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I already addressed why this is faulty reasoning. Please scroll up.
Prove to me that you are not what you described, and find a way to refute the logic rather than resort to name-calling.
You really are retarded.
I'm missing it. Sorry if I'm being obtuse, but can you restate your point?
You are not worth my time.
Certainly. Murder is wrong because it uses our own bodies to harm others. Abortion is wrong because it uses our own bodies to harm others. Using an argument such as "It's my body I can do what I want" is subject to comparisons that stretch much further than I'm sure you'd desire, but are nonetheless sound.
By which I obviously mean to say that we should abort Liberatarians rather than to drag the thread further off topic.
That, I'll grant, is still up in the air. Yet from my point of view, it seems that the line is being drawn in entirely the wrong place, based more on history and misunderstanding than science.
Right. Sorry. Libertarians are silly!
Well, then here's another crucial component I know you won't like:
Blastocysts aren't people. Embryos aren't people. Fetuses aren't people.
"My body, my choice" is shorthand for "I am allowed to make medical decisions which I feel are in the long-term best interest of my health, both physically and psychologically."
If you're going to be a pedantic, retarded asshole, expect to get called on it.
Libertarians aren't people.
Is there an abortion thread somewhere that I should be in while I'm in the mood to contemplate and argue my points?
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?t=20043
And thanks to whoever did the spinning-off.
Fetus is more complicated as it goes all the way up to birth, but the first two definitely can't really be put in the person category.
I had the best "lets have an abortion thread instead of a libertarian thread" comment as well, dammit
- Blastocysts and embryos obviously aren't people. They're simply nowhere near developed enough to count for personhood; abortions performed at this stage have no science-based ethical issues.
- Some people (okay, many people) think that full human life begins at conception, and that there's a soul present in blastocysts and embryos. That's fine with me if it's your religious view, but there's no objective way to argue for this so we can't make laws based on this reasoning.
- Fetuses get a little hairy; after all, there's a "natural" limit of viability outside the womb and it keeps getting earlier and earlier as medical techniques improve. Should we make legal limits on when abortions can occur at this stage to avoid killing full human life? I say no:
--->First of all, there simply aren't any women out there who carry a pregnancy to term and are only a week or two away from giving birth and suddenly decide to abort. It just doesn't happen. Late-term abortion procedures are performed for reasons of medical necessity: the mother's life or health is in immediate danger, and often the fetus is dead. These late-term procedures must be kept legal so that women's lives and health can be preserved.
--->If there were women in the latest stages of pregnancy who wanted to end it, wouldn't they just have induced labor instead? (Actual question here.)
Good points, and as much as I'd like to say I'm purely pro-life, I can't. I have never seen scientific/medical reports stating that so much as a two-celled organism in the womb is technically alive.
Yet I firmly believe that before a child comes out of a woman, it has more than enough to constitute it as alive.
Followup:
The same goes for "alive".
Oh, wait, no it wouldn't, because homeless people don't have the destructive power of several thousand tons of dynamite.
Yes, that would be my point.
I'd agree, except that I don't consider it "chest-thumping" to state that if a fetus were removed from a woman and could breathe, it's alive. That seems awfully cut and dry to me.
Umm, huh? When I use the word "people" I think of someone who is fully recognized as an individual by society, and who is both subject to and protected by laws.
It's certainly obvious to me that a glob of cells or an embryo is nowhere near approaching full human status.
Yes, brain-dead people are still people, but note too that they are also the subject of laws: Terry Schiavo comes to mind. Whether she was alive or not she was still "people," insofar that society recognized her as an individual.
Blastocysts and embryos aren't individuals.
Whether or not you're people is at the very heart of this issue! Murder only occurs against persons recognized by society as individuals; if someone chops your arm off in a fight, no one will claim that they "murdered" your arm. Similarly, if organisms in the womb are people, then terminating their existences would count as murder.
Because you can have a fetus born without a head that you can keep "alive" with modern medical technology, but why would you want to?
Why should we care if it's "alive"? Is a brain-dead human, kept breathing by machinery "alive"? Does it matter? Why?
I would suggest that many people who felt that Terry Schiavo was an individual also consider fetuses and blastocysts individuls.
Because parents almost always have strong emotional attachments to their children?
Look, just because biologically speaking the born-brainless fetus in question never had the capacity for sentience like other human individuals doesn't mean that the parents who looked forward to the infant's arrival didn't conceive of that infant as a person themselves, and they would no doubt have strong feelings about the infant's arrival.
I'm sure they do, but they're not following my definition. There needs to be a reasonable level of objectivity involved in this sort of thing, hence my reliance above on scientific terms and facts whenever possible.
As a similar extreme example, I can start mourning for the millions upon millions of people throughout history who will never be born because their parents never meet, but I don't think anyone here would reasonably consider them to be "people" in the sense we're using here.
(To reply to both who made similar points)
1. We should care if it's alive because that is what the morality of abortion is about. If a fetus is nothing more than an appendage, it should be controlled and it's fate determined by the mother. I contend that it is more than just an appendage.
2. I still don't know what to say about fetuses that could be born/removed and kept alive on machines, but not on it's own. You can't keep a rock breathing on life support, nor have I ever heard of corpses being revived years after death and brought to life by connecting machines. Who is to say what is worth saving in general?
Please explain why you think this.
I am still not convinced that an egg that was fertilized one second ago is not a life. I cannot prove that it is, and you cannot prove that it isn't.
Saying that it is "at best, an incredibly hyperbolic lie" is really something. Not quite irony, not quite hypocrisy, but something.
To state it simply and quickly...
An arm or leg, left to it's devices with normal instinctive behavior from it's owner, will remain an arm or a leg. A fetus will change and develop, and turn into a baby which is expelled from it's owner and becomes it's own person with appendages of it's own.
Are you kidding? Of course you can! Any biologist can tell if an ovum is living or not.
By "life" do you mean complete humanity? Moral status equal to that of a living adult? Because what, exactly, is similar (apart from genome) between a blastocyst and an adult human?
Right- It's a subjective feeling that really has no cause to be the basis of a law. People can reasonably form emotional attachments to a fetus at any stage of a pregnancy (or not form emotional attachments, for that matter).
You can't really be objective about "personhood".
A person who feels that a fetus is a person is just as right as someone who disagrees, because it's a purely subjective definition.
Yes they are alive, by biological standards. Cells which are undeniably human are still carrying out many processes of living, like respiration, just the organism as a whole will die if it doesn't receive outside support. However, brain-dead individuals aren't the only ones who will die without support.
Soylent green is people.
Unless, y'know, it doesn't - my mom had more miscarriages than babies. And either way, a bunch of cells that could eventually become a separate living thing, that for the time being require being able to parasitize someone else's body to survive don't trump that body's right to not be parasitized. Besides, I could grow colonies on agar from samples of my cells and it would grow apart from myself. Or I could fertilize any of the eggs I ovulate every month. They all have the potential to be separate entities, but I doubt you say I'm morally obliged to do that. Potential != the rights of a full human being.
I disagree. I fail to see why we should be granting cells that are wholly incapable of feeling ethical considerations. We might as well be giving ethical considerations to rocks.
Chickens breathe, and we kill and eat them en masse. Why does it matter if something breathes or not?
I realize this thread is moving pretty fast, but in regards to the first article: And how many die per every 1,000 conceived? It just seems that if I higher percent of conceived babies are born, there may be a higher percent that die, but there should also be a high number that live.
Could I, in theory, then define you to not be a person and kill you? Silly question I know, but you can't just hide behind a wall of subjectivity and expect that to be at all meaningful. This subjectivity of personhood is very dangerous territory.
Let's try out a different angle then. If a fetus fails to be a person, is it then still considered an animal? If so, on what grounds is it acceptable to kill such an animal? I'll prempt the argument over it being the same organism as the mother, as the fetus will have a different genetic makeup from the mother. Even if it was a clone, we still consider identical twins to be separate organisms.