also gone on to flourish herself).

Perhaps the social conservatives, who you write off but who as far as I am aware are generally supportive of the right to abortion in extreme circumstances, and also certain states which don't wish it to be made as freely available as more liberal states do, are actually taking a moral position?

And as for misogyny, you only have to look at the disproportionate numbers of males to females in a place like China to see that abortion, resulting in many million missing females, can just as easily be viewed as misogynistic. A lot of blacks argue it is indeed racist.

The religious-right, social conservatives, entitled, and pro-capital punishments have views on this issue every bit as valid as progressive liberals.  If you don't want to hear them, perhaps you prefer to only hear people like this instead (https://twitter.com/courrielche/status/1521363687969214464)?

If the benchmark for an end-of-third-trimester abortion is that continuing would "impair the woman's mental health", I can't help but think of the situation prior to pot being legalised, where every man and his dog could turn up at a dispensary with a "I've got this ache" certificate. 

What's the point of contributing seriously when you can be pretty sure the masses here will have a moronically simplistic take, as lopsided voting further up already seems to imply?

"Pro-choice" is a quaint term. And for people to be so offended by a "pro-life" position, especially since Roe V Wade was decided by a mostly male court, looks like it might be overturned by a more diverse SC, and on such an important personal decision any pregnant woman might only be faced with a few hours longer drive as a result of this.

For every case of rape, incest, or potential harm to a mother (very unlikely any such cases will still be unable to obtain an abortion) there are cases of the thriving and happy lives that are here today that would otherwise have been aborted, the mothers who are grateful they went through with the pregnancy, and the ones who have regretted the abortion ever since.

I don't think your views are necessarily as coherent or informed as you seem to think. Have you missed the 'Pro lifers' who won't accept any termination, at any stage, for any reason? Or the pro-death penalty advocates, who (disregarding any moral or practical considerations) are happy to terminate anyone who commits murder, regardless of any other considerations. (How the f*ck they reconcile that with Christianity I'll never know - 'thou shalt not kill' seems to be the most unambiguous command in the entire canon.)

I don't see that men should be disqualified from the abortion debate. For me it is pretty simple: is what is in the womb a person. If it is a person then it has rights, if it isn't then it doesn't and only the mother's wishes are relevant. No sane person would think a newly fertilised egg was a person or a just to be born baby wasn't. So the debate should primarily be a technical one about defining criteria for when the embryo becomes a person. There's no reason why males can't contribute to that.

The US situation is a bit strange in that the Supreme Court is supposed to decide constitutional questions. Obviously the Constitution was ratified in 1788 so it doesn't say anything directly about abortion. Addressing abortion by stretching it into a constitutional right as per Roe v Wade is probably the wrong way to do it. Ideally the US Federal government would legislate for abortion or have an amendment to the constitution specifically about abortion but the reason it can't do it is it can't assemble a majority.

Because you surely have better things to do with your life than interrupt random discussions to poke fun at trans people?

You're right.  I'm not informed and possibly not even coherent. Unfortunately the pro-choice brigade don't look to me to be any better. 

Yet here we seem to have a prevailing viewpoint that one side, in UKC's case the progressive side, is automatically morally right - with nearly the same certainty as the fundamentalist Christian right engage in.

Perhaps people guided by their Christian faith (or probably any faith), possibly even male heaven-forbid, might just have a moral compass on such issues which serves them a little bit better than an atheist, blue-haired, pro-noun-toting, progressive who seems to think abortion can simply be boiled down to "my choice" and with an apparent assumption that anything other than that is equivalent to it being federally outlawed.

I haven't missed the pro-lifers who won't accept any termination. Perhaps you have missed the pro-choicers (such as the sort linked to above) who seem to think that abortion at any point needs to be recklessly enshrined in law? I certainly haven't missed that ultimately, given the US is a federal system, RvW was potentially a flawed judgement (the SC seems to agree) and that whether you support abortion or oppose it, to have it federally enshrined is over-reach and it should be struck down - none of which will eliminate anyone's ability to obtain an abortion.  For such a serious life decision, I'd like to think the inconvenience and cost of travelling cross-state (which will almost certainly end up being funded for anyone who needs it by pro-choice groups anyway) might just be a price worth paying.

But damn those men on the SC who decided that.

Dunderhead.

In seriousness, I don’t think the evidence supports the idea that happy and thriving is the normative outcome for the children of unwanted pregnancies. It’s great in the cases where that does happen and at the same time people don’t tend to have abortions lightly; people put a lot of thought into it.  

There was some interesting research in the early 90s into a massive decline in crime in various parts of the USA. It turned out that the states where crime dropped in the 90s were the states where abortion became newly accessible after Roe v Wade in ‘73. As the first cohort of children born after Roe v Wade reached adolescence, crime rates plummeted. And the types of crime that accounted for the change were those most likely to be committed by young men. I hear that your family’s experience is different, but those findings from the US don’t point towards happy and thriving being the normative outcome in cases where someone is prevented from accessing abortion.

An Interesting podcast on how the debate around abortion became what it is

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0011cpq

Hint; like so many “culture” war issues, from guns to abortion it usually revolves around someone from the right/evangelical with something to sell books/vhs/clicks/films/lecture circuit seats/bums on church pews (and associated collection tray)

Alex Jones isn’t the first or last charlatan to shift societal norms for personal gain

Let’s not have any false equivalence, progressive’s have been fighting a (sometimes understandably strident) rearguard action since the 80’s on certain issues.

In reply to nThomp:

All the trans girl in my uni class wants to do is live in peace, and people keep shoehorning trans people into all sorts of debates, and questioning their validity, why would anybody take the most difficult path towards feeling like themselves, if there was any choice?

We don't need an opinion on everything, we can mind our own business...

Do you believe in reason?

I've just thrown up.

Some people just can't stop themselves stirring up hatred of minorities. 

And polling data shows that for every woman who regrets having an abortion there are 99 who feel relieved 5 years on. 

As a family whose first child has pretty bad difficulties, we had a 'normal' second, wife wants a third as a 'normal' sibling, fair enough. 3rd pregnancy, tests for Downs, both of us instantly votes for abortion. No way we could handle two children with difficulties.

3rd child is an amazing self sufficient character! 🙂

So all your pro-life reglious clueless fack wits can go and ...

They/you have no idea.

It seems to be bitter people, or with some kind of grudge against life (probably same thing).

I've never met anybody at peace who's had a problem with a segment of society...

Whatever the reason, I don't think mocking the existence of trans people in this way:

is acceptable. I think it's disgusting. Particularly when it's going out of the way to mock trans people, it's not as if it's careless use of language in a discussion about sport. I won't give nThomp the pleasure of crying "freedom of speech" by reporting it, but I am calling it out as f*cking shit.

There will be trans people among the forum members, when I ponder it, who'll feel a little bit worse about that. 

We haven't unfortunately advanced to the point where mocking people for being trans is as unacceptable as mocking them for being gay or for their ethnic background. The backlash is still strong, but these arguments about whether people deserve to be treated with equal respect only end one way.

It's not set in stone, though, any progress, but this feels like it's drifting off topic*. Darkness always lurks, a recent national vote preceded a spike in hate crimes of different kinds.

(*Dunno if that's a bad thing.)

You're a male aren't you? Apparently you are not be listened to on this issue.  Or is it only males in favour of abortion who are?

Your wife, as with anyone in the US regardless of RvW, can get an abortion. Those states that want dilating mothers to be able to elect to terminate a child might just remain able to. While those, for religious reasons or otherwise, can choose to not have it take place in their backyard. I see no problem with that. And anyone who has a view on the matter with any sort of nuance should have their voice heard.

An extreme position, I know. Unlike "all you pro-life religious fack wites can go and..."

Absolutely. Hence I say f-off to dogmatic pro/anti-abortion stances, and don't enjoy sermons from the religious - be that the religion of "progressivism" or the pentecostal one.

I'd take their points on the grounds on which they were made. So if a progressive can make a solid case for RvW I'll listen. I'm not interested in dismissing the argument because they are religious, or because they are male, old, voted Tory, or some other arbitrary bigoted distinction.

Seems an un-reasoned reaction to the idea that religious morality can provide every bit as good an anchor as atheist dogma. You seem quite unashamed of your own bigotry.

I don't think you understand what reason is. 

Can I recommend Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker as a good grounding in the case for reason, science and humanism.

"Religious reasons" by definition are not good reasons. Reasons stand on their own and appeal to what we know about the world through our senses and our shared understanding of how it works developed through the practice of science. This is not a dogma. This is a flexible way of understanding the world that is constantly updated as new information comes to light. This way of understanding the world is the only game in town to make progress on how we should organise our societies, because it has the firm foundations of shared observations which any human can in principle validate.

I think you want to throw all this in the bin for the sake of a petty political grudge and you don't realise what you're doing.

If you think that atheism and religion are equivalent dogmas, then you need to go back to the start and learn what reason is.

Edit: on second thoughts I’m deleting my response. You don’t reply to anything unless you think you can stir up a fight and I don’t know why I tried to engage in anything approaching an adult discussion. I’m actually a bit embarrassed that I tried to engage seriously with your points after you joined the thread just to mock trans people. Sorry folks. 

My original post didn’t say I wasn’t prepared to listen to reasonable arguments or that I had an extreme position.  What I was pointing out was that a lot of the most vocal commentators tend to have a constellation of frankly offensive views and are the people who are least qualified to talk on the subject.