On politicizing women's health

4xis.black wrote:

So it probably isn't constitutional, but it'll take a few years to prove that.

That's what I was thinking.

Speaking of politicizing women's health...

The Associated Press reports that Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the nation’s leading breast-cancer charity, will cut off its funding to Planned Parenthood affiliates, where the foundation has traditionally paid for preventive screening services.

According to the AP, the move will mean “a cutoff of hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants, mainly for breast exams.”Planned Parenthood confirms that Komen is the first, and only, organization to cut off funding since the Congress began debating the issue in earnest last winter.

Komen said it could not continue to fund Planned Parenthood because it has adopted new guidelines that bar it from funding organizations under congressional investigation. The House oversight and investigations subcommittee announced in the fall an investigation into Planned Parenthood’s funding.

Planned Parenthood has been at the center of a lot of heated political battles lately. Most center on whether the group, as an abortion provider, should receive government funds for other services it provides, such as offering contraceptives and preventive screenings.

Nice cover story.

But then...

The group has been under pressure from anti-abortion rights groups not to fund Planned Parenthood. It also hired a vice president last year who had previously advocated for the group’s defunding in her run for Georgia governor.

That, of course, has nothing to do with it, I am sure.

momgamer wrote:

Most of the ones I know use adoption not for any logical reason, but because it's the only thing they can think of as a viable option to justify the rest of their beliefs. They don't know how it really works and how screwed up the process is. They just think it will fix the problem and anyone who doesn't use it is willfully doing something they think is awful.

Trying to use facts and figures against that is useless.

Quoted for great emphasis.

As per topic:
Slut shaming backed by law. So there's that.

This is a topic that I'd like to take some time to roll around in my head and allow the bitter taste to go away for a bit before I add more than just my few cents. For now, I'll state that as a left-leaning american woman in a committed relationship and no desire at this time to have children, I'm very, very glad I no longer live in a country that would grandstand behind such an idea. What a waste of taxpayer money just to confirm one's own sense of superiority over those damned sluts.

OG_slinger wrote:

Legally that fetus is not a living, breathing, defenseless human baby. Period.

That means the pro-life group is trying to use emotions to side-step the legal compromise society has already established in regards to abortion. They lost the legal argument so now they're just trying to bully, guilt, or humiliate women into following the morals dictated by their religion. Anyway you look at it, it's still the pro-life camp trying to force their religious views onto someone else.

The same argument could once have been made about blacks and abolitionism.

Just claiming the issue's been settled is kind of disingenuous, just as personal freedoms trumped property rights back then, right to life trumps privacy or other protections today. If you believed that blacks were people, valuing their freedoms over lesser rights was the correct behavior regardless of existing social standards or laws. Not sure how you can objectively say the same thinking doesn't apply here.

OG_slinger wrote:
Nomad wrote:

I can see how this would seem like bullying and unnecessary humiliation, if someone did not believe that a fetus is a living breathing defenseless human baby. However, like most other political hot button issues, both sides have so demonized the opposition that it would seem they are both blinded to the motives of the other side. Clearly the motive here for the pro-life camp is to confront the mother with her upcoming act(what pro-lifers see as basically murder).

I know that most of you don't see it this way, but can you at least see the logic based on the pro-life morality position?

Legally that fetus is not a living, breathing, defenseless human baby. Period.

That means the pro-life group is trying to use emotions to side-step the legal compromise society has already established in regards to abortion. They lost the legal argument so now they're just trying to bully, guilt, or humiliate women into following the morals dictated by their religion. Anyway you look at it, it's still the pro-life camp trying to force their religious views onto someone else.

Nomad wrote:

If the goal was to punish women, why do pro-lifers advocate adoption so strongly?

If their goal was to reduce the number of abortions, why are those same pro-lifers against contraception? It's because having sex for pleasure instead of procreation is considered bad and contraception allows those slutty women to dodge their punishment for having pre-martial sex, which is getting pregnant.

It has been my experience that the vast overwhelming majority of pro-life advocates are not against contraception. As far as I know that was purely a Catholic Church position, although I am no expert on Catholic dogma.

It would seem that the position that pro-choice advocates argue against the most, abortion prohibition laws would punish women, isn't even one that is held by the great majority of pro-life advocates, but I guess that is about the norm for most hot button polarized issues. Can we at least agree on these 2 things?

1. Pro-choice advocates are not in favor of killing babies.(ie. they do not believe a baby exists until it leaves the mothers womb)
2. Pro-life advocates are not obsessed with punishing women for their sexual indiscretions by forcing them to care for babies. (they just want the unborn baby not to be killed)

1. Pro-choice advocates are not in favor of killing babies.(ie. they do not believe a baby exists until it leaves the mothers womb)

If you asked most pro-choice advocates, I think what they'd actually say is "Pro-choice advocates are not in favor of abortion of *viable* fetuses except in extreme cases of absolute medical necessity". Any reasonable need for abortion can be fulfilled well before viability.

It's pretty sillly to say someone doesn't "believe a baby exists" before it's born. Makes them sound really strange and ignorant.

Robear wrote:
1. Pro-choice advocates are not in favor of killing babies.(ie. they do not believe a baby exists until it leaves the mothers womb)

If you asked most pro-choice advocates, I think what they'd actually say is "Pro-choice advocates are not in favor of abortion of *viable* fetuses except in extreme cases of absolute medical necessity". Any reasonable need for abortion can be fulfilled well before viability.

It's pretty sillly to say someone doesn't "believe a baby exists" before it's born. Makes them sound really strange and ignorant.

I would also add that the overwhelming number of Pro Choice advocates would also state that they advocate policies that would make abortion less necessary, that abortion is a serious decision of which women are both painfully aware and fully capable of understanding (better than men), and that the characterization that abortion availability opponents make of Pro Choice advocates as "baby killers" is entirely unconstructive and damaging to the discourse of public health policy.

And to bring it back to the original post, that, I think was the point behind the protest legislation.

Robear wrote:
1. Pro-choice advocates are not in favor of killing babies.(ie. they do not believe a baby exists until it leaves the mothers womb)

If you asked most pro-choice advocates, I think what they'd actually say is "Pro-choice advocates are not in favor of abortion of *viable* fetuses except in extreme cases of absolute medical necessity". Any reasonable need for abortion can be fulfilled well before viability.

It's pretty sillly to say someone doesn't "believe a baby exists" before it's born. Makes them sound really strange and ignorant.

Sorry. Would a better phrasing be that they do not believe a fetus becomes a human baby until it leaves it's mother's womb?

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/qHD5v.jpg)

Nomad wrote:

Sorry. Would a better phrasing be that they do not believe a fetus becomes a human baby until it leaves it's mother's womb?

Wow. No. What you are describing there is the textbook definition of fetus... ie still in the womb. Pro Choice Pro Life has nothing to do with that term.
Let me give it a shot: Most Pro-Life advocates believe that the Stork delivers a fully conscious human baby to the womb in the exact instant a sperm touches an egg.

Most Pro-Choice advocates believe that there is a period of time after conception but before birth where a woman should have the option to opt out of the burden of child-birth. Ideally long before the cells of the zygote have differentiated enough to support a central nervous system capable of 'consciousness.' Most agree that only in extreme cases should a viable fetus in late stages of development be terminated.

That's not fair to Pro-Life groups. I might say they don't differentiate between levels of potential for human life.

Post conception, anyway.

Let me give it a shot: Most Pro-Life advocates believe that the Stork delivers a fully conscious human baby to the womb in the exact instant a sperm touches an egg.

No, they don't, because they don't have funerals for miscarriages except in the most extreme cases. (I've heard of one.)

In other words, they don't really believe that. They just say they do.

What they really believe is that women who get abortions have been engaging in stupid, irresponsible behavior, and need to be punished. You can absolutely prove this, because reproductive policies will be supported or not supported based on their effect on the woman, not the child.

If a policy even vaguely makes sex safer in any way, shape, or form, conservatives will hate it, no matter how many abortions it prevents.

Related: see The Only Moral Abortion is My Abortion, where conservatives will happily excuse an abortion for themselves, because they can't demonize their own behavior.

They don't want to protect children, they want to punish sluts. That's why they'll get abortions themselves if a pregnancy is inconvenient, because they weren't being slutty, they just had a little accident.

gregrampage wrote:
4xis.black wrote:

So it probably isn't constitutional, but it'll take a few years to prove that.

That's what I was thinking.

The Roe decision was based on a criminal statute, making it a crime to receive or procure abortion services. The decision itself allows for regulation of the procedure just like in any other medical procedure.

Subsequent cases have dealt with sideways attacks, arguably, to skirt into this exception. But these laws are so seriously scrutinized as to be dead on the doorstep.

KingGorilla wrote:
gregrampage wrote:
4xis.black wrote:

So it probably isn't constitutional, but it'll take a few years to prove that.

That's what I was thinking.

The Roe decision was based on a criminal statute, making it a crime to receive or procure abortion services. The decision itself allows for regulation of the procedure just like in any other medical procedure.

Subsequent cases have dealt with sideways attacks, arguably, to skirt into this exception. But these laws are so seriously scrutinized as to be dead on the doorstep.

Is requiring procedure X before procedure Y really regulating procedure Y? They're separate instances and it really just sounds like putting a prerequisite before what has been determined a constitutional right. If you don't have a procedure that is in no way related to an abortion, you can't have one? How is that still a right then?

This, by the way, is why we keep having this fight. Conservatives say they want to stop abortion. So liberals propose policies that provably stop abortions, because most liberals don't like them either.

But most liberal initiatives make sex safer in the process of preventing abortions, and that is absolutely unacceptable to at least mainstream conservatism, whose real goal is to force people into marriage to have sex. And they put the screws to women because, biologically, they're easier to compel into 'correct' behavior.

Conservatives don't want what they claim to want, and that's why this fight just keeps going around and around and around.

Seth wrote:

I might say they don't differentiate between levels of potential for human life.

That's what I said... Sperm + egg = Fully Conscious Human Baby.

EDIT: Reading that it comes off harsher than I intended. Let me try again: I would consider not differentiating between a fertilized egg and a fully conscious human fetus just as crazy as not considering a conscious fetus to be human.

gregrampage wrote:
KingGorilla wrote:
gregrampage wrote:
4xis.black wrote:

So it probably isn't constitutional, but it'll take a few years to prove that.

That's what I was thinking.

The Roe decision was based on a criminal statute, making it a crime to receive or procure abortion services. The decision itself allows for regulation of the procedure just like in any other medical procedure.

Subsequent cases have dealt with sideways attacks, arguably, to skirt into this exception. But these laws are so seriously scrutinized as to be dead on the doorstep.

Is requiring procedure X before procedure Y really regulating procedure Y? They're separate instances and it really just sounds like putting a prerequisite before what has been determined a constitutional right. If you don't have a procedure that is in no way related to an abortion, you can't have one? How is that still a right then?

Well, it all depends on how far you think your right to privacy goes; and what truly is a penetration of that protection. In another realm, I know of many people who think that their public information-like their license plate number, or address is private.

Your discussions, actions, advice from your doctor or with your doctor are deeply private. I am not, personally, prepared to state that a person's right to privacy extends to a right to avoidance. What if a state mandated that before selling a motorcycle, dealers had to show a video of motorcycle crashes and deaths?

It is on the drafters of such legislation/attorneys general to justify their reasoning when these laws are challenged. Like I said, this law will be under a hot lense assumed to be an invalid invasion of privacy at the outset.

Malor wrote:

This, by the way, is why we keep having this fight. Conservatives say they want to stop abortion. So liberals propose policies that provably stop abortions, because most liberals don't like them either.

But most liberal initiatives make sex safer in the process of preventing abortions, and that is absolutely unacceptable to at least mainstream conservatism, whose real goal is to force people into marriage to have sex. And they put the screws to women because, biologically, they're easier to compel into 'correct' behavior.

Conservatives don't want what they claim to want, and that's why this fight just keeps going around and around and around.

Malor, you must have an advanced graduate degree in conservative thought for the sheer number of times you declare intimate knowledge of the mind and motives of the entire conservative movement with all their differences and idiosyncrasies.

Spoiler:

I counted 8 times in your last 2 posts alone!

Making the rounds on Facebook:

IMAGE(http://laughingsquid.com/wp-content/uploads/breast-cancer-20120201-195410.jpg)

Nomad, we wouldn't be having the constant fight if my post wasn't correct.

This is the person who made the decision to pull the funding.

IMAGE(http://a.yfrog.com/img740/4001/zyuy.png)' alt='IMAGE(IMAGE(http://a.yfrog.com/img740/4001/zyuy.png))' />

At least she resigned.

I think you misread the article, Edwin - it was a different person in SGK's structure that resigned. Handel's still there.

Three sources told me that the organization's top public health official, Mollie Williams, resigned in protest immediately following the Komen board's decision to cut off Planned Parenthood.

That's what I get for trying to post articles with two hours of sleep.

Malor wrote:

Nomad, we wouldn't be having the constant fight if my post wasn't correct.

Untrue. People will always argue over differing views, and usually both sides are incorrect to some extent. When one side declares that it has comprehensive knowledge of the other side's mind and motives, it's not going to be good for anyone. Your post is not correct, but it does give you invaluable ammunition in your attacks on those with views differing from your own.

I think it's safe to say that your accusation that conservatives oppose abortion for the sole purpose of "forcing people into marriage to have sex" is completely wrong.

Yeah, it sounds like a very GOOD person quit in protest over this, while the evil one is still there.

A truly good article about the whole Komen thing.

Women’s healthcare is not about lace-trimmed scarves and bottles of perfume. It’s sure as hell not about some feel-good, lip-service version of what my colleague Rebecca Traister calls “infantilizing Pepto-ed advocacy.” It’s not even — for anyone still stupid enough to think Planned Parenthood is some giant fetus-killing complex — about abortion. It’s about screening. It’s about treatment. It’s just that simple. The further away an organization gets from that mission, the more women suffer. It’s just that simple too. And you don’t make good on a “promise” to your dead sister by selling out women who need you most.
Paleocon wrote:

A truly good article about the whole Komen thing.

Women’s healthcare is not about lace-trimmed scarves and bottles of perfume. It’s sure as hell not about some feel-good, lip-service version of what my colleague Rebecca Traister calls “infantilizing Pepto-ed advocacy.” It’s not even — for anyone still stupid enough to think Planned Parenthood is some giant fetus-killing complex — about abortion. It’s about screening. It’s about treatment. It’s just that simple. The further away an organization gets from that mission, the more women suffer. It’s just that simple too. And you don’t make good on a “promise” to your dead sister by selling out women who need you most.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/pla...

Sorry. Would a better phrasing be that they do not believe a fetus becomes a human baby until it leaves it's mother's womb?

No. That sounds like "Gee, these guys don't even know what a baby is." Seriously. That's pretty loaded language. Maybe consider how you'd feel if someone said that about you.

What's wrong with the following?

"Pro-choice advocates are not in favor of abortion of *viable* fetuses except in extreme cases of absolute medical necessity." In other words, if it can survive outside the womb on it's own, don't mess with it unless there's an extreme medical *necessity* - danger to the mother's life is one I can think of. It's very rare.

Why would you tie that to "what people believe about babies"? Other than trying to spin the language of the debate. No one wants to "kill babies", or "sexually enslave women", can we agree on those two boundaries?

No one wants to "kill babies", or "sexually enslave women", can we agree on those two boundaries?

Yes, specifically speaking of the abortion debate that is.

Did you really think I'd pull your statements out of context? Hopefully that's not an issue for you here.