Chavez loses bid to become president-for-life

[bobbob1313]

Will, in my defense, it's probably 50 degrees colder here than where you are.

 

I see what you did there.

 

And it's a brisk 77 degrees today.

[Elixir Sue]

Admittedly, I haven't read every post in this thread, but I'm curious...who is Doug?

[EL the Famous]

the dude's dog. it's a great bit, you've really missed something.

[Elixir Sue]

Awesome. I'll be sure to start at the beginning.

[Good Old Neon]

Wow now that is an assumption.

 

But a correct one, I believe that unless you are planning on having children than you should not be having sex.

 

Doug and I don't agree with this ideal. Doug likes to hump anything.

 

 

You

[EL the Famous]

You

[Good Old Neon]

There are reasonable options that outweigh denying life.

 

For you, but not for everyone.

 

throw in vasectomy for the whole married folk thing. really though, exactly how many of these unwanted pregnancies come from faulty contraceptives? plus, is having/not having a child a true 'right/freedom' or a physical capability? stil ltrying to figure out why you even brought it up other than you like to argue about it.

 

 

Because the topic of personal liberties and freedoms was raised, and Mr. Golyadkin bristled at the thought of the government imposing higher fuel efficiency standards

[bjorn_skurj]

Because the topic of personal liberties and freedoms was raised, and Mr. Golyadkin bristled at the thought of the government imposing higher fuel efficiency standards

[bobbob1313]

And not a bad one.

 

If you don't believe a fetus is alive.

[bjorn_skurj]

If you don't believe a fetus is alive.

I believe it is alive. I just don't think it has the same rights as a baby, is all. Again, the mother is the only one who should make the decision on whether to carry a baby to term. Furthermore, anyone lacking a uterus shouldn't even be involved in the discussion about abortion laws, as it is a situation we will NEVER be in.

[EL the Famous]

okay, what about all the other stuff...

[MrRain422]

How many abortions are actually done on fetuses anyway? Aren't the vast majority of them still during the embryo stage?

[EL the Famous]

I believe it is alive. I just don't think it has the same rights as a baby, is all. Again, the mother is the only one who should make the decision on whether to carry a baby to term. Furthermore, anyone lacking a uterus shouldn't even be involved in the discussion about abortion laws, as it is a situation we will NEVER be in.

 

whole other argument, but the embryo/fetus/whatever came about from both mother and father...you are making the whole decision based upon where a child is carried, not the child itself. isn't it both?

 

to be clear, i'm not saying that ron paul should decide for a woman...but to say 'anyone lacking a uterus shouldn't even be involved in the discussion about abortion' is ludicrous. what about the father of a pregnant teen as another example?

 

plus, i don't get how the father has no say whether the mother should or should not have a baby...but if she does, he's expected to support it.

[bjorn_skurj]

okay, what about all the other stuff...

I'm for robust consumer protectionism.

[caliber66]

I see what you did there.

 

And it's a brisk 77 degrees today.

So closer to 45 degrees difference, then.

 

So closer to 45 degrees difference, then.

Dog degrees or people degrees?

[EL the Famous]

How many abortions are actually done on fetuses anyway? Aren't the vast majority of them still during the embryo stage?

 

In 2003, from data collected in those areas that sufficiently reported gestational age, it was found that 6.2% of abortions were conducted from 13 to 15 weeks, 4.2% from 16 to 20 weeks, and 1.4% at or after 21 weeks. Because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's annual study on abortion statistics does not calculate the exact gestational age for abortions performed past the 20th week, there is no exact data for the number of abortions performed after viability. In 1997, the Guttmacher Institute estimated the number of abortions in the U.S. past 24 weeks to be 0.08%, or approximately 1,032 per year.

 

1,032 seems like a lot if you subscribe to one innocent person being wrongly detained is worse than letting 10 guilty go free.

 

bjorn, that 'what about the other stuff' was for jnick...although, i am interested to hear you responses on the whole no uterus, no say thing.

[Guest Golyadkin]

So closer to 45 degrees difference, then.

 

 

Dog degrees or people degrees?

 

You have some wit... some.

[MrRain422]

1,032 seems like a lot if you subscribe to one innocent person being wrongly detained is worse than letting 10 guilty go free.

 

Yeah, that would be a lot of innocent people, but we're talking about clumps of cells here.

[EL the Famous]

Yeah, that would be a lot of innocent people, but we're talking about clumps of cells here.

 

Clump of cells?! That's 1,032 abortions done at 24 weeks of age...the age a fetus could survive outside of the womb.

[bjorn_skurj]

Clump of cells?! That's 1,032 abortions done at 24 weeks of age...the age a fetus could survive outside of the womb.

What's the solution, then? Lock the mom up and force her to carry the baby to term? Then what happens? If it's a white baby, there'll be tons of people who'll adopt, I suspect; any other color I imagine is a bit more dicey.

[EL the Famous]

What's the solution, then? Lock the mom up and force her to carry the baby to term? Then what happens? If it's a white baby, there'll be tons of people who'll adopt, I suspect; any other color I imagine is a bit more dicey.

 

okay, first off, you act like in EVERY case the mother had no involvement w/ that child being inside her, that someone FORCED her to be pregnant. i understand that there are certain scenarios (rape for example) where what you are saying becomes a more viable point and i have no issue whatsoever...but (hopefully) it's more of a rare occurence than not.

 

does a white baby have more of a chance at adoption than any other? i'm sure that's the case...but that doesn't equate to a ZERO chance for one that isn't. at least there is a possibility...by aborting it, not so much.

 

plus, we're talking 24 months here...wh owas forching her to carry it for that long in the first place.

[bjorn_skurj]

I just don't see how it is good for the mother, the baby or society in general to make a woman have a child she does not want to have.

[EL the Famous]

I just don't see how it is good for the mother, the baby or society in general for a woman to become pregnant w/ a child she does not want to have.

 

again, a 24 month old fetus (really, at that point: baby) would likely have some challenges, but it could survive and have a chance at a life...that opportunity seems better for the baby than death, yeah?

 

quick side question, bjorn: do you support the death penatly?

[MattZ]

we're talking 24 months here...wh owas forching her to carry it for that long in the first place.

 

I don't know about anyone else, but I am going to concede here that it's probably not right to abort something 24 months old. I think everyone else should agree too.

 

 

 

again, a 24 month old fetus (really, at that point: baby)

 

Yeah, really. A toddler, even.

 

(I keed, I keed)

[bjorn_skurj]

I just don't see how it is good for the mother, the baby or society in general for a woman to become pregnant w/ a child she does not want to have.

 

again, a 24 month old fetus (really, at that point: baby) would likely have some challenges, but it could survive and have a chance at a life...that opportunity seems better for the baby than death, yeah?

 

quick side question, bjorn: do you support the death penatly?

Nope, because there's no way that any justice system can be perfect enough to make an innocent person being executed an impossibility. Locking up an innocent person wrongly is one thing - if you find out you made a mistake, you can always release the person, say you're really, really sorry and give him or her a million bucks or so. Executing an innocent person is irrevocable. And no, I don't see abortion as an equivalent. Fetuses are not people yet.

Should people be more careful about who they f and whether they use protection? Sure, they should. Is it better to be alive and the product of a mom who doesn't want you than to have never existed in the first place? I don't know.

And then there's this.

 

New Data on Abortion-Crime Link

 

By Richard Morin and Claudia Deane

 

Tuesday, March 11, 2003; Page A21

 

There's new and stronger evidence to support one of the most provocative and controversial social theories of recent decades, namely that abortions reduce crime, two economists contend in a new paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

 

John J. Donohue III of Stanford University and Steven D. Levitt of the University of Chicago first formally proposed the link between abortion and crime in an article published two years ago in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Now they've updated that study with fresher data and a more detailed analysis, in large part to answer the many critics of their earlier work.

 

These researchers theorize that legal abortion reduces crime by making it easier for women to end unwanted pregnancies. By their reckoning, more abortions mean fewer neglected or abused children who would be more likely to end up in trouble with the law.

 

Since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision made abortions more widely available, the generation born around this time should contain disproportionately more "wanted" children than earlier generations -- children who would be less likely to commit crimes when they grew up.

 

Three pieces of evidence support their claims. First, crime dropped sharply during the 1990s -- precisely the period in which the generation of children first affected by Roe v. Wade reached its peak of criminal activity. Second, the five states that legalized abortion in 1970, three years before the landmark abortion ruling, were the first to experience the drop in crime. Third, states with high abortion rates in the early 1970s experienced the biggest decline in crime, even after controlling for other factors usually associated with changes in the crime rate, they wrote.

 

Overall, Donohue and Levitt found that a 10 percent increase in the abortion rate was associated with a 1 percent decline in the crime rate. They estimated about half of the overall decline in the crime rate between 1991 and 1997 was due to legalized abortion.

 

Well, they got hammered by a small army of researchers who questioned their data, methods and findings. Among their critics: the researcher John R. Lott Jr., currently at the American Enterprise Institute, who produced a study that argued abortion caused crime by weakening moral values. Theodore Joyce, an economist at the City University of New York also challenged their results. He carefully analyzed the same data but did not find a negative relationship between abortion and crime in the six-year period from 1985 to 1990, or the time the Roe v. Wade generation should have been entering their peak crime years.

 

So Levitt and Donohue went back to their number crunching. They collected more data and redid their analysis -- and found that abortion seemed to have an even bigger impact on crime than they first estimated.

 

Instead of reducing homicides by about 14 percent, the new data suggested an 18 percent drop associated with abortion. Violent crime and property crime also went down as the abortion rate went up, and by a bigger amount than they had earlier forecast, they reported in their new study.