German Politics Thread

Unborn children are not persons. They do not have rights, and soon German law will recognize this.

Doesnt the universal declaration of human rights as well as many human rights organizations firmly believe that human rights are applicable from birth only, not from conception? Given that, the right of the woman to choose is what should be given priority over the right of the unborn to live, shouldn't it?

The problem is that "what is life?" is a philosophical question, not a scientific one. And people disagree about philosophy, you can't declare them wrong just because you or someone else disagree. Yes, you can objectively and factually say that given a particular definition of life a human's life begins at a certain point of time, but that doesn't make the definition itself factual or objective.

Edited by SeptimusHeap on Jun 26th 2022 at 10:45:20 AM

How? Abortion is formally illegal in Germany, that’s not a proper consideration for a women’s right to choose.

How does it have any impact upon the “right of the unborn child to live” to change from

To

Separately from that I object to the mandatory counselling, simply because that’s not a requirement for any other major surgery I’m aware of. But the big thing is that abortion is formally illegal, it would be very easy for the CDU or others to wipe away the “do not face penalties” bit and start putting criminal charges against anyone who has an abortion.

The 'mandatory counseling' is often offered by religious groups and if there's one group of people on God's green Earth I would not want to get anywhere near women considering abortion, it's religious groups who have strong opinions about abortion.

The deeper the trench you can dig around the Bible-thumpers to keep them out of reproductive rights questions, the better.

Edited by math792d on Jun 26th 2022 at 5:33:48 PM

Yet she doesn't get punished for it. That it is formally illegal reflects the right of the unborn child to live which was decided by the German Constitutional Court.

No other surgery has the kind of impact an abortion has. You are not just making a decision for yourself, but also for another potential person.

This is not just about reproductive rights. It is much more than that. It is a matter of life and death. Reproductive rights are not under pressure here. People can buy contraceptives and can get themselves sterilized, paid by health care if they choose to. As long as it is just there body, women can do whatever they want to it (well, except for illegal drugs). That changes when another life gets involved.

You don't need to be Christian or even religious to think that abortions are morally wrong in non-extreme cases like rape or when the mother's life is in danger. I don't know if there is a god or human soul, yet nevertheless I find the idea of aborting potential out of convenience abhorrent.

Edited by Zarastro on Jun 26th 2022 at 9:13:56 PM

"Potential" person. So you acknowledge that the fetus is not yet a person?

Edited by Perseus on Jun 27th 2022 at 5:21:51 AM

Nobody undergoes an abortion "out of convenience". This is literally a myth perpetuated by the anti-abortion crowd.

There's nothing convenient about abortions - they're a physically and mentally taxing procedure nobody's undergoing lightly.

So how about we stop perpetuating counter-factual nonsense like that?

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Jun 26th 2022 at 9:33:52 PM

And again, that law was about criminilazing medical advise. Jumping from it being repeald to abortions of convinience becoming commonplace is an straight up absurd leap that borders on strawmanning.

Edited by uncertanSearcher on Jun 26th 2022 at 10:10:55 AM

@ math792d

You know what's sad? The "mandatory counselling" bit might work if those who were in charge of it were actual psychologists who could help out in the before and after.

As @ Drunken Nordmann pointed out, an abortion is taxing both physically and mentally so having a therapist to help out sounds like a no-brainer.

51% of all abortions in the US ^note where the procedure was, until fairly recently, actually legal and thus could be reliably tracked by medical professionals. were performed on women who used contraceptives and they just plain fuckin' didn't work. That still represents a relative minority in the actual number of contraceptive users, but the fact remains that while these methods are very effective, their effectiveness are not 100 %. In these instances, where you've made every single precaution but whoop shit it just plum didn't work, what can you do? As far as the law is currently concerned, it's a criminal act. How the fuck is that just?

Congratulations, you're still probably not the right person to provide counseling to someone asking about the procedure.

As a psychologist ^note well, 99% of the way there, I just have to defend my thesis hoo boy would I want the person sitting in that room to be prepared for it. I'm not sure I would trust most of my colleagues to actually counsel someone through the decision to undertake the procedure. Provide care before/after? Definitely less squidgy.

Edited by math792d on Jun 26th 2022 at 11:37:01 AM

So under German law life begins and conception? Because that spits in the face of the scientific definition of life (which while fuzzy isn’t conception).

Also is “formally illegal but not punished” the system used for instances where a life needs to be ended to save enough? Be that self-defence, police use of force or medical triage? Because I’m pretty sure it’s not. You’re not going to seriously tell me that police using lethal force is “formally illegal but not punished” are you?

Sure they do. The moment we’re talking about potential life as opposed to life we bring in every surgery around a person’s reproductive system, which includes men getting a vasectomy.

Are men in German required to undergo mandatory counselling before getting a vasectomy?

I don't really want to get into this debate (not least because it's late and I need to sleep) but I just read the recent posts and I think perhaps you might be talking past each other on the phrase "potential person". It could be interpreted two ways:

1) It is possible that in the future, this thing could become a person (but it isn't yet). 2) This thing might or might not be a person right now and there's no way to know with our current understanding of the world.

I have the impression that Zarasto meant 2, and everyone else is thinking he means 1.

I for one am engaging this conversation from way 2.

Look, I know this is a heavy subject, but I think Zarastro that you have to remember that this is not a perfect world.

Arguing that women abort “out of convenience” is very patronizing considering the psychological and economical issues that an unplanned pregnancy can bring, not to mention the issues it can cause in a woman’s body even if she were an adult.

I speak as someone from a country in which lack of knowledge of reproductive rights or of contraception is one of the reasons women can remain locked into poverty and submission.

And again, abortion itself brings mental and physical issues in the before and after, which women are also aware about, so I would rather listen first to why a women would even ask to do this instead of condemning her decision outright.

On another note, I would also ask a women to join this conversation because I feel like discussing this without a word from the female sex is not exactly even.

Edited by raziel365 on Jun 26th 2022 at 10:14:53 AM

"I speak as someone from a country in which lack of knowledge of reproductive rights or of contraception is one of the reasons women can remain locked into poverty and submission. "

No even just that, some of our country are heavy on oposition to abortion: Honduras pretty much prohibic abortion for any reason and make it into the constitution in fact. Which tell us how heavy this is against woman.

/wave

There are a few reasons why women get abortions when the fetus is not the result of rape/incest. One is that they don't feel that bringing a child into their current situation is a sound choice - a bad home environment, the inevitable financial stress of childrearing, the fact that a working mother is expected to perfectly juggle childrearing and a job, whatever. More circumstantially, they may not be able to be rushed to the nearest hospital on short notice.

Tangentially, abortion may be chosen because some disorder was detected in the fetus - cerebral palsy, to pick an example off the top of my head. The various physical therapies, doctor's appointments, etc. add up to a lot of money and a lot of stress really quickly.

There may also be medical complications where a c-section, etc. would be necessary, and some women might just not want to go through with such procedures. Or someone just doesn't feel they would be a good parent, for any of the above reasons. (Like me! Partially because I have very narrow hips, so there are more chances of things going the "baby cannot get out/something else terrible happens that endangers my health greatly" route. I obviously want to avoid that.)

Last but not least, accidents happen a lot. Condoms leak, or it turns out one was broken, or whatever. And when they do happen it's almost guaranteed that the parent(s) won't be able to properly care for the child.

("Just give it up for adoption, then" is not a good faith argument - I don't know about Germany's foster care system, but the one in the US is hot garbage, and in many cases the child is just punted around between various foster homes because the system doesn't care about them. Putting more kids in is not going to help. I could also get into postpartum depression and similar but that's a whole other post.)

Tl:dr, if someone is "pro-life" without regard to how that baby might negatively affect the woman, both physically and otherwise, and the expected quality of life for that baby? They're not pro-life, they're pro-fetus. To paraphrase Trevor Noah, human life to them is like a vintage comic book - once it's out of the package, it's worthless.

Edit for spelling

Ah, gotcha. I'm neurodivergent too - the point I was trying to make is that prospective parents might not be able to afford the attendant therapies and general extra work that goes into such things. I'm very sorry if I upset you by saying what I did, though. My bad.

As for adoption, IMO it's not a matter of the hypothetical child being "better off dying", because dying is a loaded term that the pro-fetus crowd like using when comparing abortion to murder (which is, coincidentally, also a loaded term). My point is that it seems cruel to force someone to carry a child to term only for the resultant circumstances of that forced birth to cause the parent to give their child up because they can't care for the child.

Edited by Altris on Jun 27th 2022 at 7:07:20 AM

Again, I don't want to get into this argument fully (so perhaps it's hypocritical of me to keep replying...)

But as someone who is somewhat neurodivergent, the idea of aborting a child because they have have severe autism is deeply, deeply uncomfortable to me. It seems tantamount to saying "neurodivergent people are so troublesome that the world would be better off if they had never been born". (Physical disorders which mean the baby literally wouldn't survive anyway are a different matter, of course.)

Your rebuttal to the adoption solution makes me highly uncomfortable for a similar reason. It implies that someone is better off dying than going through the system. I don't know what the system is like in Germany or the US, but I really hope they aren't so bad that that is true.

Edited by pi4t on Jun 27th 2022 at 12:13:17 PM

Because that spits in the face of the scientific definition of life (which while fuzzy isn’t conception).

What scientific definition of life? Not all scientists use the same one and when it comes to human medicine "personhood" is another concept that is often used. Plus the point above about this being a philosophical question not a scientific one.

Indeed. It seems to me that appeals to the scientific definition of life are a red herring. Even if there was a consensus, it would just mean that the scientists had divided the world up sharply into "living" and "not living" to make scientific discussions easier. They wouldn't be intending to make any philosophical statements about what we should count as alive when making moral decisions. Saying that we should use such a definition to decide philosophical questions like this is like saying that we should use the scientific definition of a fruit when choosing ingredients for a fruit salad.

Edited by pi4t on Jun 27th 2022 at 2:42:31 PM

On a completely different note, this kinda flew under the radar:

The AfD emerged victorious against Ex-Chancellor Merkel at the highest german court. It was ruled that Merkel didn't adhere to neutrality and unfairly hurt the AfD's chances

https://www.dw.com/en/germany-top-court-rules-against-ex-chancellor-merkel-in-afd-spat/a-62136430

While this is more of a symbolic thing, with Merkel being out of office and all, its still a precedent. And while I certainly have no love for the party (to say the least) I still kinda think they are in the right here (no pun intended). A head of state should never, ever say that a democratic election must be "reversed".

True, which is why I am against criminalizing abortions again since it would likely lead to more suffering. Hence the compromise we have right now.

Unplanned pregnancies can certainly severely impact your plans of the future. But we have a very sophisticated welfare system in Germany. No one is going to be homeless, without insurance or starving because of an unexpected child, or lack the means of raising them properly. A unwanted child is not an existial threat in most cases, but simply not convenient.

No system is perfect, but we should keep in mind that it is often the medias who portray life in foster homes as very negative, especially as a backstory for protagonists. I do not know how the system works in the USA, but I recently read an article about it and according to which quite a lot of stereotypes are very outdated.

Has it really been only 2 years since that was the biggest concern we had in Germany? Feels like an eternity. Guess this will go down as yet another thing that Merkel did that did not age well.

In hindsight, Merkel's political legacy already crumbling isn't actually that surprising.

Her long tenure in office wasn't because people liked her - a lot of German voters valued stability and Merkel was widely seen as a stability chancellor.

Now that she's out of office, people are beginning to realise what that stability was bought with.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Jun 27th 2022 at 8:13:57 PM

Though to be fair, who would've been a better alternative in all the elections since she first went into office?

There's a reason "alternativlos" became kind of a meme.

Even if she was the best available candidate, that would not absolve her from her responsibility of making the wrong decisions.

She had never any illusions regarding Putin unlike a lot of politicians across the spectrum. Yet she allowed us to become dependent on Russian gas. She knew as a scientist that nuclear energy was safe, yet phased it out in order to keep the Green party down. She was not a pacifist and understood that we needed a properly functioning Bundeswehr. She could have used her political capital in order to either push for a better diversification of our energy or a better equipped Bundeswehr.

Worse when she did put her influence to good use, it resulted in her mad folly of 2015... .