Reply With Quote
So do you think the woman should be allowed to murder her baby if raped?
That's awesome for your family but you are extraordinarily lucky. In the vast majority of other incidents, births before 24 weeks do not survive. That's why 24 weeks is defined as the cut-off, and why it's a rational limit for abortion.
So do you think the woman should be allowed to murder her baby if raped?
Then don't say, "if you have a part of a woman's body incapable of living outside her body at all, that is not a baby."
Boy that's tough. I'd say no, but I completely understand why it would be ok in the laws eyes.
I didn't. I think you're mistaking me for someone else. I'm the one who said it doesn't matter what you call it, basically.
You are correct. My bad.
(nods)
All fairly true. I would not, though charactorize premies born before 24 weeks as surviving "all the time". If you have some article or data to support that, I might buy it, but that is not my understanding.
Feel free to answer the question posed to CosmicCowboy as well.
This is a fairly complex issue, and sorting through it involved confronting a lot of uncomfortable things that we generally don't like to think about. Are you comfortable with forcing women to be pregnant against their wishes?
Do we then also investigate women who have miscarriages as criminals?
http://www.latimes.com/world/great-r...415-story.html
That is the thing though. If the logic in attempting to ban abortions is "it is a baby, and a tragedy", then why do we not invest as much effort into stopping miscarriages?
To advocate one, but not the other, seems inconsistent to me.
so you completely understand why the law would allow baby murder just because of inconvenience on the mother? wow
Cause you cannot actually hold yourself morally superior to a woman who has a miscarriage and not look like a complete asshole.
I still think it's funny the GOP response is to propose the same that didn't work last time and burnt them pretty badly. Tells me they aren't serious. Same different decade.
An uncomfortable reality. Mostly human formed that late, yes.
Viable as an self-sustaining organism, no.
I do understand that the pictures can be upsetting. I am as empathetic as the next person, and they disturb me too.
But, one must consider that the choice is not ours to make. Personally, I would prefer no abortions happen, but they will, even if illegal. Our country does such a poor job, though, in supporting young poor women, and caring for poor children, I am not sure forcing women to come to term is really in our best interest.
If we demonized people without money a bit less, and provided care for the results of unwanted pregnancies, I would be a lot more comfortable with such a policy.
As it is, we value money more than people or children in our country, and taxes for such things are considered almost as evil. That also seems wildly inconsistent to me, that many of the same people who want to make abortion illegal are the ones who scream bloody murder when you ask them to help the children once they are born by paying for wealth transfer programs.
.
It is another case of the GOP shooting themselves in the foot. Planned parenthood, although an abortion provider, does a lot in terms of womens health.
Get rid of that thing, fine, but then you have to step into the vast gap in women's health services left.
Jeb found that out real quick and backpedaled from the stupid he said.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-33783147
That is what basing your policy decisions and positions on ignorance of the facts and data look like.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
Survivorship bias, or survival bias, is the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that "survived" some process and inadvertently overlooking those that did not because of their lack of visibility. This can lead to false conclusions in several different ways. The survivors may be actual people, as in a medical study, or could be companies or research subjects or applicants for a job, or anything that must make it past some selection process to be considered further.
Survivorship bias can lead to overly optimistic beliefs because failures are ignored, such as when companies that no longer exist are excluded from analyses of financial performance. It can also lead to the false belief that the successes in a group have some special property, rather than just coincidence. For example, if three of the five students with the best college grades went to the same high school, that can lead one to believe that the high school must offer an excellent education. This could be true, but the question cannot be answered without looking at the grades of all the other students from that high school, not just the ones who "survived" the top-five selection process.
Like I said, I am pro choice. Just don't sugar coat it and lets call it what it is. It is medically killing off a viable life if left unmolested.
As for wealth transfer programs to reward keeping babies the whole system sucks. I see teenagers near my office going to high school with a toddler, one in a stroller, and one in the belly all the time. I'm near an SAISD day care. The extra few hundred per child per month may not seem like much to us but it is viewed as a legitimate income by these young girls that get a "raise" every year as they pop another one out. It is a self perpetuating underclass lifestyle for generation after generation.
Last edited by CosmicCowboy; 08-05-2015 at 06:28 PM.
We first acquired the stem cells from the red receptacles of a local hospital’s labor and delivery ward, delivered to our lab at the University of Southern California. I would reach into the large medical waste containers and pull out the tree-like branches of the placenta, discarded after a baby had been born. Squeezing the umbilical cord that had so recently been attached to new life, the blood, laden with stem cells, would come dripping out.
But sometimes a different package would arrive at our lab. Despite my distaste for wringing placentas, I felt more squeamish about what lay inside the unassuming white box. Packed in the ice was a crescent-shaped sliver of dark red tissue: a human liver. Just like the placentas that were discarded after birth, this tissue was originally destined for medical waste following an abortion.
Although their fates were similar, their origins couldn’t be more different. One source was the byproduct of celebration, the other a procedure often marked with stigma and shame. While under the bright focus of the microscope the cells we isolated were indistinguishable, in our minds there was a significant difference.
Stem cell science is a big deal in California, thanks to the Ins ute for Regenerative Medicine, a state agency that has allocated almost $2 billion in research grants since 2004 (federal funding is still highly restricted). To meet the demand for cells, researchers turned to a procedure protected by federal law: abortions. The discarded tissue from terminated pregnancies, performed up to 26 weeks in California, is a rich source of stem cells.
But only certain fetal cells are useful. While embryonic stem cells, derived from fertilized eggs, can give rise to any cell that makes up the body, as fetal cells develop from the embryo they become committed to specific cell lineages. The liver and thymus, for instance, are packed with the precursor cells to the immune system, while the brain contains neural cells that form the nervous system.
To meet the need for these precursor cells, biotech companies form an essential middleman between tissue donated from abortion clinics and the research labs that need it. They ensure that informed consent is obtained, harvest the organs, in some cases isolate and purify the cells and then ship them out to laboratories. There are profits to be made by such middlemen in what critics call the abortion industry. A fetus runs upward of $850, not including testing, cleaning or shipping charges, while a vial packed with pure stem cells can fetch more than $20,000.
The use of fetal tissue in research is not new. Fetal cells extracted from the lungs of two aborted fetuses from Europe in the 1960s are still being propagated in cell culture. They’re so successful that today we still use them to produce vaccines for hepa is A, rubella, chickenpox and shingles. From two terminated pregnancies, countless lives have been spared.
It isn’t just vaccines. Scientists at the University of California, San Diego, have injected neural stem cells into two patients to treat their spinal cord injuries. And progress is being made in the use of stem-cell therapies against cancer, blindness, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, H.I.V. and diabetes.
As impressive as this is, for critics the lives saved cannot make up for those that have been lost. And as important as I believe my research was, I sympathize with that sense of loss, even after leaving the lab for Boston.
Every week when the plain white FedEx box was delivered, uneasiness permeated the lab. We all knew that the tissues contained within were precious. We planned our experiments meticulously, trying not to waste a single drop. We rationalized using the cells by telling one another that the abortions would happen regardless of whether we used the tissue for research. And we knew that if we didn’t use the tissue it was bound for the trash.
Perhaps this is why it was difficult to hear Dr. Deborah Nucatola, Planned Parenthood’s senior director of medical services, discuss the organs of aborted fetuses so casually in surrep iously recorded conversations with anti-abortion activists posing as fetal-tissue buyers. It’s understandable that politicians, angered by her callous tone, are investigating how fetal tissue is handled and how research is conducted, despite the strict ins utional review that governs the use of anatomical tissue donated for research.
Politicians aren’t the only ones looking for answers. Scientists are searching for alternatives to fetal cells. One solution may lie in reprogramming adult cells, creating what researchers call induced pluripotent stem cells. These cells share the ancestral adaptability of embryonic stem cells, yet can also be manipulated to look and act like fetal stem cells.
And yet, every time I worked with a fetal liver, I imagined that somewhere in California a woman had made the agonizing, heartbreaking decision to end her pregnancy. Yet she had also donated her aborted fetus to medical research. I thought of this as I isolated the golden-tinged cells inside the vent hood. A promise had been made; these cells were not simply trash.
The choice I made is repeated every day, in labs all over the world. Researchers have no say in whether a fetus is aborted or develops into a human baby; those decisions are made by women and shaped by politicians. Yet their science, performed on discarded tissue, has the ability to save lives. It already has.
About the first, I think we both agree.
As for the second, my wife teaches high school, and has some first hand knowledge of young girls having babies. They don't do it for an income, and the most identifiable reason she has been able to discern is that they are shockingly ignorant of what causes pregnancies. She is in a position to know this as the biology teacher, who gets asked some very basic questions from time to time.
If you have any actual evidence that the motivation of these girls in having children is to get more welfare, please present that. I would accept any valid study from a peer-reviewed journal.
If you can't present that evidence, why not? If it doesn't exist, are you comfortable basing important public policy on a potentially mistaken model of reality?
If education was really the problem you would think after the first one they would figure out where babies come from.
http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpo...m_campaign=app
Sorry, I know NPR doesn't have the same journalistic credibility as the Center for Medical Progress, but still an educational read.
.. shows why defunding PP would hurt Ms of poor women, as the Repugs/Bible humpers will keep attempting.
One might think that, but that is not quite always the case, according to my wife.
Is there really an epidemic around you of high school teenagers with more than one kid?
You live under a rock? Almost 40% of births in Bexar County are to unwed mothers and many of them are multiples. I see teenagers with litters at the Valero around the corner from my office downtown every time I go in there.
^^^compares unwed mothers to dogs.
stay classy, CC
It's 36%, which is about the same as Texas and the US.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions