The Starting DebateFollow

Mississippi is going to vote on legislation that defines a person as beginning at conception. This would make abortion murder.

But, would it also make mothers who may have smoked, drank, ate McDonalds fries, did a cartwheel, had a Heimlich maneuver, took some medication, or any other number of things that may impact a developing fetus, manslaughterers?

What does it mean to define a couple of freshly joined cells in a little tube inside a woman's body, as a person?





Edited, Nov 2nd 2011 3:03pm by Elinda

This argument will eventually go in this direction, so let's just point out that Mississippi just executed two people in May.

We need to go back to public executions. Since we are a government by, for, and of the people, let them know what they are taking part in.

No, the baby was obviously defending itself against being smothered by the womb.

It means no Biotech company in their right mind will set up shop in Mississippi.

Or is implanting 10 embryos to hopefully get 1 to take a crime?

How about human genes expressed in other organisms?

Does a tissue culture have rights?

Heaven help you if your freezer or incubator breaks down. Not only do you lose your cell lines, you get charged with manslaughter too?

Yeah it's a stretch, sure. But why take the risk if you don't have to?

I'm just wondering how Roe v Wade comes into play here. Didn't the Supreme Court rule that a woman has the right to an abortion up until the point of viability? I'm probably missing something here, but this seems to be in pretty direct violation of that.

If this passes, it'll be interesting to see what happens in court.

There was a pretty extensive report about this on NPR this summer--essentially, the law WOULD make all these things illegal (including embryo implantation). And while they were confident that it was being put forth for a targeted attack on abortion, with no intention to make use of the other aspects, it also sets a legal standard that anyone else could use later on to attack those areas.

Looks like its going to be a great time to be a doctor in Alabama, Tennessee, Lousianna, and Arkansas.

I've always felt sort of evil.

Realistically, this only affects the choices of the mother. There's been precedent for some time now that actions taken by others which causes the loss of a pregnancy can result in manslaughter or similar charges.



This law is specifically about challenging Roe v. Wade (or at least I'd assume so). It's far more about the states rights aspect of the issue than where precisely the law decides that personhood begins.

When I was pregnant with Noah, I didn't know it until I was several months along (yes, it's possible to be pregnant and not realize it). I still smoked, drank some wine, had a lot of coffee. He's fine, but what if I had miscarried? Should I be blamed for not even knowing I was pregnant in the first place?

After that masturbation and menstruation will be illegal, because wasting good reproductive material is a sin!

I think that a lot of the opposition cases are pretty speculative. What if the courts rule in a given way down the line? There's some common sense applications to even this law that don't turn out so draconian if you stop and think about it. When deciding cases like this, the courts tend to look at the reasonableness of the actions being taken and the expectation that they would result in the outcome. If you're walking down the street doing nothing unusual, and someone is distracted by you, runs a red light and kills someone, you aren't accountable for the result. But if you deliberately shine a light at the driver to distract him, causing him to lose control and kill someone, you are.


The intent of your actions and expectation of the outcome matters a lot. Since drinking and smoking are not unusual behaviors for someone who does not know they are pregnant, the court would have to hold you to an impossible standard to level such a charge against you. I think that's incredibly speculative and unlikely to occur even if this law does go through as written.


There's actually an interesting side point to this with regard to IVF. It may be that this law wont affect IVF at all, and may in fact actually help codify the harvesting of embryonic stem cells from the leftovers. Obviously, the law doesn't affect the fertilization of an egg and implantation of said egg. However, what about the left over embryos? It's quite possible (likely in fact) that the law would view those embryos the same way it would view any person on life support, since that's essentially exactly the state they are in. Now, whether the parents can terminate that life support gets sticky because the legal issue there is usually whether there's a reasonable chance that said person could recover and life a fully functional life in the future (that was the core issue in the Terry Schivo case IIRC). However, once the embryo has degraded to the point at which its no longer viable (or sooner depending on how future court rulings go), the legal precedent for donation of organs and whatnot of the deceased is pretty well set. A embryo is currently in a legal limbo state, but a "person" isn't. The remains of a person absolutely can be used for science if the person (or authorized guardian) wishes it.


Don't really have a pony in this race either way, but I do find the potential legal ramifications pretty fascinating. They aren't always what most people assume right off the bat.

What always amuses me about this is that it is a scientifically documented fact that one third of all pregnancies are terminated naturally by the woman's body because of the nonviability of the embryo, usually within the first two months of pregnancy, without her ever knowing she was even pregnant.

What always amuses me is that people post things like this without quivering at the obvious contradictions. I'll really never understand how your people's minds work. Just to recap, the idea is that it's a "scientifically documented fact" that 33% of pregnancies end with miscarriages, but that more than half of this documented number occur without the women ever knowing. How, praytell, are the events where the woman doesn't know, which apparently is more than 50% of the time, as it usually is the case....scientifically documented?

Are there teams of graduate students cruising landfills hoping to score menstrual blood filled items to run HCG tests on? Fuck, that is amusing!

Hey, now we're both amused!

The words you were looking for when you typed "a scientifically documented fact" were "generally estimated". It's amusing how frequently the two ideas are conflated.

Hey, now I'm twice as amused. It's a scientifically documented fact that being amused twice correlates with the amused person dying. Eventually.

The pro-life movement doesn't seem to realize that banning abortion isn't going to end abortion. If it's not available legally, it'll be available illegally. It's an ugly necessity. No one likes the fact that abortions happen--no one normal, at least. Combine this with the simple fact that a woman having autonomy over her reproductive cycle is one of the sure-fire solutions we have for poverty, and the argument becomes slightly moot. There are ways of reducing abortion, but banning happens to not be a good one.

I hope this passes in every state, ever since you people started allowing gay unions we need a new reason for you guys to come north of the border. (that isn't to watch a bills game in Toronto.)







Edited, Nov 3rd 2011 12:54am by rdmcandie

Maybe not in a "press charges" kind of way, but I wouldn't be surprised if we see at least one wrongful death lawsuit where the father sues the mother for smoking while pregnant.

Is that supposed to be an argument? At the very least, the idea that the lack of legally available abortions caused some massive number of deaths has been pretty completely debunked. Since Roe v. Wade, the number of fatalities from abortion has increased because the total number of abortions has increased (dramatically).




Where the hell did you hear this? I would argue the exact opposite, if anything.



I tend to agree, however your arguments seem to counter this statement. If abortion isn't a problem, then why reduce the number of them? Can we at least acknowledge that the conditions/choices which lead to a woman needing an abortion in the first place are negative in general and thus the rate of abortion is a problem? While I don't agree with the absolutist stance that the pro-life folks tend to take, I can respect them for at least identifying something as a problem and trying to do something about it. The problem is that many pro-choice folks, seemingly purely as part of taking the opposite position, find themselves defending abortion as therapeutic, helpful, and beneficial to women. It isn't.

If a woman intended to get pregnant, and the woman ends up killing the baby through some means or another with clear intent of killing the fetus, I'd say she was probably mentally unfit to be a mother anyway. Forcing her to go through with childbirth and keeping the baby probably isn't the smartest thing to do.

Your argument would hold more weight, gbaji, if we were talking about anything other than sex and procreation. Unfortunately, the Malthusian argument also holds for human beings: we will continue to grow in population so long as our resources continue to allow us to survive.

The level of sexual education necessary to arm men and women with the information needed to make correct choices regarding their reproductive health is continually undermined by the very same forces that claim to hate abortion.

Every time I see a pro-life billboard, I have to wonder how many people in a soup kitchen that $1000 would have fed. Of all the causes to get attached to, the pro-lifer movement is probably one of the most selfish ones. Care for the living first.

Edited, Nov 3rd 2011 5:14pm by catwho

ITT: gbaji calls calls casual sex "a waste of time".

Most billboards aren't moralizing at me.

Gbaji doesn't know that, he doesn't get his news from anywhere or trust surveys or scientific studies.

Unless you make a conscious decision to go out and find a 'friend" to waste some time with!

Because today 50% of all abortions are performed on women who've had at least one abortion already.

How about this page. There's lots of information there, but the relevant upshot is that if the purpose of abortion is to help women avoid the poverty associated with single motherhood, it's failed miserably at it. And along the way, there are a host of additional problems as well.



And yet, I seem to have a better intuitive grasp of the effects of abortion on women than most people. At least I don't just parrot political position based talking points. I'm not so invested in a "side" of the argument to ignore the negatives and downfalls of any given position. Abortion is not the magic bullet it's often made out to be. In fact, there's quite a bit of data suggesting that the primary problem it's supposed to solve (poverty among single women) has been made worse as legal abortions have become more common.


But most people aren't willing to look at or even acknowledge data which opposes their starting assumptions, so I fully expect a standard dismissal of the whole thing, probably with some snarky comment about how I hate women's rights or something. Go rhetoric!!!