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#1395197
His4Life
Danarth, I am well acquainted with suffering. I came out of an abusive marriage and was literally homeless for two years. While all of us could always use more empathy, I believe I do have a strong sense of caring for other people. In this case, I am seeing a lot of empathy for the mother (which is reasonable) but no empathy for the child or what it has to go through being born this way. Also, to all of you, please stop and look at the words you are using. "Monstrosity." "Abomination." These terms sent chills up my back when I first saw them here and I am seeing them more and more now. These are the very same terms that people in the dark ages would have used to describe hunchbacks, dwarves or other physically deformed people. Once we start of thinking of human beings as "monstrosities" or "abominations," we have lost all sense of humanity and we are well on our way to adopting a mentality like that of Nazi Germany. I sincerely pray that this is not really how any of you would think about your fellow human beings, made in God's image. Let's all pause and turn the temperature down on this debate, please.
4/22/2012 1:02:36 PM
#1395230
Bine
@His4life:
Hunchbacks, dwarves or other physically deformed people have brains ...
Again, the issue here is about not forcing women to carry out the pregnancy after they have found out that the foetus is anencephalic and will not live for any long time.
If the woman chooses to deliver - so be it (even if I personally in no way can understand why one would). If the woman chooses to abort - so be it.
4/22/2012 1:53:46 PM
#1395231
Filin De Blanc
"no empathy for the child or what it has to go through being born this way"
It doesn't go through anything. It. Has. No. Brain. It is no more capable of feeling than my shoe.
4/22/2012 2:00:59 PM
#1395232
Danarth
@His4life
I call bullshit on that. The lack of empathy you display on various subjects is telling.
As for the supposed lack of empathy for a child born with no brain? That's equally telling. What is going to happen? The child will be born with no brain, no autonomous functions, no future. How could it be kind to let a child with absolutely no future and no chance of a life be born? That's just cruelty.
As for the mother? She will go through the pains and possible complications of birth, just to see a child that will fade away before long. I wonder, can you imagine the pyschological and emotional impact that would have on not only the mother but the father too?
I doubt it. you live in your God blinkered universe where the suffering of real people takes a backseat to the bronze age laws and rules of your supposed god.
As for the whining and bitching about people using the terms monstrosities and abominations to describe other human beings..Well, I wonder who it is who uses those terms to describe people who are homosexual?
So, in conclusion, His4life. you are full of shit.
4/22/2012 2:12:27 PM
#1395234
His4Life
And yet in the two examples I gave, the child clearly had a partially developed brain and survived outside of the womb. It smiled, laughed, ate and was able to feel pain.
4/22/2012 2:19:36 PM
#1395235
Filin De Blanc
Partially developed =/= nonexistent.
4/22/2012 2:23:40 PM
#1395245
Danarth
@His4life
Are you a complete dolt? The child mentioned at least had part of a brain, not that she survived that long.
This is about a child born with no brain. No brain, no life. I am confused as to why this concept is so hard for you to grasp.
4/22/2012 3:09:06 PM
#1395255
J. James
@His4Life
Dwarves and hunchbacks are fully human. They have brains. They feel, love, care, and weep just like the rest of us. But when I said that a mother being forced to go through the dangerous, unspeakable agony of labor in order to birth a dead thing that was never, at any point, alive or human, I called that an abomination. Because it is. No person should EVER be subjected to that kind of suffering against their will. It's torture, plain and simple. But for using that term, calling it an abomination, and calling you a monster for advocating such inhuman acts, you labeled me a Nazi.
Get back to me when you actually have the moral high ground to label me a Nazi, you horrendous, sadistic thing, you. If you truly have known suffering in your life, it makes it all the more egregious and monstrous that you would force it upon other people. It shows that you have no empathy, and empathy is no small part of what makes us human.
4/22/2012 3:25:53 PM
#1395261
Ivy Mike
@His4Life:
Justify forcing people to carry this sort of pregnancy to full term. Note: that means, justify a LAW forcing people to do so.
No one here is advocating for forcing people to abort. You, however, are advocating for forced births.
I'm sure you have a non- emotional based, non-religious, valid reason for this, and you haven't been simply avoiding this point that has been made before.
Let's hear it.
4/22/2012 3:54:25 PM
#1395264
His4Life
Sure. My reason is that we are all entitled to the right of life, whatever the conditions we are born under and even if that life only lasts for a few days or a few minutes. That's the life that God gave us and it's precious and beautiful however long it lasts. None of us have the right to deny a child that right, period.
4/22/2012 4:00:29 PM
#1395266
Ivy Mike
@His4Life:
"And yet in the two examples I gave, the child clearly had a partially developed brain and survived outside of the womb. It smiled, laughed, ate and was able to feel pain."
Who cares? That was the CHOICE of those families. Personally, I think it was fundie brainwashing in full view, but that's me. They decided.
Neither You, they, the Catholic Church, or any other group of religious fanatics has the right to FORCE that choice on anyone else.
4/22/2012 4:03:47 PM
#1395267
Anon
>>His4Life
And yet in the two examples I gave, the child clearly had a partially developed brain and survived outside of the womb. It smiled, laughed, ate and was able to feel pain. <<
Those cases were not total anencephaly, so using them as examples is not valid.
Also, your sources are biased and I do not consider them to be reliable. My reasoning: normal infants exhibit laughter beginning around 4 months of age; with the total lack of higher brain function in these cases, saying that there was laughter at less than 3 months is very implausible. I have no intention of trivializing the pain that the women in those two cases have been and are going through. But they are saying things that did not happen.
And I notice that you are not addressing even a fraction of the objections that have been raised against your statements, or admitting your factual mistakes when they have been clearly pointed out to you.
4/22/2012 4:04:50 PM
#1395268
Ivy Mike
"Sure. My reason is that we are all entitled to the right of life, whatever the conditions we are born under and even if that life only lasts for a few days or a few minutes. That's the life that God gave us and it's precious and beautiful however long it lasts. None of us have the right to deny a child that right, period."
Okay, so not one valid, non-religious based argument, then. Your "god" cannot be demonstrated to even exist. You or your ilk have therefore no valid reason to force another free person to give birth.
4/22/2012 4:06:46 PM
#1395270
Ivy Mike
4/22/2012 4:09:32 PM
#1395276
J. James
His4Life, you can't grant the rights of the living to things that ARE NOT ALIVE.
4/22/2012 4:29:28 PM
#1395286
His4Life
J. James, yet in the two examples I gave, the children were alive. Hmm?
4/22/2012 5:02:36 PM
#1395302
ScrappyB
"And yet in the two examples I gave, the child clearly had a partially developed brain and survived outside of the womb. It smiled, laughed, ate and was able to feel pain."
I know I'm wasting my time, but...
As far as laughter goes, I'll bet you dollars to donuts they were random noises the mother convinced herself was laughter. Babies with normal brains don't even laugh that early. It's like how the mother was deluding herself into posting the baby was 'advanced' for her age because she could sit up at only a few days old. You know why most normal babies can't sit up at that age? Because they don't have the muscle tone to hold up the weight of their head. Obviously for this baby that wasn't an issue.
I sincerely doubt they were able to feel pain either, since the part of the brain that processes pain never developes. It was just reflexes. Like how if you touch something hot, the signal travels to the spine, which causes your hand to jerk away before your brain even registers you've been burned. No brain required.
As for the rest, those are autonomous functions. They are controlled by the brain stem with no conscious thought. People who are in a vegetative state due to trauma or illness can breathe and digest food. They even smile, make noises and flail around. The lights are on, but there's no one home. Even these people are better off than anencephalics. For them, there's a microscopic chance they could heal and improve. For anencephaly, there is no chance at all because there's nothing to heal.
We're not talking about someone who is merely physically deformed or developmentally disabled. Anencephalics have no higher brain functions. No future. No understanding. No conciousness. No hope. The ability to process thought is totally beyond them. I do have empathy for them in the sense that if it were me in the same situation, I'd rather not have been born in the first place.
If the parents think it's the right thing to carry the fetus to term, that's fine. If they think it would be too traumatic and want to abort, that should be fine too.
4/22/2012 5:43:55 PM
#1395310
Voice of Humanity
I know you guys have been refuting His4Life's "points" with both passion and proficiency, but I think I need to add something else. I think we have a lot more to gain from having the zealots birth these children, they've been deluded by Catholic Church into forcing this upon themselves and others, when its been made clear to the rest of the world that the Church forfeited its claim to a moral high ground a loooong time ago. They won't be able to shove the truth under the rug when the harsh reality smothers them.
4/22/2012 6:15:08 PM
#1395314
Danarth
@His4life
Seems that the joke about Conservatives of your ilk thinking people have a right to life until they leave the womb has some basis in reality.
You also don't seem to understand the difference between a fetus that doesn't develop a brain and one that posseses only part of a brain.
One has to presume you are either blinded by your religion or you are a dolt.
Apart from that, you still show your utter lack of empathy by the fact you are ignoring, rather utterly, the need for a person to have a quality of life rather than just a right to life.
A fetus that grows with no brain will have 'no' quality of life, no life at all. It beggers belief that you are unable to recognize this.
What does one honestly do by letting such a fetus develop? Emotional distress, potential health risks, potential pyschological tramua?
It's hardly a secret that you derive your opinions from your narrow religious belief, so I find it sickening that the words of your bible and supposed god trump quality of life.
But, you aren't going to listen to any of this.
4/22/2012 7:17:01 PM
#1395321
Canuovea
His4Life,
Anencephalics are born without any brain whatsoever, those examples given had a portion. There is a difference very very important difference.
Anencephalics do not experience anything, they physically cannot. Hence, they do not actually go through being born that way. They never were. Never were conscious and never were alive any more than I would be if you severed my head and pumped artificial blood through the rest of my body. The brain dies, the person dies. The brain was never there? The person was never there.
As such, we can't really have empathy for them, because we cannot put ourselves in their place. It is impossible. We cannot imagine, or even grasp, never having been or ever being able to be. We may be able to intellectually process such a thing, but to imagine what it could be like? Impossible.
Additionally, your argument shifted (I believe), from how the experience of birth would benefit the mother to how there needs to be empathy for the child. Probably because you recognized that the idea was about forcing mothers to give birth to anencephalics.
The only real question, then, is "do you believe a person fully without a brain to be alive?" My answer is no, because they are never conscious and never experience anything. They physically cannot.
From a religious perspective, one can question whether or not anencephalics would have a soul. Where is the seat of the soul? How does it connect to the body? There have been some who claim that the brain is the case. Though some believe that it inhabits the whole body, in which case, the Anencephalics do have a soul. Are they required to be born in order for the soul to be present? What happens to a soul that experiences nothing? Ever?
4/22/2012 7:52:46 PM
#1395322
J. James
@His4Life
Ah, yes, so the trump card appears again, those two babies that were supposedly "alive".
First, as Scrappy points out, those examples you gave aren't exactly scientific. It's just a bunch of people seeing what they want to see. And even brain-dead people do respond on reflex, just look at what people swore up and down they saw Terry Schiavo do, but she didn't. Speaking of which, healthy babies aren't exactly that much more active by comparison, relative to an adult.
Second, and most importantly, those examples have absolutely no bearing on anencephalics, because they did have brains, fragmented though they may be. It would be as if we were pointing out that a penguin has never flown, and you charge in saying, "nuh-uh, here's proof that both seagulls AND puffins can fly!" Simply put, you are entirely missing the point.
So instead of debating on whether a literally brainless lump of cells is alive, can we get back to what really matters in this case, which is the MOTHERS, who are clearly and unambiguously people?
Edit: Canuovea scooped me. I guess that means we're both double-correct.
4/22/2012 7:54:46 PM
#1395328
ScrappyB
Just to clear up some misconceptions...
Anencephaly has a range of severity. It's all terrible and 100% fatal, and all of them lack the thinking part of the brain. However, some of the more primative brain structures may be present. Motor controls, for example. The majority of anencephalic fetuses carried to term either die before birth or immediately afterward. I suspect these are the ones that do not have a functional brain stem or have additional problems.
So yeah, the ones that survive for awhile (I can't bring myself to call it living) have a little more brain than the others. But that doesn't make them any more of a person.
4/22/2012 9:53:14 PM
#1395356
And of course you're offering to take care of these zombie children and provide the needed wealth and services through YOUR institutions, producing research into the cause and working on prevention of future cases... what, no? Guess you didn't think this "human dignity" shit through all the way, because you're spitting in the parents faces otherwise.
4/23/2012 2:16:38 AM
#1395373
His4Life: "ScrappyB, so now you're judging it based on appearance?"
No, quite the opposite: he's pointing out that ~your~ side's position is entirely based on external indicators such as moving arms, legs, having a face, a heartbeat, twitching muscles and so on. Hence the need to hide the meat puppet's deformed cranium.
His4Life: "You make God want to run and throw up."
God called, she told me you're a 'false prophet'. :)
4/23/2012 3:16:29 AM
#1395376
demodocos
PZ Myers once wrote an excellent article, explaining exactly what anencephaly is about and why it's important:
"There's an important phenomenon in development called neurulation. This is a process that starts with a flat sheet of ectodermal cells, folds them into a tube, and creates our dorsal nervous system. Here's a simple cross-section of the process in a salamander, but in general outline we humans do pretty much the same thing. Cells move up and inward, and then zipper together along the length of the animal to produce a closed tube.
It's a seemingly simple event with a great deal of underlying complexity. It requires coordinated changes in the shape of ectodermal cells to drive the changes in tissue shape, and invisible in simple diagrams to the right are all the inductive interactions going on that trigger the differentiation of the tube into a nervous system.
This is also a relatively early event in humans. It begins about 18 days after fertilization, with a thickening of the ectoderm to form the initial sheet, called the neural plate. By day 19, the edges of the plate thicken and rise, and the whole thing folds at the midline and looks something like an open hot dog bun. The photo below is of a pair of 20 day old human embryos; the midline seam is open and clearly visible. [...]"
READ ON
4/23/2012 3:23:32 AM
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