No where did I say we shouldn’t be working towards better.

No, but you immediately dismissed my S and A tier objectives as fantasy and objectives that shouldn’t even be talked about. If you dismiss an objective as fantasy you aren’t going to work towards it. If I tell myself it is impossible for me to run a sub-3 hour marathon, then I am not going to put the effort in to train for it and I will certainly never achieve it, but if I believe it is possible, I will work towards it, and even though I’ll probably never achieve it, I might get close and be much happier with the results than never having tried.

Laws have to reflect reality though and not an ideal that can either never be achieved

This is the same flawed logic that I pointed out is being used in the gun violence “debate”. A country with no gun violence is an unachievable ideal that doesn’t reflect reality, so we shouldn’t try to restrict who has access to guns. You don’t see the parallel flawed logic there?

I was trying to find a common platitude that people on opposite sides of this issue could work towards, albiet for very different reasons.

1. Do we agree that unwanted pregnancies are an undesirable thing?

2. Do we agree that abortions are a direct result of #1?

3. Do we agree that abortions are an undesirable thing? If not from a moral stance, then at least in the way having an appendectomy is an undesirable thing?

If we agree on these things, then can we agree to work towards things that achieve the desired end state where abortion is legal but completely un-utilized?

I would have the exact same objective for homicide. I would love to have a country where homicide is legal but there are no homicides. Obviously that sounds ridiculous and completely unrealistic. What is the point? The point is that I want a country where nobody is murdered because nobody wants to murder anyone, not because they are afraid of legal punishment. Legal deterrence only goes so far. I am 100% confident I could murder someone and face no legal consequences, so what effect does the law have on my decision making?

This is what I have come to realize with abortion: I hate abortion, but what does changing the law really change? I don’t want mothers who only birth their babies because they are afraid of going to jail. I want mothers who love their children, both before and after birth. I don’t want women to find themselves in incredibly difficult situations with an unwanted pregnancy. But changing the law isn’t going to change anyone’s heart, and that is ultimately what I care about.

I know what a tier list is, but I’m stuck on mobile right now and it was hard to find an editor to edit the tier elements with. The new format is better.

So basically you are saying that abortions are a fact of life…

Glad to know that a country where women don’t have unwanted pregnancies is a pure fantasy, so it isn’t an objective that anyone should work towards.

• Let’s not try to reduce the maternal mortality rate so that women don’t have to make the horrible choice between living and having an abortion

• Let’s not have safe, effective, and available contraception so that women don’t get pregnant on accident

• Let’s not try to eliminate rape so that women aren’t forcibly impregnated

No, a country with legal abortions that are unwanted isn’t achievable so we shouldn’t try to work towards it. Just like we will never eliminate gun violence, so why bother even trying to work towards it…

I feel like this is just as much of a meme as this post: https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/f7799a12-d1a3-4cc3-b682-8c2943043baa.jpeg

Which is a screenshot of an old news story.

Or this post: https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/1ef0fc84-eace-47f0-b928-7a1446e03b6c.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=256

Which is simply a screenshot of someones Twitter post.

So I’m pretty sure that isn’t why it is downvoted so much…

At least my content is original.

deleted by creator

^ This is the only attempt at an objective argument in this entire thread and it is not the argument presented by the OPs story, which was the point I was trying to make.

Maternal mortality includes abortions though: A maternal death is defined by the World Health Organization as “the death of a woman while pregnant or within 42 days of termination of pregnancy".

I could care less about being downvoted, but it made me realize that even people who claim to be interested in objective truth and facts are no different than the religious people who they mock for ignoring scientific evidence for things like global warming. Everyone just wants to reaffirm what they already believe.

“Still a man, he hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest” -Paul Simon

Where does the Bible say life begins at first breath? I know that is says this, “13 For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.” Psalm 139:13 NIV.

If I were to argue on premises, then I would start with a higher premise: Why is murder illegal? If it is my religious belief that murder is wrong, then by your argument doesn’t that make homicide laws a violation of the 1st Amendment and thus unconstitutional?

It is literally the highlighted quote in the article: “we actually have the substantiated proof of something we already knew—that abortion bans kill people.”

This is true as evidenced by the story, but what is also true is that abortions also kill people. So the question should be is it a net positive or a net negative? I don’t see this being examined in any objective and scientific way.

No, what I have a problem with is using a sample size of 1 as evidence of an epidemic and the perception that no women die from legal abortion procedures.

Also, from the report: “In 20 of the 108 cases, the abortion was performed as a result of a severe medical condition where continuation of the pregnancy threatened the woman’s life.”

I point this out because another misconception is that you can always save the woman’s life with an abortion if it is threatened by the pregnancy.

I don’t want anyone to interpret this to mean that I think it was in any way OK that this woman died, but I do want to point out what I see as an objective bias here.

According to the National Libary of Medicine: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4554338/

108 women died from complications related to legal abortions during a 12 year period between 1998 and 2010, for an average of 9 per year. Where are these stories on the front page?

This is a story that is posted to elicit an emotional reaction rather than a honest attempt to examine whether there is actual recorded medical evidence that more women are dying as a result of this policy.

Edit:

• Post citing scientific data -11.
• “Religious people should be locked in asylums” +10.

Says a lot about this community.

What you are describing is actually the simple truth that many worldviews and the beliefs and values that stem from them are incompatible and cannot coexist. This is the fundamental problem with the first ammendment. It assumes that people are exercising beliefs that are not diametrically opposed to each other.

Ironically, a bolt-action hunting rifle which is legal in all 50 states would be a much better choice for an assassination attempt than “assault rifles” like an AR-15 or the even less accurate AK-47. So not only can they not shoot, they apparently don’t know anything about rifles either.

I’m not sure how you interpret this story to represent this comment, but it appears to me that Robert’s sister likely invited him to her Bible study, not because he is a Christian but expressly because he is not. He was likely dragged there by his wife Corinna. This seems to be corraborated by the ABC story:

Members of both Woodhull’s and Castillo’s family urged her not to marry him.

“It’s a testament to the kind of person she was that she went through with it, thinking she could help him,” the prosecutor said. “I can’t believe that she knew her wedding vows would ultimately be her death sentence.”

So Corinna, against the advice of everyone who knows Robert, marries into an abusive relationship thinking she can help him, and brings him to his sister’s Bible study, where he stabs her in a supposed drug induced rage, and you interpret his actions as an accurate representation of Christian love? Robert doesn’t represent even Wordly love in this story, let alone Christ like love.

If you note, I put “businessman” in quotes for both of them because it isn’t the correct term for either of them. It isn’t the correct term for Taylor because it is the wrong pronoun, and it isn’t the correct term for Trump because he seems incapable of running a successful business. It was an intentional construct for ironic parallelism, not an oversight.

Reagan was at least governor of California prior to running for president.

The argument that “you shouldn’t vote for someone just because your favorite celebrity endorses them” seemed like a much more credible argument before the 2016 election when the winning candidate essentially won by literally being a celebrity.

Prior to 2016, Trump was probably best known for being the host of a reality TV show, and being a “businessman”. Taylor Swift is definitely better known, and you could also make a solid argument that she is a better “businessman” as well.

I hate to burst any utopian bubbles out there, but the problem with society ultimately isn’t capitalism, or communism, or socialism, or fascism, or any other system of government or economics. The problem with society is people. We are the problem. While some systems of government are certainly better than others at protecting us from our ourselves, eventually they all crumble and succumb to our depravity.

“We have met the enemy, and they are us” -Pogo

Yes, and gasoline actually has less energy density than body fat at approx. 33 MJ/L vs. 35 MJ/L : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density

The thing people do no appreciate about professional and Olympic level sports is just how far the male athletes are beyond the athletic ability of the average man.

There seems to be a notion that just because someone is a male they get to compete at the highest level of sports. This is simply not the case. The vast majority of male athletes will never even come close to reaching a professional level. Even an above average male college athlete has a snowball’s chance in hell of making it in a league like the NFL.

When we are talking about women competing with these men, we aren’t talking about competing against men with average or even above average ability (professional female athletes would mop the floor with men in the 60% percentile) we are talking about competing against the top .000001% of male athletes.

Women not only have a biological disadvantage, they have a population size disadvantage. Far more boys and men compete in sports and games. I don’t care what game or sport you are competiting in, if you have population A containing 100 randomly selected competitors and population B containing 1000 competitors, you don’t have to be a statistician to figure out that your #1 competitor and probably your entire top 10 are going to come from population B.