Oh, yeah, and Karol, saying we don’t like you just because you have a different opinion is, in a word, bullshit. You’re just trying to take your balls and go home.

We disagree with you because your opinion is based on fallacies, was expressed in an insulting fashion, and because you cling to your strawmen in the face of real life people.

Oh, yeah, and I’d like to know what led you to vote for Bush. I think I’m entitled to an answer. I spent a year fighting his war, and I became about as liberal as you can be after that year. See, that’s why a lot of people become liberals. They get conservative crap on the way, then they get out into the real world and realize that women aren’t having abortions because they’re lazy sluts, that black people aren’t having kids for welfare checks, and so forth.

First of all, let me just say that I agree with you that (my) support for a woman’s right to choose does not depend on “what a blastocyst, an embryo, or a fetus is–whether they’re ‘a life,’ whether they’re ‘a human life.’ I agree with you because I believe — even if it is a human life — the rights of the human life of the woman trump any rights of the blastocyst/person that/who depends on the woman for survival.

I also agree that it is your consent which is crucial here, your right to control and make decisions re your own body.

However.

I think your assertion that “consent is not a contract [but is] truly a matter of whim” strikes me as problematic. (possibly it’s just me and i will feel differently tomorrow, but that said…) In some other cases, your assertion feels right to me, e.g. sex. A person engaging in sex obviously has the right to cancel his/her consent at any time for any reason. There is no “you started it” clause. But I’m not convinced this logic applies to pregnancy. Clearly, to the degree that a person is aware that sexual intercourse may lead to pregnancy and that birth control does not always work, it is undoubtedly at least foreseeable that pregnancy is one of the possible effects of the person’s consent to sex. It doesn’t make sense to consent to an act but not to the foreseeable consequences of the same act. c.f. a medical procedure: if you consent to the procedure and you are aware of the possible effects of it, you have consented to (i.e. acknowledged) the possibility of those effects actually occurring. Therefore, it does not seem correct to me that “it is entirely possible for a “blastocyst to impose a pregnancy on me that I did not consent to.” Obviously, you knew it was a possible outcome, and just as obviously, you retain the right to terminate. But in this hypothetical, you did consent to the blastocyst imposition, in the sense that you were fully aware the imposition was one of the two possible outcomes.

“It is also possible for me to change my mind and cease consenting after the pregnancy has begun.” Yes. And I support your right to do so. My support, however, degrades from full support (through the thirteenth week) to partial but still pretty strong support (up to the point of viability) and then extremely weak support (entirely resting on the considerations re your physical health) and finally, after delivery, no support at all.

Since you know going in that “it’s still safer to abort than to give birth up until fairly late in the third trimester,” you also are clearly aware of the risks going in. That is, you can’t claim you weren’t aware of the potential risks in general. This is very different, it seems to me, from the circumstance of any specific complication that might arise in pregnancy. To be perfectly clear: I would never question your right to abort a fetus at any stage if the mother’s health is actually at risk (i.e. there’s a complication). But you seem to be suggesting that you have the right to change your mind about the potential general risks and simply (and without any reason to believe any complication is on the horizon) abort out of a desire to play safe odds. In the first trimester, this seems reasonable. In the third (i.e. past the point of viability), I may still support your technical right to abort, which I may abstractly believe you retain, but that particular hypothetical has the hypothetical you acting in a manner that seems manifestly cruel and unconscionable.

Having said all that, it’s entirely possible that you reserve for yourself rights that you never intend to exercise. Where the state is involved, that sounds like a good idea to me. Still, there is a part of your argument that applies as well to children as it does to fetuses, and I find that disturbing.

The simple fact is that it does not matter what a blastocyst, an embryo, or a fetus is–whether they’re “a life,” whether they’re “a human life,” whatever. Doesn’t matter. Not one iota.

What matters is whether any other living thing has the right to use my body for sustenance against my will.

The answer is no.

If I want it to do so? Fine. And I’ve definitely sustained other people’s lives in the past. I’ve donated blood and plasma. I’ve borne two children. I intend to be an organ donor when I die. (Speaking of which, I’d better update my paperwork.) The point is that I have consented to do all of these things.

Consent is not a contract. It truly is a matter of whim. I can change my mind about a blood donation at any point up until that blood goes into another human being, and they have to throw out the pint I sat around for an hour donating. My family can throw a monkeywrench into the works about my organs if I die, before they ever go into another human being.

Aaand, it is entirely possible for a blastocyst to impose a pregnancy on me that I did not consent to. It is also possible for me to change my mind and cease consenting after the pregnancy has begun.

And I have the right to end that pregnancy in the safest possible manner for me. Even later in pregnancy, it is safer to abort than to give birth up until fairly late in the third trimester. It is my right to control my own body and to make decisions for my own body. If asserting that right kills another person, I’m sorry, but I am nobody’s life support machine unless I want to be.

It never ceases to amaze me how people can refuse to be blood donors on account of needles make ‘em feel icky, and nobody bats an eyelash even though blood loss patients die every damned day for lack of available blood to transfuse–nobody is suggesting we make blood donation mandatory–but let a woman assert control over her own body and that’s murder? Bullshit.

Hey, worked for Romania.

Also, another fact is that women drop out of the workforce to get married and have babies. Of course the average pay of women is going to be lower than men. We’re not in the workforce long enough to change that.

Karol–
Do you have any stats to prove this point (that some women leaving the workforce actually drops the average for the whole)?

I mean, I could argue that manual labor is mostly done by men, and that most of the accidents/incidents of disability due to work happens to men, so the average should even out since they also leave the workplace.

But I have no fact to back that up, and would just be yanking stuff out of my ass, so to speak.

Your point about appreciating money because you grew up poor is well-taken, but your comment about “spoiled liberals” reveals, I think, an unexamined prejudice. People who have money have all sorts of ways of rationalizing away the guilt they sometimes feel at having it, when so many people don’t. Generally, the typical Conservative response (not yours) is “poor people deserve to be poor” (i.e. I deserve not to be.). The Left response is often to side with the poor, and — yes — sometimes disingenuously, in terms of culture and clothes and lingo, in a misguided effort to appear much sexier and much less middle-class than they really are, but even that is generally rooted in a philosophical belief that the system can be changed to make it easier for the poor to overcome circumstances.

And conservatives are right, of course, to be defense about this belief, since liberals also generally blame conservatives for the circumstances in question. thus, the conservative argument that social services for the disenfranchised really is the problem and not the solution. of course, the fact that this conservative argument actually saves them money (in services they don’t have to provide) is not lost on anyone.

I suppose the cliche of the “spoiled liberal” is most true in high school and college, where the spoiled liberals in question have the most in common with the poor hipness factor they embrace: that is, their futures are not at all certain, they don’t have careers or jobs, they aren’t independent, etc.; not that this won’t change for most liberal, white, male college students when they pop out into the world. my younger siblings, who are in their twenties, all talk about not wanting to work for “the man” and so on, and they do wear their poverty as a badge of honor, and it is a little annoying, but really they can be allowed this pose since after all they are doing what they can to make money and have lives, and it’s not especially easy to do so.

“Like I said, I was not just pro-choice but militantly so for most of my life. I saw pro-lifers as the dumbest people alive. And the more I’d argue with them, the more reasonable they sounded while I repeated the dumb ‘it’s my body! It’s my choice!’ mantra over and over as if that was an actual argument.”

The argument is simple and actual. A human being has inviolable rights and society accords him/her certain inviolable protections. The flip side of this coin is a set of responsibilities and obligations, mostly having to do — in one way or another — with not doing harm to others. When these rights and responsibilities conflict, we have a moral dilemma.

e.g. abortion

The conservative pro-life argument attempts to resolve the conflict by saying a fertilized egg is a human being with rights and thus a woman forfeits control of her body when she becomes pregnant. Abortion is murder.

For the sake of argument, let’s just leave science out of it (however, p.s., science is not on the side of conservatives on this one…but let’s pretend).

The bottom line for conservatives is that a woman’s right to privacy and to control her own body is not as important as the rights of the single undifferentiated cell inside her body.

The bottom line for pro-choice folks is that the rights of the woman are more important. Not to mention the inevitable erosion of all our rights, which must follow from the conclusion that a fertilized egg is a human with rights.

If I personally truly believed that a fertilized egg was a human being I would expect to live in a society that protected each and every one of them equally with each and every one of us (multi-celled folks). So for starters: how can we protect citizens we don’t even know about? If a cell is a person, and women often don’t even know they’re pregnant for weeks, it seems self-evident that we have to have mandatory frequent (monthly? weekly?) pregnancy tests for all women. And, no, I’m not kidding. If you think a cell is a person and you don’t think it matters where these citizens are at any given time, you’re a hypocrite. So, mandatory frequent testing (starting at, puberty I guess); police investigations of every miscarriage as potential homicides/negligent homicides/etc.; and, really, if you’re not willing to go the distance on this, what does that say?

If you think the above sounds like a joke, then you are admitting that your pro-life stance is inconsistent and unworkable, or to put it less nicely, you don’t really believe those little cells are human beings yet and you don’t really believe a woman is less important than same.

The liberal argument is, we don’t know exactly when the potential for human life turns into the actuality of a human life, so let’s err on the safe side and say FOR SURE after he/she is born, and then be even more safe and say, FOR SURE in the third trimester (with protections limited by the overlapping rights of the mother), and then less sure and less sure until we get to the unworkable single cell definition of potential life which no liberals think is more important than the rights of citizens who we know to certainly exist.

“I grew up in NYC and being a liberal was the default position. It took a lot of reading and thinking to change that.”

I would be interested in your reading list.

One more time: That’s not why we “sound angry.” It’s not because your opinion is DIFFERENT. Understand?

I’m not angry with you. I’m disappointed in you. You’re a smart, hard-working, articulate woman, with a lot to offer. I would think that a person with the background you describe would be more open to charitable works, about helping those less fortunate than yourself, and more critical of those in power who use slander and insult as clubs to beat their opponents.

You needn’t even be a liberal to do this — just a person who cares about more than her own comfort and who doesn’t need to keep congratulating herself for how reasonable and intelligent she is.

You are a smart, competent woman with a lot to offer the world? Why be so selfish?

If the right has learned from its mistakes, I haven’t seen much evidence.

While it may be true that people in general don’t respond well to vitriol, that’s no excuse for you, personally to ignore aspects of the issues you hold positions on. The best way to avoid being called stupid is to not parrot inaccurate information–like, for example, implying that America is a conspicuously charitable nation.

The best way to get people to believe that you would be convinced if only they weren’t so rageful is to not dismiss their arguments or their level of experience out of hand: “Like I said in an earlier comment, I really recommend travel.” I have a sneaking suspicion that an extra smidge of sweetness and light wouldn’t make an iota of difference in convincing you that giving Nike a couple hundred dollars for a pair of sneakers is not the same as fairly compensating sweatshop workers for their labor.