Penny

Frokane's Mildly Politcal Hangout Thread

Obstetrics and Gyno

Grim Galaxy: Shots and Chances

"Great great, now if you can get the door open before the...," Junebug hissed as a plasma bolt blew a chunk of earth the size of a dinner plate into glowing fragments of magma. At the temperature of plasma everything burned and the earth sparkled as its trace elements burned off and cooled into slivers of volcanic glass.

"Terrans catch up," she concluded and raised her submachine gun to her shoulder. The slug thrower craked three times in quick succession and she dropped back into cover. The hatch seemed to be located in a floodway, a small tributary that fed one of the larger rivers only when it was swollen with fresh rain. The silvery surface of the hatch must have once been underground but the slow erosion of soil had revealed it to Drake. The same erosion gave Junebug a narrow trench to crouch in as the Terran return fire hissed over her head, treating her to fresh showers of burning debris.

Drake waved his hand in front of the panel and to his evident delight a series of flowing glyphs appeared in the air like holograms. The stuttered in and out of existence but were clearly visible.

"Hostile units, this is your one and only chance to surrender," a voice buzzed in Junebug's ear. They must be blasting a general frequency call and her mastoid was picking it up. She glanced over her shoulder and saw Drake touching the holograms in sequence. Another near miss dumped burning leaf mulch onto her smoke curling up from her ceramic body armor.

"Hold your fire, we are coming out," she responded. Neil looked at her in shock but she merely shook her head. Drake triumphantly hit the last rune in the sequence. Nothing happened and there was a moment of awkward silence as the Terran fire slackened. Drake's face fell like a puppy that has been kicked.

"Come out with your hands up!" called a voice, tinny and metallic through a helmet speaker. The door panel wavered and dissapeared. It didn't retract or open, it just simply wasn't there. Behind it stood a long tunnel plated in what looked like tarnished silver. It smelled like old antiseptics.

"In!" Sayeeda ordered and shoved Drake through the opening.

"Close the..." but the younger man was already on it mashing a similar sequence of rooms. A Terran in body armor burst over the rim of the ditch and pointed a military issue mob gun at them. In an instant he fired and the door wavered back into existance. The tunnel fell into darkness and there was a clanging noise like a rain of supersonic ball bearings.

"Really hoping they can't get that door open," Junebug observed dryly.

@POOHEAD189

Frokane's Mildly Politcal Hangout Thread

Sent the article to OB, that will put the cat among the pigeons!

Frokane's Mildly Politcal Hangout Thread

<Snipped quote by Penny>

I guess this is the part where I play my disability card... let's play it gently. I mean.... there's an element of eugenics in this, right? That's not the reason you (or anyone else, probably) might go along with it, not at all -- but that element is totally there, right? I mean someone, someday, would have to go compile a list of acceptable conditions under which a living baby can be legally murdered. ADD babies live, autistic babies get the axe, or whatever. I don't think anybody anywhere wants to even think about that, let alone actually DO it.

@mdk

Iceland already provides screening for babies with down syndrome and give women the option to abort. The majority of them take it. There are numerous other diseases which we already routinely screen for and a woman might opt to abort if it were. If I were carrying a fetus which were projected to have anencephaly of course I would abort. If it is eugenics to try to avoid genetic diseases, then all those gene therapy trials are in trouble. Frankly I hope we are one day able to edit out such genetic defects, although we have a considerable way to go.

a list of acceptable conditions under which a living baby can be legally murdered.

@mdk

According to the article the Netherlands alreay has such a list:

the neonate’s suffering must be unbearable or the fetus must be suffering or be likely to suffer after birth;

there must not be a prospect of improvement, and in the case of a late-term abortion, the fetal disorder must be so serious that medical experts believe that medical treatment after birth would be futile;

the parents must have been fully informed of the diagnosis and prognosis, and both the physician and the parents must be convinced that no reasonable alternative exists given the situation of the child or the fetus;

at least one other, independent physician must have examined the child or fetus and given a written opinion on compliance with the due criteria of the kind listed above;

and the termination of life or of the pregnancy must be carried out with all due care. (Euthanasia and Newborn Infants, Government of the Netherlands website (last visited Jan. 13, 2015); 2007 Directions, 2.3(a & c-e) & 4.6.2 (a-b & d-f).)

And what jumps out is, like.... nothing else works that way. If you take out a loan for a car, and then your social or psychological circumstances change and the car becomes a burden, you still have to pay your car loan. If you go to school and major in lesbian dance theory, and the economic circumstances of society change so drastically that lesbian dance theorists aren't making money (who could fathom such a dystopian world?), you still have to pay your student loans. But the author (apparently?) thinks that helpless little babies are a whole other story -- you can just whack them against a wall. Like what in the fuck.

@mdk

Ah the old fetus/car loan equivalency. Seriously? How is this even remotely similar? You didn't borrow the fetus from someone...unless ... you DID?!

It is a little unclear in the article that he is explicitly saying that a baby should be aborted for what we might think of as conventional economic reasons. He seems to be initially suggesting that a condition might be discovered that would make the care of the baby an impossible financial burden. He later broadens this to include 'non-medically' necessary abortions for economic reasons, but plenty of conditions are cripplingly expensive to the parents without medically necessitating abortion. He does extrapolate that there isn't a clear distinction to be made between a late term abortion and an after birth abortion.

Ironically the same distinction gets used in the opposite direction by the pro-womenbeingforcedtocarrybabiestotermregardlessoftheirwishes crowd. I suppose it is something that should be left up to the mothers but I personally would never be comfortable euthanizing a healthy newborn.

In a perfect world we could screen for all genetic disease and treat or terminate early. Or genetically edit, that would also be awesome.

Frokane's Mildly Politcal Hangout Thread

Most early stage abortions are carried out solely for economic/social reasons of course.

Frokane's Mildly Politcal Hangout Thread

@POOHEAD189 They don't really cite any actual cases, they are just talking in broad theoreticals.

Grim Galaxy: Shots and Chances

Junebug leaned back against a large fungus with a vaguely purplish sheen, her skin prickled with adrenaline and she felt dry and detached despite the oppressive humidity.

“Ademahawhatnow?” she asked as she clipped the plasma rifle to her pack and shifted the submachine gun forward. They might or might not have shaken the terrans but the slug thrower was the better choice of weapon, both for the short sightlines and the heavy folliage. Plasma rifles put out an impressive amount of power but they vented their energy on the first solid object they encountered. It would be very impressive to blast a shrub to flaming cinders but it was of limited utility if the commando, or xeno monstrosity behind it would be unharmed.

Sayeeda was not an uneducated woman as such things went. She had been to military college on Croyden, a high tech world whose main export was soldiers, naval officers, and administrators, but the curriculum there had left little time for such abstract topics as history. A slight smile twitched the corners of her mouth, she doubted Drake could tell her much about the operations of a signals intercept detachment, but that wasn’t really germane to the discussion. Fortunately Drake needed no encouragement to enlighten her.

“The Aelahyne or the Forerunners as the less educated call them, were the first Xenos race that humans encountered. They had a mastery of the RIP that we can’t even begin to imagine. They were the original guardians of the Vault from which many of the advanced technologies that allowed the Golden Age of expansion were drawn from,” Drake said, his voice gaining strength and authority as he covered information which was at once familiar and allowed him appear superior to his rescuers/captors. It must have been a relief to him, after days of uncertain activity, to find himself in control of at least this information. Sayeeda blinked realizing she had tuned out for a moment.

“Valuable alien tech, got it,” she supplied filling the silence which clearly required some interjection from her.
“It is a find of incredible historical significance!” Drake half shouted. Sayeeda smacked him in the jaw with the butt of her submachine gun, dropping the younger man into a pile at her feet.

“Keep your fucking voice down,” she said in a quiet deadly tone. With practices swiftness she scanned the jungle, clicking through her helmets various enhancements. No sign of the Terrans.

“Last thing we need is a brick of Terran commandos, honing in on your whining.” Drake lifted his fingers from a bloodied lip, his face a mix of shock and anger. After a moment he nodded his head and pulled himself to his feet.

“Anyone ever tell you that you can be a bit of a bitch?”

@POOHEAD189

The Sunday Group

If no one else has plane stuff ill skip to Maine, no point making a post if you dont need to.

Frokane's Mildly Politcal Hangout Thread

@POOHEAD189 Sure it can. I read the article.

I personally feel that terminating an infant after birth, barring some sort of encephalopathy or birth defect would be a violation of my Hippocratic oath.

However, if a disease has not been detected during the pregnancy, if something went wrong during the delivery, or if economical, social or psychological circumstances change such that taking care of the offspring becomes an unbearable burden on someone, then people should be given the chance of not being forced to do something they cannot afford."

It is hard to imagine that the economic cost would not be clear long before birth except in the case of an undetected medical condition.

"we do not think that in fact more than a few days would be necessary for doctors to detect any abnormality in the child."

Ok if we are talking severe and undetected abnormalities...

"then the same reasons which justify abortion should also justify the killing of the potential person when it is at the stage of a newborn."

Again in the case of defects I can go with you here but in the case that you discovered a sufficiently severe defect via amnio weeks or months in the past, you would be negligent to hold off until after birth for the abortion. Similarly the economic cost of raising a child with no undetected defect ought to be clear FAR in advance of birth and you would be negligent to not abort earlier if that were you criteria.

"we do not claim that after-birth abortions are good alternatives to abortion. Abortions at an early stage are the best option, for both psychological and physical reasons."

That much we agree on, if you are going to abort, abort as early as possible. I can see the logical outgrowth they are driving at but it is hard to see where it would really be applicable sans a defect discovered after birth. Waiting till after birth for any reason other than an undetected defect seems like negligence.