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comment by oyster

Everything illegal has a punishment. Even if it's not enforced there has to be a punishment. That just literally how it works. What's the point in making something illegal if it's not punishable ?

Peoples stories and experiences have value even if you don't choose to see it. You can pretend it's all about remaining logical but that's a complete lie, lets use the example of the last time we spoke. I spoke about my experience and you made one up in your head which you believed more. (That's an important part, because you didn't just say, ya know I'm not sure about that, you made up a story and you did believe it more likely) So let's say there's a third person involved here, who should they believe ?

Person A (me): was actually present for the scenario, can provide more details on request.

Person B (you): read a small description of events, did not ask clarifying questions, actually forget parts of the story upon reading, just kind of made a story up.

You choose to believe the story of person B which isn't logical at all. Now you can say you didn't pick one over the other but you did. You made the choice that I was wrong and you made a story you thought more likely. You're doing the same thing here. You believe fewer people will get abortions... Because reasons ? You actually have no reason to believe that.

It's not that you choose to believe data over personal story, you just believe whatever you cook up in your own head over people with actual life experience. Goobster's experience just like the experience of others can offer valuable insight and he's not the one missing out here if you don't want to see that.





bioemerl  ·  2952 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Again, and I am going to stress this a billion times over. I believe solidly in the idea that personal experience/accounts of situations is not valid, is not trustworthy, and never will be either of them.

If you experience something, and I disregarded it, it is probably for a reason. I'm getting a lot of the same vibes from you as people I've spoken to in the past, and it's always been on this same topic. I'm going to assume the experiences you had were highly subjective and quite possibly explained by things like placebo, or other situations. If we are talking about physical situations, I am going to assume there is some sort of data that contradicted your accounts, and I pointed to that.

Now, I have no idea what conversation you were talking about, I don't pay attention to the usernames of the posts I am responding to. If you could give more context I would be grateful because right now I really have no idea what you are talking about when you refer to "our past conversations".

    You believe fewer people will get abortions... Because reasons ?

Well here you fucking go, have some data.

    Abortion has been widely used in America since its earliest days. In the 1950s, estimates of numbers of illegal, unsafe abortions ranged widely, from 200,000 to 1.2 million per year.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-a-grimes/the-bad-old-days-abortion_b_6324610.html

    1981 1,577,340
'

http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/abortion/graphusabrate.html

This was the number of legal abortions in 1981 total. Population increased in the time by about 1.5, so the number estimated up in the other quote of 200,000 to 1.2 million makes it kind of hard to draw a conclusion on the number of abortions going up or down.

A study I found is actually very good, here's some of what it says:

This is a bit off the topic, but I find this statistic interesting:

    Furthermore, abortion legalization may have led to an improvement in the average living conditions of children, probably by reducing the numbers of youngsters who would have lived in single-parent families, lived in poverty, received welfare and died as infants.

Back on track:

    The number of children adopted in a given year is therefore a rough proxy for the number of newly available "unwanted" children. Legal access to abortion would be expected to reduce the number of unwanted children and thus the supply of children available for adoption and the number of adoptions. Previous research suggests that abortion restrictions less onerous than outright prohibition reduce the number of infants relinquished for adoption in the United States.

    Our results indicate that adoptions, particularly of children born to white women and by petitioners unrelated to the child, decreased in the 1960s and early 1970s when states repealed their laws restricting access to abortion. Roe v. Wade also may have lowered rates of adoption of children born to white women. Legal reforms allowing small increases in access to abortion, such as allowing the procedure for women who became pregnant as a result of rape or incest, did not affect adoption rates of children born to white women.

    Before the availability of legal abortion became widespread, relinquishing children for adoption was one of few options open to women with unwanted or mistimed births. The number of adoptions rose from 91,000 in 1957 to 175,000 in 1970, then fell to 130,000 by 1975; the decline of the early 1970s coincided with the legalization of abortion.10 During this period, the population of women of childbearing age (15-49) grew steadily, birthrates among unmarried women rose and total birthrates fell

    Adoptions by petitioners unrelated to the child accounted for the bulk of the decline: These adoptions fell 63% between 1970 and 1975, whereas adoptions by relatives per 1,000 white women declined by 19%.

    We also controlled for several variables that reflect women's opportunity costs of children and that measure economic conditions: the employment-to-population ratio in the state (i.e., the number of people employed divided by the number aged 16 and older), unemployment rate, real per capita personal income, real manufacturing wage and real average Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) benefit per recipient family (included as a measure of welfare generosity). The wage, income and welfare variables were deflated using the consumer price index for urban consumers and were measured in natural logs in the regressions.

    Relative to other states, states that repealed their abortion restrictions before Roe v. Wade saw significant declines in adoption rates for children born to white women; these declines were 34-37%, depending on whether adoptions are measured per 1,000 births or 1,000 population. The effect of repeal was not significant for adoptions of children born to nonwhite women. Reforms that legalized abortion in certain circumstances lowered adoption rates of children born to nonwhite women by 15-18% but did not have a significant effect among whites. Adoption rates did not change significantly after Roe v. Wade for states that had not repealed restrictive laws, but the estimates for whites suggest a negative effect similar in magnitude to the effects of repeal prior to Roe.

This is a bit disturbing considering the circumstances were most often rape/incest/similar situations:

    Reforms that legalized abortion in certain circumstances lowered adoption rates of children born to nonwhite women by 15-18% but did not have a significant effect among whites.

https://www.guttmacher.org/about/journals/psrh/2003/01/did-abortion-legalization-reduce-number-unwanted-children-evidence

    The Institute defines SRHR to encompass the rights of all individuals to make decisions concerning their sexual activity and reproduction, free from discrimination, coercion and violence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guttmacher_Institute

I do not believe this would be a very biased study. I found quite a few that talked about abortion going up, but many of them did things like talk about "deaths" rather than "abortions" so I wasn't willing to trust them.

oyster  ·  2952 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Dude, so you don't trust experience yet you use your experiences of "people like me" which are likely riddled with bias to not believe me and instead believe in a story you cooked up yourself ?

You said making abortion illegal would lower the amount and the provided a stat which you followed with:

    it kind of hard to draw a conclusion on the number of abortions going up or down.

This wouldn't really matter but you yourself said you base your opinion on facts and data yet you summarize that you can't draw the conclusion you made ?

This is pointless.

bioemerl  ·  2952 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    yet you use your experiences of "people like me" which are likely riddled with bias to not believe me and instead believe in a story you cooked up yourself ?

I didn't intend to use that as support to say you were wrong. I just meant to say that the patterns of what you are saying match other conversations so I am assuming things about the conversation you refer to.

    You said making abortion illegal would lower the amount and the provided a stat which you followed with:

Using the data I provided, of which I immediately followed by a reasonable amount of other information that proceeded to make more definite conclusions using statistics that are more reliable than abortion reporting, which is a very unreliable measure.

___

Listen, if you have some personal vendetta. If you have some anger at something I said, if I offended you, fucking say so and quit with the passive aggressive crap.

oyster  ·  2952 days ago  ·  link  ·  

No personal vendetta, you just write things and then contradict them almost right away. Adoption rates going down don't mean anything. In places where abortion isn't restricted you will also see better sex Ed, better access to birth control, and many factors that contribute to a lower teen pregnancy rate in general which would all contribute to a lower rate of adoption.

What's irritating is you constantly tell people their experiences are wrong but you're not smart enough to make that call. What makes it even more irritating is that you actually think you base your assumptions on logic as opposed to your own experiences and biases. The thing is though this is pointless because you will never realize that. I could link you to the thread were you chose to believe somebody who couldn't even remember the basic details over an eye witness but what's the point ? You'll never get it.

bioemerl  ·  2952 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    Adoption rates going down don't mean anything. In places where abortion isn't restricted you will also see better sex Ed, better access to birth control, and many factors that contribute to a lower teen pregnancy rate

Read the paper, they go over controls they use pretty well. It goes over all sorts of different explanations and factors and explain the reason behind their conclusions.

    In places where abortion isn't restricted you will also see better sex Ed, better access to birth control, and many factors that contribute to a lower teen pregnancy rate in general which would all contribute to a lower rate of adoption.

The paper is talking about a specific time-frame, not location. Unless there was a surge in sexual education in the areas the paper talks about where change happened, this isn't a likely explanation for a change in abortion rates.

    Oddly enough, some of the greatest resistance to sex ed arose during the sexual revolution of the late '60s and early '70s. Sex ed became a political issue during this time, as religious conservatives built a movement based, in part, on their opposition to sex instruction in the public schools. Groups like the Christian Crusade and the John Birch Society attacked SIECUS and sex education overall for promoting promiscuity and moral depravity. In the widely distributed 1968 pamphlet entitled "Is the School House the Proper Place to Teach Raw Sex?" Gordon Drake and James Hargis framed sex ed as communist indoctrination: "[If] the new morality is affirmed, our children will become easy targets for Marxism and other amoral, nihilistic philosophies—as well as V.D.!" Rumors spread that sex instructors were encouraging students to be homosexuals or even stripping and having sex in front of their classes. "Religious conservatives began using sex ed to their political advantage," says Janice M. Irvine, author of Talk About Sex: The Battles Over Sex Education in the United States. "They had this really scary rhetoric." In school districts across the country, groups of parents started protesting sex-ed programs.

http://www.newsweek.com/brief-history-sex-ed-america-81001

And it seems the opposite was true.

    What's irritating is you constantly tell people their experiences are wrong but you're not smart enough to make that call

I'm not making that call, years of knowledge about the nature of human experience in science and study have made that call.

    you base your assumptions on logic as opposed to your own experiences and biases.

This is, without a doubt, true. My own biases probably do reflect in what I say.

However, I always seek to avoid using my experiences directly when I can use knowledge or research. If someone wants proof of something, I'm not going to state "I saw this therefore it is true" I am going to find research that backs it (barring direct things like "I saw that big airplane explode" which are general and severe enough that you can trust personal experiences).

If someone's personal experiences are on a broad topic that occurs on a far larger scope than any individual than I'm not going to ever trust any one person's viewpoint on that system. They are useful to use to go and find information, but beyond that do not prove anything.