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Another reason not to have an abortion.
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shakuhachi



Joined: 08 Feb 2003
Location: Sydney

PostPosted: Sun May 15, 2005 9:04 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

whatthefunk wrote:
thats a crap argument. if you hadnt been born, you wouldnt be here to know the difference. and it would be great to be able to live your life without breaking the golden rule, but how many of us actually do this??


I dont see why it is a crap argument. I am alive now, and I am glad my mother didnt abort me. Maybe you think you were just post conceptive goo, but I feel that I started my existence at the moment of conception. As for the Golden Rule, the goal is to do your honest best to live up to it, not to persue the false goal of perfection.
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dogbert



Joined: 29 Jan 2003
Location: Killbox 90210

PostPosted: Sun May 15, 2005 9:19 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I favor abortion as a method of keeping violent crime in check:

********

From a review of the book "Freakanomics", by Steven Levitt:

"One of his best-known, and in some quarters notorious, findings concerns America's falling crime-rate during the 1990s. Towards the end of that decade, confounding the expectations of most analysts, the teenage murder rate fell by more than 50% in the space of five years; by 2000, the book notes, the overall murder rate was at its lowest for 35 years. Other kinds of crime fell too. Why? Some gave the credit to economic growth; others to gun control; still others to new methods of policing, or to greater reliance on imprisonment, or to increasing use of the death penalty, or to the ageing of the population.

"The reasoning is simple enough. In January 1973, the Supreme Court made abortion legal throughout the United States, where previously it had been available in only five states. In 1974, roughly 750,000 women had abortions in America; by 1980, the number was 1.6m (one abortion for every 2.3 live births). ��What sort of woman was most likely to take advantage of Roe v Wade?�� the book asks. ��Very often she was unmarried or in her teens or poor, and sometimes all three...In other words, the very factors that drove millions of American women to have an abortion also seemed to predict that their children, had they been born, would have led unhappy and possibly criminal lives...In the early 1990s, just as the first cohort of children born after Roe v Wade was hitting its late teen years—the years during which young men enter their criminal prime—the rate of crime began to fall.��"

http://www.economist.com/books/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=3960469
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whatthefunk



Joined: 21 Apr 2003
Location: Dont have a clue

PostPosted: Sun May 15, 2005 10:12 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

shakuhachi wrote:
whatthefunk wrote:
thats a crap argument. if you hadnt been born, you wouldnt be here to know the difference. and it would be great to be able to live your life without breaking the golden rule, but how many of us actually do this??


I dont see why it is a crap argument. I am alive now, and I am glad my mother didnt abort me. Maybe you think you were just post conceptive goo, but I feel that I started my existence at the moment of conception. As for the Golden Rule, the goal is to do your honest best to live up to it, not to persue the false goal of perfection.


yes, but if your mother had aborted you, you wouldnt have known the difference. you wouldnt be here to argue that you are happy that your mother didnt abort you. i think the argument you are giving kind of zeros itself out...
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shakuhachi



Joined: 08 Feb 2003
Location: Sydney

PostPosted: Sun May 15, 2005 10:33 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

whatthefunk wrote:
yes, but if your mother had aborted you, you wouldnt have known the difference. you wouldnt be here to argue that you are happy that your mother didnt abort you. i think the argument you are giving kind of zeros itself out...


If my argument is illogical, so is yours. If someone walked up from behind you and blew your brains out, then you wouldnt be alive to regret the incident.
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thepeel



Joined: 08 Aug 2004

PostPosted: Sun May 15, 2005 11:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

dogbert wrote:
I favor abortion as a method of keeping violent crime in check:

********

From a review of the book "Freakanomics", by Steven Levitt:

"One of his best-known, and in some quarters notorious, findings concerns America's falling crime-rate during the 1990s. Towards the end of that decade, confounding the expectations of most analysts, the teenage murder rate fell by more than 50% in the space of five years; by 2000, the book notes, the overall murder rate was at its lowest for 35 years. Other kinds of crime fell too. Why? Some gave the credit to economic growth; others to gun control; still others to new methods of policing, or to greater reliance on imprisonment, or to increasing use of the death penalty, or to the ageing of the population.

"The reasoning is simple enough. In January 1973, the Supreme Court made abortion legal throughout the United States, where previously it had been available in only five states. In 1974, roughly 750,000 women had abortions in America; by 1980, the number was 1.6m (one abortion for every 2.3 live births). ��What sort of woman was most likely to take advantage of Roe v Wade?�� the book asks. ��Very often she was unmarried or in her teens or poor, and sometimes all three...In other words, the very factors that drove millions of American women to have an abortion also seemed to predict that their children, had they been born, would have led unhappy and possibly criminal lives...In the early 1990s, just as the first cohort of children born after Roe v Wade was hitting its late teen years—the years during which young men enter their criminal prime—the rate of crime began to fall.��"

http://www.economist.com/books/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=3960469


That book is excellent btw.

About the topic at hand, I am wondering if there is a True answer to this question... I really don't know if I have seen a rational case for or against in a long while. I am very uncomfortable making statements for or against. I suspect it is better to have access to it, while at the same time discouraging it, if the other choice is for women not to have access to safe medical options.

An unsafe alternative should not be a realistic option for a woman in crisis.

Education and effective birth control for both sexes are, in my mind, more likely to diminish abortion than dogmatic positions or laws.
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On the other hand



Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue

PostPosted: Mon May 16, 2005 1:30 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Earlier in this thread, I wrote:

Quote:
But arguments appealing to the supposedly unlivable quality of life in "the ghetto" veer a bit too close to the logic of eugenics for my taste.


A few posts above, Dogbert wrote:

Quote:
I favor abortion as a method of keeping violent crime in check


Anyway, you see what I was getting at.

I don't neccessarily dispute the freakonomics analysis, as a simple statement of fact. But I don't know how comfortable I am with embracing abortion as a "method" for keeping crime down. The word "method" kinda suggests to me that the impetus for the abortions would be coming from somewhere other than the woman herself. Because I don't think too many women who choose to have abortions do so in order to help keep the crime rate low.
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dogbert



Joined: 29 Jan 2003
Location: Killbox 90210

PostPosted: Mon May 16, 2005 4:55 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Of course, they do not.

On the other hand (pardon me), I am glad that easy access to abortion has brought some benefit to society at large. And I mean that sincerely.
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guangho



Joined: 19 Jan 2005
Location: a spot full of deception, stupidity, and public micturation and thus unfit for longterm residency

PostPosted: Mon May 16, 2005 5:36 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

There are tons of people who do not want to be mothers (and fathers) but do not have the intelligence and self control to prevent pregnancies. I see no reason to force patently unfit women to give birth. If pro-lifers spent more time adopting unwanted babies and less time shooting abortion doctors, they would have more credibility.
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Tiny_Tibbo



Joined: 21 Apr 2005
Location: In My Skin

PostPosted: Mon May 16, 2005 5:39 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

On the other hand wrote:
Quote:
Tiny_Tibbo wrote:
however I guess I wouldn't say it is out of selfishness that these children are born....well in the poverty stricken areas that is...but in many ghetto areas.....maybe you could start with the millions of foster kids ...i'm sure some of them wish their mother hadn't been so selfish. And then there are the ones who have been sexually and physically abused since they were born....i'm sure a few out of that group would have wish they were aborted.....ummm.....just an educated guess......no poll to prove it but hey....i'm sure somebody could go and ask people that question to remind them of their hell on earth existance.....


By that standard, why not hit the streets of a ghetto and start 'aborting' people that you see on the street with a shotgun? You would be doing them a favor.


Quote:
that is not our choice to make......it was their mothers choice that she decided not to choose....for whatever reason that may be


No, but it is the choice of the ghetto kid himself. After all, anyone can commit suicide if they think their life is so horrible. And since relatively few people choose to commit suicide, and those suicides that do occur are often the result of some specific incident as opposed to overall quality-of-life, I think it's safe to assume that most people don't regret being born.

I'm pro-choice, simply because I think that women have the right to decide what happens to their own bodies. But arguments appealing to the supposedly unlivable quality of life in "the ghetto" veer a bit too close to the logic of eugenics for my taste.
All that said, "everyone wants to be born" is a somewhat problematic argument to make against abortion, since it could also be used as an argument against contraception and celibacy, things that most people don't have any moral problem with.



Maybe I wasn't quite clear, I wasn't talkin about the "unlivible quality of life in the ghetto". I was refurring to how i'm sure there are people who wish their mother hadn't been so selfish by deciding to not have an abortion when it was not in their (the childs) best interest. and "the ghetto" like mentality that one can be born into...or even the middle class suburbs would be a place that the previous poster could look if they didn't believe me that there are some people who wish their mother would have aborted them.....but then agian.....i think "religious" belief comes into play, If the person perhaps felt that if their mother had set them free back into the universe that they may be born into better circumstance or that babies go straight to "heaven"...they may intertain the idea that it would have been better if their mother would have let them go.....however i do see wishing that their mother had an abortion and suicide as two different wishes.... but never the less....i was just sayin....i'm sure there are people out there who wish their mother didn't drag them into the situation they were born into if she had a choice........
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Nowhere Man



Joined: 08 Feb 2004

PostPosted: Mon May 16, 2005 6:32 am    Post subject: ... Reply with quote

First off I'll admit to being "an accident". Of course, my parents did have the means to support me. That said, I am pro-choice.

There is the practical issue of health and safety, and then there are the social/moral arguments, which I see as one issue and not 2. No one knows exactly when life begins just as no one knows what happens after we die. I doubt anyone will ever be able to prove either. You do have arguments about the development of a fetus and the first heartbeats, but you also have people with fully developed beating hearts lying brain-dead or in vegetative states. To me, both arguments deal with sentient life. I myself don't think that a zygote is a sentient being. There is the potential there for it to develop into one, but there is also that same potential with sperm. Thus, I support abortion, particularly if it happens as early as possible. I think most pro-choice people do. Moving on to a second point, I think it's safe to say that every woman who decides to have an abortion does so after serious consideration. It's not as if people are going out on a lark and getting abortions. It is a huge, life-impacting decision. And a very personal, individual one (or, for argument's sake, it can be a couple's).

I don't see why it's anyone's business telling people whether or not to abort. Moreover, if you look at the politics of this, the same people who oppose abortion tend not to support welfare (Lazy bums!) but do support the death penalty (exterminate the scum!).

I'd be happy if someone could reconcile these views.

Furthermore, our foster-care system is foul. Inadequately funded and inadequately policed. While I don't have a clean-cut solution to this, one improvement would be to help homosexual couples adopt. That would mean letting them marry (or have a "civil union", if you want to be PC).

This is another issue the pro-life crowd tends to oppose.

So, yes, I hope the pro-life crowd does intend to have some follow-through on their stance and either adopt themselves or allow the state to provide proper care (and I'll note, tax cuts don't faciltate such things Wink ).
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The Bobster



Joined: 15 Jan 2003

PostPosted: Mon May 16, 2005 8:37 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

shakuhachi wrote:
Good lord. I dont know how anyone could be in favor of abortion.

Neither do I. I have yet to meet a single human being who is in favor of it. Those of us who are pro-choice are exactly that, in favor of a woman being able to have the choice to decide for or against an abortion, for herself, her body, her decision, and no one ever tries to assert that the choice is any easy one. As Kuros pontred out, the consequences of not allowing this choice offer far more hazards.

There are no abortion advocates, and if you know of any please point them my way.
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