The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age

    Right to Life will cost us the 2022 election

    By Flavius on Sun, 11/15/2020 - 4:10pm |

    Didn't publish so I'll repeat.

    We can't "win" in a combat with Right to Life. Try to assist them instead.

    Why not?

    (I was 2 when I was finally adopted.) 

    Comments

    Try again.

    "Right to Life " needn't be our enemy. And if they are they'll be effective ones.

    Per se it's a good  thing for a child to be born. Even one like me it took 2 years for me to be adopted;

    I don't remember those first 2 years but I think they weren't so good.

    Until a couple (and an about -to- be- an older brother) took a chance on me..


    by Flavius on Sun, 11/15/2020 - 9:12pm

    hey, hi! nice surprise to see ya. that is all for now.


    by artappraiser on Sun, 11/15/2020 - 5:37pm

    I get what you're saying. If only democrats worked to ban all abortions we could eliminate that issue and get some of the right to life voters. Why stop there? We could say that marriage is between a man and a woman and get a lot of the evangelical vote. If we built a wall and ended all immigration we'd get some of those voters too. With some subsidies we could get more coal fired electric plants and get some of the people working in the coal industry to vote for us. We could say Climate Change is hoax invented by china. I'm pretty sure if we ran against any republican nominee with Trump at the head of the democratic party we'd win in 2024. Most of the democrats would no longer vote at all for either party. But if democrats were a second far right party we could split the far right vote and win with a little help from the conservative democrats. I support this plan. Since I've decided I'm done with voting for candidates I don't like it would be nice to be joined by most of the democratic party. 


    by ocean-kat on Sun, 11/15/2020 - 7:49pm

    The most admirable group  ,qua group, I recall meeting were a brilliant of 25-40 year old mothers living on the Somerville line.

    They were wrong. Still are.


    by Flavius on Sun, 11/15/2020 - 9:09pm

    Our female presidential candidate tried to take this issue head on - safe, available, never as part of her "tragic" formulation that noted that the 7% who aborted were largely those not using contraception. The GOP response? Stop contraception. The left's response? Let's encourage abortion while saying we don't actually encourage abortion, but any less than enthusiastic statement about abortion "stigmatizes" it, so should be avoided. So instead of decreased abortions, they go up.

    https://slate.com/technology/2005/01/hillary-clinton-s-anti-abortion-str...


    by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 11/15/2020 - 11:22pm

    If your girlfriend youve been seeing 2 weeks showed up at your house and said, here's a dog or cat i found, you have to take care if it for me, you'd likely be rightfully pissed. But "I'm pregnant - should I keep it?" is the approach of many to the decision with the most responsibility we choose, whether that choice is just ignore the risk  and saying "whatevs, I'll deal with it then":

    In other words, nearly 5% of reproductive-age women have an unintended pregnancy each year. The unintended pregnancy rate is significantly higher in the United States than in many other developed countries. In 2011, nearly half (45%, or 2.8 million) of the 6.1 million pregnancies in the United States were unintended. - Guttmacher Institute

    With even the morning after pill, there are so many ways to avoid/reduce this to a minimum. It's hard to say treating pregnancy like a bowel movement on one hand, as a wonderful event on the other really gives life the respect it deserves. It's quite similar to the single parenting phenomenon - people do it, it's okay, but in general it's a lot less healthy and beneficial for the child, many more ending up in deprived poverty. Society wise, humanity wise, it's a less desirable situation on the whole. If trying to reduce either (while making the phenomenon more bearable and humane) in reasonable pro-human ways "stigmatizes" it, well, fine, so it goes. I mean, someone *wants* to go live in the desert, that's great. Someone can't afford to live in a town so has to live in the desert, that kind of sucks. For society, more than the person him/herself. If there's a wave of poor people headed to the desert, we shouldn't glorify it despite it being a tragic failure of our economy and social structure. (I do understand that people optimize their retirement years, such as RVs in Baja, so it's also a fairly common economic trade-off/bean-counting, so shift it to old people living on dog food - possible, shouldn't stigmatize the person as much as the society that lets this happen - unless they're just lazy and irresponsible, i suppose, but still...)

     


    by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 11/15/2020 - 11:59pm

    Plus nobody who believes in medical science should be morally upset about the morning-after pill since a lot of fertilized eggs end up in the toilet or on a menstrual pad in the garbage without it. Simply because many fail to attach to the uterus. Devout Roman Catholics should be made aware that Humane vitae is garbage medieval reasoning no different than that with which they once tortured Galileo and were forever sorry that they did so.Before the 20th century, it was more common to believe in the old midwives and folk belief in a "quickening" of the fetus at around 3 mos. when the soul entered the fetus. It makes more sense in many ways, including physical sense too; even without modern imaging, as that coincides with certain physical changes (for instance, the mother experiences reactions like morning sickness).


    by artappraiser on Mon, 11/16/2020 - 12:14am

    There's that, but also simply - morning after you're not pregnant. You're preventing a maybe, largely like contraception. But it would be nice, if I'm not being weird and naif, that every time someone does a pregnancy test, they are at least kind of looking forward to a "yes". That's pro-life. Obviously lots of situations where that might not be true, but the basic idea.

    I mean, when someone comes to you and says, "I'm getting married", you'd hope the initial reaction an be, "oh that's great, I'm so happy for you", not "are you sure? There's still time to call it off". 

    If you go to the doctor and find out you have some long-term disease, the first response should be, "how do we treat it?", not, "should we sell the house to pay for it?" or "i have to hide this from work or they'll fire me".


    by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 11/16/2020 - 2:44am

    & then there's baby stealing

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-54892564


    by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 11/16/2020 - 6:26am

    FWIW: I was immediately  separated from my mother and entered a two year adoption- go-round .BTW. the next child just stayed home. Lucky brat!  

    However the adoption process occurs, at least in some cases it's followed by a Flavius ( Lord!) and in another part of the forest by intense debates whether we done right.

    I suppose we can conclude that in the best of all possible worlds 18 year old girls wouldn't have nine month possession of a soon-to-be human being also soon to be taken away- but I digress. Let's just agree it's  likely sub-optimal. At least from the standpoint of those elements of the population who care.


    by Flavius on Mon, 11/16/2020 - 11:40am

    It's sub-optimal, but worth acknowledging (thanks for sharing your story - it's not that uncommon - 150K/year in the US, I'm surprised to find out vs 3.8m births, so 4%).
    It can also be quite different in the US and other countries, depending on resources available, but that may be misleading.
    But yes, I think we can agree that it's better to not have a young lass dealing with these tough unwinnable decisions if can be avoided (and often it can).


    by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 11/16/2020 - 12:57pm

    balanced

     


    by Flavius 50 senators (not verified) on Mon, 11/16/2020 - 4:57pm

    No one is encouraging abortions. Every dem supports reasonable ways to lessen the number. When Obamacare mandated that all health care plans cover contraceptives no one on the pro choice side objected. All the dems supported it. But the anti abortion crowd objected to it.

    There's no way to work with them. There is no acceptable compromise we could reach. The only way to work with the anti abortion side is to surrender. Then we could work together to ban all abortions and most contraceptives too because according to them, most of them are abortifacients.


    by ocean-kat on Tue, 11/17/2020 - 2:01am

    The Jessica Valenti articles didn't seem to advocate a decrease in abortions at all - it was "this is good, whenever, whatever". And any attempt to lower abortions would be "stigmatizing" it. So an attempt to find a nice comfy  phrasing of abortion for doubters failed for not being rah rah you-go-grrl enough for some of the left.


    by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 11/17/2020 - 2:34am

    David Shor interestingly points out in this interview, just in passing, as an example of something, that what the majority really wants is not to have to be paying for other people's choice of abortion. Not necessarily to outlaw the choice.

    Yeah. One thing I’ve learned from working in Democratic politics for eight years is that the idea that the limiting factor on what moves policy to the left in this country is the personal decisions of individual Democrats is kind of crazy. Democratic politicians, relative to the country, are very left wing. But campaigns really want to win.

    In my career, I have seen circumstances where polling has said to do one thing, and then we didn’t do it for ideological reasons. But every single one of those times, we ignored the polling from the left. Like, if Joe Biden wanted to just follow the polls, he should support the Hyde Amendment (which prohibits federal funding for abortion services). The Hyde Amendment polls extremely well. But the people who work on his campaign oppose the Hyde Amendment. So Joe Biden opposes the Hyde Amendment.

    from David Shor’s Unified Theory of American Politics @ nymag.com, July 17, 2020  by 

     


    by artappraiser on Fri, 11/27/2020 - 12:11am