More Attacks on Women's Right to Choose

it's a very partisan issue. AS I have said, it was the deciding factor in this years election battle, driving enough Republican women out of the party to make the difference.

Sevensquared I know you want to have a discussiona bout designer babies. And in fact, there's a post that changes the subject, if you wanted to have that discussion...

Unless you would rather keep on denying that water is wet, which is pretty boring of you.
 
Maybe by looking at your post and then scrolling up about 8 inches.

To be fair, Box most likely was still writing his post when Stella posted the one you reference. Although, yes, if Stella is posting to a thread, it's a pretty good bet that the thread is political partisan--and, yes, anti-Republican.

(But that's one part of her discussions I enjoy--until I get tired of her unprincipled "anything goes as long as I win" fringe zealotry.)
 
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Originally Posted by Boxlicker101
I know a lt has been said about eugenics, but that has nothing to do with anything. If and when this "science" becomes advanced to manipulate a fetus in the womb, that might be a time to worry, but that is still far off, and may never come to pass.

Wow . . . you've posted a whole lot of boneheaded statements, Box, but that ranks right near the top. :D

This thread had nothing to do with eugenics. It is or was about a legislator wanting to interfere with a woman's right to have an abortion. I know what the thread is about; I started it.
And I laughed at the suggestion of the rest of the paragraph. Science has been capable of much of this for decades. Although it comes before the "fetus in the womb" business (and thus isn't connected with the "abortion until you get the order you placed" issue), my wife, the at-that-time nurse, and all of her nurse friends were prearranging the sex they wanted their baby to be forty years ago. Being traditionalists and liberal leaning, we decided we wanted a boy first and a girl second, three years apart, and to stop there. My wife said there were medical ways to stand a great chance of that happening. We had a boy and three years later almost to the day we had a girl--and that was that. But again, this was by using science at the front end, not aborting until we got what we wanted.

Abortion, by the way, isn't riskless to the mother, especially done repeatedly. And I can guarantee that there are folks in nearly every woman's life who have a stake in how she risks her life. No woman is an island.

I have heard of people "stacking the deck" in favor of a son or of a daughter, but this is not even close to being exact. I don't know what the odds would be, but it is certainly not 100%. I know there are also ways to increase the chances of conception, based on the woman's cycle, but that is also not even close to 100%. You and your wife may have just been lucky in getting what you wanted,

But that's just timing and the selection of gender. Eugenics would go much further than that. With the Nazis, it used to be a matter of breeding women with certain characteristics and men of certain characteristics, but I doubt that would ever come to pass in the USA. Even that is chancy because of recessive genes and other factors that cannot be controlled.

I hope you are not going to say scientists can now take an egg and sperm and change the genes. In other words, if a man and woman, both short and with dark hair came to their ON and said they wanted to produce offspring who were tall and blonde, it could be done by making changes in his sperm and her eg? That and other changes in genes would be true eugenics, and I doubt it will ever happen.
 
Yes, I know the thread as you posted and headlined it had nothing to do with eugenics, Box. The point you continually have missed (or purposely overlooked), though, is that the topic of the article you referenced has quite a bit to do with eugenics--enough so to water down what you wanted the thread to be about. You were the one who screwed this thread up from the getgo. This is nothing new for you, though.
 
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Yes, I know the thread as you posted and headlined it had nothing to do with eugenics, Box. The point you continually have missed (or purposely overlooked), though, is that the topic of the article you referenced has everything to do with eugenics. You were the one who screwed this thread up from the getgo. This is nothing new for you, though.

I still say the news item had nothing to do with eugenics. It was about a woman trying to legally prevent other women from getting abortions, however she may have presented her opinion. In other words, eugenics, even the minimal level that would be involved, was being used as a straw person to hide the legislator's true agenda.
 
I hope you are not going to say scientists can now take an egg and sperm and change the genes. In other words, if a man and woman, both short and with dark hair came to their ON and said they wanted to produce offspring who were tall and blonde, it could be done by making changes in his sperm and her eg? That and other changes in genes would be true eugenics, and I doubt it will ever happen.

Or that any woman would want to go through the efforts of getting pregnant on purpose, going through that first quarter and the morning sickness and hormonal changes just to abort. What-- you think she'll just blithely slot up the next day? And it takes some time for the hormones to readjust so that she can ovulate again-- and then she has to get that egg fertilised. If it's anyone who cares about her, there are going to be some real issues between them at that point.

Pregnancy is really hard on the body and mind. The abrupt termination of a pregnancy isn't especially a repeat occurance kind of thing either.

I'm going to say that people who talk about "women aborting over and over until they get the right baby" are the kind of people who really should not have any say in the issue, you know what I mean?
 
I still say the news item had nothing to do with eugenics. It was about a woman trying to legally prevent other women from getting abortions, however she may have presented her opinion. In other words, eugenics, even the minimal level that would be involved, was being used as a straw person to hide the legislator's true agenda.
"Straw person" LOL! PC FTW. :D

I gotta say, Box-- when you are right, you are so very right that it makes me wonder why you can sometimes be so very wrong.
 
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Originally Posted by Boxlicker101
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How on Earth can anybody get anything politically partisan out of this thread?


Maybe by looking at your post and then scrolling up about 8 inches.

Do you mean those items about some Reps saying and doing some dumb things over the last 17 years or so? That has nothing to do with the thread; it is actually a threadjack.

Had I the time and the inclination, I could probably come up with a similar list of Dems., especially Joe Biden, saying and doing dumb things, but I have neither time nor inclination,
 
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Do you mean those items about some Reps saying and doing some dumb things over the last 17 years or so? That has nothing to do with the thread; it is actually a threadjack.

Well in light of the fact I've been sent PMs telling me I have no business being in this thread if I don't have an opinion on American politics, I hope you can forgive my confusion.

Going back and rereading this thread our fundamental disagreement seems to be on the viability of eugenics.

You appear to hold the belief (correct me if I'm wrong) that the ability to control the characteristics of our offspring (beyond what we can already do anyway) is several generations away. So any attempt to legislate, or even discuss, whether abortions based on the characteristics of the baby should be legal should just be seen as nothing more than an attack on women's right to choose.

I hold the belief that 'eugenics' is in fact already here and the ability to terminate based on the sex and race of the baby is just the tip of a large iceberg of questions that we, as a society, have to face on this subject sooner rather than later. Therefore I feel that the beliefs (call it partisan political or pro-life movement or whatever you like) of the person proposing this legislation are irrelevant and it should be discussed on its merits rather than trying to drag it into a tired pro-life/pro-choice debate.

I understand (and have some sympathy for) your position, I just don't happen to agree with it.
 
Well in light of the fact I've been sent PMs telling me I have no business being in this thread if I don't have an opinion on American politics, I hope you can forgive my confusion.

Going back and rereading this thread our fundamental disagreement seems to be on the viability of eugenics.

You appear to hold the belief (correct me if I'm wrong) that the ability to control the characteristics of our offspring (beyond what we can already do anyway) is several generations away. So any attempt to legislate, or even discuss, whether abortions based on the characteristics of the baby should be legal should just be seen as nothing more than an attack on women's right to choose.

I hold the belief that 'eugenics' is in fact already here and the ability to terminate based on the sex and race of the baby is just the tip of a large iceberg of questions that we, as a society, have to face on this subject sooner rather than later. Therefore I feel that the beliefs (call it partisan political or pro-life movement or whatever you like) of the person proposing this legislation are irrelevant and it should be discussed on its merits rather than trying to drag it into a tired pro-life/pro-choice debate.

I understand (and have some sympathy for) your position, I just don't happen to agree with it.

Eugenics has been around a long time in the USA , but it has come into considerable disfavor recently, at least when involving humans. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States

However, it has always been very inexact and has always involved breeding for desireable traits and sterilization for what was considered undesireable ones. This thread has nothing to do with breeding and sterilization. It is about a woman in Utah who wants to put obstacles in the way of women seeking abortions. I don't believe she even tried to rationalize anything remotely connected to eugenics; she just wants to make abortions harder to get.

To a limited degree, eugenics is practiced even now. A woman who wants to have a baby but doesn't want to involve a man will go to a sperm bank and pick a donor who has the characteristics she considers to be superior. A couple, when the man is infertile, might go to the same place and try to find a donor who has physical charastics like the infertile man.
 
Yeah I must admit I use the word 'eugenics' hesitantly. There should probably be a better word for what we're talking about, but none come to mind (I don't like the phrase 'designer babies' much either).
 
I think carte blanche IS the best policy. Otherwise, it's not actually "right to choose." It's something more like... "Right to choose IF your reason is on this here list of approved reasons and if it doesn't you are simply not as important as that fetus, sorry about that." 1) Although there were millions of abortions in China, there are STILL millions of births as well. Then, now and on going.

2) Your reasoning seems to imply that those little girls regret the chance to never come to be. They don't. They don't exist in any way shape or form.

In fact they were never "little girls" in the first place, they were embryos.

So what if the population is imbalanced towards males right now? It's temporary, I assure you. Women make babies, and the babies tend towards 51% female.

3) How do you expect that we can "prefigure height, hair, blue (of course you think it has to be blue) eyes?" What tests can be developed to find those things out prebirth?

.

How you do it is called PARENTS. Animal and plant breeders select traits all the time. How do you imagine new varieties come to be?
 
It was suggested that if women could be fertile, say - twice a year, it might be better inasmuch as a child born or Rape is a lower probability.

Twice a year and you'd wipe out the population in a remarkably short time.
Even if there were no problems of food, etc., you only have to look at a Giant Panda as a species that's run itself into a cul-de-sac.

I'm not sure I'm following you, my dear.

It is an acknowledged fact that the Giant Panda is (should that be was) on the edge of extinction prior to WWF and the Chinese getting their backsides in gear. Consider, however, over evolutionary (?) time, the Panda spends most of its time alone, eating some sort of bamboo (rarer due to man's encroachment, we are told), despite the digestive system which is actually omnivorous.
The females only come into season for about two day a year. Add to that that the males have forgotten what their dick's for and it's shrunk almost to the point where it's not a lot of use except for taking a piss. Artificial insemination is getting good in the Panda Zoo place!.

Now, I understand that this is unlikely with human-kind if only because there's a good chance that humans know what to do to keep their apparatus in working order.

But taken over evolutionary time ?.


Republicans don't have doubts. They have convictions.

Similar to your conviction that American political party platforms do not inform political measures generated by American politicians.


ye gods; is this crap for real ?.
 
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