I'm sorry. Planned Parenthood's Guttmacher Institute reports that less than 1% of all abortions are due to rape and/or incest.
That makes sense.
The below wikipedia article sheds some light on this topic. You'll find that most of the reasons are optional and have more to do with preservation of lifestyle or social standing. Overall 8.2% could be construed as medically needed.
That also seems to match with reality. My problem is with the use of the phrase "as a form of birth control." It implies that no other birth control is being used and people are using abortion in lieu of more common birth control. I would argue that people who would do such a thing are stupid and are abusing the procedure, and I think that most other people would as well. I think that when people use that phrase, they're implying that it's just another form of birth control and people should simply use something else. It's misleading.
If you want "as a form of birth control" to mean "because they opt not to have the child" well, yes. That's pretty much what an abortion is. I think I just wasn't following what you mean.
How do the visitors to PlannedParenthood pay for their services? No idea. It is a relatively inexpensive procedure as I remember it.
As I said before, given what it costs to use conventional birth control, an abortion would have to be just about the cheapest medical procedure you could ever have in order for it to make economic sense (especially when combined with the fact that it's not exactly a convenient thing to have done) as an alternative birth control. If that's what you meant, I can't imagine how it could be true for any but a small portion of the population.
Are you saying that you find morally objectionable my opinion about when life begins?
No, I just don't happen to agree with it. I also don't find a distaste for peanuts or the opinion that Bob Ross was the greatest painter ever morally objectionable. I just don't see a reason to enshrine those ideas into law.
If so, on what platform do you stand to make the judgment that my position is unacceptable and should be ignored?
The same platform I stand on when I say that blasphemy, dancing, speaking ill of The Prophet, interracial marriage, and eating non-Kosher foods should not be made illegal--even though some people find them so morally offensive that they froth at the mouth at the very thought. I listened to the idea, understand that some people are offended by those things, and decided that no action should be taken because (1) those actions don't appear to harm society in any material way and (2) I don't see a particularly compelling case for the existence of a victim. If I just said, "Well somebody somewhere thinks that X is immoral, so it should be illegal for everybody" the list of things that remained legal would be remarkably short. I generally start with that heuristic.
I appreciate that a lot of people would disagree with the results of the second half of the test, but that's the way the cookie crumbles. Everybody has a slightly different set of axioms in life. Mine are based on empathy, and I can't particularly empathize with something that doesn't have a nervous system. Otherwise, I just tend to err on the side of not making laws that we'll likely regret later. History is full of laws that we now consider silly that made life hard for a lot of people. If you want me to give the nod to a new law, I have to be pretty well convinced that your idea isn't one of them.
Well, while I am not an expert on stem cells, I do know that women have a limited number of eggs.
That number is *a lot* given that you only burn through a handful a year.
You make emryotic stemcells legal, and you will have a massive number of girls in college giving up their future babies for a few bucks.
I have a little more faith in the intelligence of the average college student and the ethics of the medical industry than that. Do you really think that the medical industry is going to start taking egg donations in such a way that they'd make people infertile? Seriously?
Which if you have ever met a girl that has had an abortion, you know that it messes them up mentally and sometimes physically.
That's kind of a gross generalization. Have you looked at the statistics on exactly how many people have had abortions?
Take my Aunt, she died during an abortion. So, while I can't answer the question of whether the stem cells can fix people beyond a shadow of a doubt, I know that it can kill people.
I'm sorry to hear that. You can die during just about any nontrivial medical procedure, though. What percentage of people die during this particular procedure when it's done by a properly trained and licensed doctor?
So sticking to these safer alternatives to get stem cells is a great idea.
I'm all for safe alternatives to anything dangerous, as long as those alternatives provide the same benefit (or the original thing was unnecessarily dangerous). I just don't think that the sky is falling just yet.
In fact, perhaps you can be the first, but I have yet to meet a marijuana proponent who was not also a recreational marijuana user.
For what it's worth, I'm one. Likewise, I'm all for medical use of morphine, Xanax, and any number of other potentially abusable drugs that I don't personally use recreationally. If it has a medically valid use, go for it.
It's not the rythm method, and is based on taking the woman's basal temperature (resting temperature), and checking mucus signs. It has the highest success rate (greater than 98%) with no harmful side effects. Planned Parenthood even admits to this success rate on they website!
I suppose that's one way of measuring effectiveness, but I don't know that it's necessarily a good comparison. You're measuring effectiveness based on what is, in all likelihood, a significantly decreased number of sessions of intercourse, yes? The number of times intercourse happens (or is allowed to happen under a given birth control regime) is a number that most couples wouldn't want to disregard. One could argue that complete abstinence is 100% effective, but I wouldn't consider it viable birth control in the same sense that most other methods are.
The more important question is, what proof is there that fetal stem cells would do you one damn bit of good?
Agreed! We should only ever do research on things that have already been shown to work. Forget where theory leads us. Theoretical possibilities never result in real results anyway.
Less than 2% of all abortions are due to rape/incest. In poor neighborhoods abortion is a method of birth control
I'll admit that I've never done the cost / benefit analysis, but this doesn't seem like a particularly cost effective system, and it certainly doesn't seem like a convenient one. I can't even get a physical for less than $100, so it seems like either an abortion is just about the cheapest medical procedure available to an American adult, or somebody is *really* bad at math.
Think of it more this way: If we can attract the best and the brightest from foreign countries and add them to the fold of brilliant American entrepeneurs who drive the economy, that's a win. The percentage of Americans who do brilliant work has gone up, and it's good for all of us. These people aren't exactly displacing Americans.
If there's a brilliant software designer from India with a PhD and tremendous skillset who wants to come to the US and start the next hot tech company, we can either let him do it or we can send him back to India. In the first case, we get an American business that generates jobs, tax revenues, and GDP. In the second case, he'll go back to India where costs are lower, start the same business. Then he'll compete with American businesses, generating jobs, tax revenues, and GDP somewhere else. Sending him home because he might out compete an American business is not going to produce a net win. All it does is delay the inevitable and disconnect us from a lot of the benefits of that business.
If you want to step up to the plate and compete with him, more power to you. If you just want to go to work for him, that's cool too. At least you can do it if his office is in Silicon Valley.
No, the Democrats aren't opposed to any of this. They are just itching to get one of their own into the White House to abuse all of the power the President has acquired.
I generally agree. That's why I, like so may Americans, am fond of a divided government. Whether Congress checks presidential power because it's the right thing to do or because it's politically expedient doesn't matter as much to me as whether or not they do it at all.
The way I read BrakesForElves' post, it seemed like the point was that there is something great about the wiretapping technology that made it OK and not a dictatorial abomination like a lot of us think it is, and that once the Democrats see that W was just doing The Right Thing, they'd be OK with it.
There is this thing called an Executive Order he can issue as he wishes.
Well, sort of. Executive Orders, like signing statements, simply exist because the president says so and the other branches allow it. They're not typically used to claim new powers or exemption from laws. I suppose I could issue Copid's Orders any time I want, but that doesn't mean that the Constitution gives them any currency.
Would you prefer he frame his thoughts in that context? Why does it make a difference?
No, in most cases, I would prefer that he frame his thoughts on legislation in the context of *signing* the legislation or *vetoing* it. That's how presidents are supposed to handle legislation. On the one hand, he has hardly used the veto at all since he was elected. On the other hand, the sheer quantity of signing statements indicates that he has disagreed with hundreds of provisions in statutes that he signed. Why use signing statements instead of the veto? Two reasons: 1) Because there's no tried and true recourse against signing statements and 2) Because they don't make news. It's essentially a way of giving himself a really flexible line item veto.
Remember, signing statements and executive orders have historically been used to clarify understanding of how laws should be implemented and how organizations within the executive branch should operate. That the executive uses them to claim new powers and exempt himself from laws appears to be an unintended consequence of the historical unwillingness of Congress to appropriately check presidential power. We're starting to pay the price, and I think it's time we reevaluate the system.
It's also worth mentioning that Jimmy Carter (like so many presidents from both parties) also issued dozens of the things. As did all of the folks since. Honestly, people are so obsessed with GWB they don't bother to see if the people more on their side of the fence have used exactly the same tools.
So quantity and substance don't matter? From where I sit, President Bush has been using signing statements on an unprecedented scale with unprecedented scope. I think it's possible that you're so defensive about the topic that you're parroting this talking point without actually looking into the frequency and nature of the signing statements used by previous presidents.
Err, excuse me, the polygraph is absolutely scientific. It yields data the *correlates* with lying. The fact that the correlation is not 100% does not make the instrument unscientific.
The more interesting question is, is that correlation significant enough to act as a worthwhile distinguishing characteristic? The ROC curves for what few actual studies have actually been done appear to indicate that for any reasonable hit rate, it produces a significant number of false leads. Is it more reliable than flipping a coin to determine whether a person is lying or not? Maybe. How much more reliable? I haven't seen a lot of evidence indicating that the trade off in accuracy is worthwhile, especially in the "screening" (read: "fishing expedition") use cases we see in government.
Um, why do you need classified documents to tell the NSA to start spying? Why not just send a letter with instructions to keep it confidential (eg. out of a filing cabinet)? And if they need money, just bump up the budget (nobody will ask too many questions about that). What's so hard here?
That may work from time to time, but put yourself in the position of somebody who has to do the wiretapping. You know that there will be a shitstorm if people ever find out. Do you destroy the document that proves that you were ordered to do it, or do you file the document as evidence that you were acting within the chain of command. Given any organization's willingness to let the guy who actually did the bad thing fall on his sword to protect the guys on top, I know that I would treat it like any other order that came across my desk and document it according to procedure.
Are your thoughts on the polygraph similar? I can't say I'm thrilled with the idea of random drug testing for no particular reason (if for no other reason than it's a silly additional cost to deal with a problem that has not been demonstrated to exist), but at least drug tests (properly administered with safeguards against abuse from management) are scientifically sound and generally accurate. As far as modern science is concerned, a polygraph is little more than witch doctoring combined with interrogation tricks.
You can in fact otherwise be 100% liberal, but fail to be "pure"; see Lieberman for someone pretty darned close to that, if not actually there.
Lieberman's main issue of disagreement with the majority of Democrats wasn't exactly what I would call a minor quibble. Sometimes when you come down on the wrong side of history, you get burned for it.
On the other hand, I would guess that most people max out their "legitimate" credit before going dangerously into debt with a loan shark. If the loan shark or dealer wants $500 and the debtor has $500 in legitimate credit available, you can bet that any reasonable person will take out the $500 cash advance to pay off his current creditor.
The notion of "victimless"-ness is frequently tossed around as if there are never any ramifications beyond just being stupid on the couch for the afternoon because of weed. But philosophically, you can't pretend that's not part of the larger spectrum of issues that impact society. And, if I wasn't forced to pay for other people's driving under the influence (of alcohol, weed, crack, whatever), I'd probably care a lot less. Or not at all. But that's not how things are arranged.
Just jumping in here--I see the point you're trying to make, but the specific example seems an easy distinction to me. Any time you drive impaired, it's not a victimless crime. You put us all at risk, so we're all victims. It's the same way we treat alcohol now. Drink it if you like, but if you drive drunk, we'll nail you. Likewise, if you do something illegal because you're intoxicated, don't try to use the booze as an excuse.
In a similar vein, I'm all for figuring out which behaviors cost society ridiculous amounts of money and not insuring them. If you want to ride without a helmet, that's fine, but medical care stops as soon as you can't pay any more. Insurance companies put exceptions into the rules all the time to protect themselves against stuff like that. Want life insurance but you happen to be a wing walker? That's fine, but we won't insure you if you die as a result of your idiotic hobby. If I can let an idiot die based on his own decisions and, as a result, pay to vaccinate 1000 kids who wouldn't otherwise get vaccinated, that's a pretty good social trade off to me. We would have to pretty clearly enumerate those things that disqualify you for public medical care (i.e. "Being stupid" doesn't qualify but "Driving without a seatbelt" might work).
That's not the same as undergoing a poly for your job- with verifiable facts and questions.
Ask somebody who has failed a screening polygraph whether the results were verified or not. You'd think that being found out to be an international drug dealer would be an interesting result well worth handing off to law enforcement for investigation. See if you can find anybody who has (1) been accused of something serious enough to shoot down his application (and definitely worthy of extensive investigation) and (2) had law enforcement of any sort follow up on the results. On the one hand, the results are "reliable" so they dump your application. On the other hand, they're not reliable enough that they'll follow up on the lead they have on an international drug trafficker or murderer.
The point is that the principal scientist has the clout to stand up against idiotic management decisions whereas the easily replaceable employees simply do not. When something really stupid is going on, who should be expected to speak up? The guy who's just scraping by and gets canned as soon as he becomes a "problem" or the difficult to replace guy who has access to management?
So let's say that the powers that be think that the correct way to do it is using a dowsing rod. The examiner points the stick at you and if it twitches, you're a liar and a {drug dealer, spy, child pornographer, thief, murderer,...}. If they "catch" you, it goes on your record and you become unemployable by the agencies you've trained to work for. Go find yourself a new industry. The dowsing rod found you out.
Is it just a case of "too bad, so sad, it's good for the country" if the dowsing rod splashes your career? It's one thing to be subject to "indignity" and quite another to have your reputation smeared or destroyed by straight quackery.
There's an equally important question here that is never really addressed: What percentage of truthful people are flagged as deceptive. I can catch 100% of all liars simply by accusing everybody of lying every time. That doesn't provide much useful data, though, and it might result in the government finding it difficult to find employees. How often are people who have important skills being turned away or discharged because of false positives?
What's interesting to me about this is the amount of degrading and ridiculous crap that valuable experts will go through for a clearance when they throw fits when employers even hint at questioning their credentials. For example, we like to give a pretty good basic technical knowledge test when we hire programmers. Basically, you should be able to read some basic code (nothing tricky) and answer some simple conceptual questions about data structures (e.g. Describe some differences between a linked list and a binary search tree. Give an example for the use of each.). We have had more senior guys go batshit insane when asked to spend 30 minutes running through and proving that they have some memory of the task that they're being hired to perform. Heaven forbid we bruise their egos.
On the other hand, these same guys will gladly bend over and answer the most intimate sorts of questions while hooked up to a dowsing rod operated by a professional interrogator.
Personally, I've gone through a few background investigations to get security clearances. I've always been honest and gotten through them without too much trouble (other than trouble of the bureaucratic type). I don't mind legitimate investigations, really. I shouldn't be given a clearance if I have a serious criminal record, if people who know me think I'm dangerously unstable, or if I'm so far in debt that I've been reduced to giving handjobs behind the 7-11 for spare change. I also don't mind being asked to demonstrate competence in the type of work I'm being hired to do. Even so, I'm not particularly cool with having somebody wave a magic terrorist-detecting crystal at me and putting a mark in a file somewhere based on whether I produced good or bad energy. The polygraph is little different. Maybe it's just ego, but I think that my reputation deserves more considered input than that.
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That also seems to match with reality. My problem is with the use of the phrase "as a form of birth control." It implies that no other birth control is being used and people are using abortion in lieu of more common birth control. I would argue that people who would do such a thing are stupid and are abusing the procedure, and I think that most other people would as well. I think that when people use that phrase, they're implying that it's just another form of birth control and people should simply use something else. It's misleading.
If you want "as a form of birth control" to mean "because they opt not to have the child" well, yes. That's pretty much what an abortion is. I think I just wasn't following what you mean.
As I said before, given what it costs to use conventional birth control, an abortion would have to be just about the cheapest medical procedure you could ever have in order for it to make economic sense (especially when combined with the fact that it's not exactly a convenient thing to have done) as an alternative birth control. If that's what you meant, I can't imagine how it could be true for any but a small portion of the population.
The same platform I stand on when I say that blasphemy, dancing, speaking ill of The Prophet, interracial marriage, and eating non-Kosher foods should not be made illegal--even though some people find them so morally offensive that they froth at the mouth at the very thought. I listened to the idea, understand that some people are offended by those things, and decided that no action should be taken because (1) those actions don't appear to harm society in any material way and (2) I don't see a particularly compelling case for the existence of a victim. If I just said, "Well somebody somewhere thinks that X is immoral, so it should be illegal for everybody" the list of things that remained legal would be remarkably short. I generally start with that heuristic.
I appreciate that a lot of people would disagree with the results of the second half of the test, but that's the way the cookie crumbles. Everybody has a slightly different set of axioms in life. Mine are based on empathy, and I can't particularly empathize with something that doesn't have a nervous system. Otherwise, I just tend to err on the side of not making laws that we'll likely regret later. History is full of laws that we now consider silly that made life hard for a lot of people. If you want me to give the nod to a new law, I have to be pretty well convinced that your idea isn't one of them.
I have a little more faith in the intelligence of the average college student and the ethics of the medical industry than that. Do you really think that the medical industry is going to start taking egg donations in such a way that they'd make people infertile? Seriously?
That's kind of a gross generalization. Have you looked at the statistics on exactly how many people have had abortions?
I'm sorry to hear that. You can die during just about any nontrivial medical procedure, though. What percentage of people die during this particular procedure when it's done by a properly trained and licensed doctor?
I'm all for safe alternatives to anything dangerous, as long as those alternatives provide the same benefit (or the original thing was unnecessarily dangerous). I just don't think that the sky is falling just yet.
Think of it more this way: If we can attract the best and the brightest from foreign countries and add them to the fold of brilliant American entrepeneurs who drive the economy, that's a win. The percentage of Americans who do brilliant work has gone up, and it's good for all of us. These people aren't exactly displacing Americans.
If there's a brilliant software designer from India with a PhD and tremendous skillset who wants to come to the US and start the next hot tech company, we can either let him do it or we can send him back to India. In the first case, we get an American business that generates jobs, tax revenues, and GDP. In the second case, he'll go back to India where costs are lower, start the same business. Then he'll compete with American businesses, generating jobs, tax revenues, and GDP somewhere else. Sending him home because he might out compete an American business is not going to produce a net win. All it does is delay the inevitable and disconnect us from a lot of the benefits of that business.
If you want to step up to the plate and compete with him, more power to you. If you just want to go to work for him, that's cool too. At least you can do it if his office is in Silicon Valley.
The way I read BrakesForElves' post, it seemed like the point was that there is something great about the wiretapping technology that made it OK and not a dictatorial abomination like a lot of us think it is, and that once the Democrats see that W was just doing The Right Thing, they'd be OK with it.
No, in most cases, I would prefer that he frame his thoughts on legislation in the context of *signing* the legislation or *vetoing* it. That's how presidents are supposed to handle legislation. On the one hand, he has hardly used the veto at all since he was elected. On the other hand, the sheer quantity of signing statements indicates that he has disagreed with hundreds of provisions in statutes that he signed. Why use signing statements instead of the veto? Two reasons: 1) Because there's no tried and true recourse against signing statements and 2) Because they don't make news. It's essentially a way of giving himself a really flexible line item veto.
Remember, signing statements and executive orders have historically been used to clarify understanding of how laws should be implemented and how organizations within the executive branch should operate. That the executive uses them to claim new powers and exempt himself from laws appears to be an unintended consequence of the historical unwillingness of Congress to appropriately check presidential power. We're starting to pay the price, and I think it's time we reevaluate the system.
Are your thoughts on the polygraph similar? I can't say I'm thrilled with the idea of random drug testing for no particular reason (if for no other reason than it's a silly additional cost to deal with a problem that has not been demonstrated to exist), but at least drug tests (properly administered with safeguards against abuse from management) are scientifically sound and generally accurate. As far as modern science is concerned, a polygraph is little more than witch doctoring combined with interrogation tricks.
On the other hand, I would guess that most people max out their "legitimate" credit before going dangerously into debt with a loan shark. If the loan shark or dealer wants $500 and the debtor has $500 in legitimate credit available, you can bet that any reasonable person will take out the $500 cash advance to pay off his current creditor.
In a similar vein, I'm all for figuring out which behaviors cost society ridiculous amounts of money and not insuring them. If you want to ride without a helmet, that's fine, but medical care stops as soon as you can't pay any more. Insurance companies put exceptions into the rules all the time to protect themselves against stuff like that. Want life insurance but you happen to be a wing walker? That's fine, but we won't insure you if you die as a result of your idiotic hobby. If I can let an idiot die based on his own decisions and, as a result, pay to vaccinate 1000 kids who wouldn't otherwise get vaccinated, that's a pretty good social trade off to me. We would have to pretty clearly enumerate those things that disqualify you for public medical care (i.e. "Being stupid" doesn't qualify but "Driving without a seatbelt" might work).
The point is that the principal scientist has the clout to stand up against idiotic management decisions whereas the easily replaceable employees simply do not. When something really stupid is going on, who should be expected to speak up? The guy who's just scraping by and gets canned as soon as he becomes a "problem" or the difficult to replace guy who has access to management?
So let's say that the powers that be think that the correct way to do it is using a dowsing rod. The examiner points the stick at you and if it twitches, you're a liar and a {drug dealer, spy, child pornographer, thief, murderer, ...}. If they "catch" you, it goes on your record and you become unemployable by the agencies you've trained to work for. Go find yourself a new industry. The dowsing rod found you out.
Is it just a case of "too bad, so sad, it's good for the country" if the dowsing rod splashes your career? It's one thing to be subject to "indignity" and quite another to have your reputation smeared or destroyed by straight quackery.
There's an equally important question here that is never really addressed: What percentage of truthful people are flagged as deceptive. I can catch 100% of all liars simply by accusing everybody of lying every time. That doesn't provide much useful data, though, and it might result in the government finding it difficult to find employees. How often are people who have important skills being turned away or discharged because of false positives?
What's interesting to me about this is the amount of degrading and ridiculous crap that valuable experts will go through for a clearance when they throw fits when employers even hint at questioning their credentials. For example, we like to give a pretty good basic technical knowledge test when we hire programmers. Basically, you should be able to read some basic code (nothing tricky) and answer some simple conceptual questions about data structures (e.g. Describe some differences between a linked list and a binary search tree. Give an example for the use of each.). We have had more senior guys go batshit insane when asked to spend 30 minutes running through and proving that they have some memory of the task that they're being hired to perform. Heaven forbid we bruise their egos.
On the other hand, these same guys will gladly bend over and answer the most intimate sorts of questions while hooked up to a dowsing rod operated by a professional interrogator.
Personally, I've gone through a few background investigations to get security clearances. I've always been honest and gotten through them without too much trouble (other than trouble of the bureaucratic type). I don't mind legitimate investigations, really. I shouldn't be given a clearance if I have a serious criminal record, if people who know me think I'm dangerously unstable, or if I'm so far in debt that I've been reduced to giving handjobs behind the 7-11 for spare change. I also don't mind being asked to demonstrate competence in the type of work I'm being hired to do. Even so, I'm not particularly cool with having somebody wave a magic terrorist-detecting crystal at me and putting a mark in a file somewhere based on whether I produced good or bad energy. The polygraph is little different. Maybe it's just ego, but I think that my reputation deserves more considered input than that.