FSTDT Forums
Community => Politics and Government => Topic started by: clockworkgirl21 on February 11, 2012, 11:31:01 am
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http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/02/10/1063663/-Conservatives-suggest-defeating-birth-control-by-calling-it-abortion-No-nbsp-really-
Honestly, that takes balls.
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The article is misleading. If you go to read the article that the article at Kos links to you'll see this paragraph:
Yoest, Hawkins and Tobias all said that their organizations do not take a position on birth control, only on emergency birth control. Anti-abortion activists believe emergency birth control drugs like Plan B and Ella can cause abortions, something that is disputed by the drug-makers, the federal government, and abortion-rights activists.
Granted it's total bullshit, but they aren't saying all forms of birth control are abortions, just emergency contraception.
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They've been saying that for years, kids. Granted, back then it was limited to the vernacular of the hard-right fundie loons no-one ever took seriously but then I have to remember that those fundie loons have just become mainstream.
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The article is misleading. If you go to read the article that the article at Kos links to you'll see this paragraph:
Yoest, Hawkins and Tobias all said that their organizations do not take a position on birth control, only on emergency birth control. Anti-abortion activists believe emergency birth control drugs like Plan B and Ella can cause abortions, something that is disputed by the drug-makers, the federal government, and abortion-rights activists.
Granted it's total bullshit, but they aren't saying all forms of birth control are abortions, just emergency contraception.
I just recently had an argument with a right-wing Christian friend on Facebook who considers even regular birth control pills to be abortion. And she's not the only one. She linked to a "study" on an anti-abortion site that estimated that over 13 million abortions have been caused by the pill.
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Yeah, I've heard that argument before, John. It's totally incorrect. Birth control pills prevent implantation of the egg. How people equate that to an abortion is beyond me.
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Because, don't ya know, sex is for procreation! If you're having sex and not making babies, you rape the baby Jesus and will burn in Hell for it.
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PRAISE JESUS!
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Yeah, I've heard that argument before, John. It's totally incorrect. Birth control pills prevent implantation of the egg. How people equate that to an abortion is beyond me.
Because the egg may have gotten fertilized?
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Just remember, humanity, they only care about you while you're in your mother. After that...BOOTSTRAPS!
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Republicans are pro-big tobacco and don't care if a woman gets the necessary medicine and treatments to carry a pregnancy. So not even that.
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Yeah, I've heard that argument before, John. It's totally incorrect. Birth control pills prevent implantation of the egg. How people equate that to an abortion is beyond me.
Because the egg may have gotten fertilized?
That'd be a really poor reason.
Using that logic every time a woman has her period that'd be an abortion. After all that egg could have gotten fertilized.
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On the day abortion is made illegal across the United States, the hard right will immediately retool themselves. They will redirect the energies and resources spent fighting abortion into fighting birth control and contraception with just as much ferocity as they had previously fought abortion.
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]That'd be a really poor reason.
Using that logic every time a woman has her period that'd be an abortion. After all that egg could have gotten fertilized.
Not really. I'm assuming this is their thought process:
1. Human Life begins at conception.
2. Conception happens when an egg is fertilized by sperm.
3. Birth control prevents that fertilized egg from being implanted.
4. Ergo, birth control ends a human life.
I'm not saying I agree with that logic, that it's good logic, or that it even holds true for everyone on the pro-life side. It just bugs when that side is portrayed as uniformly illogical, misogynistic, and/or inconsistent. I've known some pro-lifers in my time who honestly and wholeheartedly believed those first two points and were against abortion but not any form of birth control. When life begins is a somewhat subjective point.
On the day abortion is made illegal across the United States, the hard right will immediately retool themselves. They will redirect the energies and resources spent fighting abortion into fighting birth control and contraception with just as much ferocity as they had previously fought abortion.
Some of them will, and the Republican Party most likely would because it would woo the far right God-warriors that spur their race to the bottom, but not all conservatives or religious folks or even pro-lifers hit that anti-sex/anti-woman model.
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]That'd be a really poor reason.
Using that logic every time a woman has her period that'd be an abortion. After all that egg could have gotten fertilized.
Not really. I'm assuming this is their thought process:
1. Human Life begins at conception.
2. Conception happens when an egg is fertilized by sperm.
3. Birth control prevents that fertilized egg from being implanted.
4. Ergo, birth control ends a human life.
I'm not saying I agree with that logic, that it's good logic, or that it even holds true for everyone on the pro-life side. It just bugs when that side is portrayed as uniformly illogical, misogynistic, and/or inconsistent. I've known some pro-lifers in my time who honestly and wholeheartedly believed those first two points and were against abortion but not any form of birth control. When life begins is a somewhat subjective point.
I never said that prolifers were illogical, misogynistic, and/or inconsistent. I said I couldn't understand how someone could come to the conclusion birth control is the same as abortion.
An egg doesn't get fertilized when someone is on the birth control pill. And something else seems off about that thought process, but I can't say what. It just seems wrong.
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Life begins when the keg is tapped.
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I'm not saying I agree with that logic, that it's good logic, or that it even holds true for everyone on the pro-life side. It just bugs when that side is portrayed as uniformly illogical, misogynistic, and/or inconsistent. I've known some pro-lifers in my time who honestly and wholeheartedly believed those first two points and were against abortion but not any form of birth control. When life begins is a somewhat subjective point.
Maybe not uniformly, but they do a damned good imitation of it. Most of their positions are based on factual inaccuracies if not outright lies, appeals to emotion, appeals to tradition, and other byproducts of a thoroughly ignorant point of view. Life, such as it is, is the end result of blind, animal fecundity - a mindless impulse to further the species - expressed at any and all cost to the individual. It is imperfect, it is cruel, and leaving it to be expressed without restraint (provided by access to abortion and birth control) leads only to suffering. Every sperm is not sacred, and it's downright bizarre to think it might be so.
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Yeah, I've heard that argument before, John. It's totally incorrect. Birth control pills prevent implantation of the egg. How people equate that to an abortion is beyond me.
Because if the egg is fertilized, it's a human life! *eyeroll*
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Basically, both sides are going by the definition of abortion as "deliberately ending a pregnancy, either surgically or chemically." Both groups believe that pregnancy only naturally ends through either birth or miscarriage.
The difference is where they define the beginning of pregnancy.
The official, scientific definition is that pregnancy begins when the embryo (usually in the blastocyst stage) implants in the uterine wall (generally about a week after conception). The "pro-life" definition is that pregnancy begins at the moment of conception, because this is when a genetically distinct organism first makes the scene.
This revisionist definition has the effect of classifying any post-coital birth control that prevents implantation as abortifacient, even though it isn't by medical definition.
This discrepancy in the beginning point of pregnancy is probably also the source of my least-favorite abortion propaganda:
(https://encrypted-tbn1.google.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRN3DqaEi9ys3ZfojcfjSVjgAFgwUnmMok4QPMQbhhs5p9LqH29)
The embryo's (two-chambered) heart begins to beat about 3 weeks after the beginning of pregnancy (scientific definition); in other words, 4 weeks after the baby is conceived. A Beka's textbooks are surprisingly accurate on this score, given the publisher's tendency to ignore facts that do not suit its agenda. However, a lot of billboards use the "pregnancy begins at conception" idea to sell the tripe you see above. 18 days < 3 weeks. An embryo 3 weeks post-conception generally is just beginning to develop the spinal cord and a primitive heart tube. The heart does not yet have any chambers and thus cannot beat.
Besides, born humans don't have two heart chambers--fish do. We have four-chambered hearts. The anti-abortion crowd NEVER mentions that the embryo's heart is dramatically different from what it will become over the course of its prenatal development, because they want to push the idea that an embryo already looks like a born baby. This is also why a six-week-old embryo (dated from conception) is often deliberately mislabeled as being a four-week-old embryo (again, dated from conception); at four weeks, an embryo doesn't look recognizably human yet, and that simply will not do.