Page 3 of 4 First 123 4 Last

Pro-Life/Pro-Choice. All I know is that we eat chicken eggs and nobody seems to think that the egg is a full grown chicken.

And before someone decries my comment keep in mind Chickens are basically good people; they don't do drugs, they aren't in the habit of committing drive-by shootings, and you never hear about a Rooster coming home from work and beating the out of the Hen.

Reply

That's a clear position and your honesty has to be admired. At least you don't go for hypocrite nonsense like "it's only human when it's born, so it's not murder". At least, you don't look for excuses to avoid having to call a spade a spade.

So, you say that abortion is homicide, but it is justifiable. In your opinion, it's ok if parents murder their unborn child. Homicide is homicide; killing an unborn human is homicide, as is, of course, killing a human that has been born. Going further on your line of thought, one could argue that parents killing their disabled (let's say Dawns' Syndrome) child is beneficial to society. Indeed, if the child is removed out of the parents' lives, the parents will no longer have to stay home to take care of their disabled child and can both go to work again. There will also be no more expensive treatment, so the risk of falling into poverty, will drasticially decrease. With both working, they'll pay more taxes. The child will also be no burden to society after the parents pass away. What I'm saying is that, if you take the position that abortion = homicide but that it's justifiable, because the reductions of poverty and general improvements in societal functioning that result from abortions are sufficiently beneficial to justify the loss of life, then it becomes very easy to take it a step further and to say that allowing parents to kill their disabled child should be allowed, because the reductions of poverty and general improvements in societal functioning that result from killing the disabled children are sufficiently beneficial to justify the loss of life.

The position you take is, imo, impossible. If you consider abortion to be the equivalent of homicide, then you can't defend it, because it would open the door to practices that no longer belong in our present day society.

That said, I used to be in the camp that allows abortion up to the 12th week for no reason. After seeing on an echo how my own child was already, well, a mini human being at the 12th week of pregnancy, I'm no longer sure about that treshold (yes yes, you'll have some cynics here who'll explain that it hasn't conscience and yadda yadda, but believe me, it looks very human and the idea of that "unborn lump of cells" dying is unbearable) and more leaning to the position to allow abortion up to the 12th week, but only if a) the life of the mother is threatened; or b) the child would be severely disabled and would only come to this world to suffer a short life in pain (in that case, I'd even allow abortion up to the 20th week).

Reply

Reply

He say's "Better than Life."

Reply

Hypotethical cases clouds reality, because such examples are never what late-term abortion is about.

It's best for the mothers health that the abortion takes place as soon as possible. As people don't want unneccesary pain and suffering, they will take the abortion as early as possible. If someone has an abortion late, there will be a bloody good reason. And this is where I believe that the best judge of what to do is the mother. I refuse to take life and death decisions for other people.

Reply

LET ME LIVE

Reply

If you were a fetus with next-to-no chance to live independently and your birth is a danger to your mothers health(a typical late-term abortion); no, I'd rather ensure that your mother lives than killing her to give you three days in a breathing tube before you expired as well, leaving your daddy all alone in the world.

Reply

o

What if my daddy planned to make me the greatest Norwegian footballer ever?

Reply

I would still prefer your mothers life over the 72 hours of misery almost-stillborn Strike would endure.

Call me a barbarian.

Reply

Jesus you're an idoit

If you read the thread you know you are NAZI whom is a fore runner to modern day progressives who hope to use abortion as a social control to gain the advantage over the masses

There was a meeting and everything

Suitably ironic smiley to be inserted here thus demonstrating to those unfamiliar with SFTS' brand of humour that this is not an abusive post guaranteed to draw just under 5,000 infraction points.

Reply

There is another element to the equation which you do not discuss here: consciousness. Human beings prior to birth are not self-aware. Sure, they're human. Sure, they think and act and masturbate and whatnot, but they have no memory and no concept of their own existence. No one on this forum remembers being in utero. If any of you had been aborted before birth, you would never have known it. In my opinion, that is a major factor in making the homicide acceptable. I see it as being similar to euthanasia. A human being can be kept alive indefinitely with modern technology, despite lacking any higher brain functions or conscious thought. The person is technically alive, but they do not have the essential element that makes a person (IMHO) human: thought and self-awareness. So, for me killing an unborn child is like euthanizing a brain-dead adult.

As for the timeline of when it's acceptable and when it's not, it's impossible to give a clear cut-off line. There's simply no point where on Day X it is not a human but on Day X+1 it is a human. The fetus doesn't change rapidly enough to make such a line possible. I agree with many others that it's not human on Day 1, it's just a bunch of cells. I also agree that it is human the day before birth. For my 'acceptable homicide' analysis, it then becomes a sliding scale. Due to the non-humanness of the organism on Day 1, it's very very easy to justify the 'homicide' (if it can even be called that at that point). On Day 250, it becomes much harder, but can still be done depending on the circumstances. It seems pointless to me to try and make rules about what happens in between those days, so I call it a sliding scale and weigh each case on its individual merits.

It's actually kind of odd because I personally don't think a child really even qualifies as human on the thought basis until several months after birth, but society has sufficiently drilled home to me that it is bad to kill a child that has been born that my analysis ends there, regardless of the lack of logic in it.

Reply

Eh? I looked up Robert Swift and all I gather is he is a basketaball player...

Such ideas undermine pretty much all our values on human rights.

a) I'll go with saying 'you' is composed of your head and whatever other parts of your body are attached to it.
b) Stopping treatment is a whole different matter from taking action to end a life.
c) No it is not a human, and yes you can abort it, for the same reason I gave to answer a

But surely the difference is they only euthanise brain-dead adults when they have no hope of recovery... a foetus has its whole life ahead of it.

Reply

I don't see why that matters. Right now, there are about 5 billion potential lives in my pants. Their potential to be the next Eistein or Larry the Cable Guy doesn't mean that their rights override my own. And that's the key, because it's a balancing act of conflicting rights. Namely, the rights of the mother (and, to a lesser extent, the father) versus the rights of the unborn child. An unborn child only has potential, while the mother and father already exist and are an ongoing concern in the world. For me, the ongoing concern is far more important than simple potential (they also have the potential to be Hitler 2, you know).

Reply

I suspect DC meant Jonathan Swift.

Ajax

Reply

...another backroom abortion thread, I suppose the horse has already been stomped into bloody giblets, so why not stomp some more?

Reply

*googles* So... what did DC mean by comparing me to Swift?

Reply

Did you look into his famous satirical "A Modest Proposal"? You'd have to ask DC himself if you want to be sure of his meaning, but I suspect he thinks your posts on abortion are somewhat tongue-in-cheek . . . or maybe not.

Ajax

Reply

Well I like to present my case in the most blunt, tactless and outrageous manner possible, but what I have said is definitely a strain of thought going through my head on the matter. Yes there is a massive difference between a day old and a six-month old foetus, but the progression is constant and one of degrees, so I think people are too comfortable just saying "right first trimester you can abort".

Anyway I thought DC was against abortion?

Reply

And doing it your way undermines one of the most fundamental pillars of Christian faith...

If dead or alive is 0 and 1, then it won't matter how long it's been between dying and returning to life.
Or maybe it's Schrödinger's cat all over again, you're dead until you're brought back to life. In that case, you were never really dead to begin with. So you are both dead and alive.

In case a and more importantly c, when did the human then die?

Reply

Saying it's okay to abort the fetus ready to be born because even though it's a human it hasn't yet gone through the birth canal is obviously problematic, as is saying you can't abort the day old embryo that's not yet a human because we don't know exactly when it will become one. One way or another, we need a way to deal with fuzzy boundaries, because we face them all the time. When does a child become an adult, with implications for self-determination, financial independence, parental responsiblity, rape law, etc.? When does a person qualify as poor, with implications for taxation, welfare, etc.? When does a person qualify as mentally retarded? When does evidence add up to 'beyond a reasonable doubt'? In my field, when do different dialects become different languages, or when does an <s> sound become an <sh> sound? The world isn't black and white, and acting like an issue is all black or all white because you can't find a clear boundary in the midst of the gray is not a valid solution.

Ajax

Reply

Point of clarification, it's not entering the birth canal which signifies life, or even crowning, it is actually the drawing of the first breath when encoulment is traditionally considered to have taken place.

In my view this is a medieval relic, and those who adhere to the "until it's born" principle are refusing to face up to the scientific reality, i.e. we are clearly alive before we are born. The problem is defining when life begins. Disallowing all abortion is a way of "hedging you bet", you don't know when life begins so you take ther earliest point possible to avoid ever sanctioning homocide. Taking abortion up to the point of birth is just a refusal to engage with the issue at all.

Reply

Usually the eggs you buy at the store haven't been fertilized.

Reply

I fear you are using the wrong term in "life". There can be no doubt that life begins the moment the zygote is formed - the fertilised egg is indisputably alive.

The argument is about at which end of the developmental spectrum do we imbue that life with humanity and the rights we currently consider concomitant to that status. I would argue that the mediaeval position you describe is actually reflective of the line we ought to draw - that is, viability. In mediaeval times, lacking our modern array of machines that go ping, viability was invariably the moment when the child drew breath. Nowadays, that line is much better understood and much greyer in terms of where it sits on the spectrum of development.

To me, the mother's rights outweigh those of the foetus until the point where that foetus may survive on its own (outside her body) with a reasonable expectation of progression to adulthood. Medical intervention is clearly a factor in this assessment. At current technological capabilities, that is around 20-22 weeks (barring significant medical conditions or disabilities that may compromise viability as defined, in which case later abortions may be justifiable).

It seem to be that this is both humane and scientifically reasoned and balances the mother's rights and that of the foetus. It also appears to be the position of most thoughtful legislatures.

Reply

Indisputably alive... rather a sweeping statement for a zygote.

Roughly 1/4 pregnancies spontaneously miscarry, often due to massive genetic defects. These zygotes would never fulfil the criteria for being alive as they are unable to function independently, nor reach maturity, let alone reproduce themselves.

Reply

Nonsense. A zygote is a living cell. It is not a rock.

Reply

And along those lines, does life even begin at conception? Aren't the egg and the sperm already alive? A new genome is certainly formed, but I'd think the life is already there.

Ajax

Reply

I don't understand the logic with basing it off functioning independently though. A lot of babies born the normal way still end up hooked up on machines keeping them alive for a while. What about babies born prematurely? Does the fact that they were born prematurely mean they can't be killed (or whatever you want to call it) in the time period when if they had not been born prematurely, they would still have been in the womb and could have been aborted?

tbh I find the whole abortion argument kind of surreal. I think many of these "reasoned" and "logical" argument for abortion will one day be looked at the same way when we today look at the "reasoned" and "logical" arguments people gave to support institutions like slavery. Screw the greater social good, it's just wrong.*

*disclaimer - this is just a gut feeling I have on the matter, and people will no doubt think it is ridiculous, but I think this is one of those issues where peoples norms are very much defined by those of their particular time and place, and those from another time and place might take a very different perspective...

Reply

So is a neutrophil. So was the majority of my lunch. Just after death, most of the body is still living cells.

A living cell is not the same as a living organism.

Reply

Rather than replying to other posts, I felt tempted to start from "scratch" and write down a few of my considerations:

#1. It is not a human right to be born. All the theoretically possible combinations of DNA we cannot "allow" for natural reasons - there is not enough room for all of them. This way of speaking also concludes that if two humans share the same DNA, they are in fact the same person - which is apparently not true.

#2. a) We have no empirical reasons (including everyday observations) to believe that human life start at one point. There is a point of fertilisation that "inevitably" leads to what we will later, without much doubt in our minds, call a human being. However, if we were to look at a newly fertilised egg cell in a microscope next to another cell that was not of human origin, the untrained eye would most likely not be able to tell them apart. 'Common sense' will thus lead us to the conclusion that neither of these are human beings - as long as we are not being told anything else, something which would just cloud our judgement from this perspective.

#2. b) At later stages in the development, we would see a creature with features that what we understand as human beings have - and we could thus be inclined to conclude that, indeed, there is something human about this creature - and perhaps, we could call it a human being.


#3. a) The reason one should not kill the unborn humans, I must assume is for the same reasons that it is not allowed to kill babies. We are not allowed to kill babies, because they are considered human beings. The question is then when a human being becomes a human being.

#3. b) From #2., it is demonstrated that empiricism cannot lead us to a clear cut definition of what a human being is - we may at best get a vague sensation. One could attempt to see whether there is a point at which a human being becomes self-aware. However, this point could be well after birth. It is also clear that humans kill animals with ease without asking them whether they are self-aware or not, so self-awareness seems not to be a criterium by itself.


It is then clear to me that one cannot hope for well defined ethics on this issue, for now and perhaps for ever, otherwise we get a revelation from the thunder god Þórr telling us that life starts 453 hours after conception. Thus we must accept dealing with grey areas. I am not too concerned about this; I personally cannot recall things that go back to myself crawling at the floor. Probably, we are well within in the safe zone when we are dealing with fetuses - if self-awareness matters. If it doesn't, well, then it is clearly the moral feelings of the adults that we need to protect rather than the fetuses themselves, which is dubious - to put it mildly.

Reply

I want to start by disputing that medieval doctors were focused on viability, they were clearly focused on "life", which for them meant a joined body and soul. The soul was held to be present in the body once the child drew breath, and at least initially it was the first breath by which the soul entered. You can see this is so because nothing in the theological pastoral literature provides for administering baptism before birth, or to a stillborn. By contrast, once the child drew breath it was imperative that they not die unbaptised, in extremis this allowed for baptism by the parents themselves - an act which would normally dislove their marriage.

Viability was actually set at two or three years, because of infant mortality - and you can see this in the kind of penance set for infanticide (which is still usually a seperate crime from homocide) even when it was deliberate. The penalty usually involved life long penance and fasting, but it was nothing compared to the penalty for murder, and people don't seem to have been prosecuted that often.

This seems to me like the beginning of a humane position, but not the end of one. What about the mother's right to choice vs the foetus' right to life? If the mother decides she just doesn't want the child at 18 weeks she can abort, that seems wrong to me. I do not believe abortion should be a form of birth control, and that it should be a matter of welfare, not preference.

Reply

Page 3 of 4 First 123 4 Last