Page 20 | Is it appropriate for a university to give out pro-life leaflets

StealthPolarBear · 2018-01-04T15:50:50+00:00

I genuinely don't know. Was a bit disappointed

WriteAGoodOne · 05/01/2018 20:49

peppa You know full well that I don't mean the literal definition down to a complete T.

I mean the protection and care that is considered when it's a 'baby'

peppapigwouldmakelovelyrashers · 05/01/2018 20:49

But they're pro abortion, so that's okay for them to use it

Nobody here is pro abortion. You know that, you're just being a goady fucker.

Do you also correct women who miss carried their baby "actually it's not a baby" or pregnant women who talk about their "baby"?

Do YOU correct women who miscarry and don't see it as or call it a baby? Since you are so adamant that is what it is, you must do, right?

Mumof56 · 05/01/2018 20:51

Then get a dictionary. It's only a baby once it is born. Before that it is a foetus

Collins dictionary

an unborn child; fetus

www.google.ie/amp/s/www.collinsdictionary.com/amp/english/baby

peppapigwouldmakelovelyrashers · 05/01/2018 20:51

I mean the protection and care that is considered when it's a 'baby

That is up to the person who's body it is, and no-one else. You might see it as a baby and want to protect and care for it, or you might see it as a unwanted bunch of cells and want it to be gone.
Neither is a more valid viewpoint than the other.

peppapigwouldmakelovelyrashers · 05/01/2018 20:52

Who's body it is IN, that should read

UpABitLate · 05/01/2018 20:56

mumof56 are there any circs in which you believe abortion should be allowed, and what are they?

Notreallyarsed · 05/01/2018 20:58

It’s unhelpful and insensitive to use emotive terms like baby when discussing terminations. Equally it would be unhelpful and insensitive to use foetus or cells when discussing a miscarriage. It’s all about consideration for the woman who is going through it imo.

twofingerstoEverything · 05/01/2018 21:06

Mumof56 Do you think you could stop saying 'pro-abortion' when you mean 'pro-choice'? It makes you sound silly.

theymademejoin · 05/01/2018 21:16

As Graham Norton said in an interview: "The great thing about extremists is that they drag everyone towards the centre."

Hopefully, if pro-choice people don't act in the extreme way they do, we will see sense prevail and women's rights to bodily integrity ensured.

UpABitLate · 05/01/2018 21:16

NotReallyArsed - yes agree

UpABitLate · 05/01/2018 21:17

Pro choice people act in an extreme way?

You mean petitions and women's marches and charities and stuff?

theymademejoin · 05/01/2018 21:24

@UpABitLate - You mean petitions and women's marches and charities and stuff?

No. Those sort of activities are exactly what is needed to defeat the extremists. I mean things like disparaging and insulting people who disagree with them or refusing to listen to the concerns of people who support choice in limited circumstances. We need to draw those in the middle towards us, not repel them into the arms of the likes of SPUC.

theymademejoin · 05/01/2018 21:27

I just realised my post was a bit confusing.

Hopefully, if pro-choice people don't act in the extreme way they do, should read Hopefully, if pro-choice people don't act in the extreme way ORGANISATIONS SUCH AS SPUC do,

WriteAGoodOne · 05/01/2018 21:45

That is up to the person who's body it is, and no-one else. You might see it as a baby and want to protect and care for it, or you might see it as a unwanted bunch of cells and want it to be gone.
Neither is a more valid viewpoint than the other

A 14-20 week old fetus isn't a bunch of cells ffs

theymademejoin · 05/01/2018 22:06

A 14-20 week old fetus isn't a bunch of cells ffs

Referring to a 14-20 week old foetus as a bunch of cells is exactly the sort of attitude that pushes those in the middle towards a more extreme anti-abortion stance.

It is a foetus. The woman should have the right to decide whether she continues with the pregnancy or not but at that stage of development, it is sufficiently formed that referring to it as a bunch of cells seems like an attempt to fool people.

Certainly at 20 weeks, am abortion involves labour and delivery. What is delivered is a foetus that is fully formed. Most abortions at that stage are due to medical reasons.

UpABitLate · 05/01/2018 22:15

This boils down to a fundamental difference of view of women and reproduction I think.

Those who believe that life begins at conception and believe that any act to damage / remove / etc after that point is murder, same as killing a an adult.

Those who believe that a woman is an important being in her own right and should have sovereignty over her own body full stop, and see an embryo / foetus as a potential life, but not one that outweighs the life of the woman, given that it is dependent on her body to survive, it is a part of her body.

Most people do lie somewhere in the middle in most of the UK, believing in a woman's right to choose, but with certain constraints. There are perpetual arguments around moving the cut-off, and about the situations where abortion can be carried out to term, and the 2 doctors thing, but still, we we have the NHS, it is legal, and obtainable, and something like 90% of abortions are carried out before 13 weeks.

This is the middle ground I think.

For the anti-abortionist people, when you look at groups, societies where it is illegal, and where the population are generally against it, religion is usually involved, and abortion is under attack along with a host of other things that affect women. And they are winning. It is push push push. In the USA, it is the fundamentalist christians, they are using any means at their disposal to shut it down. There is direct collateral damage around maternal mortality - but this is OK - because the end justifies the means - even if the means result in mothers dying and babies being left without a mother. Which is pretty peverse IMO.

I don't believe that you can decouple the views of these groups, from the generally toxic view of women outside of this issue.

SPUC are extreme. They believe in no abortion under any circumstances. They are the group under discussion here as they are the group that produced the leaflets the OP started the thread about.

UpABitLate · 05/01/2018 22:16

theymademejoin thanks for the clarification that makes more sense.

Can you give some examples of pro choice people behaving like SPUC?

UpABitLate · 05/01/2018 22:23

"You might see it as a baby and want to protect and care for it, or you might see it as a unwanted bunch of cells and want it to be gone.
Neither is a more valid viewpoint than the other*"

This made it clear it was about how an individual woman might view her own pregnancy. We are all bunches of cells when it comes to it.

This idea that women don't know what they're doing and need to have pictures of babies shown to them really is odd. The vast majority of women know what they are doing and think about it carefully. Most women who have abortions already have children, so they are deeply aware of what they are doing.

In the USA they made that law that all women had to have a trans vaginal ultrasound and listen to the heartbeat and then go away for a day or 2 to think about it before they were allowed an abortion. The trans vaginal thing was very weird, seemed like they'd hope it would put women off? Esp ones who have been raped I imagine.

theymademejoin · 05/01/2018 22:30

Can you give some examples of pro choice people behaving like SPUC?

No, I can't. I don't think anyone is as extreme as the likes of SPUC. But as I already said, it's important not to be disparaging of the concerns of those in the middle so referring to a foetus rather than a bunch of cells, for example, is less likely to alienate them and so prevent them moving towards a more extreme standpoint.

BashStreetKid · 06/01/2018 00:49

Why would I have to try harder, what am I supposedly trying for.

Mumof56, you were very obviously trying to assert that you had not claimed that the CQC report had ever said that there were babies in bins, hence your choice of a separate post referring to foetuses in trying to prove that point. Which I have no doubt you will now seek to deny.

Self-evidently, I didn't need to take issue with the poster you were quoting, because her statement that SPUC leaflets depict bin bags with babies in them, is correct: that is in fact what the leaflets show, because of course they are deliberately inflammatory and misleading. You, on the other hand, sought to justify the SPUC leaflets by claiming that the CQC report did indeed refer to babies in bins, when of course it didn't. Do you see the difference?

What I was correcting was your statement that the CQC report specifically referred to babies in bins, whereas it actually referred to "surgical termination products" which frankly could mean anything including things like medical swabs. It's completely irrelevant to the issue of the wording used by miscarrying or pregnant women. And where on earth do you claim that I have expressed "outrage"?

I haven't expressed a view about practices in abortion clinics because it's not relevant to this thread. Your only evidence about such practices is a report based on evidence which is 18 months old and which the CQC acknowledges have been remedied. You, on the other hand, haven't expressed condemnation of terrible practices such as those that led to the horrible death of Savita Halappanavar. I'm not pro abortion, I would far rather that women never have unwanted or unviable pregnancies, but it needs to be an available choice. Are you pro women or just anti abortion?

sashh · 06/01/2018 01:10

Mumof56

The poster I am referring to is a black bin liner brimming with full term perfect white babies, not a thing that has ever happened.

As for the baby v foetus debate, I once asked a pro-life SPUC loving person whether, in their opinion, a woman with a molar pregnancy should have intervention to remove it. They had no idea what I was talking about.

MargaretCavendish · 06/01/2018 08:46

The trans vaginal thing was very weird, seemed like they'd hope it would put women off?

I also used to think that this was done purely to intimidate. Now that I've had to have rather more early pregnancy scans that I would ideally have liked, I know that the actual reason is that you can see sod all on an external scan until around 8 weeks, and they want women having early abortions (which is most of them) to see 'oh there's your baby (blob, but with blinking heartbeat)', not 'there's a blob that is a gestational sac'. So I've decided that it is definitely emotionally manipulative but the transvaginal thing is because they want to get the 'best' (most emotive) image and don't care about women's bodily autonomy (which we know anyway, since they're anti-abortion).

UpABitLate · 06/01/2018 10:32

Margaret - bloody hell.

It's appalling isn't it. This is why I struggle to get in the "let's all have a civilised chat" when it comes to extreme pro-lifers. They make their misogyny utterly obvious. And yet at least one poster is saying I mustn't say that.

They need to read that again. They make women (and pregnant children as well presumably) have something stuck up their cunt for a pretty reasonable length of time for no good reason whatsoever.

What has happened in the states over the last decade or so around abortion is terrifying. Trump has promised to get rid of roe v wade hasn't he, I don't know if he can. The individual states seem that want no legal safe abortion seem to have quite a lot of mechanisms at their disposal to make it happen.

Then you get people like that republican man saying that women have a way of stopping a pregnancy if they really want to these people are religious ideologues and nothing more. They are not grounded in reality.

UpABitLate · 06/01/2018 10:35

Then look at what happened in Poland, already with one of the most restrictive laws around this, wanting to make it illegal in ALL circs ie even to save the life of the mother.

These are not nice people who care about babies, that is not what this is about. It is about repressing, controlling, reducing women. About making their lives difficult, painful, unpleasant. About them knowing that the state will let them die, happily, if their body does not perform it's main function of baby vessel properly.

Lizzie48 · 06/01/2018 11:05

Well, Poland is devoutly Catholic, and the church has far too much power. The attitude against sex of any sort is extremely negative, because it mustn't be for any kind of pleasure, only for procreation. And obviously, if a woman wants to control her fertility she's not having sex for procreation.

And obviously we know that Trump is a misogynist, so his views are not surprising. I would like, as a Christian myself, to say that that is one thing he most definitely is not, however.

But you won't win over people with less extreme views to your position by calling their views misogynistic, which is really why I've made the point that you shouldn't generalise. Especially women who support the banning of abortion, telling them they hate women is hardly likely to win them over to your side. The arguments you've used on here are persuasive, especially the scandals from South America, they need to be told about that. Most of them don't know about it.