[CorsiHockeyLeague]

Originally Posted by AltaGuy

The garbage thing about the late-term "debate" is that it is almost always made in poor faith as a stepping-stone to erode a woman's right to choose and to impose a situation of state intervention in a private matter where no-one has proven harm.

I guess if you're just going to assume that everyone who disagrees with you is almost always bad actor who's lying about what they believe, there's no real conversation to be had about anything. In my experience, though, people who assume that about others based on the position they've adopted without any other information about them are really just trying to protect themselves from having to defend their own beliefs.

Originally Posted by AltaGuy

What I definitely don't understand about your (extended) arguments here is that you seem to be summing up the pro-life/pro-choice stances and making it seem as if you're saying something novel.

I don't think I am, which is why it's strange that you would act as if your contrary view is something super obvious, with which any disagreement isn't to be entertained ("get out of here" was how you started off).

Yes, if a person believes we are murdering fetuses, they might hold a pro-life view. That goes at four weeks, or thirty weeks.

Not necessarily. That's true of some people, obviously. There are quite a lot of other people who would say that it's murder at 30 weeks but not at four weeks.

My point about your latter, empirical argument is, if you're trying to convince those people - who think it's okay at four weeks but not at 30 - that there's no need to outlaw that late term abortion because there are relatively few such abortions, what they're going to hear is, "there's no reason to outlaw the murder of babies in this circumstance, because relatively few babies are murdered in that circumstance". The obvious, completely logical response, ten times out of ten, will be "relatively few murdered babies is still too many, I want zero, so I'm not changing my position that this should be outlawed". It's an argument that is inherently useless - no one will find it at all convincing unless they've already decided that they agree with you about the central point of the subject under debate.

It's the same debate: should you legislate on that opinion or allow for choice? Some here seem to believe that it's morally outrageous not to legislate term-limits on abortion, despite evidence that legislating that would have no effect on abortions, and negative effects on women's health.

First, I don't really buy your statement that there's evidence that it would have no effect on abortions. There would almost certainly be SOME effect, even if - as seems likely - it would take us from "few" to "fewer few". As I'm trying to tell you, even that is enough, for a lot of people, to make it worthwhile.

Second, what you're really positing here is a utilitarian argument about weighing costs and benefits - weighing the harm caused by, effectively, forcing a woman to carry a late-stage pregnancy to term and presumably giving the kid up for adoption against the harm of ending the pregnancy. In your view, since the latter is no harm at all by your definition of what "harm" is, this is an easy call, but there's no reason to think your definition of "harm" is any better than any competing definition anyone might want to put forward - including one that says it's harmful to end the life of a foetus at 30 weeks.

So yeah, I get what you believe, but you've offered no compelling reason to prefer your view of things to anyone else's.