Topic: Abortion - page 4. (Read 8299 times)

So you think its OK to kill mentally handicapped people?  And brain damaged soldiers?  And newborn babies? 

Why does that responsibility land only on the woman? Why do men get to fuck about and when conception is the result tell women what they can and can't do with their bodies?
A zygote doesn't have any rights. A foetus gets rights when it can survive outside the womb.

How about this? If you get to decide what a woman has to carry a conception to term (ie. controlling her body), then she has the right to do the same for you. Let her select a few major invasive surgical procedures that you have to undergo, and pay for. Fair enough? I'm sure we could solve a few transplant problems in the process. 

I guess you could expand it to include being self-aware and feeling pain, too. Rabbits would qualify then. Conscious ones, anyway.


I would argue it's no different from killing someone who is asleep or unconscoious.


The "why" would be because this person/being is able to make their own rational choices, and can chose to live. A fetus or an unconscious entity cannot. I think it's kinda close to the base libertarian or objectivist source or rights thing; I have a right to my own being. If someone can declare that, they have that right. As for animals with rational thought, pretty sure that's coming too, and if right-wing extremists had issues with blacks and gays, omg that will open a can of worms!


I would say that no, this person does not have value by themselves. The development portion is a sunk cost at this point. If someone else values them, like a family member, or a business owner who knows that this person has a lot of potential talent as a future employee, then they can value them. If no one values them, then there's no point in their existence, which I assume would be at the expense of the state with nofuture fix options (unless society deems that people like that should be fixed, and votes to foot the bill, but in this case society is valuing them for whatever reason).


I agree with the eviction sentiment. If you make it public, someone else will step in and take that child.if no one does, then society may have way bigger problems than just abortion.
I have a feeling the main anti-abortion opinion stems from religious beliefs, that as soon as a sperm enters an egg and the two halves of the DNA mingle, god imbues the resulting cell with a soul, and at that point it's a human life, the killing of which is murder. Questions of what embryo or fetus souls would look like in heaven aside, I have a feeling a lot of them also have never really bothered to consider what really defines human life, worth, and consciousness.

I don't see how "abortion people" have an easier time with these questions. Just because they have a lower threshold? Well, maybe a little...

I'm not exactly against abortion, at least not enough to forcefully prevent other people from doing it, but until I have clear answers to these questions, I abstain from killing as much as possible.

EDIT: If your measure is capacity of reason, you can define a person by the complexity of its nervous system. For instance, if you don't have anything against killing rabbits, you could kill a fetus that is at that level of complexity. I don't kill rabbits as well, so, wouldn't be my preference, but as long as you have that measure, it makes sense. The "machine with the potential to think" problem is much easier for me. It's not on, so, you are not destroying any ongoing process. Not the same as abortion.


While at it, why not take another small step and question why capacity to reason determines value? Nothing apparent, other than the fact that it is an arbitrary point where social evolution took us (economical benefits of better cooperation, etc.). You could as well include animals and beings with potential of rational thought, or go the other way and exclude some human races, social classes, etc. It's all arbitrary from a personal point of view. Not against your opinion (makes sense to me too), just questioning where it's coming from.

Suppose you have a sick person who has lost the ability to develop rational thought. You have means to fix this person. This man has the potential to do important things. Does this entity (I won't even call it a person, since it can't reason) have any value at all? There is some value because of the investment gone into developing this human of course, but let's say fixing has the same cost as developing a new person from scratch, so that we can exclude that.

An interesting side example would be cryogenics. I agree that there is almost no incentive to restore the frozen individual for people who don't value that person directly (family, etc.). However, I just don't see the difference between this and a non-frozen, living thinking person. I think the main anti-abortion opinion in this thread stems from the idea that you don't have to care for any person. No person or entity has inherent value, it doesn't matter of it can reason or not. People are saying you can evict your child from your home without giving any means to survive as long as you make it public.

Hypothetical scenario:

There is a proposal to add a safe, temporary, taste-free, sterilizer to piped water and other things so to ensure everyone gets it just by drinking and eating normally, and in order for women to get pregnant and men to produce fertile sperm, they need to take a pill that is highly controlled in order to cancel out the effect of the sterilizer, and anyone wanting to make babies must go thru the same process as people wanting to adopt in order to be given that pill.

Would you be for or against such proposal?

Maybe a different take on this:

What defines a human life? Can any collection of cells with human DNA be considered human life? Do the cells have to have a potential to become human in the future (fertilized egg cells)? If future technology allows us to take any clump of human cells (such as skin or muscle tissue) and make them grow into a full human being (e.g. through cloning), would any clump of cells being killed be considered equivalent to abortion? What if we progress to a technology level where human consciousness can be uploaded to a computer? In a world where inteligent computers loaded with human inteligence are on par with "natural" humans, would destroying a computer capable or rational thought, though not yet loaded with it, be considered abortion? Or if we go further, and create machines that can develop their own AI on par with human intelligence, would destroying a machine that is capable of this, but was never turned on and allowed to develop its AI, be equivalent to abortion?
These are all questions we'll run up against soon, and I believe anti-abortion people will have a huge problem with.

My opinion is that the value of human life (or intelligent life in general) is determined by its capacity to reason. A clump of cells has no value. An unconsciout person, or a baby, only has value to others who value that person (parents/family). Someone without the ability to have rational thought should be irrelevant, even if they have the ability to some day in the future develop rational thought.

Sorry, no matter how enjoyable it is, sex is not a recreational sport. Its a mechanism for the creation of life. With such power comes responsibility.

I humbly disagree. This is just trying to operate on definitions that are inapplicable to the case. The specific norms you have chosen are not God's will, they come from higher philosophical inquiries, which should have a say on this matter. Basically, you are responsible, because it's your decision. To me, it's not at all apparent that it is your right to dispose of a person you've created just because it didn't exist at the time of your decision. At the time if its death, it exists, and it dies as a consequence of prior decision.

I personally am pro-life.  I firmly believe that one day people will look back at our society's treatment of the unborn in the same way we look back at slavery or serfdom.

I live in a country where the law allows abortion before 20 weeks.  Its a democracy and I see the only alternative to violence being that I try to persuade people that abortion is a bad thing.  Just because I believe something is wrong does not mean I am entitled to use violence against those who disagree with me.

I suspect that off the forums in real life you take the exact same position and would not harm a girl who had an abortion just because you feel she did wrong.  On moral issues, we all have our own consciences but its majority rule as far making laws is concerned.

I suppose the same could be said about a young single mother with a baby. If she can't take care of the child, maybe she should give it up. Of course, "giving up" a child is different than abortion. One cannot abort a child outside of the womb (murder), why should should abort one from within? And don't you think if she did attempt to kill the child, that others might want to intervene to save the child? See, it's not so different after all. Who is the advocate for the unborn child? It certainly can't just remain exclusively with the mother could it; any more than it could for a mother with child outside the womb? Why is location the only determining factor here?

I suppose you could look at it from a number of different perspectives. If the woman's life is truly endangered from the fetus, you could look at it from the point of view of self-defense and evict the fetus. This would then potentially kill the unborn child. That's more justifiable. As far as I know, you typically cannot remove the child from the womb at any point in the development of the child and not severely risk it's life.

Nevertheless, it seems we should be weighing the life of the mother against the life of the child in a worst case scenario (imminent threat). The question should be one of eviction, trespass or self-defense not abortion and death irrespective of action and consequence. A proportionality of force thru action is key.

Just as in life outside the womb (analogy), evicting a person from "off of" or "out of" a location, you must use proportional force. For example: if a child wanders onto my property (it doesn't matter how he/she got there actually), I can't just shoot to kill. I could probably escort the child to the edge of my property with a stern warning to not trespass again (assuming he/she would even understand such a request) but that's about the sum total of it.

I know that a child on or in a property, and one inside a woman presents a clearly different environment, but the child within the womb really doesn't have the opportunity to be "free of" the mother until a certain point in its development.

Yes Hawker, we're all very aware of your position on lawfulness. If it's a law then it isn't "murder", or "theft", or "slavery". You never look at the logical consistency of an argument. You merely determine that if a majority of persons within a "society" make it so, it must be lawful. There is no need for logic at that point. You can throw it all out the window and just say, "but the law says....!!!"

Doing sex is in no way a contract with the fetus simply because the fetus didn't even exist when such action took place. You can't make a contract with a non-existent party. Every party in a contract must consent for it to be acceptable.

That doesn't rule out the possibility of contracts with other people which existed before the conception, of course. There may be a contract between the mother and the father, or even between the mother and some religious community, and such contracts may punish abortion.

But a contract with something that doesn't exist, no, that you can't make.

Yes I can see Americans have a unique problem with guns and abortion.  In the UK and most other countries, these things are put to the vote and people just accept what the majority vote.

+1

Using the woman's body as a moral battleground shows how these ideologues struggle to reconcile complex situations with their impractical simple moral rules. Lets all decide what the women can do with her body. That is the only moral and just way to solve this situation.



+10

Your too far ahead.

There's a fair bit of stress on a woman's body during pregnancy. Large health risks. Why shouldn't she alone be the judge on weather or not she's prepared to take those risks?

The problem you have is that people, decent people who would otherwise strike you as model human beings, deeply disagree with you.  And in a democracy, respecting people's right to vote on these things is important.

When I said that you can't be logically consistent about abortion, that wasn't an invitation to go totally mad.  Are you seriously suggesting that police raid the records of hospitals, get the tens of millions of names of all women who had abortions, incarcerate them and then perform surgery without consent on them causing permanent infertility?

I disagree with the word "murder" you used.  Murder is unlawful killing.  Even if you firmly believe that some unborn children deserve the same protection from killing that you and I deserve, provided abortion is legal the people who do it are not murderers.  

+1


Humorous, but actually this aspect is somehow missing from the debate.

You are evicting someone from your house that you took in yourself. Isn't this a non-verbal contract? The person might have sneaked in somehow, or you could have accidentally let them in, but if there is consent I think it's a game changer.

If it's not OK to evict a baby without making it public, maybe you should also make it public before you take it in? Just a thought...

But nobody should be forced to keep a person in coma alive (except somebody contractually obligated to, of course).


Good point, but I disagree logic cannot address the issue. It can, and as common sense alone should indicate, to condemn hundreds of millions of women of murder is an ethical absurd.