@"As in, I don't think anyone anywhere ever is saying that refugees/immigrants/aliens are not human."

No, the liberal side are saying that the way conservatives want to treat migrants is inhuman.

@Octavious: "I appreciate your honesty regarding the abortion/transfer question, although I struggle to understand the justification."

If you had asked the question of transferring to another human's body, (be it man or woman) and using them as a surrogate parent, and giving them legal guardianship. I would have said yes.

But that requires another human beings consent. So you still wouldn't ban abortions.

If you could freeze the development of an embryo, then wait for someone to have it implanted (or grown in an artificial womb) then you could create a system where the only parents are those who choose to thaw out embryos and grow them. Which would at least mean every child was wanted and had a parent/ parents who choose them.

@ LeonidasVader: "I don't think anyone anywhere ever is saying that refigees/immigrants are not human"

I wish you were correct but sadly this is not the case, and there are people who compare immigrants to insects or declare them not to be human.

British right-wing newspaper columnist Katie Hopkins, for example, says they are "cockroaches" who deserve to be killed:

http://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/katie-hopkins-says-doesnt-care-5534471

A Greek member of parliament, Eleni Zaroulia, who is a member of the right-wing Golden Dawn party, declared during a debate that migrants are "sub human":

http://greece.greekreporter.com/2012/10/18/greek-mp-immigrants-are-subhuman/

@ Jamie

Where's the bit where she says they deserve to be killed? I can't quite find it.

@ ora

So with it it's not so much that the rights of the mother trump that of the unborn child, it's that the unborn child doesn't have any rights whatsoever, and has no value aside from that the mother believes it to have?

I wonder how diverse the views of those broadly in favour of abortion as an option really are. I had always assumed the majority were mostly like myself. Perhaps not.

@Pctavious: no, i believe that the future suffering of the potential child should be taken into account before we make the decision to create it.

I believe i am arguing for those rights to be protected, first and foremost. And yes, if that child never exists, it has no rights to be fought over.

If someone wants to take reaponcibility for that child, then they should have that choice. But unless you are proposing a system to take care of these children, i don't think you should propose creating thousands of, what would effectively become, second class citizens.

The reason i am pro-choice is that i believe the woman who chooses to be a mother will be a better mother than the woman who is forced into that situation. And that the child will be better off in the long run. And i strongly believe that nobody is in a position to make that decision FOR the mother.

I do believe that a fetus should be considered, we don't have a sliding scale of rights. But if we did, i believe it shoul have some rights. Probably including a right to dignity, a dignified destruction. (Embryos would get less rights again) but we don't hve a clear system, we are only now - in some courts - giving Chimps protection from unfair imprisonment. There is an example of non-human rights being afforded to our closest living relative.

Are embryos people? No, if you believe they are then don't have an abortion.

*sorry, that should be Oct, not Pct.

Also, i believe Katie Hopkins said that they should be sending ships to sink the migrant craft as they cross the mediterranean. Is that right?

And the rest of right wing thought is set against a background of this being the extreme point of view which they sympathise with.

@ ora

You have an abysmally poor understanding of right wing thought :p.

The difficulty is, that if you were walking down a street and you saw a person about to be murdered which you could stop, then you would stop it. Therefore saying "
Are embryos people? No, if you believe they are then don't have an abortion" doesn't cut it. If you believe embryos are people deserving of the same rights as you or me then you are morally obliged to do whatever you can to stop abortions. How could you not?

If you believe bacteria are people and you see me taking antibiotics, how can you not stop me?

If I genuinely believed that I would stop you, yes. But not before someone stopped me (the crazy man) from stopping you in the first place.

The problem is that, whilst it is damned near possible to see bacteria as people, it is very easy to see an unborn child as a person.

@Octavious,
"I wonder how diverse the views of those broadly in favour of abortion as an option really are. I had always assumed the majority were mostly like myself. Perhaps not."
Just for the purpose of clarification, what is/are your reason(s) for being pro-choice? I'm pretty sure you mentioned it/them earlier, but being in the lazy mood that I am right now and not wanting to check back over the last few pages of the thread (or the other thread), I wonder if you could spell it/them out again (as briefly as you like) for the good of the order......or at least for the good of my order.

Yes, i did take the most extreme position available.

But as i've mentioned, i believe that taking this choice away from the women concerned is bad for their future offpsring - i would go so far as to say bad for society in general. (I would go a step further and say they should have to power to make an informed decision much earlier, and call for comprehensive sex ed, sex positive sex ed, and better knowledge of/access to medical abortion, emergency contraception, and other alternatives - presuming we're talking exclusively about surgical abortion - and of course adoption and abstinence, you know, all the options)

The problem with the crazy person is likewise a slidin one. Where do you draw the lone at crazy? What if they are just taking a small risk (like drug users, and anti-vaccine advocates)

My position, put as simply as possible, is this.

All abortions are tragic and fundamentally a bad thing. Where abortions should be permitted is in those situations were they are the least worst situation.

For late stage pregnancies, that would be purely if the health of the mother was at serious risk for the pregnancy to continue.

For very early stages (morning after pill, and the first month or so) I am comfortable enough with the idea of the mother putting an end to the pregnancy for more or less any reason she believes appropriate. God knows enough pregnancies at that stage fail on their own, and to me they feel very distant from a fully fledged human child.

As we move on it becomes a more difficult issue. As the fetus develops it becomes ever closer to being a child, and the choice to abort becomes ever harder. I believe that the choice should be available, but that availability should come with compulsory counselling and an exploration of all options for not aborting, including a reasonable effort to consult the child's father. After a certain amount of time, the right to life of the unborn child should trump the right to choose of the mother. As to when that time is, I loosely subscribe to the UK abortion law of 24 weeks, although that is very much an upper limit.

^Thank you for this.

@ Octavious: "Where's the bit where she (Katie Hopkins) says they deserve to be killed?"

She said that violence should be used against migrants, that gunboats should be used to attack migrant vessels, and she said that if people died as a result of this, she didn't care. In the same column she described these refugees using the following terms, and I quote:

"vagrants"
"swarms"
"cockroaches"
"like norovirus"

Her vile, hate-filled original column, a despicable act of hate-speech for which she should have been prosecuted, was withdrawn by the Sun (who were stupid to publish it to begin with) but a scanned image of it is here:

http://cdn.thejournal.ie/embeds/twitter/58e2643be869041e24b0e5dc959abc56.png

(For clarity:

To advocate for actions to be taken which would cause people to die, to repeatedly voice your hate for those people, and to say in the same breath that you would not care a jot if they died as a result of the actions you advocate... that is surely the same as saying you think they deserve to die.)

Well, no... She didn't say that at all. I have no interest at all in defending that woman, but at no point did she say they should be attacked and certainly not killed.

Seriously? You have read that article and you don't see Katie Hopkins calling for the use of violence against migrants?

I see her being unbelievably callus, but not encouraging of attacks against migrants. I read about gunboats escorting boats back to North Africa and those boats being destroyed, but no direct harm to the migrants themselves. If you were feeling charitable you could argue that the aim of such a policy is to save lives by removing the option of a sea crossing, although with her I doubt it.

@ora

I promise I'm not following you from thread to thread trolling you, but since you responded to both of my posts...

It's the duty of a government to serve the needs of its citizens. It is not the duty of a government to serve the needs of "the world," aka people who are not its citizens.

Let's be clear: in many cases, those two things intersect. For example, it's good for the citizens of any country to avoid war. So my government and your government coming to an agreement to avoid war is part of our respective government's duties. Likewise, it is good for citizens of a country not to get sick. If multiple governments can work together to contain a pathogen, that's in their job description. If the place where the pathogen is spreading sends a lot of its people to my country, or if a lot of my country's citizens travel there, it might even be in my government's job description to assist with eradicating that disease even though it hasn't crossed our borders.

It's not that governments are treating migrants as sub-human; they are treating their needs as less important than the needs of their own citizens and their own country. It does not benefit my country to allow people to cross our borders who do not speak our language, do not have a source of income lined up, do not have the potential to find income because of the language barrier and the general poor job market, do not have the proper medical clearances, and come from countries which have a much higher incidence of radical Islamic terrorism than my country does. Those people end up on the welfare roll and/or become criminals to support themselves. I'm not saying that they are inherently evil or that they are sub-human, but any government official who places their needs above all of those considerations is not representing the needs of his people or his country and therefore should not be a government official.

Abortion is a whole different issue, which I won't even wade into at this time.

@L vader you said: "It does not benefit my country to
allow people to cross our borders who do not speak
our language, do not have a source of income lined up, do not have the potential to find income because
of the language barrier and the general poor job
market" (i'm skipping the bit about islamic terrorism, because there are legitimate security concerns)

Have you any evidence for that? I believe that there are many who claim low skilled workers (or workers with skills but stuck by the language barrier) benefit the economy because theu are willing to work for very little and will spend anything they earn supporting their family (thus increasing domestic demand, which benefits everyone - including simply VAT reciepts)

Do some become criminal? I'm sure they do, do they end up on welfare? I don't know, i suspect that anyone granted asylum is entitled to everything a citizen would get.

Regardless, this income will still be spent domestically and stimulate the economy (in a way that quantitative easing does and has not)

I don't think i agree with your claims, but until you provide some evidence i'm done discussing them.

As for the duty of the government. Sure, but we have a duty to every other human alive. We share this small planet with them, and their suffering is a thing of consequence. So i disagree you on this as a point of morality.

I believe if i can make a big difference to someone at a small cost to myself, then that is a cost i should pay. (imagine waiting for my train to leave i see someone running to catch it, i can hold the door and be sligthly delayed, or i can let the door close and let him wait for the next train... I consider this a moral question)

@ ora It is difficult to find data which are relevant to your question, for a few reasons. The majority of refugees are hosted by developing countries, not by developed ones. Of course this is because developed countries typically have strict immigration laws, which is what OP was criticizing. Studies of economic impact in places like Tanzania don't exactly indicate what the impact would be in Austria, or the UK, or the US. Additionally, what information does exist for refugee immigration in developed countries typically reflects a very low number of refugees in proportion to the native population, and often those refugees have a higher level of education. They are political refugees more than displaced civilian victims of a war. So again, the studies that exist are not relevant to the current situation.

I could quote studies of undocumented immigration into the US, but I fear you would then accuse me of hatemongering. I will explain to you why I would equate these situations and you can tell me whether it makes sense. Both populations arrive in greater numbers than standard immigration policy would allow. After all, this is one main reason for illegal immigration in the first place. In the case of these refugees, one can easily see that there are very large numbers of them, probably more than we would traditionally welcome. Also, both populations are relatively poor and uneducated. This is demonstrably the case with illegal immigration into the US, and in the case of the current refugees, it can easily be argued that those with money and influence were able to escape much earlier and are not now starving in refugee camps. Finally, any statistics which show government dependence for illegal aliens would certainly be multiplied by these refugees, who would not fear deportation when seeking government aid.

Spoiler alert: Studies of illegal immigration all point to a net negative to the receiving country when taking into account taxes paid by the immigrant. The cost of government aid in the form of housing, education, food assistance, etc trumps those taxes by a sizable margin. And those studies don't even attempt to calculate the cost of the crimes they commit.

And yes, you, the individual, orathaic, may feel that you have a duty to other humans. If you became MP orathaic, or Prime Minister orathaic, or American President orathaic, you could spend your private time and your private money doing that duty as you see it. However, you would have an obligation to those who elected you and whose tax money paid you to put their interests first. It is not the role of an elected official to decide when morality trumps the good of their people. In performing the duty of their office, the good of their people is the only concern that should be considered, and anything less is a breach of the oaths they took when they assumed that office.