Atheism or agnosticism?Follow

You're missing something.



Yup. That's exactly my point. If one argues that abortion should be legal because it gives women the freedom to not have to either marry someone or raise a child on her own if she becomes pregnant, then the fact that the rate of children born to unwed mothers has gone up dramatically would show that it's not actually doing that. We can debate the reasons for that (and there are a number), but it's clearly not having the desired effect. That's what I'm showing with that data. I'm not saying that legalized abortion caused those statistics to change all on its own, but simply that by legalizing abortion we haven't solved the problem. It has become worse over time. So at the very least we can say that said argument for abortion is weak, right?


If a doctor produced a polio vaccine, then we implement it across society, but over time the rate of polo victims increase, we might at the very least look askance at someone arguing for continued vaccination on the grounds that it's necessary to reduce the rate of polio. We might instead suggest that there are other factors involved and perhaps we should be looking there instead, right?




It's a factor. One among many. You'll note I previously mentioned those other factors as well.



Sure. But I'm not the one who argued that abortion gives women the freedom to be "responsible" and abort children that they can't support financially. Regardless of the reasons, it's clear that that is not actually happening, is it?



As I've said. It's a combination of factors. But anything that makes the decision to have sex with someone you don't intend or want to marry easier is going to contribute to the rate at which women find themselves pregnant but not wanting to marry the person who impregnated them. And that's going to leave either abortion or single motherhood (or adoption). My point is that despite all the cheering about how abortion frees women from having to be single mothers in that situation, it hasn't actually done so.

Again, we can debate the exact reasons why, but at the end of the day, it's not really relevant to my argument. I was countering someone else's claim about the effect of abortion by pointing out that the net result isn't in the direction being claimed. Abortion rates are up since 1973 (and moreso if we go back 20 or so years when abortion was almost universally illegal), yet the rates of single mothers keeps climbing. We can sit around applauding the fact that women have the choice to abort, but it's clear that they aren't making that choice. And they're not making the choice to give a child up, or the choice to marry.

Edited, May 3rd 2011 2:37pm by gbaji

So your answer is to take away the freedom to be responsible because women choose not to do it? That's... pretty moronic. Especially when you yourself admit it might be "a combination of factors," none of which you bothered to bring up stats for, instead relying on one and saying "Obviously this played a part!"

Oh, wait, I see what you're going to say... the argument is that they can "either marry someone or raise a child on her own if she becomes pregnant." Hey, luckily, no one with half a brain should be making that argument. I mean, alma might, but the rest of us are saying "they can do what they want, including abortion, marrying, or raising a child."

It's ok big guy, tell us how you really feel.

Who's projecting now? My issue with you is you're saying abortion is a factor and not backing it up. Know what else has happened since Roe v Wade? Gasoline prices have risen. Sh*t, by your logic, increased gas is one of "a combination of factors" that correlate with more babies born to single moms.

I would like to see some statistics on your idea that women want an abortion until they find out how much welfare they can get.

Oh, I'm sorry. You've said that abortion is "a part of a social experiment that has clearly failed." What was your solution? According to you, abortion has just opened up the floodgates to allow women to have children anyway. If it's "part of the problem," are you saying that changing it by restricting access is not "part of the solution?"

Probably when we get some actual analysis on your stats. Come on. Show us how many unwed mothers had sex because abortion was an option, then changed their minds because welfare was so much better.

And segregated, lol.

So in conclusion, you have no solution, you claim there's a problem that abortion is partially responsible for but don't show any causation nor stats to back it up, and you also seem to imply that abortion has caused more single mothers than it has prevented.


Then why would you make the claim:

You are saying that women are less safe and more sexual due to thinking they can have an abortion, and then when pregnant they change their minds about abortion because of welfare. How is it unfair to ask you to prove it if you claim it is so?

Edit: I'm not trying to jump down your throat here, and I think a lot of people have the same concern. Abortion isn't a matter to be taken lightly, and single parents without the income to properly support children is a big issue. But if you're going to make claims like: Then you need to actually back it up. We know unwed pregnancies are up. Know what else I know? Planned Parenthood performed 300,000 abortions last year; assuming 40% of those were to single girls (a VERY conservative guess, no?), that means PP alone lowered the number of unwanted children born, thus helping the situation. So, show some data that the availability of abortion has caused at least more than that in a year. That is what you're claiming, right? Other factors, sure, but you chose abortion in your suggestion.

Edited, May 3rd 2011 8:48pm by LockeColeMA

You're getting off topic Locke. Here's the original statement I responded to:



This statement is clearly claiming that the responsibly choice is to abort rather than ending out on welfare. I didn't make the comparison, I was responding to someone else who had. My counter is that an even more responsible choice would be to not get pregnant in the first place. I followed that with a comment that while aborting instead of being on welfare might be a more responsible choice, it's a moot point since clearly a hell of a lot of women are in fact choosing to be on welfare instead of having an abortion.

We can speculate about why that's happening (which I have done), but no amount of you disagreeing with my speculation changes the core legitimacy of my initial statement. Don't play the "I don't agree with one tiny part of what you said, so everything you're saying is wrong" game.

lol

Yes, if only people realized they should be cold and calculating when it comes to having sex with their partner. It's so simple!

Ahahahaha, too funny. I feel bad for you, being that disconnected from how the world works.

That's your answer to throwing out a statement and then being asked to back it up? Edit: Ah, you answered more fully. I was wondering why I got the short answer before.

Agreed. Anecdotally, I don't know a single woman who said "Man, I'm going to have all the sex I want because I can abort. No need for birth control! Oh wait! Instead of aborting I'll go on welfare!" It could be my social group, though.


So... you're saying abortion helps the problem! But it also makes the problem in the first place. So again, show it.

I think what you want to say is "Birth control has increased the amount of sex going on in our country. Abortion provides a final guard against becoming an unwed mother." But even in that case, it's helping the problem (not the amount of sex, but according to your statistic, unwed mothers). You are of the opinion that, if abortion were to disappear today, but birth control and welfare remained the same, there would be fewer unwed mothers, correct? Or, on the other hand, if abortion remained legal and welfare and birth control disappeared, we'd have much higher rates than the 50's for unwed mothers?

No matter how you slice it, if you think the problem is "unwed motherhood," abortion helps. If you think it's sexual promiscuity... then your statistic was a strawman, like I said from the first. Because there's no show of a causation between legal abortion and more unwed mothers in what you said

Oh, and one last one:

If the safety features were more boats, or better pumps to allow more time for rescue to arrive, hell no. You'd string up the guy who advocated getting rid of those because "The ship is sinking anyway," because following his advice would have killed many more people.

Ie, you analogy sucks, hence me not responding until now.

Edited, May 3rd 2011 9:51pm by LockeColeMA

Ah, and one other gem I missed.

Here's some advice: STOP MAKING DUMB ANALOGIES!

Your advice here would actually be for the player to stop playing the sport. You can't get hurt in a football game if you don't play, right? Or if you do play, make sure you only play two-hand touch with a single other person.

A better answer would be you equating sex to football makes me think you have a lot wrong in your head.

Do like those tight ends, though.

Shove a Fleshlight in her and fuck that.

Welcome to the concept of unintended consequences. No one chooses to end out in jail either. They choose to commit a crime. No one chooses an unwanted pregnancy, but they choose to have sex. No one chooses to get into a car crash, but they might choose to drink and then drive. Assuming we can both accept that lots of things happen to people without them choosing that outcome, then shouldn't we look at the choices being made and assess how things affect those choices rather than throwing out the relatively weak argument that one thing can't be a causative factor for an outcome simply because no one would choose that outcome?

The existence of a safety feature absolutely does increase the likelihood of it having to be used. That doesn't mean we should stop putting in safety features. That's not what I'm proposing. I am saying, that if the rate at which the negative thing your safety feature is supposed to prevent is increasing, you might want to look at why instead of just praising the fact that you built this safety feature.



Yes. In the same way that protective gear in football helps people avoid injury, but at the same time increases the likelihood of them engaging in dangerous activity which might cause them to get hurt. The polio example wasn't intended to illustrate that causative relationship but purely to show that even in the absence of any causative relationship, you'd still not praise something if the end results were an increase in the bad thing you were trying to reduce. I'm trying to cover all the bases here, and I understand that this confuses people sometimes. But that's how I think. I divide an issue into cases and examine each one. What I see here is that under no case should we be looking at the availability of abortion as some kind of wonderful thing that has freed women from the servitude of unwanted marriages or single motherhood. Even if you don't accept that the availability of abortion has any effect on the likelihood of an unwanted pregnancy, my general statement still stands. It hasn't increased the rate at which women do make that responsible choice, has it?



Sure. But yet the end result (rate of children born to unwed mothers) has gone in the other direction, hasn't it? So that "final guard" isn't working.



I think it's possible. But my larger argument doesn't rely on that being true. I'm not proposing that we eliminate abortion. I'm saying that we shouldn't pat ourselves on the back because we made abortion legal when one of the core reasons for doing so has gotten worse. I followed this up with a whole diatribe about how we sometimes get so focused on the cause we assume is important because of something, that we forget to check the thing that is really important. We adopt affirmative action programs (at the risk of adding yet another side topic) on the assumption that it'll help balance things out in terms of racial statistics. Then we fight huge battles over the issue of affirmative action. And when those are "won", we praise ourselves for doing the right thing. And all the while we don't bother to check to see if those social imbalances are actually being fixed.

Or, to present another example: We create programs to help poor and minority people own homes. Why? Because statistically home ownership is the path to wealth and prosperity. We push the programs to the point where we bankrupt our financial industry, all the while patting ourselves on the back at how much we're helping all those people. We measure the number of loans given out to those who might not have gotten them and use those numbers to calculate how wonderful our actions are. But at no point are we looking to see if the end result is positive. We fail to get that those things are paths to prosperity for those who can afford them, but helping someone who can't to get a loan they can't afford doesn't do anything but make our stats look good on paper. But since we're judging our success based on how many of those loans we help make happen and not whether we're actually helping people obtain prosperity, we miss the forest for the trees.


I just think that we often replace the objectives we want with the specific methods we assume are needed to achieve those objectives. And sometimes we do this to such an extent that we cease to even look at the reality of what's going on and just look at the adoption rate of the methods we're using. We assume that more kids attending after-school activities means less crime and drugs. We assume that more seats filled at a homeless shelter means we're fighting homelessness. We replace solving the problem with treating the symptoms and often don't even notice that there's a difference.

My argument is much broader than just abortion. That just happened to be the specific issue at hand. I saw someone essentially praising abortion for allowing women to be responsible, but I don't think that choosing to abort after becoming pregnant with a child you don't or can't raise is responsible in the first place. It just struck me as odd.



But they weren't. That's the point. In the same way that all the added ability for women to be responsible and get abortions instead of becoming single mothers hasn't actually resulted in fewer women ending out as single mothers. You're doing exactly what I wrote about above: Focusing so much on the details of the methodology that you fail to see the bigger picture. Obviously, we can argue that had the Titanic not had any water tight bulkheads and pumps and life rafts and had still hit the same iceberg at the same speed in the same manner, that many more lives would have been lost. But at the same time, we can argue that because they had such "advanced" bulkhead and pump systems, they didn't think the ship could sink, so they didn't put as many life rafts on it as would be needed *and* it increased the confidence of those operating the ship, leading them to travel faster than was safe, and leading them to fail to ask for help even after hitting the iceberg because they assumed that the ship wouldn't sink.


Does this mean we don't put those features on ships (or even better ones)? Absolutely not. But it does mean that we need to not assume that their mere existence solves the problem. But what I see around me is a culture where we teach "safe sex" via contraceptives to our kids in our schools, we inundate them with images of sexuality on TV and in movies, we fight for the availability of abortion even for teens without the knowledge or permission of their parents, and then we wonder why each generation for the last 40-50 years has had many more children born to single mothers than the previous one?

There's also a chicken and egg issue to this: Do we argue for the importance of contraception and the availability of abortion because people are more sexually active today? Or are they more sexually active because those things are available? Does that in turn translate to a greater acceptance of sexuality in our society, which then results in more portrayals of such on TV and in film? And does that create some kind of feedback effect as well? This is why I said that there's no single cause. But it's clear that if we care about children being raised by single mothers in our society, then we maybe ought to look at that rather than just praising various things which we think should help, but apparently are not.


We clearly do seem to be acting as though the safety features we've put in place solve the problem. And as a result we don't actually act responsibly, and thus make the problem worse over time. At least, that's how I see it.

Edited, May 3rd 2011 7:46pm by gbaji