Integral Interpretation of Abortion, Abortion Bans

Thank you for letting us know your own views! This is all very clear and well written.

I think my major issue with this is, the status quo established by Roe vs. Wade WAS the compromise. This is an age-old political tactic – two parties come to a compromise and meet in the middle, then one of those parties takes a huge step back and says “why aren’t you meeting me in the middle anymore?” This to me feels like bad-faith diplomacy. It’s the “golden mean” fallacy writ large.

I don’t think they compromised here in good faith whatsoever. Again, a woman only has TWO WEEKS to miss her menstrual cycle, get a pregnancy test, confirm she is pregnant, make an informed decision about what to do next, and schedule an appointment, hoping one is available in time.

The goal here, I think, was to get as close to a “ban” as they possibly could without having to call it a “ban”. This really isn’t a compromise at all. And what’s worse, it’s clear from Abbott’s statements that the legislators either did not know that the six weeks begins at the beginning of a woman’s last menstrual cycle (which would make them incompetent/illiterate), or they did know and are pretending that a woman actually does have a full six weeks after conceiving or confirming she is pregnant (which would make them malicious).

And not including any exceptions whatsoever for rape, incest, or unviable/stillborn pregnancies seems intentionally cruel, from a purely humanitarian perspective.

Not to mention the vigilante justice system that they created, whereby ordinary citizens are deputized and have a financial incentive to ‘rat out’ their friends, family, and neighbors. Again, I feel bad for every woman who will experience a spontaneous abortion (which occurs in 1 out of 8 pregnancies), and who will then be looked at with suspicion and maybe even opportunism by the rest of her community. I’d love to hear your thoughts about this, because as far as I can tell, this effectively breaks the standards and principles of “justice” that we have evolved and sustained over the last couple centuries. If I see you hit someone else’s car on the highway, I have no right to sue you just because I was a witness to this event. If we follow this precedent to its natural conclusion, then anyone can sue anyone for any perceived transgression, regardless of whether the plaintiff was actually affected by the defendant one way or the other.

Knowing that middle-class and upper-class women still have the option of easily ignoring the mandate by simply hopping on a plane and flying to a different state, I suppose my short-term hope is that some pool of resources are made available for lower-class women to have the same opportunity.

I fully agree with your final paragraph, by the way. It takes us back to that old Winston Churchill chestnut: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others”. And of course, we also have to consider Plato’s warning: “the true navigator must study the seasons of the year, the sky, the stars, the winds, and all the other subjects appropriate to his profession if he is to be really fit to control the ship…[the electorate] think that it’s quite impossible to acquire the professional skill needed for such control and that there’s no such thing as the art of navigation.”

Personally, I just hope that our pendulum still has enough swing remaining in order to recover from this new set of regressive (relative to the previous status quo) policies that are being enacted.

Thanks again for sharing @FermentedAgave!

I call this tyranny by bureaucracy. It’s what the Communists did in Central Europe during the Communist Era. You are “free” to do all kinds of things, but in practicality you can’t due to the law either deliberately or incompetently made that way.

Ah, yes - another trick from Communism. Reward for ratting out your neighbors for not being fanatical enough. I can’t think of any other area where I can get a reward for ratting out my neighbor. In tax law it has to be over a couple million dollars at stake before you get a reward. If we had a similar reward for tax evasion, can you imagine the carnage (and increased revenues), lol.

Personally, I’ve accepted that I might need to implement a personal “no travel” policy on certain states. If more of these laws are passed on key Republican policy points and the Supreme Court does the same thing - it will be more risky to travel within those states than to Cuba, for example.

Like what specifically?

An example of a specific law that has already been passed is one making the owners of a business liable for prosecution to sex trafficking if even one prostitute uses the medium to solicit sex, for example. That bill already exists and is national law, as far as I know. Which is why craigslist no longer has any personals sections, lol. It doesn’t take any kind of stretch of the imagination that if I live a lifestyle contrary to certain values, there is no telling what kind of laws might be passed in some 20-30+ states, or if the Supreme Court will follow the Rule of Law or if they’ll just chuck it out the window as they did in the case of the Texas Anti-Abortion Law. If we cannot be guaranteed that the Supreme Court will follow the rule of law when it conflicts with religious law, then there is really no limit to one’s exposure if one lives a lifestyle that is contrary to the religious law.
This isn’t even straw manning, either. It’s two actual laws that show a trend of the direction the Republican party is going.

Just to add a little more complexity to the subject…hopefully we’re all aware that among Christians, there is no agreement in position on abortion. There are Protestant denominations that support reproductive rights, including the choice of abortion, and within that group, there is a whole spectrum of position, from elective legal abortion under any circumstance to specific cases of “morally justified” abortion. and everything in between.

There is also no agreement within Christianity as to when “life” begins; there is not even a common use of language, with some quoting Biblical scripture to uphold that “life begins before birth:” or that “life begins at conception,” or “life begins when the fetus is filled with the Holy Ghost,” or “life begins with the ‘quickening’ (when the mother first feels the movement of the fetus in the womb) or when the fetus is ‘ensouled.’”

The Catholic religion, along with Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christians and Jehovah’s Witnesses all believe that life begins at conception. Baptist churches have no agreement as to when life begins, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, while opposing elective abortion, has no clear position on when life begins.

So the abortion question is not just one of religions vs. secular humanism; there are vast differences within particular religions themselves. So we could actually say that different branches of a single religion are arguing for or trying to claim their own particular brand of “freedom,” applied not just to the female, but to and in support of their own denomination.

I would also add that while I understand what people mean when they say “the sanctity of life,” in our evolutionary history, I can’t see where this has ever been successfully upheld. I think @raybennett has been most vocal in pointing this out; everything from war to capital punishment to gun violence to starvation/famine, to forced sterilizations of the past and large scale murder in the name of religion (e.g. the Inquisition)–has in one sense made a mockery of the “sanctity of life.”
Which isn’t to say that we don’t aspire to it as a civilization, but we ain’t there yet. It’s kind of like politicians or others who around a mass shooting or the burning and looting of property during protests, or an insurrection at the Capitol exclaim “this is not who we are.” But it is who we are, at least partly, and it’s simply not logical/rational to me that we claim otherwise, and around the sanctity of life and abortion issue, I’m with George Carlin and others in wanting a little logical consistency. And a little more truth in differentiating our aspirations/ideals from the “what is.”

I would also add, as KW spoke of in the “Integral View on Abortion” podcast, a woman’s right to choose is one of those issues that some women in general, and many feminists in particular, feel/believe is paramount in continuing and forwarding the equality of the sexes–personal agency and bodily autonomy, as Corey said, being “exceptionally important concepts.”

1 Like

@corey-devos

One man’s regression is another woman’s progress - it’s all in perspective. :slight_smile:

If it helps you some, I don’t agree with everything in the Texas law (6 week cut-off, virtually no exceptions, rat on your neighbor), but I also see positives. This is only one move on the chess board of humanity. To think that the Right to Lifer’s shouldn’t be able to in act laws in states where they have a majority does seem a bit dominance hierarchy’ish.

There is much more game to be played and the Left/Far Left are in an extremely powerful position with control or coordinated alignment between Administration (including DOJ, FBI, NSA, CIA), House, Senate, mainstream media, and Facebook/Google/Twitter/Amazon. Given this incredibly popular and dominate position, after the 2022 elections (our next feedback and inclusion process) the Far Left might find it best to go ahead and pack SCOTUS to 13 justices and also amend the Constitution. That’s less than 24 months. I have little fear that the Texas law will make much dent the 1.2M US abortions that will likely happen between now and spring 2023 when the messianic cavalry so to speak arrives in DC.

Implementing policy is how any government tries to create a logical/rational framework. Just as the NY and VA late term abortion laws stretch the towards an ultimate freedom of choice vs right to life, the Texas law slides the scale more towards the right to life at the expense of freedom of choice.
NY’ers can wail that “but what about freedom of choice - TX doesn’t make sense, illogical, immoral, unconstitutional,…” with religious (or anti-religious) zealotry, just as the majority in TX can wail “NY doesn’t make sense, it’s illogical, immoral, unconstitutional…” with equal zealotry of a religious sort.

With our mutli-layered distribution of powers, many many many issues are in fact the States prerogative, not Federal. In general, like it or no, by default issues ARE the State’s prerogative unless explicitly granted to the Federal government.

I think fundamentally one of the disconnects between the Left and Right are that the Left prefers Centralized power at the Federal level, while the Right prefers States based powers. From what I am hearing, one attractive facet of centralizing power in the Federal government is to make it easy to understand. Perhaps the Right likes things messy.

This is complete mythology invented by Right wing commentators and only selective viewing of particular issues. “The Right” does also love centralization of powers - just for different issues (like inventing wars and making trillions off of the military industrial complex decade after decade).

1 Like

LIFE BEGINS AT CONCEPTION

I have reason for assuming that life starts at conception, when a new DNA molecule is created, with the union of the mother’s and father’s DNA. My reasoning for this relates to DNA entanglement; the unity of life begins with the unity of the DNA molecule. I outline the reasons for taking DNA entanglement seriously, in my article, Quantum Semiotics (which has implications for nonlocality of self, but I digress). I reject this indulgent “sanctity of human life” interpretation favored by the Right. ALL life is sacred, imho. The current casual acceptance of the abortion industry is taking on the proportions of state-sponsored genocide, and belongs up there also with the way we treat non-human animals, especially in the context of battery farming. [how we treat non-human sentients reflects how we regard ourselves]

NO SUCH THING AS INSTINCT - ALL CREATURES ARE SENTIENT

Animal activist John Odberg posted a report on a horrifying landscape of battery-penned cows in Kansas. Battery-raised pigs and chickens, everyone knows about, but this large farm in Kansas of confined sentient beings I found especially disturbing. It was the scene referenced by Odberg that first caught my attention, and made me realize how divorced us humans are from respecting and understanding life. I wasn’t able to find the original link to Odberg’s reference, but it’s just as relevant for pigs and dairy cows.

All this ties in with the mind-body problem and the neuroplastic brain. Every living entity’s body provides the tools with which it engages its ecosystem, and thus intercepts experiences. And experiences wire neuroplastic brains (Norman Doidge is a pioneer of this crucial insight). The human ecosystem is culture. Human bodies are predisposed to engaging with human cultures, which wire human brains into their functional specializations. The mechanistic approach, by contrast, assumes that the brain’s functional specializations are determined in the DNA blueprint; a fatally flawed assumption. The deterministic, Cartesian, brains-as-computers narrative weighs heavily on our abysmal failure to understand how life works. It also plays its part as the flip-side of the because-God narrative of Judeo-Christianity.

HUMANS-R-SPESHUL… NOT

Because-God ignorance expresses itself in the because-genes ignorance that opposes it. Yet despite their apparent opposition to one-another, both are united in the Humans-r-Speshul nonsense that posits humans as somehow “above” and exempt from the laws that govern the rest of nature… you know, only humans have free will, and all that human exceptionalism.

I was very interested in Intelligent Design theory until they went all human-exceptionalist on us. Human exceptionalism is responsible for our failures in the life sciences, and something analogous to a Copernican revolution is required to remove us from the center of all meaning and purpose in the universe.

1 Like

What some women (and men) in general, and many feminists in particular, believe, represents an earth-bound perspective that has failed to connect with the infinitude of possibilities that exist in the wider universe. Whenever these controversies come up, I’m always asking myself what other advanced, alien cultures would make of our parochial, earth-bound obsessions and isms. Do advanced alien cultures also concern themselves with diversity, LGBTQ rights and equality? I doubt it. The key question should be, what are the essential principles that apply to life processes, independently of individual agendas? How do gender roles relate to our cultural “knowing how to be”? Hence my interest in semiotics (CS Peirce) and biosemiotics (Jakob von Uexküll).

1 Like

If ALL life is sacred from the moment of potential and has the right to fulfil that potential then we hit a difficulty. What do we eat?

1 Like

Eat whatever you want - but can you recognize that unless you eat human meat your question is irrelevant and one of those “straw man” arguments @FermentedAgave is so sensitive about? I don’t think anyone is saying a leaf of lettuce is equal to a fetus. Of course you have to eat something that’s not the issue. But even if you eat meat why is that relevant in opposition to saying we should not bomb innocent civilians for causes that are made up and very questionable in morality?
Oh - I have a right to eat steak. Therefore it’s ok to bomb civilians and invade whoever for whatever reason? The point just makes zero sense.

It’s also possible to eat a living thing and also respect the sanctity of life. This is the origin of “Saying grace” before meals if people are religious. Part of it is thanking the almighty for providing food - and another part is observing reverence. So even if we needed to eat people meat for nutrition, it’s still possible to express the sacred nature of a meal and not just kill so needlessly or wantonly.

2 Likes

I think it’s necessary to put the events in order here:
Sexuality started as very “liberal”. There were actually sex temples, for example in many cultures. Homosexual behavior was not any kind of big deal. See Alexander the Great, for example. Masculine women and effeminate men were also completely accepted in many ancient societies and served important roles (like guarding the harem, lol).
So it’s first necessary to point out that was the original state.
Later terminology was developed to describe hate towards these groups and activities.
The various postmodern -isms are a response to take back language away from the unnatural hate towards others and replace it with more neutral language.

Honestly the issue of liberals creating neutral words to describe identity would be the absolute very last concern of an alien species observing humanity. It wouldn’t even make their top 20 list of questions.

More significant would be the issue of your previous post. Why do humans so easily place themselves in bondage in “battery-penned” offices and unpleasant housing estates for things they do not really enjoy and brings them no real joy but yet are addicted to and will allow any crime to be committed to not disturb their chattel state .

1 Like

I was trying to set up a reductio ad absurdum argument. I can see that I failed in that. It needed far more depth than I gave it. I can see that those reading it will see the argument as a straw man argument than a reductio ad absurdum argument. That I cannot now be bothered to set the reductio argument out fully is an indication of the lack of value the argument had in the first place…

1 Like

Given my abject failure above, I wonder if I might set out my understanding of where we have got so far in this thread. I do so in the hope that the flaws in my partial understanding may be spotted and pointed out to me.
The topic started with this:
What is the Integral interpretation of Texas’ just enacted post 6 week ban on abortions?
Having read a few of the threads, I realised I didn’t have the necessary knowledge to contribute to the question as posed. My “Integral Interpretation” skills were woolly and not fit for purpose. So, thank you Corey for your referral to your “Inhabit your Perspective” Episode. I watched it a couple of times and took notes.
It is perhaps trite to acknowledge that there are interiors and exteriors to four separate perspectives (8 Zones); that we can be led astray if we are not careful where we conflate any of these areas with each other.
I understand that there are no absolutes, nothing is inherently right or wrong, that all is relative.
We need some kind of structure we can use to enable us to get some understanding of what gives meaning to our lives and apply that meaning to our day to day actions. The concepts of rights and duties are a useful basis for that structure. We acknowledge those rights and duties are social constructs not absolutes, but that does not reduce their efficacy in helping us to understand and give meaning to our lives.
We are aware we suffer and have joys and so we act with compassion on the basis we cannot know the interiors of others.
So, that kind of set the ground for my making an Integral Interpretation of this thread.
My understanding of the issue for discussion is: there are a number of structures and contents in the topic that need to be teased apart and considered before being put back into the overall question if we are to have an informed Integral view:
How should discussions in this thread be framed if the thread itself is to have value
What amounts to Integral Interpretation
To what extent should something be taken as a mutually understood given and if not so, to what extent should it be explained.
Things and concepts have a value in themselves, that value increases with complexity.
Things and concepts have a value in what they contribute to to life, that inherent value increases with the increased value that they add to life.
What is the justification for the rule of law (what is its value)?
What is the justification for this particular law and what is the level of value of this law.
What is the justification for a foetus and what is its value?
What is the justification for this particular foetus and what is the level of value for this particular foetus?
What is meant by the sanctity of life and what are its levels of complexity.
What is meant by the freedom of the individual and what are its levels of complexity.
What is meant by society and what are its levels of complexity.
So these questions are eminently do-able but are simply the beginning of the interesting work.
The interesting and perhaps more valuable work, is that which we undertake when we seek to compare and contrast our personal answers to these questions. The purpose of this undertaking is to give value and meaning to our lives and so to inform the actions we take and which we wish our society to take.
The two or perhaps three big issues that seem to me to come out in this thread are: Where the rights of the individual (broadly I have the right to deal with my body as I see fit) and the rights of society (society has the right to deal with individuals as it sees fit) come into conflict, how do we resolve this.
Where the rights of one individual (the foetus) come into conflict with the rights of another individual (the host of the foetus) how do we resolve this
and perhaps the third issue, where the rights of two particular individuals come into conflict, how far can society go to resolving them.
Well, that’s where I am at the moment.
If you have been kind enough to follow this thread through, thank you for your perseverance, I appreciate it.

1 Like

I disagree. Things changed by a quantum leap with the sexual revolution and the introduction of the hormonal contraceptive pill. Before that, there were natural and unavoidable “consequences” for mistakes that always forced people to re-orientate and reconsider their assumptions. The contraceptive pill especially “tampers” with biology to impact on the cultural choices that shape our values, and, on the surface, it appears to come without consequences. The trouble is that there are consequences, and we are beginning to bear witness to them with the unravelling of our cultures.

I attribute the rise of feminism directly to the sexual revolution and the contraceptive pill. And with the rise of feminism came significant shifts in the assumptions that we make about cultural reality. Do women deserve equality in the workplace? Of course they do. But do women, given the choices that culture has historically granted them, want careers in the workplace as a priority? The Swedish equality experience, with men and women migrating to “traditional” roles on their own volition, despite the equality priority, would suggest not. The bottom line is that tampering with biology via the contraceptive pill has put in place cultural options that are neither sustainable nor desirable, nor reflective of our most primal priorities. The contraceptive pill and the sexual revolution have changed everything to create unnatural expectations and an unsustainable imbalance that is now unravelling.

The proof? What we are witnessing, in the unravelling, was entirely foreseeable… I predicted it years ago. Gender-confused people insisting on “correct” pronouns are manifestations of this tampering with biology (as a Finno-Ugric speaker, I much prefer the genderless pronoun that defers respect to all, regardless of sex - as does Sweden, with their implementation of the Finnish, genderless, “hen”). What a mess. Respect - that’s all that’s required, and that’s what’s missing in the current unravelling into hostile factions trying to assert their own idiosyncratic world views.

1 Like

Now there’s an interesting take on things. My take on feminism is that it arose from women doing what had hitherto been men’s jobs during the First World War. That it was able to get traction was with the invention of the washing machine. That freed up women to do other things. A conjecture may be that the pill came about — we bothered to invent it - as a logical continuation of the freedoms brought about initially by the availability of white goods.

1 Like

Beautiful clarity and wisdom.

1 Like

Hmm, I’m wondering if I’m getting on a soapbox here. Anyway. About gender pronouns.
I’m not LGBTQ+, I’m a heterosexual male. My view will necessarily be partial. A close member of my family is gay and I’ve witnessed her difficulties in life that arise from this, I also have gay friends and gay work colleagues. I hope my interaction with these people has informed my views.
I revel in being a heterosexual male, I would want everybody else to (be able to) revel in whatever particular sexuality floats their boat.
The freedoms that the LGBTQ+ community (wide assumptions there, I acknowledge) currently have, have been hard won. My take on it again, is that those freedoms are not the norm in society as yet.
Language is a significant source of normalisation in society. One of the normalisations in society is the use of gender pronouns. Could it be that the furore around appropriate gender pronouns for the LGBTQ+ comes about because:
(i) If the LGBTQ+ community have socially accepted pronouns differentiating them from the heterosexual members of society , their sexuality will be normalised within society. If their gender pronouns are normalised, there will less concern that their hard won freedoms will be taken away from them. Perhaps this is why the issue is so important to them.
(ii) the converse may well be the same: it could be that some sections of society do not want the LGBTQ+ community to become a norm within society and so fight against the idea of more specific gender pronouns for the LGBTQ+ community.
And this is why I think the idea of having neutral pronouns at this stage is not a good idea. I would see it as a way for those who oppose the idea of the LGBTQ+ community being normalised in our larger society to get their undermining of the LGBTQ+ community through the backdoor, as it were.

This post is to outline the abortion “normalization” going on in our culture under the drum beat of anti status quo “progressivism”. I view this post as a snapshot of “tactics” around normalization leading to monetization leading to industrialization of the abortion industry.

ProgressNow’s messaging is fairly straight forward. ProgressNow’s abortion project leads with “Keep Abortion Safe” (of course everyone wants our women to be safe). I click in it, turns into:


soliciting the “Rage Report” with aligned logos.

This under cover interview shows a bit more on the monetization plans which would seem to be skin crawling creepy at the least and systematic industrialization of genocide at the worst.

“Yeah, and so if we alter our process, and we are able to obtain intact fetal cadavers, then we can make it part of the budget, that any dissections are this, and splitting the specimens into different shipments is this. I mean that’s - it’s all just a matter of line items”.

While illegal to sell fetal cadavers or body parts, you can charge “administrative” fees. Essentially Fetus’ as a Service enablement.