• 1 Post
  • 441 Comments
Joined 8 months ago
cake
Cake day: January 22nd, 2024

help-circle






  • I’d also like to note that I agree with Abortion if it’s simply removing a dead foetus. I see that as less of an abortion and more of removing a dead foetus that’s already dead.

    Yes, that’s not abortion, that’s just D&C after the foetus died.

    As for abortions in case of the pregnancy might kill the woman, those are exceedingly rare as is, but should still be allowed.

    But it’s the same D&C procedure whether the foetus was deliberately terminated or it died of natural causes, and a doctor performing a D&C is at real and genuine risk of losing their career and going to prison, and a woman in need of D&C is at risk of losing her fertility or her life from sepsis or other complications. Criminalizing healthcare kills women. Doctors need a lot of good luck keeping their job in a red state if they agree to perform a D&C. Don’t rely on facts winning a case when anti-abortion rhetoric is one of the two main ways republicans have got and kept power.

    It’s clear that you think God loves unborn children. Do you think God loves women who stillbirth? They are at genuine risk of jail time because their baby died. Do you think God loves children who were raped? Do you think God wants rape victims to bear their rapists children? Do you believe that God always chooses the baby over the mother, no matter the cost or the consequences? Do you think God doesn’t like it when we intervene in matters of life and death?

    Do you, and this is the central question, and the only one that matters really, believe that God wants the government to put doctors and women in prison whenever an abortion is performed, and do you think God wants the increased maternal death rates amongst otherwise healthy women who have miscarried that these new policies are creating? Before you answer, please realise that early miscarriage is far, far more common and far far less admitted in public than people who have never admitted to having a miscarriage with other women in a safe environment realise. Are miscarriages hateful to God too? Is it the woman’s fault, and should she go to prison if she can’t prove her miscarriage was natural?

    The second question is this: does God care more about putting women and doctors in prison after a foetus dies more than God cares about feeding the poor and the homeless? More than looking after foreigners? More than loving your neighbour and your enemy? Is it more important to love God or to love money?

    Because what I see in america is a lot of people justifying being super condemnatory about women and immigrants and hating on helping, all in the name of religion, and I just don’t see much of “love God and love your neighbour”. No wonder young people are leaving the american church in droves. What’s all that hate got that might draw them in? Maybe if it had more for them than the promise of jailing women and doctors, they might see the point, but a lot of church folks can’t get past the jailing of women and doctors and the condemnation of sinners they judge to be particularly scandalously sinful, unless of course they’re republicans or church leaders, in which case denial that anything went wrong. Not forgiveness, that would require an admission of guilt. Just minimisation and cover up.

    I remember stories about Jesus getting cross with the temple being full of money and the religious leaders acting pious while making up hard and harsh rules for everyone else to follow (not so much themselves). Is it a relevant story for today? Isn’t it really sad and far from following commandments if the church gets into the judging others and condemnation business? I don’t think it was ever supposed to be about big theatres, big money, politics, professional music and plenty of prison time for plenty of sinners. Hadn’t it better get back very urgently to what Jesus actually said to do?


  • Edit: I think that’s a genuine question from someone who is surprised by me calling it misinterpretation and has engaged with another perspective politely and unlike many people, is listening as well as expressing their point of view. I wish more people responded like that with a request for information and respectful discussion afterwards. Evidence shows that the “How?” was genuine. Hence my upvote.


    I don’t know any religious people who think abortion is great, but I don’t know any pro-choice folk who think it’s great either, they just think it shouldn’t land a woman or a health professional in jail and they don’t like that the maternal death rate is climbing so fast in Texas which had the first five-week abortion limit in the states.

    Before the republicans figured they could be really judgemental and condemnatory about it (what does your Bible say about that kind of behavior?) and use it as a wedge issue to drive religious folks away from the democrats, it was originally a catholic-only thing to be absolutely opposed to abortion for a long time, justified by a misinterpretation of the sin of Onan, which the catholics somehow took to be a lesson about semen not being allowed on the floor, when it’s quite clearly about family duty and not help to provide a kid for his brother’s young widow who would otherwise be childless - held to be shameful for her. He wasn’t kind. I think you could boldly interpret that story to be pro IVF but I don’t think you can interpret it to be anti-abortion and anti women’s choice unless you’re really baked-in misogynistic before you think about it.

    Yeah I know it says “do not murder” but the abortion bans are literally killing women with already dead foetuses because no health professional can afford to risk their career and freedom to take any step whatsoever to save their lives until it’s obvious enough that they’re at death’s door that the court couldn’t conclude otherwise. “She might have died later” isn’t compelling enough - “she was coding” is.

    I challenge you to find a bible passage explicitly condemning abortion. I can find you at least ten explicitly condemning judgementalism, but also condemning not caring for the poor, not caring for foreigners, walking by when others are suffering, not healing someone when you can. The modern republican party is so far from “What Would Jesus Do?” and worships the liar in chief, Donald J Trump.

    So yes, somehow a bunch of big american corporate churchgoers got convinced that being rich is a sign you are a good person, that stopping abortion is the main lesson from the scriptures and that caring about black people, foreigners, poor people etc is evil. Somehow “let the person who did nothing wrong cast the first stone… go, I don’t condemn you either” became “lock her up”. If you don’t think that’s a misinterpretation of your Bible, yours is different to the ones I’ve seen.








  • If you’re that careful with the gas pedal your battery is going to love you for a long time and your electricity usage will go through the floor. I spend less than 20% on electricity than I used to spend on gas.

    A taxi company guy I spoke to swears by 2nd generation Nissan Leaf cars, says it’s saved him a ton of money.

    There’s a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt sown about electric cars, mainly by people who don’t have any experience of them whatsoever and the petrochemical industry.

    Manufacturers aren’t super keen either, because unless they make their own batteries, a big part of the cost and profit of the car is outsourced and they don’t get a lot of income from maintenance because there’s just not a lot to go wrong with the actual driving bits of an electric car and so they’re left with minor things like aircon to service.


  • You’d think this would give republicans pause, or make them reconsider.

    Young women dying in dramatically increasing numbers.

    But it won’t.

    All these young women left to die on the altar of their misinterpretation of their religion and their uncaring principles.

    But no, it was a policy born in hate and the tragic imposed deaths of women are not an unfortunate side effect, they’re just misogyny in action. Working itself out.

    If they cared about babies, there would be more support for women, for early years interventions, and maybe they might also care about children dying in schools on the altar of their misunderstanding of their 2nd amendment and their uncaring principles.

    But no, they don’t care about children dying in schools either, and do you know why? Because caring about children dying in schools doesn’t involve telling women what they have to do and ruling their lives with oppressive freedom-denying laws.

    Caring about children dying in schools would involve some infringement on their UNDENYABLE RIGHT TO FEEL IMPORTANT with a gun and caring about women dying in childbirth would interfere with their UNDENYABLE RIGHT TO FEEL IMPORTANT with a rule about what women can and can’t do.





  • I think that your line of argument is very strange indeed and I’m not sure that porn websites are quite as full of women making choices completely free of coercion as you’re making out.

    If you had asked me where on the Internet women have the most autonomy, have their preferences enacted most carefully and where their consent was prized, I wouldn’t have guessed in a thousand years that you expected me to answer “porn websites”.