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Of All the Rhetorical Questions You Could’ve Asked…
Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood, writing in The Washington Post today:
While our opponents have been working to create scandal and panic where none exists, doctors and nurses at Planned Parenthood health centers have continued to provide care to thousands of women, men and young people every day — contraception, cancer screenings, testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and safe and legal abortion. Whose efforts are doing more to help families and make our country healthier?
Whose efforts are doing more to help families than an institution explicitly dedicated to preventing their formation or expansion? Ms. Richards, virtually everybody’s.
Published in Culture
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Well, since the PP videos came out, we’ve discovered they use ultra-sound to guide the removal of baby, so they can preserve the re-usable parts of the soon to be dead baby.
Using an ultra-sound to ‘prove’ that a gestating baby is indeed a human? It shouldn’t be necessary, but an ultra-sound is icing on the cake if that helps convince some people to draw the red line of death earlier.
I agree that it’s (darkly) ironic that eagle nests have more protection than all of the unborn and I’m in 100% agreement that it’s both weird and morally obtuse for people to get bent out of shape about a lion buy shrug their shoulders at the PP videos.
Generally I’m much more comfortable talking about protections for the (early) unborn rather than rights.
Of infinite moral worth. A being with a soul.
This is really beyond the pale of decent human behavior. How hard is it to love a innocent baby enough not to kill it?
Where is their humanity? Are they even human anymore when they have murdered so many innocents?
But that paradise where all women are “equal” due to the great progressive work of PP in improving their health is only another human body away. Would you deny this
Utopia“leveling of the playing field” to future generations? (warning that I am playing devil’s advocate)There is no point in discussing ultrasound when the people you are trying to convince think that humanity is something conferred by an observer at some indefinable point between conception and birth and dependent on something as ephemeral and subjective as the maturity of organs. You have told us that the bright line of conception for granting human status is not a useful one. I suspect it’s just not a convenient one. Once you cede the basic ground of humanity at conception you are, like Planned Parenthood, simply arguing about the price for exploiting the less-than-human.
At what point of development is one ensouled? If the ability for rational thought or moral reasoning has anything to do with it then I submit that neither toddlers nor certain teenagers qualify.
Not to make fun, but you’re all over the place on this. If killing of an innocent, morally significant human is a great eveil, then doesn’t it make sense to err on the side of caution where we lack certainty if we care at all about behaving morally?
Whose efforts are doing more to help families than an institution explicitly dedicated to preventing their formation or expansion?
Planned Parenthood’s efforts — the ones supported by government dollars, i.e. the ones not prohibited by the Hyde Amendment — help families make their own decisions about whether and when to have or expand families.
I love Rico-Twitter. Sometimes the short statement says it all:
Here’s a link to the tweeted article:
http://www.lifenews.com/2015/07/30/cecile-versus-cecil-one-is-the-worlds-top-predator-the-other-is-a-lion/
Isn’t it a tad bit depressing to think that couples have to have another group of individuals tell them whether or not to have a child (or that they are ready to have and raise one). I mean its not like you can’t tell that by looking at estimates of raising a child (the 300,000 dollar minimum estimate gets thrown around all the time so little research is needed for that and divide 300,000 by 18 years and you get $16,666 dollars a year so you have to make 16,666 dollars plus X dollars to equal what ever living standard in money you want and you can decide whenever you want to raise a child) and looking at your current income. Its not that hard to do that and I am not yet legally able to drink and I understand these basic underpinnings of raising a child.
So here’s a thought. I was really frustrated that a judge was able to stop the publication of the next video and that Planned Parenthood has apparently hired a company to go to all the media outlets and squash the story. So this may be a pointless waste of time (but hey, if I’m just sitting here listening to Ricochet podcasts or watching Hulu, it might actually be a way to redeem to the time), but I started going to all the comment sections at Huffington Post and writing something like this:
“This article is interesting, but what we should be talking about is this: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/421799/we-dont-want-get-called-selling-fetal-parts-across-states-jim-geraghty”
So, Huffington Post isn’t dealing with the videos, but they are linking to them on some level. I don’t have a subscription to the New York Times or other major venues, but what would happen if a few thousand people started doing that every day on all the major media outlets. Am I crazy?
How are things back at SKDKnickerbocker?
Money is fungible. The idea that the federal funds PP receives are neatly siloed away and devoid of the taint of the group’s abortion activities is thus an accounting fiction.
If the primary interest of the Left was the non-abortion related women’s health issues Planned Parenthood handles, the money would be flowing to the women who needed care. The primary interest is subsidizing a major Democratic interest group.
There’s an easy way to answer the cui bono question on federal spending: look at who actually gets the check.
They have got to be almost in a coma from all these videos right now. The good ol’ Breitbart drip by drip video strategy always cuts down Leftist Scum and I can’t really think of a better kill right now than PP.
By killing family members.
So at what point is the soul infused then?
It makes estate planning simpler.
somewhere in there is a valuable lede or meme…showing PP as a game trophy.
EJHill could photoshop something.
I don’t think there’s a very clear point. The reason I’m muddled on it is because I think the problem is genuinely muddlesome.
In a strict sense, I agree that small children are not “fully” persons by the criteria I presented. But while I’ve said — and maintain — that ability-based personhood is the basis of rights, that hardly means that all those who fall short of it shouldn’t be subject to the same protections as those who meet it. Protections are different than rights, though.
I want fetuses to have many more protections than they currently do, and I think — for a variety of reasons — that after a certain, semi-arbitrary point the only morally responsible thing to do is treat them as equal to the rest of us.
I’ve little philosophical argument with that position, though I have practical concerns that we’ve all discussed before.
Basically, the question comes down (for me) to “At what point are you willing to tolerate the possibility that you are committing murder against the attenuating costs?” I’m willing to tolerate it up to about 10 weeks, though I’m not willing to any further. It’s a judgement call about an emergent process, so it’s not going to have clear lines. I wish it did.
Salve, I come bearing good news. That court injunction was only for the one Stem Express Video and on top of that its only in California and while Fox News is the only news that is disseminating the information with any consistency and tends to be viewed with suspicion by the left, the information on this atrocity is getting around. Those leftist organizations are too slow to counter.
This is something that has bewildered me. The left always makes this claim but I don’t think I have seen any center or right wing politician make this retort which would rather quite literally answer the question forever.
Uncertain. Honestly, I’m not sure there really is an identifiable point; it’s probably emergent.
Again, for me the question is at what point do you think the risk of murder is intolerable? If you say “at no point after conception,” I get that and even respect it, but I think we’re all just operating on judgement calls. The only way to have anything approaching certainly — well, for me at least — is how the being acts; it’s sort of like a Turing test.
Costs? Sounds a little utilitarian and moral agency doesn’t exactly matter if morals are determined by the costs of whatever this “good” we are after…..
I guess it depends on who you believe is your judge.
With one of the 9 robed ones, some might take their chances.
Me: The soul is not emergent. It’s eternity begins at conception, and is then covered by all of the accouterments of the human form, as it grows in the womb.
I could be wrong, but wouldn’t risk it.
Something I found very disturbing after studying how the Nazis went about their business is they, and the non-party members did in fact treat the medical experiments and death camps as a matter of routine. It’s not that there weren’t some real psychopaths, it’s how regular normal people, just like me, allowed themselves to be co-opted and complicit in the crimes.
Well the Nazis had actually practiced the art of eliminating the “undesirables” with the T-4 Program (elimination of mentally and physically handicapped Germans, roughly 80,000 by 1939 or 1940) and when you think only those who are not mentally and physically handicapped and of the master race are worthy of being considered as being in the collective then everything else that walks, breathes, procreates, and bleeds is to be determined for their value and then policy is to be crafted so as to best put them to use.
And Jim Kearney will tolerate it up to 40. Such is the cost of a sliding scale of humanity.
How very efficient. and tidy.
Guruforhire: Not to sure how exterminating an order of magnitude more people than the holocaust qualifies as “making the nation healthier,”
Making the nation healthier. Sounds eugenic.