"Abortion is murder"...the rhetoric vs the reality

So much gobbledygoop and make believe..... nothing worth addressing because RvW is the law and abortion is legal and women have the right to their own body and no PERSON owns them so they have final say...as it should be.....


"Natural law" doesn't stand up in court because it's a fairy tale of opinions...I already asked, "if "natural law" is being broken why not call 911 ?""....see where it gets ya


Go ahead and believe women are nothing more than broodstock.....lots of people disagree enough to keep women safe from the Anti-Choice/Anti-Freedom/Anti-Liberty/Anti-Women faction....

 

Life isn't a set of negotiations. It isn't a "favor", it's a natural occurrence that resulted from intercourse. And I don't know about you, but even the most ardent of family planners didn't go "We'll have sex this many times a day, you can only ejaculate this many times a day and if a pregnancy happens, we'll do "this and this". No, they made love passionately to one another and the discussion came afterward.

And as I pointed out to Foxhastings, I hold that the female and male hold equal responsibility in the child rearing process. Much has been made about the female's bodily damages but in reality, most pregnancies have been devoid of major consequences in the 21st century. So that emotionalism won't be permitted in this argument. But what is very real, is that child planning involves a crib, the baby's room, ingredients, diapers, etc. All a bunch of financial things that the male inherently contributes to.

So while the female holds the biological challenges, the male holds the domestic ones. We hold this especially to be true since the females can no longer work during pregnancy. Some Liberals want us to throw the bone called "family leave", asking these companies to essentially lose profits. Showing therefore the world where "we have it all" is a world of utter fiction.

It can only be had in a world where companies did not prioritize profit and in so doing, did not prioritize its long-term survival. But even in that world, if companies cannot prioritize profits and therefore its long-term survival then we will find an economic shrinkage, just like the one we have today. Only of the opposite nature. The companies will die out, as more and more families have that income with which they'll have to create and sustain for themselves.

Good luck. If we humans were that self-sufficient, we'd never have any of these problems to begin with.

Ah, this argument again. Well, going on this false argument you can only know a person's consciousness(or their mind) until they express it. And they can only really express it around two years. And so, to be philosophically consistent we would have to agree with the Fourth Trimester premise, right?

No, we wouldn't agree to that premise, since the baby is actually formulated.(I've also argued against our human bias which leads us to justify abortion. Your argument is precisely along those bias'd lines.). So no, consciousness isn't what we use to judge whether it's a life or not. Actually, the argument whether it's a life or not is nonexistent. Only humans can impregnate another human female. Sperm cells are fundamentally different from the other cells in the body and cannot be called "human cells" in the sense that you'd want me to call them.

Sperm can actually merge with the egg to form the fetus. Our bodily cells only operate within our bodies The only thing of note, regarding our human body cells and abortion, is the fundamental concept that we started from that starting point. So the concept of pregnancy cannot be dirtied, just because it is not a functional human yet.

It is functioning, it is growing, it is inevitable(well, with regard to miscarriages.) Just because we can interrupt its biological stage of growth does not necessarily give us the right to do so.

 

Then why should 1 parent have to pay to contribute to the kids? In general, parents give their share to help the kids, not one parent giving a third of their income. I learned a little bit about family law in high school social studies, and it seems like a big joke to me.

Besides, as I said before, most middle class single parents who don't receive money raise kids who aren't starving.

- - - Updated - - -

 

What has that got to do with anything? Answer: Nothing.


And your first response above is off topic.

 

Natural is irrelevant in moral arguments. Appeal to nature is a fallacy. Death is natural. It was much more natural for people to more commonly die of infection than heart disease, but living twice as long and not dying from infection, an unnatural way of things, is much better.

Well I've encountered quite a few couples like that - it's more common with people who are taking longer than usual to have children. They have calendars with do-it days and everything, but no they're not the majority. That doesn't really take away from the fact that it's no inherent burden to the man, and a significant burden to the woman, to bring a child to term.

Child rearing is what occurs after birth, not before.

Death in this age group is a big deal, because there are many years to lose and death in general is not common at childbearing age. Complications of pregnancy is the 6th leading cause of death (see link below) in women aged 20-34, and that's probably an underestimate since they could be alternatively classified as heart disease deaths in some cases (risk goes up during pregnancy). As for other "minor" complications, they were already listed by FoxHastings. In most cases, it's at a minimum a very significant inconvenience. As you say later, they can't work at some point, and if the guy isn't willing to help, it's an even bigger deal.

http://www.cdc.gov/women/lcod/2013/WomenAll_2013.pdf

Not inherently at all, just ideally if they plan to have the baby. You're talking about raising a child, I'm talking about aborting a fetus. They're not the same thing. But if you're talking about how the guy will be held responsible even if he doesn't want to be if the woman chooses to carry the fetus to term, well generally we consider that he should be held responsible for the consequences of having sex. The consequences aren't his to choose after the fact because it's not his body that carries the fetus to term. Whether there should be a way for him to opt out is a separate discussion from abortion, though, since the abortion debate is about personhood, which is much more serious than whether some deadbeat has his wages garnished.

This is still about responsibility for child rearing. We're talking about abortion. To the extent that abortion is accepted and practiced, your concerns are dealt with. In the event that abortion does not occur, and is no longer the issue, that's when your concerns here come into play. No, a guy should not be able to tell a woman to undergo a medical procedure just because he's not willing to take responsibility for impregnating her. No, a woman should not be forced to have the responsibility of a child if she doesn't want to go through with the pregnancy because an embryo is not a person.

Totally false. While we can't read people's minds using functional MRI yet (they're working on it), we know the physiological correlates of consciousness and the brain structures required for it. 20 weeks gestation is just the minimum time, as far as we can tell, that it would take for consciousness and personhood to be physically possible. We know that animals with brains have consciousness with various levels of sophistication even though few of them express it in any way we can interpret. A fetus that has never achieved consciousness is even less able to experience pain and has never thought or felt anything. In a moral sense, they are nothing yet. They are even less morally important than the animals we eat, who at least have a rudimentary consciousness.

Again, it's not "life" that we value. It's persons, or thinking feeling beings if you're a vegetarian. And yes, having ever achieved consciousness is absolutely required for personhood.

Not really, it's possible to induce pluripotency, and probably possible to induce totipotency in any nucleated somatic cell using no more sophisticated techniques than the mother's body employs.

That fact is of no moral relevance. All that exists when fertilization occurs is a totipotent cell with a new arrangement of DNA. DNA is no more a person than blueprint is a house. The potential is not actual.

Regarding rights, one person's rights end where another's begin. We have the right to because it is not a person that has thoughts, feelings, and pain. The mother does have these things, and this non-feeling, non-person does not deserve to be put above her wants/needs any more than any inanimate object or biological machinery without consciousness such as cancer cells, semen, blood, bacteria, plants, etc. Cancer cells are genetically unique and diverse, but we don't cry when they die because what matters is saving the person, not the unique instructions or "human life."

 

Are you done twisting words to fit your own narrative? That was actually, very depressing. I expected more but it appears this is the limit to intellectual discussion on this topic.

1)How ironic, you try to attack me for acknowledging Natural Law as the basis for any philosophical argument, while already committing the sin known as the apples and oranges comparison. Yes, all things are Natural and there are some things we choose to try to fight off via 'Unnatural' resources. However, what those unnatural resources try to do, is try to augment the already existing components inside the body.(IE: White blood cells, etc.)

So while the process is "unnatural", the end result(a long lived life) is very natural indeed. Are we going to call Vitamins unnatural now? Because that's the gist of your argument.

2)It's a Financial Burden, but I'm going to address more of that on your third point. For now, I'm just going to say that my position isn't going to change and you haven't added a single fact to change it.

3) How cute, I suppose the baby can live in the hospital while the man then finally starts to address the home, since for the next 9 months he doesn't have to do anything. At least, according to you.

But the real crux of your argument is that men are utterly uninvolved in the process, which just isn't true at all.

4)Here's more white washing. You thought I was fooled? What you called the "6th leading cause of death" is more like 2.8-3.1% of all deaths. In other words, we have a successful pregnancy rate of 97%. You might want to pick another argument, there's what I hold to be "statistically relevant" facts. People have died from being stung, is there a movement against bees? Not that I know of.

5) But very interestingly(and quite sexist) is that the female is completely justified in asking for the male to have his balls tied up. It's also interesting to point out that the female bares none of this "responsibility" for having sex. I guess women are simply incapable of making choices? Or does the existence of forced intercourse invalidate a woman's choice in consensual intercourse? I want to see where this utterly hypocritical logic is actually coherent.

6) So basically, we know the templates for when consciousness can exist inside a child. But until that point, consciousness doesn't exist. Given that, I continue to ask where's the justification for aborting the child? If consciousness is the cut-off point and yet that fetus isn't allowed to reach that point, that's utterly immoral. That's why several groups have moved against late-term abortion, while idiots like Debbie Wasserman calls it a laughable "war on women". No, Natural Law insists upon a limitation, that limitation allows us to live within our boundaries, not to exceed them and thereby damage ourselves.

We may have grown out of our physical cribs, but the 'law' is a fundamental crib that is in place to keep us from hurting ourselves. Or at least, that's what it should be. Now laws/privileges are mixed, to derive certain privileges to certain people as they desire. Furthermore, it's impossible to declare they are morally nothing, while they are being fed nutrients and their bodies are developing.

Either their existence is recognized, or not. You can't proclaim them a gray blob just to justify your own decisions. That's what the Pro-choice theory is: A blob. You/it changes to whatever is necessary to adapt to whatever argument is being posed against it at the time. Naturalism however, is absolute. It's not an 'appeal to authority' or to nature. It is, a fundamental fact. It's rudimentary in our philosophical outlooks. Again, you can choose to ignore it but that doesn't mean it went away.

Until it can be showed that a human lifeform can be created without the synthesis of human beings, our ecosystem is an absolute reality that you're going to have to sadly acknowledge. Even if you can't bring yourself to acknowledge that truism to me.

7)Double-murder charges. Explain it to me. If consciousness is required for personhood, a murderer did not murder that fetus when he killed the mother. He only killed the mother. Oh, here's another good one: People who are mute. They can't talk. How can they demonstrate consciousness? How about if they're mute/blind. They can't see either! Are they alive?

Yes, they are. How do we know? their heartbeats. You can strip every one of the senses from a human being, leaving only the heartbeat and they are alive. In much the same sense as the animal. So I ask you again: On what arrogance, can you strip away this life? There is none. You have no possible logical position that justifies the taking of a life, be it the life developing or the life that's alive.

"It's possible", but has it been done? Until you've done it, all you're talking about is theory.

9)Another apples to oranges. Cancer cells do not create life, they destroy it. Sperm cells is where it all begins. And the lack of awareness of a person's thoughts, feelings or pain is not a prerequisite to simply write them off. I've been willing to accept economic liability(which is how abortion first rose to the surface) as a legitimate reason. I've been willing to accept medical risks. If we abort for only these two reasons, abortions will decrease several scores fold.

 

No, that won't decrease abortions.



And out of that barrage of junk I picked this : """ I guess women are simply incapable of making choices?""


YOU seem to think so, you seem to want to take away their right to MAKE choices......

 

The point isn't whether anything is natural or not, the point is that what is natural has nothing to do with what is good or useful. Natural should not be regarded as a positive or negative term.

Natural generally refers to how things are found in nature, i.e. it hasn't gone through an extensive process of alteration by people. People who commit an appeal to nature are people who think something is automatically "bad" because it's a chemical synthesized in the lab, and automatically good if it's found on a plant or tree. In reality, this has nothing to do with how good, bad, useful or useless something is. There are natural and unnatural toxins, and unnatural and natural medicines. Nature isn't a conscious entity, and if it ever had a "goal" the only goal was to perpetuate the species in question. This has nothing to do with living a long time, provided you've already reproduced as much as you're going to be able to and your offspring are equipped to make their own offspring. Also, the "natural state" of humans barely resembles modern society.

That said, it now appears I probably misunderstood what you meant by "natural law." Since you're denying that you're making a point based upon what is natural, I'll now guess that by natural law you mean: "... the core of natural law moral theory is the claim that standards of morality are in some sense derived from, or entailed by, the nature of the world and the nature of human beings," but it does not appear to be a homogeneous philosophical position so you could mean something else. I think all we can really get from that philosophical starting position is to assert that persons have rights, regardless of what the wider society would want to do with them (contrasted to utilitarianism, for example). However, this doesn't really get us anywhere, because the core of the debate is still when personhood begins. While some pro-choice people would disagree, I am actually not okay with denying the right to life of one person in favor of the privacy of the mother - I'm denying that there is any conflict because the fetus is not a person yet.

It's pretty rare that people's opinions instantly and radically change based upon reading a forum post. It's hard for most people to admit they're wrong. If that's your expectation, you should expect quite a bit of frustration from posting on forums. I like to think that I sometimes sway people on the fence and slightly nudge opponents in my direction sometimes, but there's no expectation for sure.

I'm pretty sure we're also not communicating effectively here. You're against abortion, it seems, but you want the guy to have a say in whether the woman has an abortion? The financial burden imposed upon the guy for having a baby is just what he should incur if the woman chooses to have the baby. He should take responsibility. But in the discussion of whether or not abortion is okay in general, the core of the matter is still when personhood begins, because a guy's financial concerns are of lesser importance than whether something is murder or not.

The guy ought to be involved if no abortion is going to occur, but this is a moral directive, not an inherent state of things. If a fetus were a person (it's not), even the woman's "biological inconvenience" would not outweigh it's right to life, and if a guy has some kind of "financial inconvenience," that also would not outweigh its' right to life. The only thing that would, is the life of the mother. But since the fetus is not a person, and resides in the body of a woman, it's her choice what to do with it just like it's her choice what to do with her extra kidney.

You missed the point, so I'll clarify. It can kill women and it's not super-rare like being eaten by a shark or struck by lightning, and while not the largest contributor to mortality it can result in death and is therefore a risky activity. Sometimes risks are worth taking. You have to consider all the facts. In the case of bees causing anaphylaxis, the remedy is for anybody with an allergy to carry epinephrine, maybe even have it in a first aid kid at home or the workplace for when you don't know if somebody has an allergy. We cannot wipe out bees, because they are required for much of our food production (I don't mean honey, I mean pollinating crops). But if you were to assume that the fetus is not a person, how many maternal deaths from a forced pregnancy would be okay? None, because a fetus is not a person.

Sexist only to the extent that biology is. Pregnancy involves a woman's body, and regardless of what you or I think a guy should do, in reality it is possible for him to contribute nothing to the child, particularly if he impregnated somebody else's wife or nobody knows who the father is. Here's an analogy to help you understand: If we were talking about the guy getting some kind of major, elective surgery, it would be his choice in whether he gets the surgery. Let's say it's something that actually affects the other partner, like him getting a sex change operation. If the woman makes more money than him, she could then choose whether she's going to pay for it, but ultimately it's his choice in whether he gets the surgery. She can also choose to leave him if she isn't in to that, but it's still his choice to have the surgery.That's analogous to pregnancy for women - it often does result in surgery. I know, I know, you're going to call apples and oranges because a baby is the result. But that's not what this debate is about. We're talking about abortion. This tangent we're having is really about what's fair in child support. If you think it would be more fair for a guy to opt out and say, "I don't want this baby, and if you have it you will release me from paternal responsibilities including financial support," well it's debateable whether that's fair or not, but not the subject of this thread so let's drop it.

If the fetus never reaches that point, then no person ever existed. If you're going to call the death of a pre-conscious fetus a tragedy, you could also call it a tragedy when potential persons never got to exist because an ovulation was missed or sperm failed to reach the egg. While it's interesting to wonder about the trillion billions (10^21 at least) of people who were never born because of sperm who got lost, or chemical pregnancies that didn't get very far, or sperm who were beaten to the egg, it's not a matter of actual persons dying, it's the potential never being realized.

Not clear on how you're justifying your limitation. You say that natural law implies it, but I don't really see how. Intervening after conception isn't morally different from intervening before. The only thing that changed at conception was the egg has now recombined into a unique new set of DNA. But again, blueprint is not a house. The mother's body has to intervene heavily for it to become a person. And she owns her body.

Hurt is self-defined, though people sometimes lack insight. Again, a fetus has no self before 20 weeks for sure. So really, a fetus is property just like any other part of her body. I can declare it's morally nothing in the same way I can declare somebody else's skin morally nothing. The skin has no consciousness and is not a person. It is just a vital tool (like armor), it belongs to them and it's their choice what to do with it (tattoos, surgery, whatever). And again, sufficient technology could intervene to make another person (a clone) out of the cells in the skin just as the mother's body intervenes to make a person out of the fertilized egg. A fetus is essentially a tool like a blueprint. But once it achieves consciousness, it's no longer just a tool like other parts of the body, it's a separate person.

Asserting that something exists doesn't tell us what it is or if we should value it. Is it a potential person or an actual person? In what way is it morally distinct from any other clump of cells?

There's no doubt that it can be done, it's just our technology hasn't quite surpassed the biological machinery that has the benefit of billions of years of trial and error. Even if we could already make an artificial womb, it wouldn't change the moral facts of the matter. An embryo would still not be a person yet, and we wouldn't be obligated to put it into an artificial womb just because we could.

The law does not determine what is moral. The law reflects how those in power want things to be. Saudis like to behead people for converting to Christianity, smuggling drugs, demonstrating against the government, etc.. The fact that they behead people for those things does not have a bearing on which of those acts are moral.

You can see their consciousness by their deliberate action, but this is an imprecise measure because there is such a thing as reflexes that are more mechanical than conscious. Fortunately, we have technology like fMRI, that allows us to see the brain activity and know they have thoughts and feelings. There is such a thing as a person who is "brain dead" who we can keep "alive" but the person cannot be recovered.

The heart is just a pump. It does not determine if there is or was a person. We only use it to declare death because death is usually implied without the heart beating and it's more cumbersome to measure brain waves. I say usually because there is such as thing as ECMO, basically an external mechanical heart to keep the person alive. The beginning and end of the life of a person is truly a matter of what goes on in the brain. If you transplant a heart, it doesn't make the recipient a new person, they just got a new pump. If we were able to transplant a brain... then that would change the person.

Hypotheticals can be useful in working through moral problems. I'm sure it can be done because the information is there, it's just a matter of the packaging and regulation of the DNA.

Cancer cells are alive, but we don't care about their lives because they don't have a conscious existence and they threaten a person's life. It's immoral to allow abortions for only select reasons. When it's a person killing it is murder (sometime after 20 weeks) and only justifiable for self-defense, but before that it's not a person and killing it is morally neutral. If there's a between time (bad but not murder, for example), it would occur sometime after 20 weeks, but we don't know with enough precision to make that distinction. So a 20 week cutoff, with potential to raise it as we understand more, is the most moral thing to do. After that cutoff you could consider things like risk to the life of mother for sure, but not financial problems. The solution there would be adoption.

 

Some prolifers ALWAYS will try to derail any topic to "but it's a baby!"

So, going back to the OP, it is a very valid question. The only response is that stopping her from having an abortion is "illegal," so won't, while stopping her from killing a born child is "legal."

Yet, then that is to claim morality and ethics is whatever law says it is. Thus, since abortion is legal then it is both moral and ethical because it is legal.

While trying not to get caught, if I thought abortion was murder and abortion clinics were places of mass murdering children, I would have to try to stop it. To claim otherwise would just be true moral apathy.

Prolife is about slogans created by the Catholic church. People chant and even rage them like chanting the rosary. But, like all sin rules, they generally don't follow the rules themselves when they don't want to. It is nearly always "do as I say, not as I do" when it comes to religious slogans such as prolife slogans. And, like religion, there are those who will engage in who can have the most extreme application than others. And, of course, who mostly rages against abortion are those for whom it will never be a personal issue so it is safe moralizing.

Propose that a man who causing an unplanned pregnancy should be forcibly and permanently sterilized to prevent it from happening again? OMG of course not! Require women who continue an unwanted pregnancy to PAY the costs to society if she abandons the child at birth? Oh hell no! Make a man pay for his part in an unwanted pregnancy until the child 18? THAT'S UNFAIR!

People adjust their moral codes to suit and exempt themselves, while raging at others on matters that don't affect them personally.