PILOT SPIN
Spin Zone => Spin Zone => Topic started by: Rush on April 07, 2024, 09:13:07 AM
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WARNING! DISGUSTING AND EMOTIONAL AND DISTURBING AND CONTROVERSIAL TOPICS
So in the Dean Phillips thread I mentioned that Jordan Peterson now favors banning ALL transition surgeries, which my first reaction, as a libertarian (small “l”) is, no, if you’re an adult and you want this, no matter how stupid it is, go for it. Just don’t make me pay for it.
After listening to just the first ten minutes of this, I’m starting to see where Peterson is coming from. As long as the truth about these surgeries is suppressed, how can an adult make an informed decision?
Scott was 42 when he had the fake penis surgery. Anyone would assume he was mature enough to understand and consent, and he was mature enough, but the medical community and media withheld information he needed for informed consent. Yet another reason the First Amendment is so important. In this case it is capitalist “greed” on the part of the gender reassignment industry that is to blame, but it is vastly enabled by the sick transgender activist movement which has wormed its way into the leftist ideological propaganda machine. Without that part, the truth about these surgeries would quickly come into the open.
But the problem with simply banning these surgeries for everyone is that the right has the tendency to go to the extreme, making problems for people who aren’t the targets of the policy. My biggest beef with the right at the moment is the movement to ban IV fertilization. The issue is that the fertilized egg is now a full set of human DNA and in order to produce one live baby, you have to sacrifice a few more of the zygotes. The right, being pro-life, considers this equal to abortion.
My objection to that characterization is that rather than subtracting a human life as the net result, which regular abortion does, you are actually adding a human life to the world by using this process, that otherwise would not exist. Yes, you must create and then sacrifice one or more other zygotes to get one to survive, but in this case they are actually literally a “clump of cells”. Unlike what they become just a few short weeks after implantation into a womb. They are not differentiated cells; there is no central nervous system so no possibility of consciousness. Yes they have a full set of human DNA but so does any one of your skin cells: that doesn’t make a discarded skin cell a “person” with a right to life.
I don’t like the idea of needing to make several zygotes to get one of them to grow into a baby, but that’s where the technology is right now. I’ve heard conservatives suggest you should just make one and implant it, but they lack understanding of how this works. If you try to do it that way the odds are you will need to make many attempts before you’re successful if ever, and women have a clock running out on their ability to carry a pregnancy. To me the goal is to make more babies. IVF is doing that. Leave it the hell alone.
I suspect that what’s got a bee in the bonnet of the conservatives against IVF is the fact that gay couples are now using it to have children. To that I say, you are against abortion, so you are fine with a low IQ welfare mom in the ghetto having the unwanted baby who will grow up to be a criminal thug, but you have a problem with a gay couple who might be well off tax paying citizens having a baby. I admit that’s not ideal: I firmly believe children are best raised by one man plus one woman in a committed marriage. But I’m talking about public policy and the unintended consequences. The majority of IVF clients are heterosexual married couples with financial means. You ban abortion and IVF, you get fewer children of traditional straight couples, and more children growing up without fathers in poverty.
Anyway how this relates to gender surgeries, is if we were to ban these surgeries for adults, what about the soldier who had his junk blown off in war? What about men with penile cancer who would like some sort of package approximation rebuilt? Oh we can make exceptions for that; well that didn’t work out so well for banning the abortion pill. They made exceptions for miscarriage, but in the real world women ended up unable to get the pills to treat miscarriage because of doctors’ legal fears. They had to let the dead baby rot inside them for a while and then undergo surgical removal. This damages a woman’s ability to try for another pregnancy. If the goal is to have more babies, and I think that should be the goal, we need to be very careful not to address these matters with a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel.
I have the same reservation about Peterson’s proposal to ban transition surgeries for adults. But if I had to vote on it right now I might well vote to ban, but I prefer dismantling the whole grip the left and their sick ideologies have on society right now.
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The issue is that the fertilized egg is now a full set of human DNA and in order to produce one live baby, you have to sacrifice a few more of the zygotes. The right, being pro-life, considers this equal to abortion.
My objection to that characterization is that rather than subtracting a human life as the net result, which regular abortion does, you are actually adding a human life to the world by using this process, that otherwise would not exist. Yes, you must create and then sacrifice one or more other zygotes to get one to survive, but in this case they are actually literally a “clump of cells”. Unlike what they become just a few short weeks after implantation into a womb. They are not differentiated cells; there is no central nervous system so no possibility of consciousness. Yes they have a full set of human DNA but so does any one of your skin cells: that doesn’t make a discarded skin cell a “person” with a right to life.
I'm confused by where you stand due to your previous postings. You note above a requirement for a consciousness (which in turn requires a nervous system) in order for a cluster of cells to be considered a person, and point out that doesn't happen till after implantation. But conception occurs before implantation and yet in the past you've stated "...you’re a human from conception and exactly what abortion is actually doing to the new little life,"[1] and "Personally, I believe life begins at conception and abortion at any age is murder."[2]
Have you modified your position or am I missing some nuance or made a mistake in understanding that makes all of your above quoted statements non-contradictory?
[1] http://www.pilotspin.com/index.php?topic=7046.msg133064#msg133064 (http://www.pilotspin.com/index.php?topic=7046.msg133064#msg133064)
[2] http://www.pilotspin.com/index.php?topic=6323.msg112104#msg112104 (http://www.pilotspin.com/index.php?topic=6323.msg112104#msg112104)
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I'm confused by where you stand due to your previous postings. You note above a requirement for a consciousness (which in turn requires a nervous system) in order for a cluster of cells to be considered a person, and point out that doesn't happen till after implantation. But conception occurs before implantation and yet in the past you've stated "...you’re a human from conception and exactly what abortion is actually doing to the new little life,"[1] and "Personally, I believe life begins at conception and abortion at any age is murder."[2]
Have you modified your position or am I missing some nuance or made a mistake in understanding that makes all of your above quoted statements non-contradictory?
[1] http://www.pilotspin.com/index.php?topic=7046.msg133064#msg133064 (http://www.pilotspin.com/index.php?topic=7046.msg133064#msg133064)
[2] http://www.pilotspin.com/index.php?topic=6323.msg112104#msg112104 (http://www.pilotspin.com/index.php?topic=6323.msg112104#msg112104)
“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” - Walt Whitman
I’m sorry, I just had to do that. No, my views haven’t really changed but to put more context with what I’ve said. First, when I used the word “murder”, that was perhaps wrong. “Murder” is a legal term, and if abortion is legal then technically it’s not murder but rather killing. I am unchanged in that you are indeed killing a human, and I am still morally against doing so when the embryo is implanted in the womb. Whether or not it should be legal to do so and at what cutoff date is a completely different question where you must choose between “the lesser of two evils”.
For example, Trump recently came out and reaffirmed his position on abortion, saying it should be left up to the states, which of course means some states will allow it. This is wise strategically if he wants to be elected this fall. If he were to agree with those Republicans who want a national abortion ban he would probably lose a lot of women and independent votes and it might sway the election, the Dems would win again, and then go for a national law allowing abortion for the whole 9 months.
In other words if the Republicans push for a national ban at all stages of pregnancy, this is not in line with the majority of public opinion and would probably backfire badly, in the worst case keeping the tyrannical anti-human left in power. The left not only wants to kill us with abortion, they want to kill us with starvation, poverty, crime, terrorism and war. Yes he may lose some votes for not favoring a complete federal ban, but on balance, he has the best chance doing what he did. (In my opinion, you are free to disagree.)
I should also clarify what I said about the fertilized egg in the Petri dish being like your skin cell with a full set of DNA. That’s not strictly accurate in that the zygote has the potential to become a complete human and your skin cell doesn’t, in fact it’s dead already. But wait, theoretically you can use cloning and get a full new human from one cell, maybe not skin, but you get the point. Some sort of nurturing and support would be needed for that to happen.
Likewise the fertilized egg in the freezer has no chance of becoming a full human unless it is put into the right environment; right now a woman’s womb. Does that make it right to “create” it and then allow it to wither and die without ever being given a chance? I said I don’t like that idea, but if you’re in a situation where you cannot end up with a term baby without starting with a handful of those fertilized eggs, most of which won’t make it, then you end up with no life, and you fail to follow God’s command to be fruitful and multiply.
That’s the crucial difference to me. In the one case you are attempting to bring new human life into the world. In regular abortion you are killing a human life that already got itself successfully implanted in the womb. In fact, by week 3 it has the beginnings of that neural tube that becomes the spinal cord and brain, yet some states allow abortion up to 6 weeks, or when you can detect a heartbeat. To me that’s arbitrary.
I haven’t changed my mind that human life begins at conception but that’s a different question from whether or not it should be legal to kill it (or simply allow it not to live). In nature, fertilized eggs very often don’t make it and are discarded with a woman’s next period. It is not abnormal therefore for a percentage of them to not be viable with the IVF procedure which is why you need to make several. The technology has improved from the early days when they’d implant all of them and hope one survives, where now they more often can implant one or two, but still need several to get a couple that are healthiest. But we are nowhere near the point where we can make just one to implant and have good odds of success.
Back when they implanted many (maybe they still do in some places) you could end up - and some women did - with all five or seven successful and growing. Then the risk to all of them is very high (prematurity, etc.) and women were offered the choice of “reduction” which is selectively aborting one or more to give the others a better chance. What a horrible dilemma. Me personally, I would be unable to do it. But I was lucky. I had no trouble getting pregnant, no miscarriages, and very easy births.
Bottom line as far as personhood or consciousness, it boils down to ability to perceive pain, which requires a nervous system and must not be allowed in any case. This to me is the worst part of abortion, aside from denying it its entire future, almost all abortions (except the morning after pill) must cause pain to the embryo/fetus. If I had to have an abortion to save my life or because the baby had a fatal defect I would insist it be anesthetized first. My moral compass centers on not causing others to suffer as perhaps our highest obligation.