VEEP Debate--Who Won?

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but the working class would still have to go without health care, especially if trump also repeals EMTALA as he is being pressured to push for. what then? there will be blood in any case.

You don't need to worry about the EMTALA the Republican congress under Paul Ryan supports the initiative so it is unlikely it will be repealed in a Trump presidency.

even then it is a big no-no for most working class people whose minimum wage jobs are beyond the scope of Medicaid and also insufficient to pay for any health insurance, and the resultant ER bill will financially ruin them for life, you will not find many volunteers among the working class for that. it is unreasonable to expect struggling poor pregnant women to put themselves through all that, and in fact they en masse will refuse and get their abortions any way they can. such happened in my own family, that is how I know this.

And yet there are so many neglected children in the West, even when we do have legal abortion.


Again you are making huge assumptions with no proof.
Also, why is the possible happiness of adoptive parents relevant? The unhappiness of the person giving birth seems irrelevant to you.

The point I am trying to make is that their are enough parents in the United States to take care of the children resulting from the extra pregnancies a ban on abortion would entail. I am not for disregarding the wellbeing of women I am simply saying that a mother's temporary pain should not be a reason to end the life of a child.

If your an atheist and believe that once you die that is it, I believe their is a greater reason to support a ban on abortion. Essentially why should we deprive a child of their one opportunity to live.

Isn't it up to the individual to decide whether they want to live or not anyway?

This is a claim that you are making, but you have failed to offer any proof.


I already told you several times that my argument has nothing to do with physical pain. You don't seem to understand what autonomy means.


If a being isn't capable of making that decision (as is the case with the fetus,) is it an individual? That is, if a creature is not aware of it's own existence, is it a person?

Well tell me why I autonomy for the sake of autonomy a good thing.

The evidence I offered was more of a hypothetical scenario. 6% of married women in the US are infertile. That's 1.5 million people. If we for once decided to end the flow of abortions then many of these parents would get the joy of raising children and the children would have a life of opportunity.

Pence won that one hands down. Kaine should have, he won on points and I admire his calling Pence out on his distortions.

But, the American people usually get fussy about any interruption, and that showed in the post-debate polling. Also Kaine came off as awkward and like a teachers' pet. It made me actually like him in a wonky sort of way, and Pence had this uber-smug expression on his face whenever Kaine spoke, but I figured more people would be put off by the former. The latter looks "assholish but presidential" where the former looks "obnoxious and dorky."

Although, it was a pyrrhic victory. There's only so far you can go with "Trump never said that" in response to direct quotes, and it played poorly when Trump's statements could be synced up with Kaine quoting him the next day.

Our orphanages are already overcrowded, this would make that problem worse. The overcrowding is caused by many parents being unwilling to take older children, bee-lining straight to the babies who've never known any other life. This would lead to more babies and thus even more would-be adopters ignoring the older kids who need homes.

pence was "bugs bunny" [insouciantly unflappable] while kaine was "daffy duck" [bristly and sputtering] - historically the former tended to score the points.

Well is that big enough to justify the killing of babies in the process of abortion where otherwise we can provide for them?

Remember their is likely to be a number of couples who aren't adopting because they don't like taking children out of orphanages and not enough babies are there for them. What an end to abortion would do would be to ensure that those otherwise aborted children would have family to provide for them.

This is a question of where life begins, and then weighing that against the ability of a mother to have bodily autonomy and the ability to freely decide her life in the same ways men can. I come down on the pro-choice side because the latter are hugely important to me, and I don't really think what little sensation/cognition the fetus has is enough to justify restricting that necessary prerequisite for gender equality in our society.


There are a lot of them. There are also a lot of families who take home an older kid because babies are too hard to get, providing said usually passed-over kids with homes. Most families, given a choice, would choose a baby first.

Well the thing is here what I am saying is that temporary pain is not a big enough reason to end human life and the issue that is on the table is not to do with gender equality it is to do with someone's right to kill a baby.

The thing is in your second argument you have admitted that many parents chose the baby now just think about what that entails for thousands of perhaps otherwise aborted babies. It means these children would be able to have a home and these couples would be able to enjoy being parents.

nobody is in a position to dictate to women that they should put up with what some call "temporary pain" when in reality, from what i've seen from having worked [accessorily] in the ob/gyn field for 2+ decades, sometimes it is "permanent pain" in terms of lifelong complications from pregnancy. some women's bodies do not recover well from pregnancy. pregnancy is not as simple and easy a thing for women as some here believe, and IMHO it is a cavalier thing to say otherwise.

THANK YOU! Thank you so much for saying this--it's very true many men have little idea just how damaging and dangerous pregnancy can be to a woman's body, it is not a "mild inconvenience" like many anti-choice people like to say. It's 9 months of having a parasite feeding off your body, pushing your internal organs out of place, cracking your pelvis, etc--and then there are the changes after birth, all the crazy hormone swings and your breasts change and fill with milk and ache horribly. PREGNANCY IS A BIG f*****g DEAL. If you don't have a uterus and never have to consider what it would be like to try to grow another human inside your own body then you don't really have any valid input into the discussion other than to say it's not a decision for you to make.

As others have said, it can be much more than temporary pain. I've seen postnatal depression literally destroy a person, she was easily manipulated by a drug dealer she started dating and got hooked on heroin; she has HIV now from an infected needle. This is a really extreme case, but even aside from the physical risks, postnatal depression works similarly to any other type of depression and has the same consequences.

And unless you want to put that baby in the already-overcrowded adoption system, bearing in mind that giving up a baby that you've seen is also a heart-wrenching process that most mothers wouldn't go through, it's then 18 years of raising them. Meanwhile people of the male sex aren't encumbered by pregnancy and motherhood halting all other goals in life, so abortion rights give women agency in planning their futures that they previously didn't have. They can choose motherhood when and if they become ready, rather than life's circumstances forcing it on them when they have other dreams. This is why the feminist movement pushed for abortion rights.

Whether you weigh the small amount of sensation/cognition the fetus has higher than womens' ability to plan their future is an ethical calculus that you and I would probably decide differently.


They can enjoy being parents now by adopting older children who are usually passed over. Adding more babies to the system means less parents would "settle" for the older kids, meaning even more go without homes.

Post pregnancy depression is a big deal I must admit but so is the pain a woman would feel after having had an abortion. Many women after having an abortion have felt a deep sense of regret and guilt over the action they have taken and living with having done an abortion is no easy thing. When our side chooses the side of life over that of choice we are not saying that woman doesn't have the right to choose their own life we are simply saying that while pregnant it is her responsibility to bring a woman into the world. If anything the idea of being anti-abortion is expanding women's rights since we are saying that a woman's choice to have children is no longer constrained over whether they are fertile or not but instead have a greater chance to adopt children.

Well statistically speaking what we are doing by being anti-abortion is helping children. Since more children would be given homes than if their was no abortion. Just think about it for a minute one of the main reasons couples may not be adopting children is because of the fact they don't want to go with an older kid but can't raise a baby. What eliminating abortion would do is allow that percentage of parents to provide for children and live happy lives.