Roe v Wade

Politics
263

Again Porridge you miss the point entirely. Everybody (apart, presumably, from serial killers and war-mongers) is ‘pro-life’; nobody is ‘pro-abortion’; and our ‘beliefs’ are our own affair. I am - like I’m sure everybody else that is pro-choice - perfectly happy and relaxed about your ‘beliefs’. None of that is relevant to the real issues.

The main issue - which you (as far as I know) have persistently refused to clearly address - is that political and religious extremists want to impose their own ‘beliefs’ on all women - which in reality means trying to deny women that don’t share the same ‘beliefs’ decent healthcare.
It’s like Jehovah’s Witnesses not only refusing blood transfusions for themselves, but insisting nobody has them.

What you or I ‘believe’ is not relevant to this discussion (although for what it’s worth I don’t accept your attempt earlier to reduce both sides of the discussion to equivalent ‘beliefs’ - or even, at one point perhaps, to subsume all reason and evidence into some kind of complete relativism).
My views, and I think those of most people, are based not on any ‘belief’, but on the evidence. It’s not a matter of ‘belief’, but of history that when the option to have an abortion is not offered as part of a decent, properly funded and organised, open and accessible healthcare system, there are terrible consequences for many individual women.
But I dare bet, if you reply to this post, you will not address this reality directly. You never do.

As to the article I linked - again your comments are not just incorrect, but absurd.
Neither Brook nor the British Pregnancy Advisory Service are ‘campaign groups’ - they are both independent charities specialising precisely in this field, and they are NHS providers of clinical services on contraception, etc… (Do you really think the UK government would give service contracts of £ tens-of-millions to ‘campaign groups’?)
Not only is it accurate to describe them as ‘health experts’ - they are the UK’s pre-eminent expert organisations in relevant areas.
The criticism of SPUC by Humanists UK was not on health issues, but specifically on the religious education aspect of the report - and on this once again they are the UK’s leading experts.
So it is in fact not the article, but your own view of it that turns out to be ‘twaddle’!

5 Likes
264

Well, Geof, by your own reasoning, you can’t use “pro-choice”, because everyone apart from despots and dictators is “pro-choice”!

I’m sorry you feel like I have been avoiding any of your questions. I have certainly been treading very carefully, because some women have spoken in this thread about the decision they made. I deplore what I have seen of the Republican pro-life actions; I compared (I think you missed it) picketing abortion clinics to Christian terrorism; I said to Vero “I haven’t said, nor do I believe, that abortion can never be justified. I am worried about the huge number of abortions carried out. It seems that the “risk, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated, of injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman or any existing children of her family” is being interpreted more widely than was envisaged when the Bill was passed. Abortion Act 1967 ”. It can happen that, when you discuss principles, it sounds like you are judging people for their decisions, which of course I have no right to do.

Geof, you say “I don’t accept your attempt earlier to reduce both sides of the discussion to equivalent ‘beliefs’ - or even, at one point perhaps, to subsume all reason and evidence into some kind of complete relativism.” That is where the argument takes you. You haven’t set out how you reach a moral decision (I genuinely would be interested in your answer), but the only answer anyone has given so far is Vero’s: “things are worth what I [or what society] decide(s) they are”, which leads you inevitably to conclude either that there is no moral absolute, and slavery was right 300 years ago and wrong now, and abortion was wrong 300 years ago but right now.

I see your key point: “My views, and I think those of most people, are based not on any ‘belief’, but on the evidence. It’s not a matter of ‘belief’, but of history that when the option to have an abortion is not offered as part of a decent, properly funded and organised, open and accessible healthcare system, there are terrible consequences for many individual women.
But I dare bet, if you reply to this post, you will not address this reality directly. You never do.”

In fact, I completely understood your point even before you made it.

You look at the consequences of not having provision for abortion. You see that for some, these consequences are very serious.

You (and pro-choice people) are a decent, caring person who is troubled by those consequences. You want to make things better (e.g. safer) for women with an unwanted pregnancy.

Medical science has been able to develop medicines and techniques for abortion, so it is possible to perform an abortion.

Now this is the key point, and where your decision is based on a belief (view, opinion, …) and no longer on science or logic: You no longer believe that the foetus has any individual status, because you threw out that idea along with many others (attitudes to homosexuality, race, slavery, …) that, 300 years ago, society would have been absolutely sure were morally and unarguably correct*.

So you are able to approve abortion restricted only by the 24-week limit, because of your belief about the status of the foetus. Beyond that (I imagine: please tell me what you do believe if I’m wrong), you believe abortion should be a criminal offence.

*Yes, of course that is, at least partly, because the Church taught that. The Church was the dominant provider of morality in those days, just as nowadays – in most of Europe – it is white, liberal atheism.

As to what you say about those three campaigning organisations, the fact they provide abortion or other services means they have an interest in campaigning for the use of those services.

But “Humanists UK … are the UK’s leading experts [on … religious education]”?? That’s like saying Jeremy Corbyn is the country’s leading expert in anti-Semitism! Humanists UK exists to campaign against any form of religious faith.

265

@Porridge

Do you believe in contraception ?

266

As I predicted, you haven’t addressed the key point directly. My guess is you can’t. My guess is in fact that what you’re ‘treading carefully’ around is your ‘belief’ that women should be forced to go through unwanted pregnancies, and those that refuse condemned to the old ‘backstreet’ solutions. So maybe not only despots and dictators that are not ‘pro-choice’ eh?

And please get over this habit of telling others what they ‘believe’ (“You no longer believe that…”) because you are wrong. You see belief and morality and abstract values everywhere in everything - others don’t look at the world in that way - they see reality’s true complexity. You say you understand this, but I see no evidence that you really do.

This is indeed typical of religious thinking - like the US ‘creationists’ that say ‘all this complexity we see in nature can’t have come about by chance, there must be a designer’. What they’re really saying is the same as you: either this ‘status’ or no status. Either design or chance. No intervening structuring - no complicated natural processes (like evolution, for example) that produce structure and complexity by themselves. And moreover - no need to actually examine the evidence for what’s really going on in nature, no need to deal with real people, real lives. real history.

And I guess that thinking is pretty much the same as your denial that the real experts on women’s reproductive health might be the organisations actually delivering women’s reproductive health services. Of course (for you) they can’t know anything about it, since instead of pontificating on morality they actually get on with sorting out the reality.

2 Likes
267

@Cat, believe it? yes of course I do. Why do you ask?

Geof, if there’s one consistent thing in your responses, it’s this repeated “You haven’t addressed the key point directly.”

Of course I have: it’s just that I’ve done it in a way you dislike. But I’ve set out (some of) what I believe, and I invite you to engage with that. Playing the ball, not the man, you might call it.

(I really don’t think we want to wander off into a debate about Creationism, do we, any more than a discussion of the theory of evolution? FWIW, the Creation story in Genesis plainly wasn’t written as a scientific source, otherwise how do you get to the present population if Adam and Eve had two sons?!)

268

Incest ?

1 Like
269

That’s because your never address the key points directly! - All you did in you last response was attribute (wrongly) certain ‘beliefs’ to me - or to pro-choice people generally. That’s not an answer - it’s making up something about other people’s answers.

To directly address the point you need to tell us what you think should happen in the event of unwanted pregnancy. With real women, living real lives, in the real world - not in your personal moral universe.

But since you did not respond at all to my ‘guess’ that what you’re ‘treading carefully’ around is indeed your belief that women should be forced to go through unwanted pregnancies, and those that refuse condemned to the old ‘backstreet’ solutions - well, that’s my answer, isn’t it?

270

TSS tss Genesis says (if I remember rightly) there were giants on the earth in those days and they had children with the daughters of men. So there you are, other children must have appeared and hey presto some convenient giants.
Nothing like an old-fashioned Scottish education to get your Bible knowledge up to scratch :grin:

3 Likes
271

Well, Geof, as you have commented, life is complicated and people who want to reduce complicated issues to slogans like “My body my choice” or “Life wins” generally do that to mask their lack of arguments.

Being logical, either God exists - as almost everyone would have agreed 300 years ago - or he doesn’t, so it’s hardly a “personal moral universe” (and isn’t that remark a bit snippy, if you’d accept we all have our own moral beliefs? As I mentioned before, faith/morals/ethics is what we ought to do; your white liberal atheist Western views are atypical, if you take the world as a whole, but still worthy of my respect and analysis.)

Deploring the decision in Dobbs v Jackson is not inconsistent with being concerned at seeing the vast numbers of abortions being performed in a time when we have (in the West) unparalleled access to birth control and sex education.

As I said above, it is not for anyone to judge whether someone should have an abortion: that is a matter of conscience for the individual concerned. But it is entirely reasonable – in a pluralist society – to talk about the belief that a foetus has a value independent of whether the pregnancy is desired. That is as much a “belief” as the opposite.

NB, because I think this has been the source of some confusion, I am not saying that all “beliefs” are equally worthy of respect. A certain set of beliefs led Uber to consider it was okay for them to indulge in the practices being reported today; many other people hold beliefs to the contrary, and it would be absurd (certainly if you have an absolute moral standard of honesty) to say they were equally valid.

@Vero, you’re right of course, though that was some time later - the time leading up to Noah (another story that people can be tempted to take literally until they think about it!).

272

Richard Dawkins’ excellent book, The God Delusion (you probably know it) is a good source of commentary on the bible - particularly its irrationality and amorality.
The Joshua/Jericho story springs to mind…

Then the LORD said to Joshua, "See, I have delivered Jericho into your hands*… They devoted the city to the LORD and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it - men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys… So the LORD was with Joshua, and his fame spread throughout the land.

1 Like
273

Cain, Abel, Seth, only Cain and Seth have named descendants, with whom we may ask… We aren’t told.

I certainly wouldn’t rule out incest since it’s only from Lot onwards that it seems to be a problem. Status of women appalling obv as seen by what happens to the poor handmaids daughters in Sodom. (Etc etc etc) You’d think angels would be up to protecting themselves rather more and better, wouldn’t you.

I also think they were doing all sorts of appalling things well post-flood without batting an eyelid because otherwise why would Leviticus be so crammed with fascinating prohibitions.

So prurient the Bible, give me the Greeks any day.

274

And there is one of the big problems. He. Why should we stick to the fairly appalling version of a supreme being which was thought up by a very different, violent, intensely patriarchal and vengeful society a few millennia ago? And the Pauline NT whitewash job doesn’t make it much more tempting, Paul is awful in so very many ways.

I am an atheist but I find religion fascinating and think everyone should have at least a nodding acquaintance with the tenets and mechanisms of most of them for cultural and anthropological reasons.

My favourite English building happens to be an explicitly religious one even if rather than AMDG it is rather AMRG!! (To the greater glory of the king rather than to the greater glory if God).

275

Another big problem: Eurocentricity. It’s not even true that

Many millions of people actually had different gods, or none at all.

1 Like
276

Well, if ever there were an argument for using inclusive language like “they”, it would be the case of the Holy Trinity, eh? Curiously (or perhaps not), God compares him/herself to a mother hen in the OT. There are other examples, and you’d find very few Christians who think God is an old man with a beard.

Geof, fair question. Usually examples like that related to the abominable practices of those killed, but I’ll have a look and give you an answer.

277

I was stunned to note the other day that it is expressly legal in several US states as long as the parties are adult & consenting.

Whatever floats your boat, as they say.

2 Likes
278

And I would wager far far fewer who think of a platonic hermaphrodite let alone my favourite Pallas Athene.

279

Azura was Seth’s wife.

Maybe Cain shared?

OK, apparently it was Awan

Still rather a lot of brother-sister stuff going on though :slight_smile:

2 Likes
280

The children and babies? The unborn babies? The donkeys ?

2 Likes
281

Ah, the Book of Jubilees :rofl:

I don’t think that one even made it into the Apocrypha! There was some quality control, you know!

282

How unlike the home life of our own dear queen :grin:
Interesting even though the Authorised Version doesn’t mention them :grin: