As long as it’s not MY argument.

Wrong. Wrongwrongwrong.

You said this in the previous thread and you were wrong. You’re still wrong. You could not be more wrong, actually.

The obligation to effect rescue at sea is possibly the oldest of maritime traditions and international laws. It was encoded into international law with the Brussels Convention of 1910 and restated several times since. I believe the most recent operative law is Article 12 of the Geneva Conventions that requires all signatory states to enact their own domestic laws requiring masters of vessels carrying their flag to effect a rescue of any person or vessel in distress at sea without regard for the rescuees’ circumstances or status. Boat in trouble sends distress signal, you respond and offer aid. Happen across person floating, you take them aboard. Yes, it is a legal requirement as well as a moral one. Do otherwise and you will be charged with a crime.

Some questions arise over the status of refugees, fugitives, or asylum-seekers and the current law is that vessels’ masters aren’t competent to judge such status and are responsible for the safety of any rescuee until the rescuee is placed ashore. IOW, they may not pluck people out of a lifeboat and then hand them over to the navy of whatever country they were trying to get away from. The one thing most definetely NOT in dispute is whether they are obligated to pluck them out in the first place. They most certainly are. Always.

Simply put, if you are sipping cocktails in your boat watching somebody drown you most certainly are committing a crime and a pretty atrocious one at that. Pick another example- repeating this one casts serious doubt on your intelligence and humanity.

We don’t deny people who smoke medical treatment for lung cancer.

We don’t deny people with difficult lives treatment for depression or anxiety.

We don’t deny people who eat bacon access to drugs that help with cholesterol.

But we do deny women access to medical treatment if they have sex and get pregnant and don’t want to be pregnant. Having my kid nearly killed me. But I got to choose to take that risk. Because of the nature of my pregnancy (hellp syndrome) I didn’t know it was going to be life threatening until I was way past the point where most doctors will perform abortions. If i had chosen differently , I would have been SOL cause someone thinks that sex is such a bad habit I should die for it. I did it to myself when I chose to have sex (with a turkey baster full of sperm apparently- dudes are never mentioned in this argument).

If you really love the babies soooooooooooooo much, then why on earth would you want to make sure that there are more unwanted children in the world? If it’s all about saving lives, then what specifically are you doing to make sure the lives of actual people are better?

And do you really think that children should be viewed as a punishment imposed on women for having sex? Do you think that’s in the best interests of actual children? Do your own children know that you view them as a curse?

My kid knows that I am fiercely pro-choice. He also knows that from the moment the stick turned blue I wanted him. That’s one of the benefits of being a pro-choice parent. My kid will never doubt that he was loved and wanted. I can imagine how horrible it is for children whose parents don’t feel the same way.

Some really excellent points being made here by others, by the way.

Likewise, you do not have to give up a kidney to someone, but, if you were to beat a woman into kidney failure that would surely kill her without a transplant (and you happened to be a perfect match), you can bet that your options would be (1) giving her the kidney or (2) being charged with second-degree murder.

Whoops! There goes your argument. ”

And you fail basic reading comprehension forever.

Let’s look at the last half of that paragraph you oh so conveniently forgot to quote:

“…You can then argue that if the pedestrian dies due to the refusal they’ll be charged with manslaughter. Possibly true. It depends on the accident. But they will be charged with striking the pedestrian with their vehicle, NOT for refusing to donate and organ. This speaks to the principle of bodily sovereignty, and by refusing to allow a woman to get an abortion, you are denying hers.”

Murder implies intent to kill. Manslaughter says accidental death. And if we take it a step further down the liability scale and say the pedestrian committed suicide by jumping in front of the car, then the driver’s culpability is roughly nil (laws suits in all cases aside).

Before you charge around accusing everyone else on this thread of intellectual dishonesty and scientific illiteracy you might clean up your own act, mm-kay?

Now let me state this as plainly as I can.

If you strike someone with your car, and they die, you will be charged with striking them with your car. Whether the charge is manslaughter or murder, is dismissed as an accident, you are charged for the act of striking them with your vehicle.

If you are capable of donating a compatible organ, you may. The law has no opinion about the matter one way or another. The only way this can help you in court is if it saves the victim’s life. But if the transplant that saves their life comes from any other person on the planet, or if they take your organ but die anyway, it still won’t have any effect on the criminal charges filed. What matters is the patient’s outcome.

Once more, just so it doesn’t get lost in a sea of text:

What matters is the patient’s outcome.

Medical details of how survived the incident have no bearing on the determination of whether the driver was initially responsible. Settlement comes AFTER guilt or innocence has been established.

In your example of beating the woman nigh unto death, you are still going to charged with physical assault regardless of whether you give a kidney or not. While you might be able to reduce the charge from murder to aggravated assault if she survives, that does not change the basic nature of what you are charged with: Your deliberate injury of this woman.

In the case of pregnancy, the deliberate act in most situations is to engage in sex. That is what the actors involved have a choice over, and that is what should be criminalized following precedent.

RE: abortion and status quo

I think I speak for most women (Quiverfulls not withstanding) when I say that it is not, in fact, the status quo for me to be pregnant. I have actually spent the entirety of my life up to this point Not Pregnant. Am I in constant deviation from the status quo?

Abortion is not a deviation from a woman’s status quo, it is a return to it. True, the technical details require more active medical intervention. However, the same principles would apply if I were to surreptitiously hooked up to the apocryphal Famous Violinist so that we were hopeless entwined. In either case, I did not consent to give another life form the use of my organs, and even if it requires a team of the top surgeons in the world to separate us it is still a return to the status quo to do so.

A woman having sex is as bad as a man beating a woman into kidney failure. You people are out of your goddamn minds.

I have several points to make here.

First: You are condemning the fetuses that you are wanting to force women to bear to term to live unwanted. No child deserves that. If a woman becomes pregnant unintentionally, and is unwilling or unable to care for the child, what then? If you want people to think of the child, why don’t you?

Secondly: Are you categorically opposed to abortion in all cases, including those of rape or incest? In cases where bearing the child to term would kill the mother? In cases where the child would be a vegetable?

Thirdly: Violet’s point about your equating something that doesn’t have *senses* yet with actual people’s struggle for equal rights is valid. Is it a safe assumption that you are a at least marginally religious heterosexual white female in at least the middle class?

Oh, and your holier-than-thou comment about conservatives donating more than liberals just makes you look like a prick.

it makes it, in this instance, a religious campaign gleefully appropriating the language of social justice.

Oh, Violet. As you may not know, I’m not religious, nor do I belong to a “religious campaign.”

By the way, I love how the “social justice for me but not for thee” crowd gets so upset about “appropriation” of language. AWESOME stuff. It was like during the Prop. 8 debacle, when the African-American community (70% of whom voted against allowing gay marriage) got its collective panties in a bundle because the gay-rights crowd “appropriated” their civil rights language. Then the feminists got all upset, because they like both groups and think that their fight applies to both minorities and gays, and, oh, it was a mess. Unless, of course, you believe in the dignity of the individual and therefore understand that no one group “owns” the language of social justice or a civil rights movement.

Let’s be honest: if you actually have no fight against the arguments, and if you see the horrific parallels between dehumanising various groups of people and dehumanising the unborn, the only argument you have left is to complain about “glee[ful] appropriation” of your language. The other option is to stop your whining (and swearing) and come over to the pro-life camp – the one that fights for social justice in the face of thought experiments involving firefighters and refrigerators.