Why isn't guaranteed maternity leave a "pro-life" imperative?

[Xanthippe_Voorhees]

What you were told was incorrect. I’m looking at the actual laws according to legitimate sources, including abortion rights advocacy groups who show what is and isn’t permitted by country.

If even the advocacy groups say that those reasons are allowed, I’m going to trust them since they have a vested interest in pushing for as much as possible.

It doesn’t make it right, it’s still a grave evil. But what the law permits is still what the law permits. They have far more allowances than the Phillipines, for instance which only allows to save a woman’s life, and Saudia Arabia and the UAE which tack on for a woman’s physical and mental health. South Korea, in addition to those, allows abortion for rape and because of fetal impairment.

 

[Pup7]

Well, we can only go by what commanders and we ourselves are told.

We were informed that it was for no reason, and expense and procedure were the issue of the person seeking the abortion and not the responsibility of Tricare or the military. I’m sure the DOD follows as it is advised by the host nation.

As for others telling me otherwise - again, I can only go by what we were told.

 

[Xanthippe_Voorhees]

Well, we can only go by what commanders and we ourselves are told.

We were informed that it was for no reason, and expense and procedure were the issue of the person seeking the abortion and not the responsibility of Tricare or the military. I’m sure the DOD follows as it is advised by the host nation.

As for others telling me otherwise - again, I can only go by what we were told.

And what you were told was perhaps based on the military and not reality. You were working with bad information. It’s great that the military has that standard, but South Korea does not. At this point you’ve been corrected as to the reality of the situation.

 

[Pup7]

At this point you’ve been corrected as to the reality of the situation.

You know, Xanthippe, I get it. And no, it was not “per the military”. I lived there and talked with actual Koreans, several of whom work for the actual system. The military doesn’t just make arbitrary statements about health care. You seem to think that we just whip stuff out, and we don’t. I don’t need to keep being told how you’ve “corrected” me, as that’s not actually the point here. Read and acknowledged. And as I said, one can only go off what one is told by multiple sources. Correction is fine.

Moving on…

 

[KathleenT]

I tried that, it doesn’t work. I get much further pointing out it is murdering children.

Humans are very good at justifiying their bad acts. We all are. One of our methods is to convince ourselves that it is other people’s jobs to convince us things are wrong. It really isn’t, it is our responsibility to think through our actions and rationalizations and decide if what we believe is true.

Most people know or suspect abortion kills babies. They just refuse to acknowledge it (which is why I made a reference to “waking up” the conscience.) In the end, taking everything to the logical conclusions, there is no science or philosophy that supports abortion other than “Do as thou will, is the whole of my law.”

Take early term abortion. Not every pregnancy is 40 weeks, not every baby develops at the same rate, what we know about fetal development has grown by leaps and bounds in the last 50 years as we develop more and more technology. There is no agreement of what suddenly makes a life a life or when it happens. You are literally picking a point on the line and saying “This is it” while other people are taking another point and saying “No, this is it.” Whereas picking conception at least errs on the side of caution.

After all, if you have 20 cupcakes to give your friends and family but knew there was chance some of them were posiounous, would you give the cupcakes to them? Of course not. That’s because your family and friends are real to you while unborn children are an abstract concept.

You understand all of this, you are an intelligent person. You don’t need a jerk like me to point all of this out. But it is nice when a jerk like me points it out because then you can dismiss me for being a jerk. That’s how rationalization works.

So no, I don’t have to convince people abortion destroys actual babies, they already know that.

 

[Vonsalza]

I meant the public schools. Considering how much learning is going on in many cases they basically amount to public daycare.

Also, “public” is just a euphemism to cover up that the ruling class exists. “The people” do no rule and never have.

As a Kentucky public school kid that had test scores rivaling the best kids in the nation, I’d be a little less eager to use such a broad brush when describing public schooling.

The issue is that every kid goes there. Not the just the doctor’s and CEO’s kids.

 

[Theo520]

It’s very simple: The cost of living is geared toward what the average family makes. When two income families became the norm, the cost of living went up to reflect that reality. Nobody got ahead. The average family income doubles? The cost of living doubles right along with it.

It’s a conscious choice. A modern couple could choose to live in a smaller house like my parents, and eat cheaper food at home instead of eating out and shopping at whole paycheck for designer foods.

 

[QwertyGirl]

To me, you seem hard-hearted, and very judgemental when it comes to deciding how other people utilize the consciences they have. I think that is an error. Just because somebody uses their conscience and comes to a different conclusion than you do, it does not mean that they don’t struggle with these moral issues and think them through very deeply. And that’s really all I have to say on the matter.

 

[KathleenT]

That’s fine, you can think that.

But if you are Catholic, you are also going against Catholic teaching and the collective wisdom of the saints and faithful. I would just caution you to be careful before dismissing that wealth of insights. Find out what the Catholic counter arguments are to your specific concerns before walking away.

The truth is our faith has amazing depth and beauty. The collective bra(name removed by moderator)ower of the Church is astounding but it takes work sometimes to find it and work through it.

I wish you the best.

 

[QwertyGirl]

I am agnostic with 16 years of Catholic Education. I understand the Catholic teachings just fine. I believe they are not correct in all cases.

 

[Monica83]

It doesn’t matter if the women choose not to bond with them or don’t call them the subjective term “baby”, they are their offspring, they are human beings growing on the continuum of human development as we all are. They are as much a “person” as a newborn-a blank slate, but we can’t kill newborns can we?

 

[KJW5551]

What you’re calling “judgmental” is nothing but the official teaching of the Church which is that abortion is always and everywhere wrong.

As @KathleenT rightly points out, everyone knows abortion is the destruction of a human organism. This is just basic medical science. They choose to rationalize it away using arguments like “my body my choice” that utilize emotion, not actual facts. Let me ask you this: are you glad you weren’t aborted? If your answer is yes but you still support abortion, you break the Golden Rule.

 

[Pup7]

It’s a conscious choice. A modern couple could choose to live in a smaller house like my parents, and eat cheaper food at home instead of eating out and shopping at whole paycheck for designer foods.

But it’s not always a conscious choice. And not everyone buys fancy food and lives in a fancy house. Some places need two jobs just to pay rent in a safe neighborhood - not the fanciest, not the poshest, just a safe neighborhood. Again, look up rent here in the PNW. Ridiculous.

 

[Pup7]

What you’re calling “judgmental” is nothing but the official teaching of the Church which is that abortion is always and everywhere wrong.

We may agree with that. But we can’t believe that everyone does - because they don’t. If they’re not Catholic, they don’t have to agree (and really, if they’re Catholic, they don’t have to either - that’s between them and God, at the end of the day). And this board is open to everyone, so she’s allowed to state her case.

 

[ATraveller]

-I currently moved in a region with one of the highest abortion number in the whole country. At the same time, this region has the lowest rents and life costs in general, so, money isn´t the thing. The majorty of women who abort here (recently checked the stats because I was shocked of it) abort not because they were teens / had health issues/were raped/ etc, the majorty was between 25 and 35 if I remeber it right. They simply didn´t want a child. The “ethic” here told them over decades this was ok, so they do.

That’s not surprising.
It’s marginally related but some social scientists I follow on social media shared a recent study of Poland’s very generous and expensive welfare programs to increase the birth rate. What they found was it did practically nothing. The increase was infinitesimally small. The details are now fuzzy to me now, but it was something along the lines of if they extrapolated the data, it would mean Poland would have to go bankrupt several times to get it to increase just a bit more.
I think it’s a perception vs. reality problem when it comes to expenses and finances and ‘personal taste’.

So while guaranteed maternity leave isn’t going to prevent any abortions (empirically), it’s the right thing to do to foster a pro-family environment.

 

[Pup7]

As a Kentucky public school kid that had test scores rivaling the best kids in the nation, I’d be a little less eager to use such a broad brush when describing public schooling.

The issue is that every kid goes there. Not the just the doctor’s and CEO’s kids.

You and me both. My public school education got me into one of the top ranked nursing schools in the country. I did just fine in public schools, my nieces and nephews are just fine in public schools, millions do just fine in public schools. We have public schools because basic education is a right guaranteed to all who live here. It’s not a “ruling class” thing, which seems to be a pretty popular opinion these days.

 

[alice24]

So while guaranteed maternity leave isn’t going to prevent any abortions (empirically), it’s the right thing to do to foster a pro-family environment.

This, so much!!
It´s not that more or another group of people would get more children or any children at all, it´s that those who already try to build a family and do this sometimes with a huge load of burden will have it a bit easier.

 

[QwertyGirl]

As @KathleenT rightly points out, everyone knows abortion is the destruction of a human organism. This is just basic medical science. They choose to rationalize it away using arguments like “my body my choice” that utilize emotion, not actual facts. Let me ask you this: are you glad you weren’t aborted? If your answer is yes but you still support abortion, you break the Golden Rule.

Human organism does not equal human being.

Would I have cared if I had been aborted? Well lets see, do I care what happend in 1823? No. Why? Because I wasn’t a human being yet.

Think outside the box once in a while. You might understand that most people dont’ sit around deciding a good argument for abortion so they can then support it or go have one. They truly believe there is nothing morally objectionable about it.

 

[KJW5551]

Absolutely true, which is why I expanded on this in the second part of my post (which I doubt she’ll respond to).

Pro-choice people are welcome to come here and make good arguments for their beliefs. What they tend to do, however, is merely come here and state their beliefs without much in the way of facts or rational arguments; things that they would, in any other context (think climate change etc.) demand from their opponent.

 

[Monica83]

I believe embryology textbooks do call them human beings. You must be thinking of cognition as a determinant of human rights.

A human being-a man, woman, or child of the species homo sapiens. Yes, indeed, a human fetus is a human being.