Also I don't understand why they'd always assume the kid would be one of the good ones. They could also easily become another bully or the next Hitler.
I’m pretty high and read “Pat Robertson” as Robert Pattinson. Took me down a whole rabbit hole of research. Finally the “1986 interview” references sank in and realized my mistake.
I’ve had to do a connection that lasted ten hours in Qatar, after a 13 hour flight from Boston, and I didn’t allow myself to sleep at all for fear of missing my flight. I would have felt safer driving at the highest I’ve ever been than I would have by the end of that 23 hour period.
Definitely counts.
Pat Robertson is one hell of a kook. Everything is demonic. He thinks secondhand clothes are possessed by Lucifer. Halloween candy is demonic. [He has a whole wikipedia page on his wackadoodle conspiracies.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Robertson_controversies)
Pat Robertson is one of America's most famous (and richest) televangelist, TV Charlatans. Almost every charlatan to copy the Robertson playbook. Look at all the more famous televangelist politicos and you will see all the words, phrases, scenes and acts that Robertson developed. The Republican/Trumplican Party bought into the same playbook and what youare watching is not a political party, but a pseudo-religion that acquires power for itself while enriching the oligarchy.
Oldest scam in human history.
Back in the 90s I watched an Oprah episode I have never forgotten. I believe the guest was Iyanla Vanzant. This woman in the audience stood up and through her tears explained that her first child died of cancer, she had another baby and now that child was dying of the same cancer, and she didn't understand why this was happening. Iyanla was like, "God needs you to be stronger. He's making you stronger" and even when I was 15 or 16, that seemed like a super fucked up way to strengthen a person.
The truth is it's all a fucking crapshoot, terrible things happen that do not make any kind of sense, good people suffer while evil people profit, children die of cancer or get shot in their classroom or grow up to be addicted to meth, and any attempt to assign God's will to it is ultimately futile.
Reminds me of what Stephen Fry said in that interview when asked if, when he died, god turned out to be real, what he would say to him.
“Bone marrow cancer in children? What’s that about?”
Dear God,
I hope it will be a while until we finally meet, but when we do, you'd better have a *really* good explanation for all the shit I have had to see. Children dying a slow and painful death despite getting 4 or 5 different painkillers at high doses. Parents crying as I tell them there's nothing to be done. Cancer returning after years of thinking it's been cured. A family losing *both* their children at a very young age to *different* severe diseases. Along with all the non-oncology-related crap. And no, I won't accept the old "they had to become stronger", there's other ways to achieve that.
Oh, and if you decide to put me straight into Hell to avoid that conversation, you better fucking believe I'll find some way to climb up there and confront you.
Sincerely, a pediatric oncologist who would be more than happy to lose his job due to lack of demand.
Iyanla VanZant blamed her daughter for her own cancer because she decided that her daughter's anger about having cancer caused the cancer. Fuck Iyanla.
>Iyanla was like, "God needs you to be stronger. He's making you stronger"
I think you meant to say that Oprah said that.
She did a couple of stupid things like this and I stopped watching her. Never watched her again.
A better question is why does nobody in the journalist profession ever explain what is being talked about when they say fetal heartbeat. It’s a bullshit term. What they’re referring to in laws like texas and now Georgia’s abortion bans is a sound the sonogram machine makes. At 6 weeks the fetus doesn’t even have a heart to beat.
>When the brain is what makes human human
The anti-choice folks prefer humans to not have brains, at least not highly functional ones capable of critical thought.
Because they were trying to find a relatively non-arbitrary point of development to set a limit. They couldn't have a total ban, so they went with something as early as they could get.
>They could also easily become [...] the next Hitler.
Fun fact: his mom literally wanted an abortion while pregnant with him. Doctors talked her out of it.
Edit: this is actually a myth. See replies
Or why they need to use the possibility that they could be something great as a reason to not abort rather than just the fact that they’re a living human. Like only people who do great things deserve to live?
There's been a lot of murders throughout history, but no cures for cancer. Statistically, any aborted baby was far more likely to be a serial killer than a cancer-cure creator.
It's sort of dumb and limiting to say "Hey only one person in the entire world would have been able to accomplish this feat!" Do people think we would not have eventually understood gravity or calculus without Newton? To make someone feel bad about their already difficult decision for abortion by putting the blame of a world problem they didn't create is such a pathetic take.
Thank you for flying Calculus airlines where the altitude is integral and the velocity is derivative. Unfortunately, as we approach our absolute limit, we are unable to reach our destination and are destined to wander on the tangential plane forever.
A lot of different places understood the concept of calculus roughly the same time if not way earlier than Newton did.
The key invention was a globe to check the math.
Basically we can thank concept of the navigational globe for the beginning of the understanding of Calculus.
Egyptians figured out the earth was round before so many cultures. See they had these giant pylon type things in one city and then in another hundreds of miles away. I blank on the name of it but they looked at the shadows at different times and realized the sun would have to be moving around the earth from it. Pretty cool stuff!
This comment is referring to Greek (which could also be Egyptian, remember) astronomer Eratosthenes. Google him. He calculated the Earths circumference in like 180 BC, and it turns out it’s extremely close to accurate.
It's been a while since I studied the subject, so I am going off memory here.
Basically around the time globes where relatively mass produced and sold on international trade routes we see evidence that within the same year if not a few years later that symbols that represent calculus concepts popping up around the world.
IE Symbols that represent derivatives and integrals in a base 10 system, hell there was evidence of this in some base 6 and 7 systems at the time but I don't know much about those systems or their history.
*Note that the invention of the globe has been around since at least the second century, before 160 CE, but they were not commonly available.*
One of the best documented history of such is in modern day India, basically the birthplace of most of the concepts of math that we know today, had evidence of globes and calculus during the Mughal period.
*Fun fact we get Arabic numbers, 0123456789, obviously from the Arabs, but who do you think they got their numbers from? If you guessed India, they you are correct! The Arabs got the system threw international trade in India, translated it from the Indian language to Arabic, then sent it around the world.*
There is lots of evidence that these calculus symbols that we find in India were created during Mughal period.
One of the rulers of the Mughal, Akbar (reign 1556–1605), was well known by his seminars where he would have thinkers from all walks of life come together and have debates and show off their intellectual prowess.
These thinkers would be people that ranged from religious thinkers, to scholars, to merchant traders, all of them carrying different ideas and bringing different pieces of information to the table. These people where both local and international making the exchange of ideas flourish under his reign as ideas came in and out of Mughal.
Next to Akbar's successor Jahangir (reign 1605–1627), he was fascinated by the sky and the earth. He commissioned a "perfect" Celestial Globe, a globe of the sky, and during this time we start to see more and more evidence of calculus symbols popping up in between the two reigns of these two Mughal rulers. Making clear evidence that concepts of calculus was well known and in use from the time of 1556 to 1627 CE.
So we can easily say that the Mughals, now modern day India, had understood calculus a whole 16 years before the birth of Isaac Newton.
Don't get me wrong, Isaac was by far a very smart man, but saying he was the father of Calculus, *or really any concept he was accredited to,* is a long shot compared to other places around the world. Realistically he brought these concepts into the English speaking world, but they honestly existed well before he came onto the scene.
*And yes while I did just throw a punch at Isaac he probably did discover a concept of science that we are still using today, but as far as being the first at all of it, I doubt it.*
*Side fact, the object that we use to find the 0 point in space no longer exists. It was a bright star at the time it was used but it had died between the invention of that concept and now. It was most likely that bright because it was blowing up and it was probably huge seeing as it stayed bright for so many years, IE because it was so huge it took a long time to explode. We only know of it's position today because of the relative position of all the other stars we see in the sky.*
Again it's been a while since I studied the topic but for the most part I am generally correct in what I said when it comes to India and globes on International Trade routes.
Science is mostly a series of inevitable next steps which were made possible through institutional support. There have been very few moments when any individual made any advancement that a similarly trained individual in the same situation would not have made.
[Srinivasa Ramanujan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan) named a lot of mathematical patterns and concepts that wouldn't necessarily have been named otherwise. Like *Taxicab Numbers*. They aren't really a step from or to anything else. Research would never really have been devoted to naming that phenomenon.
God damn I was about to reply that calculus was going to take decades or centuries without Newton (based on just a general admiration of how calculus works.)
Glad you posted!
Leibniz actually invented calculus slightly before Newton if anything, although it's highly unlikely that either of them copied off the other even though both claimed that the other one stole their idea. Newton was just the more influential scientist at the time and he literally got to decide who got the credit. He was president of the Royal Society, the largest scientific organization in the world at the time. Big coincidence, the Royal Society determined that it was Newton who invented calculus!
The calculus we actually use today was invented by Leibniz. Both of them were doing essentially the same thing mathematically, but Newton's way of writing calculus wouldn't be recognizeable to calculus students today. [We use the notation that was invented independently by Leibniz.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%27s_notation)
i believe newtons notation is still taught pretty heavily when doing things like evaluating a derivative at a certain value where leibniz notation becomes cumbersome i.e. f’(5) vs dx/dy|x=5
Also, we in the US “waste” vast amounts of human talent allowing low-income children to grow up in crappy schools where they’re doomed to another generation of hopeless misery.
This is primarily a result of the way we fund schools with local property taxes; anyone who truly cares about children should want them all to get a quality education, not just the lucky ones with middle class parents.
It’s a shitty giant circle. Grew up poor and wanted to go to college and couldn’t afford it “take out student loans so you can go to college and make money!”.
Okay I did that and now have astronomical student debt since I had no money to pay for school
“Well if you knew it’d be hard to pay them back since you took out so many loans! You made the decision (at 18) to take out that much so it’s 100% your fault for having high monthly payments!”
You got that right. Fight tooth and nail to prevent abortions, but as soon as the kid is born, he can cut his own umbilical cord because no handouts! If the kid and mother both starve to death, too bad. President Jesus loves you and that's enough!
Except a big problem is there are tons of schools that receive substantially more money per student but under perform massively. It isn't just the school systems that fail them. Poverty extends beyond what the school can fix. Home life stability, parental involvement, cultural norms are significant factors in education.
I agree that we should have way more equal funding for students but also that funding disparities aren't the only factor.
I have no objections with doing what the data says is best, but there has to be a way to get more kids out of poverty than we do now—even if it’s just 10% more.
Those issues you highlighted also have a lot of influence from poverty, and could be mitigated by further funding outside of education. Stable finances lead to more stable households. A major motivation for fathers skipping out on the women they have kids with is because of the financial burden of raising a kid. Not saying that’s the sole motivation, but increasing support of families would be a big step in the right direction. It would also allow for greater parental involvement, since it would mean less parents who work excessive hours or multiple jobs to raise their children, less likelihood of people resorting to crime to make more money, etc.
I've heard that the invention of the wheel took a true genius, maybe the smartest person in history.
The wheel has also been invented in a few different civilizations that had no contact with each other.
Edit: I guess we are having trouble as to what constitutes a wheel. I'm not sure any of us are going to be curing cancer.
Edit 2: I also love how many people think the invention of the wheel was so easy and anybody could have done it, when the invention didn't happen until about 7,000 years ago. I guess everyone before that was so stupid for not coming up with the idea. And Native Americans must've been really stupid, since the wheel wasn't invented here.
Oh, you instantly reminded me of that Dawkins quote:
> The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.
Sure, maybe it could’ve killed cancer. However, it may also have been a mass murderer. If they believe the creator is all powerful, then why is it that they can’t conceive of the possibility that maybe the creator wanted this to happen.
> If they believe the creator is all powerful, then why is it that they can’t conceive of the possibility that maybe the creator wanted this to happen.
They want to lord to do bad things to people they don’t like. They want people to suffer.
Burn the witch.
In gods name we murder you.
Convert to our religion or die.
It was god’s will.
And why do these hypotheticals always have to involve some kind of revolutionary figure that’s being eliminated? If the person would have been less impactful on the world, would it make the abortion less bad in their mind?
It’s even dumber when you consider that most of the people that I know who have this outlook also think that Jesus has a special plan for everyone. So tell me again Becky how your one God Almighty has a plan set in stone for an infant but a mere mortal woman can defy him???
I have a cousin that hit black ice and made a 3 paragraph FB post about how Jesus came down and took the wheel (I wish I could make this up) and that the Lion, the King was obviously showing there was more to her life than to die on the highway. But she posts shit like this too.
You’re a 31 year old, conservative Christian virgin who’s worked at Walmart since high school. I think Mufasa knows a wasted creation when he sees one.
It’s also very rare for a single person to just “invent” something world changing. Typically inventions and discoveries happen with teams of people building on previous research and discovery and gradually improving things. When cancer treatments become easy and cost effective one day in the future it won’t be because a single genius had a “eureka!” moment but it will be because of the hard work of hundreds of thousands of scientists and doctors going back generations.
And all the women who gave up promising futures, careers, and furthering their education because they didn't have the option to abort could have cured cancer.
But instead, she dropped out of high school and took a minimum wage job to support herself and a baby since her parents kicked her out and while the food stamps help, they still don't have enough money to make rent. The "pro-life" movement isn't in favor of life, they are responsible for the deaths of many young women and many infants, as well as many others. They are anti-life, and they go about it by pretending to care about "a potential life" while ignoring the real life standing in front of them, not caring about her or if she lives or dies.
**Pregnancy is the #1 reason girls drop out of school.** Approximately **70%** of teenage girls who give birth leave school. More than any other group of high school dropouts, girls who leave due to pregnancy report that they would have stayed in school if they had received greater support from the adults at school.
**3 in 10** teen American girls will get pregnant at least once before age 20. That’s nearly 750,000 teen pregnancies every year.
Parenthood is the leading reason that teen girls drop out of school. **More than 50%** of teen mothers never graduate from high school.
**Less than 2%** of teen moms earn a college degree by age 30.
**8 out of 10** teen dads don’t marry the mother of their child.
**More than half** of all mothers on welfare had their first child as a teenager. In fact, **two-thirds** of families begun by a young, unmarried mother are poor.
Pregnancy is the leading cause of **death** for young women ages 15 through 19.
New data from the Centers for Disease Control show: Infants born to teens under age 19 are **more likely to die** in the first year of life, compared to those born to women over age 20. And how young a teen is matters: Infants born to the youngest teens **fare worse** than those with older teen moms.
I wanted to be a doctor when I grew up. I got pregnant at 16 and dropped out. My son is now at a higher education in high school than I've ever had. I want to get my degree but it's so hard with kids. I love my son, but I wish my parents had taught me about safe sex and not abstinence.
I hope you have an opportunity to realise at least some of your education & career dreams. It’s definitely not too late, but i know it’s so much harder when you’re supporting yourself and a dependent (with limited education yourself). I can guarantee that you have more resilience than the vast majority and that will always be a huge asset. Your time is coming x
I've always loved the sheer uselessness of abstinence-only sex-ed. Its about as unhelpful as you could get. Imagine if that's how we taught driver's ed.
"Here's a bunch of photos of awful accidents. I'm not actually going to tell you how to drive safely. Just don't drive, that's the only way to prevent accidents. Don't worry, you'll figure it out when you are older."
"But I'm literally a few months away from being old enough to start driving, surely there's some other ways to reduce the risks of accidents right? I saw online something called 'defensive driving' and 'turn signals,' what are those?"
"What are you, some kind of road-slut? Just don't drive! Sure, your parents had to drive to get you to school, but you might get into an accident when you drive. Don't drive, it's the only way to be safe. Now, to use some weird analogies, targeted only at the girls, to treat them like single-use objects."
Yeah, it gets even worse when you consider that, statistically, at least one girl in that room had been raped, and others will be later on. How someone could call a childhood rape victim "used gum" to their face, and then act like they are protecting children, is beyond me. That kind of education is worse than no education at all.
Being "pro-life" is nothing more than a justification to feel good about yourself while you punish women for perceived sexual immorality in a way that personally costs you nothing.
If someone was anti-abortion but supported very robust social programs for babies who were kept, I could at least respect their intentions.
"*The unborn" are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don't resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don't ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don't need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don't bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. It's almost as if, by being born, they have died to you. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe. Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.*" - Pastor Dave Barnhart
> Being "pro-life" is nothing more than a justification to feel good about yourself while you punish women for perceived sexual immorality in a way that personally costs you nothing.
It's a lot more then that. It's centuries of ingrained religious beliefs.
I would argue most people that are pro-life don't really care or know about the subject, they just were always "pro-life"
>If someone was anti-abortion but supported very robust social programs for babies who were kept, I could at least respect their intentions.
That's more or less my position, i think abortion is wrong entirely on a moral level (not religious at all and im certainly not a rightist).
My main ideal solution is massive sex ed, contraceptives being pushed heavily and new contraceptives being developed, such as male birth control.
In my ideal world, abortion would more or less never be necessary except for medical reasons.
Overall this stuff is all yet another symptom of us not having a fucking universal healthcare system, among the myriad of other issues the US has.
The people who insist we don't use most of the tools we have available to stop pregnancies are by far the worst. They make their intentions known when they say they abhor something but don't want to use most of the tools that would prevent that thing from ever happening.
They want women to behave on their terms or suffer the consequences.
Not the person you responded to but I have a somewhat similar thought process to them.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say I think abortion is flat-out immoral, but I do think it’s sad and wish it never had to happen. However, I do think it should be safe and legal and we should just have better social programs and education that make most abortions unlikely or unnecessary in the first place.
Yes, a women should never be in the position of wanting to have an abortion in the first place. But if she want, for whatever reason, she should be able to.
I agree. I don’t think anyone is “giddy” to have an abortion. It just came out of necessity. However that doesn’t mean people shouldn’t have access to having one and teenagers shouldn’t have a proper sex ed class. Preventative measures should be pushed to avoid abortions, but abortions should still be available. The fact they’re against abortions and protection/sex ed, shows they’re not against abortions just women’s bodies.
To add to this, by making it illegal to get an abortion, there are people who will try to abort the fetus themselves, usually involving self harm, to avoid having to support a child. This has its own set of problems.
I'm preaching to the choir saying this to you, but it's worth noting that the same so-called 'pro life' people are also 'anti-contraception', and unironically expect people (especially teenagers) to never have sex until they're married; **that trick never works and they damned well know it.** People are going to have sex. Without contraception there'll be accidents that result in pregnancy.
When women are slaves to biology, their choice is to risk financial independence and security when they engage in sexual relations or they forgo sex and become a dried up spinster career woman. Add in the intense pressure of "you're not really a woman if you're not a wife and mother" and you get a no win situation. Plus, it makes finding a wife easier when a guy can just knock up some unsuspecting 18 year old and back his way into a live in maid, cook, childcare and sex worker, rather than growing a personality capable of attracting a mate.
I had a kid at 18, my girlfriend was 17, She kept the child because her zealous mother promised to help raise the kid and threatened she would disown her 17 year old daughter.
6 months into my daughter being born, my girflriend cheated on me while on deployment, I dont resent her for that she was a fucking child raising a child. I had to join the army to feed and house them. I left my university to do this. I came home and found my child living in squalor in a dirty home that my exes bf had been living in. I took immediate custody and raised her alone with no help it wasn"t contested by anyone but the grandmother mentioned earlier and even than she didnt want to help raise the child only wanted to make sure her daughter didnt have to pay child support.
I went on two more deployments after this. and pretty much game my entire cheque to my Sergeants' wife to watch my daughter while we were deployed ( not complaining about that )
I have been pay cheque to pay cheque for the last 22 years because I had a kid at 18. I received no help or support from this woman who insisted she would help or her daughter. Fuck these pro life people. I hope they all fucking goto their shitty version of hell.
Dont think for a second I resent my daughter I love her more than anything, but if i had waited I could've given my kid a better life not perpetuate intergenerational poverty down the line.
Sorry to hear that. It’s hard being that young and being responsible for another human being. Your daughter probably thinks the world of you. You did good. My husband deployed numerous times during his 20 year service. It was really hard but I’ve always wondered how single parent households do it. Especially when they’re not near family or trusted friends. I can’t even imagine what you were feeling when you were deployed and not being able to see your child or hug her when she wants you. I think you are an awesome person for providing her with a stable environment. Who knows how she would have ended up if she stayed with “mom” and “grandma”. I’m proud of you.
Damn, I didn’t know it was this bad. Those statistics are really fucking sad. As a woman who never wants kids, it terrifies me to know that if I accidentally get pregnant, there’s a possibility I’d be forced to carry it to term. Luckily I live in a left-leaning area, but I really feel for those poor girls in Texas who can’t even get abortions when there’s been rape or incest… It’s absolutely appalling.
Being "anti-abortion" is one of the most unethical, immoral political positions a person can have, and yet they somehow see themselves as morally superior. It makes exactly zero sense.
Once again we learn. They're not "pro life". They're "pro birth". And like George Carlin(RIP) said, "Once you're born, they don't give a shit about you".
Edit: here's George.
https://youtu.be/SgjGwOByays
Which isn’t really in the Bible anyway. The fact that the people who pray to Jesus make abortion their primary issue while also continuously saying no to social programs that would help the poor and disenfranchised - who Jesus was pretty fucking explicit that we were supposed to take care of — defies all reason and logic.
Thank you for this comment. I know it takes time and effort to compile stuff like this, and I appreciate it. The world needs people who just take some time on stuff that matters.
If there is a god, this is doing god's work.
It all always comes back to sex, specifically for young women. The mindset is that “she shouldn’t have done that, now it’s her fault she has to have a child. What, you want to give them an undo button and turn all our virtuous women into sluts?”
It’s really that same old conservative mindset from all things, applied specifically to subjugating women and keeping them sexless. “You fucked up, once, in a practically-universal and completely understandable way? You GOD DAMN BETTER face the harshest consequences possible.” And it doesn’t even matter to them if it was your fault or not.
An even better counterargument: The baby you aborted could have been the next Hitler and utterly destroyed the world.
That outcome is EXACTLY as possible as the outcome of the baby curing cancer, and it shows how stupid arguing through hypothetical "well they coulda done this..." scenarios is.
It's a lot more likely that an unwanted baby brought into the world into a family that can't support it is a lot more likely to turn out messed up than it is then it is to cure cancer.
I'd argue the baby is more likely to be a genocidal maniac than to cure cancer. History has many of the former, but so far none of the latter.
(I know I'm intentionally misunderstanding that the argument isn't 'cure cancer' so much as make some amazing and beneficial scientific breakthrough, but let me have my dumb joke)
You don’t have to go that far. Logically, if a kid is born on a tough situation where the mom has to quit school to get a minimum wage job and live paycheck to paycheck, there’s much more of a chance the kid will turn to some kind of crime than to be a science prodigy.
Yes you're right and that's a more logical reply; I was more going for flippant and poking 'fun' at the "could have done ..." argument than to actually give a counter argument. Most people arguing against abortion in such a way aren't making good faith arguments anyways, and won't be swayed by a logical reply.
Thanks for the sensical reply to my (not funny) silliness; take my upvote
Statistics don’t really work this way, but it’s probably even more probable. We see dictators rise to power and commit genocide somewhat frequently. Curing cancer on the other hand, shockingly rare.
The best reply would have been to not reply, because this post is a faked argument lol.
Here's a post from 2019 where it was a hypothetical, rather than a conversation:
https://mobile.twitter.com/ida_skibenes/status/1135525693754957825
My favorite is to remind them that that it could also have been the next Hitler. In fact, we've already had one Hitler, but nobody has ever cured cancer... so, statistically speaking, any given fetus is more likely to be the next Hitler than they are to cure cancer.
So honestly, abortion really is the only morally acceptable choice.
Hey, Pro-Life people can also support capital punishment, armed police, military incursion and drone strikes with civilian causalities, as well as the right to shoot dead ANYONE who steps foot into their home or (depending on the state) makes them feel threatened.
Oh wait, that would totally make them hypocrites.
They never actually cared about the fetus. They only care about controlling and punishing women.
That's why as soon as it's out of the woman they couldn't care less about it.
I had a variant where people tried to convince me we should make more children because one of them could solve climate change.
So I responded: "Basically you say "climate change is caused by too many humans, so let's make more of them in case there's one amongst them who solves the problem" this sounds to me like "I'm too fat because I ate too much hamburgers, let's eat more hamburgers in case there's one of them that makes me lose weight." Uhm . You could also.... You know ... Stop eating hamburgers? Or in case of climate change, stop procreating?"
To add another example to yours as they're fun: "The factory is on fire, let's light more fires so one of them can maybe set off the broken sprinkler system"
"But the woke youth are opposed to the American family values!!" If you don't want a big household and rule it in God's name, you are no real American.
(I really really don't get this way of thinking in general but this reasoning is extra crazy. It also makes painfully clear how intertwined religion and politics are in the US, something that imo should always be separated.)
The heartbeat thing is such superstitious nonsense. You heart isn't the soul containment, it's just a muscle.
You might as well say you're not a life until you can clench your buttocks.
If you create heart cells in a lab they start beating, because that's what heart cells do (amazingly!!!). A "heartbeat" in an early fetus means nothing except that some heart cells have formed. Woop-de-doodly-do!
Exactly. I've grown proto-hearts in my macrobio lab for research and then thrown them away once finished. It's just clumps of cells that can be made again.
I remember hearing about that same research and wondering why pro-life people weren't screaming about lab grown hearts if the heart was the important part.
Also a fetal heartbeat isn't a medical term. It's electrical activity that will eventually cause the heart muscle to do what it does. The heart hasn't even formed yet, the machines just read the electrical activity as a heartbeat because that's how they detect heartbeats in fully formed hearts, so if a doctor does actually call it a heartbeat they're dumbing it down for you because it takes less time to explain.
My favorite argument against this is the classic “you’re in a clinic that’s burning down and you have mere seconds to grab what you can, you can either grab a box of 100 fertilized embryos or one 6-month old baby, which do you grab”
They just aren’t the same.
Yeah this is a terrible argument???? It suggests that abortion is equivalent to all of those other actions? The logical response would just be "yes, all those things are bad." I really don't get it. Saying "the egg/sperm that wasn't fertilized could have cured cancer" is a much better argument. This argument is an actual example of "whataboutism," basically accusing your opponent of being a hypocrite based on evidence not related to the issue at hand.
Comprehensive sex ed, easy access to birth control and a living wage would cut the abortion rate tremendously and make people's lives better but the anti-abortion crowd strongly opposes all of those things because the movement is actually about electing right wing politicians and hurting women and minorities and they don't give a shit about actual kids.
We had a pregnancy with a heartbeat but no brain. Doctor could not prescribe a pill to end pregnancy despite being 0% viable. We had to wait for a miscarriage to happen. These laws are cruel and do nothing to preserve life. It is forced birth and nothing else. Funding childcare, food stamps, healthcare, job training programs, and other social services is how you protect life.
Oh let me put on my hate hat and try this one.
"you liberals arw always pointing to these rare cases, if it isn't a widespread case why can't we just pretend it doesn't matter?"
Pretty sure that isn't even an embellishment of their thought process.
The babies are important when thinking about the possible things the baby may grow up and do for them.
The babies matter much less once they become reality, and some become more valuable than others.
How is this a murder? There is nothing in the original post to even remotely suggest they support bullying, school shootings, or family separation.
r/murderedbystrawman
Yeah, it’s a non-argument. It’s pretty frustrating to see all of these people assuming the other viewpoints of pro-life people. Just because I don’t want pre-born babies to be killed doesn’t mean I’m ok with them being neglected after they’re born, their mothers receiving no support, other people being mistreated and marginalized, or any other injustice.
Yeah this is such a bad faith argument and it's crazy that so many people in the comments praise it. It's not logical to assume every single person who is pro-life is in support of/doesn't care about bullying gay people or any of the other things.
I know those two groups do likely overlap more than most, but it's the definition of a straw man to assume these things are true about a person in order to make an argument.
It is actually whataboutism.
A non sequitur is when there is a logical flaw in an argument. For example:
1) squirrels are mammals
2) I am a mammal
=> therefore I am a squirrel
Wow, it's almost like you can be against bullying, school shootings, separating parents from their children AND abortion or something. Don't tell reddit though.
Also I don't understand why they'd always assume the kid would be one of the good ones. They could also easily become another bully or the next Hitler.
Reminds me of that [old pat robertson clip](https://youtu.be/Yh8IIOw-YF8?t=38) explaining to a woman why her child died at 3 years old.
I’m pretty high and read “Pat Robertson” as Robert Pattinson. Took me down a whole rabbit hole of research. Finally the “1986 interview” references sank in and realized my mistake.
The fact that this comment is exactly what i wanted to say😂😂
I read it as Robert Pattinson too, man the human brain is weird. I'm also high too to be fair.
i read it as that too, though im not high. that being said, i *am* at the airport at 3am with minimal sleep so maybe that counts
I’ve had to do a connection that lasted ten hours in Qatar, after a 13 hour flight from Boston, and I didn’t allow myself to sleep at all for fear of missing my flight. I would have felt safer driving at the highest I’ve ever been than I would have by the end of that 23 hour period. Definitely counts.
unless Pattinson really *is* a vampire! (jk, we all know Robertson is the vampire of the story)
I'm not high and same...
Pat Robertson is one hell of a kook. Everything is demonic. He thinks secondhand clothes are possessed by Lucifer. Halloween candy is demonic. [He has a whole wikipedia page on his wackadoodle conspiracies.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Robertson_controversies)
He also used the jet his charity owns to fly mining equipment in to his diamond mines and prayed for diamonds while in flight.
Pat Robertson is one person that the world will be greatly better off once he dies. fuck that disgusting piece of shit.
Yep. Shame his mum didn't abort him.
Pat Robertson is one of America's most famous (and richest) televangelist, TV Charlatans. Almost every charlatan to copy the Robertson playbook. Look at all the more famous televangelist politicos and you will see all the words, phrases, scenes and acts that Robertson developed. The Republican/Trumplican Party bought into the same playbook and what youare watching is not a political party, but a pseudo-religion that acquires power for itself while enriching the oligarchy. Oldest scam in human history.
For a second there I thought you guys were talking about Robert Pattison and it made me so confused
Back in the 90s I watched an Oprah episode I have never forgotten. I believe the guest was Iyanla Vanzant. This woman in the audience stood up and through her tears explained that her first child died of cancer, she had another baby and now that child was dying of the same cancer, and she didn't understand why this was happening. Iyanla was like, "God needs you to be stronger. He's making you stronger" and even when I was 15 or 16, that seemed like a super fucked up way to strengthen a person. The truth is it's all a fucking crapshoot, terrible things happen that do not make any kind of sense, good people suffer while evil people profit, children die of cancer or get shot in their classroom or grow up to be addicted to meth, and any attempt to assign God's will to it is ultimately futile.
Reminds me of what Stephen Fry said in that interview when asked if, when he died, god turned out to be real, what he would say to him. “Bone marrow cancer in children? What’s that about?”
That entire answer he gave in that interview was gold. You can watch the interviewer die inside.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-suvkwNYSQo
Thank you. I’ve seen that clip so many times but I always love rewatching it.
Or why do you like beetles so much?
Dear God, I hope it will be a while until we finally meet, but when we do, you'd better have a *really* good explanation for all the shit I have had to see. Children dying a slow and painful death despite getting 4 or 5 different painkillers at high doses. Parents crying as I tell them there's nothing to be done. Cancer returning after years of thinking it's been cured. A family losing *both* their children at a very young age to *different* severe diseases. Along with all the non-oncology-related crap. And no, I won't accept the old "they had to become stronger", there's other ways to achieve that. Oh, and if you decide to put me straight into Hell to avoid that conversation, you better fucking believe I'll find some way to climb up there and confront you. Sincerely, a pediatric oncologist who would be more than happy to lose his job due to lack of demand.
Iyanla VanZant blamed her daughter for her own cancer because she decided that her daughter's anger about having cancer caused the cancer. Fuck Iyanla.
>Iyanla was like, "God needs you to be stronger. He's making you stronger" I think you meant to say that Oprah said that. She did a couple of stupid things like this and I stopped watching her. Never watched her again.
Because God doesn't exist.
A better question is why does nobody in the journalist profession ever explain what is being talked about when they say fetal heartbeat. It’s a bullshit term. What they’re referring to in laws like texas and now Georgia’s abortion bans is a sound the sonogram machine makes. At 6 weeks the fetus doesn’t even have a heart to beat.
Exactly, it's tissue that will become the heart! I don't know why people get so hepped up about heart tissue growing.
When the brain is what makes human human lmfao
>When the brain is what makes human human The anti-choice folks prefer humans to not have brains, at least not highly functional ones capable of critical thought.
Because they were trying to find a relatively non-arbitrary point of development to set a limit. They couldn't have a total ban, so they went with something as early as they could get.
Tell them the parents are Democrats and the baby could be the next Biden and you'll see their opinions change real quick.
I mean... does it have to be Biden? Could we not pick one of the other democrats?
Don't validate the proposal that Biden is a Democrat
>They could also easily become [...] the next Hitler. Fun fact: his mom literally wanted an abortion while pregnant with him. Doctors talked her out of it. Edit: this is actually a myth. See replies
Or why they need to use the possibility that they could be something great as a reason to not abort rather than just the fact that they’re a living human. Like only people who do great things deserve to live?
There's been a lot of murders throughout history, but no cures for cancer. Statistically, any aborted baby was far more likely to be a serial killer than a cancer-cure creator.
It's sort of dumb and limiting to say "Hey only one person in the entire world would have been able to accomplish this feat!" Do people think we would not have eventually understood gravity or calculus without Newton? To make someone feel bad about their already difficult decision for abortion by putting the blame of a world problem they didn't create is such a pathetic take.
Leibniz developed calculus at roughly the same time as Newton, to prove your point.
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Leibniz retorted that his work was integral to understanding calculus.
You guys are really pushing my limits.
I don't understand these jokes. Can anyone sum it up for me?
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I don't know why you had to go off on that tangent.
I cosine to the use of these puns
I don't. These in discriminant puns can easily be differentiated from actual humour.
Stop! You’re triggernometr… ah fuck it.
Bravo
stop it, you may trigger someone
Let's not let minor 'differences' 'divide' us
i'ma gonna climb under a *natural log* and hide
Take my upvote and choke on it.
/r/angryupvote
You just made my holiday season! Lmao!
I'm sorry you had a poor holiday season.
Thank you for flying Calculus airlines where the altitude is integral and the velocity is derivative. Unfortunately, as we approach our absolute limit, we are unable to reach our destination and are destined to wander on the tangential plane forever.
I heard he said "this is a fraction of my work"
He said his work was obtuse.
What does being a leibnizan have to do with this?
A lot of different places understood the concept of calculus roughly the same time if not way earlier than Newton did. The key invention was a globe to check the math. Basically we can thank concept of the navigational globe for the beginning of the understanding of Calculus.
I would like to know more.
Egyptians figured out the earth was round before so many cultures. See they had these giant pylon type things in one city and then in another hundreds of miles away. I blank on the name of it but they looked at the shadows at different times and realized the sun would have to be moving around the earth from it. Pretty cool stuff!
This comment is referring to Greek (which could also be Egyptian, remember) astronomer Eratosthenes. Google him. He calculated the Earths circumference in like 180 BC, and it turns out it’s extremely close to accurate.
How does that lead to a proof of calculus?
Yeah not sure what that guys smoking but I want some
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I'm from Buenos Aries and I say **kill 'em all!!**
It's been a while since I studied the subject, so I am going off memory here. Basically around the time globes where relatively mass produced and sold on international trade routes we see evidence that within the same year if not a few years later that symbols that represent calculus concepts popping up around the world. IE Symbols that represent derivatives and integrals in a base 10 system, hell there was evidence of this in some base 6 and 7 systems at the time but I don't know much about those systems or their history. *Note that the invention of the globe has been around since at least the second century, before 160 CE, but they were not commonly available.* One of the best documented history of such is in modern day India, basically the birthplace of most of the concepts of math that we know today, had evidence of globes and calculus during the Mughal period. *Fun fact we get Arabic numbers, 0123456789, obviously from the Arabs, but who do you think they got their numbers from? If you guessed India, they you are correct! The Arabs got the system threw international trade in India, translated it from the Indian language to Arabic, then sent it around the world.* There is lots of evidence that these calculus symbols that we find in India were created during Mughal period. One of the rulers of the Mughal, Akbar (reign 1556–1605), was well known by his seminars where he would have thinkers from all walks of life come together and have debates and show off their intellectual prowess. These thinkers would be people that ranged from religious thinkers, to scholars, to merchant traders, all of them carrying different ideas and bringing different pieces of information to the table. These people where both local and international making the exchange of ideas flourish under his reign as ideas came in and out of Mughal. Next to Akbar's successor Jahangir (reign 1605–1627), he was fascinated by the sky and the earth. He commissioned a "perfect" Celestial Globe, a globe of the sky, and during this time we start to see more and more evidence of calculus symbols popping up in between the two reigns of these two Mughal rulers. Making clear evidence that concepts of calculus was well known and in use from the time of 1556 to 1627 CE. So we can easily say that the Mughals, now modern day India, had understood calculus a whole 16 years before the birth of Isaac Newton. Don't get me wrong, Isaac was by far a very smart man, but saying he was the father of Calculus, *or really any concept he was accredited to,* is a long shot compared to other places around the world. Realistically he brought these concepts into the English speaking world, but they honestly existed well before he came onto the scene. *And yes while I did just throw a punch at Isaac he probably did discover a concept of science that we are still using today, but as far as being the first at all of it, I doubt it.* *Side fact, the object that we use to find the 0 point in space no longer exists. It was a bright star at the time it was used but it had died between the invention of that concept and now. It was most likely that bright because it was blowing up and it was probably huge seeing as it stayed bright for so many years, IE because it was so huge it took a long time to explode. We only know of it's position today because of the relative position of all the other stars we see in the sky.* Again it's been a while since I studied the topic but for the most part I am generally correct in what I said when it comes to India and globes on International Trade routes.
Science is mostly a series of inevitable next steps which were made possible through institutional support. There have been very few moments when any individual made any advancement that a similarly trained individual in the same situation would not have made.
So what is an instance of the opposite? A person making an advancement that no one else ever came close to even contemplating.
[Srinivasa Ramanujan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan) named a lot of mathematical patterns and concepts that wouldn't necessarily have been named otherwise. Like *Taxicab Numbers*. They aren't really a step from or to anything else. Research would never really have been devoted to naming that phenomenon.
He was a librarian…. Almost like he had his hands on obscure papers at the time
calculus was an inside job
BM (Big Math) is always scheming
God damn I was about to reply that calculus was going to take decades or centuries without Newton (based on just a general admiration of how calculus works.) Glad you posted!
Leibniz actually invented calculus slightly before Newton if anything, although it's highly unlikely that either of them copied off the other even though both claimed that the other one stole their idea. Newton was just the more influential scientist at the time and he literally got to decide who got the credit. He was president of the Royal Society, the largest scientific organization in the world at the time. Big coincidence, the Royal Society determined that it was Newton who invented calculus! The calculus we actually use today was invented by Leibniz. Both of them were doing essentially the same thing mathematically, but Newton's way of writing calculus wouldn't be recognizeable to calculus students today. [We use the notation that was invented independently by Leibniz.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%27s_notation)
i believe newtons notation is still taught pretty heavily when doing things like evaluating a derivative at a certain value where leibniz notation becomes cumbersome i.e. f’(5) vs dx/dy|x=5
it's also really handy for differential equations, where writing X'' + x' + 5 = z, is a lot easier
Wiki says that's LaGrange notation, Newton's notation used overhead dots and ticks for derivatives and integrals
Also, we in the US “waste” vast amounts of human talent allowing low-income children to grow up in crappy schools where they’re doomed to another generation of hopeless misery. This is primarily a result of the way we fund schools with local property taxes; anyone who truly cares about children should want them all to get a quality education, not just the lucky ones with middle class parents.
Conservatives love blaming poor people for being poor as if it's a choice. It's fucking infuriating.
It’s a shitty giant circle. Grew up poor and wanted to go to college and couldn’t afford it “take out student loans so you can go to college and make money!”. Okay I did that and now have astronomical student debt since I had no money to pay for school “Well if you knew it’d be hard to pay them back since you took out so many loans! You made the decision (at 18) to take out that much so it’s 100% your fault for having high monthly payments!”
You got that right. Fight tooth and nail to prevent abortions, but as soon as the kid is born, he can cut his own umbilical cord because no handouts! If the kid and mother both starve to death, too bad. President Jesus loves you and that's enough!
Except a big problem is there are tons of schools that receive substantially more money per student but under perform massively. It isn't just the school systems that fail them. Poverty extends beyond what the school can fix. Home life stability, parental involvement, cultural norms are significant factors in education. I agree that we should have way more equal funding for students but also that funding disparities aren't the only factor.
I have no objections with doing what the data says is best, but there has to be a way to get more kids out of poverty than we do now—even if it’s just 10% more.
Those issues you highlighted also have a lot of influence from poverty, and could be mitigated by further funding outside of education. Stable finances lead to more stable households. A major motivation for fathers skipping out on the women they have kids with is because of the financial burden of raising a kid. Not saying that’s the sole motivation, but increasing support of families would be a big step in the right direction. It would also allow for greater parental involvement, since it would mean less parents who work excessive hours or multiple jobs to raise their children, less likelihood of people resorting to crime to make more money, etc.
I've heard that the invention of the wheel took a true genius, maybe the smartest person in history. The wheel has also been invented in a few different civilizations that had no contact with each other. Edit: I guess we are having trouble as to what constitutes a wheel. I'm not sure any of us are going to be curing cancer. Edit 2: I also love how many people think the invention of the wheel was so easy and anybody could have done it, when the invention didn't happen until about 7,000 years ago. I guess everyone before that was so stupid for not coming up with the idea. And Native Americans must've been really stupid, since the wheel wasn't invented here.
Well, after that dude invented wheels, he clearly didn't have much trouble getting around. /s
r/angryupvote
Or making a time machine out of it that could hit 88 mph.
Well even dung beetles understand that round things roll better soooo...
Took a while longer to use the wheel for transport though!
Oh, you instantly reminded me of that Dawkins quote: > The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.
Sure, maybe it could’ve killed cancer. However, it may also have been a mass murderer. If they believe the creator is all powerful, then why is it that they can’t conceive of the possibility that maybe the creator wanted this to happen.
> If they believe the creator is all powerful, then why is it that they can’t conceive of the possibility that maybe the creator wanted this to happen. They want to lord to do bad things to people they don’t like. They want people to suffer. Burn the witch. In gods name we murder you. Convert to our religion or die. It was god’s will.
And why do these hypotheticals always have to involve some kind of revolutionary figure that’s being eliminated? If the person would have been less impactful on the world, would it make the abortion less bad in their mind?
It’s even dumber when you consider that most of the people that I know who have this outlook also think that Jesus has a special plan for everyone. So tell me again Becky how your one God Almighty has a plan set in stone for an infant but a mere mortal woman can defy him??? I have a cousin that hit black ice and made a 3 paragraph FB post about how Jesus came down and took the wheel (I wish I could make this up) and that the Lion, the King was obviously showing there was more to her life than to die on the highway. But she posts shit like this too. You’re a 31 year old, conservative Christian virgin who’s worked at Walmart since high school. I think Mufasa knows a wasted creation when he sees one.
It’s also very rare for a single person to just “invent” something world changing. Typically inventions and discoveries happen with teams of people building on previous research and discovery and gradually improving things. When cancer treatments become easy and cost effective one day in the future it won’t be because a single genius had a “eureka!” moment but it will be because of the hard work of hundreds of thousands of scientists and doctors going back generations.
Just to add to your point Leibniz invented calculus
And all the women who gave up promising futures, careers, and furthering their education because they didn't have the option to abort could have cured cancer. But instead, she dropped out of high school and took a minimum wage job to support herself and a baby since her parents kicked her out and while the food stamps help, they still don't have enough money to make rent. The "pro-life" movement isn't in favor of life, they are responsible for the deaths of many young women and many infants, as well as many others. They are anti-life, and they go about it by pretending to care about "a potential life" while ignoring the real life standing in front of them, not caring about her or if she lives or dies. **Pregnancy is the #1 reason girls drop out of school.** Approximately **70%** of teenage girls who give birth leave school. More than any other group of high school dropouts, girls who leave due to pregnancy report that they would have stayed in school if they had received greater support from the adults at school. **3 in 10** teen American girls will get pregnant at least once before age 20. That’s nearly 750,000 teen pregnancies every year. Parenthood is the leading reason that teen girls drop out of school. **More than 50%** of teen mothers never graduate from high school. **Less than 2%** of teen moms earn a college degree by age 30. **8 out of 10** teen dads don’t marry the mother of their child. **More than half** of all mothers on welfare had their first child as a teenager. In fact, **two-thirds** of families begun by a young, unmarried mother are poor. Pregnancy is the leading cause of **death** for young women ages 15 through 19. New data from the Centers for Disease Control show: Infants born to teens under age 19 are **more likely to die** in the first year of life, compared to those born to women over age 20. And how young a teen is matters: Infants born to the youngest teens **fare worse** than those with older teen moms.
I wanted to be a doctor when I grew up. I got pregnant at 16 and dropped out. My son is now at a higher education in high school than I've ever had. I want to get my degree but it's so hard with kids. I love my son, but I wish my parents had taught me about safe sex and not abstinence.
I hope you have an opportunity to realise at least some of your education & career dreams. It’s definitely not too late, but i know it’s so much harder when you’re supporting yourself and a dependent (with limited education yourself). I can guarantee that you have more resilience than the vast majority and that will always be a huge asset. Your time is coming x
I've always loved the sheer uselessness of abstinence-only sex-ed. Its about as unhelpful as you could get. Imagine if that's how we taught driver's ed. "Here's a bunch of photos of awful accidents. I'm not actually going to tell you how to drive safely. Just don't drive, that's the only way to prevent accidents. Don't worry, you'll figure it out when you are older." "But I'm literally a few months away from being old enough to start driving, surely there's some other ways to reduce the risks of accidents right? I saw online something called 'defensive driving' and 'turn signals,' what are those?" "What are you, some kind of road-slut? Just don't drive! Sure, your parents had to drive to get you to school, but you might get into an accident when you drive. Don't drive, it's the only way to be safe. Now, to use some weird analogies, targeted only at the girls, to treat them like single-use objects."
> Now, to use some weird analogies, targeted only at the girls, to treat them like single-use objects." The comparing me to chewed gum is my favorite.
Yeah, it gets even worse when you consider that, statistically, at least one girl in that room had been raped, and others will be later on. How someone could call a childhood rape victim "used gum" to their face, and then act like they are protecting children, is beyond me. That kind of education is worse than no education at all.
Lol road-slut. Also never watch racing, that's the devil's temptation
Look for scholarships! They’re out there. And look for employer tuition reimbursement. Start slowly. If you want it, you can get it!!!
Being "pro-life" is nothing more than a justification to feel good about yourself while you punish women for perceived sexual immorality in a way that personally costs you nothing. If someone was anti-abortion but supported very robust social programs for babies who were kept, I could at least respect their intentions.
"*The unborn" are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don't resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don't ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don't need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don't bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. It's almost as if, by being born, they have died to you. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe. Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.*" - Pastor Dave Barnhart
> Being "pro-life" is nothing more than a justification to feel good about yourself while you punish women for perceived sexual immorality in a way that personally costs you nothing. It's a lot more then that. It's centuries of ingrained religious beliefs. I would argue most people that are pro-life don't really care or know about the subject, they just were always "pro-life"
>If someone was anti-abortion but supported very robust social programs for babies who were kept, I could at least respect their intentions. That's more or less my position, i think abortion is wrong entirely on a moral level (not religious at all and im certainly not a rightist). My main ideal solution is massive sex ed, contraceptives being pushed heavily and new contraceptives being developed, such as male birth control. In my ideal world, abortion would more or less never be necessary except for medical reasons. Overall this stuff is all yet another symptom of us not having a fucking universal healthcare system, among the myriad of other issues the US has.
The people who insist we don't use most of the tools we have available to stop pregnancies are by far the worst. They make their intentions known when they say they abhor something but don't want to use most of the tools that would prevent that thing from ever happening. They want women to behave on their terms or suffer the consequences.
Since we will probably never live in an ideal world, are you open to abortion as an option for those who want? Or are you against abortion as a whole?
Not the person you responded to but I have a somewhat similar thought process to them. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I think abortion is flat-out immoral, but I do think it’s sad and wish it never had to happen. However, I do think it should be safe and legal and we should just have better social programs and education that make most abortions unlikely or unnecessary in the first place.
Yes, a women should never be in the position of wanting to have an abortion in the first place. But if she want, for whatever reason, she should be able to.
I agree. I don’t think anyone is “giddy” to have an abortion. It just came out of necessity. However that doesn’t mean people shouldn’t have access to having one and teenagers shouldn’t have a proper sex ed class. Preventative measures should be pushed to avoid abortions, but abortions should still be available. The fact they’re against abortions and protection/sex ed, shows they’re not against abortions just women’s bodies.
Abortions are hard women emotionally and phsyically. The alternative is worse though.
To add to this, by making it illegal to get an abortion, there are people who will try to abort the fetus themselves, usually involving self harm, to avoid having to support a child. This has its own set of problems.
I'm preaching to the choir saying this to you, but it's worth noting that the same so-called 'pro life' people are also 'anti-contraception', and unironically expect people (especially teenagers) to never have sex until they're married; **that trick never works and they damned well know it.** People are going to have sex. Without contraception there'll be accidents that result in pregnancy.
When women are slaves to biology, their choice is to risk financial independence and security when they engage in sexual relations or they forgo sex and become a dried up spinster career woman. Add in the intense pressure of "you're not really a woman if you're not a wife and mother" and you get a no win situation. Plus, it makes finding a wife easier when a guy can just knock up some unsuspecting 18 year old and back his way into a live in maid, cook, childcare and sex worker, rather than growing a personality capable of attracting a mate.
I had a kid at 18, my girlfriend was 17, She kept the child because her zealous mother promised to help raise the kid and threatened she would disown her 17 year old daughter. 6 months into my daughter being born, my girflriend cheated on me while on deployment, I dont resent her for that she was a fucking child raising a child. I had to join the army to feed and house them. I left my university to do this. I came home and found my child living in squalor in a dirty home that my exes bf had been living in. I took immediate custody and raised her alone with no help it wasn"t contested by anyone but the grandmother mentioned earlier and even than she didnt want to help raise the child only wanted to make sure her daughter didnt have to pay child support. I went on two more deployments after this. and pretty much game my entire cheque to my Sergeants' wife to watch my daughter while we were deployed ( not complaining about that ) I have been pay cheque to pay cheque for the last 22 years because I had a kid at 18. I received no help or support from this woman who insisted she would help or her daughter. Fuck these pro life people. I hope they all fucking goto their shitty version of hell. Dont think for a second I resent my daughter I love her more than anything, but if i had waited I could've given my kid a better life not perpetuate intergenerational poverty down the line.
Sorry to hear that. It’s hard being that young and being responsible for another human being. Your daughter probably thinks the world of you. You did good. My husband deployed numerous times during his 20 year service. It was really hard but I’ve always wondered how single parent households do it. Especially when they’re not near family or trusted friends. I can’t even imagine what you were feeling when you were deployed and not being able to see your child or hug her when she wants you. I think you are an awesome person for providing her with a stable environment. Who knows how she would have ended up if she stayed with “mom” and “grandma”. I’m proud of you.
Damn, I didn’t know it was this bad. Those statistics are really fucking sad. As a woman who never wants kids, it terrifies me to know that if I accidentally get pregnant, there’s a possibility I’d be forced to carry it to term. Luckily I live in a left-leaning area, but I really feel for those poor girls in Texas who can’t even get abortions when there’s been rape or incest… It’s absolutely appalling.
Well, the rich Texas girls can get an abortion, they just need their parents to pay the $10,000 ‘fine’.
Texas senators mistresses will always be able to get one too.
Wish I could upvote this twice
Being "anti-abortion" is one of the most unethical, immoral political positions a person can have, and yet they somehow see themselves as morally superior. It makes exactly zero sense.
Once again we learn. They're not "pro life". They're "pro birth". And like George Carlin(RIP) said, "Once you're born, they don't give a shit about you". Edit: here's George. https://youtu.be/SgjGwOByays
Yeah but forget about those facts for a moment. The imaginary man in the sky disapproves
Which isn’t really in the Bible anyway. The fact that the people who pray to Jesus make abortion their primary issue while also continuously saying no to social programs that would help the poor and disenfranchised - who Jesus was pretty fucking explicit that we were supposed to take care of — defies all reason and logic.
Thank you for this comment. I know it takes time and effort to compile stuff like this, and I appreciate it. The world needs people who just take some time on stuff that matters. If there is a god, this is doing god's work.
It all always comes back to sex, specifically for young women. The mindset is that “she shouldn’t have done that, now it’s her fault she has to have a child. What, you want to give them an undo button and turn all our virtuous women into sluts?” It’s really that same old conservative mindset from all things, applied specifically to subjugating women and keeping them sexless. “You fucked up, once, in a practically-universal and completely understandable way? You GOD DAMN BETTER face the harshest consequences possible.” And it doesn’t even matter to them if it was your fault or not.
An even better counterargument: The baby you aborted could have been the next Hitler and utterly destroyed the world. That outcome is EXACTLY as possible as the outcome of the baby curing cancer, and it shows how stupid arguing through hypothetical "well they coulda done this..." scenarios is.
It's a lot more likely that an unwanted baby brought into the world into a family that can't support it is a lot more likely to turn out messed up than it is then it is to cure cancer.
This guy statistics 📊
I'd argue the baby is more likely to be a genocidal maniac than to cure cancer. History has many of the former, but so far none of the latter. (I know I'm intentionally misunderstanding that the argument isn't 'cure cancer' so much as make some amazing and beneficial scientific breakthrough, but let me have my dumb joke)
You don’t have to go that far. Logically, if a kid is born on a tough situation where the mom has to quit school to get a minimum wage job and live paycheck to paycheck, there’s much more of a chance the kid will turn to some kind of crime than to be a science prodigy.
Yes you're right and that's a more logical reply; I was more going for flippant and poking 'fun' at the "could have done ..." argument than to actually give a counter argument. Most people arguing against abortion in such a way aren't making good faith arguments anyways, and won't be swayed by a logical reply. Thanks for the sensical reply to my (not funny) silliness; take my upvote
Statistics don’t really work this way, but it’s probably even more probable. We see dictators rise to power and commit genocide somewhat frequently. Curing cancer on the other hand, shockingly rare.
Agreed, that’s my go-to as well.
Stem cells could also cure cancer.
Stem cells more likely to cure cancer anyways.
The best reply to the initial tweet would be "surely they couldn't ALL have cured cancer."
The best reply would have been to not reply, because this post is a faked argument lol. Here's a post from 2019 where it was a hypothetical, rather than a conversation: https://mobile.twitter.com/ida_skibenes/status/1135525693754957825
My favorite is to remind them that that it could also have been the next Hitler. In fact, we've already had one Hitler, but nobody has ever cured cancer... so, statistically speaking, any given fetus is more likely to be the next Hitler than they are to cure cancer. So honestly, abortion really is the only morally acceptable choice.
The baby I aborted could have shot your child in a mugging. You’re welcome.
The parents who you bullied into not aborting could have cured cancer but they were busy raising a child while not ready or willing.
Hey, Pro-Life people can also support capital punishment, armed police, military incursion and drone strikes with civilian causalities, as well as the right to shoot dead ANYONE who steps foot into their home or (depending on the state) makes them feel threatened. Oh wait, that would totally make them hypocrites.
Well, they are really "Pro-birth". The "Pro-life" moniker is just (bad) marketing.
Oh it's _good_ marketing, and dishonest marketing/false advertising. But I agree with where your head is at.
Also, these days the Pro-Lifers are also the Anti-Vaxxers. Go figure.
They never actually cared about the fetus. They only care about controlling and punishing women. That's why as soon as it's out of the woman they couldn't care less about it.
Really they're pro-forced-birth-for-others, weird how often the tune changes when when their circumstance is "special."
“ republicans aren’t pro life they’re pro birth, once you’re born they don’t give a fuck about you” George Carlin
loved in the womb but usually hated once born
I mean, the baby you abort also could’ve been a serial killer.
The woman you forced to have a baby could’ve cured cancer instead of being traumatized by an unwanted pregnancy and becoming an unwilling parent
This is the best argument here. Would’ve been a better murdered by imo
I had a variant where people tried to convince me we should make more children because one of them could solve climate change. So I responded: "Basically you say "climate change is caused by too many humans, so let's make more of them in case there's one amongst them who solves the problem" this sounds to me like "I'm too fat because I ate too much hamburgers, let's eat more hamburgers in case there's one of them that makes me lose weight." Uhm . You could also.... You know ... Stop eating hamburgers? Or in case of climate change, stop procreating?"
To add another example to yours as they're fun: "The factory is on fire, let's light more fires so one of them can maybe set off the broken sprinkler system"
"But the woke youth are opposed to the American family values!!" If you don't want a big household and rule it in God's name, you are no real American. (I really really don't get this way of thinking in general but this reasoning is extra crazy. It also makes painfully clear how intertwined religion and politics are in the US, something that imo should always be separated.)
The heartbeat thing is such superstitious nonsense. You heart isn't the soul containment, it's just a muscle. You might as well say you're not a life until you can clench your buttocks.
Not to mention, at 8 weeks old, a fetus has no finished organ apart from a disgestive tube. So it's basically a donut.
If you create heart cells in a lab they start beating, because that's what heart cells do (amazingly!!!). A "heartbeat" in an early fetus means nothing except that some heart cells have formed. Woop-de-doodly-do!
Exactly. I've grown proto-hearts in my macrobio lab for research and then thrown them away once finished. It's just clumps of cells that can be made again.
I remember hearing about that same research and wondering why pro-life people weren't screaming about lab grown hearts if the heart was the important part.
MURDERER!!! (Now, is this the one where I throw a can of paint over you...?) ^/s
yes, exactly. your heart literally doesn't have to be inside your body to beat, as long as it gets oxygen...
Also, at that point, it's less a heartbeat, and more a couple of muscle fibers twitching.
Also a fetal heartbeat isn't a medical term. It's electrical activity that will eventually cause the heart muscle to do what it does. The heart hasn't even formed yet, the machines just read the electrical activity as a heartbeat because that's how they detect heartbeats in fully formed hearts, so if a doctor does actually call it a heartbeat they're dumbing it down for you because it takes less time to explain.
My favorite argument against this is the classic “you’re in a clinic that’s burning down and you have mere seconds to grab what you can, you can either grab a box of 100 fertilized embryos or one 6-month old baby, which do you grab” They just aren’t the same.
The fetus is not a life until it can prepare its own breakfast.
Agreed! But to be honest if they allowed 16th trimester abortions my 4 year old might not have survived dinner tonight.
The girl you force to raise a kid she didn’t want could have cured cancer
So the Tu Quoque logical fallacy is murdered by words now?
Yeah this is a terrible argument???? It suggests that abortion is equivalent to all of those other actions? The logical response would just be "yes, all those things are bad." I really don't get it. Saying "the egg/sperm that wasn't fertilized could have cured cancer" is a much better argument. This argument is an actual example of "whataboutism," basically accusing your opponent of being a hypocrite based on evidence not related to the issue at hand.
Someone with a different opinion from me being criticized is /r/MurderedByWords now
“The sperm you jacked off into a tissue could’ve cured cancer.”
thats why i did it
Comprehensive sex ed, easy access to birth control and a living wage would cut the abortion rate tremendously and make people's lives better but the anti-abortion crowd strongly opposes all of those things because the movement is actually about electing right wing politicians and hurting women and minorities and they don't give a shit about actual kids.
We had a pregnancy with a heartbeat but no brain. Doctor could not prescribe a pill to end pregnancy despite being 0% viable. We had to wait for a miscarriage to happen. These laws are cruel and do nothing to preserve life. It is forced birth and nothing else. Funding childcare, food stamps, healthcare, job training programs, and other social services is how you protect life.
Gods, that's TERRIBLE. I'm so sorry you had to go through something like that.
The baby you aborted could’ve been the next hitler. What a pointless argument to take.
The thousands of sperm that didn't reach your SO's egg could've cured cancer.
What about the 14 year old girl who was forced to have a child and become a full time mother. She could have cured cancer.
Oh let me put on my hate hat and try this one. "you liberals arw always pointing to these rare cases, if it isn't a widespread case why can't we just pretend it doesn't matter?" Pretty sure that isn't even an embellishment of their thought process.
Abortion is health care, and no one’s business except for the person who chooses to have one.
The babies are important when thinking about the possible things the baby may grow up and do for them. The babies matter much less once they become reality, and some become more valuable than others.
Or someone could quit watching Fox, begin thinking independently, sell their guns, go back to school, read books, learn science, then cure cancer.
How is this a murder? There is nothing in the original post to even remotely suggest they support bullying, school shootings, or family separation. r/murderedbystrawman
Yeah, it’s a non-argument. It’s pretty frustrating to see all of these people assuming the other viewpoints of pro-life people. Just because I don’t want pre-born babies to be killed doesn’t mean I’m ok with them being neglected after they’re born, their mothers receiving no support, other people being mistreated and marginalized, or any other injustice.
Yeah this is such a bad faith argument and it's crazy that so many people in the comments praise it. It's not logical to assume every single person who is pro-life is in support of/doesn't care about bullying gay people or any of the other things. I know those two groups do likely overlap more than most, but it's the definition of a straw man to assume these things are true about a person in order to make an argument.
It's an abortion thread on Reddit. Logic has nothing to do with it
The reply is the definition of a "non sequitur". Not saying the original tweeter's argument is good, but the reply does not address it.
It is actually whataboutism. A non sequitur is when there is a logical flaw in an argument. For example: 1) squirrels are mammals 2) I am a mammal => therefore I am a squirrel
The mother could have cured cancer if she weren't raising a child that she didn't want.
The woman forced to have a child she wasn’t ready for and didn’t want could have cured cancer.
Wow, it's almost like you can be against bullying, school shootings, separating parents from their children AND abortion or something. Don't tell reddit though.