But it’s coupled with being against birth control. And required all children of Catholics to be raised catholic. The Catholic Church is very irrational except that it wants to gain members and keep as many people under their thumb. I would suggest that their dogma is designed to accomplish that end

True, but why let in migrants of low IQ

So why is there so much discussion about the issue over many years if it’s so simple

The Catholic Church condemns abortion for everyone and tries to ban it everywhere, not just among its own subjects. That is not a strategy for increasing its own numbers. Over a thousand years of belief in church dogma is not explained by a membership drive. People are driven by their philosophic beliefs. The destruction of western civilization in the Dark and Middle Ages was a result of their religious ideas, and so is the contemporary proselytizing and lobbying.

Understanding that fetuses are not persons and do not have rights, that to be a person requires birth, and that living human beings have rights and therefore the right of abortion is not too complicated for you. Understanding that much does not require complex legal philosophy.

Both the capacity and its exercise differ among different people. Everyone has and must use his rational capacity in order to live, no matter the degree of ability. It is why everyone has rights.

Whatever your doctor explained and recommended about the risks of that pregnancy have nothing to do with Ayn Rand, me, or any other assertions you made about "sacraments", "sacrificing virgins", welfare entitlements, or alleged philosophical co-opting for defending the right of abortion.

You said, "here is where you and Rand differ from most of us. Our intentional pregnancies represent a significant investment. Yes, it is a "potential", but not one without capital, both financial and personal, invested. We are being asked to sacrifice our effort for a definite death. What we are being asked to do is not all that different than being asked to flush cash down the toilet."

You know very well that neither Ayn Rand nor I told you any such thing, nor does that misrepresentation address the discussion of your other accusations.

My wife's response to the OB/GYN doctor who didn't just counsel her with regard to genetic testing but for five minutes actively encouraged an abortion: "After two miscarriages, I am now five months pregnant, and you are asking me to flush this down the toilet." I was prepared to continue the counseling, but she had already started toward the door. You will not convince me that ob/gyn doctors do not encourage sacrifice. I have seen it with my own eyes and heard it with my own ears. If it happened to us, it can't possibly be uncommon.

So do a lot of people, but it has nothing to do with this topic.

No one has told you to flush anything "down the toilet". If someone does want to bear a child with what you call her "intentional pregnancy representing a significant investment" then that is her value that she has a moral right to seek for herself.

To say that Ayn Rand asked you to "sacrifice your effort for a definite death" involving a child that you want for yourself and "invested" in is not true and not honest.

The right of abortion means that a woman who does not choose to bear a child does not have to and that that choice is not unsavory. It does not tell you to sacrifice anything. It means that another woman's body is not yours to sacrifice and her choice is not rationally yours to demean when she doesn't do what you want. The value of having a child is a value or not to the woman, not a supposed intrinsic value apart from that.

The misrepresentation of Ayn Rand (and of me) is also no defense of the assertions claiming bizarre "sacraments", "sacrificing virgins", hostility to someone else's moral right of abortion in her own life by her own means that you package-deal with taxes for welfare entitlements, and the false claim that I have been philosophically co-opted. The misrepresentation is not only false, it does not address what I wrote refuting those claims.

Hostility to the fundamental moral right to the freedom to have an abortion because you don't want to be taxed for some of them makes no more sense than would hostility to the principle of the human right of freedom to decide what food to eat because some today get welfare checks. Freedom of action and welfare entitlements are opposites. Opposing entitlements does not justify opposing, or hostility towards, moral rights.

Indeed I respect my wife, and she respects me.

And here is where you and Rand differ from most of us. Our intentional pregnancies represent a significant investment. Yes, it is a "potential", but not one without capital, both financial and personal, invested. We are being asked to sacrifice our effort for a definite death. What we are being asked to do is not all that different than being asked to flush cash down the toilet.

The point you made in your previous posts is what I responded to. What you now say is your point is "essentially independent of" what you wrote in your own previous posts. We will get to what you now say is your point, and how it represents a common underlying theme implicitly, but first look at the progression.

Someone playing the role of forum class-clown dancing in glee over a third rate song including "showers" for abortions initiated this thread ridiculing the right of abortion and those who support it. You piled on with a post bizarrely claiming abortions are "sacraments" and "sacrificing virgins". The peanut gallery got the point and voted it up to the lead post.

You followed by claiming that a fringe academic book "justifies abortion as an act of human sacrifice to the goddess Artem", as if that has anything to do with either defending the right of abortion or what even most of the left believes.

You then switched to arguing that abortion is a sacrifice to you and other taxpayers, as if that is a reason to not support the fundamental right of abortion -- which right does not mean welfare entitlements. You asserted that "your correct philosophy has been turned against you by the looters, and you are providing your sanction to your own victimization", which makes no sense.

From that followed a personal story about how you and your wife chose to have a child even though doctors told you that from genetic testing there was a 5-10% of a birth defect, which, along with the rest of the 90-95%, fortunately did not happen to you. But it has nothing to do with the moral right of a woman to choose to not bear a child.

You now claim you have been arguing something entirely different: that a "significant number of abortions happen because obstetricians use genetic testing results to encourage people who otherwise would not want to have an abortion into having one" -- which has nothing to do with "sacraments", "sacrificing virgins", pressure to not support the right of abortion at all because some are subsidized, or the equally bizarre claim that I have been somehow philosophically co-opted.

From the use of genetic testing as a basis of rational medical decisions you conclude in another non sequitur that "this argument is about the encouragement of sacrifice of what you and Rand call a potential human for a certain finality of that potential."

No it is not. It is about the right of a woman to have an abortion when she does not want to bear a child, and the fact that if she does not then the choice not to is moral. No one supporting that moral right is "encouraging sacrifice".

A fetus is not "sacrificed" at all, which returns to the original bizarre claims about "sacraments" and "sacrifice of virgins" -- which is how in your own mind, but not stated in the earlier posts, the theme of all your posts is hostility to the choice to abort a pregnancy under the premise that there is something intrinsically wrong with it, that it is intrinsically a moral sacrifice.

Sacrifice is "the surrender of a greater value for the sake of a lesser one or of a nonvalue". A fetus is not a moral being, has no "rights", and has no intrinsic value. Value is a moral term. There is no such thing as 'intrinsic value', which is mysticism. https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post... The notion that a potential human is human in the sense of a person as a moral end in itself is mysticism (as is the anti-concept "rights of the unborn" that we hear so often).

The concepts of moral value and rights do not apply to fetuses, only to the woman deciding what to do for her values in accordance with her own hierarchy of values. If she decides on that basis that she does not want to bear a child it is not a sacrifice of anything, let alone "sacrifice of what you and Rand call a potential human for a certain finality of that potential."

Nor is a fetus only "called" a potential human. It is a potential. It does not become a person until it is born, for reasons discussed here many times. Concepts of morality do not apply to it.

You say you concede that abortion is a right politically, yet repeatedly demean it in inapplicable moral terms, apparently ascribing to it intrinsic value emotionally adhered to, as if abortion were somehow inherently morally unsavory. It is not. The only values at stake are the woman's.

Subjectively deciding (which all claims of 'intrinsic value' are) for yourself that you value a "certain finality of that potential" does not give you a superior moral status over the woman, who is the only one with any moral say over what is done with her own body.

I think you are wrong at least about the Catholic Church. Yes their dogma supposedly comes from their god, but their disapproval of birth control and abortion is a thinly veiled method of getting more members in the church. Remember that catholic parents are commanded to raise the child as a catholic.

All the rights are with the woman who bears the fetus. You need not get bent out of shape so that you have to use terms such as butchery and tortured to death. Term 'killing' would do nicely.

Churches don't have a hidden agenda for nore members. Their desire for more subjects is open. But their demand to ban abortion is ideological, not as a means to get more subjects. They want abortion banned for everyone world-wide, not just for their own members.

It's not enough to only say "government should not be involved". That is a-philosophical libertarianism. The anti-abortionists are motivated by a false, anti-man morality generated by a false and destructive epistemology of faith, subjectivism and mysticism. They cash in on a lack of understanding of reason and rational egoism.

The threat of that destruction is not "making a mountain out of a molehill". It has caused a lot of damage including, but certainly not only, a millennium of the Dark and Middle Ages after the collapse of Greek civilization.

It is not enough to be against evil, you must know and understand what you are for and why, and give the proper philosophical basis for it on behalf of reason and rational egoism.

With a basic understanding of the rights of human beings it is not complicated to understand what is wrong with sacrificing women to a potential for life (let alone a mystic soul). Whether or not someone makes a "bad choice" leading to unwanted pregnancy, it has absolutely nothing to do with the morality of abortion as a choice.

Ok, I dont mean to be a pain in the ass. I give up on the discussion. I have no need for abortion so I really would leave it up the women who want it

And that one was already rotely down to 0 just for saying that, or more precisely, for saying anything. Clearly there are cowardly trolls here rotely downvoting posts they don't read or understand, without response, in a jihad against those who post because of who we are. That along with the anti-intellectual explicitly anti-Ayn Rand posts, many of them savage, are obviously contrary to the purpose of the forum and the guidelines for posting here. The question is why this nihilism is tolerated in allowing them to stay.

You keep ignoring everything that has been patiently explained to you, providing the correct position and reasoning on abortion, just restating your own position and claims of complexity, over and over.
The need for abortion is not a result of bad choices in most cases, there's no way for you to know that, nor would it change anything about the legal question even if it were true.

infanticide is the holocaust of the 21sr century...

It’s not word games. I don’t think government should be involved at all. The subject has been exhausted and in some ways it’s making a mountain out of a molehill. The need for abortion is the result of a lot of bad choices in most cases, with the number of cases the result of real need like health and rape just not being that large

The churches have a hidden agenda to get more members

Such is the nature of propaganda and manipulation. It does happen all the time unfortunately

And this is not complicated?

I think history and neurological studies hasve certainly suggested some may have more mental capacity than others. The brain is a physical, chemical, and electrical structure built by the effect of genes. Why would you assume every human has the same capacity to think? People don’t look the same, don’t have the same athletic capabilities..

At least the kid has a shot to be wanted.