Blogs Jun 7, 2013 at 4:21 pm

Comments

1
A bit hokey, but still pretty great.
2
Not bad, but they're not going to top this one-- http://youtu.be/uov1Q_3jNxY
3
Lesbians go through the door first.
4
Wow. Just wow.

Time to move to Australia!

5
Okay, so here's the awful devil's advocate quandary with this...

If the parents wanted to terminate the pregnancy because they're having a lesbian, you'd have to say it should be allowed because abortion should be legal. Otherwise pro-choice groups would be hypocritical, as it is the woman's decision.
6
@ 5 - Yes, you would have to say it's allowed. It's the same with gender based pregnancy termination. But as gay rights and women's rights continue to progress, it becomes less likely that people will object to having a daughter or a child who is homosexual. If, on the other hand, we begin to police women's reasons for choosing to terminate a pregnancy, we create a situation in which lengthy court battles can force women to not abort.

So it sucks but the best way to deal with it is not to restrict abortion rights. Instead, it's to work for equality for the people who have already been born.
7
@5 actually there's a progressive pro-choice way to address your concern -- if the ability to determine sexual orientation existed how can you support elective at-will abortion: make all screening and even preimplantation genetic diagnosis available ONLY to screen out genetically-linked anomalies that cause functional deficits that lead to substantial pain and suffering to the future child / adult and for which no treatment is available.

Take out the "market demand" idea of screening for eye color, and any other "desirable" trait that is not a painful physiological dysfunction. I think this is actually what many northern European countries already do by law.

Thus, elective abortion is on the have a baby / don't have a baby decision point, or on the baby-will-suffer reasons.

Sure, screening / abortion on for "elective" traiits -- eye color (and perhaps one day orientation-linked traits) is available to northern europeans only if they fly to another country like the USA or China that are capitalism run wild (ironic for China, huh?)... but that's a very tiny % of folks.

So for most northern Europeans, they get on-demand elective abortion, pro-choice, but it's primarily on progressive principles (you do / don't want a child, your future child will suffer from an untreatable genetic condition that causes pain) and not due to social prejudices. Sex is determined from ultrasounds after most abortions occur (although it could be earlier, again, northern European countries discourage sex selection abortions), so again, along progressive principles!
8
M? Drop - I've seen that hypothetical discussed; it doesn't reach the level of a debate. At most, some feminists have said that they would privately think orientation selectivity a rotten reason to abort, but almost none would ever say so.

Here's a possibly thornier devil's advocate question. Assuming detectability at that stage, there is a legislative proposal. All abortions will be made safe, legal and free with just one anti-choice caveat that any same-sexer-to-be must be aborted. If I could think like the sort if scientist who wants to find The Cause no matter how much harm the knowledge does, it would be interesting to see the debate on the left about such a proposal. The best reason I can conjure that such a proposal wouldn't come into being is the 1984-flavoured idea that our presence as The Menace is a cash cow of greater value to the enemy than our extermination could ever be.
9
@raindrop, I disagree.
Here's this Canadian's opinon. In Canada abortions are legal (as they should be, and people don't usually make a stink about it. Thank goodness). But it is my understanding that terminating a pregnancy because of the gender of the foetus is illegal. I think that the way this is done is that late term abortions are not legal and parent's are not allowed to find out the gender of their foetus until after that date has passed. That would work in terms of your "we're having a lesbian" quandary as well.
I could be wrong. I haven't looked up the details or gone through any of the procedures, but from the general knowledge sloshing around up here, I think that's the way it goes.
10
@7.
Thank you for making my point better than I did.
11
Ms Delta - No, no, no, no. We are way too small a minority to be able to trust being protected by progressive principles. Far too many progressives would be only too happy to throw us under the bus for the right incentive.

And since true scientists will insist on finding out only to claim (with varying degrees of sincerity) total surprise when the knowledge is used for evil, the only hope is that The Cause prove undiscoverable.
12
Ms Misc - I think that what's less likely is that people will be able to get away with using the excuse that it's too hard and painful a life to impose on anyone as a cover for aborting based on innate revulsion. But as long as there's a hard core of innate revulsion that isn't going to disappear no matter how much progress is made, the only answer is for The Cause to prove unfindable. I entirely agree that there's no point in restricting reproductive choice.

Unfortunately, I desperately want to avoid getting caught in the How Many = Too Many? Game, but Reduction isn't enough.
13
@9 -- As a Canadian myself, I can tell you that abortion is not actually mentioned in Canadian law, but is dealt with only as a private medical issue between a woman and her doctor. There are no Canadian laws governing how late in a pregnancy an abortion can be performed, or for what reasons.
14
@9, @13: While there is no law governing abortion in Canada, in practice it is not possible to obtain an abortion past 24 weeks gestation as there are no facilities or doctors in the country that will provide one at that point. There are few who will even provide an abortion past 20 weeks.

90% of abortions in Canada take place prior to 13 weeks, and fewer than 1% take place after 20 weeks. Something about having abortion services freely available in almost every region of the country seems to totally eliminate the demand for late-term abortion.

As to gender selection, most doctors and hospitals who do fetal ultrasounds will not determine or reveal the gender until 20 weeks gestation. Most private ultrasound clinics also have this policy. There are cases where clinics have been found to be violating these policies and some communities where gender selective abortion seems to be taking place. The approach to this has not been to ban the practice in law, but rather to educate the public and work on changing the cultural values that promote gender selective abortion.
15
No right is absolute. I quite seriously doubt gender-selection abortion will ever be an issue in the US because the public will rightly recoil in horror from it. If you think the US is ever going to reach a point where abortion is available under any conceivable circumstances, you're living in a fantasy world. The same goes if you think abortion is going to be outlawed. I think we will eventually reach a stalemate (or compromise) where abortion is available under some circumstances, and we're all going to have to make our peace with the fact that none of us is going to get everything we want, regardless of our respective position on the issue.
16
On a different, less weighty note, the title of the video, which pops up at the top, basically gives away the key line of the ad, which is kind of annoying.
17
@15 and others, gender and race selection in abortion is an issue, because Arizona has made it so!

http://www.policymic.com/articles/46363/…
19
@4, it is the OECD's happiest country three years running.

@18, now I am frightened.
20
Re: Bans on selective abortions.

Would you force a woman to to have a person inside of her body if her reasons for saying no to them were based on homophobia, racism or sexism? Would you force someone to donate a kidney to someone if their reasons for saying no to the donation were based on bigotry?

Because when you talk about banning sex/sexuality selective abortions, that's basically what you're saying. You want to deny women the autonomy of their own bodies for the sake of someone else--and in this case, someone who is not even an independent person yet.

Unless you're pro-raping bigoted women and pro-stealing-bigots'-kidneys, I don't see how a pro-choice person could support sex/sexuality selective abortion bans. These selective abortion bans are just a way for the forced birth movement to get people to agree with them so they can drive a wedge in and make it harder to get abortion access. "There's a chance this woman might want an abortion for [banned reason], therefore we will not allow her to have one."

You're not saving anyone. You're just forcing a life-threatening situation (all childbirth is life-threatening) on an unwilling woman.
21
@7
pro-choice as long as your choice is on the pre-approved list of "progressive" choices.
22
well.

what a tidy bunch of rules and provisos.

just one question;

does it muss your hair to shove your head so far up a woman's vagina?
23
and while you are congratulating yourselves on your enlightenment and progressive standards for slaughtering your babies 13 million females are aborted every year just because they are female.

the baby slaughter seems to be tough to control.
24
but please don't take any of this as criticism.

no.

the ones you abort are the lucky ones....
25
@5, 21

In France elective abortion is only legal until the 12th week of pregnancy - that is, before the embryo (a pack of cells looking like a bean) has tansitionned into a foetus (a mini-human, with limbs and yes, a recognisable sex).

Late-term abortion can only happen as a result of doctors (not the woman) prescribing it. Their guidelines : the baby will never become a functionnal human being, or there will be pretty severe health problems for the mother. And if the woman disagrees with the therapeuthic abortion, she can elect to carry to term, whatever the consequences.

Before 12 weeks, the woman is free to choose to continue or to terminate the pregnancy. After 12 weeks, she can choose to continue the pregnancy, even if her doctors want it terminated.

So, in effect, abortion for gender-related reasons is not possible in France, while elective abortion is possible at the very beginning of the pregnancy. Which is pretty logical : if a woman doesn't want to have a child, she knows that from the very beginning. And if an adult woman is stupid enough not to realize she's pregnant before 12 weeks, then she has to carry the child to term, and she can give it up for adoption.

As far as I know, like delta35 said, only in deregulated capitalistic countries are late-term elective abortions allowed - not in european ones.
26
Why did this ad bring out all the abortion comments? nice ad!
27
Aren't the people who would object to having a gay kid the same people who hate abortion?
28
Anti-choicers in America often try to pass legislation about sex-selection-based-abortions, and the fact is: it's really not a problem in the US. If we ever got to the point where we understood human sexuality well enough to predict orientation in utero, then we'd surely have advanced to the point that plenty of parents wouldn't care (i.e., they'd be confident that they'd still get grandchildren, attend a wedding, etc, etc). The parents that would consider orientation-based-abortion are the same parents that might be the absolute worst for a gay child to be raised by--so, maybe they shouldn't be raising a gay child, anyway. That said, this ad was cute and sweet and not actually about abortion.

Final note: the unregistered user @2 actually links to an adorable video. I'd seen that anti-marriage-discrimination ad before, but was glad to see it again.
29
Ms Melooley - Agreed that the parent(s) who'd abort a proto-same-sexer would be a nightmare of a parent to a born and actualized one. But, really, is confidence about "still getting grandchildren" progress? One of the side benefits that I should hope opposite-sex couples might reap from marriage equality is that in-laws might come to stop viewing becoming grandparents as some sort of automatic entitlement.

And, while I hope you're right, why so confident that social progress will keep pace with scientific advancement? The latter may feed the former to some extent, but I'd still far, far rather never know when the only plausible use for the knowledge is extermination.
30
Vennominon - There's only one answer I could come up with for your question: "And, while I hope you're right, why so confident that social progress will keep pace with scientific advancement?"

I'm going to have to blame sheer, blind optimism. You caught me. I'd like to think that solid evidence of a genetic basis for orientation would eliminate the "being gay is a choice" argument, but when I look at the bigots we've got today, there's not much hope for reality-based evidence changing either their opinions or their hatred. Sigh. I've got to go with my fantastical hope and optimism, or else I'd be too depressed to get out of bed each day. I'm one of them scientific research types, and to be honest, a lot of researchers are legitimately amazed when they meet someone who, say, doesn't find the distinctions between proteins X, Y, and Z among humans and walruses to be utterly fascinating--these people (my people) have trouble imagining something as beautiful as knowledge being used for evil. I'm not saying every researcher is this ignorant or idealistic, just that the ignorant/idealistic folk aren't all that rare in laboratories. No matter how obvious the social implications, there will be some myopic scientist who believes, deep in her heart, that the most important reason to research a subject is to better understand how something works.

That said, my (mostly) straight self has been telling my folks since I was a toddler that the best they can hope for is grandbeagles, and they're still holding out for me to pop out some kids for them to spoil. I suppose I was using the concept as a catch-all for "parents that honestly don't care about the orientation of their proto-child," but I'm right there with you in hoping that someday, grandchildren aren't seen as a given.

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