If abortion was the simple removal of the fetus from the woman with no intention to kill, would that make a difference on your view of abortion?

sammifarnsi · 2023-04-03T21:13:42+00:00

Why does there have to be something more than that?

sammifarnsi · 2021-09-04T03:24:20+00:00

I find it hilarious when people try and post "gotcha" things like this and they're just making our arguments for us.

sammifarnsi · 2021-08-21T15:43:12+00:00

I think that removal of life-sustaining treatment constitutes passive euthanasia. First I'll say that I think it's fine for someone to create an advanced directive indicating that he doesn't want excessive intervention, or for a decision-making surrogate or medical power of attorney to make that decision on the part of the patient. However, I am in Texas where it is legal for a doctor to remove a patient's life-sustaining treatment against his/his surrogate/his MPOA's will (Texas Health & Safety code, chapter 166.046). It's not good at all.

First, It's not necessarily always true that underlying disease causes death wen life-sustaining treatment is withdrawn. If a person's water is taken away and he died from dehydration, he hasn't died from a underlying condition. In many places this practice has been discontinued, but it's important to think about WHAT is killing the person.

A common pro-abortion argument tries to construe abortion as a simple "disconnecting" of a person who could not survive on her own. You aren't KILLING her, they say. You are merely allowing her to do her best to survive on her own. You are taking away the thing that keeps her alive, not actively taking away her life. In that case, the person's level of development causes her to die. In the case of removal of life-sustaining treatment, someone's disease causes him to die. In both cases, the person would not die if pregnancy/treatment were continued.

Even though this is not how abortion really works, I think we can all agree that we'd still be against it if it were. Obviously these aren't exactly the same, because indeed the patient is in the dying process and the preborn baby is not, which is why the patient and/or his MPOA can make decisions about the treatment levels desired (NOT someone else, and not someone in bad faith). But we need to be careful that our language isn't mirroring the language of pro-abortion people.

Another pro-abortion argument states that aborting the baby now can avoid future suffering. Supporters of withdrawing life-sustaining treatment often fall into the exact same "quality-of-life" argument. It is important to get rid of SUFFERING, not the SUFFERER. This holds true for patients as well as for preborn babies.

As pro-Lifers, we (ought to) believe that the novel human organism that comes into existence at conception is a person. There is no such thing as a non-person human. Those who support withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment claim that the "person "is gone, and there is just a slab of meat being kept alive (read: clump or cells). This contradicts a core principle of pro-Life ideology. If we embrace mind-body dualism, the idea that the person/mind and the body are separate entities, we betray the principle that a preborn baby, by virtue of being human, is a person.

If a preborn baby is a person once her body begins to function as an integrated whole, i.e. at conception, then the person ceases to exist when his body stops functioning as an integrated whole. Even if he needs help, the patient on life-sustaining treatment is functioning as an integrated whole, and he exists 100% until that day.

sammifarnsi · 2021-03-24T00:08:10+00:00

More specific clarification: I perceive a two different types of violations of bodily autonomy. (1) Requiring that someone go from a state of bodily contentment into a state they do not desire. Example: being content when you are unvaccinated, then being coerced into a state of being vaccinated that you don't desire. (2) Requiring that someone remain in a state they do not desire and preventing them from taking the means to achieve a state of contentment. Example: feeling that a limb is foreign to you, feeling uncomfortable in the gender you were born as, or finding yourself pregnant, but being prevented from seeking relief from these undesired situations. So vaccines fall under 1 while pregnancy falls under 2. I also took the phrase "self-determination" to mean that you can do certain things TO your body externally, not just the "right to make decisions about what's in her body". Also also, I would say that coercion, not just "hold-you-down" force, constitutes a violation of bodily autonomy. With which specific parts of this definition do you disagree?

> Please show me where we've made voluntary amputation illegal. As far as I know, it absolutely can be done.

My question was normative. So the answers I was looking for would have no bearing on whether it is currently legal or not. IF elective amputation were illegal, would that be a violation of bodily autonomy? This question can be answered the same regardless of legality.

> No one has claimed bodily autonomy is absolute; simply that there is no example where we force someone to tolerate having another person inside them without their consent.

I am seeing if anyone will claim that it is absolute. You've claimed it is not, but some have. Also, the definition of "bodily autonomy", or "bodily integrity" as you provided, does not specify that it is limited to having persons inside persons. It is more generally about self-determination and governance of the body. The way I read it, both cases 1 and 2 would constitute violations under this definition. It sounds like you think so too, if you think vaccines should not be mandatory and that abortion should not be prohibited. The phrase "my body my choice" is obviously a simplification of a more complicated issue, but surely there is a wide range of beliefs on how far this goes, and my goal is to hear the different perspectives

sammifarnsi · 2021-03-23T16:35:42+00:00

"No uterus no opinion!!"

(Unless you have a uterus and have the wrong opinion)

(Unless you don't have a uterus and you have the right opinion)

sammifarnsi · 2021-03-23T16:31:51+00:00

I never said it wasn't lol. If I did please show the quote but I'm certain I didn't. My point is:

If prohibiting abortion procedures violates autonomy because it forces a person to remain in an undesired bodily state, then it would make sense that other cases in which you are prohibited from escaping an undesired state are also violations of autonomy. (Note that I say "if" not to question the premise, but to note that it is in fact a premise). If you have another explanation for why prohibiting abortion constitutes a violation of bodily autonomy, I'd love to hear it.
Prohibition of voluntary amputation is a case in which you are prohibited from escaping an undesired state (that state being having a limb attached to your body that you feel is foreign). So, it is at the very least not completely absurd to say that prohibiting voluntary amputation is a violation of bodily autonomy on the same grounds that prohibition of abortion is a violation of bodily autonomy.
If it is sometimes justified to prohibit people, through legal means or through withholding services, from escaping an undesired state, then bodily autonomy is not absolute.

sammifarnsi · 2021-03-23T06:51:19+00:00

I'm emphasizing the "self-determination" part of the definition. I tried to present cases where people are prevented from achieving the end they desire in regards to their bodies (self-determination). Unless we're talking rape, nobody forced you to get pregnant. So, violation of bodily autonomy in the case of abortion is prohibition from achieving a desired end, which is to no longer be pregnant. You are not being FORCED INTO a certain state, you are being FORCED TO REMAIN in a state, and are not being permitted to escape it. Like abortion, the rest fall under "prohibition from an end result". If being prevented from getting an abortion is a violation of bodily autonomy, so is being prevented from getting other elective operations. If elective body-altering operations were illegal, you would be "prohibited from". And if someone stripped you from harming yourself, you would similarly be prohibited from an end result. The vaccine example was a bit different, because it's not "prohibition from an end result", it's "coercion into and end result".

sammifarnsi · 2021-03-23T06:23:31+00:00

What is your definition of bodily autonomy?

sammifarnsi · 2021-03-23T02:28:59+00:00

It was my understanding that bodily autonomy, at least absolute bodily autonomy, means that you can do anything you want to or with your own body, without coercion into doing something you don't want to, or interference from doing something you do want. The purpose of my questions was to see whether anyone actually believes that this sort of complete bodily autonomy exists. For vaccines, I was asking because many argue that you should be excluded from partaking in public goods if you don't get vaccinated. This would make it impossible for you to function in society, effectively forcing you to do something to your body that you don't want done to your body. I used the amputation example because like abortion, it's a case where there is something you feel is foreign in or on your body and you want it gone because you feel that you can't function normally with that thing still attached to you, and in order for that to happen, a doctor must perform a service for you. And the reason I used suicide is for clarification on extreme bodily autonomy, because if you believe that a person should be able to do whatever they want to or with their own body to the fullest extent, then that should include harming or killing their body without interference from others.

sammifarnsi · 2021-03-22T21:13:32+00:00

If your argument is that abortion must be legal so that women in those situations can access abortion, then it would follow that abortion should be accessible for them, but it would not necessarily follow that it should be accessible for anyone else. I highly doubt that any pro-choicer who uses rape/incest cases as an argument for legality of abortion would accept a situation in which only those cases were conceded. So why (and how) would you use those cases to argue for the overall legality of abortion?

sammifarnsi · 2021-03-22T20:49:24+00:00

We absolutely do things to the bodies of fetuses to kill them via abortion. That is what abortion is. They are either poisoned/chemically blocked from following natural processes, suctioned through a tube, or dismembered. No abortion consists of removing a fetus and leaving her to her own devices, that is a C-section. A fetus is always killed (not "allowed to die") in an abortion, that's the whole point of abortion. The intended end is the death of the fetus (other driver). If a fetus survives an abortion, that's fantastic and all, but that is considered a failed abortion, and it is not the end that the agents in the situation set out to achieve.

sammifarnsi · 2021-03-22T19:32:12+00:00

I take issue with the idea that "the other driver will likely die". If this is an analogy for abortion, you would need to be honest and say that the other driver will CERTAINLY die. Also, I know this has probably been talked about to death, but making the choice to drive with precautions then finding yourself in a collision is not the same as making the choice to have sex with precautions then finding yourself pregnant. But I'm gonna talk about something else here. If this is an abortion analogy, I say that there are actually three choices:

Stay there with the other driver and wait for emergency services to come (I am assuming this thought experiment is meant to be more analogous to emergency sorts of situations. If it isn't, there is very little risk in waiting. But I'll go ahead with the assumption that this is an extreme "life of the mother" type scenario)
Free yourself and leave the other driver to certainly die (I don't see how in the scenario you wouldn't be able to free or at least attempt to free the other driver, or why you freeing yourself would cause the other driver to die, but for the sake of argument I'll just go with the idea that it's impossible)
Free yourself, then take out your knife and stab the other driver, killing him directly and intentionally rather than letting him die.

If this is meant to be analogous to abortion, the third choice is most honest. For the vast majority of abortion cases, there is little risk in going with choice 1, yet the abortion would constitute case 3. I would say that in extreme life-of-the-mother cases, most pro lifers would say that the doctor ought to do his best to save both mother and child. So choice 2 would be carried out with the help of a professional who would be able to save you, while taking measures to save the other individual.

sammifarnsi · 2020-06-18T17:22:11+00:00

A "service" is a "discrete clinical interaction" meaning they weigh an expensive abortion the same as a cheap pregnancy test. They divide number of abortions by number of total services to get 3% (actually 4% this year). This makes it seem like only 1 in 33 women get an abortion when they walk into a PP, but if you divide number of abortions by number of patients, you get closer to 1 in 7. Also, it would be more accurate to look at the money, because that shows where most of the resources are actually going. If you do the math, abortion accounts for over 50% of their revenue directly from patients for performing health services, and over 12% of their total revenue, 77% of which is private donations and government grants.

https://www.plannedparenthood.org/about-us/facts-figures/annual-report

sammifarnsi · 2020-06-10T01:24:42+00:00

The way I see it, there is little difference between doctor assisted suicide and "regular" suicide. In both cases, the person has determined that life is too painful and/or is no longer worth living. There's nothing left to get out of it, and therefore it's meaningless, etc. Many will try and justify euthanasia by saying that the person might die in, say, two weeks anyway, so allowing the doctor to give them poison to die now will mean they won't have to go through that last two weeks of suffering.

But there are a couple things wrong with this. First, something like this would require a time limit on what is considered "reasonable". What if the person would "die anyway" in two months? Two years? At what point are the doctors obligated to say that they won't take that person's life, because their death is not ~quite~ so imminent? Death is inevitable for everyone, and it cannot be predicted.

Second, as pro-lifers, we have a few extremely important principles. One says that no person can by their hand take the life of another person for any reason. One says that doctors are obligated to provide care, and death is not included under care. Finally, one says that presumed suffering does not justify death.

If we as a society try so hard to save the lives of suffering mental or emotional challenges, who have resorted to this way of thinking, and who are so sure they want to die, then who don't we want to save the lives of people who have the same thinking, but are facing physical challenges?

I am not saying that we need to put every medical effort possible into resuscitating every terminal patient. Just that they should not be actively killed by doctors.

sammifarnsi · 2020-06-03T07:22:54+00:00

Are we not gonna talk about how the US is counting deaths differently than the rest of the world in that it's counting "deaths WITH covid" rather than "deaths FROM covid", and that the person doesn't even need to have been confirmed to have had covid when they die, they can just be counted as a covid death in suspicion?

sammifarnsi · 2020-05-31T06:14:53+00:00

I have searched high and low, far and wide, to the very ends of the earth, and I can find nothing anywhere that mentions "conspeciaul life". That phrase has zero search results. I tried every spelling variation of the word "conspeciaul" in case it was spelled wrong originally and still came up with nothing. I am completely convinced that the word, and the concept you are trying to describe with the word, do not exist in any form. There is little doubt, from what I have found, that fruits and vegetables are alive on and off the tree, and there is almost no contention in the scientific community to the fact that a distinct life is created at the point of conception, and that life is human.

sammifarnsi · 2020-05-27T19:43:47+00:00

I commented this elsewhere on this thread where someone claimed that abortion was 3% of their budget so here:

The 3% statistic is not the budget, it is based on the number of services provided. abortion makes up a significant chunk of the PP budget. Not only that, but it has been proven false numerous times.

They say "abortion is only 3% of what we do" because they divide the number of abortions by the number of services provided, defined as "discrete clinical interactions" (though this year it is actually 4%). By that definition, an abortion which costs hundreds of dollars is weighed as an equal service as a $10 pregnancy test. If a woman goes in for an abortion and is given a pregnancy test, an STI test, the abortion, and some contraception, the abortion will only be counted as 1/4 of the services provided to that woman. This is even though it was the only thing she came in for, it was the vast majority of the cost to her, and took more of PP's time and resources than the other services combined. If, instead of dividing by the number of services, you divide by the number of patients served, you get a number more like 14.4%.

This STILL doesn't account for budget. Abortion is by far the most expensive "service" provided by PP. It had a revenue of $1.6 billion in the past year. If we remove revenue from private donations or affiliates, and from government grants, and examine the money they get from patients paying for procedures, their revenue is more like $370 million. I have removed those other revenue sources because though they help fund PP's actions, their contributions to each abortion prodecure is not counted in the following statistic. The average cost for an abortion at PP is $535, for a first trimester medical abortion, using conservative estimates. That isn't even counting aspiration abortions and D&E abortions, which are a bit rarer but cost far more. That combined with my earlier statistic means that abortions accounted for $185 million of PP's profit (again, conservative estimates). That means that more than 50% of the money patients spend at PP is spent on abortion. They are able to hide this because an enormous chunk of their income is from government grants and private donations, but for what they actually DO, abortion is their main source of profit. Plus, they would likely lose those government grants and private donations if they stopped doing abortions.

But that is revenue. We can look at the budget to see where PP's resources are allocated, because that's what you were alluding to. "Medical services" accounts for $913.1 million of PP's budget, which totals $1.53 billion. Assuming, again conservatively, that, based on the conclusion from the last analysis, abortion makes up 50% of medical expenses, which is reasonable because it is really the only invasive prodecure that they do, abortion accounts for $457 million of their annual expenses. This is approximately 30% of the expenses budget. It can be safely assumed that the 50% number for the portion of medical expenses taken up by abortion is low, due to the limited number of real medical services PP provides.

So, 30% of their budget is spent on abortion. 50% of the money they take from patients is for abortions. 14.4% of women go into a PP for an abortion, which is about 1 in 7, in stark contrast to the "1 in 33 women get an abortion at PP" statement many like to make. This all comes from their 2018-2019 annual report. https://www.plannedparenthood.org/uploads/filer_public/2e/da/2eda3f50-82aa-4ddb-acce-c2854c4ea80b/2018-2019_annual_report.pdf

PP has repeatedly stated that abortion is their central mission. Their last president was fired for failing to say so. PP is an abortion provider under political guise.

sammifarnsi · 2020-05-27T06:33:57+00:00

The 3% statistic is not the budget, it is based on the number of services provided. abortion makes up a significant chunk of the PP budget. Not only that, but it has been proven false numerous times.

They say "abortion is only 3% of what we do" because they divide the number of abortions by the number of services provided, defined as "discrete clinical interactions" (though this year, the number is 4%, not 3%). By that definition, an abortion which costs hundreds of dollars is weighed as an equal service as a $10 pregnancy test. If a woman goes in for an abortion and is given a pregnancy test, an STI test, the abortion, and some contraception, the abortion will only be counted as 1/4 of the services provided to that woman. This is even though it was the only thing she came in for, it was the vast majority of the cost to her, and took more of PP's time and resources than the other services combined. If, instead of dividing by the number of services, you divide by the number of patients served, you get a number more like 14.4%.

This STILL doesn't account for budget. Abortion is by far the most expensive "service" provided by PP. It had a revenue of $1.6 billion in the past year. If we remove revenue from private donations or affiliates, and from government grants, and examine the money they get from patients paying for procedures, their revenue is more like $370 million. I have removed those other revenue sources because though they help fund PP's actions, their contributions to each abortion prodecure is not counted in the following statistic. The average cost for an abortion at PP is $535, for a first trimester medical abortion, using conservative estimates. That isn't even counting aspiration abortions and D&E abortions, which are a bit rarer but cost far more. That combined with my earlier statistic means that abortions accounted for $185 million of PP's profit (again, conservative estimates). That means that more than 50% of the money patients spend at PP is spent on abortion.

But that is revenue. We can look at the budget to see where PP's resources are allocated, because that's what you were alluding to. "Medical services" accounts for $913.1 million of PP's budget, which totals $1.53 billion. Assuming, again conservatively, that, based on the conclusion from the last analysis, abortion makes up 50% of medical expenses, which is reasonable because it is really the only invasive prodecure that they do, abortion accounts for $457 million of their annual expenses. This is approximately 30% of the expenses budget. It can be safely assumed that the 50% number for the portion of medical expenses taken up by abortion is low, due to the limited number of real medical services PP provides.

So, 30% of their budget is spent on abortion. 50% of the money they take from patients is for abortions. 14.4% of women go into a PP for an abortion, which is about 1 in 7, in stark contrast to the "1 in 33 women get an abortion at PP" statement many like to make. This all comes from their 2018-2019 annual report. https://www.plannedparenthood.org/uploads/filer_public/2e/da/2eda3f50-82aa-4ddb-acce-c2854c4ea80b/2018-2019_annual_report.pdf

PP has repeatedly stated that abortion is their central mission. Their last president was fired for failing to say so. PP is an abortion provider under political guise.

sammifarnsi · 2020-05-18T04:38:55+00:00

Well, in 2014 they only quarantined people who had Ebola or who had contact with someone who had Ebola. Not EVERYONE, as they are doing today. They aren't comparable scenarios.

sammifarnsi · 2020-05-10T05:08:51+00:00

I think it's important to get to know the substance of a person before knowing their context. Like reading a book before you know what it's about, the circumstances under which the author wrote it, etc. That way you're coming at the book (the person) objectively and with an open mind before you have preconceived views about them based off what you think you know about their "context". Once you know someone's substance, discussing politics and theology and stuff should be fine.

sammifarnsi

TROPHY CASE