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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Philosopher who wrote (11701)	4/17/2001 3:10:53 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 82486

I don't know whether you're stretching to make a point or whether you don't understand the span of the gag rule. The gag rule eliminates funding for contraceptives in Africa because another arm of the provider counsels on abortion in New Jersey. That's no more acceptable to me than genital mutilation. Karen

To: The Philosopher who wrote (11701)	4/17/2001 3:32:45 PM
From: E	Respond to of 82486

<<As long as you understand that they are saying back "get off our backs [the support of] the murder of innocent children and create death and misery throughout the world.">> I don't support the murder of innocent children. A fertilized egg is not a child. Is this getting repetitive? It is only a child if someone has stipulated a definition of "child" and "personhood" most, er, abstract, either using the slippery slope rationale, which I addressed and is not insane, or the religious/notional one, which i consider an arguably insane belief, if literally held. Okay, yes, i'm being provocative. Pretending that early abortion causes more misery than the Global Gag Rule or forcing girl children to gestate their rapist's seed until it becomes the person it damn sure isn't the next morning except to a zealot is rhetoric. And non-sentient fetuses don't experience misery. <<<I know that you don't believe that the unborn child is a full human being. >>> Yes, I do, at a point when it becomes one. There are reasons I understand (the slippery slope! the slippery slope!) that women argue for abortion rights up until the moment of birth, and those women, imo, do the defining trick just as anti-choice zealots do. "I know, let's define 7 month fetuses as non-babies, non-human beings!, that way the complex slippery slope issues don't have to cloud the discussion!) Everybody knows a 7 month fetus is a human being. A six month fetus, too. Everybody knows that a 24 hour old fertilized egg isn't a baby -- except the religiously motivated, who simply DEFINE it as one because they think it's got a holy soul; though zealots talk about the screams of dying children in the same breath they talk about RU486; i wonder why. The problem for sane, ethical people who really do care about AIDS-orphaned children dying of starvation with maggots hatching in their sinuses (I mean care so's you'd notice), (or even care about first world females being forced against their will by the government into gestation), isn't not knowing that a six month fetus is a baby and a six week fetus isn't; it's making the hard, human, mortal, decision about drawing lines, and deciding what weight to give the dangers of the slippery slope in the face of present, and imminent, horrors. And making the hard decisions about individual exceptions, which are also, often, slippery slope-weighing decisions. <<<Whose are right? We really don't know. We're all guessing here. >>> So let's not let those whose guesses result in agony for those on whom they force their guesses push around those who guess differently and don't want to be pushed around and have their lives ruined and their children starve for that other guy's guesses.

To: The Philosopher who wrote (11701)	4/17/2001 3:51:17 PM
From: E	Respond to of 82486

Let us assume... that Bush were to start using federal tax dollars to support African health centers that advised parents to engage in infant female genital mutilation, and funded those operations... Wait. Those African Health Centers that are having their funds cut never have to themselves have advised anybody to get an abortion. You need to know that, to assess the moral status of the Global Gag Rule. And as for "advising," when something like that happens, do you know that actually "advising to get an abortion" isn't necessary to get your funds cut? Just telling the pregnant AIDS mother the implications of continuing her pregnancy is enough. The information must be withheld from her in those clinics. Female genital mutilation isn't done for reasons of health. We certainly agree on that. It is an instrument of social control that causes much pain, suffering, and death. But of course if someone had cancer of the clitoris, i'd assume the physician under any program of proscription of FGM funding should be able to recommend surgical removal. I would think that constraints on physicians that forced them to let people die (or in a similar case, give birth to AIDS-infected babies who would die of starvation after the mother died of her AIDS), would have to be rethought.