It's an unsatisfactory bit of reasoning, but pro-life is a misnomer as well. Very few people are anti-life. The framing is so very ridiculous it's hard to take someone who in one breath can denounce a miscarriage as murder and claim they want life, then be for the death penalty.
It's internally inconsistent and that bothers me a lot. Abortion is complicated because sometimes life is complicated. It's much more emotionally gratifying to put pro-life on a shirt and not think it through.
Edit: I think the difficulty of moving from anti-choice to pro-choice is probably very difficult.
Something to keep in mind is that discussions about abortion are usually not actually about abortion. It's actually about female sexuality and the morality that surrounds it.
Note PA discussions about abortion are exceptions to the rule.
The Republican lawmaker behind a controversial bill — which could make it legal to charge women and providers with murder for an abortion — defended the proposal by saying completely removing access to the procedure would “force” women to be “more personally responsible” with sex.
State Representative Tony Tinderholt, of Arlington, said in an interview with the Observer that, if passed, the bill would reduce the number of pregnancies “when they know that there’s repercussions.”
So if we took one of the embryo that didn't have a soul and intervened to have it grow up we would have a zombie?
I assume you meant to quote me, but no, because God would have known that we'd intervene and thus they would both have souls.
Omniscience and omnipotence break a lot of things.
e: to clarify, I'm not saying I believe this. Just explaining why there's no logical trap one can spring, so that people are better equipped for any discussions they choose to have.
There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there is a one year-old baby. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there are five fertilized embryos tied up and unable to move.. You have two options: (1) Do nothing, and the trolley kills the one year-old baby on the main track. (2) Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill the five fertilized embryos. Which is the most ethical choice?
Edited to better reflect the choice that should be presented.
There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five fertilized embryos tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is a one year-old baby. You have two options: (1) Do nothing, and the trolley kills the five fertilized embryos on the main track. (2) Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill the one year-old baby. Which is the most ethical choice?
Can I throw the lever such that it rolls over both the baby and the embryos?
As far as the post quoted from MrMister, i tend to agree with Michael Tooley from a philosophical perspective. My question is, what provides the sanctity of human life above and beyond other forms of life? How do we justify meat-eating or other forms of animal slaughter while treating murder as a special kind of evil?
It's an argument where everyone has to be on the same page about a lot of things to come to an agreement. First off the cuff, you have to shed religious preconditions, namely that human life is sacred because God says so. This cannot apply as a moral truism without first proving that your religion is the one true religion and outclasses all others. This isn't to say that everyone needs to be atheist to even engage in this argument fairly, but they need to at least be willing to assume that there must be a non-religious basis for the value of human life along with the religious one.
Second, you have to answer the question of whether the destruction of any life is valuable, a place where vegans or the more extreme end of animal rights groups might get off the wagon. If you believe *all* life is sacred, you are at least taking a logically consistent position, even if not one that's especially practical or popular.
Now, you can narrow down point two by saying that the brains are what separates the sacred life from the unsacred life, namely the ability to feel pain. Now you get into vegetarian realms and away from veganism, only higher-order meat is bad because of the perceptive capabilities of those creatures and the suffering they go through before their slaughter, but you're still in a realm where turning Babe into pork cutlet is the same as taking an axe to Tiny Tim, since pigs have brain power equivalent to human toddlers. Pretty sure they can pass the mirror test, an important test of individuality, in that they understand the difference between illusion and reality.
The mirror test is a weird hill to die on, though, because the game Peekaboo works because human infants consistently fail the mirror test before a certain point: to them, as soon as they can't see you, you are no longer there for all intents and purposes. Thus they do not understand that things exist beyond perception, whereas the pig that knows what it sees in the mirror is merely a reflection of itself *does* grasp that things exist beyond perception, which is the very basis of abstract thought, the thing which separates us from other creatures. Some other animals seem to have this level of intellect which surpasses that of babies.
The bad problem with the Tooley position is that there's no way to adhere to it without saying that infanticide is justifiable.
There are other messy philosophical implications here, namely the question of whether people in comas or permanent catatonia (or people who were born so mentally disabled that they will never move past mental infancy). So under this moral paradigm, infanticide and euthanasia for the severely mentally challenged is viable. Now we're getting into a realm that certainly *feels* wrong. But is it?
Often Kant's categorical imperative is a good signpost to follow: do what is right in the universal sense, all actions are good or evil because we can see whether the action is universally applicable, the golden rule writ large. The problem in abortion's case is that "abortions always" would lead to human extinction, while "no abortions ever" leads to unnecessary death, illness, and general misery.
So we turn to John Stuart Mill. Abortion is a topic where we must weigh the outcomes with the limited knowledge we have. Every fetus famously has the opportunity to be the next Gandhi or the next Trump, however human population growth is generally good and we agree that all life has some value, even life which has not yet attained self-awareness, but if the mother feels she is unfit, she could create bad conditions for the child, which would then lead to bad conditions for society due to poor upbringing. Finally, there are cases where the health of the mother or the health of the child make abortion an inevitability.
So it comes back, morally, to the consensus position. Some things society generally deems bad are theoretically justifiable (including infanticide at an early enough age), but at the same time all life deserves some degree of respect due to the golden rule, but we must weigh that against the utility of each specific pregnancy. The median position: safe, legal, rare.
A takedown of the pro-birth position might come later, but damn this took me a while.
It's an unsatisfactory bit of reasoning, but pro-life is a misnomer as well. Very few people are anti-life. The framing is so very ridiculous it's hard to take someone who in one breath can denounce a miscarriage as murder and claim they want life, then be for the death penalty.
It's internally inconsistent and that bothers me a lot. Abortion is complicated because sometimes life is complicated. It's much more emotionally gratifying to put pro-life on a shirt and not think it through.
Edit: I think the difficulty of moving from anti-choice to pro-choice is probably very difficult.
Something to keep in mind is that discussions about abortion are usually not actually about abortion. It's actually about female sexuality and the morality that surrounds it.
Note PA discussions about abortion are exceptions to the rule.
The Republican lawmaker behind a controversial bill — which could make it legal to charge women and providers with murder for an abortion — defended the proposal by saying completely removing access to the procedure would “force” women to be “more personally responsible” with sex.
State Representative Tony Tinderholt, of Arlington, said in an interview with the Observer that, if passed, the bill would reduce the number of pregnancies “when they know that there’s repercussions.”
So if we took one of the embryo that didn't have a soul and intervened to have it grow up we would have a zombie?
I assume you meant to quote me, but no, because God would have known that we'd intervene and thus they would both have souls.
Omniscience and omnipotence break a lot of things.
e: to clarify, I'm not saying I believe this. Just explaining why there's no logical trap one can spring, so that people are better equipped for any discussions they choose to have.
It's not a trap but people who believe that life begins at conception certainly owe us an explanation on a)how personhood works in early development and b) why they think that.
+2
Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
A great difficulty in almost all discussions of abortion is that two sides generally argue in entirely incommensurate fashions:
The pro-choice side tend to argue in the language of consequentialism while the pro-life side is more often than not strictly deontological (but then, how else do you address purely deontological ethics? @MrMister ? ). The concerns and worldviews also tend to be libertarian and authoritarian as well, which only further serves to make conversation more difficult.
Which isn't to say that productive discussion isn't possible between two parties of good faith - it definitely IS - but it is challenging and requires effort and the willingness to investigate the more fundamental areas of disagreement.
The bad problem with the Tooley position is that there's no way to adhere to it without saying that infanticide is justifiable.
The easiest way out of this is to acknowledge that the infant has some moral value - though less than a full person. (For that matter, a fetus has some moral value - though less than an adult woman.) In other words, if there's a convenient way to preserve the infant's life - say, a safe surrender site - then that's the ethical choice. If there isn't any convenient way to do so - say, you're a political refugee fleeing a war-torn country and you don't have enough food to feed your entire family - then infanticide is forgiveable.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
A great difficulty in almost all discussions of abortion is that two sides generally argue in entirely incommensurate fashions:
The pro-choice side tend to argue in the language of consequentialism while the pro-life side is more often than not strictly deontological (but then, how else do you address purely deontological ethics? MrMister ? ). The concerns and worldviews also tend to be libertarian and authoritarian as well, which only further serves to make conversation more difficult.
Conveniently, most lay deontology is just naive consequentialism wrapped in a flag and holding a cross.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Solution: Perform vasectomies on all sexually mature males.
The number of men who refuse to consider vasectomy but want their significant others to get a tubal ligation is infuriating.
If men could have abortions, they'd be free with the purchase of a full tank of gas. There would be informercials for OTC feticides and Toby Keith would brag about how many he'd had.
Edit: Vasectomies are awesome. No hormones, implants or abdominal surgery under general anesthesia. All of which significantly impact women's health and carry risks far above a man having to be an adult for 15 minutes.
dispatch.o on
+11
MortiousThe Nightmare BeginsMove to New ZealandRegistered Userregular
Solution: Perform vasectomies on all sexually mature males.
The number of men who refuse to consider vasectomy but want their significant others to get a tubal ligation is infuriating.
If men could have abortions, they'd be free with the purchase of a full tank of gas. There would be informercials for OTC feticides and Toby Keith would brag about how many he'd had.
Edit: Vasectomies are awesome. No hormones, implants or abdominal surgery under general anesthesia. All of which significantly impact women's health and carry risks far above a man having to be an adult for 15 minutes.
Once my wife's IUD expires, I'm opting for one.
Even if I have to go to a private hospital to do so, the Family Planning clinic was a bit grumpy last time we talked to them about it.
This may be intellectually lazy of me but personally I find most public discussions (real discussions, not... whatever the other stuff is) about abortion to be academic. The decision begins and ends with the women (and her partner, if applicable). It was her body and her life first. She holds primacy over any embryo, period. The moral opinions of others hold absolutely no merit in her decision.
The only thing needed is clarification on when it becomes a distinct living thing and not merely tissue. Once you have that figured out, you have a clear cutoff point for non-needed abortions, like if the mother's life is in danger.
Note that I'm not trying to shut down the discussion! Not everyone shares my values. I just wanted to contribute the opinion of a liberal minded male, in a respectful manner.
+3
surfpossumA nonentitytrying to preserve the anonymity he so richly deserves.Registered Userregular
It's an unsatisfactory bit of reasoning, but pro-life is a misnomer as well. Very few people are anti-life. The framing is so very ridiculous it's hard to take someone who in one breath can denounce a miscarriage as murder and claim they want life, then be for the death penalty.
It's internally inconsistent and that bothers me a lot. Abortion is complicated because sometimes life is complicated. It's much more emotionally gratifying to put pro-life on a shirt and not think it through.
Edit: I think the difficulty of moving from anti-choice to pro-choice is probably very difficult.
Something to keep in mind is that discussions about abortion are usually not actually about abortion. It's actually about female sexuality and the morality that surrounds it.
Note PA discussions about abortion are exceptions to the rule.
The Republican lawmaker behind a controversial bill — which could make it legal to charge women and providers with murder for an abortion — defended the proposal by saying completely removing access to the procedure would “force” women to be “more personally responsible” with sex.
State Representative Tony Tinderholt, of Arlington, said in an interview with the Observer that, if passed, the bill would reduce the number of pregnancies “when they know that there’s repercussions.”
So if we took one of the embryo that didn't have a soul and intervened to have it grow up we would have a zombie?
I assume you meant to quote me, but no, because God would have known that we'd intervene and thus they would both have souls.
Omniscience and omnipotence break a lot of things.
e: to clarify, I'm not saying I believe this. Just explaining why there's no logical trap one can spring, so that people are better equipped for any discussions they choose to have.
It's not a trap but people who believe that life begins at conception certainly owe us an explanation on a)how personhood works in early development and b) why they think that.
Because God* said so.
I am reasonably confident that if you dig far enough, for most staunch anti-abortion advocates the whole thing is a proxy war for whether or not their concept of God is right. Giving in on this issue is giving up their religion.
So, like, I agree that they should provide a legal/scientific/something argument if they want to see it become law. But I was approaching this from the perspective of trying to change their minds.
From the perspective of influencing legislation... show up in larger numbers.
It's an unsatisfactory bit of reasoning, but pro-life is a misnomer as well. Very few people are anti-life. The framing is so very ridiculous it's hard to take someone who in one breath can denounce a miscarriage as murder and claim they want life, then be for the death penalty.
It's internally inconsistent and that bothers me a lot. Abortion is complicated because sometimes life is complicated. It's much more emotionally gratifying to put pro-life on a shirt and not think it through.
Edit: I think the difficulty of moving from anti-choice to pro-choice is probably very difficult.
Something to keep in mind is that discussions about abortion are usually not actually about abortion. It's actually about female sexuality and the morality that surrounds it.
Note PA discussions about abortion are exceptions to the rule.
The Republican lawmaker behind a controversial bill — which could make it legal to charge women and providers with murder for an abortion — defended the proposal by saying completely removing access to the procedure would “force” women to be “more personally responsible” with sex.
State Representative Tony Tinderholt, of Arlington, said in an interview with the Observer that, if passed, the bill would reduce the number of pregnancies “when they know that there’s repercussions.”
So if we took one of the embryo that didn't have a soul and intervened to have it grow up we would have a zombie?
I assume you meant to quote me, but no, because God would have known that we'd intervene and thus they would both have souls.
Omniscience and omnipotence break a lot of things.
e: to clarify, I'm not saying I believe this. Just explaining why there's no logical trap one can spring, so that people are better equipped for any discussions they choose to have.
It's not a trap but people who believe that life begins at conception certainly owe us an explanation on a)how personhood works in early development and b) why they think that.
Because God* said so.
I am reasonably confident that if you dig far enough, for most staunch anti-abortion advocates the whole thing is a proxy war for whether or not their concept of God is right. Giving in on this issue is giving up their religion.
So, like, I agree that they should provide a legal/scientific/something argument if they want to see it become law. But I was approaching this from the perspective of trying to change their minds.
From the perspective of influencing legislation... show up in larger numbers.
* Reagan
That's what I think is so interesting, since god doesn't have anything to say about when life begins.
In the Old Testament a woman being pregnant didn't grant you reprieve from the death penalty and causing a miscarriage wasn't murder.
Solution: Perform vasectomies on all sexually mature males.
The number of men who refuse to consider vasectomy but want their significant others to get a tubal ligation is infuriating.
If men could have abortions, they'd be free with the purchase of a full tank of gas. There would be informercials for OTC feticides and Toby Keith would brag about how many he'd had.
Edit: Vasectomies are awesome. No hormones, implants or abdominal surgery under general anesthesia. All of which significantly impact women's health and carry risks far above a man having to be an adult for 15 minutes.
Not to disagree with the tone of your post, but having seen several of my friends having issues sitting for a few days after one it's also not just 15 minutes of your time.
It's an unsatisfactory bit of reasoning, but pro-life is a misnomer as well. Very few people are anti-life. The framing is so very ridiculous it's hard to take someone who in one breath can denounce a miscarriage as murder and claim they want life, then be for the death penalty.
It's internally inconsistent and that bothers me a lot. Abortion is complicated because sometimes life is complicated. It's much more emotionally gratifying to put pro-life on a shirt and not think it through.
Edit: I think the difficulty of moving from anti-choice to pro-choice is probably very difficult.
Something to keep in mind is that discussions about abortion are usually not actually about abortion. It's actually about female sexuality and the morality that surrounds it.
Note PA discussions about abortion are exceptions to the rule.
The Republican lawmaker behind a controversial bill — which could make it legal to charge women and providers with murder for an abortion — defended the proposal by saying completely removing access to the procedure would “force” women to be “more personally responsible” with sex.
State Representative Tony Tinderholt, of Arlington, said in an interview with the Observer that, if passed, the bill would reduce the number of pregnancies “when they know that there’s repercussions.”
So if we took one of the embryo that didn't have a soul and intervened to have it grow up we would have a zombie?
I assume you meant to quote me, but no, because God would have known that we'd intervene and thus they would both have souls.
Omniscience and omnipotence break a lot of things.
e: to clarify, I'm not saying I believe this. Just explaining why there's no logical trap one can spring, so that people are better equipped for any discussions they choose to have.
It's not a trap but people who believe that life begins at conception certainly owe us an explanation on a)how personhood works in early development and b) why they think that.
Because God* said so.
I am reasonably confident that if you dig far enough, for most staunch anti-abortion advocates the whole thing is a proxy war for whether or not their concept of God is right. Giving in on this issue is giving up their religion.
So, like, I agree that they should provide a legal/scientific/something argument if they want to see it become law. But I was approaching this from the perspective of trying to change their minds.
From the perspective of influencing legislation... show up in larger numbers.
* Reagan
That's what I think is so interesting, since god doesn't have anything to say about when life begins.
In the Old Testament a woman being pregnant didn't grant you reprieve from the death penalty and causing a miscarriage wasn't murder.
This keeps crashing on my phone so I can't read much of it, but it matches the impression I've gotten from bits and pieces elsewhere: the rise of "the Social Issue" in politics (mostly page 234).
The religious aspect is there but it's not the core. Mostly religious arguments are justification for the real reason: punishing women for having sex.
I'm starting to thing that every single women's issue boils down to "Women shouldn't have sex unless their man wants babies".
I don't think this is really a coherent distinction given pretty much every religious tradition you care to name explicitly contains a lot of instruction around sex and it almost always focuses more on female sexual responsibilities and restrictions. I'm always very eager to point out that modern Christianity bears only the most superficial resemblance to Christianity of centuries before let alone the text itself but it's difficult to ignore the fact that continuous tradition over history is sexually repressive and moreso toward women. "Punishing women for having sex" (or, at least, the moral intuitions that undergird it) isn't a separate belief justified by religious arguments, it's a bona fide religious belief in and of itself.
The problem with the pro-birth position is entirely down to the other positions embraced by the pro-birth movement, namely "abstinence only" preaching and the rank lack of respect for the fetus as soon as it comes out of the womb.
I guess it really doesn't need a thorough takedown. It could be an intellectually consistent position to hallow all human life from zygote until the paramedic calls time-of-death, but then you'd better damn well be anti-death-penalty, anti-war, and anti-police brutality. If not, you're a hypocrite, period.
Even if the justification is merely that "I'm a good Catholic," then you'd better adhere to the whole fucking nine yards: be an environmentalist, believe in evolution like the Pope does, be charitable, love the poor, and support public welfare programs, or you're not a good Catholic, again you're just a hypocrite.
Same with more fundamentalist Christian variants: turn the other cheek, love the poor, and condemn the rich, or shut up.
The religious aspect is there but it's not the core. Mostly religious arguments are justification for the real reason: punishing women for having sex.
I'm starting to thing that every single women's issue boils down to "Women shouldn't have sex unless their man wants babies".
I don't think this is really a coherent distinction given pretty much every religious tradition you care to name explicitly contains a lot of instruction around sex and it almost always focuses more on female sexual responsibilities and restrictions. I'm always very eager to point out that modern Christianity bears only the most superficial resemblance to Christianity of centuries before let alone the text itself but it's difficult to ignore the fact that continuous tradition over history is sexually repressive and moreso toward women. "Punishing women for having sex" (or, at least, the moral intuitions that undergird it) isn't a separate belief justified by religious arguments, it's a bona fide religious belief in and of itself.
I cannot wrap my head around that. How is "PWFHS" religious? It's like you just told me the color blue has a crunchy flavor. I'm not saying your wrong, though. I'm just confused.
0
Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
The religious aspect is there but it's not the core. Mostly religious arguments are justification for the real reason: punishing women for having sex.
I'm starting to thing that every single women's issue boils down to "Women shouldn't have sex unless their man wants babies".
I don't think this is really a coherent distinction given pretty much every religious tradition you care to name explicitly contains a lot of instruction around sex and it almost always focuses more on female sexual responsibilities and restrictions. I'm always very eager to point out that modern Christianity bears only the most superficial resemblance to Christianity of centuries before let alone the text itself but it's difficult to ignore the fact that continuous tradition over history is sexually repressive and moreso toward women. "Punishing women for having sex" (or, at least, the moral intuitions that undergird it) isn't a separate belief justified by religious arguments, it's a bona fide religious belief in and of itself.
I cannot wrap my head around that. How is "PWFHS" religious? It's like you just told me the color blue has a crunchy flavor. I'm not saying your wrong, though. I'm just confused.
As I say, it's the moral intuitions that undergird it - the value of virginity, the sanctity of sex, the immorality of fornication and adultery, the sinfulness of lust and so on and so forth. The special sauce is that women are very much property of their father and then husband in the religious traditions and while it seems like we've mostly discarded that aspect the consequent misogyny has been maintained.
The bad problem with the Tooley position is that there's no way to adhere to it without saying that infanticide is justifiable.
The easiest way out of this is to acknowledge that the infant has some moral value - though less than a full person. (For that matter, a fetus has some moral value - though less than an adult woman.) In other words, if there's a convenient way to preserve the infant's life - say, a safe surrender site - then that's the ethical choice. If there isn't any convenient way to do so - say, you're a political refugee fleeing a war-torn country and you don't have enough food to feed your entire family - then infanticide is forgivable.
This isn't as tidy as you make it sound.
Say there is something that prevents a human from developing past infancy intellectually. Are they never of full moral value? what if they at some point incur a diminished mental state, do they lose their moral value? can they get it back if they recover?
Is their moral value forever tied to their mental development? does someone who is more developed have greater value?
In my city, in Canada, abortions are available on request up to 14 weeks. This is due to provider preference only- later abortions are less safe and should be done by people who do them regularly. We will perform them up to 24 weeks for medical need. (We would perform them past this arbitrary line if the fetus was not going to be viable. We do also perform preterm inductions for lethal anomolies, such as trisomy 13, without fetal monitoring and in full expectation that the fetus will die during labor, because it cannot survive long past birth anyway.In a sense, we are inducing them to die. Some might call that an abortion, too, but i think forcing a woman to carry an inevitably dead baby for most of a year is cruel.)
Overall, we probably perform 10-20 per week electively and 2-4 per month for medical reasons.
It seems that most people here know this, but i want to restate that there is incontrovertible evidence that decreasing access to legal abortions does not reduce their number. Countries with no legal abortions have a similar rate to those with no restrictions. It simply makes women have illegal and unsafe abortions. My senior colleagues tell me that before legal abortions they would perform multiple hysterectomies a month for intractible uterine infections on young women, forever preventing them from having a family. I refuse to go back to that. Abortions will be made illegal here over my dead body, and i mean that.
If anyone has questions about the technical aspects of providing them, ask away.
As an aside, i think the american ultrasoundlaws are rather silly. We require a transvaginal ultrasound to date the pregnancy. It's necessary part of doing them safely.
It's an unsatisfactory bit of reasoning, but pro-life is a misnomer as well. Very few people are anti-life. The framing is so very ridiculous it's hard to take someone who in one breath can denounce a miscarriage as murder and claim they want life, then be for the death penalty.
It's internally inconsistent and that bothers me a lot. Abortion is complicated because sometimes life is complicated. It's much more emotionally gratifying to put pro-life on a shirt and not think it through.
Edit: I think the difficulty of moving from anti-choice to pro-choice is probably very difficult.
Something to keep in mind is that discussions about abortion are usually not actually about abortion. It's actually about female sexuality and the morality that surrounds it.
Note PA discussions about abortion are exceptions to the rule.
The Republican lawmaker behind a controversial bill — which could make it legal to charge women and providers with murder for an abortion — defended the proposal by saying completely removing access to the procedure would “force” women to be “more personally responsible” with sex.
State Representative Tony Tinderholt, of Arlington, said in an interview with the Observer that, if passed, the bill would reduce the number of pregnancies “when they know that there’s repercussions.”
So if we took one of the embryo that didn't have a soul and intervened to have it grow up we would have a zombie?
I assume you meant to quote me, but no, because God would have known that we'd intervene and thus they would both have souls.
Omniscience and omnipotence break a lot of things.
e: to clarify, I'm not saying I believe this. Just explaining why there's no logical trap one can spring, so that people are better equipped for any discussions they choose to have.
Eh, but that line of reasoning leads to "God knows the aborted embryo will be aborted so it doesn't have a soul...", and then you lose the main thing against abortion. And obviously it can't be different in that case because God isn't (usually - see Job) an asshole.
Alternatively - ask when the cutoff is where God decides it won't get a soul.
In my city, in Canada, abortions are available on request up to 14 weeks. This is due to provider preference only- later abortions are less safe and should be done by people who do them regularly. We will perform them up to 24 weeks for medical need. (We would perform them past this arbitrary line if the fetus was not going to be viable. We do also perform preterm inductions for lethal anomolies, such as trisomy 13, without fetal monitoring and in full expectation that the fetus will die during labor, because it cannot survive long past birth anyway.In a sense, we are inducing them to die. Some might call that an abortion, too, but i think forcing a woman to carry an inevitably dead baby for most of a year is cruel.)
Overall, we probably perform 10-20 per week electively and 2-4 per month for medical reasons.
It seems that most people here know this, but i want to restate that there is incontrovertible evidence that decreasing access to legal abortions does not reduce their number. Countries with no legal abortions have a similar rate to those with no restrictions. It simply makes women have illegal and unsafe abortions. My senior colleagues tell me that before legal abortions they would perform multiple hysterectomies a month for intractible uterine infections on young women, forever preventing them from having a family. I refuse to go back to that. Abortions will be made illegal here over my dead body, and i mean that.
If anyone has questions about the technical aspects of providing them, ask away.
As an aside, i think the american ultrasoundlaws are rather silly. We require a transvaginal ultrasound to date the pregnancy. It's necessary part of doing them safely.
I am a Canadian who has had 2 abortions. One I was barely 16 and just not ready to have or give up a child with my what I realized later emotionally abusive ex.
The second was when we found out at 24 weeks our son was not going to survive past birth. He had too many problems to be compatibale with life. I was told we had until 25+5 to decide without the doctors agreeing it was for medical. (Which they all said they would agree to). I went to women's hospital and they gave my son a shot in his heart to stop it. I watched it stop on the ultrasound from one beat then nothing. He would not know pain. I was then induced and gave birth to him sleeping. The care I received from everyone was awesome and made a hard time much easier.
The same can be said for mine when I was 16. About 10 weeks and was put right out in the hospital.
These experiences just reaffirmed for me that we need to treat all people with respect especially the woman who have to make this call. And no I have never felt regret from either of my abortions.
Thank you @psyck0 for what you do. I know I was lucky to live in a part of the province where it was only 2 ferries and a drive to receive care.
Mom2Kat on
+11
FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
Man, I remember the days when this thread would be locked (there was a time when these threads and gun threads were banned from D&D, for very good reason)
I'm largely ambivalent about the morality of actually having an abortion--when a human counts as human and when they have a right to live seems increasingly fuzzy, as premature birth survival continues to happen earlier as we (hopefully) progress toward artificial wombs as an option. And then of course weighing that against a woman's right to control her body is another whole can of worms that I don't like getting into and no longer hold a clear position about.
What I'm not conflicted or confused about is the necessity of abortions being legal, for practical reasons. Making it illegal seems more about punishing women and less about stopping abortions, based on the practical effects.
My zombie survival life simulator They Don't Sleep is out now on Steam if you want to check it out.
Blameless Cleric An angel made of sapphires each more flawlessly cut than the last Registered Userregular
Hey! I was talking about this thread with a friend who had an abortion a couple years ago, and she suggested that I tell her tale in here briefly. So!
My friend has issues with some sort of thing (she never remembers what it's called) having to do with the internal climate of her uterus that makes it extremely unlikely for a fertilized egg to be able to survive more than 10 or so weeks (without extensive medical intervention). She has had two miscarriages (one at 15, one at 17) that happened before 9 weeks. Both of those were pretty traumatic because, among other reasons, in both cases she was not at home and unaware that she had been pregnant (she doesn't have regular periods regardless).
Our freshman year, she got mono and wound up in the hospital for a couple of weeks, during which time she was too sick and groggy to remember to ask someone to bring her her birth control. Time rolls on and around winter break, she finds out that she's 6 weeks pregnant. She made the decision to have an at-home abortion (she took the pill) through PP and, while that ended up being somewhat traumatic for other reasons, she feels like it was worlds better than having to wait it out and probably losing the pregnancy later down the line, because she does not have the money to do the medical stuff that would give it a chance of being viable.
So, yes, that's all. She just wanted to have the perspective of someone in an odd medical spot - pregnancy to term could be possible if she went into large amounts of medical debt - considered, and thinks sharing stories like hers is important (I agree!).
I have spent time around people who were very anti-choice, including in the south (Tennessee). For people who aren't aware, there's a lot of genetic testing that is available to ensure a pregnancy can go to term with a healthy fetus/baby being the end result.
Many people use genetic testing as a way to make sure they're not going to end out with birth defects resulting in a burden for the parents but a tragically low quality of life for the child. This is especially true if a woman is in older as age increases risk of complications.
The look on someones zealously anti-choice face as they work out the logical conclusion when you ask why they're getting the testing done during their pregnancy is really sort of eye opening. The entire process isn't something they've ever actually thought through in the fashion one would normally use when solving a puzzle or working out a solution. I often wondered if much like church (not an insult to church goers) that it's as much about being involved in a cause or having a place to go as it is holding a belief someone arrives at through careful self evaluation.
I'm really thankful I grew up in California and had what I consider very good health science classes from 7th grade onward. As I age and talk to people who grew up in regressive hyper Christian controlled regions of the country and hear about how "DON'T FUCK OR YOU GO TO HELL WHORE" was basically the sex education, I wonder why anyone would want that to be the national standard.
0
JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered Userregular
The bad problem with the Tooley position is that there's no way to adhere to it without saying that infanticide is justifiable.
The easiest way out of this is to acknowledge that the infant has some moral value - though less than a full person. (For that matter, a fetus has some moral value - though less than an adult woman.) In other words, if there's a convenient way to preserve the infant's life - say, a safe surrender site - then that's the ethical choice. If there isn't any convenient way to do so - say, you're a political refugee fleeing a war-torn country and you don't have enough food to feed your entire family - then infanticide is forgivable.
This isn't as tidy as you make it sound.
Say there is something that prevents a human from developing past infancy intellectually. Are they never of full moral value? what if they at some point incur a diminished mental state, do they lose their moral value? can they get it back if they recover?
Is their moral value forever tied to their mental development? does someone who is more developed have greater value?
"full of moral value" is not really the way to think about this. the point is rather that our set of obligations and responsibilities towards a human is relative to how they are.
for example, our obligation to respect bodily autonomy and free choice is relative to the ability of a person to use it. it is wrong to lock up you or me in a home against our will, it would be not (or less) wrong to lock someone with the mental capacity of an infant up against their will.
There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there is a one year-old baby. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there are five fertilized embryos tied up and unable to move.. You have two options: (1) Do nothing, and the trolley kills the one year-old baby on the main track. (2) Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill the five fertilized embryos. Which is the most ethical choice?
Edited to better reflect the choice that should be presented.
According to Surfpossum's explanation of the theological goalpost-shifting:
God would know whether you picked option #2 and make sure not to allocate souls accordingly. Because God is omnipotent and omniscient.
Man, not having to evidence or justify the pointless word salad is kinda nice.
As far as the post quoted from MrMister, i tend to agree with Michael Tooley from a philosophical perspective. My question is, what provides the sanctity of human life above and beyond other forms of life? How do we justify meat-eating or other forms of animal slaughter while treating murder as a special kind of evil?
I just assume the universe is amoral by default. Saves a lot of annoying headaches.
It's an argument where everyone has to be on the same page about a lot of things to come to an agreement. First off the cuff, you have to shed religious preconditions, namely that human life is sacred because God says so. This cannot apply as a moral truism without first proving that your religion is the one true religion and outclasses all others. This isn't to say that everyone needs to be atheist to even engage in this argument fairly, but they need to at least be willing to assume that there must be a non-religious basis for the value of human life along with the religious one.
Okay, in fairness, I'd say any religion ought to at least set out to try and prove its claims if it's going to make any claims to its own profundity. Otherwise it has no mandate to claim.
But if people were going to take the skeptical unpersuaded position by default, then nobody would be religious.
Second, you have to answer the question of whether the destruction of any life is valuable, a place where vegans or the more extreme end of animal rights groups might get off the wagon. If you believe *all* life is sacred, you are at least taking a logically consistent position, even if not one that's especially practical or popular.
I think variants of Buddhism and Taoism are like this in the sense that any sense of self-worth is essentially selfish and illusory.
Meaning it's not wrong for you to eat meat, per se. You just don't get to cry foul when you get eaten in turn or an earthquake kills you. It's just an acceptance that one isn't above nature because of magic or some special divine status chartered to you by a god. Mortality is part of the game.
Now, you can narrow down point two by saying that the brains are what separates the sacred life from the unsacred life, namely the ability to feel pain. Now you get into vegetarian realms and away from veganism, only higher-order meat is bad because of the perceptive capabilities of those creatures and the suffering they go through before their slaughter, but you're still in a realm where turning Babe into pork cutlet is the same as taking an axe to Tiny Tim, since pigs have brain power equivalent to human toddlers. Pretty sure they can pass the mirror test, an important test of individuality, in that they understand the difference between illusion and reality.
The mirror test is a weird hill to die on, though, because the game Peekaboo works because human infants consistently fail the mirror test before a certain point: to them, as soon as they can't see you, you are no longer there for all intents and purposes. Thus they do not understand that things exist beyond perception, whereas the pig that knows what it sees in the mirror is merely a reflection of itself *does* grasp that things exist beyond perception, which is the very basis of abstract thought, the thing which separates us from other creatures. Some other animals seem to have this level of intellect which surpasses that of babies.
The bad problem with the Tooley position is that there's no way to adhere to it without saying that infanticide is justifiable.
There are other messy philosophical implications here, namely the question of whether people in comas or permanent catatonia (or people who were born so mentally disabled that they will never move past mental infancy). So under this moral paradigm, infanticide and euthanasia for the severely mentally challenged is viable. Now we're getting into a realm that certainly *feels* wrong. But is it?
I resolve the riddle by saying we're speciests.
There's no reason we value human lives more than a pig's life other than culture and habit. Basically other humans are socially-biologically compatible for certain uses.
Note that certain animals just have a higher status than others as a simple matter of culture (e.g. domestic dogs) or others are food depending on where you live (e.g. cows) or too sacred to kill (e.g. cows again).
Eh, but that line of reasoning leads to "God knows the aborted embryo will be aborted so it doesn't have a soul...", and then you lose the main thing against abortion. And obviously it can't be different in that case because God isn't (usually - see Job) an asshole.
Alternatively - ask when the cutoff is where God decides it won't get a soul.
There's a way to tweak that question to be non-theistic, as well.
If abortion is wrong because it denies someone their future potential, is it still wrong to abort a fetus that's just going to end up being aborted anyway?
The bad problem with the Tooley position is that there's no way to adhere to it without saying that infanticide is justifiable.
The easiest way out of this is to acknowledge that the infant has some moral value - though less than a full person. (For that matter, a fetus has some moral value - though less than an adult woman.) In other words, if there's a convenient way to preserve the infant's life - say, a safe surrender site - then that's the ethical choice. If there isn't any convenient way to do so - say, you're a political refugee fleeing a war-torn country and you don't have enough food to feed your entire family - then infanticide is forgivable.
This isn't as tidy as you make it sound.
Say there is something that prevents a human from developing past infancy intellectually. Are they never of full moral value? what if they at some point incur a diminished mental state, do they lose their moral value? can they get it back if they recover?
Is their moral value forever tied to their mental development? does someone who is more developed have greater value?
If you look at how people treat mental illness, perceived lack of willpower, personal character, economic capability and intelligence in general in practice -- that answer would be "Yes."
The bad problem with the Tooley position is that there's no way to adhere to it without saying that infanticide is justifiable.
The easiest way out of this is to acknowledge that the infant has some moral value - though less than a full person. (For that matter, a fetus has some moral value - though less than an adult woman.) In other words, if there's a convenient way to preserve the infant's life - say, a safe surrender site - then that's the ethical choice. If there isn't any convenient way to do so - say, you're a political refugee fleeing a war-torn country and you don't have enough food to feed your entire family - then infanticide is forgivable.
This isn't as tidy as you make it sound.
Say there is something that prevents a human from developing past infancy intellectually. Are they never of full moral value? what if they at some point incur a diminished mental state, do they lose their moral value? can they get it back if they recover?
Is their moral value forever tied to their mental development? does someone who is more developed have greater value?
If you look at how people treat mental illness, perceived lack of willpower, personal character, economic capability and intelligence in general in practice -- that answer would be "Yes."
In a sane country, suicide would be considered the product of powerful mental illness. But there are so many people who call it "cowardice" or "weakness" or "selfishness."
Posts
Omniscience and omnipotence break a lot of things.
e: to clarify, I'm not saying I believe this. Just explaining why there's no logical trap one can spring, so that people are better equipped for any discussions they choose to have.
There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there is a one year-old baby. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there are five fertilized embryos tied up and unable to move.. You have two options: (1) Do nothing, and the trolley kills the one year-old baby on the main track. (2) Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill the five fertilized embryos. Which is the most ethical choice?
Edited to better reflect the choice that should be presented.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Can I throw the lever such that it rolls over both the baby and the embryos?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
It's an argument where everyone has to be on the same page about a lot of things to come to an agreement. First off the cuff, you have to shed religious preconditions, namely that human life is sacred because God says so. This cannot apply as a moral truism without first proving that your religion is the one true religion and outclasses all others. This isn't to say that everyone needs to be atheist to even engage in this argument fairly, but they need to at least be willing to assume that there must be a non-religious basis for the value of human life along with the religious one.
Second, you have to answer the question of whether the destruction of any life is valuable, a place where vegans or the more extreme end of animal rights groups might get off the wagon. If you believe *all* life is sacred, you are at least taking a logically consistent position, even if not one that's especially practical or popular.
Now, you can narrow down point two by saying that the brains are what separates the sacred life from the unsacred life, namely the ability to feel pain. Now you get into vegetarian realms and away from veganism, only higher-order meat is bad because of the perceptive capabilities of those creatures and the suffering they go through before their slaughter, but you're still in a realm where turning Babe into pork cutlet is the same as taking an axe to Tiny Tim, since pigs have brain power equivalent to human toddlers. Pretty sure they can pass the mirror test, an important test of individuality, in that they understand the difference between illusion and reality.
The mirror test is a weird hill to die on, though, because the game Peekaboo works because human infants consistently fail the mirror test before a certain point: to them, as soon as they can't see you, you are no longer there for all intents and purposes. Thus they do not understand that things exist beyond perception, whereas the pig that knows what it sees in the mirror is merely a reflection of itself *does* grasp that things exist beyond perception, which is the very basis of abstract thought, the thing which separates us from other creatures. Some other animals seem to have this level of intellect which surpasses that of babies.
The bad problem with the Tooley position is that there's no way to adhere to it without saying that infanticide is justifiable.
There are other messy philosophical implications here, namely the question of whether people in comas or permanent catatonia (or people who were born so mentally disabled that they will never move past mental infancy). So under this moral paradigm, infanticide and euthanasia for the severely mentally challenged is viable. Now we're getting into a realm that certainly *feels* wrong. But is it?
Often Kant's categorical imperative is a good signpost to follow: do what is right in the universal sense, all actions are good or evil because we can see whether the action is universally applicable, the golden rule writ large. The problem in abortion's case is that "abortions always" would lead to human extinction, while "no abortions ever" leads to unnecessary death, illness, and general misery.
So we turn to John Stuart Mill. Abortion is a topic where we must weigh the outcomes with the limited knowledge we have. Every fetus famously has the opportunity to be the next Gandhi or the next Trump, however human population growth is generally good and we agree that all life has some value, even life which has not yet attained self-awareness, but if the mother feels she is unfit, she could create bad conditions for the child, which would then lead to bad conditions for society due to poor upbringing. Finally, there are cases where the health of the mother or the health of the child make abortion an inevitability.
So it comes back, morally, to the consensus position. Some things society generally deems bad are theoretically justifiable (including infanticide at an early enough age), but at the same time all life deserves some degree of respect due to the golden rule, but we must weigh that against the utility of each specific pregnancy. The median position: safe, legal, rare.
A takedown of the pro-birth position might come later, but damn this took me a while.
It's not a trap but people who believe that life begins at conception certainly owe us an explanation on a)how personhood works in early development and b) why they think that.
The pro-choice side tend to argue in the language of consequentialism while the pro-life side is more often than not strictly deontological (but then, how else do you address purely deontological ethics? @MrMister ? ). The concerns and worldviews also tend to be libertarian and authoritarian as well, which only further serves to make conversation more difficult.
Which isn't to say that productive discussion isn't possible between two parties of good faith - it definitely IS - but it is challenging and requires effort and the willingness to investigate the more fundamental areas of disagreement.
The easiest way out of this is to acknowledge that the infant has some moral value - though less than a full person. (For that matter, a fetus has some moral value - though less than an adult woman.) In other words, if there's a convenient way to preserve the infant's life - say, a safe surrender site - then that's the ethical choice. If there isn't any convenient way to do so - say, you're a political refugee fleeing a war-torn country and you don't have enough food to feed your entire family - then infanticide is forgiveable.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Conveniently, most lay deontology is just naive consequentialism wrapped in a flag and holding a cross.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
The number of men who refuse to consider vasectomy but want their significant others to get a tubal ligation is infuriating.
If men could have abortions, they'd be free with the purchase of a full tank of gas. There would be informercials for OTC feticides and Toby Keith would brag about how many he'd had.
Edit: Vasectomies are awesome. No hormones, implants or abdominal surgery under general anesthesia. All of which significantly impact women's health and carry risks far above a man having to be an adult for 15 minutes.
Once my wife's IUD expires, I'm opting for one.
Even if I have to go to a private hospital to do so, the Family Planning clinic was a bit grumpy last time we talked to them about it.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
The only thing needed is clarification on when it becomes a distinct living thing and not merely tissue. Once you have that figured out, you have a clear cutoff point for non-needed abortions, like if the mother's life is in danger.
Note that I'm not trying to shut down the discussion! Not everyone shares my values. I just wanted to contribute the opinion of a liberal minded male, in a respectful manner.
I am reasonably confident that if you dig far enough, for most staunch anti-abortion advocates the whole thing is a proxy war for whether or not their concept of God is right. Giving in on this issue is giving up their religion.
So, like, I agree that they should provide a legal/scientific/something argument if they want to see it become law. But I was approaching this from the perspective of trying to change their minds.
From the perspective of influencing legislation... show up in larger numbers.
* Reagan guh I mean Nixon
That's what I think is so interesting, since god doesn't have anything to say about when life begins.
In the Old Testament a woman being pregnant didn't grant you reprieve from the death penalty and causing a miscarriage wasn't murder.
I'm starting to thing that every single women's issue boils down to "Women shouldn't have sex unless their man wants babies".
Not to disagree with the tone of your post, but having seen several of my friends having issues sitting for a few days after one it's also not just 15 minutes of your time.
It's a good read.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/01/ultrasound-woman-pregnancy/514109/
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
I don't think this is really a coherent distinction given pretty much every religious tradition you care to name explicitly contains a lot of instruction around sex and it almost always focuses more on female sexual responsibilities and restrictions. I'm always very eager to point out that modern Christianity bears only the most superficial resemblance to Christianity of centuries before let alone the text itself but it's difficult to ignore the fact that continuous tradition over history is sexually repressive and moreso toward women. "Punishing women for having sex" (or, at least, the moral intuitions that undergird it) isn't a separate belief justified by religious arguments, it's a bona fide religious belief in and of itself.
I guess it really doesn't need a thorough takedown. It could be an intellectually consistent position to hallow all human life from zygote until the paramedic calls time-of-death, but then you'd better damn well be anti-death-penalty, anti-war, and anti-police brutality. If not, you're a hypocrite, period.
Even if the justification is merely that "I'm a good Catholic," then you'd better adhere to the whole fucking nine yards: be an environmentalist, believe in evolution like the Pope does, be charitable, love the poor, and support public welfare programs, or you're not a good Catholic, again you're just a hypocrite.
Same with more fundamentalist Christian variants: turn the other cheek, love the poor, and condemn the rich, or shut up.
meh, toned language down a little.
I cannot wrap my head around that. How is "PWFHS" religious? It's like you just told me the color blue has a crunchy flavor. I'm not saying your wrong, though. I'm just confused.
This isn't as tidy as you make it sound.
Say there is something that prevents a human from developing past infancy intellectually. Are they never of full moral value? what if they at some point incur a diminished mental state, do they lose their moral value? can they get it back if they recover?
Is their moral value forever tied to their mental development? does someone who is more developed have greater value?
In my city, in Canada, abortions are available on request up to 14 weeks. This is due to provider preference only- later abortions are less safe and should be done by people who do them regularly. We will perform them up to 24 weeks for medical need. (We would perform them past this arbitrary line if the fetus was not going to be viable. We do also perform preterm inductions for lethal anomolies, such as trisomy 13, without fetal monitoring and in full expectation that the fetus will die during labor, because it cannot survive long past birth anyway.In a sense, we are inducing them to die. Some might call that an abortion, too, but i think forcing a woman to carry an inevitably dead baby for most of a year is cruel.)
Overall, we probably perform 10-20 per week electively and 2-4 per month for medical reasons.
It seems that most people here know this, but i want to restate that there is incontrovertible evidence that decreasing access to legal abortions does not reduce their number. Countries with no legal abortions have a similar rate to those with no restrictions. It simply makes women have illegal and unsafe abortions. My senior colleagues tell me that before legal abortions they would perform multiple hysterectomies a month for intractible uterine infections on young women, forever preventing them from having a family. I refuse to go back to that. Abortions will be made illegal here over my dead body, and i mean that.
If anyone has questions about the technical aspects of providing them, ask away.
As an aside, i think the american ultrasoundlaws are rather silly. We require a transvaginal ultrasound to date the pregnancy. It's necessary part of doing them safely.
Eh, but that line of reasoning leads to "God knows the aborted embryo will be aborted so it doesn't have a soul...", and then you lose the main thing against abortion. And obviously it can't be different in that case because God isn't (usually - see Job) an asshole.
Alternatively - ask when the cutoff is where God decides it won't get a soul.
3DS: 0473-8507-2652
Switch: SW-5185-4991-5118
PSN: AbEntropy
I am a Canadian who has had 2 abortions. One I was barely 16 and just not ready to have or give up a child with my what I realized later emotionally abusive ex.
The second was when we found out at 24 weeks our son was not going to survive past birth. He had too many problems to be compatibale with life. I was told we had until 25+5 to decide without the doctors agreeing it was for medical. (Which they all said they would agree to). I went to women's hospital and they gave my son a shot in his heart to stop it. I watched it stop on the ultrasound from one beat then nothing. He would not know pain. I was then induced and gave birth to him sleeping. The care I received from everyone was awesome and made a hard time much easier.
The same can be said for mine when I was 16. About 10 weeks and was put right out in the hospital.
These experiences just reaffirmed for me that we need to treat all people with respect especially the woman who have to make this call. And no I have never felt regret from either of my abortions.
Thank you @psyck0 for what you do. I know I was lucky to live in a part of the province where it was only 2 ferries and a drive to receive care.
So good job, guys! Keep talking.
What I'm not conflicted or confused about is the necessity of abortions being legal, for practical reasons. Making it illegal seems more about punishing women and less about stopping abortions, based on the practical effects.
My friend has issues with some sort of thing (she never remembers what it's called) having to do with the internal climate of her uterus that makes it extremely unlikely for a fertilized egg to be able to survive more than 10 or so weeks (without extensive medical intervention). She has had two miscarriages (one at 15, one at 17) that happened before 9 weeks. Both of those were pretty traumatic because, among other reasons, in both cases she was not at home and unaware that she had been pregnant (she doesn't have regular periods regardless).
Our freshman year, she got mono and wound up in the hospital for a couple of weeks, during which time she was too sick and groggy to remember to ask someone to bring her her birth control. Time rolls on and around winter break, she finds out that she's 6 weeks pregnant. She made the decision to have an at-home abortion (she took the pill) through PP and, while that ended up being somewhat traumatic for other reasons, she feels like it was worlds better than having to wait it out and probably losing the pregnancy later down the line, because she does not have the money to do the medical stuff that would give it a chance of being viable.
So, yes, that's all. She just wanted to have the perspective of someone in an odd medical spot - pregnancy to term could be possible if she went into large amounts of medical debt - considered, and thinks sharing stories like hers is important (I agree!).
I'd love it if you took a look at my art and my PATREON!
Many people use genetic testing as a way to make sure they're not going to end out with birth defects resulting in a burden for the parents but a tragically low quality of life for the child. This is especially true if a woman is in older as age increases risk of complications.
The look on someones zealously anti-choice face as they work out the logical conclusion when you ask why they're getting the testing done during their pregnancy is really sort of eye opening. The entire process isn't something they've ever actually thought through in the fashion one would normally use when solving a puzzle or working out a solution. I often wondered if much like church (not an insult to church goers) that it's as much about being involved in a cause or having a place to go as it is holding a belief someone arrives at through careful self evaluation.
I'm really thankful I grew up in California and had what I consider very good health science classes from 7th grade onward. As I age and talk to people who grew up in regressive hyper Christian controlled regions of the country and hear about how "DON'T FUCK OR YOU GO TO HELL WHORE" was basically the sex education, I wonder why anyone would want that to be the national standard.
"full of moral value" is not really the way to think about this. the point is rather that our set of obligations and responsibilities towards a human is relative to how they are.
for example, our obligation to respect bodily autonomy and free choice is relative to the ability of a person to use it. it is wrong to lock up you or me in a home against our will, it would be not (or less) wrong to lock someone with the mental capacity of an infant up against their will.
According to Surfpossum's explanation of the theological goalpost-shifting:
God would know whether you picked option #2 and make sure not to allocate souls accordingly. Because God is omnipotent and omniscient.
Man, not having to evidence or justify the pointless word salad is kinda nice.
I just assume the universe is amoral by default. Saves a lot of annoying headaches.
Okay, in fairness, I'd say any religion ought to at least set out to try and prove its claims if it's going to make any claims to its own profundity. Otherwise it has no mandate to claim.
But if people were going to take the skeptical unpersuaded position by default, then nobody would be religious.
I think variants of Buddhism and Taoism are like this in the sense that any sense of self-worth is essentially selfish and illusory.
Meaning it's not wrong for you to eat meat, per se. You just don't get to cry foul when you get eaten in turn or an earthquake kills you. It's just an acceptance that one isn't above nature because of magic or some special divine status chartered to you by a god. Mortality is part of the game.
I resolve the riddle by saying we're speciests.
There's no reason we value human lives more than a pig's life other than culture and habit. Basically other humans are socially-biologically compatible for certain uses.
Note that certain animals just have a higher status than others as a simple matter of culture (e.g. domestic dogs) or others are food depending on where you live (e.g. cows) or too sacred to kill (e.g. cows again).
There's a way to tweak that question to be non-theistic, as well.
If abortion is wrong because it denies someone their future potential, is it still wrong to abort a fetus that's just going to end up being aborted anyway?
If you look at how people treat mental illness, perceived lack of willpower, personal character, economic capability and intelligence in general in practice -- that answer would be "Yes."
In a sane country, suicide would be considered the product of powerful mental illness. But there are so many people who call it "cowardice" or "weakness" or "selfishness."